Angels of Detroit (22 page)

McGee didn’t know whether it was the chemicals in the air or the misery of the charade, but she suddenly felt like crying. Yellow drops were streaking down the glass.

The woman opened the glass door, and the yellow drops swerved toward the bottom.

The scene McGee overheard Calice narrating into the receptionist’s
phone was not flattering, but there was nothing she could think to do to about it.

Then the numbered lights above the elevator fell—3, 2, 1, B. And then back up they came, 1, 2, 3, and McGee felt her pulse rise with each digit. The elevator doors parted, and Dorothy burst between them, unbuttoned plaid shirt flapping behind her.

Throughout the cursing and pointing that followed, McGee stood silent and dumb, offering nothing in response.

Was it minutes? It felt like hours. She didn’t know. Eventually Dorothy and Calice gave up and went away. They must have decided it was easier to retreat.

McGee waited alone in the reception area a short while longer, wobbling in her orthopedic shoes, but the women never came back.

She needed to get moving. Too much time had already slipped away. Skipping the cubicles, McGee headed straight for the corridors of private offices. As she went, she read the etched bronze nameplates on the thick oak doors. None of them belonged to Ruth Freeman. So back she went again to the beginning, but she was finding it hard to focus. The names passed under her eyes, and she forgot to read them.

Back to the beginning again, once more. Slowly, slowly this time. Concentrate. Nameplate after nameplate, but it still wasn’t there. No Ruth Freeman.

Fitch had been useless. She’d interrogated him repeatedly in the days leading up to this. But he’d been such a wreck when he’d been here before, he couldn’t remember anything about the layout. They might as well have blindfolded him.

McGee wilted backward into the spongy wall of the nearest cubicle. Was it possible Fitch had given her the wrong floor number?

On her way back to reception, to the cleaning cart she’d left behind, McGee passed a poorly lit corridor in a corner far removed from the other offices. In a glance, it looked unused, if not forgotten,
space set aside for some unknown future. Most of the doors along the darkened corridor were unlabeled. Only a few of the rooms had windows overlooking the hall. Peering inside as she went, McGee saw conference rooms, long tables circled with chairs.

She was moving quickly, not watching where she was going, and as she turned a corner, she slammed her shin at full stride into the metal leg of a desk. The pain was so exquisite, she couldn’t even cry out, her breath stuffed in her mouth like cotton. She crumpled to the floor, holding her leg, biting her lip until she tasted blood.

She stayed there several minutes, squeezing her knee to her chest. When the pain finally subsided enough that she was able to lift her pant leg, she found a scarlet welt along the ridge of her shin. What kind of place was this for a desk, anyway—this dim, narrow hallway? Had it been left there to be thrown away? And would she be the one responsible for getting rid of it? But no, the computer on top was hooked up and plugged in, as was the phone. There was a pile of papers in a metal tray. A rubber stamp lay on its side in the center of the desk. McGee picked up the stamp and held it before her eyes. The letters were a backward-slanting cursive. Ink had rendered them almost indistinguishable from the background. McGee pressed the stamp into the pad and untucked her shirt. On her belly, she tattooed herself with Ruth Freeman’s signature.

Of course. Of all the offices, this one, tucked away in the shadows, was by far the most villainous.

She left the desk limping, but she’d already forgotten the pain in her shin.

McGee’s training had consisted of an hour spent sitting in front of a TV/VCR combo in the basement. On a tape drained almost entirely of color, a pair of actors in extravagant perms had demonstrated the art of dusting and vacuuming and mopping (coil the head before pressing!), and when it was over, Dorothy had turned the lights back on and handed McGee a flip chart full of colorful pictures and a schedule of which things she was supposed to clean on which night:
light switches, light fixtures, keyboards, computer screens, telephones, windows, floors and carpets, door handles, door frames, windowsills, blinds.

McGee made her way back toward Ruth Freeman’s office, in what she hoped would appear to the guards watching on the security cameras as a natural progression, touching her cloth to everything in sight but never stopping.

In the private offices, with no cameras, she skipped steps that seemed unimportant. But in these places there were far more steps to begin with. The executives had bookcases and shelves and tables and chairs and file cabinets, collections of glass elephants and tennis trophies, awkwardly posed family photos with the same frosty blue backdrop—as if the rich all lived somewhere up among the clouds.

And then at last, McGee stood in the doorway of Ruth Freeman’s office. The office was less spacious than the others but had the same furniture: the polished tables and chairs, the hardwood desk so large it looked like an aircraft carrier. The room, at least, was just as Fitch had described.

Ruth Freeman didn’t decorate. Little in the office suggested anything about the woman who worked there. But that in itself said a lot. The anonymity could have been a sign of bland taste. But more likely it was the hallmark of a woman who liked to keep secrets. The only object at all revealing was a small photograph in a simple cherry frame propped up in one corner of the desk. In it a man and woman posed on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Behind them the sun was setting, the sky streaked with crimson. McGee had long imagined Ruth Freeman as middle-aged and underfed, desperately trying to cling to her youth, a wearer of pantsuits with shoulder pads and too much makeup, hair chemically stiffened to the texture of funnel cake. But as Fitch had said, the woman in the photo was older than middle age, her hair gray. She’d made no attempt to color it. Her skin collected in wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her smile was friendly. But of course, the Ruth Freeman in the picture was on
vacation. The Ruth Freeman who sat in this chair, at this desk, was someone else entirely.

The man standing beside her in the picture was younger, lean and handsome, dressed in khakis and a white linen shirt, the top three buttons undone. On his face McGee recognized the smile of someone at ease with himself, someone well acquainted with comfort.

As she’d expected, Ruth Freeman’s file cabinet was locked. In vain McGee searched the one unlocked desk drawer for a key. But as it was, she didn’t yet have a plan for handling the files once she found them. And not until dawn was blandly announcing itself though the tinted windows of the corridor and it was time for her to move on to the next floor, did McGee come across the room housing the photocopier. By then all she wanted to do was go home to bed.

Myles didn’t even roll over when she came in. There were no grunts when she fumbled to join him under the covers, still dressed in her horrible jeans. She was too tired to deal with zippers and bows.

Sometime later—hours later, maybe—McGee became aware of Myles’s lips on her forehead, but she had no strength to do anything in return. And then he was gone.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, her phone rang, and she let it go to voice mail. A few seconds later the ringing started all over again.

“What happened?” April asked, even before McGee had a chance to say hello. She was calling from the bookstore.

“There was this video,” McGee said with a yawn, describing the actors and their perms, and then she told April about the cleaning cart and about how Calice and then Dorothy had yelled at her, and then about the glass elephants and the trophies and about the desk and her shin, which now looked as if there were a mouse hiding under her skin.

“You mean it actually worked?” April said.

Until that moment, the thought had never crossed McGee’s mind. Despite everything Holmes and Myles and Fitch had said, their
insistence that she was crazy even to consider it, the plan had actually worked.

Holmes came over with his picks later that afternoon, and he and McGee practiced on an old dented file cabinet. She’d underestimated how difficult it would be to get a feel for pins and tumblers. She’d thought it would be like learning to juggle or to perform a card trick, just a matter of getting down the motions, the sleight of hand. Every dozen or so tries, she got the lock to pop, but she never understood why. It would just happen, the sequence of steps buried somewhere inside the metal casing.

“Try again,” Holmes said each time. “Try again.”

He never lost patience, but he also never took off his coat.

“You understand it’s a felony, right?” he said. “Just getting caught with them.”

“I’m not going to get caught.”

“Just having them on you.”

“You’re worse than Myles,” she said. “When did you guys get to be such pussies?”

Holmes stood up and checked his watch. “I’ve got to go.”

After four hours, it was the first mention he had somewhere to be.

That evening, riding the bus into the downtown twilight, McGee was jittery, her feet pumping the pedal of some imaginary machine. Twice on her way from the bus stop to the building, she nearly stepped directly into oncoming traffic.

In the basement, she got her cart and went through the motions of checking her supplies. She was waiting for the elevator when she heard footsteps behind her.

“Zolska, Zolska.”

Not until the fourth or fifth time did she recognize her name.

It was one of the guards, the black one with the kind face, the mouth that even at rest seemed to settle into a smile. The same expression was there on his ID badge: Darius.

“They told me to help you upstairs,” he said. And then, “to your floor.” There was no meanness in his voice, and yet as he hooked two fingers to the front of her cart, steering it toward the elevator, she felt flattened. Together they stepped inside the car. Darius pushed the button for the twenty-fourth floor. But while his head was tipped back to watch the numbers change, McGee pressed the button for the third floor. And when the doors opened there first, she rushed out, rocketing the cart before her. She was already removing supplies when Darius realized what had happened, sticking his foot out just in time to stop the doors from closing.

McGee’s second confrontation with Calice was even more unpleasant than the first. Calice cursed. Calice waved her arms. Calice made every threat she could think of. McGee felt genuinely sorry to have caused this woman so much trouble. But there was no room for regrets when so much was at stake.

In the end, it was good that Darius
had
come up with her. He was the one who finally managed to coax Calice and her cart onto the elevator, reassuring her she was right. A simpler task, presumably, than arguing with a woman incapable of understanding what you were saying.

As soon as they were gone, McGee hurried to Ruth Freeman’s office, skipping all the pretenses from the night before. She knew she had only a few minutes before Darius returned to his security cameras in the lobby.

She slid the leather case from her pocket. Inside, the picks looked like dental tools, thin and delicate and all neat in a row, shining and sterile. Holmes had told her the desk would have a wafer lock, like the one in her cabinet at home. So she did what she’d spent hours practicing, inserting the tension wrench and then raking at the wafers with the ball pick. After a couple of tries, she could feel the wafers rising, one at a time, but she couldn’t get the cylinder to turn. Her fingers were getting sweaty.

Holmes had prepared her for this as well. Deep breath. Then
another. Remove. Start over. In again with the wrench and the pick. Again she felt the wafers move against the springs, but no matter how much she wiggled and pressed, the wrench wouldn’t turn. She wished she could call Holmes, but it was too risky to bring her phone. The Lucite clock on Ruth Freeman’s desk told her ten minutes had already passed. She had no choice but to get on with the cleaning.

The hours that followed were some of the longest of her life. It wasn’t the cleaning she minded. It turned out she liked vacuuming, enveloping herself in the drone of the machine, how it cut out every other sound, the way being underwater reduced the outside world to a harmlessly diffused suggestion of light. But her mind kept returning to the lock, to what she’d done wrong. She replayed the sequence in her head, and in tandem she replayed Holmes’s lessons, looking for mistakes. But she was sure she’d done exactly the same thing tonight that she’d done with Holmes that afternoon.

She called Holmes as soon as she got home the next morning. It was five
A.M.
, and he was sleeping. So was Myles, just a few feet away from where she stood with her phone.

“I need you to come over.”

Myles snuffled into his pillow.

“Are you kidding me?” Holmes said, the words coming out in a croak.

She told him what had happened, that she needed his help.

“I’ll be over later,” he said.

Through the phone McGee could see him closing his eyes. “No,” she said. “Now.”

Myles was sitting up on the futon, squinting. “What’s going on?” he said.

“Nothing.” She sat down at the computer. “Go back to sleep.”

*    *    *

“It must be a double wafer,” Holmes said. It had taken him three hours to make the twenty-minute drive. She smelled coffee on his breath, eggs and bacon. Myles had left for the store.

“What does that mean?”

“The things inside that make it lock,” he said. “They move in both directions, not just one.”

“So what do I do?”

Holmes picked up the black leather case from the steamer trunk. He pulled out what she guessed was a wrench, but different from the one she’d tried the night before, a pair of sharp tines poking out from one end. “Two-prong wrench,” he said, and then he pulled out a pick shaped like a snowman. “Double-ball pick.”

He showed her how to rake the pick along the wafers. “It’s not enough just to do the top,” he said. “You have to do both. Top and bottom.”