A Quarter for a Kiss Page 5

  “Oh, no,” she said vaguely, waving away the thought. Obviously, the man wasn’t aware that Stella was wealthy and could afford to do whatever she needed to get through this crisis. Like many older folks, she lived on a shoestring, but I knew for a fact her bank accounts and other assets were quite hefty.

  As they reviewed the papers and she signed on the dotted lines, I thought about the break-in and felt a surge of dismay. Had Eli been outmaneuvered by professionals? Was I chasing after something that had already been found and removed from the premises?

  Suddenly, the dismay gave way to a glimmer of hope. Eli Gold was no amateur either. If he had hidden something important, I doubted anyone would be able to find it easily, even if they were pros. I think Eli realized that himself and that’s why his words to Stella were for me to find the notes. He knew they were hidden too well for anyone else to discover them. Wherever he had put them for safekeeping, they certainly weren’t going to turn up just by random searching.

  Once the adjuster left, Tom and Stella prepared to head to the bank. I thought about going with them but decided my time would be better spent here taking one last look around. One of us needed to stay behind anyway, to let in the cleaning people when they came.

  “Stella, may I ask you a question?” I said as she was stepping out the door. “Do you mind if I poke around your home myself? Is there any area you wouldn’t want me digging through?”

  Stella looked back at me, her expression baffled.

  “Eli and I are two old folks who play canasta and have a fondness for mocha chocolate chip ice cream. What do you think you might find, Callie? Our secret collection of nuclear weapons?”

  “I just want to respect your privacy.”

  “Everything I own has been dumped out onto the floor!” she cried. “I don’t have any privacy left. Help yourself.”

  Six

  I went to work the moment the door shut behind them. There was a big difference between poking around when a homeowner was there and digging through things when they were not—especially digging with permission.

  This time I didn’t just look for physical evidence of Eli’s notes. I also skimmed documents and letters, rooted around the files that had been dumped all over the floor next to their small filing cabinet, and generally stuck my nose deeply into all sorts of places that it didn’t belong. In the process, I decided that Stella was involved in a number of activities, such as bunco, bingo, church work, civic duties, and more. No wonder she hadn’t paid much attention to what Eli had been doing—she was too busy!

  She seemed to have saved the past ten years’ worth of greeting cards from her children, and as I went through them I noticed that the ones from Jodi were elaborate and colorful, filled with enthusiastic words of love and appreciation. The ones that had come from Stella’s sons, however, were cheap looking and generic, their sentiments oddly formal. I was reminded of how much I had disliked both men when I’d met them. Nothing I saw here served to soften that opinion.

  Sadly, my biggest revelation upon digging through Eli’s private possessions came from seeing the reminders of his advanced age: a tube of denture cream, a bottle of Metamucil, a prescription for anti-inflammatories. Somehow, I had managed to ignore the fact that my friend Eli wasn’t exactly a spring chicken anymore. He was getting older—maybe so old that he might not pull through this whole thing after all.

  That sobering thought was on my mind when I found a small box of mementos that had been dumped out on the side of the bed, obviously taken from the bedside table. On the floor were a few of Eli’s most precious keepsakes: the good citizenship medal he received at his eighth-grade graduation; dog tags from his time in the Navy; a photo of him and me together, snapped at my wedding. I held the picture in my hands, remembering that my dad had taken the shot, posing us in front of the table in such a way that made it look like wedding cake was sprouting from the top of Eli’s head. I had tossed the photo aside but Eli had asked if he could have it. I had no idea he had held onto it all these years.

  Under a few other photos of people I didn’t know, I found the small black cap that had been Eli’s boyhood yarmulke. Holding the small satin cap in my fingers, I said another prayer for this gentle Jewish Christian who had been such an important figure in my life.

  Please, God, heal him. Heal him now.

  Wiping tears from my eyes, I put the mementos together in the cigar box they had come from and slid it into the empty bedside drawer. I was at a loss for what to do next, so I bent down and picked up a few other items, putting them back in the drawer where I assumed they belonged. It wasn’t until I came to Eli’s old prayer shawl that I felt a small tingle at the back of my neck.

  The prayer shawl.

  The yarmulke.

  Both symbols of his faith.

  I stood up, memories rushing back to me in a flash.

  The mezuzah!

  The mezuzah held the key!

  There had been two cases years ago where the safety and security of Eli’s files had been paramount. In one situation, Eli had been called to testify against the leader of a major crime network; in the other, he had gathered evidence against an important politician. Both times he had needed to store his files in an absolutely impenetrable location, safe from the long arms of those he was going up against.

  Eli had used a safety deposit box, as he did for other important cases, except each of those two times he had rented a new box in a different town where no one knew him. Then he had taken steps to make sure that no one would be able to locate the box and get it open unless they knew three separate things: where the key was hidden, the name of the bank, and the number of the box. He had provided me with enough information so that I could figure those things out for myself if worse came to worse and something bad happened to him. But I had never needed to take those steps.

  Chances are, it was time for me to take those steps now.

  I ran through the condo, grabbing a screwdriver from the spot in the laundry room where a small toolbox had been dumped out on the floor. Then I dragged a chair to the front door, opened it wide, and set the chair on the threshold.

  The phone rang just as I was climbing up on the chair, and so I paused to answer it. Tom was calling to tell me that he and Stella were finished at the bank and were on the way to the hospital. They had looked into the safety deposit box and it was empty except for the items Stella had already described to me.

  “That’s what I expected to hear,” I said, and I’m sure Tom was a bit confused by the excitement in my voice.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Just another idea I had. I’ll call you back if it pans out.”

  I hung up before he could reply.

  Back on the chair, I inhaled deeply at the sight of what I had been hoping to see: Mounted on the right doorpost and set at an angle was Eli’s old mezuzah. I used the screwdriver to remove it, and as I worked I tried to remember what Eli had told me about this traditional Jewish fixture.

  According to him, a mezuzah was simply a small case inside of which rested a tiny scroll containing several special passages of Scripture from the Old Testament. Many Jews had mezuzahs mounted on their doorframes as a constant reminder of God’s presence and a response to the directive in Deuteronomy 6:9 to put God’s commandments on the doorframes of their houses.

  Before Eli became a Christian, he followed the Jewish tradition of paying respect to the mezuzah each time he went in or out of his home. After he gave his life to Christ, he left the mezuzah in place but no longer followed the rabbinical directives that accompanied it.

  One time he needed to leave a message for me outside of the office, and I facetiously suggested that he write it on a little piece of paper and stick it in the mezuzah. He told me that he felt that would be disrespectful, but that I might be onto something nevertheless. When it came time for him to hide the key to his safety deposit box, he removed the little mezuzah, hollowed out a flat space for the key behind it, and then remounted it. H
e didn’t think God would have a problem with that; he also liked the idea of hiding something in plain sight, something I would be able to get to easily if the need arose.

  My hope was that he had taken the same actions here in Florida, and seeing the mezuzah on his doorframe was a good indication that he had. As soon as the little box was loose I would know for sure.

  I managed to poke the screwdriver behind the box, pressed it like a lever, and watched one side of the box swing loose. I gasped, my heartbeat pulsing in my throat. There, hidden behind the mezuzah, was a small, flat key. I pushed aside the mezuzah, pried it loose from the wood, and turned it over in my hand.

  “Excuse me, is this the Gold residence?”

  I nearly tossed everything in the air at the sound of the person who had snuck up behind me. Spinning precariously on the chair, I spied two women standing on the sidewalk, their arms loaded with cleaning supplies.

  “Sorry,” one of them said, “we didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “That’s okay,” I replied, smoothly pocketing the key, “I’m just a little jumpy.”

  “No wonder, judging by the condition of the house,” the other woman said, leaning to one side to look into the condo behind me. “We’re here to clean up the mess. You called this morning?”

  I climbed down from the chair and smoothed out my clothes.

  “Yes. Thanks for coming.”

  “No blood, right?” one of them asked. “We didn’t bring the right stuff for that.”

  “Just…vandalism,” I replied, turning so that they could come inside.

  They seemed quite blasé about the mess, and I supposed that came with the territory. If their job was to clean up crime scenes, then they probably saw much worse things than this every day.

  They decided to start at the back of the house and work their way forward. That was fine with me, and as soon as they got started, I went to the kitchen, pulled the key from my pocket, and studied it.

  It looked a lot like the key to my own safety deposit box, same size, same basic shape. Slipping it back into my pocket, I closed my eyes and tried to remember the other two steps I needed to take that would lead me to the correct box at the correct bank.

  A bookcase. It had something to do with a bookcase—but it had been so many years since Eli told me about these things, I didn’t fully remember.

  I walked into the empty living room and crunched my way across the mess to where all of their books lay strewn in a heap at the foot of a big bookcase. Second shelf, far right, I could almost hear Eli telling me, and in a flash the entire memory came flooding back: Inside a book, he found the page number that corresponded with his box number and he had drawn a circle around it with a pen. Then he had placed it on the shelf, second one from the top, at the far right.

  Unfortunately, his books were no longer on the shelves, so I didn’t know which book he had put the clue in. I would have to go through each one just to find the page I wanted. With a small sigh I cleared a space on the floor, sat down, and began. I figured I would flip quickly through each of the books and see if anything jumped out at me. If that didn’t work, I would go back through them more thoroughly a second time.

  It took a while, but after thumbing through 15 books, it dawned on me to check the fattest books next, back to front, because the odds were that the box number was high. I struck gold with a heavy tome titled The Riverside Shakespeare: On page 1569, at the bottom right corner, the page number was circled in black ink. By coincidence, I noticed, the last line on the page was from The Winter’s Tale, and the quote seemed ironic, considering the situation: Would they else be content to die?

  Now that I had the correct book, I was to look for two more notations that would tell me the correct bank, and these were harder to remember. Something about a square and a triangle and “x marks the spot.”

  I held the book to me and closed my eyes, praying that God would bring the memories I needed back to me. It had been so very long since Eli had told me all of this; what had given him the right to believe I would still remember after all this time?

  Frustrated, I started on page 1 of the nearly 2000-page-long book and flipped through, page after page, until I found what I was looking for. On page 17, a small triangle had been lightly drawn around the number, and then, on page 43, the same thing had been done with a square. I knew I was supposed to use these numbers to find the page and listing of the correct bank in the phone book.

  I had seen a telephone directory in the kitchen, so I stood and made my way back there, first checking out the seventeenth listing on page 43 and then the forty-third listing on page 17. One was a personal residence and one was a dog groomer. Neither was a bank.

  Back to square one. I put the phone book down on the counter and tried, again, to clear my mind. What now, Lord? I prayed silently.

  X marks the spot, I could almost hear Eli say in reply.

  X marks the spot—of course! I wasn’t supposed to use the local phone book, because the box hadn’t been rented locally. Heart pounding, I ran to the guest bedroom, where I remembered seeing five or six other phone directories for the state of Florida.

  They were still in a heap on the floor, and it didn’t take long to look inside each directory’s back cover until I came to the one with a big “X” marked across it in black ink. The directory was for the Orlando area.

  Hands trembling, I sat on the edge of the bed and turned to page 43, the seventeenth listing.

  Boss Lumber.

  I tried again, page 17, the forty-third listing.

  American Fidelity Bank.

  Bingo.

  Seven

  “Hey, Harriet,” I said into my cell phone as Tom steered us toward the interstate. “It’s Callie. I need some banking info.”

  “Sure,” Harriet replied. God bless her, she always knew when my tone meant “right away, no time to chat.” At the moment, though I was sure she was dying to ask me questions, she held her tongue. “What can I tell you?”

  “Can I get into a safety deposit box without showing ID?”

  Because Harriet had worked for a bank before becoming office manager of the J.O.S.H.U.A. Foundation, she was always my go-to gal for banking procedures.

  “Depends,” she replied. “Do they know you there?”

  “No. I’m trying to get into Eli’s box. But I feel sure they don’t know him, either.”

  “Hmm…” she said, and I could picture her chewing her pencil—or twirling it into her deep red hair. “There’s a chance they won’t ask, but if they’re doing their job right, they will. Everybody’s more careful these days, you know. If I had to lay odds, I’d say there’s about a ninety percent chance you’re gonna have to show your driver’s license to get into that box. And the name on the license has to match the name on the box or you’re out of luck.”

  “I was afraid of that,” I said.

  “Even if they don’t ask for ID,” she said, “you’ll have to sign the signature card, and it has to look just like the sig they already have on file.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said, wishing I could be the one to do this instead of Tom. Eli and I had learned to write each other’s signatures years ago, a skill that had come in handy considering the flow of papers that came through our office. Of course, I couldn’t exactly march into the bank now and claim to be “Eli Gold”—even if I could make the signatures match.

  “I mean, you can give it a shot,” Harriet said. “Ask for the box by number, and if they say ‘we need to see some ID,’ tell them you don’t have any with you but you’ll go get it and come back. Then hightail it out of there fast. Banks don’t look kindly on fraud. If they figure out you’re trying to get into a box that’s not your own, they just might call the police.”

  “All right, Harriet,” I replied, looking out at the flat Florida landscape. I could hardly believe only three days ago I had been relaxing deep in the Smoky Mountains. “Thanks for the advice.”

  “You okay, hon?”

 
“Yeah. I’ll call you when I have some time to talk.”

  “I’ll be holdin’ my breath ’til then, you know.”

  I disconnected the call and told Tom all that Harriet had said. The drive took nearly an hour, and we tossed out different options all the way there. Tom had some banking connections, of course, so there was always a chance he could pull some strings. But despite the influential names in his smartphone, he was doubtful any of them could give him access into another person’s safety deposit box—at least not without causing a big stir.

  I knew we could always go the police route and do this legally, but that would take too long—not to mention that then the police would confiscate the contents of the box and I would never get to see them at all.

  In the end we both decided that the quickest, easiest way to get into Eli’s safety deposit box was to take that ten percent chance the bank wouldn’t ask for ID. If our plan didn’t work, we would follow Harriet’s directive to “hightail” it out of there.

  Then we would decide on a Plan B.

  Once we reached downtown Orlando, the bank was easy to find. We parked on the street at a meter and then spent some time in the car with paper and pen as I tried to teach Tom how to write Eli’s signature. When he had the hang of it, we got out of the car and crossed the street to the bank.

  “It’s showtime,” he whispered as he held the door open for me.

  We walked across the lobby together, our footsteps clicking on the shiny marble floor. Shoulders high, Tom approached a bank representative confidently and announced that he would like to have box 1569 please. Then he glanced at his watch, insinuating he was in a hurry.

  “Of course,” the woman replied, and she walked immediately to a filing cabinet. As she turned to go, I noticed the red blush along her hairline, a common response to Tom and his handsome presence.

  I looked around the bank as we waited for her to pull the file, noting the beautiful ornate moldings that lined the ceiling. This was an older building, filled with elaborate architectural details, dignified whispers, and the distinctive smell of money.