Episode 1:
Better Safe Than Sorry
Almost every Saturday morning during the spring and summer, one of the graduate students from the college in the town where I grew up would dress in black, paint his face white and act out, in complete silence of course, funny things for the change people gave him when they walked by. He did this at the corner, at the top of the “Main Street” that led to the harbor in our little city, just off the Chesapeake Bay. It was the corner where my dad worked, in the old four-story, red-brick building set back from the street, in his office three floors up. He had his own business as some kind of marketing and financial consultant. Beyond that, I'm not exactly sure what he did, but then neither was he. Mostly, he used to tell me whenever I asked, he did what he had to do. He would laugh when he said that, and told me I'd understand what he meant someday. I didn’t tell him then, but I already did.
Well, in any case, it was an almost perfect day. Not too hot and not too sunny, with some darker clouds here and there that threatened to rain, but wouldn't dare. I was walking up the street with Rollo, my cat, who I'll tell you more about in a minute, almost thirty minutes early to meet my father for lunch, when I looked up to see the college kid doing his act, and then higher up to see a safe. That's right, a big, black safe, with a combination dial in the middle of the door, the kind you might have seen on the floor of some office in the old days, before they had drive-in banks and electronic money. There it was, dangling on its way down to the street, hanging from a portable crane someone had set up on the fire escape near my father's office window. Looked pretty rickety, I remember thinking. And just then, when it swayed in the wind, obviously too much for the rope and pulley holding it up to handle, the safe fell. I mean, it dropped from the third story, rolled on its side on its way down and fell – “Ka-boom!” – on top of you-know-who performing his act on the corner plaza below.
Needless to say, this was a considerable catastrophe for the actor, not to mention a matter of substantial interest to me, personally, given that the safe was coming, so it appeared, from my father's office. The good news about this event was that it afforded me the opportunity to begin this extraordinary story with that traditional, well, almost traditional fairytale opening.
Once upon a mime, in the small, Chesapeake Bay town where I grew up, something so amazing happened to Rollo and me, I just had to write about it.
My name is Elizabeth. I'm fifteen, just barely, and my cat, Rollo, he’s three. Rollo and I, but especially Rollo, are still recovering from the recent loss of our mutual good friend, Sam, the old Beagle who lived next door until the Levinsons moved away at the beginning of the summer. The Levinsons named him Sam after the private detective in an old Humphrey Bogart movie, “The Maltese Falcon,” that they still show sometimes on TV, in the middle of the night, that I watch sometimes on the weekends and when my parents are out of town. They named him after Detective Sam Spade because he was so curious about everything and was always sniffing around.
You see, my parents got Rollo for me when he was just eight weeks old. Not knowing all that much about being a cat, he spent most of his time playing outside with Sam, as well-trained and sharp a hunting dog as you could imagine. Rollo went just about everywhere with Sam, sniffing at this and that, growling and barking as good as he could, doing his best to imitate Sam's every move. Well, Sam is gone now and, as far as Rollo is concerned, it's up to him to carry on the way Sam would have. So now you see why Rollo thinks he's a dog. Other than me, I think Sam was the only real family Rollo ever had.
By the time... Wait a minute. It just occurred to me that you might have the impression that Rollo is some cute little, roly-poly ball of fur, with a demure... I like saying that word, “demure.” Lots of outward lip movement. As I was saying, with a demure, high-pitched, Disney “Meow.” Not even close. Forget that concept entirely. Rollo is the size of an adult Beagle, with a deep, often loud and sometimes-booming voice. He’s huge. His head, oversized. A bulky animal with powerful forearms, and shoulder and hind leg muscles you can see rippling when he walks, through the coarse and uneven black, gray and brown hair on his back and shoulders. And vocal? You’ve got to be kidding. This is one talkative furry creature. And not just an occasional grunt or growl, mind you. No, no. Frequent and lengthy whole sentences. We talk all the time, although it was mostly just me for the first year after we brought him home. Not any more. I speak English and he makes noises back to me. Who knows exactly what he’s trying to say, although, for the most part, I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring that out. And I know he knows what I’m talking about. No doubt about it.
As I was saying, by the time I got to the corner, it was all I could do to see between the people in the crowd that had formed around the student and the safe lying on top of him. An ambulance came and took him away. Through some miracle, he didn't seem to be all that badly hurt. (I guess the bushes around where he was performing had softened the blow.) Good news, but then his condition has nothing to do with this story. The police were there too, questioning everyone, including my father who had apparently just driven up and was parking his car when it happened. The safe having fallen from the fire escape just outside one of his office windows, the police were understandably interested in hearing what he might know about what happened.
Standing near my father on the corner, I remember him talking to the one officer in a suit, the one with a small notebook he was using to take notes – which, geez, I just realized, is probably why they call it a notebook. (I really need to pay more attention to things like that.) “Why don't we go upstairs, Officer, and take a look?”
“It’s ‘Detective.’”
“Of course. ‘Detective,’” my father repeated his title respectfully. “..I know about the safe, but I haven't the slightest idea how it got outside,” my father told the detective, looking up at his floor-to-ceiling office window behind the fire escape. “Sugar,” my father, seeing me standing there a few feet away on the edge of the crowd, motioned for me to come closer, which I did. I always liked seeing “The Daddy,” which is what I called him sometimes. “When we get upstairs, I want you to call Mommy and have her pick you up. This is going to take a while. Maybe you guys can meet me for dinner.”
“Sure, Dad,” I assured him, “but not until I hear what you and this policeman are going to talk about,” I thought to myself. I looked at Rollo and he looked at me. “Meeeeark!” It was the odd sound he made whenever he tried to bark, but I knew that he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Me, too, Rollo.”
“You mean, you weren’t moving the safe into your office when this happened?”
“No, Detective. We brought it up in the elevator early this morning, although the elevator hasn’t been working since then. …Looks to me like someone was trying to take it out of my office.”
“What exactly do you keep in it? Money?”
“No, Detective,” my father was quick to say, just in case one of the people milling around outside was listening, “but let’s go up to my office. We’ll talk about it there.”
When we got upstairs, I called my mother and sat quietly with Rollo in the large room where my father had his desk, the one with the window along the fire escape where someone had tried to take out the safe. “Please sit down,” my father suggested to the detective, holding out his arm, pointing to the wooden guest chair next to his desk, across the room from where we were sitting on his leather couch.
“The safe belonged to my father. Apparently, it was the property of a land development company he owned with a partner years ago, out west. It just turned up, for some reason. I don’t know the precise circumstances yet, except that an attorney in Denver, who used to work for my father, sent it to me.” He paused for a moment while he peered through the blinds behind his desk at the policemen and others still working around the safe on the plaza below his window. “I didn’t even know it was coming until it arrived earlier this morning. ...I
’ve got to get some people to bring it back up here,” he mumbled that last sentence, talking to himself.
“And what exactly was in it, Mr. Coleman?”
“I haven't the slightest idea. It just got here a few hours ago, locked tight. There was no combination in the letter from the attorney, so I hired a locksmith to come in on Monday and open it for us.”
The detective was on his feet now. Walking behind by father’s desk, he pulled down on the cord to the right, raising the blinds quickly to just above his short, heavy, five-foot-something frame. Looking out the window at the safe lying on its side, he pointed out the obvious, “No need for that now. Either whoever took the safe opened it first, or the fall must have done it.”
Just then, there was knock on the glass of my father's office door. Without waiting, another policeman came in. This one was wearing a uniform. “Lieutenant? Can I talk to you for a moment?”
“Go ahead, Frank. I want Mr. Coleman to hear this.”
“Well, the safe was..” Just inside, standing on the Oriental rug that covered most of my father’s wood floor, the policeman looked over at Rollo and me sitting on the couch. “Whoa. Is that a cat?!” He was kidding, of course, probably thinking he was being funny.
“Yes,” was the only answer I gave him, wondering, for Rollo, what exactly he meant by that question.
“Big,” he observed, staring while he shook his head up and down, every so slightly.
Rollo just looked up at him, mostly with his eyes, muttering “Mmuh” – which was Rollo-speak for “Duh?” – just loud enough for me to hear, wondering sarcastically if he was the first cat the officer had ever seen.
“Get to the point, Frank.”
“Of course, Lieutenant.”
The officer was holding a small notebook like the detective’s. Personally, I preferred the full-size kind, with the spiral on the left of the page, that I already had open in my lap. “If he had a backpack,” I remember thinking to myself, “he’d have been able to carry a larger notebook instead of one that had to fit in his shirt pocket. I mean, how many words can he write on a page in that thing?” In any case, he wasn’t looking at it.
“It was empty,” the policeman reported, “except for some loose papers and some files. From what we can tell, it had been opened and left unlocked. I think the fall did more to the brick pavement and that college kid than it did to the safe.”
“Any prints?”
“All over it. Myra’s working on them now. Said we could be looking at twenty or more different people. It’ll take her until tomorrow to sift through them all. The good news is that we grabbed two men in a blue pickup that one of the witnesses saw blow out of here just after the safe hit the pavement. Both men were seen running out of the building and getting into the pickup truck they had parked in the loading zone out front. One witness, a man from the shoe store next door, said he thought he remembered a cream-colored panel van parked behind the truck, like they were together, but he wasn’t sure.”
The Lieutenant turned to my father, “You say your elevator’s been out since this morning?”
“That's right,” I said to myself turning to Rollo, “that's why they tried to lower the safe out the window! More to the point, they must have been in a hurry, worried that we might open it first, to have risked taking it out in broad daylight.” Rollo, looked at me as if he’d already figured that out, but only for a moment, turning back quickly toward my father so as not to miss a thing he was going to say.
“It's been shutting down, on and off, for the past few weeks. I'm not sure when it broke exactly, except that it was working this morning when the delivery people arrived. ..I've started walking up the stairs. My daughter,” he smiled, looking over at me, “recommended it for the exercise.”
“And she's right,” the detective said, looking over at me, rubbing his stomach under his tie while he walked toward the door, his shirt straining a bit around the couple of buttons above his belt. “We could all use some of that. ..Oh, Mr. Coleman, we need you to come down to the station with us, just in case you recognize either of the two men we're holding.” As it turned out, they were just a couple of kids some other men had picked up at the last minute to help them move the safe. They got scared when it fell, and ran when they saw that other people were coming to help.
“What about the safe?”
The other policeman, the one in uniform, had the answer. “Your maintenance man is coming over with his keys to turn on the elevator. He says it works, but keeps breaking down so frequently, he's afraid someone might get stuck, so he's turned it off for the weekend since most of the offices here are closed until Monday. You can have it brought up as soon as my forensics team is done with it.”
“I’ll have them put it in our storage room.” My father pointed to the door just to the right of his worktable across the room, at the other end of his suite. “What do you think? An hour or so?”
“Yeah. An hour at most.”
“Good. Elizabeth, you lock up when they leave, when Mommy gets here.”
“If you could look through the papers we found inside, as soon as you can,” he put the originals down on my father’s desk. “We made copies on your machine, for our records. Let us know what you find, and if you think it has any bearing on what's happened.”
“Glad to, Officer. I'll go through them tomorrow and,” looking down at the numbers on the business card the Lieutenant had given him, “fax you an inventory with my notes.”
“Great. Com’on. I'll give you a ride to the station and then have someone bring you back for your car later.”
“Sugar, have them put the safe against the wall on the right, just inside the door. We've already got too much junk in ‘the cave.’” That's what he called it, the part of his L-shaped store room that turned left into what used to be a piece of the office next door. It was dark and crummy back there where he kept rolled up maps, boxes of old files and supplies he had no place else to keep. “Put these papers inside for me,” he tapped his forefinger on the binder and loose papers too close to the edge of his overcrowded desk. “I want to keep them separate from all this other stuff. But, whatever you do,” he slowed down the way he always does when he wanted to make sure I got the point, “don’t let them close the door all the way, not until I get a locksmith to figure out or reset the combination. Mommy will be here in a while. You and Rollo stay inside and wait for her.”
“No problem, Daddy,” I responded with considerable confidence and that air of professionalism I'd heard him use when he was doing business. Besides, there wasn't much Rollo and I couldn't handle. I had my backpack with me, an absolutely essential piece of support gear for every fledgling writer and anyone who might get into trouble now and then as, inexplicably, I seemed prone to do. I had my dad’s old Leatherman combo knife and tools. A Baby Ruth, which I prefer to Snickers. Two spiral pads and two pens, just in case. Miniature, high intensity flash light with an extra battery. Couple of heavy duty rubber bands, because you never can tell. A small plastic bag with the “nuggets” Rollo eats, and a plastic atomizer – I love that word, as if spraying it would cause something to disintegrate. – filled with water in case one of us gets thirsty. Rollo opens his mouth and I spray some at his face. A small pack of Kleenex that my mother gave me, and a third of a roll of toilet paper, because you should see some of the bathrooms I’ve had to use in an emergency. And then there’s always the woods. It never hurts to be prepared.
Well, needless to say, the men who brought up the safe weren't out the door on their way back down the stairs before Rollo and I were in the storeroom. “Click.” (I hit the light switch.) Hmmmm. No windows in the storeroom and the overhead light in the front part, just inside the door, was the only one that seemed to be working, but then that's where the safe was. It was a big safe, up on four wide iron wheels. I'm already five four, and still growing, but I could barely see over the top if I lifted myself up on
my toes. There was a single dial in the front, with a large handle to the left of it. It had been painted, more than once maybe, covering over some writing that I could feel through the most recent layer of paint, maybe the name of the manufacturer or the company that owned it, but I couldn’t make out much except what appeared to be the word “Denver.” The whole surface was badly scratched and there was rust in some places where the paint was gone. Still, it was a formidable looking thing. Well worn, but just about indestructible. Three stories down to the brick pavement, and not a fresh dent I could find. (Lucky for the safe, the mime must have broken its fall. Not so lucky for the mime.)
The door to the safe was just barely open. With its hinges on the right, I had to walk past the door to open it. “Rrrrrrrrr,” it creaked loudly, taking both my hands to push it back, partially blocking the storeroom doorway. Rollo jumped right in, but not all the way before I grabbed him and shoved him out. “Not so fast, Rollo.” I started to set the papers down on the floor of the safe, but thought it best to look around first. Who knew? Maybe there was something the police had missed. There were no shelves or interior compartments, but you never can tell. Reaching as far as I could with my right hand, the papers under my left arm, all I could feel was the rough, cool walls of the interior. “Hm. Nothing,” and so I put the papers down on the floor of the safe in front of me.
“You know, Rollo, maybe we should..”
“Murr-errk?”
“Exactly, but we have to be careful not to mess them up.” Bending over, I leaned in as far as I could and still use the light coming from overhead. My knees were on the open edge of the door where it sloped down in small steps that matched the door when it would shut. By force of habit, I’d thrown my backpack ahead of me, toward the back of the safe. Peeking inside the binder on top, I pulled its contents halfway out, lifting up the first few pages until one in particular caught my attention. “‘DEED OF TRUST.’ Seems the man owned some property in Colorado,” I commented to Rollo who was perched on my back, his neck sticking out as far as it would go, turning his head left and right as if he could read – and I wasn’t entirely sure he couldn’t. “And look at this. It's a letter he wrote by hand. ‘January 4, 1948...’”
I had just started to read it out loud, sitting there on my knees, leaning into the safe with Rollo behind me, when I thought I heard something being dragged across the floor. When I read something, I tend to be so focused that I don’t pay attention to what’s happening around me which explains how it is that I miss what my mother tells me. “Honey, I’m going out,” she’ll say, assuming I’ve just been sitting there waiting for her to say something. “Be sure to..,” whatever. No wonder she thinks I’m ignoring her. I am, but it’s for technical reasons, not because I don’t care. ..What am I talking about? (I tend to be easily distracted.) Back to the safe in my father’s office.
“Meooooak!” Rollo dug his claws into my sweater – I hate it when he does that. – but not well enough to prevent him from being ripped off my back, like something had yanked him by his neck.
“Rollo!” I shouted at him, turning first to my right to see where he had gone. Then the dragging noise again to my left. Dropping the papers, I whirled back toward the other way. Looking up, blinded by the exposed bulb in the ceiling, all I could see was a large dark form. “HEY!” It was all I had the time to say before two large arms, one on my back, the other holding my leg, lifted me up – “STOP IT!!” I shouted. – and shoved me into the safe.
“ROLLLLLOOOOO!!! Go get Daddy!!” And the door of the safe slammed shut behind me, squishing me against the back interior wall and my backpack. Pitch black. No light and hardly enough space to turn around. Hearing the “chunk” of the bolt, I knew I was locked in, but I turned, which wasn’t easy, and pushed with my feet against the door anyway, as hard as I could. “LET ME OUT OF HERE!!” I was sure they could hear me because I could hear them, more or less. What a racket. “MRRRRR!! Meooarkkkk!!!” Sam, the dog, would have stood his ground, and that's exactly what Rollo was doing. His instinct was to protect me, not run like most cats would have. Sam had taught him well. There were thrashing noises, and then the sound of what must have been the open metal shelves that held the supplies falling over.
Rollo wasn't all that big, but he was fearless, and he could leap like crazy – and lightening fast when he had to be. From the sound of things, he was giving whoever was out there one heck of a fight. “Rollo, GO!! RUN ROLLO! GET OUT!!! YOU'VE GOT TO GO FOR HELP!” I thought, for a moment, I had heard other voices, but couldn’t tell through the thick iron walls that surrounded me. “ROLLLLLOOOOO!” And then nothing. Quiet. And a moment later, that dragging sound again. Two, three and four times, before I couldn't hear it any more.
Now what? “Rollo?!” Nothing. Okay, okay. Got to be calm. Checking my watch, I pressed the light button. 1:20 PM. Couldn't be more than 10, maybe 20 minutes of air in here, 30 at best I figured, but what did I know? My mother should be here soon. Balled up the way I was, I could barely move. And all this shouting and heavy breathing hadn't helped a bit. Had to conserve on my air supply. Opening my backpack I got out my flashlight and Leatherman. “Rollo!!” Still nothing. “CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME?!!” Zero.
Shining the light on the inside of the door, I could make out a plate over almost the entire surface, held on by a dozen or so Phillips screws. Perfect! Maybe, if I unscrew these, I can get to the lock mechanism, throw the bolt. My knife has a screw driver.... Easier said than done. The safe was old, and the screws rusted and hard to turn. Just two screws later, and 8 minutes had gone by. Shoot, I don't feel well. “Rollo? Are you okay, Rollo?”
To be continued...
And so we leave our heroine and her trusty cat, Rollo, for now. Will she escape or will help come before she passes out? ...or worse?! Is help on its way? And, Heaven forbid, will this be Rollo’s only episode? ...Are you kidding? Hey, they don't call him, “Rollo, the Wondercat” for nothing! Besides, who do you think is telling this story?
“Sorry, Rollo, but I’ve got to get to class. Young Elizabeth,” I liked talking about myself that way, “will just have to hold her breath until I get back.” Rollo got up quickly and began to follow me out. “Not this time,” I reminded him, bending over to rub his head. “You stay here and watch out for stuff. I’ll give you my ‘English Lit’ notes when I get back.” He answered, nodding his head in agreement. “Let me know if any birds show up at the window feeder.”
As for the rest of you, stay tuned for another exciting installment of “The Adventures of Young Elizabeth and Rollo, the Wondercat who thought he was a dog?” Same time, same station. Be there, or... We’ll just have to find out what happens together, when I get back.
* * *