The Firm

On the dresser she found two key rings, eleven keys. Downstairs in the hall between the kitchen and the great room with a view of the beach, she found the mysterious locked door Mitch had found in November. He had paced off every room, upstairs and down, and determined this room to be at least fifteen by fifteen. It was suspicious because the door was metal, and because it was locked, and because a small Storage sign was affixed to it. It was the only labeled room in the condo. A week earlier in Unit B, he and Abby had found no such room.

One key ring held a key to a Mercedes, two keys to the Bendini Building, a house key, two apartment keys and a desk key. The keys on the other ring were unmarked and fairly generic. She tried it first, and the fourth key fit. She held her breath and opened the door. No electric shocks, no alarms, nothing. Mitch told her to open the door, wait five minutes and, if nothing happened, then turn on the light.

She waited ten minutes. Ten long and frightful minutes. Mitch had speculated that Unit A was used by the partners and trusted guests, and that Unit B was used by the associates and others who required constant surveillance. Thus, he hoped, Unit A would not be laden with wires and cameras and recorders and alarms. After ten minutes, she opened the door wide and turned on the light. She waited again, and heard nothing. The room was square, about fifteen by fifteen, with white walls, no carpet, and, as she counted, twelve fireproof legal-size file cabinets. Slowly, she walked over to one and pulled the top drawer. It was unlocked.

She turned off the light, closed the door and returned to the bedroom upstairs, where Avery was now comatose and snoring loudly. It was ten-thirty. She would work like crazy for eight hours and quit at six in the morning.

Near a desk in a corner, three large briefcases sat neatly in a row. She grabbed them, turned off the lights and left through the front door. The small parking lot was dark and empty with a gravel drive leading to the highway. A sidewalk ran next to the shrubbery in front of both units and stopped at a white board fence along the property line. A gate led to a slight grassy knoll, with the first building of the Palms just over it.

It was a short walk from the condos to the Palms, but the briefcases had grown much heavier when she reached Room 188. It was on the first floor, front side, with a view of the pool but not of the beach. She was panting and sweating when she knocked on the door.

Abby yanked it open. She took the briefcases and placed them on the bed. "Any problems?"

"Not yet. I think he’s dead." Tammy wiped her face with a towel and opened a can of Coke.

"Where is he?" Abby was all business, no smiles.

"In his bed. I figure we’ve got eight hours. Until six."

"Did you get in the room?" Abby asked as she handed her a pair of shorts and a bulky cotton shirt.

"Yeah. There’s a dozen big file cabinets, unlocked. A few cardboard boxes and other junk, but not much else."

"A dozen?"

"Yeah, tall ones. All legal size. We’ll be lucky to finish by six."

It was a single motel room with a queen-size bed. The sofa, coffee table and bed were pushed to the wall, and a Canon Model 8580 copier with automatic feed and collator sat in the center with engines running. On lease from Island Office Supply, it came at the scalper’s price of three hundred dollars for twenty-four hours, delivered. It was the newest and largest rental copier on the island, the salesman had explained, and he was not excited about parting with it for only a day. But Abby charmed him and began laying hundred-dollar bills on the counter. Two cases of copy paper, ten thousand sheets, sat next to the bed.

They opened the first briefcase and removed six thin files. "Same type of files," Tammy mumbled to herself. She unhitched the two-prong clasp on the inside of the file and removed the papers. "Mitch says they’re very particular about their files," Tammy explained as she unstapled a ten-page document. "He says lawyers have a sixth sense and can almost smell if a secretary or a clerk has been in a file. So you’ll have to be careful. Work slowly. Copy one document, and when you restaple it, try to line up with the old staple holes. It’s tedious. Copy only one document at a time, regardless of the number of pages. Then put it back together slowly and in order. Then staple your copy so everything stays in order."

With the automatic feed, the ten-page document took eight seconds.

"Pretty fast," Tammy said.

The first briefcase was finished in twenty minutes. Tammy handed the two key rings to Abby and picked up two new, empty, all-canvas Samsonite handbags. She left for the condo.

Abby followed her out the door, then locked it. She walked to the front of the Palms, to Tammy’s rented Nissan Stanza. Dodging at oncoming traffic from the wrong side of the road, she drove along Seven Mile Beach and into Georgetown. Two blocks behind the stately Swiss Bank Building, on a narrow street lined with neat frame houses, she found the one owned by the only locksmith on the island of Grand Cayman. At least, he was the only one she’d been able to locate without assistance. He owned a green house with open windows and white trim around the shutters and the doors.

She parked in the street and walked through the sand to the tiny front porch, where the locksmith and his neighbors were drinking and listening to Radio Cayman. Solid-gold reggae. They quietened when she approached, and none of them stood. It was almost eleven. He had said that he would do the job in his shop out back, and that his fees were modest, and that he would like a fifth of Myers’s Rum as a down payment before he started.

"Mr. Dantley, I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve brought you a little gift." She held out the fifth of rum.

Mr. Dantley emerged from the darkness and took the rum. He inspected the bottle. "Boys, a bottle of Myers’s."

Abby could not understand the chatter, but it was obvious the gang on the porch was terribly excited about the bottle of Myers’s. Dantley handed it to them and led Abby behind his house to a small outbuilding full of tools and small machines and a hundred gadgets. A single yellow light bulb hung from the ceiling and attracted mosquitoes by the hundreds. She handed Dantley the eleven keys, and he carefully laid them on a bare section of a cluttered workbench. "This will be easy," he said without looking up.

Although he was drinking at eleven at night, Dantley appeared to be in control. Perhaps his system had built an immunity to rum. He worked through a pair of thick goggles, drilling and carving each replica. After twenty minutes, he was finished. He handed Abby the two original sets of keys and their copies.

"Thank you, Mr. Dantley. How much do I owe you?"

"They were quite easy," he drawled. "A dollar per key." She paid him quickly and left.

Tammy filled the two small suitcases with the contents of the top drawer of the first file cabinet. Five drawers, twelve cabinets, sixty trips to the copier and back. In eight hours. It could be done. There were files, notebooks, computer printouts and more files. Mitch said to copy it all. He was not exactly sure what he was looking for, so copy it all.

She turned off the light and ran upstairs to check on lover boy. He had not moved. The snoring was in slow motion.

The Samsonites weighed thirty pounds apiece, and her arms ached when she reached Room 188. First trip out of sixty, she would not make it. Abby had not returned from Georgetown, so Tammy unloaded the suitcases neatly on the bed. She took one drink from her Coke and left with the empty bags. Back to the condo. Drawer two was identical. She fitted the files in order into the suitcases and strong-armed zippers. She was sweating and gasping for breath. Four packs a day, she thought. She vowed to cut back to two. Maybe even one pack. Up the stairs to check on him. He had not breathed since her last trip.