The Keyholder

The key was brass, heavy, and it belonged to a storage unit on Santa Monica Boulevard that Jack Murphy had no business opening. But Jack was a keyholder, and a keyholder opens doors. That's what he told himself, anyway. It was easier than admitting that the woman who'd handed him the key had looked at him with eyes that said she knew exactly what kind of man he was and didn't care.

Her name was Valerie. Valerie Stanton. She wore black silk dresses and moved through Los Angeles like a shadow that had learned to walk in daylight. Her husband was Carl Stanton, a man who dealt in land and influence and the kind of power that doesn't need a badge to be effective. Jack knew this because Mike Kovac, his old comrade from the war and now a badge-wearer for the LAPD, had told him over cheap whiskey at a bar on Temple Street.

"Stay away from the Stantons, Jack," Mike had said. But Mike also gave Jack the key, which was contradictory in the way that Los Angeles contradictions often were.

The storage unit was on the second floor of a concrete building that smelled of dust and old cars. Jack picked the secondary lock—habit, not necessity—and pushed the door open. Inside: a single cardboard box, no furniture, no boxes of old magazines. Just the cardboard box, sitting in the centre of the empty space like a question mark.

He opened it. Inside was a photograph. A woman standing in front of a window, sunlight pouring through the glass behind her. She was beautiful in the way that women in photographs are beautiful—frozen, silent, unable to tell you whether they were happy when the shutter clicked or terrified.

On the back, in handwriting that had faded to brown: Sunset Apartments, 414. Unit 3B.

Jack put the photograph in his coat pocket and closed the door. He walked to his car, a Ford that started more often than it didn't, and drove to Sunset Apartments.

The building was white, which in Los Angeles meant either rich or trying very hard to look rich. Unit 3B was on the third floor. The hallway smelled of lemon polish and something underneath it that Jack couldn't identify. He knocked.

She opened the door wearing a housecoat the colour of dried blood. Valerie Stanton. Up close, she was older than the photograph—thirty-two, maybe. Old enough to know better. Young enough to not care.

"You're the locksmith," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I am."

"You opened the unit."

"I did."

She looked at him for a long moment, then stepped aside. "Come in."

The apartment was large and cold. White furniture, white walls, white carpet that Jack was afraid to walk on. It looked like a showroom, not a home. Valerie sat on the edge of a white sofa and crossed her legs.

"What did you find in the box?"

"A photograph. Of you."

She smiled. It was a small smile, not happy. "Did you look at it?"

"I did."

"Did you recognize me?"

Jack considered this. "I recognized a face I thought I'd forgotten."

This was true, though he didn't know why. The photograph triggered something in the back of his mind—a memory from before the war, before Chicago, before he'd learned to be the kind of man who opened doors for people he shouldn't. Something about sunlight and a woman's face and a feeling he couldn't name.

"Why did my husband give you the key?" Valerie asked.

"Your husband didn't give me the key. Mike did."

"Mike Kovac." Her smile disappeared. "How generous of him."

Jack left without asking what she meant. He drove back to his shop on Venice Boulevard, a small room with a sign that said Murphy Lock and Key and a counter that had been scratched by a thousand nervous hands. He sat behind the counter and thought about Valerie Stanton and the photograph and the feeling that something was moving around him like a car in the night, headlights off, getting closer.

He started watching her. Not stalking—watching. There's a difference, or there was, before Los Angeles taught him that differences were just flavours of the same corruption.

He saw her every night at the same bar, a place on Sunset Strip that was dark enough to hide and bright enough to be seen. She sat in the same booth, ordered the same drink—neat whiskey, no ice—and waited for someone who never came. Jack sat in the corner, drinking beer and watching the door, the way he'd watched doors in the war, expecting enemies or friends and sometimes not caring which.

One night, Carl Stanton came to the bar. He was a big man with a big car and the kind of face that smiled easily but didn't reach the eyes. He sat with Valerie for ten minutes, said something that made her laugh without smiling, and left. Jack watched him walk to his car and drive away, and he felt the way you feel when you're standing on the edge of something and you can't tell if it's a ledge or a diving board.

He dug deeper. The public records office at City Hall was warm and full of men who moved slowly and spoke slowly and knew everything. Jack asked about Carl Stanton's land deals. The clerk, a man named Frank who owed Jack a favour from the war, pulled the files and spread them out on the desk like a hand of cards.

"Stanton's got his fingers in a lot of pies," Frank said. "But the big one's in South LA. Land that belonged to a Jewish family before the war. The Rosenbaums. They had a property near Exposition Boulevard. Big piece. Stanton bought it for pennies after they 'left for California.' Everyone knows what that means."

Jack knew. Everyone in Los Angeles knew. The war had displaced thousands of people, and the people who had land and money had made sure to be ready when the displaced needed to be displaced again.

"But the Rosenbaums had a daughter," Frank continued. "A daughter who married into the Stantons. Or was supposed to. Nobody talks about it."

Jack felt the car's headlights get closer. "Valerie," he said.

"Valerie. Yeah."

The pieces were coming together, and Jack knew that in a normal story, the hero puts the pieces together and does something noble with them. But Jack was not a hero. He was a keyholder. And a keyholder opens doors and walks away.

Except he couldn't walk away. Because that night, back at his apartment, he found the photograph on his table. He was certain he'd left it in his shop. Someone had been there. Someone had taken it and brought it back with a note:

*Some doors should stay closed. –V*

Jack sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the photograph. The woman in the sunlight. The woman who was not Valerie Stanton but Valerie Rosenberg. The woman who was not waiting for someone but waiting for the right moment to destroy someone.

He understood then that he had been used. The key, the storage unit, the photograph—it was all a test. Valerie needed to know if he was the kind of man who asked questions or the kind who opened doors and stayed silent. He had passed the test. And now he was part of something he didn't understand.

He went to see Mike Kovac. Mike's office was on the fourth floor of the LAPD building, and it smelled of coffee and cigarette smoke and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from seeing too much of the same thing.

"Valerie's not who she says she is," Mike said before Jack could speak. He looked tired. Older than his thirty-five years. "She's the Rosenbaums' daughter. Her parents 'left for California' in 1943. She stayed. She married Stanton because marriage gave her access. To his records. To his contacts. To the people who helped her parents leave."

"Why didn't you arrest him?"

Mike laughed. It was not a funny sound. "Because Carl Stanton is the reason half the cops in this building have jobs, Jack. You think I don't know what he did? I know. Knowing doesn't fix it."

Jack left the station and walked to Sunset Boulevard. It was raining, which in Los Angeles means the sky cried for five minutes and then stopped. He stood under an awning and watched the cars pass, their headlights cutting through the rain like knives.

He thought about Valerie. About the photograph. About the way she had looked at him in her white apartment, knowing he was starting to understand and not caring whether he finished the understanding.

He thought about the storage unit. About the key. About the fact that he had opened a door that he should never have opened.

And then he went back to his shop, because that's what keyholders do. They open doors. Even when they know what's behind them. Even when they know they'll never close them again.

The photograph sat on his counter, face up. Valerie in the sunlight. And Jack, sitting behind the counter with a beer in his hand and a city full of locked doors around him, understood the bitterest truth of all:

He didn't regret it.