“You’re not using
enough antiseptic,” Labeck pointed out. “A big, tough convict like you is
scared of a little sting?”
I scowled.
Keep
it up. Let’s see how the little sting feels when I squirt it in your eye.
Before I could
consider eye squirting as an escape strategy, Labeck said, “You’re starting to
get pruney. Let’s get you out.”
Let’s get you
oot.
You can take the guy out of the tundra, but . . .
I was willing to
bet my secret decoder ring that the big lout
was
Canadian. Evidence A:
the Manitoba cap. I was probably one of the few Americans who knew that
Manitoba was not somewhere in Montana. Evidence B: The dead giveaway
oot.
I’d
spent six weeks in Montreal during junior year of college and that was how
Canadians talked.
Oot. Get oot of the warteh.
He
took a towel out of a cupboard. It was the kind of towel men like: sheet-sized,
white, no frou-frou. He bent and all in one easy movement yanked the shampoo
bottle out of my hand and hauled me out of the water. So much for my
gonad-whacking plans. In seconds I was all mummied up in the towel. Labeck
unlocked the bathroom door. Keeping me close, he steered me to his kitchen and
shoved me into a chair.
“Move a single
eyeball toward that knife block,” he growled, “and I tie you to that chair.”
Escape tip #11:
Whiskey is the best anesthetic.
I
sat, too excited at the prospect of food to cause trouble. Labeck opened his
refrigerator, took out a frozen pizza, and popped it in the microwave. I gazed
around the kitchen checking for telltale signs of serial killer syndrome:
suspicious stains on the rugs, surgical instruments in the knife block, bone
fragments in the dish drainer. It was an ordinary-looking kitchen with lots of
white appliances and a big round pedestal table possibly inherited from a
great-grandparent. Labeck took two cans of ginger ale out of the refrigerator,
popped them both, and handed me one. I took a gulp, experiencing a rush as the
tiny bubbles fizzed up my nose. Go a long time without carbonated beverages and
you learn to appreciate life’s little pleasures. I belched in a spectacularly
unladylike way.
“How
long since you ate?” Labeck asked.
I
had to think. “Not counting jelly beans? Two days.”
Labeck
opened the fridge again, took out a round plastic container, and set it in
front of me. It was a divided veggie tray, the kind supermarkets sell to people
who don’t have time for a lot of fiddly peeling and chopping. Broccoli, cherry
tomatoes, celery, and baby carrots, served with a tiny container of dill dip.
The vegetables were crisp and fresh. In prison we never had fresh veggies. They
were always out of a can, cooked to mealy mush.
We will serve no pea before
its time.
I left the
tomatoes alone. Everything else I wolfed down like a starving hyena snatching a
kill away from lions. My mother would have been aghast that I hadn’t said thank
you, but I figured that captives had no obligation to be polite to their
captors.
A prisoner’s
first duty is to escape.
I’d read that in a book about a World War Two
prisoner of war camp and was totally on board with that program. Rations first,
though. Can’t go digging tunnels on an empty stomach.
Labeck leaned
back against the counter and watched as I stuffed. “Don’t like tomatoes?”
“They fight
back.”
He picked up an
innocent-looking cherry tomato and bit into it. Seeds and juice squirted out,
dribbling down his shirtfront. He looked extremely stupid. I laughed out loud.
Couldn’t help it; the chortle just bubbled up, as unstoppable as a fart. I
tried to disguise it as a cough. This man might have the desiccated remains of
a dozen women stashed in his closets and I didn’t want to be the thirteenth. He
turned and reached for something behind him, possibly a garrote to strangle me
for daring laugh at him.
Not a garrote. A
ceramic cookie jar shaped like a pumpkin. He plunked it onto the table. “Help
yourself.”
Oreos! Real, live
Oreos, no mistaking those decadently dark circles of crisp chocolate layered
with creamy white frosting. Dessert before the meal—this guy was a rule
bender for sure. Possibly that could work in my favor. I felt a tiny flicker of
hope. If he’d intended to kill me, he would already have done so, wouldn’t he?
No. I quashed the
flicker. Maybe he was an eat-first-dismember-later guy.
Labeck watched as
I demolished a cookie in two bites.
“My girlfriend
always took the cookie apart and licked the filling. Sometimes she didn’t even
eat the cookie part.”
He had a
girlfriend. That made him seem normal. On the other hand, he’d used the past
tense. She might have infuriated him by licking the filling first. Maybe her
rotting body lay beneath the floorboards. Did I dare ask him whether his
girlfriend was still alive?
No. Dangerous
territory. I took another Oreo, recalling a survival tip I’d picked up in
prison.
To fend off an assault, make yourself as unattractive as possible
.
I chewed the cookie but allowed the crumbs and gunk to stay on my teeth.
The grimy teeth
bit wasn’t working. Labeck wasn’t averting his eyes. And he had a one-track
mind; he studied me cooly before reverting to his truth-seeking quest. “That
nanny cam tape,” he said. “If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
I chewed on
another Oreo. “I don’t know. Nobody else could have been in our house.”
“You’re
certain of that? Where were you when your husband was shot?”
“In
our guest bedroom. Asleep.”
Labeck
cocked an eyebrow. “You and your husband—what was his name again—Kip?
You didn’t . . . uh . . . sleep together?”
“Not
after I found out he was bonking Miss Upper Crust.”
“The
other woman.”
This was good.
Talking to the bad guy was good. Rule number two for staying alive in the
clutches of a potential psycho killer:
Get him to see you as a person.
The
more he learned about you, the harder it would be for him to carve out your
heart and stick it in the freezer between the microwave burritos and the
Klondike bars. So I prattled on, Mazie the motormouth.
“It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d
picked someone predictable—a lingerie model or yoga instructor. Instead
he went for
Prentice Stodgemore
. God—even her name was boring.
We’d see her at parties. I’d be pigging out on the angels on horseback—”
“The what?”
“Oysters wrapped
in bacon.”
Probably Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t know his appetizers either.
“But
Prentice would be nibbling from a baggie of carrot sticks she brought along. I
guess she was terrified she might blimp up to a size two.”
Labeck looked
startled. “Is there such a thing?”
I tried to imagine
what it must be like belonging to a gender that never worried about fitting
into its pants.
“Trust me on
that. Anyway, Kip started seeing Miss Trust Fund when they both served on some
charity board. I guess wiping out illiteracy or saving the rain forests wasn’t
easy, because Kip and Prentice were forced to meet for a lot of ‘working
lunches.’ I found out later that what they were
working
at was screwing
each other silly.”
It was hard
picturing anyone doing the deed with Prentice, though. Those collarbones would
rip you to shreds. I toweled my wet hair with a corner of the bath sheet.
“Maybe it was her money that revved Kip’s engines. Oldy, moldy money. Shake her
family tree and the DuPonts and Vanderbilts start falling out.”
“What about you?
No silver spoons in your family?”
“Nope. We eat
with our hands.”
Labeck cracked a
grin.
Hmm.
“I think Kip was
attracted to me at first because I was different from the women he usually
dated. Maybe he married me to spite his mother—to prove she didn’t
control him. But she had the last laugh. When he married me, she cut off his
allowance.”
“You’re kidding,
right? The guy was what—thirty years old and he’s still getting an
allowance?”
I spoke through a frenzy of crumbs.
“Kip was
thirty-two when we got married. And Vanessa—that’s his mother’s
name—had always footed his bills. When Mommy Dearest turned off the money
faucet, Kip blamed me for it. He still had his nickel-and-dime trust fund and
his salary, but it wasn’t enough.”
“What did your
husband do for a living?”
“He worked for
his uncle’s company, Brenner Brewing. He was a VP in some department where he
couldn’t do much harm. But his wages were being garnisheed. Kip didn’t tell me
this before we got married, but he’d invested a big chunk in real estate just
before that whole bubble burst. He ended up owing his creditors a lot of money.
They got a court order to take what he owed out of his wages. But Kip didn’t
understand the concept of cutting back. He was spending way more than we could
afford, and the bills were piling up. He even—”
I stopped,
feeling a flush creep from hairline to neck.
“Come on, just
between us girls here.”
“Kip only made a
small down payment on my engagement ring. But he didn’t keep up the monthly
payments, so . . .”
“The Mafia came
and chopped off your finger?”
Even after five
years the memory still stung. “I had to return the ring to the jeweler.”
Taking a deep
breath, I continued. “Kip and I starting fighting a lot. I’d cry, he’d walk
out. I’d grovel and Kip would sort of—well, you know how you peel off a
puppy who’s trying to crawl up your leg? I thought we were just going through a
rough patch. The marital advice experts all say that’s normal in the first
couple of years. So I tried seducing Kip back into my arms. I starved myself,
tried different makeup, new hair colors, new lingerie . . .”
“Did it work?”
“Kip liked the
lingerie. He liked the sex. Only he wasn’t . . .”
There.
The
man I thought I’d married was no longer present. Maybe he’d never been there in
the first place. Maybe I’d been so dazzled by the man I’d created in my mind
that I’d never seen the shallowness at the core of Kip’s personality.
The two-minute
warning signal on the microwave pinged.
“I found out that
Kip was seeing Miss Junior League, but I didn’t have the guts to confront him.
We started avoiding each other. This wasn’t hard since our schedules were so
different. Kip stayed out late most nights and slept late in the morning. I was
out of bed and driving to work by the crack of dawn.”
“Wait—you
were married to one of the Vonnerjohn heirs and you still worked?”
“How else were we
going to make our mortgage payments? I taught high school music. Which is a
damn tough job—I was ready to crawl into bed by ten o’clock every night.
Kip and I communicated by notes.”
Each note a little
more hostile.
Buy
toilet paper.
Your
mother wants you to call her back.
Keep
your goddamn pantyhose out of the sink.
Refill
the ice cube trays! In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have a butler!
Third
notice from the security company. Pay the bill, for Christ’s sake!!
Turn
the kitchen faucet all the way off. Water dripped all over the floor last
night.
F.
U.
“Instead of
telling me face-to-face he wanted a divorce, Kip stuck the divorce papers on
the refrigerator with a Scooby Doo magnet. And attached to that was a legal
notice requesting that I
quit the premises
within thirty days.”
Labeck
took out the pizza, set it on the counter and started slicing it. “You were
being kicked out of your own house?”
“Yes.
Even though we’d used
my
money to make the down payment.”
We’d bought a
two-story colonial in Whitefish Bay, a pricey Milwaukee suburb. It was a step
down status-wise from Vanessa’s River Hills neighborhood, where the homeowners
mulched their flowerbeds with thousand-dollar bills and even the garbage
collectors had PhDs. Still, Whitefish Bay was an expensive neighborhood.
Somebody should have thrown a bucket of ice water in my face and told me I was
biting off too much house, but I was in the throes of first love and wouldn’t
be talked out of my rose-covered cottage fantasy.
Unfortunately,
the reality of keeping up a house and yard soon dampened the warm glow of new
home ownership. “I was the one who mowed the lawn, cleaned out the gutters, and
caulked the windows,” I told Labeck. “All the maintenance work Kip never
learned growing up as a poor little rich boy. I started to feel resentful. He’d
spend his weekends whacking golf balls while I spent mine whacking crabgrass.
It turned out that the house had problems I couldn’t fix—the roof needed
replacing, we had a centipede infestation, and the basement walls were
cracking.”
So was our
marriage. The bloom was definitely off the rose by our second year of wedlock,
and I had learned to my bitter regret that
caveat emptor
ought to apply
not just to picking out a long-distance carrier or a Blu-ray TV but to choosing
a spouse. “A week after he served me with divorce papers, Kip was shot to
death.”