“Mazie-mania,”
Labeck groaned. He switched off the TV. He rubbed his neck, probably to
demonstrate how painful sleeping on the sofa had been. He was wearing a T-shirt
and fresh jeans. He’d shaved, showered, and slicked back his wet hair. He
looked five years younger. “What is it with these people? What is it with me?
I’m in deep shit. I’ve aided and abetted a wanted fugitive.”
“You have no one
to blame but yourself. You
kidnapped
me.”
“Well, you’re
lucky I did or you’d be back in prison by now.”
I was hazy on the
details of the previous night. So much for not closing a single eye. The
Bushmills and the bath had turned me into a big, sleepy slug. I’d barely been
conscious as I’d pulled on a pair of Labeck’s pajamas and poured into his bed,
asleep before my head hit the pillow. Dumb, dumb, dumb! Would Doctor Richard
Kimble have been that trusting?
Labeck looked at
me. “You’re really a deep sleeper, you know that? You were out so deep I was
worried you’d died. I actually held a mirror under your nose.”
“I
was tired.
You
try sleeping in trees and barns.”
“I
thought maybe you were faking. I thought you’d scram the second I fell asleep.
Then it occurred to me that from my point of view, your sneaking out was the
best thing that could happen.” He went to his dresser and pulled out a wad of
crumpled but clean underwear. “I tossed your undies in the incinerator. Wear
these.”
A
wife-beater athletic shirt and a pair of tighty-whities.
Mazie Maguire,
cross-dressing convicted murderess.
Labeck’s
dirty clothes, neatly hung on the floor, rang. He picked yesterday’s jeans up,
pulled out a cellphone, listened. “Yeah, I saw the Mazie-mania thing. Yeah,
uh-huh, unbelievable. I’ll have the truck back by noon.”
He
turned and faced me. He folded his arms across his chest. “I didn’t sleep much
last night. I kept thinking about that nanny cam. Something about the whole
thing stinks. So here’s the deal. You’ve got two hours to convince me you
didn’t kill your husband. After that you’re on your own. Go find your precious
Brenner, who’ll turn you over to the cops faster than he can pocket a bribe.
And if you tell the cops I helped you—”
“I’m not a rat.”
If prison teaches you anything, it’s to keep your trap shut.
“Good. Get
dressed.”
“Not in front of
you, perv.”
“Honor system. We
turn our backs.”
Hah!
Prison doesn’t give you much respect for the honor system. But since I didn’t
have a lot of choice, I turned around. Then whipped around again to make sure
Labeck was keeping his part of the deal. He was. Which was actually kind of
ego-deflating.
“So
you’re saying the woman in the video wasn’t you?” Labeck said.
“No.
It looks like me from the back, but the face isn’t visible because of the way
the camera is angled.” I took off the pajama top and pulled on Labeck’s
undershirt. No digging straps, no jabbing underwires, just soft, ribbed cotton.
Men had it so good.
“I
want to see that video. Not the crap version that floated around the Web. What
happened to the actual nanny tape?”
I
thought for a moment. Did my lawyer have it? No—it hadn’t been a defense
item; it had been the DA’s slam dunk. Maybe I could call the district
attorney’s office. Yeah, that would work
. Come on down, Mazie—we’ll
hold the tape until you get here, heh, heh.
I pulled on the
men’s briefs. They felt weird—bulky and with flaps where I didn’t need
venting. “I think my mother-in-law must have the original tape,” I said. “She
made the prosecutors give back all Kip’s personal items, even the bloody
clothes and stuff.”
“That’s
kind of—”
“Freaky?
Macabre? Vanessa probably saved Kip’s nail clippings and nose pickings. He was
her baby, her reason for existence.”
“What
if you phoned her, asked if she had the tape?”
I
shuddered. “I think Vanessa can send death rays over the phone wires. She kept
sending me poisoned cookies when I was in prison.”
Labeck was silent
for a moment, apparently trying to decide whether I was serious. Then he said,
“Sounds like that woman is knitting with only one needle.”
Probably
another old Canadian expression, I thought, adjusting the waistband of the
briefs. If Vanessa had a knitting needle, she’d jab it in my eyeball.
“What
if we show up on her doorstep? Where does she live?”
“On
Lake Shore Drive. But there’s no way anyone can get in that house. Her security
system is better than Taycheedah’s.”
“Who
else lives there?”
“Her
housekeeper, Purvis Jackson. And a pack of dogs.”
“Big
dogs?”
“Little
runty dogs like furry piranhas.”
“Hmm.
This sounds like a job for the cable guys.” He went to his closet, rummaged
around in some cardboard boxes, then tossed me a navy twill shirt and matching
pants.
I
examined them. The shirt was a large, the pants were a medium, and they were
wrinkled as elephant skin. The name
Ben
was embroidered in red thread on
the shirt’s flap pocket. “Who’s Ben?”
“I
moonlighted for a janitorial service a few years ago. That was my uniform.”
So
his name was
Ben
? I pulled on the pants and shirt. I rolled up the pants
legs and shirt cuffs by a couple of miles and studied myself in the dresser
mirror. The clothes looked like they’d fallen out of the sky and onto my body
by mistake, but the excess shirt fabric camouflaged my bumpy parts.
Labeck studied
me, cocking his head. “Still needs something.”
“A tailor?”
Foraging around
in the closet again, he found a brimmed cap with a logo that was a cross
between the Starbucks mermaid and the U.S. Mail eagle. ABCO Systems, it read, a
name so generic it could have referred to a garbage pickup service or a search
engine.
I poked through a
desk organizer atop Labeck’s dresser, fished out a rubber band, and used it to
knot my hair into a ponytail, which I crammed under the cap.
“Practice
walking,” Labeck said.
Heaving an
exasperated sigh, I walked across the bedroom to the window and back.
“You walk like a
girl.”
“Well, excuse
me.”
“Ram
your hands in your pockets. Come down harder on your heels.”
I
tried it. I felt like a clodhopper. “How’s this?”
“You
look like a girl pretending to be a guy. Kind of bend your knees.”
I tried to think
like a guy. Did guys think? Maybe I ought to let my arms swing down to my
knees? Scratch my crotch?
“Okay, that was
amazingly awful,” Labeck said. “Try sitting.”
Tossing a stack
of newspapers off the only chair in the room, I sat.
“For God’s sake,
don’t cross your legs!”
I uncrossed them.
“Spread your
legs.”
I aimed an evil
look at him.
Pink washed
across his cheeks. “I mean, guys sit with their knees apart.”
Widening my
knees, I leaned forward. It made me feel assertive.
“I’m taking up
enough space for two people.”
“That’s the way
guys think. This is my area. Get the hell out of my way.”
I stood up. I
hulked across the room, remembering to bend my knees and come down hard on my
heels.
Labeck closed his
eyes and shook his head as though what he’d seen was painful. “It’ll have to
do. You’ve at least achieved Ru Paul.”
Escape tip #13:
Electricity and water don’t mix.
“This
is illegal.”
“Said
the convicted felon.”
“Murder
is one thing,” I said. “Driving around displaying the logo of the world’s
biggest cable company is another. They’re going to send you to Guantanamo.”
“Haven’t
been caught yet,” Labeck said with an annoying smirk.
Jailbreak,
auto theft, toilet vandalism—
now I’d have
impersonating a cable
repairman
tacked onto my list of crimes. Labeck and I were heading north
along Milwaukee’s Lake Shore Drive in the Channel 13 camera van—except
that the van no longer read Channel 13. A large vinyl sheet with the Cable King
emblem was taped up over the station logo on the side of the truck. Artfully
splayed wire dangled from the rear doors, obscuring the truck’s license plate.
“How’d
you get the fake sign, anyway?” I asked.
Labeck
grinned. “It’s not fake; it’s real. I can’t reveal my sources, being as how I’m
a respected journalist and all—but that sign has gotten me and my crew
into a lot of places we’d otherwise have been kicked out of. Everyone’s got
something wrong with their cable, so when Cable King shows up, we’re greeted
with hugs and kisses.”
“That’s
downright sleazy.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes we actually do
fix their cable.”
I sifted through the strata of junk
sloshing around the van’s floor—film canisters, old socks, road maps,
crumpled beer cans—and fished out a pair of sunglasses. I slid them on.
Maybe Vanessa wouldn’t recognize me. I’d just be the shrimpy assistant who handed
the burly guy his wrenches.
Vanessa
Vonnerjohn lived on Lake Shore Drive, Milwaukee’s Mansion Row. Here, the
Schlitzes, the Pabsts, the Millers, and the other beer barons had built their
small-scale castles in the days of no income tax and indentured servants. The houses
were set far back from the street on lawns large enough to support herds of
polo ponies, so close to Lake Michigan that on windy days, spray from the waves
drenched the back patios.
Vanessa
had originally been a Brenner, a member of the Brenner brewing clan, a family
whose fortune had been built on Milwaukee’s most famous product. She’d grown up
in the city, but had gone east to attend Radcliffe. Although she was a baby
boomer, Vanessa had missed all the turbulence of the sixties. While her classmates
were marching against the Vietnam War and burning their bras, Vanessa was
collecting cashmere sweaters, dancing at charity balls, and waiting around for
a man from a Good Family to marry her.
She’d
settled on Christopher Vonnerjohn. Brewery Fortune, meet Plumbing Fortune. Beer
and toilets, was that a marriage made in heaven? Apparently not—the
Vonnerjohns weren’t quite up to snuff by the standards of Milwaukee’s high
society. Christopher Vonnerjohn was one of the toilet tycoon’s numerous
grandchildren and had inherited a measly one-eighteenth of the plumbing pie.
The home he’d purchased for his new bride was puny by North Shore standards,
more a large house than a mansion: three stories, built of pale sandstone that
turned gold in the light of the setting sun, with towering faux chimneys
designed to give it a Jacobean appearance. Vanessa had always considered the
house second-rate, but Kip told me he loved growing up there; it was perfect
for rainy day hide-and-seek, with odd nooks and crannies and old wooden
wardrobes that looked as though they might lead to Narnia.
I
pointed out the Vonnerjohn driveway. We drove around to the service entrance at
the rear of the house. “Vanessa will know she didn’t call for cable repair,” I
said, suddenly panic-stricken as it sank in on me that we were actually going
to go through with this.
“Nah—that’s
the beauty of being a cable guy. You can waltz into people’s homes, tell ’em
you might have to shut down service for a while, and they let you do it. People
wait around for
months,
stay home from work, bend over backward just to
please the cable company jerks. The hard part is when the poor schmucks trail
along with you, explaining how the cable company screwed up their Internet or
begging you to set the billing department straight.”
“Now I feel even
guiltier.”
Labeck clamped
his hat on his head. “Let’s roll.”
We
got out and went around to the van’s rear doors. Labeck started hauling stuff
out. He handed me a spool of wire and an industrial-sized tape measure. “You’re
the scrub team,” he said. “While I fool with the TV, you sneak around
pretending you’re checking the outlets. Only you’re actually hunting for that
video, right?”
“You’re
crazy, you know that?”
“Crazy
like a fox,” Labeck winked at me. “What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll get
fired and you’ll go back to prison for the rest of your life.”
If I’d been shaking any harder I would
have set off a seismograph. My hands were so numb I could barely grip the
tools. Labeck hoisted a toolbox and a roll of orange cable, strode purposefully
to the back door, and rang the bell. We waited, my stomach plunging to the
soles of my clownishly-oversized sneakers. A minute ticked away. Then the door
jerked open. It wasn’t Vanessa, I saw to my relief, but Purvis Jackson, her
housekeeper, blinking in the bright morning sunlight, wiping her hands on a
towel. I fidgeted with the tape measure, keeping my head ducked so she wouldn’t
recognize me.