The Escape Diaries (19 page)

           
The
back of the photo had a scrawled name,
Luis,
and a phone number in what
looked like Kip’s handwriting. I turned the photo over again. Was the boy in
the snapshot
Luis
? He wore only navy running shorts with striped sides,
the kind of shorts that double as swim trunks for poor kids. He had unruly
black hair, an undercut jaw, and the scrawny arms and legs of a kid who’d grown
up hungry. The man, by contrast, was beefy and muscular, with a bit of a belly.
 

The man looked
vaguely familiar. Something niggled at the back of my mind.

“Hey—check
this out!” Labeck sounded excited. He pointed at the screen. He’d rolled the
videotape back to the beginning, to where Kip is sitting in his office. He
zoomed in on the computer sitting on Kip’s desk, then zoomed again, angling in
on the bottom corner of the monitor. The date and time numbers went big and
blurred, then jumped into focus.

           
“Notice
the date?” Labeck asked.

           
9/22.

                 
But
Kip had been killed on September twenty-fifth.

           
I
stared at the numbers. “Probably a glitch in the time-setting program.”

           
“That
can be tested for, if we can get hold of his computer. But here’s something
even weirder. Watch.” He rewound. Black screen, then Kip appeared, sitting in
his office. Labeck stopped the video. “What did you see?”

           
 
I shrugged. “Nothing.”

           
“Exactly!
The camera was motion-sensitive, right? It started recording when it sensed
movement. But there’s just a long black stretch of . . . two minutes forty
seconds in real time before the murder takes place. Why didn’t the camera start
recording when Kip entered the room and sat down? This video is like a movie
set, where somebody yells
Action
and the camera starts rolling. Where’s
the day-to-day stuff that went on in that room? Where’s the film of the last
owners, the ones who installed the nanny cam in the first place?”

           
He
fast-forwarded. The woman in the nightgown walked in, shot Kip again. The lamp
tipped, plunging the room into darkness. “Now, afterward you see everything
that happened. You see the tape activate when the bug guys enter the room.
Here’s you, running into the room, still wearing your pajamas. Here’s where the
EMTs arrive, here’s the police. Everything gets recorded right up to the point
where—”

Vanessa arrives,
starts shrieking, flings herself on Kip’s body, jabs a finger toward the video
camera. A police officer climbs up on a chair and reaches toward the camera,
his face growing large in the lens. A hand blurs the screen, there’s a
somersault of images, then everything goes black as the camera is shut off.

           
“And
check this out!” Labeck rewound to where the woman in the nightgown entered the
room. Zooming in, he froze the image on her feet. “Those are the ugliest female
feet I’ve ever seen.”

           
 
I had to agree. They had big, misshapen
toes and tufty hairs on the knuckles.

           
“I’ve
seen your feet,” Labeck said. “Those are not your feet.”

           
“That’s
not the rest of me, either.” I was starting to feel excited.

           
“Is
that your nightgown?”

           
“Yeah.
But I never wore it. My cousin gave it to me for Christmas. I wrote her a gushy
thank-you, then I stuffed it away in a closet.”

           
Labeck
banged his fist down on the table. I jumped. Muffin growled. “I can’t believe
you were convicted on the basis of this piece of shit!”

           
The
door rattled, Muffin set up a frenzied yapping, and Bob called from outside the
door. “You jerkin’ off in there or what, Labeck? Gangbanger shootout at
Twenty-ninth and Center—gotta roll.”

           
“Be
right out,” Labeck called.

           
Turning
to me, he dug in his pants pocket, handed me a set of keys. “I’ve got to go. Take
my car—it’s the blue Volks in the lot—and drive back to my place.
Straight
back
.
”

He gripped my
upper arms, made me look at him. “Mazie, are you listening?”

Mazie.
So
now we were on a first-name basis?

“Wait at my
place. Keep the door locked. Don’t try to drive to Illinois or run around
hunting for clues or act on whatever other harebrained impulses occur to you.”

This brought
out my Miss Orange Jumpsuit scowl.

He released
his grip. “I can trust you, right?”

Who did he
think he was, giving me orders?

I flashed him
my sincerest con smile. “Sure. You can trust me.”

Escape tip #15:

When the going gets tough,

the tough stop and ask:

“Why the f **k am I doing this?”

           
 
Forty-five minutes later I was zipping
into a parking slot in downtown Milwaukee. I’d been forced to bring Muffin
along because he’d have attracted too much attention left back at the station.
He’d ridden shotgun, standing on the seat with his nose pressed to the window,
barking to alert me to passing cars, garbage cans, blowing paper, and other
dangers.

I parked in the
trendy Third Ward, where old warehouses had been converted into lofts and
condos and where Labeck’s Volks would blend in with the Priuses and Mini Coops
favored by the resident hipsters. Taking the toolbox and clipboard, I got out.
Muffin shot out like a small, hairy torpedo and immediately attacked a flock of
sparrows on the sidewalk. I’d have to ditch him somewhere in the city, maybe
stick a label on him and drop him in a mailbox.

           
I
found duct tape in the toolbox, tore off a strip, and taped Labeck’s keys to
the car’s rear wheel well, a trick I’d picked up from a Taycheedah inmate
busted for running a chop shop. Later I’d contact Labeck and tell him where he
could find his car. I quashed my guilt pangs by reminding myself that I was
doing him a favor. The more distance I created between us, the safer Labeck
would be. Irving Katz hadn’t struck me as the kind of fed who made idle
threats; I was taking his obstruction of justice warning seriously. Labeck
didn’t deserve going to jail because he’d allowed himself to get sucked into my
mess.

I was starting to
trust Labeck, which worried me. The man was contradiction piled on
contradiction: gentlemanly enough to allow me to hog his bed while he slept on
the sofa, but boorish enough to watch while I took a bath. He possessed the
rogue mindset of a clever criminal, yet he was cautious and clever enough to
not get caught. He was overbearing, chauvinistic, and treated me as though I
had brains of suet. On the other hand, he’d fed me supper, analyzed the nanny
cam video, and lent me his car.
 

Fortunately, Ben
Labeck’s quirks were no longer my concern. I was ditching him, Volkswagen and
all, before he wound up in prison, too. Right now I had to focus all my energy
on staying free.

Snatching up the
toolbox and clipboard, I strode off.
Radon-Man,
saving the city from
radon, whatever radon was. The day was unseasonably hot and humid. Everyone
else was wearing shorts or skimpy skirts, and I was dying in my heavy twill
shirt and pants. My cap kept sliding down over my ears and the toolbox bumped
against my thighs, growing heavier with every step. My pontoon-boat shoes
smacked against the pavement like Play-Doh being flung against a wall.

           
 
Muffin was having the time of his life,
lolloping along without a leash, wee-weeing at every hydrant, terrorizing
pigeons, drinking out of rain puddles. I walked faster, hoping to shake him.
Radon guys didn’t go around with their little doggies. “Scram,” I hissed at
him.

 
          
He
ignored the order and tagged along, looking happier than I’d ever seen him, his
small red tongue outthrust, not even giving the ankles of passing pedestrians a
second glance.

It was a ten-minute
walk to the corporate headquarters of the Brenner Brewing Company, which sat in
massive splendor above the east bank of the Milwaukee River. A knockoff of the
German Renaissance style, it was built of cream city brick with a black slate
roof like scalloped licorice and a twelve-story clock tower. The beer baron who’d
commissioned the building had wanted to cap the tower with a forty-foot-tall
beer stein that would flip its lid on the hour, wafting buckets of beer suds
over the city—
it’s
three—hic!—o’clock—
but
more sober heads had prevailed, and the tower had been topped with a ho-hum
copper dome.

Sweaty after my
ten-block walk, I gazed up at the building’s top-floor windows. Kip’s office
used to be up there. Back in our early days, when the marital waters were clear
and unruffled, I’d often popped in on Kip so we could go out for lunch. To get
into Kip’s office, though, I had to pass through his secretary, Freda
Schermerhorn, who guarded Kip’s inner sanctum like Smaug defending the gold in
the Lonely Mountain.

“Did you phone
ahead?” Freda would inquire. “He’s busy, you know.”

It didn’t matter
to Freda that I was Kip’s wife and that the only thing I might be interrupting
was Kip’s forwarding dirty jokes on interoffice email; I still had to be vetted
and approved before she buzzed me in. It was annoying, but at least I didn’t
have to worry about Kip enjoying nooners with Freda, who was twenty years too
old to be his type. I think she lived in terror that Kip would pension her off
and replace her with some cute young bon-bon. Hardly likely, since he couldn’t
have functioned without Freda’s help. She wrote his reports, compiled his
statistics, and fibbed for him when he came in late. She dropped off his dry
cleaning, waited in line to buy him Bucks playoff tickets, and lent him pocket
change when he was broke. All this for a salary one fourth of what Kip made.

It was painfully
obvious that Freda was in love with Kip and I’d felt sorry for her, a lonely
middle-aged woman who lived only to make her boss’s life run smoothly. I took
her out to lunch every couple of weeks and invited her to join my book club. We
discovered that we shared an enthusiasm for Ruth Rendell mysteries and secretly
adored Harry Potter. Our mutual enthusiasm for books formed the basis of a
tentative friendship, and when Kip was murdered, Freda at least didn’t jump on
the send-the-bitch-to-the-slammer bandwagon.

The police had
interviewed Freda at the time of Kip’s murder, but she’d always insisted that
there was nothing suspicious going on at the company, nobody in Kip’s circle of
business acquaintances who’d have reason to kill him. But wasn’t it possible
that Freda knew something without realizing she knew it? She might possess some
tidbit of information that when pried loose, would prove to be the clue that
would point to Kip’s murderer. “I suddenly remembered,” she would say. “Mr.
Vonnerjohn was financing a Colombian gun cartel and was getting threats from a
New Jersey gambling syndicate.”

Imagination. A
shiny helium balloon with an unfortunate tendency to rip loose from the
moorings of reality and soar off toward Never-Never Land.

Obviously I
couldn’t just brazenly march into the building and knock on Freda’s door, not
with every security guard in town slavering over that five-grand reward. I
could try the radon scam again, but the Brenner building had its own full-time
staff of gas sniffers, official types who wore uniforms and IDs on lanyards.
They’d spot me as a phony the minute I walked in.

I glanced at
Muffin, who was snuffling around a
Keep Milwaukee Clean
trash barrel.
Gingerly I poked at a soggy Waffle House bag. Could fast food be my ticket to
the top? The Brenner staff, who liked to believe they were so overworked they
barely had time to scratch their own butts, were always ordering out. Delivery
guys waltzed in and out of the building all day. I pulled an Erbert &
Gerbert
sack out of the trash and peeked inside. Corned beef on rye with
a single bite chomped out and a side of slaw. Muffin climbed my leg, trying to
get at the rank-smelling stuff.

“We can do better
than this,” I told him. The dopey dog seemed to be bonding with me and if I
didn’t keep him occupied, he might try to follow me into the building. Shoving
my toolbox out of sight under a bush, I started hauling trash out of the
container and spreading it across the sidewalk.
Mazie Maguire: Murderer, Car
thief, Litterbug
. While Muffin was occupied with a sack of goodies, I
picked up the Erbert & Gerbert sack and my clipboard and strode toward the
building entrance.

Heaving myself
through the set of heavy revolving doors, I studied the directory signboard in
the vast, marble-floored main lobby. Freda, I discovered, had been downgraded
to Data Processing and now resided in the basement.

This was bad. The
basement offices offered all the privacy of a football stadium.

Abort mission.
I about-faced.

Too late. An
authoritative voice rang out behind me. “Hold it right there, mister.”

Mister?
Did
he mean me? Slowly I turned around, keeping my head ducked. A security guard
was giving me the once-over.

“You got a
visitor’s pass?” he asked.

Heart knocking
against my ribs, I pretended to read from my clipboard. “Delivery,” I muttered,
drawing on my natural alto. “Corned beef for Schermerhorn, B eighty-nine.”