The Escape Diaries (29 page)

           
“Miller
time,” Rico said. “Anybody want a beer?”

           
“You’re
what—fifteen?” I sputtered. “Don’t they card?”

           
“Sixteen.”
Rico smiled smugly, patting his pocket. “I got ID that says I’m twenty-one.
Bought it over the Internet.”

           
“Your
funeral, homey,” said Eddie. “Princess Mazie?”

           
 
I shook my head. I didn’t need a beer
buzz to make me dumber.

           
When
he’d left, Eddie turned to me and asked, “So now you’re going to tell me what
this Luis business is about, right?”

           
I
hesitated, debating whether to tell him the truth. Stalling for time, I
stripped off the Zablocki sweatshirt and reached for the Brewers jersey. Eddie
leaned over to assist, his hands brushing against my boobs as he helped me pull
on the shirt.

           
“No
bra, huh?” he commented, sounding very interested.

           
“Deal
with it.” I elbowed Eddie’s groping hands away. I didn’t need
Corruption of
a minor
added to my list of crimes.

           
“How
come you’re changing?” Eddie asked.

 
         
“To
fake out whoever’s chasing me.” I was taking my cue from Doctor Richard Kimble,
who’d eluded his pursuers yet again by donning a green derby and joining
Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. In my Brewers blue-and-white-striped
jersey, I blended in with the baseball fans like a melting marshmallow in a cup
of hot cocoa. I pulled the Luis snapshot out of my pants, wiped off the dirt
smears, hand-ironed the creases, prayed it didn’t smell like pee, and handed it
to Eddie.
 

“Do you recognize
the boy in this picture?”
 

           
He
took it from me and studied it, a line forming in his smooth young forehead.
“Looks a little like Luis—like maybe when he was a kid. Who’s the
stoner?”

           
“I’m
not sure. You said Luis came to Milwaukee to kill someone?”

           
Eddie
nodded. “Luis told me he came here so he can find the guy who killed his
brother. I think this guy used to live in Luis’s village in Mexico.”

           
“Luis
didn’t tell you the man’s name?”

           
“Just
that he was some big shot
bolillo.”

           
“
Bolillo.
White guy?”

           
Eddie
nodded. He and Rico spoke perfectly ungrammatical Milwaukee English sprinkled
with
Calo
—pungent Chicano street slang. I’d heard enough of it
during my teaching years to be able to name every sexual organ on the human
body.

           
“The
guy had a nickname, though,” Eddie said. “He called himself Uncle Teddy.”

“Uncle Teddy?”
As in Teddy
Bear
?

           
“Yeah.
Luis, the dumb
ojete,
says he’s got to keep the real name secret because
Uncle Teddy is rich and powerful and if word gets out, he might send out his
bad guys to take care of Luis. Luis says he’s going to hunt down this
bolillo,
but it might take awhile. In the meantime, my mama helps Luis find a job over
in Piggsville, at this pickle plant where they ain’t too finicky about checking
papers. He does a lot of other off-the-books work, too. Like waiting tables or
patching roofs for rich people who slip him a C-note. Once he gets a couple
paychecks under his belt, Luis buys a gun. I found it when I snooped under his
mattress, looking for his dirty magazines.”
 

           
Rico
came back with a cardboard tray holding four cup of suds, settled back in his
seat, and started happily slurping away. I wondered how dumb a vendor would
have to be to sell him beer. Rico looked like he ought to be spending his
allowance on Pokemon cards.

 
          
A
food vendor came by and Eddie sprang for brats. I hadn’t had a brat since I’d
gone to prison. I moaned as I bit into it. Spicy pork sausage baptized in beer,
slathered in spicy sauce, and plopped inside a Kaiser roll. Heaven on earth.
Muffin got his very own brat, minus the sauce, and a paper cup of water. Eddie
and I had Mountain Dews. Rico had another beer.

By the time we
finished our brats and licked our fingers clean, it was the middle of the
sixth, time for the Racing Sausages. They trotted up to the starting line:
Italian, Polish, Hot Dog, and Bratwurst, all the old familiar sausages I
remembered from before I’d gone up the river. Then a new sausage, this one
wearing a sombrero, trotted up to the starting line.

           
“That’s
Chorizo,” Rico explained. He toasted the Mexican sausage with his third beer.

 
          
The
starter pistol fired and the Sausages sped around the bases, tiny arms and legs
pumping furiously. The Sausages, a Milwaukee icon almost as famous as Harley
Davidsons, are a gimmick dreamed up by a local meat company. They race one
another during the sixth inning of every game. One time a Pittsburgh player
standing on the sidelines stuck out his bat and tripped Italian, which resulted
in a sausage chain reaction collision. The player got a three-day suspension,
while the Sausages came out with a line of
Don’t Whack My Weiner
T-shirts and made a quick million.

Today, Bratwurst
won and jogged a victory lap.

           
Rico
booed loudly.

           
“Shut
up,” I hissed at him. “People are looking up here.”

           
“Sorry,
baby,” Rico smiled loopily at me and oozed back into his seat. Eddie rolled his
eyes so hard he may have sprained his eyeball muscles.

           
The
teams came back on the field and everybody settled back down. The warm sun was
making me drowsy. I shook myself awake. I couldn’t afford to sleep. I had
detective work to do. “You don’t know the man in the photo?” I asked Eddie.

           
Still
holding the snapshot, Eddie studied it carefully. “The white guy? No.”

           
Rico
leaned over and stared glassily at the Polaroid. “Looks like a
pederasto de
niño.
”

           
A
child molester.

           
Eddie
pointed at the boy in the photo. “The more I look, the more it looks like Luis.
And the big blond guy—maybe that’s Uncle Teddy.”

           
That
was what I was beginning to think, too. “When was Luis killed?”
       

 
          
“Let’s
see—some time in early fall about four years ago. Things were going good
for Luis that year. He moved out of our place, got his own apartment over on
National Avenue. School started and I didn’t see him much, so I figure he’s
okay. Then one night, must be the end of September, he phoned. He sounded
scared. Said the bad guys knew where he lived and they’d already whacked
someone.”

I was suddenly
very alert. “Who?”

“Didn’t say.
Maybe some fool Luis roped into his big revenge scheme.”

“Did Luis know
Kip Vonnerjohn?”

“That’s the guy
you were married to, right?”

“Right.”

“The guy they
said you killed.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“So you ask did
your husband and my cousin like, know each other? Nah. Luis didn’t even legally
exist in this country, and your hubs was a rich bitch from the North Shore. So
where are them two going to meet, at the charity ball?”

Where
were
those
two going to meet? Good question.

           
“So
anyway, Luis phones me, he’s drinking, raving, scared. I tell him he should go
to the police with what he knows. Being deported is better than being killed.
But Luis just hangs up.” Eddie crushed his soda can and set it under his seat.
“Three days later the cops come to our door. Say they found a body they think
is Luis’s, want Mama to go to the morgue and do a positive ID. I don’t want
Mama to face this thing alone, so I go with her. Gruesome, man. Someone done a
number on him before he died. Cigarette burns, broken ribs, face all cut up,
ring finger cut off. The police think it’s gangbangers. They say Luis maybe
tried to screw them on drugs. But the cops don’t waste a lot of time on Luis.
He’s just another dead gangbanger far as they’re concerned.
Quien da una
mierde?
Who gives a shit?”

           
“Was
he shot?”

           
“No.
Get this, Mazie—he died from a heart attack. That’s what the autopsy
said.”

I blinked.
“The guy was what, in his twenties?”

           
“Maybe
what they were going to do to him was such bad shit he was—”
 

“Asustato a la
muerte,”
Rico supplied.

“Yeah,” Eddie
said. “Scared to death.”

God.

“Anyhow, a couple
days later Luis’s landlord calls,” Eddie went on. “Says Luis’s apartment was
broke into and we better take care of it. The place was destroyed, like ripped
to pieces. So Mama and me, we clean up the mess. Only when we clean his
cupboards, I find this key taped to the bottom of Luis’s Cocoa Puffs box. He
loved those little chocolate crunches, ate ’em like candy. Didn’t care they
were for kids.”

           
Eddie
took out his wallet and removed a small brass key with the number 1019
inscribed in the head. “I figure it’s a lockbox key and I get excited, thinking
I’m going to find thousands of bucks stashed away in some bank lockbox.”

           
I
took the key from him and examined it. “Lockbox keys are longer.”

           
“Yeah,
I found that out. I took it to some banks. They just laughed at me.”

           
The
Brewers’ heaviest hitter came up to the plate. He slammed the first pitch into
far left field, tripling in two runs. Tied game. The crowd came to life,
cheering and whistling. Rico whooped and hollered, sloshing his beer on Eddie
and me.

           
“So
then I figure it’s a locker key,” Eddie said once things quieted down. “I try
every place I can think of, the lockers at the bus station, the Amtrak
station.”

           
“The
storage area in his apartment?” I turned the key in my hands, as though it
could reveal its secret by touch.

           
“I
looked.
Nada.
So after I think of all the places Luis the moron would of
hid money, I try the places he
wouldn’t
of. The colleges where they rent
lockers by the semester, the malls—”

           
“The
YMCA?”

           
“I
tried the downtown one and the ones in the ’burbs. No sale.”

           
The
Cubs coach trotted out onto the field to argue with the first base umpire.

           
“What
about that place he worked at?” Rico was slumped down on his spine with the
cardboard cup holder crammed on his head like a sun visor and his beer balanced
on his belly. “Higgledy Piggledy Pickles.” He belched. “Or whatever they call
it.”

Escape tip #24:

 
Never trust any food that

 
can run
faster than you.

We both stared at
Rico. I examined the key again. The dull brass glinted in the sunlight. “This
place is where?” I asked Eddie.

           
“Piggsville.”
He was starting to sound excited. “It’s worth a shot.”

           
 
Rico lurched to his feet and reeled into
the aisle. “Gonna hurl.”

           
 
Eddie groaned. “I better go with him.”

           
 
I palmed the locker key—a skill I’d
picked up in my cellblock’s Pickpocketing 101 course. It’s easy: you just have
to momentarily distract your mark, and Rico had provided the perfect
distraction. The boys ran down the ramp leading to the indoor concourse. I
hoisted Muffin into my backpack and hurried after them.

           
Rico
dived into the nearest mens’ john. Sounds of copious upchucking came from
inside. “Maybe you ought to go check on him,” I told Eddie.

           
Eddie
hesitated, shot me a mistrustful look, then pushed through the door. The second
the mens’ room door swung closed, I took off. Sorry, fellas. Better hurt
feelings than a juvie record. Slipping the locker key into my backpack and
tugging my hat brim, I hurried along the concourse, heading for the exit. I
wanted to get into that pickle factory and look for a locker marked 1019. Of
course with my luck this would turn out to be a wild goose chase, but for now
it was all I had to go on.
 

As I approached
the escalator that led down to the exits, a door on my right marked Employees
Only
opened. Two Racing Sausages emerged and stood there, blocking the
aisle, staring at me. Polish Sausage wore a racing cap and a striped T-shirt.
Hot Dog, an anemic peach color, looked like a big penis wearing a baseball cap.
Chorizo slumped between them, looking like a deflated balloon. Only it wasn’t
Chorizo, I realized; just his costume, a bandito-mustached head topped with a
giant sombrero.