“With a shoestring I just happened to have in my pocket? Or did I tell Rhonda to stand still while I unlaced my shoe?” Labeck is probably the coolest person I know. He treats most provocations with mockery or laughter. But now I saw him truly angry, his jaw clamped so tight the cords in his neck strained.
Josie held her hands up. “Oh, simmer down, Boney. I’m on your side. I’m just telling you how Trumbull will sell it to the judge. He’s already obtained a search warrant for your car and apartment.”
“Seriously?” Labeck stared at Josie.
“Serious as death, Boney. Next Trumbull is going to request that a judge issue a warrant for your arrest. He’ll say you were the only one with motive, opportunity, and the strength to do the deed. When Forensics discovers that it’s your skin beneath Rhonda’s nails, they’ll nail your hide to the wall.”
“This is all bullshit.” Labeck looked disgusted.
“I know. What can I tell you? Trumbull’s got a one-track mind. And right now it’s tracking on you.”
Our sandwiches came and we dug in. Sloppy joes on kaiser rolls, potato chips, and dill pickles so sour they puckered my mouth. The sloppies, whose secret ingredient, I’ve heard, is tapioca, were so good I was unable to use my usual strategy of saving half for my next meal. I had to stop myself from licking the plate.
“What I don’t get,” Labeck said, “is why whoever killed Rhonda dragged her body outside onto the lawn?”
“Maybe it’s a sick joke,” Josie said. “Here’s the neighborhood slut, out sunning for the last time.”
“When we find the guy who did it, we can ask him,” I said.
Labeck glared at me. “There is no we. You are going to stay out of this, Mazie.”
“The hell I will. I’m already involved, remember?”
“This thing could get nasty. I don’t want you getting hurt.”
Same old overprotective Labeck, treating me like a Fabergé egg. I opened my mouth to make a scathing reply, but Josie spoke first.
“Don’t fight, babies.” She pointed her pickle slice at Labeck. “You listen to me now, Bonaparte. I know how Trumbull thinks. He’s going to come after you tomorrow. He gets off on waking people at five in the morning, catching them asleep. You need to lawyer up. The second you’re busted, your lawyer steps in to handle things.”
Labeck nodded. “You’re right. I’ve already retained Maury Eisenberg.”
Josie whistled. “Lawyer to the stars. Pretty heavy hitter. Can you afford him?”
“He owes me a favor.”
The people who owed Labeck favors were coming out of the woodwork, and it struck me once again how little I actually knew about the guy.
Labeck looked at me. “You’re sure you want to get involved in this, Mazie?” I returned his gaze. My voice shook a little. “I’m sure.”
“All right. You are now my official fugitive advisor.” He glanced up at the beer poster above our table as he rose from the booth. “It’s time to grab my balls and strike.”
Chapter Fourteen
My cellphone video trumps your ten eyewitnesses.
—Maguire’s Maxims
It was six o’clock in the morning and a police officer named Melvin Stumpf was rapping his knuckles against the floorboards of my apartment, apparently on the theory that a secret underground hidey-hole lay beneath. His partner, a pinched-faced woman named Nadine Krumholz, was unscrewing the plates on the hot-air registers so she could peer inside.
When Stumpf finished rapping on the floor, he walked around opening closets, peeking under my sofa bed, and checking my kitchen cupboards. Krumholz opened my refrigerator. Maybe she came from a land where six-foot-two-inch males lived scrunched up among bottles of cranberry juice and doggie bags of moldy Panda Express, because I assumed they were hunting for Ben Labeck.
The officers had knocked on my door ten minutes ago, flashing a search warrant in front of my sleep-clogged eyes. Neither of them would answer my questions; they just kept repeating that they had legal permission to search the premises, and informed me that if my dog bit one of them I’d be charged with a misdemeanor for failure to restrain a pet.
Restraining my pet was not easy. Barking and growling, Muffin was squirming furiously in my grip, trying to get at the intruders so he could tear them to kibble. Muffin is a shih tzu–bichon frise about the size of a hairy jelly bean. He has soft, pale-gray fur, enormous black button eyes, and wiry white whiskers. He looks like a teddy bear who’s been demonically possessed by a wolverine. Technically, Muffin belongs to Vanessa Vonnerjohn, my ex-mother-in-law, but he’d switched his love and loyalty to me, and I was never giving him back.
If they were looking for Labeck here, that must mean he’d bugged out before they could arrest him. I smiled. They’d never find Bonaparte Labeck. He was too smart and waaay too sneaky to get caught.
Melvin Stumpf lumbered into my bathroom. A minute later he called out, “Ma’am, could you come in here and open this for me?”
Keeping Muffin clamped tightly in my arms, I walked the few steps to my bathroom. The officer was staring at a wicker laundry hamper whose lid was closed. Really, this was ridiculous. Did he think Labeck was hidden in my dirty laundry?
“It’s not locked,” I said. “You just open it.”
“This is a real nice hamper,” Stumpf said. “My wife would like a hamper like this. Where’d you get it?”
“Saks Fifth Avenue.”
“Really?”
“Nah. St. Vinny’s.” Same as everything else in this place.
“What’s going on in here?” inquired a voice from the doorway of my flat. Muffin detonated from my grip and rocketed to the door, tail wagging furiously. Magenta was here! Magenta, his hero! Magenta, dispenser of gourmet dog biscuits!
“I’m Miss Maguire’s landlord. I live in the apartment above and heard all the racket,” Magenta said, one hand laid dramatically to his heart. “People are trying to sleep.”
“Sorry, sir,” said Officer Krumholz. “But we have a warrant to search this apartment.”
Magenta scooped up Muffin and shook his head sorrowfully. “Mazie, Mazie, Mazie—have you been hiding men in here again?”
Both officers stared at Magenta. He was wearing yellow silk pajamas beneath an emerald-green bathrobe embroidered with sequined dragons. A sleep mask was pushed up on his forehead, his skin glistened with cold cream, and he wore a peach-colored patch between his eyebrows called a Frownie, which he claimed smoothed out his frown lines while he slept.
Magenta’s real name is Wally Pfluge, but he didn’t intend to go through life with a name that sounded like a drain cleaner, so he’d changed it to Magenta in honor of a character in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Like Cher, Madonna, Eminem, and Bono, Magenta possesses the larger-than-life personality to carry off a single-name name. He has hazel eyes, a wide, expressive mouth, and hair that until recently had been worn in a ponytail, but now was short and spiked, like peaky black meringue.
He’s the closest friend I’ve had since Gloria Dinkmeier got married and moved to New Zealand. He owns the building, lives in the apartment above his clothing shop, and rents me my flat at a monthly rate way below fair-market price.
“You’ve made a mess in here, officers,” Magenta scolded, looking around my flat. “I hope you’re planning to put everything back when you’re through.”
“We’re done here,” Krumholz said brusquely, and both officers shouldered past Magenta and left, not bothering to close the door.
I looked at Magenta. “That was bizarre.”
“That was beyond bizarre,” Magenta said. “And I saw that woman going through your purse.”
I snatched up my purse and began rummaging through it, feeling outraged. Root in my closets, ferret around my fridge, but keep your paws off my purse!
“Did she take anything?” Magenta asked.
“I have no idea.” I dumped everything out onto my coffee table.
“Mazie, that thing’s a landfill. You’ve got to
get organized.”
“I am organized. I’m prepared for life’s emergencies.”
“Check your wallet.”
I did. “Nothing’s missing.”
“Keys?”
“Here.”
“Cellphone?”
“Check.”
“Pills?”
“Motrin … let’s see … aspirin, Advil, Tylenol—”
“Omigod,” Magenta gasped. “She was planting something. Dope, bet you anything.”
We stared at each other. The penny dropped. “That’s why the other cop called me in to the bathroom,” I said. “He didn’t care about the stupid hamper. He was giving Krumholz time to stick something in my purse. Why would she—”
“So they can find the illegal substances later and arrest you. Those guys were Brookwood police, weren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“Then they must be acting under orders from that detective—what’s his name again, the one with the hideous comb-over?”
“Trumbull?”
“Right. So this guy arrests you for possession, then bargains with you. He drops the dope charges if you squeal on Labeck.”
“He can’t do that!” I sputtered, but I knew Magenta was right. Trumbull had one toe over the line between legal-but-dicey and “Fourth Amendment? What Fourth Amendment?”
Setting Muffin down on the coffee table, Magenta pointed to the mound of purse junk and commanded, “Find the bad stuff, boy!”
“Muffin is a lover, not a sniffer,” I said.
Ignoring both of us, Muffin hopped off the table, trotted into the kitchen, and sat down in front of the cupboard where I kept the doggie treats.
We went through every item in my purse. I flushed all my drugstore pills down the toilet, just in case Krumholz had substituted street drugs for over-the-counters, and tossed out my packets of gum, hard candies, antacids—even my mini-tube of toothpaste. If there’s one thing I’d learned in prison, it was that drugs have the pliability of Play-Doh: you could tart up amphetamines to look like Altoids, or barbiturates to look like Bubble Yum.
By the time I was finished, it was too late to go back to bed. I gave Muffin his breakfast, took him for his walk, then left him with Magenta, who would puppysit him in his shop while I was gone. Paranoia in full bloom, I drove to work, checking my rearview mirror about every five seconds.
It was still early when I arrived at Hottie Latte, and the Doyennes hadn’t yet shown up. I couldn’t blame them. It was a good day to sleep in: cold, dark, and drizzly. The sidewalks were already coated with a glaze of soot-speckled ice. Inside, my coworkers were clustered around Heidi, who was holding the morning newspaper. Weaseling my way between everyone, I scanned the lead article: Local Man Sought as Cougar Killer. The gist of the piece was that Benjamin Labeck, a cameraman at Milwaukee’s WPAK television station, was the chief suspect in the strangulation death of Rhonda Cromwell.
“They got his name wrong,” I said. “His real name is Bonaparte.”
“You know him?” Giselle asked.
Five pairs of eyes swiveled to me.
“We’re just sort of friends,” I mumbled.
“I wouldn’t settle for being ‘just friends’ with that man,” breathed Carleen, who was not letting the fact that she was the grandmother of four keep her from salivating over the photo of Labeck in hockey gear that appeared with the story.
“God, he’s hot,” breathed Heidi. “Check out that glint in his eyes.”
“Yeah,” said Samantha. “Those eyes are saying, ‘I’m betting you’re wearing your Friday-night-get-lucky underpants, but I’m going to find out for myself.’ ”
I skimmed the rest of the article. According to a police spokesperson, Labeck had admitted to being with Rhonda Cromwell the night she was murdered, and was believed to be the last person to have seen her alive. Physical evidence found at the murder scene linked Labeck to the victim. Pretty heavy-handed hinting there. This guy is guilty as sin, was the unsubtle message.
The other Hotties wanted to pump me for the down and dirty on Labeck, but the café got busy just then, the door constantly opening and closing, letting in cold air. I thought wistfully of how good a pair of long underwear would feel, and wondered whether Labeck was dry and warm or out walking the streets, soaked and freezing. His plan had been to hunt down leads on Rhonda’s murder, but I had no idea how he was going to accomplish that with his face all over the news and every eager-beaver citizen in town poised with fingers on the police-hotline speed dial.
I had some ideas of my own on hunting down leads, and during the late afternoon lull I approached Juju.
“Could I take off a little early? Like now?”
Juju was concocting her Starbucks-would-send-out-assassination-squads-to-get-this-recipe cocoa and looked up distractedly. “You’re not coming down with something, are you?”
Pneumonia from exposure to the elements, maybe. I was wearing a black lace teddy and high-cut bikini briefs from my personal lingerie collection, a special from K d’ Marte. “No, I’m fine. I just …”
“You’re worried about Mister Macho Man,” Juju said, eyeing me shrewdly. “You want to go out and track down leads, don’t you? In your place, I’d do the same thing, except my boyfriend is such a lowlife I’d turn him in and use the reward for a day at the spa. So what are you planning to do?”
“Talk to Rhonda’s ex-husband.”
“What if he’s the strangler? He might try to strangle you.” She wrapped her hands around her neck and made a grotesque face.
“You’re creeping me out.”
But she had a point. Recalling the way Freddy Cromwell had threatened me with spray paint in the CRS parking lot, I scanned Hottie Latte’s tiny kitchen for a weapon. A knife? The large serrated knife we used to slice bagels would never fit in my purse. Maybe I could squirt him into submission with a can of high-pressure whipping cream? Finally I concluded weapons were too much trouble and decided to just go with my usual arsenal—my ability to fudge, flatter, and fib.
As I left the café, the Doyennes of Decency, who’d been huddled in a dispirited clump over a heat grating, suddenly sprang into action and swooped in to attack.
“Hussy!”
“Harlot!”
“Floozy!”
A large woman with permed red hair frizzing around the edges of her parka hood stepped in front of me. “You should be ’shamed of yourself,” she said, breathing schnapps fumes in my face. “You’re a shameless schlut!” Spit sprayed with every S. “God is gonna send you to the hot place!”
“Don’t have time for this today,” I said cheerfully, attempting to weave around her. “Maybe we could make an appointment for you to harangue me tomorrow.”
“You little snotface!” She thrust herself in front of me, blocking my way, but suddenly lost her footing on the icy sidewalk. Panicked, she shot out a hand and clutched at me. I grabbed her arm, trying to keep her upright, then we both toppled to the sidewalk, the schnapps woman falling on top of me. Something tore in my back.
The Doyennes hurried over and helped Schnapps Lady to her feet.
“She pushed me,” the woman shrilled, pointing at me.
“Exactly what I would expect from one of them,” hissed Uncle Sam.
“They hate us because we tell the truth,” another Doyenne chimed in.
Juju burst out of the café, Samantha and Heidi on her heels, a trio of fire-breathing, teddy-clad Valkyries. “I saw it all,” Juju barked. “Mazie saved that woman from breaking her stupid neck. You okay, Mazie?”
“Yeah,” I said.
No. My back was killing me. I’d pulled something. Demons were ripping up and down my back, jabbing pitchforks into my spine.
“I’m gonna sue,” yelled the Schnapps Lady.
“I’m gonna sue you,” Juju shot back. She sniffed. “You’ve been drinking!”
“Have not!”
I rose to an elbow. Big mistake.
Juju bent over me and whispered in my ear. “La
y down. Play along.”
I played along. It was cold, but the hard sidewalk felt good against my back. Maybe I could just stay here, not moving, the rest of the day. Customers could step over me. I could stick out my tongue and drink sleet when I got thirsty. People might fling spare change to me.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” Juju said. “Then I’m going to call the cops and tell them how this drunk woman assaulted my employee.”
The protestors stared uneasily at Juju. “We got a right to be here,” a man quavered.
“You don’t have the right to knock people down,” Heidi snarled.
“I videotaped the whole thing!” Samantha held up her cellphone. “I’m uploading it to the Internet. I’m sending it to all the TV stations.”
All the steam leaked out of the demonstrators. Their signs drooped, their voices trailed off, and when the schnapps woman slunk away, the others followed.
“I didn’t really have my camera turned on,” Samantha confessed when they were gone.
Juju held a hand out to me. “Good acting, girl.”
“I wasn’t acting,” I said.
Chapter Fifteen
People only say “Not to speak ill of the dead” when they’re about to speak ill of the dead.
—Maguire’s Maxims
Juju allowed me to leave only after making me solemnly promise to drive myself straight to the nearest emergency room.
I promised, crossing my fingers behind my back.
I wasn’t going anywhere near an emergency room. I knew how it would go:
Me: I think I sprained my back.
Doctor: Do you have insurance?
Me: No.
Doctor: Do you have 750 dollars in cash?
Me: No.
Doctor: Go home and put a package of frozen peas on your back.
Forget it. I was going to handle things the Maguire way, which of course was also the deny-reality way—by toughing it out.
I drove north through rush hour traffic and pulled in to the CRS lot about twenty minutes later. I found a parking spot, turned off the ignition, and just sat there. My back had stiffened while I’d been driving, the demons upgrading from pitchforks to jackhammers.
Crazy for You: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 9