Legally Undead

by Margo Bond Collins

  “You’re going to blackmail the mob.” He wasn’t asking a question, but I answered him anyway.

  “I guess so.” I’m going to blackmail a vampire mob, I amended silently.

  “And you think that reporting them to the police will make you more of a target than blackmail?” Malcolm sounded incredulous.

  “I think that reporting them to the police might be less effective.”

  Malcolm didn’t say anything for a long time. He sat in his chair tracing the checkerboard pattern on the tablecloth. Finally he looked up.

  “How can I help?”

  I stared at him for a long time, unable to believe that he’d volunteered. “Why?” I finally asked. “You barely know me. I tell you that I’m about to start blackmailing the mob, and you want to help?”

  His look became more calculating. He opened his mouth and started to say something, then shook his head and closed his mouth again. Finally, he just smiled and said, “Let’s just say I have a savior complex. Along with my need to figure everything out.”

  I had met up with Malcolm planning to ask for his help, but now I found myself feeling suspicious. Sure, he could walk around in sunlight, but what if he really was connected to the vampires?

  Not that I had much choice if I wasn’t willing to drag my friends into it. And I wasn’t.

  So I took a deep breath and said, “Okay. I’m planning to break into a law office and look at files. Are you ready to do something like that? Something illegal?”

  He gave me another thoughtful look. “I’ll bet we can find a way to get them to let us in, completely legally.”

  “Legally?”

  “Yep. And they’ll never realize why we were really there.”

  He told me what he was thinking and we refined the plan over another two cups of coffee each. I had some research to do, but I was ready for it.

  I had help.

  I left the restaurant buzzed on caffeine and feeling prepared for anything.

  *

  Malcolm and I spent the weekend preparing for our undercover operation, which Malcolm took to calling “The Sting.”

  The first thing we needed, of course, was a way to get into the law offices, and Malcolm was in charge of that. The second thing we needed was time to search without being interrupted.

  I began by visiting the New York City Department of Records on Chambers Street on Friday morning. I had to show my ID and walk through a metal detector before I was allowed into the building. Good thing they didn’t have a wooden stake detector. As it was, the guard on duty looked at the chopstick in my purse with a certain amount of suspicion.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I use it to hold my hair back sometimes—I don’t like it in my face while I’m working.” To demonstrate, I quickly twisted the top part of my hair into a knot and stuck the chopstick through it. It held, to my great relief. This might be a great new vampire-repellent hairstyle.

  Satisfied, the security guard waved me through.

  It was still early, so there were a few microfilm machines left to rent. They quickly filled up, though, so I was glad I’d left the Bronx when I did. If I’d thought about it, I would have realized that lots of people do genealogical research in the Department of Records.

  I spent much of the day sorting through microfilm copies of the “docket books” for the building that housed Pearson, Forster, and Sims. By the time the Municipal Archives offices closed at 4:30, I had copies of the building’s blueprints.

  I stepped out of the building and turned my face up to the late-spring sunlight, stretching my arms above my head to work out the kinks from spending all day staring into a microfilm screen.

  I needed to pick up a few items before I headed back to the Bronx, so I made my way to 14th Street and ducked into the “Wigs and Plus” store. I came out sixty dollars poorer but one long, curly, black wig richer. With my medium-toned skin, it made me look like any of the locals in my neighborhood—vaguely Italian or Puerto Rican or Albanian. I also stopped at a Duane Reed pharmacy and picked up a handful of makeup, all in rich, dark tones that distinctly contrasted my usual neutral palette. The wig and heavy makeup would, I hoped, complete my disguise.

  When I got home, I found Malcolm leaning against the brown brick wall that made up one side of my building, his arms crossed in front of him, one booted foot kicked out in front of him, and a plastic Staples bag dangling from his left hand. He looked both completely at ease and anticipatory. I’m not sure how he managed that combination, but it was clear to me that he could hardly wait to show me something but was prepared to wait all day if necessary.

  “Hey,” I said as I approached him. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got the website ready to go. And I’ve got something else to show you.” He bounced up and down slightly on the balls of his toes, looking much like a five-year-old waiting to show off his new toys. As I unlocked the double doors leading into the building and headed up the stairs, he followed, digging a t-shirt out of the bag he was carrying. Once we were inside my apartment, he grabbed the shirt by its shoulders and shook it out.

  “Voila!” he said, grinning.

  The t-shirt itself was an unremarkable blue. On the upper left side of the front, however, it had a small round logo with a red apple and the words “Big Apple Citywide Cleaning Service” around it. He turned the shirt around to show me a bigger image of the logo on the back.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “You should be.” He grinned.

  “So? Let’s see the website.”

  He sat down at the desk and I stood behind him, leaning over his shoulder. I could smell his aftershave—a light, clean, slightly spicy scent.

  The website he pulled up was impressively professional-looking.

  “So when do we get going with this?” I was almost afraid to hear his answer.

  “All we need are the phones. I’ll drop the flyer with the coupon off at the office and see what I can do to sell them on the idea of a free cleaning.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” I could feel my stomach tightening with anxiety.

  “We’ll deal with it if it happens.” He put his hand on my shoulder.

  *

  Cell phone stores have proliferated in the Bronx in the last few decades. There’s one or two on virtually every block; we went to one on Fordham Road next to one of the ubiquitous jewelry stores. Getting a “business” cell phone is remarkably easy.

  We were ready for The Sting.

  At 2:00 that afternoon, Malcolm left for the city dressed in his new Big Apple Citywide t-shirt and carrying a stack of coupons for a free cleaning. He also carried a battered-looking calendar book that we’d spent part of the night before filling up with “appointments” for Citywide’s services.

  I stayed at home with my new cell phone in my hand, pacing around my one room like a caged animal.

  I checked over the blueprints again and again. By 5:00, I had almost chewed a hole in my bottom lip worrying about Malcolm. By 6:00, I was certain he’d been caught in his lie and that he was either in jail or had been fed to a group of hungry vampires.

  When the cell phone rang at 6:20, I jumped straight up into the air. Breathless, I punched at the keypad wildly before finding the right button. Then I froze, forgetting for a moment what I was supposed to say. Oh. Wait. Right. “Big Apple Citywide. How may I help you?”

  “Elle! They went for it! We’re on for Sunday.” Malcolm sounded elated. “I’m on the train right now. I’ll be there in half an hour. We can…”

  The line fuzzed and went dead. The train had probably moved him out-of-area, but I immediately thought of all the worst possibilities: vampires had found him, lawyers had gotten him, he’d fallen out of an open window and onto the track below. Okay. That last one was a bit farfetched, I realized, and started to calm down.

  By the time Malcolm arrived, I had stopped pacing and was waiting at the door.

  “So? How did you manage it?” I asked.

  �
��Easy. I talked to the head secretary. That’s the secret to any business—the secretaries are always in charge, even if the people who own the business don’t realize it.”

  “The main secretary? Sheila?”

  Malcolm nodded.

  “Oh, hell. Sheila knows me. She’s the one who helped Greg get settled in at the firm. I can’t go in on Sunday and talk to Sheila!”

  “Don’t worry. I have some more ideas about how to disguise you.” He grinned at me in a way that looked suspiciously like a leer.

  “What?”

  “I’ll let you know later. In the meantime, let’s figure out where we need to concentrate our search Sunday night.” He sat down and began studying the blueprints as carefully as I had earlier in the day.

  The law firm had agreed to let Big Apple Citywide in to clean their offices. Sunday. That gave me five days to consider everything that might go wrong.

  I suspected that it was going to be an awfully long list.

  Chapter 6

  So how exactly does one spend the days leading up to breaking into one’s vampiric ex-boyfriend’s former bosses’ office? Filling up time before committing a crime—a felony, for all I knew—was something I’d never had to consider before. I’m sure other people could come up with good ideas with practical applications; those people might spend their time learning to pick locks or crack safes. Or reading up on the New York penal code.

  Not me. I spent those days trying to catch up on my classwork. I did a pretty poor job of it, too. I had absolutely zero interest in writing papers about “British Politics and the Exclusion Crisis” or “The Socio-Political Ramifications of Clandestine Marriage,” but I had even less interest in losing my funding and having to get some sort of job. I was running pretty low on cash as it was, having spent a large portion of what I had remaining from the spring semester’s funding in order to finance The Sting.

  Anyway, the unfinished coursework and the missed classes had been weighing on me a bit—I had never been anything but a good student, and my inner critic had begun complaining that I was throwing away my career on a bunch of vampires. I responded by pointing out that if I didn’t focus on the vampires, I might get killed by one. But inner critics are notoriously impervious to logic and mine was no exception, so I dutifully went to class or marched myself over to the library on every one of those days. I participated in class discussions. I read, I took notes, I Xeroxed pages. I even tried to write a bit. But really, all I could do was gather information—my concentration was shot, so I couldn’t even begin to organize the notes I’d come up with. In the end, my inner critic had to settle for “a good start” instead of “completing those papers.”

  I’m not sure what Malcolm did with that time. I think he graded some exams from his freshman class. I think he prepared for the next week’s class. He probably went to his own grad classes. But he didn’t call me, and I didn’t call him.

  I did get several calls from people wanting to get their homes and offices cleaned, though. Apparently Malcolm had handed out flyers to every office in the Park Avenue building, just for consistency. And our website had gotten several hits since we’d put it up. If the grad school thing fell through, I could always become a cleaning lady. At any rate, I made “appointments” for everyone who called. I figured I could call them back after Sunday and tell them we’d gone out of business or something. Or I could go clean their offices and start my new business.

  *

  By the time Malcolm showed up on Sunday, I was shaking all over. I wanted a stiff drink to calm my nerves, but I had given up drinking and now didn’t seem like the time to start up again. I would need all my faculties tonight.

  Malcolm was carrying a huge, bulging Target bag. He looked irritatingly chipper.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the bag.

  “It’s the rest of your disguise.” He grinned and pulled out an enormous pair of panties and matching bra. They were at least four sizes too big for me. Then he pulled out two clear plastic packages labeled “pillow stuffing,” both full of puffy white material. Finally, he produced a pair of blue drawstring pants like the ones nurses wear in hospitals.

  “You go put these clothes on, then stuff yourself silly. Especially the panties and bra. Oh. And here’s a pair of pantyhose. You might want to stuff your legs, too.” He looked more pleased with himself than I had imagined possible.

  Great. I was going disguised as an opera singer moonlighting as a cleaning lady. And Malcolm got to go disguised as himself.

  This was not going to be attractive.

  In fact, just getting into the disguise was unattractive. I locked myself in the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and started with the pantyhose—I figured that I would put the underwear on over the hose so as to keep them from pinching in my waist. I wanted to look dumpy, not curvy.

  Putting on pantyhose is an unpleasant endeavor at the best of times. They twist and pinch and rip. At least they do when I put them on. I assume that other women are better at that sort of thing than I am. Shoving pillow stuffing down into the stockings makes the whole process even more irritating. I finally got it done, though I had to go back and re-stuff the left leg after I looked in the mirror. It was only half as large as the right. Dumpy Cleaning Lady, I thought. Not Victim of Elephantitis. The hose were full of runs by that point, but since no one was going to see them, I didn’t care.

  The underclothes were easier. The underwear came up over my bellybutton, the kind we called “granny panties” when I was in high school. Using the stuffing, I broadened my hips and gave myself an enormous rear. And by the time I’d finished with the bra, I had breasts a stripper would be proud of. Until she took off her clothes, anyway.

  Malcolm had brought a Big Apple Citywide t-shirt for me, size XXL. Once I got it on, I looked like my junior-high math teacher. For a moment, that thought frightened me more than the prospect of breaking into a law firm’s files.

  The makeup was easy. I just applied it about five times thicker than usual. When I was done, I looked a little like a has-been country singer, all thick eyelashes and bright red lips.

  The wig took a little more doing. I slicked my hair back with gel and pinned it with bobby-pins, just like the guy at the store had suggested. But when I put the wig on, it looked a touch too glamorous, like I was ready to go out to a seedy bar instead of a cleaning gig. So I pulled it up on top of my head with a butterfly clip, letting pieces of it hang down randomly. There. That looked more like I was trying to keep it out of the way so that I could finish cleaning and then go to a seedy bar.

  When I stepped out of the bathroom, Malcolm glanced up from the blueprints he was studying once again and did a double take.

  I’d never seen anyone do an actual double take before. It was kind of cool. He looked at me, then back at the blueprints, then whipped his head up for a second look—I was afraid he might give himself whiplash. He let out a low whistle.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “I’m not sure that this is a whistle-appropriate outfit,” I said.

  Malcolm laughed. “But it is an effective one. I wouldn’t have recognized you if I hadn’t known you were the only one in the bathroom.”

  “Good. That’s what I was going for.”

  Malcolm, on the other hand, looked just like himself. I hadn’t been worried about that at first, since no one at the law firm knew him as anyone other than “James Allgood,” the proprietor of Big Apple Citywide.

  But Greg had seen him, if only briefly, and I was beginning to worry about that a little. Of course, it was about item number 72 on my List of Things to Worry About. Number 71 was What if Malcolm’s in league with vampires? But there was nothing to be done about either of those things now. This might be my only shot at getting into the law firm, and I needed to take it.

  *

  Luckily for us, most companies stock their own cleaning supplies, so when we got on the train to head into the city we weren’t burdened with mops and brooms and buckets and such
.

  We’d decided to actually clean the office in order to give ourselves a bit more lead time. If the offices weren’t cleaned by Monday morning, Sheila the Secretary might notice and realize that she’d been snowed. This way, though, she might attribute anything being out of order to a sloppy cleaning crew rather than a secret raid on her office’s files.

  “So tell me again why we have to do this at night?” I asked Malcolm as the train clattered away from the Fordham station. “The law office is closed on Sunday. I know. That was the only free day Greg ever had.”

  “Sheila said that some of the lawyers choose to come in on Sunday anyway—what an awful job that would be. Lawyers work too many hours—eighty, ninety hours a week. Yuck.”

  “The point, Malcolm.”

  “Oh. Yeah. She said that most everybody’s gone by 6:00 or so on Sundays, so we ought to have the place to ourselves; she said that way we wouldn’t have to clean around anyone.”

  “And what about the security guards?”

  “There’s one at the front desk. He monitors the offices via video cameras.”

  “So how are we going to get around those?”

  “We’re going to take turns blocking their line of sight.”

  “Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I can do this.”

  Malcolm smiled. “Of course you can.”

  Sheila was waiting to let us into the main office once we got to Forster, Pearson, and Sims.

  “There are only two of you?” she asked. “Our regular cleaning team has five.”

  Malcolm smiled his most charming smile. “Our free offer turned out to be a lot more popular than we had expected. We’ve had to split up into four crews tonight instead of two—I usually just supervise, but we’re so busy I’m having to clean. I promise we’ll be thorough, though.”

  I think it was more the smile than the explanation that did it. And she dismissed me in a single glance.

  Malcolm’s pillow stuffing had been a fabulous idea. In Sheila’s eyes, it left me firmly in the category of Below Notice.