“I think they had the camera plugged into an outlet so it would continuously charge,” Labeck said. “The videotape was magnetic and the recorder mechanism was motion-sensitive, so it only turned on when something triggered its sensors. Theoretically, you could record for years. Who else knew about the nanny cam?”
“Vanessa might have told some of her friends. And of course the Subramattis knew, but they moved to California.”
“If it’s not you in that video, then who is it?”
I nudged away Muffin, who was climbing my leg trying to get at my sandwich. “The jury could never get past that. If it wasn’t me, who was it—my evil twin? It even occurred to me that Vanessa might be a shape shifter or something—but no matter how much she hated me, she would never have hurt Kip.”
“What about whatshername? The carrot-chomping debutante?”
“Prentice? Why would she want to kill Kip? She was probably going to be the next Mrs. Vonnerjohn. Anyway, she had an alibi for that night. I forget exactly what—she was shaving her celery sticks or flogging the servants or something like that.”
Once the tabloids had gotten hold of the story, they’d run with it in their teeth, vilifying Prentice as The Other Woman, the scheming rich girl who’d broken up my happy marriage. True, Mazie Maguire had shot her husband in cold blood, a very bad thing to do, but Prentice Stodgemore had been carrying on with a married man! I’d received the sympathy vote by a wide margin while Prentice, relentlessly pursued by the media, had been forced to sneak around town in a head scarf and sunglasses.
“Enemies?” Labeck asked.
I shook my head. “My lawyer hired a detective agency to investigate that angle.”
“What about the people your husband worked with? Maybe he stole someone’s
client.”
“Kip never did any work, so he probably never stepped on anyone’s toes.”
“How’d he keep his job?”
“Nepotism at its most flagrant.”
“Maybe someone at the company was cooking the books, doing insider trading?”
“I don’t think Kip would have picked up on that. He didn’t know a debenture from a denture.”
Labeck polished off his sandwich and stuffed the wrappings back in the bag, then returned to the video and started doing some complicated slicing and dicing on the computer. Finishing my own sandwich, I crammed the extra lunch napkins up my pants legs to absorb the bathwater. When I turned out my sodden pants pockets, the baggie of money fell out. I’d forgotten about it.
I pulled out the bills. The bag had leaked and the money was soggy.
I flipped through the cash, my spirits going as damp as the bills. A measly tenner and some singles, wrapped around a square of stiff, glossy paper. It was a snapshot, I saw, rolled to fit inside the bills. I picked it up and studied it.
The photo looked as though it had been taken with a cheap flashcube camera back in the pre-digital days. A boy of about fifteen and a man sat side by side on a sofa. Some of the color had leached out of the photo, but it was possible to see that the boy was dark—Mexican or Puerto Rican—and the man was white, maybe in his thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair too yellow to be natural. He was shirtless, wearing Hawaiian print shorts and nothing else. He was slumped across the couch, one arm around the boy, one arm flung up to half-conceal his face. Impossible to tell his eye color; they were the devilish red produced by cheap flash. No telling where the photo had been taken—it was an anonymous, dingy room with liquor bottles lined up on a windowsill.
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.”
; “Yeah, okay, go,” grunted the guard. “Just tell Freda she’s supposed to phone up here when she’s expecting a delivery.”
Now I was forced to go through with the charade. The guard watched as I descended the steps to the basement, my hands leaving sweat streaks on the curlicued iron railings. Data Processing was just as I’d remembered it. A dump. The floors were cracked, pipes ran along the ceiling, the fluorescent light fixtures buzzed like angry flies, and the central area had been partitioned off into chest-high prairie dog cubicles that offered the privacy of public urinals. It looked as though they’d modeled it on the inmate-processing center at Taycheedah.
In for a penny, in for a pound. As long as I was here I might as well try to track down Freda. I strode briskly along the row of offices that lined the outer walls. The secret to success as a fugitive, I’d discovered, was appearing to know where you were going. B89 was halfway down the hall, its door open but the room unoccupied.
Freda had come down in the world since her days as Kip’s secretary. Back then, she’d had her own office suite, a view of the river, and a private bathroom. Now her office was a nine-by-twelve-foot box with a steel desk, a shabby swivel chair, and ranks of oversized file cabinets that looked like body drawers in a morgue. Freda’s cat photos provided the room’s only splash of personality. No view of the river here—just a coat closet.
Clumping into the office—Erbert and Gerbert at your service!—I plopped the sack lunch onto Freda’s chair while scoping out the appointment calendar on her desk. She had a meeting that ran until four o’clock. It was 3:45 now. I just had to stay out of sight for a few minutes until Freda returned. Pretending to scribble something on my clipboard, I covertly studied the closet door. It appeared to be stout oak, with a brass key the size of a teaspoon resting in the lock.
It would be bad manners to unlock that door. Bad business ethics, too; Erbert and Gerbert would frown on their delivery personnel poking their noses in their customers’ closets. On the other hand, people shouldn’t leave keys out in plain sight if they didn’t want doors opened, I rationalized, using the same logic Vicki Jean employed to forage her way through supermarkets. Stifling whatever pangs of conscience I still retained, I unlocked the door, angling it so it screened me from the view of anyone passing by.
The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam Page 13