“What size cartridge?”
“About the size of a pack of pocket tissue. Black, hard plastic, with spoolie things.”
“Spoolie things.” Labeck ran a hand through his hair, giving me a disgusted look. “You make a lousy detective. How many minutes on the tape?”
“I don’t know. Hours, I think. It was motion-sensitive, it only turned itself on when—”
“I know what motion-sensitive means.” He thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “You’re talking about a camcorder.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you didn’t. So now it makes sense. Modern spy cams transmit to a computer, even a cellphone. Using a camcorder is really old technology.”
“Yeah. When I spy on my nannies, my technology will be up-to-date.”
Labeck shoved the pizza toward me. “Eat,” he said.
The pizza was piping hot and burned my tongue, but I didn’t care. I chewed and gobbled and stuffed. My stomach swooned in gratitude. Labeck sat down across from me, still watchful, but at least relaxed enough to eat. I focused on my pizza. This was probably the last decent meal I’d ever have, then it was back to macaroni and cheese minus the cheese in the prison cafeteria. I washed it down with the last of my ginger ale, then helped myself to another slug of Bushmills. The stuff grew on you. It reminded me of one of my dad’s old jokes: Why did God invent whiskey? To keep the Irish from taking over the world.
Labeck poured himself a slug of Bushmills, too, which put me on red alert again. Liquor brought out whatever violent tendencies lurked inside a man. Just because a guy feeds you doesn’t mean he’s not going to kill you.
“I’ve been following your escape,” Labeck said. “When I heard you’d been caught at that farm outside Campbellsport, Bob and I hightailed it over there. I was filming from the hill above the farm when I spotted you diving into the sunflowers. So I drove the camera van over where I thought you might come out and left the doors hanging open.”
“You live-trapped me?”
He nodded. “The second I got in the truck and smelled the daisies, I knew you were there. If the police had stopped me, I would have claimed I didn’t know you were stowed away.”
“You still haven’t told me why you didn’t turn me in.” I folded my arms and narrowed my eyes at him. Labeck folded his own arms and tilted his chair back. We engaged in a staring contest.
Labeck lost. He broke eye contact and shifted his gaze to the refrigerator.
“I was at your trial,” he finally mumbled.
Well, now we were getting somewhere.
“Working for a local cable station back then, filming. It was a weird trial. Nothing seemed to fit together. You just didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who’d kill her husband in cold blood, then hide the murder weapon in her basement. Although you did come across as too dumb to know how to shoot a gun. That I believed.”
“Well, the jury sure didn’t. The prosecutor sliced me to smithereens on cross-exam and I got all flustered. My lawyer warned me not to testify, but I didn’t listen to him.”
He snorted. “Your lawyer was Sterling Habenmacher, right? No wonder you were convicted.”
“Sterling’s very respected. He was personally recommended to me by Senator Brenner.”
“Brenner? This just keeps getting better and better. How do you know Brenner?”
“He’s Kip’s first cousin. And he happens to be a close friend.”
“Politicians don’t have close friends. They have ass-kissers. Look, you want some advice?”
“No.”
“Get yourself a new lawyer. Just close your eyes and point to a random name in the attorneys section of the phone book. Then have your new lawyer negotiate the terms of your surrender.”
Surrender, Dorothy. The words painted across the sky by the Wicked Witch of the West.
I knew Labeck was right. I had to give myself up. It was the smart thing to do. It might even be fairly painless. Maybe the warden wouldn’t come down too hard on me if she knew I had some big-shot barracuda backing me. Except that I couldn’t afford a barracuda. I couldn’t even afford a minnow.
So surrender. That was my choice. I had no money, no car, and no one to help me. My brothers might be willing to hide me for a few days, but they lived two hundred miles away and there was no way to get to them. I had to face it: my escape had been a disaster from the second I’d jumped the fence.
So what had kept me going? Why had I slogged through swamps and cornfields, stolen a car, nearly gotten myself blasted to smithereens by the toilet police, and risked breaking my neck jumping out of a barn when I could have given myself up a dozen times?
What had kept me going, I thought, popping a schnibble of mozzarella into my mouth, was anger. Anger over being convicted of a murder I hadn’t committed. Anger over the fact that someone had murdered my husband and walked free. Anger at the friends and relatives who’d turned their backs on me. Now, clean, fed, and possibly safe for the moment, I brought out the idea that had been quietly percolating at the back of my mind from the moment that roof had come sailing out of the storm. I turned the idea over, studying its angles, letting it grow on me. What if I didn’t give myself up? What if I tried to find the person who’d really killed Kip? It hadn’t been a random murder. The weird video proved that. Who was the woman wearing my nightgown? How had she gotten hold of Kip’s gun? Who benefited from Kip’s death?
Naturally, I’d mulled over these questions hundreds of times over the past four years, sitting in my cell, but I’d never been able to come up with answers. Now I was only a few miles from my old house, and in a position to start looking for the murderer. Was I going to waste this opportunity?
Labeck had been watching me closely, as though he was following my train of thought. “You look beat,” he said gruffly. “You can stay here tonight, get some sleep.”
“Thank you,” I said stiffly, grudging every syllable.
“Take my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
The couch, right. I didn’t trust this guy one inch. I was going to watch him like a hawk. I was not going to close a single eye all night.
Escape tip #12:
Real women wear skivvies.
“Wake up—you’ve got to see this.”
Someone was shaking me. I came groggily awake. It was morning. I was curled up against Labeck’s pillow, wearing his pajamas, lying in his bed.
I stared blearily at the TV on the dresser. The Today news anchor was smirking into the camera and saying, “. . . and in small town Campbellsport, Wisconsin, the scene was the same. Dozens of fans lining the streets, chanting and holding up signs.”
The camera cut to a street scene. Throngs of people were waving to a rolling camera van and yelling. “Go, Mazie, go!” Teenaged girls were jumping up and down in front of the camera, waving homemade signs: Run, Mazie, Run!
“It’s called Mazie-mania, Sarah,” said a young red-haired male reporter, “and it seems to have taken over the state.”
The scene switched to a tavern. Guys on bar stools were watching the overhead TV, tuned to the scene where I dive out of the barn. They were whistling and pounding their beer mugs on the bar as though they were seeing the Packers trounce the Bears in the playoffs.
“Law enforcement authorities say they’ve never seen anything like it,” the reporter continued excitedly. “Instead of helping police officers capture the wanted fugitive, local citizens seem to be rooting for her. Maguire, who escaped from prison on Friday night, has eluded capture for three days, stealing a car, causing an estimated hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage to a plumbing display room, and escaping through a cattle herd despite being pursued by a small army of law enforcement officers.”
The camera switched to the street outside the tavern, focusing on a black SUV with federal plates and a forest of antennae. The door opened and Marshal Irving Katz emerged, looking grumpy. The film must have been shot yesterday, because he was wearing the clothes he’d had
on at the farm. His pants were smeared with brown stuff. He used the curb pavement to scrape something off his shoe soles. “No comment,” he snapped at the swarming news crews, before slamming into a coffee shop.
I laughed out loud.
Labeck switched to Good Morning America. Wanda Kronenwetter appeared on-screen, beaming and looking a world removed from Walmart—lipstick, new hairstyle, whitened teeth. “When I seen my van was gone, I figured some kids took it to go joyriding,” Wanda said, nervously licking her lips. “Then the state patrol shows up and tells me Mazie Maguire stole it! First I freaked out, but then I figured what the heck. It’s kind of an honor, sort of like being robbed by Bonnie and Clyde, you know? If you’re watching this, Mazie, no hard feelings, aina?” She blew a kiss.
“Mazie-mania,” Labeck groaned. He switched off the TV. He rubbed his neck, probably to demonstrate how painful sleeping on the sofa had been. He was wearing a T-shirt and fresh jeans. He’d shaved, showered, and slicked back his wet hair. He looked five years younger. “What is it with these people? What is it with me? I’m in deep shit. I’ve aided and abetted a wanted fugitive.”
“You have no one to blame but yourself. You kidnapped me.”
“Well, you’re lucky I did or you’d be back in prison by now.”
I was hazy on the details of the previous night. So much for not closing a single eye. The Bushmills and the bath had turned me into a big, sleepy slug. I’d barely been conscious as I’d pulled on a pair of Labeck’s pajamas and poured into his bed, asleep before my head hit the pillow. Dumb, dumb, dumb! Would Doctor Richard Kimble have been that trusting?
Labeck looked at me. “You’re really a deep sleeper, you know that? You were out so deep I was worried you’d died. I actually held a mirror under your nose.”
“I was tired. You try sleeping in trees and barns.”
“I thought maybe you were faking. I thought you’d scram the second I fell asleep. Then it occurred to me that from my point of view, your sneaking out was the best thing that could happen.” He went to his dresser and pulled out a wad of crumpled but clean underwear. “I tossed your undies in the incinerator. Wear these.”
A wife-beater athletic shirt and a pair of tighty-whities.
Mazie Maguire, cross-dressing convicted murderess.
Labeck’s dirty clothes, neatly hung on the floor, rang. He picked yesterday’s jeans up, pulled out a cellphone, listened. “Yeah, I saw the Mazie-mania thing. Yeah, uh-huh, unbelievable. I’ll have the truck back by noon.”
He turned and faced me. He folded his arms across his chest. “I didn’t sleep much last night. I kept thinking about that nanny cam. Something about the whole thing stinks. So here’s the deal. You’ve got two hours to convince me you didn’t kill your husband. After that you’re on your own. Go find your precious Brenner, who’ll turn you over to the cops faster than he can pocket a bribe. And if you tell the cops I helped you—”
“I’m not a rat.” If prison teaches you anything, it’s to keep your trap shut.
“Good. Get dressed.”
“Not in front of you, perv.”
“Honor system. We turn our backs.”
Hah! Prison doesn’t give you much respect for the honor system. But since I didn’t have a lot of choice, I turned around. Then whipped around again to make sure Labeck was keeping his part of the deal. He was. Which was actually kind of ego-deflating.
“So you’re saying the woman in the video wasn’t you?” Labeck said.
“No. It looks like me from the back, but the face isn’t visible because of the way the camera is angled.” I took off the pajama top and pulled on Labeck’s undershirt. No digging straps, no jabbing underwires, just soft, ribbed cotton. Men had it so good.
“I want to see that video. Not the crap version that floated around the Web. What happened to the actual nanny tape?”
I thought for a moment. Did my lawyer have it? No—it hadn’t been a defense item; it had been the DA’s slam dunk. Maybe I could call the district attorney’s office. Yeah, that would work. Come on down, Mazie—we’ll hold the tape until you get here, heh, heh.
I pulled on the men’s briefs. They felt weird—bulky and with flaps where I didn’t need venting. “I think my mother-in-law must have the original tape,” I said. “She made the prosecutors give back all Kip’s personal items, even the bloody clothes and stuff.”
“That’s kind of—”
“Freaky? Macabre? Vanessa probably saved Kip’s nail clippings and nose pickings. He was her baby, her reason for existence.”
“What if you phoned her, asked if she had the tape?”
I shuddered. “I think Vanessa can send death rays over the phone wires. She kept sending me poisoned cookies when I was in prison.”
Labeck was silent for a moment, apparently trying to decide whether I was serious. Then he said, “Sounds like that woman is knitting with only one needle.”
Probably another old Canadian expression, I thought, adjusting the waistband of the briefs. If Vanessa had a knitting needle, she’d jab it in my eyeball.
“What if we show up on her doorstep? Where does she live?”
“On Lake Shore Drive. But there’s no way anyone can get in that house. Her security system is better than Taycheedah’s.”
“Who else lives there?”
“Her housekeeper, Purvis Jackson. And a pack of dogs.”
“Big dogs?”
“Little runty dogs like furry piranhas.”
“Hmm. This sounds like a job for the cable guys.” He went to his closet, rummaged around in some cardboard boxes, then tossed me a navy twill shirt and matching pants.
I examined them. The shirt was a large, the pants were a medium, and they were wrinkled as elephant skin. The name Ben was embroidered in red thread on the shirt’s flap pocket. “Who’s Ben?”
“I moonlighted for a janitorial service a few years ago. That was my uniform.”
So his name was Ben? I pulled on the pants and shirt. I rolled up the pants legs and shirt cuffs by a couple of miles and studied myself in the dresser mirror. The clothes looked like they’d fallen out of the sky and onto my body by mistake, but the excess shirt fabric camouflaged my bumpy parts.
Labeck studied me, cocking his head. “Still needs something.”
“A tailor?”
Foraging around in the closet again, he found a brimmed cap with a logo that was a cross between the Starbucks mermaid and the U.S. Mail eagle. ABCO Systems, it read, a name so generic it could have referred to a garbage pickup service or a search engine.
I poked through a desk organizer atop Labeck’s dresser, fished out a rubber band, and used it to knot my hair into a ponytail, which I crammed under the cap.
“Practice walking,” Labeck said.
Heaving an exasperated sigh, I walked across the bedroom to the window and back.
“You walk like a girl.”
“Well, excuse me.”
“Ram your hands in your pockets. Come down harder on your heels.”
I tried it. I felt like a clodhopper. “How’s this?”
“You look like a girl pretending to be a guy. Kind of bend your knees.”
I tried to think like a guy. Did guys think? Maybe I ought to let my arms swing down to my knees? Scratch my crotch?
“Okay, that was amazingly awful,” Labeck said. “Try sitting.”
Tossing a stack of newspapers off the only chair in the room, I sat.
“For God’s sake, don’t cross your legs!”
I uncrossed them.
“Spread your legs.”
I aimed an evil look at him.
Pink washed across his cheeks. “I mean, guys sit with their knees apart.”
Widening my knees, I leaned forward. It made me feel assertive.
“I’m taking up enough space for two people.”
“That’s the way guys think. This is my area. Get the hell out of my way.”
I stood up. I hulked across the room, remembering to bend
my knees and come down hard on my heels.
Labeck closed his eyes and shook his head as though what he’d seen was painful. “It’ll have to do. You’ve at least achieved Ru Paul.”
Escape tip #13:
Electricity and water don’t mix.
“This is illegal.”
“Said the convicted felon.”
“Murder is one thing,” I said. “Driving around displaying the logo of the world’s biggest cable company is another. They’re going to send you to Guantanamo.”
“Haven’t been caught yet,” Labeck said with an annoying smirk.
Jailbreak, auto theft, toilet vandalism—now I’d have impersonating a cable repairman tacked onto my list of crimes. Labeck and I were heading north along Milwaukee’s Lake Shore Drive in the Channel 13 camera van—except that the van no longer read Channel 13. A large vinyl sheet with the Cable King emblem was taped up over the station logo on the side of the truck. Artfully splayed wire dangled from the rear doors, obscuring the truck’s license plate.
“How’d you get the fake sign, anyway?” I asked.
Labeck grinned. “It’s not fake; it’s real. I can’t reveal my sources, being as how I’m a respected journalist and all—but that sign has gotten me and my crew into a lot of places we’d otherwise have been kicked out of. Everyone’s got something wrong with their cable, so when Cable King shows up, we’re greeted with hugs and kisses.”
“That’s downright sleazy.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes we actually do fix their cable.”
I sifted through the strata of junk sloshing around the van’s floor—film canisters, old socks, road maps, crumpled beer cans—and fished out a pair of sunglasses. I slid them on. Maybe Vanessa wouldn’t recognize me. I’d just be the shrimpy assistant who handed the burly guy his wrenches.
Vanessa Vonnerjohn lived on Lake Shore Drive, Milwaukee’s Mansion Row. Here, the Schlitzes, the Pabsts, the Millers, and the other beer barons had built their small-scale castles in the days of no income tax and indentured servants. The houses were set far back from the street on lawns large enough to support herds of polo ponies, so close to Lake Michigan that on windy days, spray from the waves drenched the back patios.
The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam Page 10
