“It’s me!” I yelled.
The pounding stopped. “I heard shots,” Labeck called through the door. “Are you all right?”
“She tried to electrocute me.”
“You didn’t shoot her, did you?”
“No! She tried to shoot me!” I looked around for the padlock key, hoping Vanessa had left it out in plain sight. Of course she hadn’t. Time was running out here and the back of my neck was prickling. I could picture Vanessa charging down the stairs with a chain saw in her hands.
“Stand away from the door,” I yelled. I aimed at the lock and for the first time in my life pulled the trigger of a gun. The padlock exploded.
I screamed. Labeck screamed. He emerged from the closet a moment later, looking pale and shaken.
He stared at me. “You elected to marry into that gene pool?”
Escape tip #14:
Don’t fall in the radon.
Labeck stopped in a deserted church parking lot to rip the cable company signs off the van while I huddled in the passenger seat, stuffing wads of Kleenex inside my soaked clothes. Labeck got back in, started the van, and peeled out.
“Was she always like that?” He was still smarting over the way Vanessa had forced him to the basement at gunpoint and locked him in the luggage closet.
“She’s mellowed a bit.” I sorted through my memories, trying to select one that would illustrate what it was like having the kind of in-law who would booby-trap your shoes with scorpions or spike your coffee with WD-40. I told Labeck about the time Vanessa and I had gone shopping together and she’d planted an expensive necklace in my handbag so I’d be arrested for shoplifting. How she’d volunteered to mail out our wedding invitations, but had never mailed the ones to my side of the family. How she’d given Kip’s best man a thousand dollars to get Kip so drunk at his bachelor party he wouldn’t make it to the church.
“You’d have been a lot better off if he hadn’t shown up,” growled Labeck.
Muffin snarled, annoyed by Labeck’s tone of voice. He was imprisoned inside an
upended plastic milk crate on the van floor. The mutt had chased us as we’d run out of Vanessa’s house and leaped into the van. A rottweiler trapped inside the body of a beanie baby, he’d rampaged around madly, trying to rip out our jugulars, until Labeck had the presence of mind to clap the crate over him. Labeck was not taking any guff from a two-pound fur ball; when Muffin snarled at him, he snarled back. Growling sullenly, Muffin lay back down, his upraised hackles clearly expressing the concept: This ain’t over yet.
“Think the Queen of Mean called the cops after we left?” Labeck asked.
“Who knows what goes through that diseased brain? If the police pick me up, she loses her chance to force drain cleaner down my throat.” Nervously I checked the van’s rearview mirror. Vanessa must have seen the cable van, parked outside her house. The police could be pulling over white vans all over the city.
Labeck fiddled with the illegal police scanner on the dashboard and we listened to garbled transmissions for a while. They might as well have been speaking Klingon as far as I could make out, but Labeck seemed to comprehend the static and after listening for a while relaxed.
“Nothing. I think we’re okay for now.”
He reached inside his shirt pocket and pulled out a black cartridge, tossed it in my lap.
“Is this it?” I breathed. “The nanny cam tape?” There was a white label on the outside and the date 9-25.
“Might be. I found it inside your mother-in-law’s VCR. The reason the cable wasn’t working is that she accidentally unhooked the cable link when she plugged the cord into her old VCR player.”
Yes, I could picture that. Vanessa, sitting in front of her television, watching the videotape of Kip’s murder scroll across the screen, psyching herself into the state of bubbling bile that would enable her to execute me.
“I want to run that film through the NSRT at the station,” Labeck said.
“Sorry, I don’t speak acronym.”
“Nonsequential ray tracing. A videotape analysis program.”
Moving west through Milwaukee’s sluggish mid-morning traffic, we pulled into Channel 13 headquarters half an hour later. It was a one-story brick building with billboard-sized photos of Peter Polifka mounted on the roof amidst a jungle of antennae and satellite dishes large enough to bounce signals to distant galaxies. We rolled around to the back, where a parking lot held two more camera vans like Labeck’s.
“Take the toolbox,” Labeck said. “There’s a face mask in there—put it on.”
I found the ventilator mask, a flattened paper cone of the type worn by brain surgeons and asbestos removers, snapped it on, and immediately began to breathe like Darth Vader. We got out of the van, me lugging the heavy toolbox and carrying a clipboard. Muffin, who’d been sullenly lying inside the crate, sprang to his feet and began biting at the crate slats, growling out threats about what he was going to do to us once he busted out. Labeck slammed the van door.
“You’re a service guy,” Labeck instructed. “You’re here to fix the . . . you’re checking for radon. Nobody knows what the hell radon is, so we ought to be safe with that story.”
We. What a sweet word. A buddy-buddy word, a spine-stiffening word, a word ten thousand times more powerful than the puny I. When had you and I morphed into we? Had Labeck begun to believe my side of the story; was that why he was still helping me? Maybe it was best not to look too hard into that particular gift horse’s mouth.
Labeck took out a set of keys and unlocked the building’s back door. I followed him inside, into a service corridor. We hadn’t gone two steps before a mens’ restroom door opened and a man emerged, still zipping his fly.
“Benny, my man!”
“Hey,” Labeck responded unenthusiastically.
My Darth Vader breathing quickened. Standing directly in front of me was the real-life Peter Polifka, Channel 13’s anchorman. He was even more gorgeous in person than on TV. He was tan, square-jawed, and full-lipped. His teeth were the blinding white of a Cloroxed toilet bowl. He wore a pink shirt, a burgundy tie, and a dark gray suit. His voice was a deep, sexy baritone. I knew two Taycheedah inmates who had his face tattooed on their inner thighs.
Polifka pointed at me, puzzled by my mask. “What’s he here for?”
I hated being a male in front of Peter Polifka. I wanted him to see me as a desirable woman, not a shrimpy repair creep. Although now that he was standing in front of me, I noticed that he was a foot shorter than I’d pictured and that his tan looked like pancake makeup.
“Radon check,” Labeck muttered.
Polifka looked alarmed. “Oh. Is there—”
“Strictly routine.”
Polifka peered at me. “Do you know your pants are wet?”
“He fell into some radon,” Labeck said casually. “It happens. But you should be okay if you stay in your office with the door locked and the blinds down for a couple hours. Maybe crawl under your desk.”
Peter Polifka rocked back on his two-inch heels, considering this information. “Well. Okay then. Carry on.” He turned around and scurried away, as though radon were contagious.
“Idiot,” Labeck muttered. He unlocked a door marked Authorized Personnel Only and hustled me into a long, narrow room lined with electronics panels that looked complicated enough to launch an intercontinental missile. A dozen television sets, each tuned to a different station, flickered on another wall, apparently Action 13’s way of checking up on the competition.
Peter Polifka grinned from one of the screens, delivering a report that must have been taped earlier that day. He was standing in front of a suburban school. Bright yellow buses were disgorging kids.
“ . . . It’s back to school time all over southeast Wisconsin,” Polifka cheerily intoned. “I’m here at Hassenpfeffer Elementary School in Elm Grove, where kids are saying good-bye summer, hello school year. New teachers, new classmates, new pencils, new notebooks. But the best thing—�
� He held out a box of Crayolas, the 128 pack. “—is the brand-new crayons. Mmm, love that waxy smell. Some things never change.”
What an in-depth report! Edward R. Murrow would have been jealous.
“So, back to you, Lori.” Polifka giggled, as though he’d had one too many hits of crayon wax.
“ . . . for escaped convict Mazie Maguire.” The NBC station was leading their news with the ever-popular escape story. Marshal Irving Katz appeared on-screen at a press conference. He did not look happy. “We believe that the fugitive may be hiding somewhere within a twenty-mile radius of the Lautenbacher farm,” he said.
Very good, Irving, just keep on chasing those wild geese. I smiled.
“However,” he went on, “we have strong reasons to believe that Ms. Maguire was aided by a person in a vehicle. Citizens who choose to transport, hide, or in any way assist an escaped felon should be warned that they will face obstruction of justice charges.”
I wasn’t smiling anymore.
Labeck snapped off the NBC channel. “Where’s the nanny tape?” he asked.
I took it out of the toolbox and handed it to him. Labeck popped it into an elaborate computer that transmitted images to a large wall screen.
“This is the NSRT,” Labeck said. “It has a two hundred fifty times resolution. Ordinarily zooming in that close would blur everything to a dot matrix, but it has an override to provide focus. It can check for light-dark tonal contrast, filter out extraneous sounds, and do a one one-thousandth of a second breakdown for running speed.”
“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t understood a single syllable.
“The FBI has a program like this, except not as good.” He tore his eyes away from the electronic gizmos and looked at me. “Tell me your lawyer had this film analyzed before the trial.”
“Technology was not his strong suit. I don’t think he could tell a DVD player from a waffle iron.”
“What was his strong suit?”
“Oh, Sterling was pink-skinned and white-haired and dignified looking. He came from an old, reputable law firm. I figured that just the fact he’d taken my case lent me credibility.” Sitting next to Sterling Habenmacher at the defense table, I’d felt protected, even cosseted. He patted my hand a lot. He told me not to worry. He smelled like pumpkin pie spice. He billed at a thousand dollars an hour. It hadn’t occurred to me until much later, when I was sitting in a cell at Taycheedah, that Sterling Habenmacher hadn’t for a single moment believed that I actually was innocent.
The prosecution had been required to share the evidence they planned to present with the defense, which included the nanny cam tape. Sterling hadn’t even watched the tape; he’d spent an entire day of the trial wrangling with the judge and prosecution, explaining why the tape should be excluded as evidence. Despite all Sterling’s objections, the judge had ruled that the tape would indeed be entered as evidence. The fact that we’d tried to suppress it worked against us; the video was all the more powerful when it finally was shown to the jury.
“No,” I said. “The film wasn’t analyzed.”
Labeck shook his head in disgust. He pressed a button and the video began to play.
“So that’s your house,” Labeck said. “Your husband’s office?”
I nodded. Seeing the familiar room was a jolt. “The people who owned the house were named Subramatti,” I said. “They were both cardiac surgeons and worked long days at the hospital, so they had a nanny caring for their kids. They turned the first floor library into a playroom, with kids’ books on the lower shelves and medical texts on the top. The spy cam was hidden inside a book with a hole drilled in its spine.”
When we’d moved into the house, Kip had immediately claimed the playroom as his office. Office, what a joke! Kip wasn’t the type to lug home a briefcase full of contracts. He kept Scotch in the file drawer and used his computer to surf for porn. He hadn’t bothered to toss out the medical journals; maybe he felt the ponderous volumes lent his office a certain classiness. Since neither Kip nor I were top-shelf dusters—or bottom-shelf dusters for that matter—we never discovered the camera, hidden behind a copy of Liver Flukes and Hookworms.
I turned my attention back to the screen, back to the day my husband had been murdered. Kip is at his desk, back turned, the top of his head visible over the high-backed leather swivel chair. One bare elbow juts out and you can just make out a swatch of short-sleeved shirt. He’s on our landline phone, the cord stretched between desk and chair. His voice is a low, indistinct murmur. What light there is in the room comes from the lamp atop his desk and from the computer screen.
A door opens. Off-camera, but the sound is audible. A woman walks into the room. Her back is to the camera so her face is hidden. She has dark, shoulder-length hair, a long-sleeved, floor-length nightgown, and bare feet. She’s wearing rubber gloves, the kind you use to wash dishes. Kip doesn’t hear her come in. Now the gun in the woman’s right hand becomes visible. The woman walks up to Kip, raises the gun, fires a single shot. Kip slumps and falls against the desk lamp, which crashes to the floor, dousing the light. The room goes black.
Someone pounded on the door and I jumped. I’d been four years in the past, watching my husband being murdered. I mentally regeared to the present: Channel 13, the NSRT, Labeck.
“Radon,” Labeck hissed. I snapped on my mask, snatched up a television remote control, and began running it along the tiles, hoping that radon was the kind of substance that loitered around floors. Labeck cracked the door. There was a familiar yapping noise.
“This thing yours?” a man growled. I caught a glimpse of Bob, Labeck’s cameraman buddy. He shoved Muffin into Labeck’s arms. “I need to use the van. This little bugger almost took my arm off when I lifted his crate. Want me to step on it for you?”
Labeck shrugged. “Tempting, but no. I’m dog-sitting for a friend.”
“How much you want to bet your friend never comes back for it?” Bob said.
He left, chortling. Labeck closed the door and dropped Muffin, who instantly made a beeline for me, snarling like a small grizzly. He lunged for my ankles, but I held up a warning hand. Apparently remembering the spanking, he abruptly halted and started yapping at me, a high-pitched sound in the same irritating tone as a dental drill.
“Shut him up,” Labeck said.
“You shut him up!”
“Shut up!” we yelled in unison, but Muffin kept barking.
“Here’s the plan,” Labeck said. “We feed him. If he’s eating, he’s not barking. I’ll get something in the cafeteria. Don’t open the door to anyone.”
Duh. After he left, I tried to grab Muffin, but he danced just out of reach, barking so hard there were times when all four feet were off the floor.
“Let’s play fetch!” I said with feigned enthusiasm. “Fetch? I throw something and you chase it. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
I didn’t have a ball or a stick. I took off my shoe—actually Labeck’s old shoe, still wet from Vanessa’s bathtub—and tossed it across the room. Muffin was after it in a flash. He picked it up in his mouth, swaggered around with it for a minute, but then didn’t seem to know what to do with it. He dropped it and started barking again. I bent to retrieve the shoe. Muffin immediately snatched up the toe end. I yanked on the heel end. We each tugged, Muffin growling fiercely, but now he just seemed to be play-acting. Was it possible the wretched creature was having fun? Did Vanessa ever play games with her dogs? Or was their social life pretty much limited to Attack, Kill?
Muffin was actually kind of cute, I noticed for the first time. His fur was soft gray, his underbelly white. He had a teddy bear head—wide and round, with black button eyes and whiskers like bristle brushes. His teeth were white and needle-sharp. Vanessa probably filed them to points every night. Although he only weighed about as much a large cucumber, he was surprisingly strong; muscles rippled beneath his fur.
There was a knock on the door. “Open up,” Labeck called in a low voice. In full bay, Muffin raced over to th
e door. I had to hold him by the collar while I opened the door wide enough for Labeck to slide through. He came in and set a paper sack down atop a desk. Demonstrating a surprising agility, Muffin sprang up onto a stool, then onto the desk, poking his snout into the bag.
“No!” Labeck said sharply, shoving him away, setting him on the floor. Muffin coiled himself to spring again. Labeck tossed him a ham sandwich. Accustomed to eating out of an embossed porcelain bowl, Muffin happily scarfed the sandwich off the tile floor. Labeck gave me dibs on the remaining sandwiches. I picked egg salad; he had tuna and lettuce. He’d even remembered pickles, bless him—large, juicy, sliced dills. We sat on swivel chairs, eating and washing down the sandwiches with chocolate milk while Labeck replayed the video.
“Who knew that camera was in the room?” Labeck asked.
“Well, I didn’t. Neither did Kip. He would have wanted to—” I stopped, reddening.
“Do home porno?”
“Probably.”
“Did Vanessa know it was there?”
“Vanessa knew everything. Somehow she got hold of our house keys and made copies. She’d come over to snoop when we were gone, go through our bathroom cabinets, check what we were using for birth control, look through our mail. She must have discovered the nanny cam while she was poking around one day, because she told the police to check it right after Kip’s body was discovered.”
Labeck scowled at Muffin, who’d snorked down his own sandwich and was now looking up at us, growling, demanding another one. “The nanny cam was a low-tech cheapie,” he said. “Its time-dating feature wasn’t even activated, the focus is fuzzy, and everything looks completely amateurish. Probably the owners installed the camera themselves.”
That would fit with what I knew of the Subramattis, who were so cheap they’d dug their rosebushes out of the lawn and taken them along when they moved. They would have begrudged the few bucks it required to install a professional surveillance system.
The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam Page 12
