Different name, same game.
No mingling with the other inmates—the staff didn’t want me made into a hero. No exercise period, television, books, or newspapers. The cell was eight by ten feet, windowless, virtually airless, furnished only with a bunk and a toilet. Meals were delivered through a hole in the cell door. I wasn’t restricted to bread and water, but RS is a long way from the kitchens and the food was always cold by the time it got to my cell. I refused to eat most of it anyway, on the theory that the staff had probably spit in it.
I wasn’t physically abused, but my female guards were cruel in that quietly vicious way only women can manage.
Where’s your Mazie-mania now, bitch?
I seen you on TV, prancing around practically naked.
You still stink like cow crap!
I let it all float over my head. When you’ve been buried alive, almost electrocuted, practically incinerated, and nearly brained with a horse hock, everything else shrinks to mere inconvenience. I ached all over. My mosquito bites itched. My sliced hand throbbed. My shoulder was turning the reddish purple of grape jelly.
And I missed Bonaparte Labeck with an ache that was as much physical as emotional.
Pacing the closetlike confines of my cell, I worried about the men, boys, and dog in my life, marveling over their courage in helping me, wondering how much trouble they were in, and praying that Muffin hadn’t been returned to Vanessa.
If there were any justice in the world, Vanessa would be here in Taycheedah, wearing a neon orange jumpsuit and fending off the advances of Mona the Monobrow. She and I could swap beauty tips: Pumice that dry, flaking skin off your heels with recreation yard dirt. Condition your dull, lanky hair with Crisco oil swiped from the kitchens.
And what about Bear? Had he survived? Dead was good, but second best would be shackled hand and foot in a cell with a dozen other drug-dealing, pedophile murderers.
I was sitting up on my bunk, scraping the margarine off my lunch bread to use as elbow moisturizer, when a guard unlocked my cell door and Winnifred Stuckey, the Assistant Warden, strode in. She was a tall, stoop-shouldered woman with scraggly orange hair scraped back by a plastic headband. “C’mere, you,” she ordered, crooking her index finger.
I followed Stuckey down miles of corridors. An inmate was listlessly mopping a floor in the E wing hallway, her dreadlocks swinging into her face as she worked. She looked up dully, but when she saw me, her face suddenly brightened.
“Mazie Maguire!” she said. “Hey, Maze—how you doing?” She fist-bumped me.
I bumped back, realizing as we touched how much I’d missed simple human contact. Annoyed, Stuckey ordered the inmate back to work. But word grapevined up and down the hallways; prison news travels even faster than Twitter. By the time I was hustled down the next hallway, women’s faces were pressed up against cell windows. Whistles, cheers, war whoops.
“Way to go, girl!” That was Tina Sanchez, beaming ear to ear. I hoped we’d be reassigned as cellmates.
“Nice work, babes!” A double thumbs-up from Vicki Jean the Boosting Queen.
“I wormed the warden’s computer for you,” Vonda the Virus informed me.
“Don’t sign anything without an attorney present!” Liza Loonsfoot, jailhouse lawyer.
Winnifred Stuckey, who now looked as though she were chewing a giant wad of aluminum foil, opened a door and shoved me into a room. I blinked. The room was filled with bright daylight. I was in the Unrestricted Visitors Room, which meant there was no security glass between inmates and visitors. You could sit and talk on the kind of furniture they have in motels where the television is chained to the wall.
A man was standing at the window on the far side of the room, looking out onto the grounds. He turned when I came in and walked toward me. It was U.S. Marshal Irving Katz.
“Miss Maguire.” He held out his hand and I shook it, surprised. Last time I’d seen him, the night I’d turned myself in to his custody, he’d been stiff, cool, and still royally pissed at having had to chase me all over the state for six days. Now he was relaxed and smiling. He looked like a guy who’d picked a ticket up off the sidewalk and discovered he’d won the Powerball. He’d ditched the suit and was wearing khakis and a black knit shirt with a U.S. Marshal’s Office logo on the chest. I was starting to like the Zorro mustache.
As a favor to him, I decided to stay downwind. I hadn’t been allowed a shower, shampoo, or change of underwear since I’d been thrown into RS. I was wearing paper slippers and a moss green gown designed along the lines of those Snuggle-sack blankets advertised on late-night television.
The sharp dark eyes skimmed over me. If there really was such a thing as X-ray vision, Irving Katz had it.
“I’d like to speak privately with Miss Maguire,” Katz said, turning to Stuckey.
She bristled. “It’s against the rules. She’s an escape risk.”
“I’ll take responsibility for her.”
Stuckey left, muttering about regulations, and Katz turned to me. “You’re not going to try to escape, are you?”
“I never rule it out.”
Katz laughed. It made him look younger. “It wouldn’t be very smart, considering how close you are to being released.”
My heart started thumping wildly. I tried to calm down, reminding myself that close could mean anything from weeks to years. Wrangles over jurisdiction, delays on legal technicalities, Brenner money jingling into the right palms . . .
“Released? Seriously? I’ve been in RS, nobody’s told me anything, I don’t even know what day it is.” My words tumbled out in an angry torrent. “Is Ben Labeck all right? And Rico and Eddie? What happened to—”
“It’s September fifteenth. Your friends are fine. Mister Labeck has been a constant thorn in the warden’s side and a pain in my own posterior. He’s been here every day, raising hell and demanding to see you.”
“He was here? Ben Labeck was here?”
“He’s practically staging a sit-in in the warden’s office. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to parachute in next time.”
I could feel myself flushing scarlet. Labeck was such a dope! He ought to be getting on with his life, finding a nice girl who knew a hundred different ways to cook with maple syrup. I might be stuck in prison for years. But the thought that he was trying to see me, that he still cared for me, filled me with such a fierce, giddy joy that I actually felt dizzy.
“Maybe you better sit down.” Katz looked slightly alarmed.
I shakily lowered myself onto the visitors room sofa, which was upholstered in a bristly, barf-colored fabric that scratched the backs of my thighs.
“So what else do you want to know?” Katz asked, settling himself across from me in a torn vinyl armchair.
“What about Brenner? Is he dead?”
Katz came as close to squirming as was possible for someone with his self-control.
“Not dead. He’s on an island in the Caribbean.”
“He’s in the Caribbean?” I could feel my eyes about to shoot out of their sockets.
“The night of the museum gala—”
“The night he tried to kill me, you mean. I should have jammed that stick up his—”
“I did not hear you say what you just said.” Katz shot me a warning glance, a reminder that our conversation was probably being taped. “Brenner was taken to a local hospital, suffering from a concussion and other injuries. During the night, members of his staff had him airlifted to Washington. Senatorial privilege. From there he was flown to St. Andrew’s in the Caribbean.”
“Don’t tell me. The place has no extradition.” I kicked the plastic coffee table, sending it shooting across the floor. Katz eyed me warily, probably worried that I was going to start throwing things.
I made myself calm down. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to the next question, but I felt compelled to ask. “What about Vanessa Vonnerjohn?”
“She hired a shrink, got herself declared mentally unstable, and was
committed to a private mental health facility. For the time being at least, she’s immune from prosecution.”
Bear was on a Caribbean island and Vanessa was cozily nestled in a facility where the straitjackets were probably designed by Ralph Lauren. Where’s the justice, Atticus?
“Okay, that’s the bad news,” Katz said. “Now here’s the good. We’ve got Hemmings and Lor in custody.”
“Who?”
“Brenner’s heavies. They’ve been talking.”
I listened while Katz shared what he’d learned from the thugs. Labeck and I already had figured out some of it, but Katz, with his Justice Department creds, had been able to dredge up every last detail. Brenner had been producing rohypnol in the Mexican lab twelve years ago. Luis had covertly photographed the operation, perhaps with an eye toward blackmailing his employer. But when Brenner gave Miguel Ruiz the overdose of rohypnol that killed him, Luis had sworn revenge. He’d stolen the disk containing Bear’s records, then had melted away into the streets, vowing to someday find Bear, kill him, and reveal his criminal activities. Five years ago, Luis had managed to slip into the United States, blending into Milwaukee’s Mexican community. Bear had proved difficult to get at, and months had passed before one of Luis’s friends had tipped him off that the senator planned to attend a wedding at a suburban club. Wearing a borrowed waiter’s jacket that night, carrying the cheap revolver he’d bought, Luis had bided his time, waiting for his chance to blow Brenner’s brains into the chopped liver.
But Luis was not at heart a killer. All night long he’d sneaked drinks from the free bar, trying to work up the courage required for venganza. Finally he’d snatched his gun from its hiding place and staggered out shouting about killing the gabancho Brenner.
“Why didn’t the security goons rush over and nab Luis?” I asked.
“They were up front in the dining area, keeping an eye on all the big shots. None of the wedding guests realized there’d been a disturbance. A couple of the other waiters wrestled Luis’s gun away. He collapsed and started crying, babbling about his brother. That’s when your husband came out of the staff restroom.”
“Kip was using the waiters’ toilet?”
“He wasn’t alone. He and one of the bridesmaids were . . . uhh . . .” Katz cleared his throat, looking embarrassed.
“I get the picture.” Kip Vonnerjohn, what a prince. Cheating on the woman he was cheating on me with. That concept couldn’t even be expressed in a simple sentence.
“The bridesmaid left first and rejoined the guests, while Kip stayed in the toilet, smoking a cigarette. When he came out, he heard Luis’s drunken rant about Brenner, the pederasto de niño, the pruductor de la droga. So he volunteered to drive Luis home.”
“Mr. Nice Guy.”
“Yeah. We learned most of this over the last couple of days, tracking down the waiters who worked that wedding, getting them to talk, but the rest of this is surmise. Probably Luis, in his drunken state, showed Kip his photos and told him about Brenner’s illegal activities back in Mexico. Kip would have immediately seen the possibilities for blackmail. Even the slightest breath of scandal can torpedo a politician’s career, and the Luis stuff was huge—I mean go-to-prison huge.”
“So Kip proceeded to blackmail Bear.”
Katz nodded. “For big bucks. We’ve been following a paper trail on this. Kip set up an offshore account and made the senator wire money into it, but he was playing a dangerous game. Brenner is not a person to mess with.”
I shuddered, recalling how Bear had drugged me, buried me, and sent his thugs to murder me. “So Bear had to have Kip eliminated, right? Did you find out how he faked the nanny cam tape?”
Katz started pacing the room, hands jammed in pockets. “Lor told us what happened. He helped Brenner with the whole operation. They picked a night when your house was empty. Kip had once given Brenner a house key. Brenner also knew about the nanny cam because your mother-in-law had mentioned it to him. He took out the old tape and put in a new one. Lor played you, Mazie. The guy is short, skinny, and narrow-shouldered. Wearing a wig and your nightgown, he could pass for you from the back.”
Jeez, thanks, I thought.
“Brenner sat at the desk, pretending to be Kip, while Lor shot a blank at him—bang-bang you’re dead! Brenner knocked over the lamp as he fell. In the dark, he removed the tape—”
“Wait—why did he need to remove the tape?”
“Because it would look funny if Kip is dead one minute, then bounces into the room ten minutes later.”
“Oh, right.”
“Three nights later, he and Lor returned and hid in your garage. Kip pulled in around two in the morning. Brenner shot him with his own gun, which he’d stolen earlier. He and Lor wrapped Kip’s body in a tarp, dragged it into his office and set up the murder scene there. They smeared Kip’s blood on your nightgown, then hid it and the gun in your basement.”
“But weren’t Lor’s prints on the gun?”
“He wore gloves. Remember, in the fake video, the woman is wearing plastic gloves, so naturally no prints would be on the gun. After that, Brenner reinserted the fake murder tape into the camera and turned it back on.”
“I can’t believe I slept through all that.”
Katz gazed out the window. He looked as though he was sitting on a smile. “According to Ben Labeck, you’re quite a heavy sleeper.”
I could feel a flush working its way across my face. “You’ve talked to Labeck, then.”
“We had a long, off-the-record chat. He agreed to turn over the disk containing the records of Brenner’s drug activities in exchange for immunity from prosecution for himself and the rest of your crew.”
I nodded. That had all been part of our Operation Payback plan.
“Once he’d killed your husband, Brenner only had to get rid of Luis. Oh, and cancel the car and the other items purchased with the extortion money. The senator used an insulating layer of lawyers and accountants, of course, but he eventually recovered most of the money Kip blackmailed from him. Brenner is nothing if not thorough. Unfortunately for him, it only took a little pressure to get his accountant to blab everything.”
I sat there in silence, trying to make sense of what Katz had told me. Finally I asked, “Why go through all that trouble? Why not kill Kip in a dark alley, make it look like a random shooting?”
Katz shook his head. “Brenner couldn’t risk having some enterprising cop looking up his own drawers. You had to be implicated, Mazie. Spouses are always the primary suspect in a murder, and you were straight out of central casting—young, pretty, a woman scorned. It didn’t help that your mother-in-law was denouncing you as Satan’s spawn or that Brenner got you the world’s most incompetent lawyer.”
My spirits were rapidly rising. “So my name has been cleared? I’m going to be set free?”
“There’ll be a hearing. A Superior Court judge was scheduled to review your case next month.” Katz got to his feet, looking pleased with himself. “But I managed to get it moved up to next week.”
“Next week? How did you—”
“I pulled strings. It’s the least I could do. There are now three separate government agencies investigating the former senator’s activities. More bodies are turning up in Mexico, arrests are being made, and I’m coming out of this smelling like a rose. My boss is recalling me to New York.”
He shook his head. “Too bad. I was just starting to like cheese that squeaks.”
Escape tip #34:
If you must surrender,
then surrender to the right person.
“Mazie Maguire Vonnerjohn,” intoned the Superior Court judge, a gray-haired woman so short she probably had to sit on law books to see over her own desk. “In light of evidence that has recently come to light, it is the judgment of this court that you did not commit the crime for which you were convicted and imprisoned. You are hereby released from state custody and are granted your full and unequivocal freedom.”
Freedom. Is the
re a sweeter word?
I stood in front of the courtroom, my hands icy, my ears roaring, certain I was about to pass out. Bonaparte Labeck, who’d held my hand throughout the whole two-hour ordeal, pulled me against him. I clung to him gratefully, feeling his own radiating warmth soak into my cold, shaking body. But I didn’t cling too hard, because he had two very tender healing ribs, battle scars from Operation Payback.
“Congratulations,” he whispered, and although I was pressed against his chest and couldn’t see his face, I could hear the smile in his voice.
I shook my head. “You’re the one who deserves the congratulations.”
Labeck stroked circles on my back. “Nah, you would have come through anyway, Mazie. Life gave you lemons, you made lemonade.”
This was the man who’d believed in my innocence from day one, who’d kicked open lockers, hot-wired cars, wrestled the bad guys to the floor, and adopted my kidnapped dog. If he wanted to spout the occasional cliché, he was entitled.
Someone cleared his throat behind us. I looked up to see U.S. Deputy Marshal Irving Katz standing there. A jolt of terror shot through me. There’d been a screw-up. I was going to be sent back to prison!
“Relax, Mazie,” Katz said, and he smiled. “I’m not here to drag you back to the slammer.”
“I though you’d gone back to New York.”
“I flew back for your hearing. To make sure everything went all right.”
I returned Katz’s smile. “More than all right. I was given an unconditional release.”
Katz nodded. “Any other decision and the judge would have heard from me.”
“I owe you. For speeding things up.”
The Escape Diaries: Life and Love on the Lam Page 27
