The Escape Diaries (23 page)

September 16:
See Bill re Sea Goddess. 10 am South Marina.

The
Goddess
!
Kip had always admired that boat, a small sleek yacht owned by one of his
sailing buddies. Was Kip seriously thinking of purchasing a yacht? That was
nuts—even a small yacht must run two hundred grand!

No mention of
P.
in the later entries. If Prentice was financing his yacht-sailing,
Maserati-driving new lifestyle, shouldn’t she and Kip have been spending face
time together? Or was Kip’s income from some other source? Now that he was
suddenly living like a hip-hop star who’d just cut a record deal, had things
cooled between them?

September 18:
Lawyer 10 am re Mazie/Divorce.

I’d rated a
mention at last! I was now
Mazie-slash-divorce,
a distasteful tag end of
business to be checked off Kip’s to-do list.

The last few
entries were for upcoming events
,
events he’d never lived to experience.

October 5:
Pick up suit at Phillips.
Phillips was a store that sold expensive
menswear.

November 18:
Maserati to be delivered.

I drummed my
fingers on the keyboard, thinking so hard my head hurt.

Where had this
cornucopia of goodies come from?

Scenario one: His
blue chip chippie Prentice had handed Kip a chunk of change, a little
walking-around money to last until he shucked his ties to me and they could get
married.
And remember, darling
—gigolo
is just an Italian word
.

Scenario two:
Someone had died and left him a pile of money. Not very likely. Transfers of
wealth involved an ungodly amount of paperwork as well as the notification of
spouses and the IRS.

Scenario three:
Vanessa was giving him money. Possible, but unlikely. Vanessa was well-to-do,
but she certainly wouldn’t fling money at her son to buy a sports car that
might end up wrapped around a telephone pole.

Kip’s calendar
didn’t supply any more clues, at least none that I was picking up. So what
next? I got up and walked over to the refrigerator. Muffin was sitting in front
of it with doggie patience. I broke down, opened the fridge, and gave him the
other half of the wiener.

“Where do I look
next?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, clearly conveying
that I had the brains of a Milk Bone dog biscuit. Where else do you look up
people? The social networking site that everyone uses, even the Pope.

I went back to
Jelka’s computer and brought up Facebook
.
A Facebook
page stayed
up beyond divorce, disgrace, and death, the cyberspace equivalent of
immortality. Using the same password as before, I logged in; Kip was nothing if
not predictable. He’d used a boating shot for his profile photo. Out on the
lake, wearing sunglasses, with his hair ruffled by the wind, he looked like JFK
Junior.

I scrolled
through the photos in Kip’s album. He must have deleted any photos that showed
the two of us together. But he
had
uploaded photos from the Wannamaker
wedding. There was Sophie and her groom. And there was Kip arm in arm with
Prentice, his orchid corsage pinned to her chicken wing shoulder. A blurb
issued from Prentice’s mouth.
Okay, buddy, I gave you half a million bucks,
now get out of those clothes!

Not really. No
blatant clues like that, just a bunch of wealthy suburbanites grinning at the
camera, making bunny ears, and sloshing down champagne. Bear was in several of
the photos, posing with the bride, the bride’s mother, and a bunch of other
richie-riches.

Not helpful. I
started scrolling through Kip’s Friends list. Charlene Brenner appeared as a friend.
Since I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I clicked on her profile.

Wow! Charlene
compensated for her shyness by photo-recording her every move. I flipped
through the pictures in reverse order, the newest ones first, then the older
ones. Some apparently went back to high school and college. Mostly they were of
Charlene and her friends, but there were some of Bear, too, apparently in their
dating days. In one photo a young hunk with dyed-blond hair, wearing a skimpy
Speedo, mugged on a beach, showing off his biceps, his triceps,
and—outlined graphically by the Speedo—his heat-seeking love missile.
Charlene had tagged the picture:
Bear, Malibu, 1999.

           
I
peered closer, studying the strong jaw, the wide, thin-lipped mouth, the
tattooed bicep?
That
was Bear?

Something swam up
from my subconscious.

Bear looked like
the guy in the Luis snapshot.

Escape hint #18:

 
Trust your gut. Guts don’t lie.

           
“No
way,” I muttered.

           
Where
was the
Luis
photo? I panicked for a second before remembering I’d left
it in my radon guy shirt, now stuffed in the back of Charlene’s closet. I
hurried to retrieve it, smoothed out its creases, and compared it to the
Bear-Malibu
photo. Resemblances zinged out—same surfer blond hair, same jaw, same
build. I zoomed the Facebook photo. At 400 percent, the tattoo on Bear’s left
bicep leaped into focus as a Harley Davidson eagle.

The guy in the
Luis snapshot had a dark blob on his left bicep that could have been a tattoo.
Or a smear of blueberry popsicle or a hairy mole or a weird birthmark. Why was
I jumping to conclusions? This whole notion was preposterous. Half the men in
America had bicep tattoos. More details popped out as I examined the snapshot
under a lamp: a newspaper with a Spanish headline, liquor bottles with Spanish
labels. It might be a place in Mexico; the boy looked Mexican. I squinted at
the tiny printed date at the bottom of the Luis snapshot. If the camera’s
built-in dater had been set correctly, the picture was about twelve years old.

Bear had been
head of his company’s Mexican operations eleven or twelve years ago.

Why was the man’s
arm wrapped around the kid’s shoulder? There could be a perfectly innocent
explanation—mugging for the camera, a boisterous guy-type hug, maybe a
game of Couch Twister
.
Only that’s not what it looked like. And why was
the guy who resembled Bear holding up his hand as though to shield his face?

           
Turning
the snapshot over, I stared at the number on the back, written in Kip’s sloppy
scribble. Why had Kip hidden this photo in his secret stash at Vanessa’s house?
Why not just hide it in our house? Maybe because he didn’t want to risk my
finding the snapshot and asking nosy questions about it. Who
was
Luis,
anyway? Before I could talk myself out of it, I picked up the kitchen phone and
dialed the number on the back of the snapshot.

           
“Hola?”
A woman’s voice. Spanish; I could hear the upside-down question mark.

“Uhh . . . Is
Luis there?”

           
A
pause. Then, “Who is this?”

“A friend.”

“Yeah, some
friend. Luis is dead and you should drop dead too, bitch.” Slam.

           
Jeez.
        

           
Luis
was dead? What did that mean? I needed to know more. I started to redial, then
replaced the receiver. Did I really need to get chewed out twice?

This was a job
for FonePhlip!

           
Type
a phone number into your computer and Phlip spits out a name and address.
Privacy? What privacy? No such thing these days. I learned about FonePhlip from
Vonda “The Virus” Wollensky—hacker, identity thief, and Taycheedah’s
reigning arm wrestling champion. She keeps the inmates abreast of every
technological advance happening on the outside, so in case we ever get paroled
and see flying cars we won’t flip out. She explained to us how corporations
track your every Google search, how nothing you ever do on the Internet really
goes away, and how even your emptied trash lurks forever in the depths of your
hard drive.

In seconds I had
the name that matched the phone number:
Constanza Arguello, 1633 East
Schiller Street.
Now what did I do? I desperately wanted to ask Ben
Labeck for advice, but I’d burned my bridges with him when I’d stolen his car.

           
A
key rattled and the front door opened.
“Loo-see,”
Bear called from the
foyer. “I’m ho-o-me.”

           
I
jumped, my heart doing the guilt dance
.
In one twitchy motion, I
switched off the computer, rocketed off the stool, and frantically tried to
stuff the snapshot into Charlene’s strangler jeans, which turned out to lack
pockets. Clawing at the jeans’ tight waistband, I crammed the snapshot into my
underpants.

Muffin detonated
as Bear entered the room, charging out from beneath the table and hurling
himself at Bear, snapping and snarling.

           
“Muffin!
Knock it off!” To my shock, Muffin careened to a halt. Glancing back at me, he
sat down on his haunches, then turned and glowered at Bear, growling deep in
his throat, obviously restraining himself with difficulty. Muffin obeying a
command? What next?

           
“Sorry,”
I said.

           
Bear
set a paper sack down on a counter. Grinning, he came over and planted a kiss
on my cheek. “You okay, sweetie? No shootouts with the coppers, no jumping out
of barns?”

           
“I’m
okay. But scared.” The snapshot was burning a hole in my skin.

           
“You’d
be crazy not to be. Hungry?”

“Ravenous.”

“I hope you still
like Chinese.” He began pulling what appeared to be the entire contents of a
Chinese restaurant out of the sack. Moo goo gai pan. Colonel Tso chicken. Mu
Shu pork. Three different kinds of rice, four kinds of egg roll, fortune
cookies, Cokes, chopsticks.

           
“How
about getting some plates out of the cupboard?” Bear had changed out of his
suit into a long-sleeved polo shirt, dark pants, and black high-top sneakers.
His pants cuff had a smear of mud on it and stick-tight burrs were snagged on
his shoelaces.

           
A
thirty-something Bear, wearing only shorts, his hand up to block the camera.

I blocked out the
image. “You didn’t walk all the way from downtown, did you?”

           
Bear
laughed. “Twelve miles? Mazie, I can barely walk twelve steps without puffing.
One of my staffers drove me as far as my health club—that’s only a couple
of blocks away—then I walked from there. I didn’t want to take a chance
on my driver spotting you.”

           
“I
was starting to get worried.”

           
“Hey,
babes, have I ever let you down?”

           
 
He fished napkins out of the bag, popped
the Cokes, unwrapped the chopsticks. I found plates and set them on the
counter. Strung out on guilt and nerves, I knocked against cabinets, fumbled
silverware, bumped Bear’s hip. Something hard was in his pocket.

“Is that a
gun
?”

           
“No,
Mazie—I’m just glad to see you.” He laughed at the old joke. “Yeah, it’s
a twenty-two-caliber jobbie. Want to see it?”

           
“No.
I hate guns.”

He shrugged. “You
can’t be too careful these days. Lots of nut jobs out there.”

We ate perched on
stools at the work island, looking out at the lake, faintly glimmering in the
lights from cottages on the opposite shore. I described my escapades since the
night I’d broken out of prison: stealing the van, crashing the Great Wall of
Potties, being strung up in a milk house, and nearly being electrocuted in
Vanessa’s bathtub.

           
 
I made them sound like adventures, rather
than the gut-wrenching near-death experiences they’d been. Bear laughed in all
the right places and it was like old times. It made me feel warm, happy,
protected. And ashamed of what I’d been thinking. Bear raised his glass. “To
Mazie the Amazing! Leaps tall buildings in a single bound.”

           
I
clinked my soda can against his. “To Senator Brenner. Rescuer of damsels in
distress, defender of democracy, and . . . and . . .”

“Golden-tongued
speechmaker. Purveyor of pork barrels.”

I slurped my
Coke. I noticed that Bear’s right hand, clamped around his soda can, had grimy
nails and a blistered thumb.

           
“Dirty
politics?” I pointed at his hands.

           
He
picked at a crescent of dirt beneath a nail. “Ground-breaking ceremony for a
new strip mall.”

           
“Another
strip mall. Just what we need.”

           
He
grinned. “Yeah, but it gets my picture in the paper.”

           
I
took a deep pull on my pop. I’ve never understood the concept of tea with
Chinese food. Coke provides the perfect icy sweetness to offset the heat of the
spices.

           
Bear
dished shrimp-fried rice onto my plate. “You didn’t tell me how you got from
that farm to Milwaukee.”

           
 
I popped a shrimp in my mouth, chewing to
give myself time to think. I couldn’t tell Bear about Labeck, not yet. I stuck
as close to the truth as possible. “I stowed away in a TV truck. Luckily, it
was a Milwaukee TV station.”