Crazy for You (3 page)

Until then I was clipping coupons, mining my pockets for stray pennies, and taking home doggie bags. Glancing at the Happy Soup wall clock, I discovered that I was running late. Too bad about my leftover booyah, but a doggie bag just never works on soup. I tossed my iPad into my purse and barged out the door, failing to notice that someone else was entering while I was exiting.

“Oops—sorry,” I said.

I looked up.

Shit!

Of all the booyah joints in all the world, why did he have to walk into this one?

It was Labeck. He was holding open the door for the TV dodo behind him, but he came to a jolting halt when he saw me. We stared at each other. Well, not exactly stared, on my part. Drank in, inhaled, devoured. He was wearing the aftershave I liked, the one that smelled like cinnamon and wood smoke.

“Hi,” he said, looking as surprised as me.

“Hi,” I replied, as a hellish red tide swept from my hairline to my clavicles.

“How’s Muffin?”

“Muffin? Muffin’s good.”

“That’s good.”

“How are
you
?” I could feel my brain cells committing suicide, one by one.

“Me? I’m good, too.”

Who knows how long this witty repartee might have continued, but the Talent got
tired of standing out in the cold and popped up beneath Labeck’s outstretched arm, which had frozen on the door. Looking as though he wished he could vanish beneath an invisibility cloak, Labeck said, “Mazie, this is Aspen Lindgren. Aspen, Mazie Ma—”

“Oh, this little gal needs no introduction.” Aspen smiled a dazzling high-definition-TV-just-out-of-the-box smile and stuck out her hand. We shook. “Maziemania, right? What a fantastic survival story! It’s terrific that you were cleared of those charges that you killed your husband.”

“Thanks.”
For remembering to mention it
.

To anyone watching, we were just two women making polite chitchat, but we knew better. We were taking each other’s measure. I was the ex-girlfriend and she was aiming for the new-girlfriend slot. Aspen was
radiating
, showing off for Labeck.

No one was going to outdo
me
at radiating, dammit! I wasn’t a former Miss Quail Hollow for nothing! I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, sucked in my gut, thrust out my boobs, and turned up the wattage on my own smile. Labeck looked stunned, as though he’d been hit with exploding estrogen bombs.

“I’ll be sure to watch for your reports from now on,” I said to Aspen, still in the same overdosed-on-cotton-candy tones, resisting the urge to shorten her name to Ass.

“So where do
you
work, Mazie?” she asked.

“Cromwell Research Services.”

Aspen’s eyes lit up. “The website, right? They run tons of ads on our station. The owner of your company Rhoda? Rhonda?—anyway, she invited me and some people from our station to this party she’s throwing tomorrow night. I’m making Benny take me, even though he’s a great big ol’ grouchy bear about parties.”

“Yes, I bet he is.” I bit down on a laugh, noting that a nerve in Labeck’s jaw was twitching. How fascinating. I was almost enjoying this.

“I suppose we’ll see you there,” Aspen chirped.

“Probably.” My jaw muscles were getting sore from smiling.

“Super! Well, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got to grab a bite and then we’re off to the next crisis. Just rush-rush-rush, all day long, you know how it is with us media folks.”

“Uh-huh. Nice meeting you.” I fled outdoors into the cold, clear air. Tiny black specks boogied across my vision and I suddenly staggered, overcome by dizziness. I was
about to fall into the gutter and get run over by a garbage truck.

Aspen would cover the story, of course. “And so ends the tragic story of Mazie Maguire, the woman who murdered her husband in cold blood but later beat the rap.”

I didn’t “beat the rap.” I flushed out the guy who did the actual crime. Thanks mainly to Ben Labeck, who’d hidden me in his apartment. He’d also arranged the setup that nailed the scumbag, despite the fact that he could have been charged with aiding and abetting a criminal. When I’d been released from prison, Labeck had asked me to move in with him. We’d spent five blissful days together, most of them in his bed.

And then, with dizzying suddenness, before I quite comprehended what was happening, we’d broken up, Labeck spinning off to the wilds of Montana and me to the urban wilderness of Brady Street. Six weeks had passed since then. I hadn’t even known Labeck was back in town.

The dizziness passed. I pulled myself together and walked to my car. Milwaukee wasn’t that large; sooner or later Labeck and I were bound to run into each other. Now we’d both survived the encounter. We were getting on with our lives, me with my canine companion, Muffin, and Labeck with his junior Diane Sawyer.

I’m over him
, I told myself. I didn’t need Ben Labeck in my life.

One of these days I might even start to believe that.

Chapter Four

A boss’s effectiveness will be in inverse proportion to the height of her heels.

—Maguire’s Maxims

The CRS office is located in Brookwood, an upscale suburb on the east side that merges indistinguishably into the city of Milwaukee. The offices occupy the ground floor of a century-old brick building on Oakland Avenue, Brookwood’s main street. The motif is art deco, the facade is sandstone, the landscaping is winter-resistant, and at four in the afternoon, parking spaces are nonexistent. Luckily, today being Friday, a couple of the building’s tenants had sneaked off for the weekend, and I snagged a primo slot in the lot.

I was just getting out of Pig when a man slammed out of the building’s rear door, strode across the lot, and halted in front of a cherry-colored Audi with vanity plates that read RHONDA. He jerked a can of spray paint out of his briefcase, shook the can, snapped off its top, and began spraying black paint on the driver’s side of the Audi.

“Hey!” The guy had scribbled a whole
B
before my brain caught on. “Stop that!”

I took a step in his direction.

The man spun around, holding the spray can toward me like a weapon. His face was maroon with rage, and his eyes were bulging like those plastic googly eyes kids glue onto arts and crafts projects.

I halted in my tracks.

When he saw that I wasn’t going to actually do anything to stop him, he turned back to his job. He wasn’t your typical car vandal. He must have been sixty years old, with salt-and-pepper hair and a paunch. The mere effort of raising his arms seemed to have winded him, but he doggedly continued to work.
B-I-T
…

The only question now was whether he’d have his heart attack before or after he finished the entire word.

I scurried into the CRS building. “Call the police,” I yelled. “A guy is vandalizing
Rhonda’s car!”

“All right!” someone said. Grins flashed; fists pumped; employees surged to the window to look out. The graffiti artist had finished
BITCH
and was scribbling the
C
word on the windshield. He had to rest for a while, head down and hands on knees, panting, before continuing the job.

“
Go
, guy,” muttered Charlie, a fellow mystery shopper, who nursed a passionate hatred for our boss.

“There’s room near the bumper for
witch
,” Rhonda’s assistant, Belinda Wernke, helpfully pointed out.

“I could lend him my box cutter to use on the tires,” another employee suggested.

“What’s going on here?” We all turned around to regard Rhonda, who had just emerged from her office. No one replied. To speak was to draw down abuse. Rhonda clacked over to the window on her high heels, looked out, and gave a gurgle of laughter.

“Oh, that’s Freddy. My ex-hubby. He was just in here, throwing a tantrum about some silly tax thing. He’s really harmless.”

“Should I phone the police?” one brave soul quavered.

“Don’t bother.” Rhonda pointed to the security camera mounted on a light pole in the lot. “It’ll all be caught on tape. The stupid shit can’t deny he did it. But he’ll be the one who pays the repair bill.”

She snapped her fingers. “All right, people, show’s over. Get back to work. Maguire, in my office.”

Rhonda was a natural brunette, with olive skin and burnt-sienna eyes, which made her hair, dyed to the color of yellow sidewalk chalk, all the more startling. It was straight and glossy, geometrically cut to emphasize her strong jaw. Her lips were plumped to platypus proportions, and her nose was planed to elegant straightness, finished off with a piquant upturn. Rhonda should have been pretty, but her hardness canceled out her perfect features. She looked like the kid who’d grabbed all the presents under the Christmas tree, but still wanted to take away the empty stocking you held in your hand.

Rhonda didn’t do subtle. If it didn’t shine, glitter, or call attention to her, it didn’t go on her body. Today she wore a skinny black skirt, a spangled gold top tight enough to show off her nipples, and a black bolero sweater. In her spike heels, she was six feet tall.
I think she would have stood on stilts if she felt it made her legs look longer.

Her office smelled like the cosmetics department of a department store. Someone must have told Rhonda that white was the new black, because her office was done in Snow Queen tones: white carpeting thoroughly detested by the cleaning staff, shiny white-vinyl office chairs that stuck to your thighs and made farting noises if you squirmed, and a glossy white boomerang-shaped desk with matching credenza and bookshelves. Framed black-and-white photos filled an entire wall. Naturally, they were all of Rhonda. Rhonda at nightclubs, on the golf course, on boats. Rhonda with clients, minor politicians, and the kinds of entertainers who headline at local gambling casinos.

She’d morphed through the years. In the earlier photos, she had dull brown hair and a protruding stomach. As time passed, she’d become blonder and shapelier, her cheeks hollower, her boobs bigger, her lips poutier, her wardrobe more flamboyant. Maybe that explained her personality: there was an ugly duckling quivering inside that swanlike exterior. Belinda Wernke claimed Rhonda was bipolar. Some days she was Ms. Happy-Happy-Happy, lavishing praise on everyone and buying coffee and doughnuts for the entire staff. Some days she’d bite your head off if you disagreed with her. And some days she’d keep her door closed, put her head down on her desk, and sob for hours, exhausting the office’s supply of Kleenex.

I raised my antennae as Rhonda settled into her desk chair, trying to sense her mood.

“Well, sit,” she said, nudging a chair and sending it rolling in my direction. “You’ve been on your feet all day.”

I sat. The chair made a farting noise.

Rhonda whipped a sheet out of her printer and flourished it. Reading upside down, I saw it was the Hottie Latte evaluation I’d emailed earlier. “You made this lingerie café sound like jolly fun. I heard they do lap dances for ten bucks.”

If a Persian cat could talk, it would sound like Rhonda. Low pitched and growly, with undertones of sardine.
Yes, I’m soft and beautiful
, the voice said,
but I can disembowel you with a swipe of my claw
.

“No. It’s legit. Imagine Starbucks married to Victoria’s Secret.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” She tried to scowl, but the skin between her eyes was
so paralyzed with botulism toxins that her frown muscles didn’t work. Instead, her mouth drew downward, an inverted U I’d learned to dread.

“Figurative language.”

“You’re telling me these bimbos aren’t doing blow jobs in the back room?”

“No, they’re waitresses. They dress like that to get bigger tips.”

“I saw on TV that some church people are picketing the place.”

“You know what they say. All publicity is good publicity.”

She looked at me blankly. “I never heard that.”

Rhonda was a shrewd businesswoman, but there were vast holes in her cultural knowledge. She was bright and personable, with the glib self-assurance of a television talk-show hostess and a brassy charm that drew in swarms of clients. With potential customers, she radiated charisma, fetching them coffee, fawning and flattering, working for the sale with the energy and persistence she’d once employed in her days as a door-to-door encyclopedia saleswoman. She’d never gone beyond high school, but she had enough blue-collar work experience to give her street cred with the car czars, mufflershop magnates, taco-stand tycoons, and other self-made millionaires who made up the bulk of her clientele. She spoke their language, understood their problems, and knew how to get them to part with their money.

“Actually,” Rhonda purred, “I liked your review. It was really smart and funny. You’re good at this job, Maguire. Lots of positive responses from my customers. We ought to get you more assignments.”

“Yeah, I’d like that.” I tried not to show how much the compliment pleased me, because I loathed the way I was hooked on the heroin of Rhonda’s praise. When something is scarce, it increases in value.

Her desk phone rang. She raised an imperious finger to indicate that she wasn’t done with me yet and picked up. Whatever was being said on the other end of the phone wasn’t making her happy.

“That’s ridiculous,” she snapped. “Of course I paid that bill. Your accounting department must have made a mistake.”

She listened again, then cut in. “Listen have your people show up at eight sharp tomorrow night, unless you want to show up on my website as Rip-off of the Month.”

Even six feet away, I could hear laughter at the other end of the phone.

She slammed down the phone, flung herself back in her chair, and swung her legs up on her desk. “Well, that’s just great. I am now officially up shit creek without a paddle.”

“What happened?” I averted my gaze, not wanting to accidentally glimpse her day-of-the-week undies.

“The bartending service for my cocktail party just cancelled.” She drummed her fingers on her desk.

“Gee, that’s too bad.” Hard to feel sorry for someone throwing a party you’re not invited to. I got up and started to leave.