The Sexiest Man Alive (25 page)

“You remember Lester, right?” Juju said.

“Yeah,” he said testily. If this was the news that Lester and Mazie had eloped, he was moving to Tierra del Fuego.

“Well, Lester stopped in at Mazie’s to drop something off this morning. Her door was open but Mazie was gone—so was Muffin.”

“Try Magenta’s.” Ben gave the evil eye to a shifty-looking NBC cameraman who looked like he was about to elbow in on Ben’s territory.

“Magenta just got in from Vegas and he doesn’t know where she is, either. Something’s wrong, Ben. Mazie’s furniture is tossed around and there’s a bloody smudge on a wall—”

“Blood?” Ben suddenly came alert.

“It looks like there might have been a fight.”

She was in trouble and needed help. That was all he needed to hear. “On my way,” Ben said.

He found the wet-behind-the-ears reporter who was rehearsing his on-air segment and dragged him over to the tripod camera. “You’ve just been promoted to cameraman. I got the camera pointed exactly where it’s supposed to point. Just turn it on and go stand in front of it. Red, it’s on; black, it’s off—got it?”

“What? No. What’re you talking about? Nobody told me I had to—”

“Phone the station. Tell ’em to send a backup camera guy.”

And then he was out of there. He rammed out of the zoo lot, ran red lights, pounded way over the speed limit, made the ten miles between the zoo and Brady Street in sixteen minutes flat and double-parked next to a U.S. Postal Service truck. He sprinted into Mazie’s flat.

Juju stopped him at the door. “Don’t walk on the evidence.”

Ben looked down. Part of a large, muddy footprint was visible on the floor of Mazie’s foyer. Looking more closely, he saw several others.

Fear uncoiled from the pit of his stomach. He knew immediately that whatever this was, it was bad. Magenta and Lester, both looking scared, were perched on Mazie’s sofa. He surveyed the room. Mazie’s fig tree—the one she talked to and fussed over—was knocked over, dirt was spilled on the carpet, and a ceramic lamp lay smashed on the floor, its shade crumpled.

“Here’s the smudge,” Juju said, pointing to the wall near a crooked painting. The smudge was about at head height for a short person and was definitely blood, a barely noticeable smear about the size of a thumbprint, dried to a brownish-maroon shade.

“I stopped by this morning with a letter for Mazie,” Lester said. “From my aunt. And the door wasn’t even closed. I looked around and knew right away something must have happened, so I phoned Juju.”

“When Juju got here she woke me,” Magenta said. He looked tired; he hadn’t even put on his makeup. “I got in on an early flight from Vegas this morning.”

Ben’s mind immediately flew to Dreadlocks. He’d detested the guy on sight. He must have come back after Ben had left and attacked Mazie. “That guy she went out with—the dick with the dreads,” he said, turning to Juju. “Do you know him?”

“Not personally,” she said. “I just set him up with her as a blind date.”

Ben bit down all the things he wanted to say to Juju, most of which contained the word
stupid
, and forced himself to use a controlled tone. “Where does he live?”

“I already called him. His name is Chad and he claims you beat him up last night—”

“I did not beat him up.” The muscles in Ben’s jaw tightened. “If I had, the jerk wouldn’t be capable of talking today.”

“Well, according to him, he went home after leaving here. He and his band buddies smoked dope all night, then passed out in someone’s pad. I talked to a couple of the other guys and they all said Chad was—”

“I don’t care if a pack of nuns back him up. I’m going to beat the truth out of him.”

“Ben, shut up and listen,” Juju snapped. Grabbing his arm, she hauled him to the bathroom. “Look at this. It’s weird.”

She pointed at the clothes on the floor. “The bra and panties? They aren’t Mazie’s. Neither are those jeans or that shirt, which, by the way, are a men’s size extra large. Also, there’s a bloody Band-Aid in the shower drain.”

“Mazie’s banged-up knee—”

“No—she took off the bandages days ago. Look—those are small Band-Aids that came off in the shower.”

The bathroom was a mess. Mazie wasn’t a neat freak, but she wouldn’t have left towels, tape, and scissors lying around like this. A faint scent of her shampoo lingered in the air, and it brought Mazie so vividly to mind that he had to dig his nails into his palms to make himself focus.

“There’s also a man’s leather jacket thrown over a chair in her living room,” Magenta said. “And a motorcycle helmet and size twelve boots. And there are two plates on the kitchen table and eggs and milk sitting out on the counter.”

Ben could feel his muscles tensing, his entire body crying out for action. He wanted to
do
something, not stand around playing detective.

“Here’s her purse,” Juju said, picking up Mazie’s enormous black bag. “No woman ever goes anywhere without her purse.”

“I’m phoning the police.” Lester spoke up for the first time, his voice trembling but showing more spine than Ben had credited him with. “Mazie’s life might be at stake—”

“Go for it,” Ben said. If Mazie was okay, if this was some huge practical joke, she wouldn’t appreciate having the police dragged in. But Ben knew this wasn’t a prank.

The doorbell rang. Magenta opened the door to a short, pudgy, gray-haired woman. Ben recognized her as Mazie’s neighbor, Irma Schirmer, who occasionally babysat Muffin. She wore
a quilted bile green bathrobe and fluffy Garfield bedroom slippers. Her arms were crossed truculently across her chest and her mouth was drawn down in a thin-lipped grimace. “Did one of you jokers use my back lawn as a garbage dump?” she demanded. “You wanted to get rid of your filthy old motorcycle so you threw it in my petunias? You think my lawn is a junkyard?”

“What motorcycle?” Ben said, his voice sharper than he’d intended.

Mrs. Schirmer’s gaze shifted to him and her face softened. “I know who you are—Mazie’s boyfriend. Why haven’t I seen you around lately? And where’s Mazie? And my sweetie Muffin—I was supposed to doggie-sit him today. What’s going on here, anyway?”

Ignoring her question, Ben walked down the driveway, hoisted himself up onto the property-line fence, then swung easily down to the other side. A crumpled heap of metal lay there, sprawled on its side amid a flower bed. He recognized the motorcycle as a Triumph, one of the ugliest bikes ever built. Its handlebars were bent, its headlight smashed, its side mirror snapped off, and Mrs. Schirmer was right—it did appear to have been just tossed over the fence. Hauling it upright, Ben wheeled it out of her flower bed, across her lawn, onto the sidewalk, and up Magenta’s driveway.

“Did you hear motorcycles last night?” Ben asked Mrs. Schirmer.

“Motorcycles, no. But I saw a truck. A big truck right there in the driveway.”

“When was this?” Ben asked.

“Oh, golly—somewhere around midnight, maybe. Something woke me up—maybe it was the noise of the motorcycle being thrown over the fence. So I got up to use the toilet—that’s when I noticed that truck out there, with its engine running.” Mrs. Schirmer nervously knotted and unknotted her bathrobe belt. “I wondered what the heck this fool was doing there so late at night. I looked out, but I could only see the top part of the truck, what with the fence blocking my view. It looked like a big delivery truck—I thought maybe they were working late, dropping off a shipment to Magenta’s shop. But then they drove away and I went back to bed.”

“Did you see anything else,” Juju asked, “or hear anything?”

Mrs. Schirmer pondered. “Come to think of it … I think I heard a man’s voice. Thought it was a drunk out on the street. Something like, ‘hurry up’ or ‘let’s go.’ They slammed the truck tailgate down—you know, the clanging noise those things make.”

“Did you get the truck’s plates?” Ben asked tensely.

“No. It was dark. And why should I care about a license plate? Would somebody please
tell me what in the goshdarn heck is going on here?”

While Juju talked to the Schirmer woman, Ben inspected the motorcycle. He had a photographer’s memory and instantly memorized the license plate number. The vehicle would probably turn out to be stolen, but it would give them a starting point.

A patrol car rolled up to the curb and two Milwaukee Police Department officers got out.

Ben hadn’t expected cops to show up so soon. He knew exactly what was going to happen next; he’d seen it hundreds of times when he was filming news stories. The officers would follow proper procedures. They would go through Mazie’s flat room by room, and they’d be skeptical, inclined to treat the whole thing as some ditz forgetting to close up her apartment while she ran out to Starbucks rather than as a kidnapping. They would ask endless questions, meaning he and the others might be stuck here for hours.

When they discovered that the missing person was Mazie Maguire, things would explode. Mazie was famous. The patrol officers would call in detectives, and the detectives in turn would report back to their superiors, who would hurry over to check out the scene themselves; there was lots of potential here for the top brass to get themselves on camera, saying, “At this time we are not prepared to make a comment.”

This was going to turn into a three-ring circus. The police would bring every resource to bear on Mazie’s disappearance, but the process would be slow and cumbersome, and some of the cops would be more concerned with covering their asses in case something went wrong than in taking action.

Remembering the blood smear on the wall, Ben’s stomach sank. He felt a terrible sense of urgency. He needed to take action now. Laying a hand on Magenta’s shoulder, he said, “Can you handle this? I’m cutting out.”

“But—” Magenta was biting his nails, something he always did when he was nervous.

“Just tell ’em everything you know. I’ll be back as soon as I check some stuff out.”

Ben slipped into Mazie’s flat and out again via her side door. He managed to get to his car without the officers noticing him, then drove to the parking lot of a nearby church and sat there, mulling things over. The Triumph was the key here, he thought. Whose was it and why had it been thrown over the fence? He needed someone with the authority to trace the chopper’s license plate.

Who did he know who would do it? The Milwaukee police department would trace the
plate, of course, but they would never share that information with a civilian.

Hoolihan
.

Ben groaned aloud. He didn’t want to go begging favors from Johnny Hoolihan. But Mazie’s life was at stake here, and if he had to swallow his pride to get her back, then that’s what he was going to do.

“This place is the old Coulee County Lunatic Asylum,” Mazie told Shayla. “It used to be a hospital for the mentally ill years ago—only they were called lunatics then.”

“That totally sucks,” Shayla said.

“Back when this thing was built, they didn’t know what to do with schizophrenics or old people with dementia or whatever, so they just locked them up in institutions.”

Shayla looked at Mazie, disbelieving. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not. The attitudes toward the mentally ill were practically medieval. That’s why they built the asylum way out in the middle of nowhere—so they didn’t have to worry about the loonies escaping and scaring the townspeople.”

“You’re sure that’s where we are? I mean, have you ever, like, been in here or something?”

“No, I’ve never been inside. The place has been closed down for years. But I’m almost sure that’s where we are—even though I’ve only ever seen it driving past.”

“It’s completely creepy.”

Mazie nodded. “I think the buildings were supposed to be torn down a long time ago. I sort of remember reading in the paper about how the county was selling the land to a developer, but that deal fell through because there were old graves on the property.”

“What graves?”

“You can see them up on the hillside there.” Mazie rubbed a spot clear on the window so Shayla could look out. “There’s a cemetery up there. It’s kind of hard to see because those trees are in the way.”

“I can see it. So is that where they buried those poor people—the lunatics? And their ghosts would, like, haunt anyone who disturbed them, so nobody wanted to buy the land?”

Mazie smiled. “I don’t know about ghosts, but there’s some kind of law about disturbing graveyards. Or maybe the developer simply ran out of money. Anyway, the buildings were left standing, but rumors started flying that the place was haunted. Teenagers would sneak onto the property and hold beer parties here, vandalize stuff, build bonfires. I think they burned down a
couple of the buildings.”

“Were
you
one of those teenagers?” Shayla asked.

Mazie laughed. “You wouldn’t ask that if you knew what a coward I am. I’d have been too terrified to set foot within a mile of the place after dark. Do you think the Skulls own this place—or are they just squatting here?”

Shayla sipped from a water bottle. She and Mazie had unpacked their smuggled-in goods, hiding them behind one of the old steam radiators sitting on the room’s perimeter. “I think Papa Yatt probably owns it all legal. Ricky Lee told me the old man buys property cheap just by paying the back taxes. ’Course it’s never under his name—he always gets some relative listed as the legal owner, I guess so it makes it harder for the law to track him down.”

The gang couldn’t have found a better place for a hidey-hole, Mazie thought. The old asylum was miles from the nearest town and had no neighbors who might complain about the noise from the motorcycles. The fence would keep out any unwanted visitors, and there was plenty of space to park their bikes or store guns and drugs.

“What do you think they used this tower for in the old days?” Shayla asked, standing in the center of the room and gazing around. “Did they throw boiling oil down on their enemies?” Mazie had been thinking about this, too. “I think maybe they put the TB patients up here. They’d have had a hospital ward up here.”

“TV?”

“
TB
. Tuberculosis. It was an epidemic years ago. The doctors thought sunlight and fresh air helped cure people—that’s why they’ve got all the windows—to let in fresh air. Probably they kept the mentally ill people on the lower floors.”