So how exactly does one spend the days leading up to breaking into one’s vampiric ex-boyfriend’s former bosses’ office? Filling up time before committing a crime—a felony, for all I knew—was something I’d never had to consider before. I’m sure other people could come up with good ideas with practical applications; those people might spend their time learning to pick locks or crack safes. Or reading up on the New York penal code.
Not me. I spent those days trying to catch up on my classwork. I did a pretty poor job of it, too. I had absolutely zero interest in writing papers about “British Politics and the Exclusion Crisis” or “The Socio-Political Ramifications of Clandestine Marriage,” but I had even less interest in losing my funding and having to get some sort of job. I was running pretty low on cash as it was, having spent a large portion of what I had remaining from the spring semester’s funding in order to finance The Sting.
Anyway, the unfinished coursework and the missed classes had been weighing on me a bit—I had never been anything but a good student, and my inner critic had begun complaining that I was throwing away my career on a bunch of vampires. I responded by pointing out that if I didn’t focus on the vampires, I might get killed by one. But inner critics are notoriously impervious to logic and mine was no exception, so I dutifully went to class or marched myself over to the library on every one of those days. I participated in class discussions. I read, I took notes, I Xeroxed pages. I even tried to write a bit. But really, all I could do was gather information—my concentration was shot, so I couldn’t even begin to organize the notes I’d come up with. In the end, my inner critic had to settle for “a good start” instead of “completing those papers.”
I’m not sure what Malcolm did with that time. I think he graded some exams from his freshman class. I think he prepared for the next week’s class. He probably went to his own grad classes. But he didn’t call me, and I didn’t call him.
I did get several calls from people wanting to get their homes and offices cleaned, though. Apparently, Malcolm had handed out flyers to every office in the Park Avenue building, just for consistency. And our website had gotten several hits since we’d put it up. If the grad school thing fell through, I could always become a cleaning lady. At any rate, I made “appointments” for everyone who called. I figured I could call them back after Sunday and tell them we’d gone out of business or something. Or I could go clean their offices and start my new business.
* * *
By the time Malcolm showed up on Sunday, I was shaking all over. I wanted a stiff drink to calm my nerves, but I had given up drinking and now didn’t seem like the time to start up again. I would need all my faculties tonight.
Malcolm was carrying a huge, bulging Target bag. He looked irritatingly chipper.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the bag.
“It’s the rest of your disguise.” He grinned and pulled out an enormous pair of panties and matching bra. They were at least four sizes too big for me. Then he pulled out two clear plastic packages labeled “pillow stuffing,” both full of puffy white material. Finally, he produced a pair of blue drawstring pants like the ones nurses wear in hospitals.
“You go put these clothes on, then stuff yourself silly. Especially the panties and bra. Oh. And here’s a pair of pantyhose. You might want to stuff your legs, too.” He looked more pleased with himself than I had imagined possible.
Great. I was going disguised as an opera singer moonlighting as a cleaning lady. And Malcolm got to go disguised as himself.
This was not going to be attractive.
In fact, just getting into the disguise was unattractive. I locked myself in the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and started with the pantyhose—I figured that I would put the underwear on over the hose so as to keep them from pinching in my waist. I wanted to look dumpy, not curvy.
Putting on pantyhose is an unpleasant endeavor at the best of times. They twist and pinch and rip. At least they do when I put them on. I assume that other women are better at that sort of thing than I am. Shoving pillow stuffing down into the stockings makes the whole process even more irritating. I finally got it done, though I had to go back and re-stuff the left leg after I looked in the mirror. It was only half as large as the right. Dumpy Cleaning Lady, I thought. Not Victim of Elephantitis. The hose were full of runs by that point, but since no one was going to see them, I didn’t care.
The underclothes were easier. The underwear came up over my bellybutton, the kind we called “granny panties” when I was in high school. Using the stuffing, I broadened my hips and gave myself an enormous rear. And by the time I’d finished with the bra, I had breasts a stripper would be proud of. Until she took off her clothes, anyway.
Malcolm had brought a Big Apple Citywide t-shirt for me, size XXL. Once I got it on, I looked like my junior-high math teacher. For a moment, that thought frightened me more than the prospect of breaking into a law firm’s files.
The makeup was easy. I just applied it about five times thicker than usual. When I was done, I looked a little like a has-been country singer, all thick eyelashes and bright red lips.
The wig took a little more doing. I slicked my hair back with gel and pinned it with bobby-pins, just like the guy at the store had suggested. But when I put the wig on, it looked a touch too glamorous, like I was ready to go out to a seedy bar instead of a cleaning gig. So I pulled it up on top of my head with a butterfly clip, letting pieces of it hang down randomly. There. That looked more like I was trying to keep it out of the way so that I could finish cleaning and then go to a seedy bar.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, Malcolm glanced up from the blueprints he was studying once again and did a double take.
I’d never seen anyone do an actual double take before. It was kind of cool. He looked at me, then back at the blueprints, then whipped his head up for a second look—I was afraid he might give himself whiplash. He let out a low whistle.
“Wow,” he said.
“I’m not sure that this is a whistle-appropriate outfit,” I said.
Malcolm laughed. “But it is an effective one. I wouldn’t have recognized you if I hadn’t known you were the only one in the bathroom.”
“Good. That’s what I was going for.”
Malcolm, on the other hand, looked just like himself. I hadn’t been worried about that at first, since no one at the law firm knew him as anyone other than “James Allgood,” the proprietor of Big Apple Citywide.
But Greg had seen him, if only briefly, and I was beginning to worry about that a little. Of course, it was about item number 72 on my List of Things to Worry About. Number 71 was What if Malcolm’s in league with vampires? But there was nothing to be done about either of those things now. This might be my only shot at getting into the law firm, and I needed to take it.
* * *
Luckily for us, most companies stock their own cleaning supplies, so when we got on the train to head into the city we weren’t burdened with mops and brooms and buckets and such.
We’d decided to actually clean the office in order to give ourselves a bit more lead time. If the offices weren’t cleaned by Monday morning, Sheila the Secretary might notice and realize that she’d been snowed. This way, though, she might attribute anything being out of order to a sloppy cleaning crew rather than a secret raid on her office’s files.
“So tell me again why we have to do this at night?” I asked Malcolm as the train clattered away from the Fordham station. “The law office is closed on Sunday. I know. That was the only free day Greg ever had.”
“Sheila said that some of the lawyers choose to come in on Sunday anyway—what an awful job that would be. Lawyers work too many hours—eighty, ninety hours a week. Yuck.”
“The point, Malcolm.”
“Oh. Yeah. She said that most everybody’s gone by 6:00 or so on Sundays, so we ought to have the place to ourselves; she said that way we wouldn’t have to clean around anyone.”
“And what about the security guards?”
“There’s one at the front desk. He monitors the offices via video cameras.”
“So how are we going to get around those?”
“We’re going to take turns blocking their line of sight.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I can do this.”
Malcolm smiled. “Of course you can.”
Sheila was waiting to let us into the main office once we got to Forster, Pearson, and Sims.
“There are only two of you?” she asked. “Our regular cleaning team has five.”
Malcolm smiled his most charming smile. “Our free offer turned out to be a lot more popular than we had expected. We’ve had to split up into four crews tonight instead of two—I usually just supervise, but we’re so busy I’m having to clean. I promise we’ll be thorough, though.”
I think it was more the smile than the explanation that did it. And she dismissed me in a single glance.
Malcolm’s pillow stuffing had been a fabulous idea. In Sheila’s eyes, it left me firmly in the category of Below Notice.
Sheila gave us a quick tour of the suite of offices, showed us the cleaning supply closet, then gathered up her bag to leave.
“The door will automatically lock behind you when you leave the suite. Be sure to sign out with security at the front desk before you leave the building—they’ll want to check your bags. Don’t take it personally; we all have to do it.”
Then she was gone, and there we were, alone in the law offices of Forster, Pearson, and Sims.