by Ed McBain
He later also supposed that he’d started up with Christine only because he was no longer in love with Alice. It never occurred to him that he might have fallen out of love with Alice only because he’d already started up with Christine.
The way Eddie looks at it now, he chose Marina Blue as a hideaway only because he thought it would be a safe, familiar, and therefore comforting place to hold the kids until all this was over and done with.
It never occurs to him that he might have been trying to re-create for himself one of the happiest times of his life—before it got too late.
It never once occurs to him that it might already be too late.
Eddie doesn’t think of himself as a criminal. He met criminals while he was working at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich, thanks, men who engaged in insider trading and were later caught and sent to prison. He was never one of those. Which was perhaps why he’d never made a killing in the market, he was never a goddamn criminal. And he is not a criminal now.
There are men all over these United States, perhaps all over this world, righteous men who take their children away from negligent or promiscuous mothers, men who rescue their children, in effect, from households that are hopeless—though he can’t claim to have done that, no. That would be lying to himself. And Eddie has never in his life lied to himself.
He knows that in the eyes of the law, he has kidnapped his children, which is a crime, but he is not a criminal. In the eyes of the law, he has taken his own children away from their mother, a woman perceived to be a widow. Which, by the way, and for all intents and purposes, is patently true. Since he is legally dead, or at least presumed to be dead, who is to say that someone declared dead isn’t actually dead? Who is to say that Alice is not truly a widow if, in her own perception, she is in fact a widow? Who indeed?
And who is to say that Edward Fulton Glendenning did not cease to exist on that night of September 21 last year, which was when Edward Fulton Glendenning disappeared? And is it a crime to vanish from the face of the earth? Does this make him a criminal?
He was certainly not a criminal when he first began seeing Christine on the sly, began cheating on Alice, so to speak, his wife of so many good years; that did not make him a criminal. Florida is supposed to have state laws going all the way back to 1868, and these laws govern adultery, unmarried people living together, and oral sex—but they are never enforced. When he first started seeing Christine on a regular if clandestine basis, Eddie got curious about these laws so he went into the legal department of Baxter and Meuhl, where he was then working, and checked out the Florida statutes in their brown leather covers embossed in red and gold, but he couldn’t find any of those laws anywhere in any of the books. So if they weren’t in the statutes, were they even laws at all, or just myths? So he convinced himself that he was not doing anything criminal by seeing a sexy little black girl once, and then twice, and then three or four times each and every week, he was certainly not a criminal.
But Chapter 61.052 of those same Florida statutes informed him that if he and Alice ever got divorced because the marriage was “irretrievably broken,” then according to Chapter 61.08, titled “Alimony,” the court could consider “the adultery of a spouse… ”
Uh-oh.
“…and the circumstances thereof in determining whether alimony would be awarded.”
Which was not such good news.
By the time he met Christine, Eddie was into Angelet and Holmes for thirty grand. When he finally decided he had to do something to get out of this desperate situation, he owed them two hundred thou. With this huge debt hanging over his head, getting a divorce and paying alimony besides was entirely out of the question.
In Eddie’s mind, the two “problems” (he called them) became inextricably linked. If he could not get rid of Alice, he could not be with Christine full-time, and he would have to keep sneaking around corners and taking her to cheap roadside motels for quick afternoon fucks, which was not fair to either one of them. And if he could not get rid of his debt to Angelet and Holmes, then he could not get a divorce with its attendant alimony “penalties” (he called them).
So what to do?
Well, he could always kill Alice.
This was not a joke. Although he was not a criminal, killing Alice seemed to him a perfectly viable solution to at least one of the problems. Kill Alice, and he wouldn’t have to divorce her. He would be free to marry Christine and be with her night and day, you are the one.
Unfortunately, this still left the other little problem, which was a debt of two hundred thousand dollars, payable on demand or he would either be killed or hurt very badly, these people did not fool around.
What to do, oh what to do?
Well, desperate people do desperate things.
When he first told Christine about the insurance policy on his life, she thought this was very interesting but did not see how it applied to their current situation.
“If I die in an accident, the death benefit is doubled,” he told her.
“So?”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”
“So?”
“So if I die in an accident, Alice gets two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And we get to start a new life together.”
“One,” Christine said, “how do we start a new life together if you’re dead?”
“I’m not dead. I’m presumed dead.”
“And two, if Alice is the one who gets this insurance money, how do we get to start this new life together?”
“We kidnap my kids and hold them for ransom,” Eddie said.
After he faked the drowning, they moved out of the state entirely. It might have been safe to settle on the East Coast of Florida someplace, but from Fort Myers to Palm Beach was just a short hop across the state on U.S. 80, and farther south you could jump onto Alligator Alley at Naples and be in Fort Lauderdale in what, two, three hours? They couldn’t take that chance. Eddie Glendenning was dead. They didn’t want any travelers from Cape October to run into his ghost in a bar someplace.
They chose New Orleans.
Easier to get lost in a big city.
Fun town besides. The Big Easy, they called it. And nobody looked cockeyed at a black-white relationship there. Plenty of those there already; Eddie and Christine didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow.
He knew you could buy a fake ID on the Internet, but he was reluctant to do that because he felt it would leave some kind of paper trail that might come back to bite him on the ass later on. He was also leery of contacting anyone… well, criminal… who might be able to help him establish a new identity. By faking his own death, Eddie had already committed insurance fraud, and he was about to commit the crime of kidnapping, but he still did not think of himself as a criminal. He had not given up gambling—just because a person is dead doesn’t mean he has to stop gambling—but gambling wasn’t a crime. Gambling was an addiction, even though Eddie wasn’t quite ready to admit he was an addict, either.
However, some addictions are related, and so there were gamblers in New Orleans who also used narcotics, and the sale or possession of controlled substances was a crime in Louisiana, the same as it was in any other state of the union. And these gamblers who were also using drugs knew the people who were selling these drugs, of course, and these people were criminals, even Eddie had to admit that. And these drug-dealer criminals knew people who were involved in yet other types of criminal activity, and one of those activities happened to be the manufacture and creation of false documents like passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and even diplomas from Harvard University.
So by asking around—cautiously, to be sure—Eddie finally got a line on a man named Charles Franklin (“No relation to Ben,” he told Eddie with a grin) who was able to provide a false driver’s license issued to one Edward Graham residing at 336 East 120th Street in the city of New York, State of New York, with Eddie’s new signature on it and everything.
And he was abl
e to provide first a false American Express card under the cloned name of Michael Anderson, which he said would take Eddie through the month of October when the company would bill the real Michael Anderson, who would begin squawking about charges he’d never made. Franklin then created a cloned Visa card (true owner a man named Nelson Waterbury) that would take Eddie through November, and then a cloned Master Card for December and a cloned Discover card for January. By then, Eddie had found a job selling computer equipment and established a bank account of his own. When he applied for a bona fide credit card under his new name—Edward Graham, no middle initial—it was granted at once. He had no trouble passing a Louisiana driving test, either, and acquiring a legitimate driver’s license as well.
By then, he had also married Christine Welles, who became Christine Graham, thereby adding the crime of bigamy to Eddie’s already growing list of denied crimes.
Then again, it wasn’t Eddie Glendenning who married her.
Eddie Glendenning was hardly a memory by then.
Always mindful of leaving a trail that can somehow be picked up, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Graham fly not to Fort Myers—the closest airport to Cape October—but instead to Tampa, where they rent a car and drive to a marina he knows in St. Pete. Using his new name and his new legitimate credit card and driver’s license, Eddie rents a forty-foot Sundancer, a Sea Ray power cruiser that, with its pair of twin Volvo 430-horsepower engines, is capable of high performance in open water—although he plans only to take her down the Intercoastal to Cape October. In effect, he needs the boat more as a floating hotel than as a means of transportation.
Once on the inland waterway, he motors leisurely southward past the towering Sunshine Skyway to Anna Maria and Longboat, into Sarasota Bay, and past Venice and Englewood, and finally rounding Cape Haze and coming past Boca Grande. On the first day of April, he exits the Intercoastal at October Bay, where he finds the marina he and the family stayed at aboard the Jamash several years ago. Here on the northern end of Crescent Island, a thousand yards from where Lewiston Point Road dead-ends into Crescent Inlet, the azure docks of Marina Blue beckon in brilliant sunlight as he parks the Sundancer and cuts the engines.
He reminds Christine that this is April Fool’s Day.
An appropriate time to be setting their plan in motion.
Eddie Glendenning drowned in the Gulf of Mexico on the night of September 21 last year. Surely the insurance company has paid the death benefit by now. Even so, they do not plan to take the children till the middle of May, after they’ve gone over the ground a hundred times, walked it through again and again to make sure there will be no mistakes.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is riding on this little venture.
Their entire future together is riding on this little venture.
He does not dare wander very far from the boat, for fear someone will spot him, and recognize him, and blow the whole scheme.
It is Christine who purchases the hinged hasp that Eddie himself fastens to the door and jamb of the forward stateroom. In the same hardware store on the Trail, she buys a padlock that fits into the hasp, to keep the children secure until it is time to release them.
It is Christine as well who takes the ferry over to Lewiston Point, and phones for a taxi to carry her to the Fort Myers airport. They dare not choose any of the rental car companies that line U.S.41. It is their reasoning that if she rents at a smaller site, she might be recognized later on. There is a lot of traffic at an airport the size of the one in Fort Myers. No one will remember her. Or so is their reasoning.
The flat rate for the ride from the Lewiston Point ferry landing to the airport is seventy-five dollars. She goes directly to the Avis counter and presents her Clara Washington credit card and her Clara Washington driver’s license with her Clara Washington photograph and signature on it, and within fifteen minutes she is driving a blue Chevrolet Impala out of the airport.
She picks up Route 78 West, and drives directly to the Cape.
At the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road, she crosses U.S. 41 and drives out over the bridge to Tall Grass. At the end of the road, she parks the car and again boards the ferry to Crescent Island.
It has taken her exactly thirty-two minutes from the gas station to Marina Blue.
She is still worried about that guy in the restaurant.
It is now almost midnight, and they are lying in each other’s arms on the converted double berth in the middle stateroom, several feet from where the children are asleep in the locked master stateroom. It is Christine’s expectation that tomorrow they will turn the children loose and leave Cape October behind forever—but she can’t stop wondering why that guy in the restaurant thought he knew Eddie.
“Are you sure you never saw him before?” she whispers.
“Positive,” he says.
She nods. The boat bobs gently on the water. Her eyes are wide open in the dappled dark.
“Suppose he recognized you?” she asks. “Suppose he knew you were Eddie Glendenning sitting there in that restaurant?”
“I don’t think that’s likely.”
“But suppose.”
“Who cares? We’ll be out of here tomorrow night. Bali, remember? And we’ll never come back. So who cares what some old fart in a restaurant—?”
“Why don’t we leave tonight?”
“No,” he says. “There are still some things I have to figure out.”
“What things?”
“Well… the kids, for one.”
“What’s there to figure out? We drop them off someplace, and we’re on our way.”
“I’m not sure we can do that, Christine.”
“Do what?”
“Just drop them off like that.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Eddie. Why can’t we… ?”
“It’s not as simple as that, Christine! I have to figure it out!”
His voice is a sharp cutting whisper.
She catches her breath.
Then, very slowly, she asks again, “What is there to figure out, Eddie?”
“We kidnapped them,” he says. “We held them for ransom,” he says. “That’s what there is to figure out.”
They are both silent for several moments.
“Why don’t you take this off?” he whispers, and lifts the hem of the baby-doll nightgown she bought at Victoria’s Secret.
On the other side of the locked master stateroom door, the children are wide awake, listening to every whispered word.
Sunday
May 16
11
Garcia’s column is indeed in the coveted upper-right-hand position of the Sunday section’s first page. His photograph runs in a box at the top of the column. It shows him smiling at the camera.
The story that leads off “Dustin’s Dustbin” is titled:
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
The subhead reads:
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
The story reads:
A simple failure to communicate caused a dollop of confusion and measure for measure of consternation these past few frantic days. It all began when a blonde in a blue Impala drove into the parking lot of Pratt Elementary School at the end of the school day Wednesday and picked up James Glendenning, 8, and his sister Ashley, 10. When the children did not show up for school the next morning, and when the school’s calls to the home of Alice Glendenning, the children’s mother and a recent widow, went unanswered, school officials became alarmed.
“It was all a comedy of errors,” Mrs. Glendenning told the Dustbin last night. “It was my sister who picked up the children. She was down here from Atlanta, visiting with her own children, and we decided to take the kids to Disney World, which is where we’ve been for the past two days. I should have called Pratt, I guess, but it was a spur of the moment decision, and we didn’t think missing a few days of school would cause such a tempest.”
Carol Matthews, Mrs. Glendenning’s sister, is now back in Atlanta.
And the
Glendenning children will return to school on Monday.
Which is as you’d like it.
There are some people out there who know that Garcia’s little story is a pack of goddamn lies.
Well, not Phoebe Mears.
She accepts unconditionally that Alice Glendenning took little Jamie and Ashley to Disney World and forgot to tell the school about it. But if she sent her own sister to pick up the kids after school Wednesday, then what was that phone call from her asking about did they miss the bus and all? Had she also forgotten her sister was picking up the kids?
Phoebe knows that Mrs. Glendenning has been through a lot lately, her husband drowning and all. In which case, she can be forgiven a lapse of memory every now and then. So she agrees that all’s well that ends well, and that everything was probably just much ado about nothing, after all. Which is just as she likes it, yes.
Luke Farraday can’t figure out why that newspaper reporter would give him fifty bucks to tell him about the blue Impala and the blonde driving it if he knew all along that it was Mrs. Glendenning’s sister picking up the kids. And also, what was that business about wanting to put an announcement about a party in the social calendar, when instead it turns out the kids went to Disney World with their mother? Or is the party next week sometime? Is it a birthday party? Is that why Mrs. Glendenning took the kids to Orlando? Was it a birthday present? Is it one of their birthdays coming up?
Sometimes, Luke gets confused.
Then again, it said in the paper that “A simple failure to communicate caused a dollop of confusion and measure for measure of consternation these past few frantic days,” so maybe everybody’s confused and consterned about whatever arrangement the sisters made between them.