Alice in Jeopardy

by Ed McBain

  “What’d she sound like?”

  “I… I don’t know. A woman. I…”

  “White? Black?”

  “I don’t know. How can anyone tell…?”

  “Everyone can tell. Was she white or black?”

  “Black. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “How old?”

  “In her thirties maybe.”

  “Call the police. Tell them a black woman in her thirties has your kids. Do it now, Mrs. Glendenning. A bad situation can only get worse. Trust me on that.”

  “I can’t take that chance, Rosie.”

  “You can’t take any other chance.”

  The women look at each other.

  “Call them,” Rosie says.

  “No,” Alice says.

  “Then God have mercy on your soul,” Rosie says.

  Alone in the house now, Rosie gone in a flutter of dire predictions, Alice first begins blaming herself. I should have bought Ashley the cell phone, she thinks, and remembers her daughter arguing like an attorney for the defense.

  “But, Mom, all the girls in the fifth grade have cell phones!”

  Oh, sure, the same way all the girls in the fifth grade are allowed to wear lipstick and all the girls in the fifth grade are allowed to date, and…

  “No, Ashley, I’m sorry, we can’t afford a cell phone just now.”

  “But, Mom…”

  “Not just now, darling, I’m sorry.”

  Thinking now, I should have bought her the phone, how much would it have cost, anyway? If Ashley had a cell phone, she’d have called me at the office before getting in a car with a strange woman—what on earth possessed her? How many times had Alice told them, her and Jamie both, never to accept anything from a stranger, never, not candy, not anything, never even to stop and talk with a stranger, certainly never to get in a car with a stranger, what was wrong with them?

  No, she thinks, it isn’t their fault, it isn’t my fault, it’s this woman’s fault, whoever she is, this woman driving a blue car, do I know anyone who drives a blue car? She tries to remember. She’s sure she must know someone who drives a blue car, but who remembers the color of anyone’s car unless it’s yellow or pink? A blue car, she thinks, a blue car, come on, who drives a blue car, but she can’t think of a single soul, and her frustration leads once again to unreasoning anger. Anger against herself for not having bought the goddamn cell phone, anger at her children for getting into a car with a strange woman, but especially anger at this undoubtedly crazed person, whoever she is, this woman who probably has no children of her own, and who has now stolen from Alice the only precious things in her life, I’ll kill her, she thinks. If ever I get my hands on her—

  The phone rings.

  Alice picks up the receiver at once.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Mrs. Glendenning?”

  The same woman again.

  “Yes,” Alice says. “Listen, Miss—”

  “No, you listen,” the woman says. “Don’t interrupt, just listen. We want a quarter of a million dollars in cash. Hundred-dollar bills. Get the money together by noon tomorrow. We’ll call again then. Get the money. Or the kiddies die.”

  And she hangs up.

  Alice puts the receiver back on the wall hook, and stands silently at the kitchen counter for what is perhaps thirty seconds. Then she reaches for the phone again, and immediately calls Charlie Hobbs.

  2

  She does not think anyone is watching the house.

  But she walks swiftly from the kitchen door to the car, and opens the door on the driver’s side and gets in behind the wheel, and starts the car, and then backs out of the driveway and into the street and is on her way in less than a minute and a half. Even in off-season traffic, it takes her ten minutes from her house to the Lewiston Point Bridge. From there, it takes her another fifteen minutes to Charlie’s house on the northern end of Tall Grass Key.

  He is sitting on the front porch of his ramshackle house, waiting for her. Wearing white trousers and a baggy blue shirt, he is smoking a pipe, and he looks like the stereotype of any fisherman you might see on any calendar selling cod liver pills, except that he is not a fisherman, he is a painter of abstract-expressionist canvases, and a damn good one at that. His trousers and shirt are now stained with paint, and there are traces of paint under his fingernails as well, and even in the white beard that clings to his cheeks, his chin, and his upper lip, like leftover lather from a hasty shave. It is ten minutes past seven and still light, the sun hovering above the western horizon as if indecisive about its final descent.

  The moment she pulls into his shell driveway, he rises from where he is sitting on the steps. She goes to him, and he holds her close. She is trembling in his arms. Until this moment, she has not realized how frightened she really is. Charlie smells of paint and turpentine and tobacco smoke. He is the only friend she now has in all Cape October, and she loves him to death.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  “I’m so scared,” she says.

  “It’ll be okay. What happened to your foot?”

  “I got run over.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. The ankle’s broken.”

  “Never rains,” he says.

  She first met Charlie three months ago, when a developer represented by Lane Realty tried to buy the four acres of waterfront land Charlie had been living on since 1970. He’d come down to Cape October after the Vietnam War, having barely escaped death in the massive artillery barrage on Khe Sanh. He was nineteen years old in that March of 1968. He was fifty-six when Alice met him. Frank Lane sent her—new and inexperienced—to negotiate for Charlie’s now-precious land. He’d turned her down, of course. But they became fast friends, and Charlie later told her he’d have thrown anyone else off the property sight unseen.

  She tells him about the children.

  In the gathering dusk, she tells him everything that happened.

  Tells him about the school guard, Luke Farraday, seeing the kids getting into a blue car driven by some woman. Tells him she got a call around four o’clock, four-fifteen it must’ve been, from a woman telling her not to call the police or her children would die. Tells him the same woman called again at six to say they wanted a quarter of a million dollars in cash by tomorrow at noon, hundred-dollar bills…

  “There’s more than just her,” she tells him. “She said we want the money, we’ll call again tomorrow. Should I call the police, Charlie? I don’t know what to do. Rosie said I should call the police. But if I do that…”

  Inside the house, the telephone rings.

  Charlie goes up the steps. Alice follows him.

  His studio overlooks the Gulf, where the sun is just beginning to dip low over the water. The huge canvases stacked against the walls resemble sunsets themselves, oranges and reds and yellows streaked in harmonious riot against backgrounds of blues, violets, deeper purples, and blacks. They walk through the studio and into the adjoining kitchen, where Charlie lifts a portable phone from its cradle.

  “Hobbs,” he says.

  “Mr. Hobbs, this is Detective Sloate, Cape October Police Department. Is there a Mrs. Glendenning there with you?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Charlie asks.

  “We understand she might be in some kind of trouble. If she’s there, would you please put her on, sir?”

  Charlie covers the mouthpiece.

  “It’s a police detective,” he says.

  “What!”

  “Wants to talk to you. He knows you’re in trouble.”

  “How…?”

  “I think you’d better talk to him, Al.”

  She takes the phone.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Mrs. Glendenning?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Detective Wilbur Sloate, Cape October PD. I understand you’ve got some kind of trouble, ma’am. Would you like to tell me about it?”

  “Where…? What mak
es you think…?”

  “We received a phone call from a Mrs. Rose Garrity, says she works for you. Is that right?”

  “Yes?”

  “She says someone took your children, warned you not to call the police, is that right, too?”

  Alice says nothing.

  “Mrs. Glendenning?”

  This, now, is the moment of decision.

  Tell this Detective Wilbur Sloate of the Cape October Police Department that yes, her children were picked up outside Pratt Elementary by some woman driving a blue automobile, year and make as yet unknown, and that she has been told to assemble $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills by noon tomorrow, Thursday, the fifteenth day of May, at which time she will be contacted again. Tell him all this and immediately bring in all the local law enforcement agencies, the Cape October Police, of course—who are already here—and the Sheriff’s Department as well, she feels certain, and undoubtedly the FBI…

  Or—

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “My children are here with me this very minute. Anyway, how’d you…?” “May I speak to one of them, please?”

  “How’d you find me here?”

  “Mrs. Garrity told us you had a friend named Charles Hobbs, Junior, lived out on Willard. May I please speak to one of the children, ma’am?”

  “They’re outside playing,” Alice says.

  “Could you please call one of them to the phone for me, ma’am?”

  “I will not have you frightening my children,” she says.

  “Ma’am,” he says, “I’m trying to help you here. If someone has taken your children…”

  “No one has taken my children. I just told you…”

  “Mrs. Garrity was there when you received that phone call, ma’am. She told us a black woman—”

  “She’s mistaken.”

  “Ma’am, you stay right where you are with Mr. Hobbs, and someone will be there to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want anyone to come here,” Alice says. “I’m telling you my children are here with me, my children are safe.”

  “Then let me talk to one of them, ma’am.”

  “No.”

  “Ma’am…”

  “And stop ma’am-ing me. I’m not your grandmother!”

  “Mrs. Glendenning, I’ve already called Pratt Elementary and I talked to a Miss Phoebe Mears there who told me you’d spoken to her at a little past four today, asking did your kids get on the wrong bus and all…”

  “Yes, that was before they came home,” Alice says.

  “You’re saying they finally got home?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Then they weren’t picked up by a woman driving a blue car, is that it? The way Miss Mears says one of the school guards had told her they were?”

  Alice says nothing.

  “Mrs. Glendenning? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Did someone in a blue car bring your kids home to you?”

  “No,” Alice says. “What happened is they realized they were on the wrong bus, so they asked the driver to let them off at a phone booth. My daughter phoned me at home, and I went to pick them up.”

  “The driver let them get off the bus?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “And your daughter called home, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s how old, your daughter?”

  “She’s ten.”

  “Knows your home phone number, does she?”

  “Of course she does. My office number, too.”

  “And you went to pick her up?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Where was that, ma’am, Mrs. Glendenning?”

  “Outside the Eckerd’s on Kalin and U.S. 41.”

  “And she’s there with you now, your daughter?”

  “Yes. Outside.”

  “And your son, too.”

  “Yes, my son, too.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mind showing them to the officer when he comes knocking on your door in, it should be two, three seconds, will you?”

  “Officer? What?” she says, and hears a car pulling into the shell driveway outside.

  The uniformed cop standing beside the right front fender of a Tall Grass police cruiser takes off his hat when he sees Alice coming down the steps at the front of Charlie’s house. Charlie is walking out just behind her.

  “Mrs. Glendenning?”

  “Yes?” she says.

  “Officer Cudahy,” he says. “I’m sorry to be bothering you, ma’am.”

  “No bother at all,” she says. “What is it?”

  “We got a call from a Detective Sloate downtown, he says you might be in need of some assistance.”

  “No, everything’s fine, thanks,” she says. “But thanks for your concern.”

  “Mrs. Glendenning,” Cudahy says, “I wonder if you’d mind my speaking to your children for a minute.”

  “My children aren’t here,” Alice says at once.

  Charlie gives her a sharp look.

  “It is Detective Sloate’s understanding that they’re outside playing,” Cudahy says.

  “He must have misunderstood me.”

  “It’s what he told me on the radio, ma’am.”

  “Yes, well, he must’ve heard me wrong.”

  Cudahy looks at her. Then he turns to Charlie.

  “Are you the lady’s father, sir?” he asks.

  “No, I’m just a friend,” Charlie says.

  “Would you happen to know the lady’s children?”

  “I would.”

  “Are they here, sir?”

  “They are not.”

  “Would you know where they are?”

  “I would not.”

  “Mrs. Glendenning, do you know where they are?”

  “Yes, I took them to the movies. I’ll be picking them up when the show breaks, at nine-fifteen.”

  Cudahy looks at her.

  “That’s not what you told Detective Sloate,” he says.

  “Detective Sloate seems to have misunderstood a great many things,” Alice says.

  “I’ll have to tell him the children aren’t here,” Cudahy says, and goes back to the car and pulls a mike from the dash. From where Alice stands with Charlie on the front steps of the house, she can hear first some static, and then only some garbled words. She does not know what she can tell the police next. She only knows there is one thing she can not tell them. She can not say her children have been kidnapped. If she brings the police into this, Ashley and Jamie will be killed.

  Cudahy comes out of the car again.

  “Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, “Detective Sloate would like to talk to you, please.”

  “Very well,” Alice says. “On the car radio, or does he want me to phone him?”

  “In person, ma’am,” Cudahy says. “He’s asked me to bring you in.”

  “That’s absurd,” Charlie says.

  “Be that as it may, sir,” Cudahy says, and opens the car door for Alice. “Ma’am?”

  Downtown Cape October is exactly nine blocks long and three blocks wide.

  The tallest buildings here, all of them banks, are twelve stories high. Main Street runs eastward from the Cattle Trail—which is now a three-way intersection with a traffic light, but actually used to be a cow crossing back when the town was first incorporated—to the county courthouse, which, at five stories high, is the tallest building anywhere on Main. The other buildings on Main are one- and two- story cinder-block structures. The banks are on the two streets paralleling Main to the north and south. Alice has learned that when anyone says “downtown Cape October” he isn’t talking about a place that also has an uptown. There is no uptown as such. There is merely downtown Cape October and then the rest of Cape October.

  The police station here is officially called the Public Safety Building, and these words are lettered in white on the low wall outside. Less conspicuously lettered to the right of the brown metal entrance doors
, and partially obscured by pittosporum bushes are the words police department. The building is constructed of varying shades of tan brick, and its architecturally severe face is broken only by narrow windows resembling rifle slits in an armory wall. This is not unusual for the Cape, where the summer months are torrid and large windows produce only heat and glare.

  Cudahy drives Alice around into the parking lot behind the building, and parks the car alongside a white police paddy wagon marked with the words CAPE OCTOBER PD. He leads her to a back door, raps on it, and is admitted by another uniformed officer, who then takes Alice through marbled corridors to the front of the building, and then up to the third-floor reception area, where an orange-colored letter conveyor rises like an oversized periscope from the floor diagonally opposite the elevator doors. There is a desk against the paneled wall facing Alice, and a uniformed officer sits behind it, a woman this time, typing furiously. The clock on the wall above the woman’s head reads fourteen minutes to nine. She stops typing the moment Alice gets off the elevator.

  “Mrs. Glendenning?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Come with me, please.”

  Alice feels as if she has been arrested for shoplifting.

  Detective Wilbur Sloate is a gangly man in his late thirties, early forties, Alice guesses. He is wearing a rumpled linen suit with a polka-dotted blue tie on a paler blue shirt. His hair is what Alice’s mother, rest her soul, would have called dirty blond, a shade darker than Eddie’s was. It is parted neatly on the left side of his head. He rises the moment Alice is led into his office.

  “Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, “please have a seat.”

  “I want to know why I’m here,” Alice says.

  “For your own good,” Sloate says.

  “That’s what my father used to say before he whopped me one.”

  “Look, I can tell you we have reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed, and I can tell you we believe you’re withholding evidence of a crime, and I can tell you you’re hindering an investigation. I can tell you all of those things, Mrs. Glendenning, and you can tell me to go straight to hell and walk out of here right this minute. But that won’t get your kids back if they were kidnapped.”

  Kidnapped.