Alice in Jeopardy

by Ed McBain

There was nothing on last night until she went to bed at eleven, and there’s nothing on this morning, either, not on WSWF, anyway. WSWF is Cape October’s own Channel 36, the “SWF” in the call letters standing for Southwest Florida. Rosie starts surfing the cable channels, one after the other, figuring a kidnapping always gets covered on the cable shows, but there’s nothing there either.

  She’s beginning to wonder if whoever she spoke to at the police yesterday has taken any action on the case—Sloane or Slope or something like that, said he was a detective. Because if he was just sitting on this thing instead of doing something about it, why, he should be reported to a superior officer for disciplinary action, these were two innocent little kids out there. She is just about to dial the police again, when the phone rings, startling her. She picks up at once, thinking this might be Detective Sloane wanting further information.

  Instead, it is Alice Glendenning.

  “Hello, Mrs. Glendenning,” she says. “Have you heard anything further from that black woman?”

  “No, nothing yet,” Alice says. “Rosie, the reason I’m calling…” She suspects that she is going to be bawled out for having called the police. But then Alice says, “I don’t think you should come in today,” and Rosie immediately believes she’s about to be fired.

  “Why not?” she asks defensively.

  “Because my children are gone, and I want to be alone here when that woman calls, if she calls.”

  Alone.

  She has just told Rosie that she is alone.

  Which means the police have not contacted her, as that Detective Sloane said they were going to do, which means the police are most certainly being derelict in their duty.

  Well, we’ll just see about that, Rosie thinks.

  “I understand, Mrs. Glendenning,” she says. “Just call me if there’s anything you need, okay?”

  “I will, Rosie. Thank you.”

  But there is something odd in her voice, something cool and distant. Rosie wonders just what the hell is going on here.

  “Good-bye now,” she says.

  She hangs up, and immediately begins searching the Cape October-Fort Myers-Sanibel directory under GOVERNMENT AGENCIES.

  When the phone rings at 9:10 A.M., Detective Marcia Di Luca says at once, “I’m not ready here yet, Will.”

  Alice can only think they’ve been working here all damn night, and she’s still not ready. Alice can only think her children’s fate is in the hands of Keystone Kops.

  Sloate is putting on the earphones.

  “I don’t think it’s her again, so early,” he says. “But if it is, just let her talk, hear what she has to say.”

  The phone is still ringing.

  “Shall I pick up?” Alice asks.

  Sloate hits some buttons on his recording equipment. Reels begin spinning.

  “Go ahead,” he says.

  Alice picks up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Alice?”

  A woman’s voice. She recognizes it at once. Aggie Barrows, her assistant.

  “Yes, Aggie,” she says.

  “Did you forget your nine o’clock?”

  “My…?”

  “With Mr. Webster.”

  “Oh Je—”

  “He’s here now. What shall I tell him? Are you coming in?”

  “Let me talk to him, Agg.”

  She waits.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Webster, hi, I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” he says. “What happened?”

  “I broke my ankle.”

  “Well, that’s a new one,” he says.

  “I really did,” she says. “I got knocked down by a car yesterday afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says.

  “I’m in a cast. I should have called you, I know, but what with the hospital and all…”

  “Hey, that’s all right, we can do it another time.”

  “I hope so.”

  There is a silence on the line.

  “Is… everything else all right?” he asks.

  Sloate glances up from his recording equipment.

  “Yes, I’m fine, thanks,” Alice says. “I really am very sorry about this.”

  “Long as it wasn’t anything I said yesterday.”

  “No, no, I really did have an accident.”

  “I thought maybe I’d been out of line.”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “None of my business, after all.”

  “That’s okay, really. I took no offense.”

  “I hope not. So how shall we leave this? Will you call me? Shall I look for another broker?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Mr. Webster…”

  “Webb.”

  “I’d love to find a home for you here on the Cape, I really would. But it may be a few days before…”

  “I have some other business to take care of down here, anyway. Why don’t we just play it by ear? Just call me when you think you’ll be up and around again.”

  “Well, I’m able to walk now,” she says. “It’s just…”

  It’s just my children have been kidnapped, you see. It’s just I have two detectives here in the house with me right now, one of them listening to every word you and I are saying. It’s just that in less than three hours, a woman is going to call here again to tell me what I have to do next if I ever want to see my kids alive again. It’s just all that, Mr. Webster, Webb, it’s just I am going out of my mind with fear and anxiety, that’s all it is, Webb.

  “I have your number,” she says. “I’ll call you.”

  “Please do,” he says, and hangs up.

  She looks at the receiver. She places it back on its cradle.

  “Sounds like a nice fellow,” Sloate comments.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “How you doing with that?” he asks Marcia.

  “Getting there,” she says.

  Sloate looks at his watch.

  “You’ve got two and twenty-five,” he says.

  “Thanks a lot,” she says dryly.

  “Just thought I’d remind you.”

  There is between them the easy banter of two people who have worked together for a very long time. It is almost like a good marriage, Alice realizes. Sloate isn’t going to start yelling at her if she doesn’t have her equipment set up in the next two hours and twenty-five minutes, and Marcia is not going to have a hysterical hissy fit if she doesn’t come in under that deadline. Sloate seems confident that she will have the job done in that time. And she seems confident that she will not fail him. As he takes off the earphones, he nods assurance to Marcia, and she looks up from where her rather delicate hands—Alice notices for the first time—are twirling dials and throwing switches, and she winks at him to let him know the situation is completely under control here.

  Alice wonders if it really is.

  There was a time ...

  Alice was twenty-two years old, and just completing NYU’s film program. Her idea was to become a famous director. That was before she met Edward Fulton Glendenning. Eddie was twenty-four, a graduate student in the business school. They met in University Park, on a bright afternoon in June.

  She was sitting on a bench, crying.

  He appeared out of the blue.

  Tall and slender, crew-cut blond hair glistening in the spring sunshine, cherry trees in bloom all up and down the side streets surrounding the school. She saw him through the mist of her tears, standing suddenly before her.

  “Hey, what’s this?” he said, and sat, and took her hands in his.

  His hands were soft. Delicate. She looked into his face, into his eyes. A narrow fox face, with a slender nose and fine high cheekbones, nearly feminine in its elegance, as sculpted as a Grecian mask, the eyes a pale blue, almost gray. She allowed him to hold her hands. Her hands were clasped between his own two hands, slender, a pianist’s hands with long tapering fingers, everything about him so beautifully exact.

 
He offered her a handkerchief.

  He asked her why she was crying.

  She told him she’d spent all day yesterday editing hundreds of feet of film, and marking the strips with Roman numerals to differentiate this go-round from the earlier strips marked with Arabic numerals, and one of the other girls on her team— “There are five of us altogether,” she said. “We have to do this fifteen-minute film as our final project…”

  One of the other girls came in this morning, and reedited everything she’d already done, messing everything up, getting the sound all out of synch, and replacing the Roman numerals with Arabic numerals all over again because she didn’t know what Roman numerals were!

  “Can you believe it?” Alice said. “She’s twenty-one years old, she’s from Chicago, that’s not a hick town, and she’s never heard of a Roman numeral in her life! She thought it was some kind of secret code! Can you believe it?”

  “Amazing,” Eddie said.

  “I know. How can anyone be so…?”

  “You. I mean you. Amazing.”

  He was still holding her hands, she noticed.

  “You’re so very beautiful,” he said.

  “Oh sure,” she said.

  “Oh sure,” he said.

  They were married six months later.

  The two detectives who drive into the bus loading area at Pratt Elementary at 9:30 that Thursday morning are looking for a man named Luke Farraday. Like Sloate and Di Luca, they work for Cape October’s Criminal Investigations Division, and they have been sent here by Captain Roger Steele, who wants them to find out whatever they can about the blue car that supposedly picked up the Glendenning kids yesterday afternoon.

  The two detectives are named Peter Wilson Andrews and Julius Aaron Saltzman. Saltzman is very large, standing at six-four in his bare feet, and weighing a good two hundred and twenty pounds when he’s watching his diet. He is wearing a little blue-and-gray crocheted yarmulke fastened to the back of his head with bobby pins, this because he is very proud of his Jewish heritage and will take the slightest opportunity to discuss the impending American holocaust if nothing is done to stop the tide of anti-Semitism in this nation. Saltzman is what Andrews would call a Professional Jew, more or less, in that his Jewishness seems to dictate every move he makes and every word he speaks.

  Andrews is perhaps five feet eight inches tall, very short for any cop but especially for a detective, where promotions often depend on brawn rather than brain. He is what one might generously call a redneck. In fact, he drifted down here to Florida after working on a tobacco farm in Tennessee, where his neck and his arms did grow very red indeed and then brown from hours of laboring in the hot sun, until he decided there had to be a better life somewhere for a red-blooded (and red-necked) American boy like himself.

  Andrews found that better life here on the Cape, where first he worked as a bouncer in a strip joint on the Trail south of the airport, and then joined the police force as a uniformed rookie earning $28,914 a year. He is now a full-fledged detective in the CID, working with Saltzman, and thanking his lucky stars for his partner’s size and raw power every time they go up against some redneck like Andrews used to be, carrying a sawed-off shotgun or a machete or even a pool cue.

  They find Farraday in the school cafeteria. He tells them he came in half an hour ago after supervising the unloading of the buses, and he is just now lingering over a cup of coffee before heading home. What he does, he explains to them, is come in early in the morning to unload the buses, and then goes home until it’s time to come back in the afternoon, when the kids are boarding the buses again. There’s not much for Farraday at home. His wife died three years ago, he tells them. He’s alone in the world, he tells them.

  Farraday is wearing bifocals and a hearing aid, a man in his mid-sixties, one of a breed who come down here to retire and then discover that they have all the time in the world to do nothing but play golf and push a shopping cart up and down the aisles of a supermarket. They finally take jobs as cashiers in souvenir shops, or bank guards, or—as is the case with Farraday here—guards at school crossings or bus-loading areas, anything to keep them busy, anything to make them feel useful again. There is nothing like early retirement to make a person feel dead.

  The detectives have got to be very careful here.

  They have been cautioned by Steele that they are not to indicate in any way, manner, or form that a kidnapping has taken place. The Glendenning woman was warned that if she notified the police, her kids would be killed. Apparently, she is none too happy that the police are already on the job, but that’s the way the little cookie crumbles, lady, and if you want your children back you don’t go to a lawyer or a private eye. You go to professionals who know how to do the job. Though, to tell the truth, this is the first kidnapping Saltzman or Andrews has ever caught.

  The point is, a death threat was made.

  So they have to tiptoe around old Farraday here—to both Saltzman and Andrews, sixty years old is ancient—find out whatever they can about the car that picked up the kids yesterday, without indicating in any way that any sort of crime has been committed here. They have an advantage in that Farraday seems kind of stupid to them. Then again, all old people seem stupid to Andrews and Saltzman.

  “These’d be Jamie and Ashley Glendenning,” Andrews says. “Little boy and girl.”

  “You fellas want some coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” Saltzman says.

  Andrews shakes his head no.

  “Make a good cup of coffee here,” Farraday says.

  Old farts talk about food a lot, Andrews notices.

  “Not as good as Starbucks,” Farraday says, “but pretty damn good for a school cafeteria, am I right?”

  “This would’ve been about two-thirty yesterday,” Saltzman prods.

  “You know who else makes a nice cup of coffee?” Farraday asks.

  “Who’s that?” Andrews says.

  “Place called The Navigator? On Davidson? I stop there every morning on my way to work, they give you a good breakfast for a buck twenty-nine. Eggs and all. Nice cup of coffee, too.”

  “Would you happen to remember these kids?” Saltzman asks. “The Glendenning kids?”

  “He the one can’t talk?” Farraday asks.

  This is the first they’re hearing about the kid being a mute. The two detectives look at each other.

  “Father drowned out on the Gulf one night. Probably taking a piss over the side, lost his balance, fell in. Most of these small boat drownings are guys taking a piss over the side, did you know that? It’s a fact,” Farraday says, and nods. “The Glendenning boy can’t talk, it’s some kind of post-traumatic thing, the shock of it, you know. Won’t talk is more like it, I guess.”

  “That’s a shame,” Saltzman says. “Did you happen to see the Glendenning kids yesterday afternoon?”

  “Yes, I did,” Farraday says. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

  “Apparently, they missed the bus, and some woman was kind enough—”

  “No, they didn’t miss no bus,” Farraday says.

  “Whatever,” Andrews says. “The thing is, some woman was nice enough to pick them up, and drive them home. But she left them with the housekeeper, and drove off without saying what her name was.”

  “That’s funny, ain’t it?”

  “Well, she was probably in a hurry, Thing is, Mrs. Glendenning would like to thank her, so if there’s—”

  “But they didn’t miss no bus,” Farraday says. “Fact is, they were about to get on the bus when she called them over.”

  “This would’ve been a blue car, is that right?”

  “Blue Chevrolet Impala, that’s right.”

  “Woman driving it.”

  “A blonde woman, yes.”

  “Would you happen to know who she was?”

  “Nope. Never saw her before in my life.”

  “A woman, though?”

  “Young blonde woman, yes,” Farraday says. “Hair down to here,
” he adds, and runs the flat of his hand along the side of his neck, about three inches above the shoulders.

  Scratch a black woman, Andrews thinks. But he asks anyway. “White or black?”

  “I just said she was a blonde, didn’t I?”

  “Well, yes, but lots of blacks these days bleach their—”

  “I suppose that’s true, at that,” Farraday says, and nods. “But this woman was white.”

  “How old would you say?”

  “I didn’t get that good a look. Just saw a blonde leaning over to open the door for the kids.”

  “And the kids got right in, is that it?”

  “Got right in the car, yes.”

  “Must’ve known the woman, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Don’t know if they knew her or not. Just saw them get in the car, and she drove right off.”

  “You’re sure it was an Impala?” Andrews asks.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with my eyes, mister.”

  “Didn’t think there was,” Andrews says, and smiles. In which case, why are you wearing bifocals? he wonders.

  “Blue Impala, right?” Saltzman asks.

  “Blue as my eyes.”

  Which Andrews now notices are, in fact, blue. Behind bifocals as thick as the bottoms of Coca-Cola bottles.

  “The year?” Saltzman asks.

  “Couldn’t say exactly. But it was a new car.”

  “You didn’t happen to notice the license plate, did you?”

  “Wasn’t looking for it.”

  “Florida plate, would it have been?”

  “I didn’t look. I got things to do here, you know. I got a job here. I have to make sure all these kids get on their right buses. I have to make sure they all get home.”

  Right, Andrews thinks.

  So you let two of them get in a car with a blonde woman you never before saw in your life, quote unquote.

  You blind old fart, he thinks.

  Special Agent Felix Forbes is here on Rose Garrity’s doorstep this morning at eleven o’clock because apparently she reported a kidnapping to a detective in the Cape October PD’s CID, and no action was taken on her complaint. Standing beside him on Rosie’s doorstep is another federal agent named Sally Ballew, whom the Cape October cops call “Sally Balloons” because of her extraordinary chest development, which even Forbes has noticed on occasion. He does not think she knows the cops call her Sally Balloons. He is wrong. She knows. There is not much that gets by Sally Ballew.