Alice in Jeopardy

by Ed McBain

  This surprises Charlie. He hopes it doesn’t show on his face. Why would the cops have been here? Alice told him they let her go yesterday, so why…?

  “Sorry to bother you again then,” he says. “She’s just eager to thank the woman.”

  Farraday is a man maybe sixty-five, seventy, in there, one of the retirees who come down here to die in the sun. Charlie’s fifty-four, which is maybe getting on, he supposes. But he knew what he wanted to be when he was seventeen. Had to leave art school when the Army grabbed him, but returned to his studies and his chosen profession the moment he was discharged. He’s been painting ever since, never hopes to retire till his fingers can no longer hold a brush or the good Lord claims him, whichever comes first.

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

  “Yep, I know them. But like I told the detectives this morning—”

  “That when they were here?”

  “Round ten o’clock,” Farraday says.

  “And you told them what?”

  “Told them a young blonde woman called the kids over to the car, drove off with them.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Straight blonde hair down to here,” he says, and indicates the length of it on his neck. “Slender woman from the look of her, delicate features. Wearing sunglasses and a white little-like tennis hat with a peak.”

  “She wasn’t black, was she?” Charlie asks.

  “Cops asked me the same thing.”

  “Was she?”

  “I don’t know many black blondes,” Farraday says. Then, chuckling, he adds, “Don’t know many blondes at all, for that matter. Nor too many blacks, either.”

  “How old would you say?”

  “I couldn’t say. Young, though. In her thirties maybe? I really couldn’t say.”

  “Called over to the kids, you said?”

  “Called to them. Signaled to them. You know.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Now there’s where you got me, mister,” Farraday says, and lightly taps the hearing aid in his right ear.

  “Couldn’t hear what she said, is that it?”

  “Knew she was calling over to them, though. Waving for them to get in.”

  “And they just got in.”

  “Got in, and she drove off with them.”

  “In a blue car, is that right?”

  “Blue Chevrolet Impala.”

  “Notice the license plate?”

  “No. Told the cops the same thing. Wasn’t looking for it.”

  “Florida plate was it, though?”

  “Must’ve been, don’t you think?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cause it was a rental car.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Had a bumper sticker on it. ‘Avis Tries Harder.’”

  Bingo, Charlie thinks.

  The call from Captain Steele comes at twenty minutes to three.

  “What does Oleander Street look like right this minute?” he asks Sloate.

  “Empty. No traffic at all, nobody parked.”

  “Do you think they’re watching the house?”

  “No.”

  “If I sent somebody over right now, with those bullshit hundreds from the Henley case, can he drive right into the garage?”

  “Yes. It’s a two-car garage, there’s only the vic’s car in it right now.”

  The vic, Alice thinks.

  She is pacing the floor near the table where Sloate sits with the phone to his ear. The vic.

  “I’ll call when he’s on his approach. You can raise the door then.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m sending Andrews and Saltzman to check out that babysitter,” he says. “You think there’s any meat there?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Meanwhile, when your lady calls, tell her you’ve got the money.”

  “Okay.”

  “And set up a drop.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you think they know we’re already in this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  Sloate puts the phone back on its cradle.

  “What?” Alice asks.

  “He’s sending two of our people to talk to Maria Gonzalez.”

  ”They found her then?”

  “Yes. And he’s sending someone else here to—”

  “No! Why?”

  “With bogus bills.”

  “Bogus…?”

  “Counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.”

  “No. If anyone’s watching the house…”

  “He’ll be driving right into the garage.”

  “If they smell something fishy…”

  “They won’t, don’t worry.”

  “These are my kids we’re talking about!”

  The grandfather clock now reads 2:45 P.M.

  In fifteen minutes, the woman will call again with instructions.

  “When she calls,” Sloate says, “tell her you have the money. That’s the first thing.”

  “They’ll know the bills are phony.”

  “No, they won’t,” he says. “These are confiscated super-bills. The Federal Reserve loaned them to us when we were working another kidnapping case down here.”

  “What’s a super-bill?”

  “All you got to know is they’re so good nobody can tell them from the real thing. She won’t recognize them, believe me.”

  “How do I get my children back?”

  “That’s the whole point of this phone call. You’ll set up an exchange. Kids for money. No kids, no money.”

  “They won’t go for that.”

  “You’ve got to insist on it.”

  “How?”

  “Way we’ve done it before—”

  “How many damn kidnappings do you have here in Florida?”

  “One every now and then. Way we do it is this. You get out of your car with a satchelful of money. You go to her alone. She checks out the money while you’re there with her. But you don’t actually give her the money till she goes to get the kids from wherever…”

  “Why would she do that? Once she’s got her hands on that money—”

  “She’ll do it. That’s the way we’ve worked it before. They need to have some assurance…”

  “No! I’m the one who needs—”

  “Mrs. Glen—”

  “—assurance that I’m going to get my kids back! Either she has the kids with her, or I don’t turn over the money. Period!”

  “Well, that’s what we hope will be the case.”

  “That’s not what you said. You said she takes the money and runs. That’s what you said.”

  “I said you don’t actually give her the money. All you do is show it to her. Mrs. Glendenning… ma’am… let us try to help you, okay? Give us a chance here.”

  Alice says nothing.

  “Let me go over it one more time, okay? One: You set up the meet.”

  The meet, Alice thinks.

  “Two: You get out of the car, walk over to her…”

  “Why would she risk that? Me seeing her?”

  “Tell her to disguise herself however she wants, okay? We’re not interested in identifying anyone at this point in time. The bills are marked, the minute they try to spend them, we’ve got ’em. All we want to do right now is get your kids back.”

  “Will I be alone?”

  “No. We’ll be there, wherever she says you’re to bring the money.”

  “I’d rather go alone.”

  “No. We may have to move in.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. These are my kids, damn it!”

  “I know that. But these people—”

  “What do you mean, you may have to move in? I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”

  “Can you think of a better way?”

  “Yes. Leave me alone. Let me handle this alone.”

  “How?”

  “I do
n’t know how, damn it!”

  Sloate looks at his watch.

  “You’ve got ten minutes,” he says. “Relax a bit till the call comes.”

  “I’m relaxed,” she says.

  He looks at her.

  “I’m relaxed, damn it!”

  “Ma’am, we’re just trying to help,” he says. “No one wants anything to happen to—”

  “Please don’t call me ma’am. My name is Alice.”

  “And mine’s Wilbur,” he says.

  Alice nods. She cannot in a million years imagine calling this man Wilbur. Or any other man, for that matter. He is still standing near the table where the recording equipment is set up. Leaning against the table. Big gun holstered on his right hip. In the hallway beyond, the grandfather clock ticks noisily.

  “Why do you suppose Rafe popped up here all of a sudden?” he asks.

  “I don’t know why. My sister said Jacksonville.”

  “But here he is on the Cape.”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing here.”

  “A coincidence probably,” Sloate says.

  “Probably,” Alice says.

  They look at each other.

  “Unless they wanted an inside man at the skunk works,” Sloate says. “Somebody who’d know what’s going on in here.”

  “I don’t think Rafe is involved in this,” she tells him.

  “Be nice to know if he told anybody about that big insurance policy, though. Be real nice to know,” Sloate says. “How much longer you think he’ll be snoring in there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He looks at her again. He’s really trying to figure this out, she thinks. But he seems so very damn stupid. If this wasn’t a hick town with a Mickey Mouse police force…

  But it is.

  This is Cape October, Florida, population 143,000, and my children have been kidnapped, and in ten minutes the woman who has them will call again and we will make arrangements for an exchange, kids for money, money for kids. And if it works…

  “Try to keep her on the line longer this time,” Sloate says. “Tell her you’re getting confused, tell her you can’t keep it straight, all this hanging up. She’ll resist, but she’s closer to the payoff now, so she may be getting hungry. And careless. They sometimes get careless.”

  With my children, Alice thinks.

  And in that instant, the doorbell rings.

  Sally Ballew recognizes Sloate at once.

  “Hello, Wilbur,” she says, and steps boldly into the house, taking in the living room with a single swift sweep of her dark brown eyes, knowing at once that the Garrity woman wasn’t snowing them about a kidnapping. There’s another dick from the CID here, too, Marcia Di Luca from their Tech Unit, which means they’ve already set up a wire tap and a trace; nobody’s fooling around here.

  “Hello, Marcia,” she says. “Catch yourselves a little snatch here?”

  “Who are you?” Alice asks at once.

  “Special Agent Sally Ballew,” she says, and shows her shield. “FBI. My partner Felix Forbes. We’re here to lend a hand, ma’am.”

  It is three o’clock sharp.

  Alice is surrounded by law enforcement people.

  Yet for the first time since four yesterday afternoon, she really feels in jeopardy.

  The telephone rings.

  Alice’s hand is trembling as she picks up the receiver.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Have you got all the money?” the woman’s voice asks.

  “Yes,” Alice says.

  “Good. Now listen to what I have to say. I’ll be on for thirty seconds. You can think over what I’ve told you before I call back again. Is that clear?”

  Marcia Di Luca pulls a face. Thirty seconds again! Standing beside her, Sally Ballew seems to grasp what’s going on with the trace. She nods sympathetically.

  Into the phone, Alice says, “I understand.”

  “There’s a gas station on U.S. 41 and Lewiston Point Road. A Shell station. Do you know it? Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” Alice says.

  “Bring the money to the ladies’ room there. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Have you got all the money?” she asks again.

  “Yes,” Alice says. “But—”

  “Just listen. There’s only one stall in the ladies’ room. Leave the money in the stall. Ten o’clock. Come alone.”

  “I will. But how do I—?”

  “I’ll call back,” the woman says, and hangs up.

  Sally Ballew thrusts out her chest as if to assert female superiority. It is some chest. All the men in the room are impressed. So is Alice. But she does not need the FBI here now, not when her children are out there someplace with a strange woman and whoever may be her accomplice. Too many cooks, she thinks. Too damn many cooks.

  “How long does he stay on the line, average?” Sally asks.

  “She,” Marcia corrects. “Twenty, thirty seconds.”

  “You’ll never get her.”

  “We might,” Marcia says dryly.

  The two women do not like each other. This is very clear to Alice.

  My children will die, she thinks.

  “What are you hoping to accomplish?” Sally asks Sloate.

  “Who invited you here?” Sloate asks. “I wasn’t aware a state line had been crossed.”

  “I’m asking what you hope to accomplish, allowing this woman to talk directly to the—”

  The phone rings again.

  Sloate nods to Alice. She picks up. It is going to be the same routine again. On again, off again. Except that this time, she is caught in the crosshairs of inter-agency rivalry.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Do you understand everything I told you?” the woman asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Repeat it to me.”

  “Ten tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes?”

  “Shell station at Lewiston and the Trail.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “The stall in the ladies’ room.”

  “Yes. You’ll leave the money there,” the woman says.

  “No,” Alice says.

  There is a brief silence.

  “No?” the woman says. “Listen to me, girlfriend. You ever want to see your children alive again—”

  “We make an exchange,” Alice says quickly. “Right then and there.”

  Sloate is already shaking his head. Sally doesn’t know what’s going on. Neither does Forbes.

  “I hand over the money, you hand over the kids,” Alice says. “A simultaneous exchange.”

  “Stay by the phone,” the woman says, and hangs up.

  “Thirty seconds on the nose,” Marcia says.

  “You just blew it,” Sloate tells Alice.

  Charlie gets to the airport Avis desk at ten minutes past three that afternoon. A woman with voluminous blonde hair greets him with a cheery smile, but the moment he asks about who might have rented a blue Chevrolet Impala sometime recently, she tells him she’s not allowed to give out such information.

  Charlie tells her what the problem is.

  Using the same open infectious smile and innocent guile he used while talking countless susceptible Japanese maidens into bed on R & R in Tokyo during the Vietnam War, he says that he is an artist, and here he shows her several postcard-sized samples of his work from his gallery in Naples. He tells her that his gallery in New York informed him that they were sending an independent contractor down to pick up some of his paintings, but the person never showed up. So when he called New York this morning, they told him a blue Chevrolet Impala from Avis had been rented by the contractor sometime recently…

  “What is this man’s name?” the Avis lady asks.

  “Woman. It’s a woman. A blonde woman. Hair about to here,” Charlie says, and with his finger shows her the length on his neck. “She’s supposed to pick up four of my paintings,” he says. “I sure wish you could help me, miss,” once again flashing his Come-Hither Lieutenant B. F.
Pinkerton smile.

  “What’s her name, this woman?”

  “I have no idea,” Charlie says. “She’s just an independent contractor the gallery sent down.”

  “Don’t they know her name?”

  “It was arranged down here.”

  “Where down here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, where’d they send her from? If she rented a car here at the airport, she had to be coming in on a plane, am I right?”

  “I would guess so. Yes, you’re absolutely right.”

  “Well, where was she coming from? How can I locate a rental if I don’t have her name, which besides I’m not supposed to give out such information, anyway.”

  “I know that, and it’s very kind of you to give me all this time. But if you could check your records for any blue Impalas you may have rented yesterday or the day before, anytime recently…”

  “You know how many blue Impalas we rent every day?”

  “How many?” Charlie asks.

  “Plenty,” she says. “Also, these look like very big paintings here on these postcards. I doubt—”

  “You can keep those if you like.”

  “Thank you, they’re very pretty. But I doubt if they’d even fit in an Impala,” she says. “Four of them, no less. Are you sure she rented an Impala?”

  “That’s what they told me. Miss, I’m gonna lose this sale unless I can locate her.”

  “Don’t know how I can help you,” the Avis lady says.

  Just try a little harder, Charlie thinks, but she has already turned away and is starting to talk to the next customer in line.

  Rafe comes out of the bedroom at three-thirty.

  “Don’t believe we’ve met,” he tells Sally, his glance idly coveting her chest.

  “Who’s this?” she asks Sloate.

  “The brother-in-law,” Sloate says.

  “Rafe Matthews, nice to meet you.”

  Sally merely nods. “What’s your plan?” she asks Sloate.

  Sloate tells her. Show her the money. Send her for the kids. Make the exchange. Kids for money.

  “She won’t go for it,” Sally says. “She’ll take the money and tell you they’ll let the kids go later, such and such a time, such and such a place. That’s the way they work it.”

  “Well, we’ve worked it this way before,” Marcia tells her.

  “When?”

  “The Henley case. Three years back.”