Alice in Jeopardy

by Ed McBain

  “Have you called the FBI?” Carol asks.

  “They’ve been and gone.”

  “I’m coming down there,” Carol says. “Right this minute.”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “I’m getting in my car and driving down.”

  “Carol…”

  “Look for me, honey,” she says, “I’m on the way.”

  And she, too, is gone.

  They do not want to get the Tampa PD involved in this because in Captain Steele’s view, there are enough law enforcement people on the scene already. He didn’t like the FBI sticking its nose in this uninvited and unannounced, and he certainly doesn’t want any fresh representatives of the law marching in now.

  The computer kicks up an Ernesto de Diego recently released from prison and regularly visiting a parole officer in Tampa, but he’s forty-three years old, and Maria told the detectives that her former boyfriend was only eighteen. So that rules him out, unless Mr. de Diego has a namesake son, which would make him Ernesto de Diego, Jr., but the computer has nothing at all on such an offspring.

  In the Tampa phone directory, they find listings for a Dalia de Diego, a Godofredo de Diego, a Rafael de Diego, and a Ramon de Diego, but alas, no Ernesto. On the off chance that one of these de Diegos might be a relative of the Ernesto they’re looking for, they go down the list and hit pay dirt on the second call they make. A woman named Catalina de Diego tells Detective Saltzman that she is Godofredo’s wife, and that his brother Ernesto is presently living with them until he can find a place of his own. Belatedly, she asks, “What’s this about, Officer?”

  At a quarter to one that afternoon, Detectives Saltzman and Andrews are on the de Diego doorstep, talking to Catalina again, in person this time. She tells them her husband and her brother will be home for lunch around one o’clock, and invites them in to wait. She serves them strong coffee and these tasty little cookies sprinkled with sugar. She tells them that both her husband and her brother-in-law work at an auto repair shop not far from here. “My husband got the job for Ernesto,” she says. She introduces them to her three-year-old son, Horacio, who immediately tells the detectives he knows how to “go potty.” Detective Andrews tells him, “That’s nice, son.”

  So far, this does not look like a bunch of desperados who’ve kidnapped the Glendenning kids, but who knows? The quietest guy on the block is always the one who turns out to have killed his whole family and the goldfish, too, isn’t that so? Besides, Ernesto can’t be such a sweetheart, can he? Leaving a pregnant girlfriend back on the Cape?

  The brothers get home at a little before one.

  The detectives can hear them laughing up the front walk to the small house. They are both light-skinned, with brown eyes and curly black hair. Ernesto is a little taller than Godofredo. They look like a pair of hardworking guys who’ve just put in a long morning, and are ready now to wash up for lunch, but who knows?

  The detectives tell them they’d like to talk to Ernesto privately, if that’s okay. They go out together into the yard behind the small house. There is a coconut palm in the yard, and several bird-of-paradise plants. There is a shell walkway and wooden lawn furniture painted pink. A nice cool breeze is blowing. Inside, they can hear Godofredo and his wife talking in Spanish.

  “So what is this?” Ernesto asks. “Is she claiming the kid’s mine?”

  “You mean Maria?” Andrews asks.

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “You tell us,” Saltzman says.

  “What’s there to tell? She fucked everybody in that high school, not only me. So now she says the baby’s mine. That’s a crock of shit, man.”

  “She says you have a new girlfriend now, is that right?”

  “What’s that her business?”

  “It’s just what she told us.”

  “It’s none of her business, what I have or I don’t have.”

  “Do you have a new girlfriend?”

  Ernesto gives them a long hard look.

  He is suddenly suspicious. Suddenly tipping to the fact that this has nothing to do with Maria’s baby.

  “You come all the way up from the Cape to ask me do I have a new girlfriend?” he says.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “She doesn’t happen to be a blonde, does she?”

  “What?” he says.

  “Your girlfriend. Is she a blonde?”

  “Is that what Maria told you?”

  “That’s what she told us.”

  “She should learn to keep her mouth shut.”

  “Well, you knock her up, you disappear…”

  “I didn’t knock her up! And I didn’t disappear, either! My brother got me a job here, so I moved up. I even called Maria to tell her where I was.”

  “Nice of you.”

  “I don’t owe her a fuckin thing!”

  “Does she drive a blue Impala? Your blonde girlfriend?”

  “What?”

  “Your new girlfriend. Does she happen to drive a blue Impala?”

  “No, she drives a white Jag.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s married.”

  “Oh?” Saltzman says.

  “Well, well,” Andrews says.

  “Anyway, what is this? Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “Tell us her name, Ernesto.”

  “Jesus, what did she do?”

  “Tell us where she lives, Ernesto.”

  “She’s married, I can’t—”

  “You want to take a ride to the Cape, or you want to give us your little married girlfriend’s name and address? Which, Ernesto?”

  “Judy Lang,” he says at once.

  Charlie Hobbs pulls into the driveway at twenty minutes past one that afternoon. Alice greets him at the front door, taking both his hands in hers and leading him into the house.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m glad you came.”

  “She call yet?”

  “Not yet. Charlie, I’m scared silly.”

  “Don’t be. She’ll call.”

  “You think?”

  “I know she will.”

  Charlie looks around the living room, takes in all the police equipment.

  “So where are the masterminds?” he asks.

  Alice shakes her head.

  “Tell me everything that happened,” he says.

  “Here’s what we’ve got,” Sally Ballew is telling her boss.

  The agent in command of the regional FBI office is a man named Tully Stone, bald and rangy and mean as dog shit. It is rumored that shortly after the disputed Gore-Bush presidential election, Stone single-handedly rounded up a ring of anti-government protestors right here in the sunny state of Florida. Broke a few heads and cracked even more ribs, or so the story went, before all those bleeding-heart liberals decided it wasn’t right to go against the Supreme Court decision that made Bush president of these United States.

  Sally Ballew feels that black people—her people—in the state of Florida were disenfranchised in that election, but she has never mentioned this to her boss, whose role model is John Ashcroft. She is reporting to him now on the number of blue Chevrolet Impalas that were rented from Avis at the Fort Myers airport during the past two—

  “I don’t understand,” Stone says. “Is this our case?”

  “That depends,” Sally says.

  “On what?”

  “On do we want it.”

  “Why would we?”

  “Might become high-profile.”

  “How?”

  “Woman’s a widow. Pretty woman, two good-looking kids—the ones who got kidnapped, sir. Eight and ten years old, little boy and girl.”

  Stone does not seem impressed.

  He is pacing his office. In one corner of the room, an American
flag rests furled in an ornate wrought-iron stand. The wall behind him is adorned with a big replica of the FBI seal with its thirteen stars and its laurel leaves, and its red-and-white-striped shield. On the upper rim of the predominately blue seal, the words DEPART-MENT OF JUSTICE are lettered in white. On the lower rim, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, again in white. Just below the striped little shield with its engraved blue scales, there is a flowing white ribbon upon which the words Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity are lettered.

  There was a time, Stone reflects, when those words meant something.

  Now he’s standing here with a woman who can’t contain her tits, and they’re debating whether or not they should step into a case merely because it might become high-profile, in which event the Bureau will be able to bask in the cleansing light of some much-needed glory, if/when they ever arrest the sons of bitches who took two little kids from their mama.

  “What’d be our justification for butting in here?” he asks.

  “Reasonable presumption that the perps crossed a state line.”

  “They’re already out of Florida?”

  “We don’t know that, sir.”

  “Then how’s a state line been crossed?”

  “We think they may have come down from New York.”

  “Oh dear, we’re dealing with big-city sharpies, eh?” Stone says, and almost grins in anticipation. There is nothing he likes better than to bust the ass of a city slicker. That ring of liberal rabble-rousing ruffians was based in Chicago. Came down here to raise a fuss and cause six kinds of trouble. He has not mentioned to Sally Balloons here that the leader of that little band was black as the ace of spades. Some of these people can get touchy, even if they work on the side of the law.

  “You got proof of that?” he asks.

  “No, sir. Not quite proof.”

  “There’s no such thing as not quite proof,” Stone says. “There’s evidence, or there’s lack of evidence. Nobody can be just a little bit pregnant.”

  “Well, sir, we think we may have found whoever rented the Impala described by the school guard,” Sally says. “And she’s from New York City. Which means a state line may have been crossed in anticipation of committing a future crime. At least, her driver’s license gives an address in New York City.”

  “Anticipation of a future crime? What the hell is this, a Tom Cruise movie? Do you know for certain that this woman has in fact committed the crime of kidnapping?”

  “No, sir, we do not. But, as I was about to say—”

  “She the only person rented an Impala like the one this school guard described?”

  “No, sir. Twenty-six blue Impalas were rented at the Fort Myers airport within the past two weeks, sir. Twenty of them have already been returned, and the renters long departed. Six of the cars are still out, we’ve got the license plate numbers for all of them, and in some instances local addresses for the renters.”

  “Isn’t that obligatory? Giving a local address?”

  “Some people just don’t know where they’ll be staying. They drive around the state, they stop here, they stop there…”

  “Have you got a local address for this woman you say crossed a state line in anticipation of committing a future crime?”

  “No, sir. She’s one of them who didn’t know where she’d be staying.”

  “If I was about to kidnap some kids, I’d make damn sure I didn’t tell Avis where I’d be staying, either.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s her name, this woman?”

  “Clara Washington.”

  Stone almost asks, “Black?”

  He doesn’t.

  But a name like Washington?

  Has to be black, doesn’t it?

  “Avis rep who rented the car to her says she was black,” Sally says, beating him to the punch. “Woman in her thirties, about five-eight, five-nine, good-looking according to the Avis person. Showed a New York driver’s license as ID. Charged the lease to an American Express credit card.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “We checked with American Express; they do not have any card holder named Clara Washington in the city of New York. We checked with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles; they did not issue a driver’s license to anyone named Clara Washington in the city of New York. It would appear that both pieces of ID are false, sir.”

  “Dime a dozen nowadays.”

  “Dime a dozen, sir.”

  “So you don’t really know if a state line has been crossed. If that driver’s license came in a Cracker Jack box…”

  “That’s what I meant by ‘not quite proof,’ sir.”

  “If the driver’s license is queer, the woman could have come from anywhere. Could’ve got off a bus from Jacksonville or Tallahassee, could’ve walked over to the airport from downtown Fort Myers, no state line crossed, no reason for the FBI to come into the case, end of story.”

  “Except, sir—”

  “Except what?”

  “Except if we find her, and she really is from New York, and we nail her for the kidnapping, then we had good reason all along to assume the case fell within federal jurisdiction. And we become the heroes, sir.”

  “Heroes,” Stone says.

  “Yes, sir. And not the Cape October PD.”

  “Heroes,” Stone repeats.

  There was a time when a hero was someone who single-handedly charged a Vietcong machine-gun nest with a hand grenade in each hand and a bayonet clenched between his teeth. Now you were a hero if you tracked down a little colored girl—well, not so little, five-eight, five-nine—who may or may not have crossed a state line in anticipation of committing a crime that would get your name and your face all over television if you caught her.

  “So what do you suggest, Ballew?”

  He almost called her “Balloons.”

  “We have the license plate number, sir. I suggest we do a sweep of all the area motels, hotels, B & B’s, what-have-you, see if we can’t find that car and that woman.”

  “Declare ourselves officially in this thing?”

  “Not until we’re sure we’ll be making an arrest, sir. Otherwise, we let the local cops take the heat.”

  Stone is wondering how many of his people he will need for a sweep of all these area dwellings. But if he doesn’t grant Special Agent Ballew’s simple request, will she then file a report to division headquarters later on, claiming she went to her superior with information about a kidnapping, and he swept it under the carpet the way certain flight-school information was swept under the carpet prior to the 9/11 attacks?

  Stone is tempted to tell Special Agent Sally Ballew here to take a walk, they have no jurisdiction.

  But the entire nation is ready to reward whistle-blowers of every stripe and persuasion nowadays, a far cry from the scorn heaped upon one of the country’s true heroes, Linda Tripp.

  “Set up the sweep,” he says. “Full team, twenty-four-seven, the whole nine yards. But find this woman fast, or back off.”

  Sally can almost see herself on television already.

  “I’ll find her, sir,” she says.

  The little digital clock on Stone’s desk reads 1:47:03.

  The phone call comes at two o’clock sharp.

  By then, Charlie has figured out the wiretap equipment and is sitting with the earphones on his head. He flicks a switch and nods for Alice to pick up.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “We’ve got a problem here,” the woman says. Alice’s heart leaps into her throat. Charlie is suddenly attentive, as if he’s listening for incoming mail at Khe Sanh.

  “Somebody followed me,” the woman says.

  “Let me talk to Ashley.”

  “No, your daughter’s got a big mouth, you don’t have to talk to her again,” the woman says. “My partner spotted them behind us. Two men in a maroon Buick. It wasn’t for a garbage truck, we’d be in serious trouble here.”

  Alice says nothing.

  My partner, s
he is thinking. Does this mean her partner in this ambitious little enterprise of theirs? Or does it mean her sexual partner? Is this a pair of lesbians she’s dealing with?

  “Were they cops?” the woman asks.

  “I don’t know who they might have been,” Alice says. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Are they there with you now?”

  “No one’s here with me,” Alice says.

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

  “That’s her pattern,” Alice explains. “She’s afraid we’ll be tracing the call.”

  “Is she right about that Buick?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “How damn stupid can these people be?”

  “I told you, Charlie. They deserted me this morning…”

  “Putting a clumsy tail on—”

  The telephone rings.

  “There she is,” Charlie says.

  Alice picks up.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Why’d you call the police?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then who were those men in the Buick?”

  “I don’t know. I came there alone. I don’t know anything about anyone following you. Let me talk to my daughter.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You said—”

  “Never mind what I said. You went back on your word.”

  “I did not call the police!” Alice screams into the phone.

  Even Charlie almost believes her.

  The woman is silent for a moment.

  Then there’s another click on the line.

  “Damn her,” Alice says, “I could kill her!”

  “When she calls back, get right to the point. Tell her she’s got the money, ask her when and where you can pick up the kids.”

  Alice nods.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t let her rattle you. If the kids have been harmed already—”

  “Oh Jesus, Charlie, don’t even—”

  “—they wouldn’t be calling you, don’t you see, Alice? The kids are still all right.”

  The phone rings.

  “Remember. Stick to the point. When, where? Stay calm.”

  “Okay.”

  “Pick it up.”

  He throws the LISTEN switch. Alice picks up the receiver.