Alice in Jeopardy

by Ed McBain

  “Sorry, miss,” she says, “but Mr. Parkins has to run those bills through the machine.”

  “What machine?” Christine asks.

  “To verify them.”

  “Oh dear,” Christine says. “Did someone pass me some fake money?”

  “It happens,” Henrietta says, and smiles. “These supers are hard to recognize with the naked eye. But the machine will tell us.”

  “Supers?”

  “Super-bills. They’re made in Iran on intaglio presses the U.S. sold to the old shah. They print the bills on German stock. They’re really very good.”

  “I see,” Christine says.

  Her eyes are on that closed walnut door.

  “But the Fed installed these machines in all our branches. Just like the ones they’ve got in D.C. I guess after 9/11, they’re more worried about people using fake money to do mischief.”

  “I’ll bet,” Christine says.

  “Did you read about all those bank accounts the terrorists had? Right here in Florida! Opened them with fake social security cards, can you imagine? You can buy all sorts of fake ID nowadays, no wonder there’s so much trouble in the world. Ah, here he comes now.”

  Run, Christine thinks.

  But something keeps her rooted to the spot.

  The bald-headed man is smiling behind the bars of the teller’s cage.

  “Miss,” he says, “I’m sorry, but these bills are counterfeit. We’ll have to confiscate them.”

  “What does that mean?” Christine asks.

  “By law, we’re required to send them to the Federal Reserve in Washington. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, but what do you mean, confiscate? Will I be out three hundred dollars?”

  “I’m afraid so, miss. The bills are counterfeit.”

  “I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine,” Christine says, and pulls a face.

  “I’m sorry, miss.”

  “I just don’t see why I have to suffer for somebody else passing phony bills.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s the law. We can’t allow counterfeit currency to stay in circulation. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s fair,” Christine says.

  Her heart is pounding in her chest.

  She turns away from the teller’s cage, walks past the guard at the front door and the sign asking patrons to please not wear hats, kerchiefs, or sunglasses, puts on her sunglasses, and walks out to where she parked the Taurus.

  What Henrietta and Mr. Parkins neglected to do this morning was check the Cape October police list of marked bills that was circulated to every bank and merchant in the state of Florida.

  On that list were the hundred-dollar bills Christine just now tried to cash.

  Luke Farraday is beginning to wonder why so many people are so suddenly interested in who picked up the Glendenning kids on Wednesday afternoon. The one here now is from the Cape October paper, on Luke’s day off, no less, and he’s given Luke some cock-and-bull story about one of the kids, he doesn’t know which one, having a party, he doesn’t know what kind of party, and wanting to put an announcement about it in the social calendar, but he needs to have a cute little story to go with it. He thinks the story about them getting picked up after school and their mother thinking they missed the bus might be just the sort of human interest thing that would tickle his paper’s readers. Then again, Garcia looks like a Cuban to Luke, and maybe Cubans have different senses of humor than Americans have.

  “What kind of car was it, would you remember?” Garcia asks.

  It suddenly occurs to Luke that maybe there’s a bit of change to be made here.

  The job he holds at Pratt Elementary is what the Cape October Department of Education officially calls a School Loading Area Director, a Level-4 position that pays $8.50 an hour, not a hell of a lot more than he could earn at the local Mickey D’s, if they were hiring anything but teenyboppers these days. Way Luke looks at it, the entire state of Florida is run by teenagers, if not the entire United States of America. So if there’s a few extra bucks to be picked up here for providing information to a journalist, well, why not take advantage of the situation? There were women who’d been raped by Martians who sold their stories to the tabloids for thousands of dollars.

  “Why’s this of such importance to you?” he asks, and Garcia immediately recognizes that he’s about to be hit up.

  “Give the story some interest,” he says.

  “Get your facts right, you mean.”

  “Kind of car, all that.”

  “How much would your newspaper pay,” Luke asks straight out, “to give the story some interest? Get the facts right?”

  “Let’s say that depends on the facts.”

  “How much do you usually pay for facts of this sort?”

  “Twenty bucks? Thirty?”

  “How about fifty?” Luke says.

  “Fifty’s cool.”

  “The kids were picked up by a blue Impala driven by a blonde woman,” Luke says. “Avis sticker on the right rear bumper.”

  “Thanks,” Garcia says.

  In Cape October, because the police force is so small, the Radio Motor Patrol officers ride one to a car. The single officer in the car usually hangs his hat on the back rest of the passenger seat, so that it looks as if there are two cops patrolling instead of just one. Everybody in town knows there’s just that one cop in the car, however, so the effect is somewhat diminished.

  The RMP officer patrolling Charlie Sector of the Pecan Street Division hung his hat beside him when he started his tour of duty at 7:45 A.M. this morning, and it is still there at 9:15. Like Tom Hanks talking to the volleyball in Cast Away, Officer Searles has begun talking to his own hat of late, a good argument perhaps for putting a second officer in the cars. Searles considers this good police work, however. Talking things out loud, so to speak, checking out the scene with someone else, even if the someone else is only your own hat.

  “Narrow it down to blue cars,” he tells his hat. “No sense checking the tag on a red car, for example.”

  He is slowly cruising the parking lot of the Pecan Street Mall. The mall opened at nine, and there are already plenty of parked cars in the lot.

  “Weekend shoppers,” he tells his hat.

  He is coming around the northern end of the long mall building, making a turn past the new Barnes & Noble that just came in last week, when he spots a pale blue four-door sedan parked some four ranks back from the front doors of the store.

  “Hey!” he tells his hat. “A blue one! But is it a Chevy?”

  The car is a Chevy.

  It is, in fact, a four-door full-size sedan that Searles identifies at once as an Impala. On the right rear bumper there is a sticker that reads WE TRY HARDER. Searles takes out his pad, studies the notes he took this morning at roll call.

  “We may have just won the lottery,” he tells his hat.

  He pulls up alongside the blue Impala, engages the parking brake of his own vehicle, leaves the engine idling, and gets out of the car. He bends over, takes a look through the left rear window of the Impala. Empty. He drapes a handkerchief over his right hand, tries the back door. Locked. He tries the front door on the driver’s side. It opens to his touch. He leans into the car.

  There is a red baseball cap on the backseat.

  Christine is afraid to go tell him what happened.

  Phony bills! Super-bills! What the hell is this, some kind of science fiction? Bills printed in Iran? He’ll never believe her. He’ll think she’s trying to pull a fast one, he can be so damn suspicious sometimes.

  She has stopped for breakfast in a diner on U.S. 41, not far from the bank where she tried to cash the counterfeit bills. Can you imagine them just taking the money from her like that?

  We’ll have to confiscate them.

  What does that mean?

  By law, we’re required to send them to the Federal Reserve in Washington. I’m sorry.

  Yes, but what do you m
ean, confiscate? Will I be out three hundred dollars?

  I’m afraid so, miss. The bills are counterfeit.

  I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine.

  She guesses she should’ve.

  Fuckin thieves.

  Worse than a stickup in a dark alley.

  But what was she going to tell him?

  Never mind being out three hundred dollars. If the bills are phony—well, they have to be phony, the bank has a damn machine! So, yes, let’s say the bills are very definitely phony. Which means they are out not three hundred dollars but two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which further means the whole damn scheme has gone up the chimney. Unless he can come up with another idea, he’s never been short of ideas, it was his idea to do this thing in the first place.

  She is afraid to go tell him.

  “More coffee, miss?”

  The waitress.

  “No, thanks,” she says. “Just a check, please.”

  What do we do now? she wonders.

  Here we are with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in perfectly fine-looking fake money we can wipe our asses with, and we’ve got two kids on our hands we won’t know what to do with now that—

  “Here you go, miss.”

  “Thank you,” she says, and takes the check, studies it. Six dollars and twenty cents for an orange juice, a cup of coffee, and a toasted English. At least on the Cape, they didn’t get you by the food. All they did was get you by the bills.

  Smiling in spite of herself, she leaves a dollar tip on the table, and then walks to the cash register. She has a ten-dollar bill in her wallet, and she can just as easily pay for her breakfast with that. But suddenly…

  I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine.

  …the thought comes to her.

  She opens her wallet and takes out another of the hundred-dollar bills.

  “I’m sorry,” she tells the cashier. “I don’t have anything smaller.”

  The cashier looks at the bill, snaps it sharply between both hands, the bill making a crisp little cracking sound, holds it up to the light to check the security strip, and then rings open her register and begins counting out change…

  “Twenty-five, fifty, seven dollars,” she says, placing the coins on the countertop. And then three singles, “Eight, nine, ten.”

  Watching her counting out more bills now.

  “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred. Thank you, miss, have a nice day.”

  Christine picks up the cash.

  “You, too,” she says, and walks out of the restaurant and across the parking lot to where she left the red Taurus.

  “Are you okay?” Charlie asks.

  Alice looks at him across the breakfast table. It occurs to her that she has not sat at this table with anyone but her kids since Eddie’s death.

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m okay, Charlie.”

  “We’ll get them back, don’t worry,” he says.

  There is something confident and comforting about his manner. It reminds her of Eddie’s self-assurance when first they met. But Eddie was very young then, and Charlie, of course, is fifty-six, though there is about him the vigor of a much younger man. She finds this strength reassuring, and realizes all at once that if she were facing a dozen hungry lions, she would rather have Charlie at her side than a hundred Wilbur Sloates.

  “Something?” he says, and smiles.

  “No,” she says, and returns the smile. “Nothing, Charlie.”

  He hears a sound outside, and turns toward the living room windows. A car is pulling into the driveway. Alice has begun dreading the appearance of anyone here at the house. Every new appearance seems to bring her children closer to greater peril. A car door slams. A moment later, the front doorbell rings.

  “Want me to get it?” Charlie asks.

  But she is already on her way. She looks through the peephole, and then immediately unlocks the door and throws her arms open wide. The sisters embrace. Carol looks up into her face.

  “Hey, honey,” she says.

  “Hey,” Alice says.

  She leads Carol in, locks the door behind them. Charlie is standing now, a napkin in one hand.

  “Charlie,” she says, “this is my sister, Carol.”

  “Never would’ve guessed,” Charlie says, and extends his free hand. “Damn if you don’t look like twins.”

  “I’m a year older,” Carol says.

  “Have you had breakfast, hon?”

  “Could eat a bear.”

  Alice goes to the stove, pours a cup of coffee for her sister, carries it to the table. She realizes she is smiling. For the first time since Wednesday afternoon, she is smiling. She cuts a few slices of rye bread, pops them into the microwave. Charlie is asking Carol how the trip down was. She’s telling him there was a lot of traffic, but it was moving fast. Alice carries the bread, a slab of butter, and a jar of raspberry jam to the table. Carol digs in.

  “So what’s happening here?” she asks.

  Alice suddenly hugs her close.

  “Hey, what?” Carol asks. “What?”

  Christine figures one of the malls is the best place to go. No need to go driving all over town, all the shops are in one location here. In a Barnes & Noble, she buys the two latest Nora Roberts novels, and pays for them with one of the hundred-dollar bills. The man behind the counter doesn’t even bother to check the bill’s security strip. He makes change for her, smiles, and looks up at the next customer in line.

  At a Victoria’s Secret, she buys two Balconette push-up bras at $19.99 each, one in the black hydrangea, the other in the cheetah print, and a pair of low-rise thongs, both in the leopard print at $5.99 each, and a black lace garter belt at $7.99, for a total of $59.95 before tax. She hands the salesperson a hundred-dollar bill and then wanders over to look at the sleepwear collection, choosing a red sequin-lace baby-doll nightgown and carrying it back to the cash register.

  “Can you add this to the bill?” she asks, and the salesperson smiles and says, “Of course, miss,” adding $29 to the earlier total, for a grand total of $88.95, plus tax, and then counts out the change without a whimper.

  Christine wonders if it’s time to press her luck.

  Dustin Garcia is not a crime reporter as such, and he is not familiar with any of the cops downtown at the Public Safety Building. When he stops at the reception desk in the main lobby, he merely asks for the detective who’s handling the Glendenning kidnapping, and waits while the uniformed officer behind the desk plugs into one of the extensions.

  “Anyone up there handling a kidnapping?” the officer asks into the phone. He listens, looks across the desk at Garcia. “Who’d you say?” he asks.

  “Glendenning. Alice Glendenning.”

  “I mean you,” the officer says. “Who’re you?”

  “Dustin Garcia, Cape October Trib.”

  “Dustin Garcia,” the officer says into the phone. “October Trib.” He listens again. “Third floor,” he says, “Detective Sloate.”

  Just as Christine steps off the escalator on the second floor of the mall, she finds an electronics store selling Sony, Hitachi, Samsung, and Philips television sets. She does not know how far she should go here, how much she should risk to test her theory. The salesman is a guy in his sixties, she guesses, another one of the bored retirees down here. He tries at first to sell her a Philips 34-inch digital wide-screen, which, at $2,800, happens to be the most expensive set in the store. She is reluctant to go that high, not because she doesn’t have that kind of money—she is still carrying almost five thou in hundreds in her bag—but only because she doesn’t want any eyebrows raised.

  The salesman figures she’s a deadbeat, maybe because she’s black, maybe because she’s relatively young, who the hell knows or cares? He immediately switches to pitching the cheapest set he has in the store, a Samsung 27-inch that goes for $300.

  “If you don’t need top-shelf features like a flat
screen or picturein-picture,” he says, “this little beauty’ll give you good picture quality. And it has an excellent remote control, and V-chip parental control, do you have any children?”

  Two, she almost says. Temporarily.

  “I had something a bit more upscale in mind,” she says.

  “Then how about this?” he asks, brightening, and shows her a 32-inch Sony Trinitron Wega that he says is on sale for a mere $1,800.

  “This model earned more votes than any other HD-ready model,” he tells her. “It can auto-switch to enhanced mode when it detects wide-screen sources, and the pull-down circuitry improves the picture quality of film-based material.”

  “I’ll take it,” Christine says.

  “It also comes in a thirty-six-inch version, on sale for $2,300,” the salesman says.

  “No, I’ll take the thirty-two-inch,” Christine says.

  She digs into her handbag.

  She guesses he thinks she’s searching for a checkbook or a credit card. Instead, she comes up with a wad of hundred-dollar bills, and begins counting out $1,900.

  “Will that be enough to cover the tax?” she asks.

  “Florida sales tax is six percent,” he says. “That comes to a hundred and eight dollars. I’d need another eight dollars from you.”

  She fishes a five and three singles from her wallet.

  “I’ll write this up and be back in a minute,” he says, and walks to a door on the far wall, and enters what she assumes is someone’s office, possibly a manager’s. She waits with her heart in her throat. Are they checking the bills on a machine similar to the one the bank had? Will they discover the bills are counterfeit? Are they on the phone to the police this very moment?

  She waits.

  At last, the door opens, and the salesman comes out smiling.

  “Here’s your receipt,” he says. “Someone’s bringing a fresh set down now. Will you need help carrying it out to your car?”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Garcia?” Sloate asks.

  They are in his third-floor office.

  A red baseball cap sits on his desktop.

  “Are you the man handling the kidnapping?” Garcia asks.