Alice in Jeopardy

by Ed McBain

  “Locals?” she asks.

  “Probably not. It was a rental car.”

  “The Impala?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who rented it?”

  “The black girl.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Garcia doesn’t know her name. Sloate didn’t tell him her name. All he said was that a black girl rented the Impala at the Fort Myers airport, and that this led them to believe the perps had flown in.

  “What’s she look like, this black girl?”

  “Hot. Jungle meat.”

  “And the blonde?”

  “Delicate features, hair to her shoulders.” He pauses. “Like you,” he says.

  The blonde still doesn’t blink.

  “What else?” she asks.

  “That’s all they’ve got.”

  “Why the phony story?” the man asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You wrote the fucking thing…”

  “They told me what to write!”

  “But not why, huh?”

  “Only broad strokes.”

  “Let’s hear the broad strokes.”

  “Sloate wants… he’s the local cop on the case,” Garcia explains.

  The man nods. He already knows this. But if they have nothing to do with the kidnapping, how…?

  “He wants the black girl and her blonde accomplice to believe that Alice Glendenning followed their instructions and did not go to the police. The black girl warned her not to go to the police, you see. Told her if she wasn’t alone when she dropped off the ransom money, they’d kill the children. Told her if she wasn’t back where she was supposed to be in half an hour, they’d kill the children. So my story was all about protecting those two kids. If the kids went to Disney World, there was no kidnapping, you see? In which case, it’s safe to return them, drop them off on a street corner someplace, anyplace, just get rid of them. Sloate wants those kids back safe and sound. That’s what he hopes the story will accomplish.”

  “It just might,” the blonde agrees.

  “Do the cops have any idea where these people are holding the kids?” the man asks.

  “If they knew that—”

  “Do they even have a fucking clue?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  There’s one thing Garcia hasn’t given them. He hasn’t told them that once the two dames let the kids loose, Sloate hopes they’ll go on a spending spree. Run out to spend all those marked hundred-dollar bills. Buy themselves some fur coats and diamond rings. Leave a trail a mile wide. That was one of the purposes of the story. But he hasn’t told them this.

  “Okay to go now?” he asks.

  “No, now we’re gonna shoot you,” the blonde says.

  For an instant, Garcia’s heart stops.

  But the blonde is laughing.

  Garcia is still sweating when he steps out of the red Thunderbird into blistering heat.

  As the pair drive off, he hears more laughter from inside the convertible.

  His name is Joseph Ontano, and that is the name he goes by at work. But Angelet and Holmes know him as Joey Onions because in addition to being an insurance adjuster, Joey is also a gambler, and they are the men with whom he places his frequent bets. At the moment, and by their virtually infallible count, Joey Onions is into them for some fifty thousand bucks, give or take. Which is why he is always so happy to provide them with sometimes valuable information about the inside workings of Garland Insurance. The numbers racket, as Angelet and Holmes both know, is premised on the insurance business, which is why it is also sometimes known as the “policy game”—but that’s another story, and that’s not why they’re looking for Joey today.

  Angelet and Holmes know exactly where to find him because that is their business, even on a Sunday. At ten minutes past noon, on this particularly sweaty hot Sunday in May, when the dogs aren’t running, they look for Joey at a cockfight in the black section of Cape October. Florida’s HB 1593 makes it a felony to breed, sell, or possess dogs or birds for the purpose of fighting. But hey, man, this is Colleytown.

  Colleytown was, in fact, once a real town named Colley before it got incorporated as part of greater Cab’Octubre after the Civil War. Minuscule in comparison to some of the sprawling black ghettoes elsewhere in the South—there are maybe, what, two, three thousand people here?—Colleytown can hold its own with the worst of them. Because Cape October is a resort destination with sandy beaches and palm trees and fishing piers and little hidden lagoons, one tends to forget that it’s a part of the South, or that the entire state of Florida, in fact, is really the deepest part of the South. In the South, there are ghettos. And in ghettos, there are drugs and prostitution and gambling, and the gambling often includes illegal sports events like cock-fights. Then again, that holds true for almost every city in the United States. So who gives a shit about what happens in the rest of the world? Holmes thinks. Then again, Holmes is black. And he considers himself lucky that he’s here in Florida living off the fat of the land instead of getting shot at in some foreign hood like all his dumb fuckin brothers in Bush’s stupid fuckin crusade.

  The cockfighting season in Cape October roughly coincides with the tourist season, though not too many tourists are attracted to what its devotees call “a blood sport.” The end of May will mark the official end of this season’s fights, but even now, in the middle of the month, there are fewer fights than there were last month or the month before then. Actually, the fights began tapering off shortly after Easter, which is when the tourist season unofficially ends. There have been only two or three fights a week since then, at different times and in different venues, depending on how much advance knowledge the police have managed to gather. This Sunday’s fights were supposed to take place last night at a venue in Bradenton. Instead, the local fuzz were alerted, and so the venue was changed to Colleytown, and the time was changed to Sunday afternoon, when most good people are home reading the comics.

  This Sunday afternoon, there are plenty of good people about to watch the first of the fights, which is between a rooster named Ebony because he is as black as midnight, and a rooster named King Kock because he has been crossbred with a very large pheasant and is positively enormous. Nurtured on steroids to increase their muscle tissue, dosed with angel dust to numb any pain, both birds are equipped with fighting spurs before they enter the carpeted ring. In India, where the “sport” enjoys wide popularity, the birds fight bare-heeled using only their God-given claws to shred and destroy. In Puerto Rico, a long plastic apparatus that resembles a darning needle is attached to each of the bird’s heels. Here in this part of Florida, the chosen artificial device is called a slasher. It is a piece of steel honed to razor-sharp precision. These spurs are fastened to both claws. One of these birds will die a horrible death in the next few minutes.

  King Kock is the favorite to win, the odds on him being five-to-six. This means that if Joey bets two grand on the bird’s nose—or his beak, to be more accurate—he will take home twenty-four hundred dollars, which is not a fortune but which is better than a kick in the face. He has been on a losing streak this past month, which is why he’s into Angelet and Holmes for such a large sum, and so he takes the favored bet, King Kock to win at five-to-six.

  Ebony turns out to be a vicious little bastard.

  The crowd roars, “Kill him, kill him! ”—this is such a genteel sport—as he tears King Kock apart, limb by limb, feather by feather.

  Joey Onions has just lost a lot of money on this stupid fuckin King Kock, and he’s not happy. He is even less happy to see—entering the barn enclosing the ring—the two men to whom he still owes fifty large. Sometimes these people come around to collect at the most inopportune times. Like now, when he has just dropped two thousand dollars on a bird that couldn’t peck shit out of his own grandmother. If they are here for even part of the fifty, they haven’t got a prayer. But if they decide to get ugly about this, he may very well go home with a broken kneecap.

&
nbsp; This is not what Joey Onions enjoys about gambling. He does not enjoy losing, but even less does he enjoy crossing the path of an irate bookie. Or bookies, as is the case here and now, pushing their way through the crowd toward him, one of them Hispanic and the other black, and both of them bigger than the big bald guy at the door, who Joey now wishes hadn’t let him into the ring in the first place, where he’s just lost two grand he could now be handing over to these two thugs if that’s why they’re here, which he certainly hopes isn’t the case.

  “Hey, guys,” he says jovially. “What gives?”

  “No check in the mail, bro,” Holmes says.

  Joey doesn’t like it when a nigger calls him “bro,” but he’s willing to take any kind of insult so long as this isn’t about the money he owes these guys. Or is that what Holmes means by “No check in the mail, bro?” Is that his cute nigger way of saying “You still owe us fifty large, bro, and here you are throwing away money on the birds”?

  “Which check might that be, Dave?”

  “We spoke to the lady yesterday,” Angelet says. “No check in the mail.”

  “And which lady might that be, Rudy?”

  “That lady might be Alice Glendenning, who you said a check went out to from Garland last week.”

  “Oh,” Joey says.

  So that’s what this is about.

  What occurred, actually, was the last time these two came around asking about money matters and such, they happened to mention that they were still in the hole for two hundred K from a guy named Glendenning who drowned out on the Gulf seven, eight months ago, it must’ve been, and whereas they might be getting stiffed by him because he was dead and all, this didn’t mean they were going to let themselves get snookered by a small-time little shit like Joey who was still alive, was actually what they’d called him. Which was when Joey happened to mention that he recalled the name Glendenning from some correspondence back and forth between Garland and a lawyer, and he would look into the matter for them if they so desired.

  So he went back to the office and checked the files, and sure enough there was indeed a claim filed by a woman named Alice Glendenning as beneficiary of a $250,000 double indemnity policy on the life of her husband, Edward Fulton Glendenning. According to the records, this claim had not yet been satisfied, though it looked as if it might soon be.

  Now Joey is not a very big reader, but he is fond of the sequence in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-four where the hero is being tortured with caged rats about to eat his face, and he yells, “Do it to Julia!” who is his girlfriend, telling them to put the rats on her face instead of his, thereby betraying her to save his own skin.

  So Joey stretches the truth a tiny little bit and goes back to Angelet and Holmes with news that a check has already gone out to the Glendenning woman, and they should look to her for payment of her husband’s gambling debt, instead of coming around breaking his balls all the time for a lousy fifty G’s.

  “Yeah, that check went out,” he tells them again now.

  Which is another lie.

  “You sure about that?” Holmes asks.

  “Positive,” Joey says.

  And then—figuring it can’t do any harm, can it?—he embroiders the lie just a tiny little bit more.

  “In fact, it was already cashed,” he says. “I saw the cancelled check last week sometime.”

  “Then the fuckin bitch is lying to us,” Holmes says.

  “I’ll bet,” Joey says.

  What the hell, he thinks.

  Let her mother worry.

  The FBI arrives at twenty minutes past noon.

  Brusquely and bustily informing Sloate and Di Luca that the Feds have now taken over the case, Sally Ballew immediately begins detailing the way things will be handled from this moment on.

  “First,” she says, ticking the point off on her index finger, “Mrs. Glendenning will never again talk directly to the kidnappers. Is that clear? Detectives? Mrs. Glendenning?”

  “What if they ask for me?” Alice says.

  “Hand the phone to me.”

  “That can be dangerous,” Sloate says. “They told her not to call—”

  “They already know we’re in it,” Sally says. “From what I understand, you blew surveillance.”

  “A garbage truck intervened,” Sloate says.

  Sloate offers the excuse like a kid explaining that the dog just ate his homework. Sally merely gives him a look.

  “Second,” she says, using her middle finger to tick off another point, “no one outside of law enforcement enters this house again.” She turns to Carol as if just discovering her and asks, “Who are you, miss?”

  “I’m Alice’s sister,” Carol says.

  “She stays,” Alice says.

  “Fine, just keep out of the way,” Sally says, dismissing her.

  “How do you plan to get my children back?” Alice asks.

  “Exactly the way we’ve done it before,” Sally says.

  “And how exactly is that?”

  “First,” Sally says, using her fingers again, “we let them think they’re running the show.”

  They have been running the show, Alice thinks. And they’re still running it. They’ve got the money, and they’ve got my kids. What does that add up to, if not running the show?

  “They are running the show,” she says.

  Sloate says nothing. He is enjoying seeing someone else in the hot seat for a change. Marcia is enjoying this, too. She hasn’t liked Sally from minute one, and her opinion of her hasn’t changed an iota. The two local dicks can barely suppress smiles.

  “Next,” Sally says, ticking it off on her ring finger, “we find out where they are…”

  “And how do we do that?” Alice asks.

  “We are still currently checking hotels, motels, bed and—”

  “Suppose they rented a private house?” Alice asks. “Or a condo? There are hundreds of—”

  “We’re checking real estate agents as well. We have the woman’s false name, we’re hoping she may have used that. Once we learn where they are, we contain them there with the children, and we move in.”

  “Move in?” Alice says. “What about my kids?”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be completely safe.”

  “How can you promise that?”

  “Trust us,” Sally says.

  The telephone rings.

  Marcia is about to put on earphones. The phone rings again. Sally grabs the earphones from her and puts them on her own head. The phone rings a third time. “Take it,” she tells Alice. “If it’s them, put me on. I’ll do the talking.” Alice picks up on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Glendenning?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Rudy Angelet. You’re lying to us. We’ll be there to pick up the money in half an hour.”

  The line goes dead.

  “Who the hell was that?” Sally asks.

  12

  At the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road and U.S. 41, they buy a road map and two containers of coffee, and then go out to Jennifer’s T-Bird to study the map.

  The top is up and the air conditioner is blowing full blast; Rafe is afraid his wife might be out buying a container of milk or something, and he doesn’t want her to spot him in an open red convertible with a gorgeous blonde. For all Carol knows, he’s on the road to Atlanta, which reminds him that he ought to call the kids when he gets a chance, make sure they’re okay. He hasn’t yet mentioned this to Jennifer, because he knows how women feel about another woman’s kids. Rafe thinks he knows a lot about women.

  Poring over the map, sipping at their coffees, he and Jennifer could easily be two tourists trying to figure out the best way to get to Sea World or someplace. Instead, they are trying to figure out the best way to get to the black woman and the blonde who have Alice’s children and incidentally $250,000 in so-called super-bills.

  “Half hour’s drive from here,” Jennifer says.

  “
Is what the man said.”

  Told her if she wasn’t back where she was supposed to be in half an hour, they’d kill the children.

  Was what Garcia said, exactly.

  Half an hour from the gas station here on 41 and Lewiston.

  “Means what?” Rafe says. “Thirty or forty miles in any direction?”

  “Depending on traffic, right.”

  “Is there a scale on this thing?”

  They turn the map this way and that until they find a scale of miles in the lower left-hand corner. They don’t have a ruler in the car, but it looks like an inch equals thirty miles, more or less. An inch is about the length of the top joint of Rafe’s thumb. So if the two chicks are holding the kids someplace a half hour away from the Shell station here, then using the station as the center of a circle, and using Rafe’s thumb joint as the radius…

  Thirty miles to the east of Cape October would put them in the middle of the General George C. Ryan Wildlife Refuge. Is it possible they’re keeping the kids in a tent out there?

  “I don’t want to go anyplace where there are any snakes,” Jennifer says. “Fuck the two-fifty.”

  “Me, neither,” Rafe says.

  But he wouldn’t mind facing a few snakes if it meant getting his hands on all that cash. Hell, people on Survivor did that for a lot less money.

  Just southeast of the refuge, on route 884, is the town of Compton Acres, which Rafe has never heard of. About a half hour north of the Cape, on U.S. 41, there’s Port Lawrence. About a half hour south is Calusa Springs. To the west of the Cape are the offshore keys and the great big Gulf of Mexico.

  “Let’s call some real estate agents,” Jennifer suggests.

  On her way home from twelve o’clock Mass, Rosie Garrity picks up the Cape October Tribune. She does not begin reading it until she is in her own kitchen sipping a cup of hot tea. She knows at once that Dustin Garcia’s story is a complete lie.

  First, she was right there in the Glendenning house when that black woman called and told Mrs. Glendenning she had the kids.

  Next, she has met Mrs. Glendenning’s sister—Carol Matthews is her name—and she knows damn well that woman ain’t no blonde. Her hair is as brown as Mrs. Glendenning’s, the two of them could pass for twins, in fact, there ain’t no way the blonde in the blue Impala could be Carol Matthews, no way at all.