Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

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.