Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

Something else he said continues to bother her.

It was just before Christmas. Carol had invited Alice and the kids up to Atlanta, but she said she had to stay down there on the Cape, where Jamie’s speech therapist was, he had already stopped talking by then. Rafe told Carol that he’d read something in the Atlanta Constitution about some insurance company paying any accident-related claims within a week of filing, even without death certificates.

“So when’s this insurance company of Alice’s gonna pay her that two-fifty?” he asked.

“I’m sure Alice is asking that very same question along about now,” Carol said.

“Be nice to get our hands on some of that, wouldn’t it?” Rafe said.

“What makes you think…?”

“Be real nice,” he said.

Carol wondered about this at the time. She knew her sister would be coming into $250,000 as soon as that insurance claim was settled, and she knew she and Rafe still had a big mortgage on the house, and payments on the Ford to make each and every month, and it would certainly be helpful if Alice decided to be generous with a little of that money. But Carol would never ask, and Rafe knew that, and so it was funny that he’d brought up the insurance money, and she’d wondered about it at the time.

She is still wondering about it.

She keeps her foot pressed hard to the accelerator.

“How do we know they didn’t rent a condo?” Forbes asks.

“That’s another possibility,” Sally says.

“People come down, rent a condo for a week or two,” Forbes elaborates.

“I know that.”

“What I’m saying, this could turn into a wild goose chase,” Forbes says.

In fact, he doesn’t like the way this whole damn thing is shaping up.

First off, they are putting those children in harm’s way. That is the plain and simple truth of the matter. Stone knows that, and so does Sally. You go knocking on someone’s door, ask did they rent a blue Impala at the airport, if they’ve got the kids inside there with them, they’re going to panic and maybe blow the kids away. That is a fact that should be evident to any law enforcement officer. That is the first thing that stinks to high heaven here.

The second thing is that this is once again turning into a footrace with the local fuzz, everybody grabbing for the gold ring, never mind the welfare of the vics. It’s who’s gonna bring home the bacon, who’s gonna end up the glory boys and girls. There’s no question but that the FBI can use a little praise these days, the way we fouled up before and after 9/11, none of us has yet found whoever it was mailed that anthrax around, now have we?

So jump on the merry-go-round, boys and girls, and let’s see who can find that blue Impala first, us or the local yokels, and pray to God nobody behind one of those hotel, motel, B & B, what-have-you doors won’t start blasting away the minute we say those words “FBI” and show the shield, just pray to God, boys, just pray to God.

The FBI has not shared with the Cape October PD’s Criminal Investigations Division the information it gathered from the Avis desk at the airport. So Captain Roger Steele does not know that the person who rented a blue Impala four days ago showed identification bearing the name Clara Washington.

Steele knows only that a blue Impala driven by a slender blonde picked up a good-looking black girl some five feet seven inches tall — close enough to the five-eight or — nine described by the Avis woman, but that’s another thing he doesn’t know. He does know that the girl was carrying Alice Glendenning’s Louis Vuitton bag full of Monopoly money, and he further knows that the car was subsequently obscured by an orange Cape October Department of Sanitation garbage truck, thereby eluding their grasp this morning. He also knows that the blue Chevy has got to be out there someplace because, as Detective Wilbur Sloate put it to him, “ Ever’body gotta be someplace, boss.”

So Steele has put out an all-points bulletin for the car, and meanwhile, his entire CID team is out checking every hotel and motel in town, hoping to locate the blue car and consequently the black girl and her blonde girlfriend.

Cape October is a city of 143,000 year-round residents, 90 percent of them white, 8 percent of them Cubans who have drifted over to the West Coast from Miami, 2 percent of them black, and the remainder a tiny spattering of Asians. There are twenty-four churches of varying denominations on the Cape, ranging from Catholic to Baptist to Jewish (Orthodox and Reform) to Presbyterian to Lutheran to Seventh-Day Adventist and including two for the Mennonite sect, its followers identified by the black clothing and beards worn by the men, and the plain dresses and simple white caps worn by the women.

And because the Cape is a tourist destination, there are also fifty-two hotels, motels, small inns, and cottages in this town, not to mention a few dozen more bed-and-breakfast places.

Roger Steele does not think the kidnappers would risk taking those two kids to any of the bigger hotels or even to one of the resorts out on the keys. But there are small motels all up and down the Trail, and even some out on Grosse Bec. These are the ones his team of sixteen CID detectives are checking. Sixteen detectives. That’s all Steele has. This is a very small number of detectives for such a mighty number of venues, even assuming the perps are still in the state of Florida.

And besides, it is starting to rain again.

The manager of the Shell station on U.S. 41 and Lewiston Point Road is not happy to see three detectives from the Cape October Police Department coming out of the rain at two-thirty that Friday afternoon.

One of the cops, a burly black man named Johnson, tells the manager they’re investigating an automobile theft.

“The thief may have used the ladies’ room sometime this morning. So we’d like to go in there and look around, if that’s okay with you.”

“What kind of car was it?” the manager asks.

“Cadillac Saville,” Johnson lies, without batting an eyelash.

“We get lots of Savilles in here,” the manager says.

“Yeah,” Johnson says. “So if you’ll unlock the ladies’ room for us, we’ll just go about our business.”

“It’s unlocked as it is,” the manager says.

“Well, fine then, we’ll just get out of your way.”

The three Mobile Crime Unit cops have been sent by Captain Steele to get everything they can from the ladies’ room where Mrs. Glendenning dropped the ransom money, and where an as-yet-unidentified suspect picked up the bag and managed to elude a successful surveillance. Steele’s game plan, such as it is, is to find out if the black girl who sashayed off with two-fifty large in supers has a record of any kind. From what his detectives have told him, Steele has a pretty good inkling that Mrs. Glendenning isn’t too happy about the continued presence of the Cape October Police in this case. So he intends to send Sloate and Di Luca back to her with some real information, as soon as he gets some real information, before she goes blabbing on television that the cops in this neck of the woods don’t know what they’re doing.

Unfortunately, the two suspect women — the blonde and the black girl — have thus far eluded pursuit, and so far none of the Cape October uniforms have spotted the suspect blue Impala. So he figures if the MCU can come up with real meat, then he can go back to the Glendenning woman and calm her down regarding the procedure they’ve been following, a perfectly sound procedure, by the way, that resulted in a capture and conviction in the Henley case three years ago, even though the little boy was dead by the time they got there.