Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

Well, she didn’t believe in pushcart psychology. She knew only that the moment Alice got out of that house, the moment she went off to New York and college, she shed the pounds as if they were water rolling off a tin roof. By the time she met Eddie, she was as slender as a model. Also wore her hair longer, down to the shoulders, though Eddie was wearing his in a crew cut at the time. Dirty blond and raven brunette, they made a striking pair on the streets of a city not renowned for being easily impressed.

But now Eddie is dead and a stranger on the phone has just told Alice her husband owed him two hundred thousand dollars.

“I’ll go with you,” Carol says.

“No, I’ll go,” Charlie says.

“I’ll go alone,” Alice tells them.

She sometimes wishes she were six feet two inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds. She wishes she could bellow like a gorilla, pound her chest, smash everything on the road ahead of her. Is that what this kidnapping is all about? she wonders. Is that what this gets down to? Her husband owing money to a man who sounds like a grizzly bear, is that it? Is that why they took her children? If so, you deserved to die, Eddie, you…

I don’t mean that, she thinks at once.

God forgive me, she thinks.

I’m sorry, Eddie, please forgive me.

Her knuckles on the wheel are white.

She takes a deep breath.

The man on the phone — Rudy Angelet, he said his name was — threatened the children. Does this mean he actually has them? Is he somehow connected with the black girl in the Shell station, oh so fucking confident, looked Alice straight in the eye, never mind worrying about later identification, Do anything foolish, and they die. Are they accomplices? Or is Alice merely wasting time here, meeting Mr. Angelet and whoever he’s having breakfast with, when she should be home waiting for a phone call? She knows there’s more than just him; he said, “Your husband owes us, ” he said, “ We’ll be at the diner,” so there’s more than just Mr. Rudy Angelet and his veiled threat. Are there now four of them? More than four? Is this a gang she’s dealing with, dear God don’t let it be a gang! Let it be just the black woman and her blonde girlfriend, and now Mr. Rudy Angelet and maybe one other person waiting for her at the Okeh Diner.

It is unusual to find heavy traffic on The Trail at ten forty-five on a sweltering morning in May. As Eddie once put it, only an iguana would find the Cape habitable during the summer months. And despite what the calendar says, summer starts at the beginning of May and often lingers through October, though many of the full-timers insist that those two bracketing months are the nicest ones of the year. Native residents of the Cape tend to forget that May and October are lovely anywhere in the United States. They also conveniently forget that in May down here, you can have your brain parboiled if you don’t wear a hat.

Driving toward the Okeh Diner on Randall and the Trail, Alice suddenly realizes how much she hates this place.

Hates it even more now that Eddie is dead.

Wonders why on earth they ever moved down here from New York.

Wonders what in the world kept them here all these years.

God, she thinks, I really do hate this fucking place.

She hadn’t planned on getting married so soon.

Her plan was to finish film school and then take a job as a third or fourth or fifth assistant director (a gopher, really) with one of the many companies advertising for recent film school graduates to go on location in Timbuktu or Guatemala or wherever they were shooting the latest documentary or low-budget (or even no-budget) independent film. These were learning jobs for single men or women. So marriage definitely was not in her plans.

But along came Eddie, so what was a girl to do?

His own plan was to earn his master’s in business that June (which he did) and then get a job with a Wall Street brokerage firm (which he also did that August, to start in September) and then sit back and watch the big bucks roll in (which he never did manage to do, but he was still young, and that was the plan). He didn’t reveal the rest of his plan to her until Halloween night of that magical autumn thirteen years ago.

She was dressed as Cinderella.

Eddie was dressed as Dracula.

An odd couple, to be sure, but the pairing was granted some measure of legitimacy by the fact the Eddie was carrying one midnight blue satin slipper in the pocket of the frock coat under his long black cape, and Alice was limping along on one shod foot, the other clad in a skimpy Ped.

“The limp adds vulnerability to your undeniable beauty,” Eddie told her.

She was, in fact, feeling quite beautiful that night, all dolled up in a sapphire blue gown she’d rented for a mere pittance at a costume shop on Greenwich Avenue, masses of pitch black hair piled on top of her head, faux diamond earrings (they came with the gown) dangling from her ears, a faux diamond necklace (also courtesy of Village Costumes, Inc.) around her neck, a lacey low-cut bodice to surpass that of the heroine on the cover of any Silhouette romance — but hey, she was Cinderella, the romance heroine of all time!

And Eddie was as sinister a vampire count as anyone might have conjured in his wildest nightmares. Alice had never seen a Dracula with a mustache and a pointed little beard, but Eddie was wearing those tonight, together with greenish makeup around his startling blue eyes, creating a sort of hungry look — hell, a famished look — that promised an imminent bite on the neck from those prosthetic fangs he was also wearing.

“Are you supposed to be Lucy?” their host asked them. “Or was that her name?”

“Beats me,” Alice said. “I’m Cinderella.”

“What’s Cinderella doing with Dracula?”

“We’re in love,” Eddie said.

“Ah,” their host said.

“See? I have her slipper,” he explained.

“Ah,” their host said again.

His name was Don Something-or-Other, and he was an NYU student taking classes in Method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute on East Fifteenth Street. Don himself lived on Horatio Street near Eighth Avenue, in a loft that was probably costing his parents a bundle, and which tonight was filled with a variety of Trekkies, monsters, clowns, superheroes, hookers, ghosts, witches and warlocks, pirates both male (with mustaches and eye patches) and female (in ragged shorts and soft boots), angels, devils and demons, and one girl dressed as a dominatrix (but this was, after all, Greenwich Village). Since this was thirteen years ago, and the first President Bush had recently sent ground forces to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the first of the Bush Dynasty’s Persian Gulf Wars, there were also two men wearing Bush masks.

The dominatrix, who said her name was Mistress Veronique, made a pass at Eddie, and Alice whispered in his ear, “I’ll break your head!” which seemed to dampen any interest he might have had in whips or leather face masks. He asked Alice what she wanted to drink, and then he made his way to the bar, where a girl who identified herself as a Barbie doll made yet another pass at him. (Apparently there were many would-be vampire victims on the loose tonight, longing for the count to draw first blood.) Eddie made his way back to Alice, cradling a pair of dark-looking drinks in his hands. He made a toast to “All Hallows Eve and beyond” (significant pause), and then led her through the crowd to a pair of French doors opening onto a small balcony overlooking a postage-stamp garden below.

The night was mild for the end of October.

Back in Peekskill, she’d be shivering. But here in New York, on a balcony well-suited to a scullery maid soon to become a princess, or at least already a princess until the horses turned back to mice at midnight, Alice stood looking out over this dazzling city, her one unshod foot somewhat chilled, but otherwise toasty warm in the cape Count Dracula wrapped around her, the better to bite you on the jugular, m’proud beauty!