Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

Cudahy comes out of the car again.

“Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, “Detective Sloate would like to talk to you, please.”

“Very well,” Alice says. “On the car radio, or does he want me to phone him?”

“In person, ma’am,” Cudahy says. “He’s asked me to bring you in.”

“That’s absurd,” Charlie says.

“Be that as it may, sir,” Cudahy says, and opens the car door for Alice. “Ma’am?”

Downtown Cape October is exactly nine blocks long and three blocks wide.

The tallest buildings here, all of them banks, are twelve stories high. Main Street runs eastward from the Cattle Trail — which is now a three-way intersection with a traffic light, but actually used to be a cow crossing back when the town was first incorporated — to the county courthouse, which, at five stories high, is the tallest building anywhere on Main. The other buildings on Main are one- and two- story cinder-block structures. The banks are on the two streets paralleling Main to the north and south. Alice has learned that when anyone says “downtown Cape October” he isn’t talking about a place that also has an uptown. There is no uptown as such. There is merely downtown Cape October and then the rest of Cape October.

The police station here is officially called the Public Safety Building, and these words are lettered in white on the low wall outside. Less conspicuously lettered to the right of the brown metal entrance doors, and partially obscured by pittosporum bushes are the words police department. The building is constructed of varying shades of tan brick, and its architecturally severe face is broken only by narrow windows resembling rifle slits in an armory wall. This is not unusual for the Cape, where the summer months are torrid and large windows produce only heat and glare.

Cudahy drives Alice around into the parking lot behind the building, and parks the car alongside a white police paddy wagon marked with the words CAPE OCTOBER PD. He leads her to a back door, raps on it, and is admitted by another uniformed officer, who then takes Alice through marbled corridors to the front of the building, and then up to the third-floor reception area, where an orange-colored letter conveyor rises like an oversized periscope from the floor diagonally opposite the elevator doors. There is a desk against the paneled wall facing Alice, and a uniformed officer sits behind it, a woman this time, typing furiously. The clock on the wall above the woman’s head reads fourteen minutes to nine. She stops typing the moment Alice gets off the elevator.

“Mrs. Glendenning?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Come with me, please.”

Alice feels as if she has been arrested for shoplifting.

Detective Wilbur Sloate is a gangly man in his late thirties, early forties, Alice guesses. He is wearing a rumpled linen suit with a polka-dotted blue tie on a paler blue shirt. His hair is what Alice’s mother, rest her soul, would have called dirty blond, a shade darker than Eddie’s was. It is parted neatly on the left side of his head. He rises the moment Alice is led into his office.

“Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, “please have a seat.”

“I want to know why I’m here,” Alice says.

“For your own good,” Sloate says.

“That’s what my father used to say before he whopped me one.”

“Look, I can tell you we have reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed, and I can tell you we believe you’re withholding evidence of a crime, and I can tell you you’re hindering an investigation. I can tell you all of those things, Mrs. Glendenning, and you can tell me to go straight to hell and walk out of here right this minute. But that won’t get your kids back if they were kidnapped.”

Kidnapped.

The first time anyone has said the word out loud.

Kidnapped.

Alice says nothing.

“I want to help you. I know they told you not to call the police. I know they made death threats. But Mrs. Garrity did the right thing by calling us. I want to help you. Please let me help you.”

“How?” she says.

“We can put a tap on your phone, get our people in your house. They won’t know we’re listening, they won’t know we’re there, I promise you. They don’t have to know we’re in this.”

“They may already know! You brought me here in a goddamn police car…”

“We were very careful, Mrs. Glendenning…”

“Careful? A police car pulled right up in front of Charlie’s house! Why didn’t you take an ad in the paper?”

“I asked them to show the utmost discretion. Mr. Hobbs’s house is in an isolated, heavily wooded part of Willard Key. There were no cars parked on the approach road, no sign of anyone watching the house. Officer Cudahy checked the perimeter carefully before he drove in. And when you arrived here, we brought you in through the back entrance of the facility. I feel certain that the people who kidnapped your children don’t know you’re here.”

Kidnapped.

His using the word again makes it real all at once.

Kidnapped.

Her children have been kidnapped.

Jamie and Ashley have been kidnapped.

She suddenly bursts into tears.

“Here,” he says, and yanks a tissue from a box on his desk, and hands it to her.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Want to tell me what happened?”

She tells him.

“Have you got a quarter of a million dollars?” he asks.

“No.”

“How much have you got?”

“About three thousand.”

“So what makes them think you’re rich?”

“They probably think I collected a fortune.”

“How do you mean, ma’am?”

“My husband drowned eight months ago. He had a double indemnity policy with Garland.”

“Is that an insurance company? Garland?”

“Yes. Garland and Rice.”

“How much are you looking at?”

“Well… two hundred and fifty thousand, actually. When they pay it.”

“You’re expecting the exact sum they’re asking for? I would say that’s some kind of a rare coincidence. Who else knows about this big death benefit you’re supposed to be getting?”

“My attorney… and his partners, I guess. And people at the insurance company, I suppose. But they all know it hasn’t been paid yet.”

“Anyone else? Have you mentioned to anyone else that you’d be coming into two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

“Well… my sister. And I suppose she told her husband.”

“Where do they live?”

“In Atlanta.”

“What’s he do for a living?”

“Drives a truck. When he isn’t in jail.”

“That’s a joke, right?”

“No, it’s the truth.”

“He’s done time?”

“Yes. But not for anything serious.”

“What was it?”

“Two dope convictions.”

“Trafficking?”

“No.”

“Cause that’s serious, trafficking.”

“This was simple possession.”

“Do any of his pals know about this big insurance policy?”

“Pals?”

“Any of his former cellmates? Any of the yardbirds he buddied with? Wherever it was he did time.”

“I don’t know.”

“Be nice to find out,” Sloate says, and nods thoughtfully. He’s really trying to dope this out, she thinks. But he seems so very… country-boy. If this were New York or some other big city…

But this isn’t New York.

This is Cape October, Florida, and my children have been kidnapped, and at noon tomorrow a woman with a voice like a razor blade will call again and ask me if I’ve got the money. And all Alice can think is I don’t have the money, I don’t have the money, they will kill my children.

“How about your sister?” Sloate asks. “What does she do?”