Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (27 page)

“Someone might.”

“Or someone might meanwhile
kill
those kids,” Stone says.

The line goes silent.

“Here’s what I’m gonna do, Sloate.”

No more “Detective,” Sally notices. The gloves are off.

“I’m sending Forbes and Ballew to the Glendenning house. They should be down on the Cape by…”

He looks up at the wall clock.

“…eleven, eleven-thirty. Let’s say twelve noon to be safe. They’ll be running the case from now on, and I expect your full cooperation in bringing it to a swift and—”

“With all due respect, sir, it’s
your
department that hasn’t been—”

“You don’t understand me, Sloate, do you? This just went
federal
on you. The case is
ours.
Ballew and Forbes are running it from this minute on.”

Sloate says nothing.

“Think you’ve got that?” Stone asks.

“Yes, I’ve got it,” Sloate says.

“Good,” Stone says, and hangs up.

He looks across his desk at Sally.

“You heard,” he says.

“We heard,” Sally says.

Ashley is complaining that
it’s Sunday, and they want to have waffles.

“We always have waffles on Sunday,” she says.

Christine explains that there isn’t a waffle iron here on the boat, but she can make pancakes if they’d like. Would they like her to make pancakes?

“Why’d we have to come here, anyway?” Ashley asks. “And why can’t I talk to Mommy again?”

“Yes or no, honey?” Christine says. “Pancakes or cereal, which?”

“Daddy always makes waffles on Sunday,” Ashley says. “Where is he, anyway?”

“Up at the front desk. Getting the newspapers.”

“I’m gonna tell him you wouldn’t make waffles for us.”

“Fine, tell him,” Christine says. “Pancakes or cereal?”

“Pancakes,” Ashley says grudgingly.

Eddie comes back with
the newspapers some ten minutes later.

“She wouldn’t make waffles for us,” Ashley tells him.

“That’s okay,” he says. “Pancakes are good, too.”

“Not as good as waffles.”

“But I see you ate them all, didn’t you?”

“When are we going home, Daddy?”

“Soon,” he says. “Why don’t you go watch television awhile? Lot of good shows on Sunday morning.”

“Jamie?” she says. “You want to watch TV?”

Jamie nods and gets up from the table.

“You got a kiss for Daddy?” Eddie asks.

Jamie offers his cheek, but doesn’t say a word. It breaks Eddie’s heart that his son doesn’t talk anymore. He wonders if that has anything to do with the drowning, some kind of reaction to the supposed drowning. He’d hate that to be the case. But he hates a lot of things about this entire undertaking. He only knows that a man has to do what he has to do. Intently, he watches his children as they go into the forward stateroom. He hears cartoons starting on the television set. He sighs heavily.

Taking Christine topside, he shows her the Sunday section.

“What do you make of it?” she asks.

“Well, we know it isn’t true,” he says. “It’s just some story she invented for this reporter.”

“But
why
?”

“To let us think she didn’t call the police.”

“We
know
she called the police!” Christine says. “They followed us. And she knows that, too. I
told
her we were followed. So why this story in the paper?”

“She’s trying to convince us she knows nothing about that maroon Buick. She’s telling us the cops
don’t
know anything at all about this, we’ve got the money now, so just let the kids go.”

“I think you’re right,” Christine says. “That’s what it means, honey. She’s promising safe passage, is what this story is. Let the kids go, and we’re home free.”

“If only it was as simple as that,” he says.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“Nothing,” he says.

“No, tell me, hon. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he says again.

Wearing a pale blue
sports jacket with darker blue slacks, a blue straw hat with a snap brim, and blue loafers with a fancy Gucci buckle, Dustin Garcia feels he looks quite dapper on this sticky hot morning. He comes walking out of the
Trib
building jauntily, a man secure in the knowledge that he is a big-time celebrity in this little town that is Cape October.

As he is about to enter his car in the parking lot behind the building, the pair of them suddenly appear. Big burly man, tall beautiful blonde woman.

“Mr. Garcia?” the man says.

“Yes?”

Fans, Garcia thinks. He is not surprised. His photo is at the top of his column and he has even been approached for an autograph once or twice, which can become annoying when a man is having dinner in a restaurant.

“Few questions we’d like to ask you,” the man says. “Want to come with us, please?”

“Who…?”

The man grabs Garcia’s right arm, just above the biceps. He squeezes hard.
Not
fans then. In which case…?

“The red car,” the man says. “Right over there.”

Garcia says nothing as they lead him to the car and open the front door on the passenger side. The man urges him inside with a polite little shove. The blonde takes a seat beside him, behind the wheel. Car doors slam. The blonde twists the ignition key, starting the car and the air conditioner.

“You know, of course—” Garcia begins.

“We just want to ask some questions,” the man says.

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“It
is
that way,” the blonde says.

“All right, I’ll accept that. What are your questions?”

“Why’d you and the cops concoct that story in your column this morning?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“About the Glendenning kidnapping. Why’d you make up a fake story?”

“What kidnapping? I don’t know anything about a kidnapping.”

“Your Disney World story,” the blonde says.

“You know those kids didn’t go to Disney World,” the man says.

“You know those kids are missing,” the blonde says. “So why the phony story?”

“Those are the facts as I collected them,” Garcia says.

“From who?”

“From Mrs. Glendenning herself.”

“That’s a lie and you know it.”

“Look,” Garcia says, “who the fuck
are
you people?”

“Language, language,” the man warns.

The car has cooled off rapidly. Outside in the parking lot, the black asphalt reflects shimmering waves of heat, but it is cool here in the car now, and yet Garcia is sweating. He wonders who these people are. Is it possible they’re part of a gang that took the Glendenning kids? Is there in fact a gang instead of just the black woman and her blonde accomplice, as Sloate and his people seem to think? If so, and if these two
are
part of a gang, if there
is
a gang and not just the two women, and if this ape of a man is part of the gang, then Garcia is in danger here. So tell them what they want to know, he thinks.

Instead, he asks, “How do you know about any kidnapping? If, in fact, there’s
been
a kidnapping?”

“You know there’s been a kidnapping,” the man says.

“The Glendenning kids,” the blonde says.

“You know a quarter of a million dollars in phony bills has already been paid.”

As a matter of fact, Garcia does not know this. Neither Sloate nor anyone on his team ever once mentioned that the ransom money was counterfeit. They told him the bills were marked, yes, but they did not say they were fake. So this, now, is a new development. He is once again sniffing Pulitzer prize in the air.

“Let’s say the children
were—
”

“Look,” the man says, leaning closer to him and talking directly into his ear, “let’s cut the shit, okay? The kids were snatched, and you know it. All we want to know is what the
cops
know about whoever done it.”

“Did
you
do it?” Garcia asks.

“Don’t be a fucking moron,” the man says.

Garcia’s mind is reeling. If these two are not, after all, part of any gang that kidnapped the Glendenning kids, then who or what
are
they? And what do they want?

“The cops only know it’s a blonde and a black girl,” he says, and looks the blonde directly in the eye, hoping she will blink. She does not.

“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.