by Ed McBain
“Are you the man handling the kidnapping?” Garcia asks.
“What kidnapping is that?” Sloate asks.
Garcia knows at once that he is lying. Anglos lie to him a lot. That’s because he looks like a Cuban. He has a dark complexion and straight black hair and the rednecks down here think of him as a Cuban-American even though he was born in this country, in this state, in fact. Which in his view makes him an American, right? An American who votes here, by the way, but not for Mr. Bush, thank you, and fuck little Elian Gonzalez, too. It’s Garcia’s parents who are so-called Cuban-Americans, which means they immigrated here from Cuba and became American citizens who also voted, but their votes for Bush outnumbered his vote for Gore by two to one, and besides the Supreme Court had the final say.
Sloate is lying to him, he knows that.
“The Glendenning children,” he says. “The little boy and girl who were snatched from school on Wednesday.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that case,” Sloate says.
“Then why’d you tell downstairs to send me up?”
“Courtesy to the press,” Sloate says, and shrugs.
“Why are you stonewalling this?” Garcia asks.
“Mr. Garcia, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t heard of any kidnapping here on the Cape for the past three years. If you think you have information…”
“The Glendenning kids have been out of school for the past two days.”
“Maybe they’re home sick.”
“No, I went there, they’re not home sick. The mother refused to let me in. If they were there, she’d’ve let me talk to them. They’ve been kidnapped, Detective Sloate. You know damn well they’ve been kidnapped.”
“Sorry,” Sloate says.
“Here’s what the Trib’s gonna do,” Garcia says. “We’re gonna run a big picture of Mrs. Rose Garrity on our front page tomorrow morning. She’s the woman who called in to say the Glendenning kids are missing and nobody’s doing anything about it. We’re gonna run her picture big as life, and we’re gonna tell her story. And when we turn inside to page three, we’re gonna see a big picture of the school guard who witnessed those two kids getting into a blue Impala driven by a blonde woman who definitely ain’t Mrs. Edward Glendenning, who isn’t blonde and who doesn’t drive a blue Impala. We’re gonna tell his story, too, his name is Luke Farraday, and we’re gonna tell the people that the police in this town aren’t doing a damn thing to get those two kids back! How does that sound to you, Detective Sloate?”
“You want to help us?” Sloate asks. “Or you want those kids killed?”
Garcia blinks.
“Tell me,” Sloate says. “Which?”
The voice on the phone is a new one to her.
Gravelly and thick, the voice of a habitual unregenerate smoker, it says merely, “Mrs. Glendenning?”
“Yes,” she says, and then at once, “Who’s this, please?”
“My name is Rudy Angelet, I’m an old friend of your late husband.”
Across the room, wearing the earphones, Charlie looks at her, puzzled. Alice returns a puzzled little shrug.
“Yes?” she says.
“I’d like to offer my condolences,” Angelet says.
“Thank you,” she says, and waits.
It has been almost eight months now since anyone has called to offer condolences. That first week, those first two weeks actually, the phone never stopped ringing. Then news of the drowning became ancient history, and even their closest friends stopped calling to say how sorry they were. She has never heard of Rudy Angelet, though, and she wonders why the call at this late date. So she waits. Warily.
She is wary of any voice on the phone, any knock on the door, fearful that anything she says or does might endanger the children.
“Ah, Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, “I’m sorry to bother you about this, I know you’ve been through a lot…”
“Yes, what is it?” she asks.
“…but we’ve waited what we consider a respectable amount of time before contacting you…”
Waited for what? she wonders.
“…and we feel it’s time we now met to discuss this matter of Eddie’s debt.”
“Eddie’s what?” she says.
“His debt. The money he owes us. Mrs. Glendenning, I don’t think we should discuss this further on the—”
“I don’t know anything about—”
“—telephone. Perhaps we can meet someplace for a cup of coffee…”
“I don’t even know you,” she says.
“My name is Rudy Angelet,” he says. “And your husband owes us two hundred thousand dollars. Do you know the—?”
“He what?”
“He owes us two hundred thousand dollars, Mrs. Glendenning. Do you know the diner on 41 and Randall? It’s right on the corner there. The southwest corner…”
“Look, who is this?” she says.
“Last time, Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, and the smoke-seared voice is suddenly loaded with menace. “My name is Rudy Angelet, and your husband owes us two hundred thousand dollars. We’ll be at the Okeh Diner on 41 and Randall at eleven o’clock this morning. I suggest you be there, too. We’ll have breakfast together.”
“I’ve already had breakfast,” she says.
“You’ll have it again.”
“Look, mister—”
“Unless you’d like something to happen to your kids,” he says, and hangs up.
“Who was that?” Carol asks.
“Someone who says Eddie owed him two hundred thousand dollars.”
“They always come out of the woodwork,” Charlie says knowingly.
“He threatened the kids.”
“Then call the police,” Carol says.
Alice looks at her.
“Do you see the police here?” she says. “Are the police doing anything?” she says. “The police in this fucking hick town are sitting on their fat asses while my kids—”
“Hey,” Carol says, “hey, come on, sis,” and takes her into her arms.
It is like when they were children together, growing up in Peekskill, and the kids at school taunted her by calling her “Fat Alice” because she was a little overweight. Well, a lot overweight. But maybe she ate a lot because their father beat her with his goddamn razor strop all the time, the son of a bitch. Carol could never understand why he picked on Alice and exempted Carol herself from punishment. Nothing Alice did ever seemed to please him. Carol could only figure that he resented her being born at all. Or maybe…
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.
9
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—Ru
dy 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!
Eddie took the midnight blue slipper from the pocket of his frock coat.
He knelt before her.
“May I?” he asked.
And tried the slipper on her shoeless right foot.
And, of course, it fit.
“Will you marry me?” he whispered.
The words took her quite by surprise.
They’d been living together since September, when Eddie started work at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich. This was, after all, thirteen years ago, and the entire civilized world east of the Mississippi had already been sexually liberated. But marriage had never come up as a viable option. Not before now, anyway. How could a married woman go trotting off to Brazil lugging cameras and running out for coffee while some would-be eminent director filmed piranhas in the Amazon?
She was speechless.
Eddie was still kneeling.
His hand was still resting on her now-slippered foot.
His wonderful blue eyes were asking, “Well?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.
They were married shortly before Christmas.
She didn’t want to get pregnant, either.
That wasn’t part of her revised plan.
She had already begun implementing this modified plan by getting a part-time job editing film for an indie who was making a movie titled The Changing Face of the Lower East Side. Her idea was to find a series of similar temporary jobs in various aspects of film-related work until she could find full-time employment as a production assistant in a New York–based company.
What she wanted to do, you see, was prod
uce films. She wasn’t interested in cinematography or screenwriting or directing or, God forbid, acting. What she wanted to do was create, for all these other people, an environment in which they might make good movies. Movies that won all the prizes. She felt this was an ambition compatible with a good marriage. Eddie was beginning to find his way downtown on Wall Street; she was beginning to find her way in the film industry. Pregnancy was not part of the scheme.
Encouraged by her sister, Carol, who’d been married for two years already and had been successful in avoiding any unwanted pregnancies, Alice consulted her gynecologist about acquiring the same sort of diaphragm Carol had been using so effectively. She was told by Dr. Havram—a woman whose first name was Shirley—that the diaphragm was a flexible rubber cap that a woman filled with a spermicide prior to intercourse and before inserting it.
This, Alice already knew, duh.
She learned, however, that there were some slight, ahem, disadvantages.
To begin with, using it increased the chances of bladder infections. Whee, just what Alice needed, a bladder infection! Next, the cream or jelly spermicide might have an unpleasant taste, not very appealing to Count Dracula, eh, kiddo? Moreover, it might “interrupt the effortless flow of foreplay,” as Dr. Havram put it, and added, “Although you can teach your husband to insert it as part of the foreplay.”
Not to mention the fact that it was less effective than the condom either as a birth-control device or as protection against STDs. Although Alice knew what an STD was, Dr. Havram informed her anyway that the letters were an acronym for “sexually transmitted diseases” such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydial infection, or herpes, none of which Alice had ever had or ever wished to have.
“Also,” Dr. Havram said, “as a contraceptive, the failure rate of the diaphragm is about eighteen percent annually. In fact, it’s most effective with older married women who experience intercourse less than three times a week.”
(“That’s nonsense,” Carol later told her on the phone. “Whenever Rafe’s home, we go at it hot and heavy almost every night of the week, and you don’t see any little creatures running around here yet, do you?”)
