Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (15 page)

This is not the rainy season; this is May.

But by three o’clock that afternoon, the rain is coming down in buckets.

Detectives Wilbur Sloate
and George Cooper have been driving in the pouring rain from motel to motel ever since two o’clock. Following the Cape October city and county grid supplied to them by Captain Steele, they have already visited twelve motels, and when they spot an Impala in the courtyard outside the Tamiami Trail Motor Lodge, they can hardly wait to get out of the maroon Buick they’re driving.

“Go!” Sloate shouts, and both detectives burst out of the car and into the rain, dashing across the courtyard to the motel office, where—in his soft-spoken, seemingly subservient black way— Cooper tells the clerk behind the desk that they are looking for a person driving an Avis-rented blue Impala, and they’ve just noticed that there is such a vehicle parked outside, sir.

“Yeah?” the clerk says.

“Want to tell us who’s driving that car?” Cooper asks.

“Let me see your badges,” the clerk says.

They both flash the Cape October PD tin.

The clerk studies the shields as if they were freshly minted. He is not sure how he feels about cops on the property. He is sure his boss won’t like learning about it when he comes in tomorrow morning. But there’s nothing he can do about their being here, he supposes, unless…

“You got a search warrant?” he asks.

“Mister,” Cooper says, “let’s just see your damn register, okay?”

This turns out to be academic because Sloate is already turning the register so they can read it. They have no trouble finding the license plate number from the car outside, or matching it with the name alongside it, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Holt from Cleveland, Michigan.

“This the room they’re in?” Cooper asks. “3B?”

“It’s a cabin. We don’t have rooms here, we have cabins,” the clerk says.

“This the cabin then?”

“That’s the one.”

“They happen to be black, these people?”

“Man was white. Didn’t see the woman, she stayed in the car. Lots of them stay in the car while the man registers. Specially if it’s raining.”

“Was it raining three days ago, when it says here they checked in?”

“I don’t know what it was doing three days ago,” the clerk says.

“Then you want to show us where 3B is?” Sloate says.

“It’s right across the courtyard,” the clerk says. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“Just checkin on a car, is all,” Cooper says.

The clerk figures they’re looking for either a wanted desperado or an al-Qaeda terrorist, but he points them in the right direction, and hopes there won’t be any gunplay here.

The white man who opens the door is wearing a bathrobe over pajamas. This is a quarter to four in the afternoon and he’s ready to go to bed. Meanwhile, the two detectives are standing in the rain.

“Mind if we come in, sir?” Sloate asks.

“Well, gee, I don’t know,” Holt says.

He has a little Charlie Chaplin mustache. Behind him, the television set is on with a rerun of a cop movie. The detectives have just showed him their shields, but Holt seems more interested in the movie than in the real live cops standing in front of him. They can hear a shower running behind a closed door they assume leads to the bathroom. Mr. Holt’s wife, no doubt, if indeed she is his wife. Quarter to four in the afternoon, he’s ready for bed. Can it be his wife? They are still standing in the rain. He still hasn’t asked them to come in.

Sloate steps in, anyway, guidelines be damned. Cooper comes right in behind him. Holt still doesn’t know what they want, but to play it safe he tells them he’s from Cleveland, Michigan—which they already know from the register—and that he has been coming down to Cape October ever since 1973, when he caught bronchitis and his doctor advised him to go someplace warm for the winter. He tells them that he is here with his wife, Sophie, who is at this moment taking a shower, and he tells them that tomorrow he will be taking her to Disney World in Orlando.

“Been coming down here for more ’n thirty years now, never been to Disney World, can you imagine?” he says.

“Is your wife black?” Cooper asks.

“Black?” Holt says. “No. What kind of question is that? Black? I’m from Cleveland. What do you mean, black? My wife? What’s this all about, anyway?”

He does not look or sound like the sort of person who has kidnapped a pair of little kids, but then again not many rapists look like rapists or bank robbers like bank robbers, at least not in the experience of these two cops. In any case, there is just this one room here, and the bathroom beyond, where they can still hear the shower going, so they have to assume—until they can check out the bathroom, at any rate—that since there are no little kids in evidence, this is not the man and woman who kidnapped the Glendenning children. Unless Mrs. Holt—if she is Mrs. Holt—turns out to be the black Sheena of the Jungle they followed strutting up Citrus Avenue with the expensive French luggage bouncing on her hip and the wide gold bracelet on her arm.

“We’d like to have a look in that bathroom whenever Mrs. Holt is finished in there,” Sloate says.

“I don’t suppose you have a search warrant, do you?” Holt asks.

“No, we don’t, Mr. Holt,” Sloate says. “Do you want us to go all the way downtown to get one?”

Holt decides he would rather not have them do this.

For the next five minutes or so, they stand around awkwardly, waiting for Mrs. Holt to finish her shower. At last, she turns off the water. Holt goes to the bathroom door, knocks on it, and says, “Hon, there’re some police detectives here. You’d better put something on before you come out.”

“There are some
what
here?” a woman’s voice answers.

She does not sound black.

She comes out a moment later, wearing a pink robe and a bemused expression that says, Gee, there really
are
two people who look like detectives standing here with my husband!

She is definitely not black.

She is, however, blonde.

But not the slender blonde with hair to her shoulders Sloate saw at the wheel of the Impala. Instead, she is in her late forties, a somewhat stout little woman, her short hair still wet and straggly, her face shiny bright from the shower.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Sloate says, and they both go into the bathroom to look around, though neither of them now believes there are any kids here in this motel room.

“Sorry to bother you,” Sloate repeats as they come out of the bathroom. “Just had to check out something.”

“What is it you’re looking for?” the woman asks.

“Routine matter,” Cooper says in his shuffling, soft-spoken way, and they thank the Holts for their time, and then leave the room, and drive out of the motel grounds, on their way to the next place on their list.

“Now what do you make of that?” Holt asks his wife.

Judy Lang is perhaps
five feet seven inches tall, and slender, and quite beautiful in a fox-faced way, her blonde hair cut so that it falls loose and straight to just above her shoulders. When she opens the door to the tenth-floor condo, she is barefoot and wearing a brown mini and a short pink cotton sweater that exposes a ring in her belly button. Her blue eyes open wide when she spots the yarmulke on the back of Saltzman’s head. Her first thought is that somebody has told the rabbi she’s been dating an eighteen-year-old Cuban.

Dating isn’t quite the proper word, either, since she and Ernesto haven’t yet
gone
anywhere together, except the backseat of his brother’s big roomy Oldsmobile. Judy knows that her husband will kill her for sure if he ever finds out about what she’s been doing in that car every day of the week except Saturday and Sunday, with a Cuban teenager, no less. So here’s this big tall guy with a yarmulke, standing on the doorstep, here to read her passages from the Talmud, she feels certain. Instead, he flashes a badge that has the initials
copd
on it, which—it immediately becomes clear—stand for Cape October Police Department.

“Detective Julius Saltzman,” he says. “My partner, Detective Peter Andrews.”

The shorter guy with him mumbles something Judy doesn’t quite catch. At least they aren’t here from the synagogue.

“May we come in, please?” Saltzman asks.

“Well… my husband isn’t home,” she says.

“It’s you we want to talk to,” Andrews says. “If you’re Judy Lang?”

“Well… yes, I am,” she says. “But why?” Despite the exuberant breasts in the snug sweater and the lissome hips in the tight-fitting mini, there is a certain adolescent gawkiness about this woman. Both detectives suddenly wonder if Ernesto de Diego hasn’t nailed himself another little teenager here, instead of the thirty-something housewife Judy Lang actually is. They follow her into a living room that overlooks the wide green expanse of a golf course below, and take seats on a sofa opposite her. All they want to know is whether or not Judy Lang might have been the blonde who picked up the Glendenning kids yesterday afternoon. Being cops, however—and small- town cops at that—they can’t come right out and ask her if she happened to kidnap two kids. Instead, they go at it in a more subtle manner, they think.

“Do you drive a car?” Andrews asks.

“Yes, I do,” she says.

“What kind of car is it?”

“A white Jag. My husband gave it to me for my thirty-fifth birthday.”

Thirty-five then. Going on thirty-six.

“Ever drive a Chevy Impala?”

“I don’t think so. No. Why?”

“Blue Chevy Impala?”

“No.”

“You weren’t driving a blue Chevy Impala this past Wednesday afternoon, were you? Down in Cape October?”

“Not this past Wednesday or
any
Wednesday,” Judy says. “I’ve never been to Cape October in my life.”

“But your boyfriend’s from the Cape, isn’t he?”

“What boyfriend?” she says. “I’m a married woman. What are you talking about, boyfriend?”

“Do you know a girl named Maria Gonzalez?”

“No. Did somebody run her over with a Chevy Impala?”

“Ever hear of a woman named Alice Glendenning?”

“No. Who is she?”

“Did Maria Gonzalez ever mention the Glendenning children to you?”

“I told you I don’t know anybody named Maria Gonzalez.”

“Judy?”

A voice from the front door. They all turn to look at the arch leading to the entrance foyer.

“Is someone here, dear?” the voice asks.

He is wearing sandals, khaki slacks, and a lime green shirt. He is a man in his fifties, they guess, bald, tanned, with a dead cigar in his mouth. Putting his keys back into his pants pocket, he enters the living room, his eyes squinching in puzzlement when he sees the two men sitting on the sofa.

“Yes?” he says.

“Darling,” Judy says, and rises, and goes to him and takes both his hands in hers. “These gentlemen are from the Cape October Police Department.”

“Oh?” he says.

“Detective Saltzman,” Saltzman says.

“Detective Andrews,” Andrews says.

“Murray Lang, what can I do for you?”

His manner is abrupt and hostile. He is not used to finding policemen in his luxurious condo, even if one of them is wearing a yarmulke, and his attitude clearly wants to know what the hell they’re doing here. Judy’s eyes are darting all over the place, from one detective to the other. Just a few minutes ago, they mentioned a boyfriend, which means they know about Ernesto. She is sensing imminent disaster here. She is thinking of throwing herself out the window before her husband finds out what’s been going on. Her eyes have a desperate pleading look. They are saying, “Please, officers, don’t tell him about Ernesto, okay? Please.”

The detectives don’t want to cause any trouble here. All they want to know is whether or not Judy Lang and some black woman—

It suddenly occurs to Saltzman that they may have real meat here. However unlikely might seem the menage à trois formed by a married Jewish lady in her thirties, a teenage Cuban boy, and a black woman also in her thirties, the possibility exists that Judy Lang, Ernesto de Diego, and the nameless woman on the telephone are all in this together. A coalition of the willing, so to speak.

“We’re trying to locate a blue Chevy Impala,” he says.

“Why?” Murray Lang asks. “And what’s it got to do with us?”

“A woman who fits your wife’s description—”

“Am I going to need a lawyer here?”

“Not unless you want one, sir.”

“Because I have lawyers coming out of my wazoo, you want lawyers.”

“We want to know where your wife was at two-thirty
P
.
M
. Wednesday afternoon, sir. Is all we want to know.”

“Tell them where you were, Judy. And then you can get the hell out of here,” Murray tells the detectives.