Free Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel by Ed McBain

they’ll die.
    Charlie doesn’t want Farraday to think anything out of the ordinary has happened here. At the same time, he hopes to get a bead on that blue car.
    “I’m a friend of Alice Glendenning,” he says. “She wants to thank whoever picked up her kids yesterday afternoon. Maybe you can help me.”
    “Cops’ve already been here,” Farraday says. “Told ’em everything I know.”
    This surprises Charlie. He hopes it doesn’t show on his face. Why would the cops have been here? Alice told him they let her go yesterday, so why…?
    “Sorry to bother you again then,” he says. “She’s just eager to thank the woman.”
    Farraday is a man maybe sixty-five, seventy, in there, one of the retirees who come down here to die in the sun. Charlie’s fifty-four, which is maybe getting on, he supposes. But he knew what he wanted to be when he was seventeen. Had to leave art school when the Army grabbed him, but returned to his studies and his chosen profession the moment he was discharged. He’s been painting ever since, never hopes to retire till his fingers can no longer hold a brush or the good Lord claims him, whichever comes first.
    “These’d be Jamie and Ashley Glendenning,” he says. “Little boy and girl.”
    “Yep, I know them. But like I told the detectives this morning—”
    “That when they were here?”
    “Round ten o’clock,” Farraday says.
    “And you told them what?”
    “Told them a young blonde woman called the kids over to the car, drove off with them.”
    “What’d she look like?”
    “Straight blonde hair down to here,” he says, and indicates the length of it on his neck. “Slender woman from the look of her, delicate features. Wearing sunglasses and a white little-like tennis hat with a peak.”
    “She wasn’t black, was she?” Charlie asks.
    “Cops asked me the same thing.”
    “Was she?”
    “I don’t know many black blondes,” Farraday says. Then, chuckling, he adds, “Don’t know many blondes at all, for that matter. Nor too many blacks, either.”
    “How old would you say?”
    “I couldn’t say. Young, though. In her thirties maybe? I really couldn’t say.”
    “Called over to the kids, you said?”
    “Called to them. Signaled to them. You know.”
    “What’d she say?”
    “Now there’s where you got me, mister,” Farraday says, and lightly taps the hearing aid in his right ear.
    “Couldn’t hear what she said, is that it?”
    “Knew she was calling over to them, though. Waving for them to get in.”
    “And they just got in.”
    “Got in, and she drove off with them.”
    “In a blue car, is that right?”
    “Blue Chevrolet Impala.”
    “Notice the license plate?”
    “No. Told the cops the same thing. Wasn’t looking for it.”
    “Florida plate was it, though?”
    “Must’ve been, don’t you think?”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Cause it was a rental car.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Had a bumper sticker on it. ‘Avis Tries Harder.’”
    Bingo, Charlie thinks.
     
    The call from Captain Steele comes at twenty minutes to three.
    “What does Oleander Street look like right this minute?” he asks Sloate.
    “Empty. No traffic at all, nobody parked.”
    “Do you think they’re watching the house?”
    “No.”
    “If I sent somebody over right now, with those bullshit hundreds from the Henley case, can he drive right into the garage?”
    “Yes. It’s a two-car garage, there’s only the vic’s car in it right now.”
    The vic, Alice thinks.
    She is pacing the floor near the table where Sloate sits with the phone to his ear. The vic.
    “I’ll call when he’s on his approach. You can raise the door then.”
    “Got it.”
    “I’m sending Andrews and Saltzman to check out that babysitter,” he says. “You think there’s any meat there?”
    “I hope so.”
    “Meanwhile, when your lady calls, tell her you’ve got the money.”
    “Okay.”
    “And set up a drop.”
    “Okay.”
    “Do you think they know we’re already in