Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (19 page)

“Then why wouldn’t she let me in?”

“Because…”

“Because the two of you were alone in there. And if I know you...”

“No, no, we weren’t alone.”

“Then who was there?”

“The police.”

“The police? Why?”

So he has to explain that his little niece and nephew were kidnapped…

“Get out!”…and that the people who kidnapped them asked for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, which the police supplied for Alice to drop off Friday morning…

“That poor woman!” Jennifer says.

“Yeah, and she
still
hasn’t got the kids back,” Rafe says.

“What do you mean the police supplied it? Where’d
they
get that kind of money?”

So he has to explain that the Treasury Department supplied the bills for another kidnapping down here a couple of years ago, and that the bills were these counterfeits called super-bills…

“Get out!” she says again.…which are so good it’s impossible to tell them from the real thing.

“Which is what I tried to explain to these former business associates of mine,” Rafe says, “but they wouldn’t buy into it.”

“Wouldn’t buy into what?”

“Well, these people are criminals, am I right?” Rafe says. “The ones who kidnapped Alice’s kids?”

“So?”

“So what harm would it do if someone
took
that money from them? I mean, they’re
criminals,
am I right? Serve them right, am I right?”

“I’m still not following.”

“And also, the money is fake besides.”

She shakes her head, totally bewildered.

“What we’ve got,” he explains, “is a pair of chicks sitting out there on two hundred and fifty grand in fake money so good you can’t tell it from the real thing. So what if some enterprising souls
relieved
them of that money? It’s fake, anyway, am I right? And they’re criminals in the bargain. So where’s the harm?”

“Two chicks, huh?” Jennifer asks.

“It would appear so, yes.”

“All we have to do is find them,” she says.

“That’s all, baby,” he says.

For some reason, he’s getting hard again.

Alice’s phone rings
at 8:45
A
.
M
.

Charlie is still asleep on the living room sofa. She grabs for the receiver at once.

“Hello?”

“Alice, it’s Frank. How are you?”

Her boss at Lane Realty.

“Fine, Frank.”

“How’s your foot?”

“Okay.”

“Are you able to get around?”

“Pretty much so.”

“Do you think you’ll be coming in today?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Still in pain, are you?”

“No, Frank, it’s just… the foot’s in a cast, you know…”

“Yes, so I understand.”

“…and it’s a little clumsy driving. Maybe Aggie can handle any appointments I have for today…”

“Is that what you’d like me to do?”

“Yes, Frank.”

“Give these various listings to Aggie?”

“I’m sure she can handle them.”

“When do you think you’ll be coming back to work, Alice?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Sundays are big, too.”

“Yes, I know.”

“O-kay, Alice,” he says, and sighs heavily. “Let me know when you’re ready to come back, will you?”

“I’ll let you know, Frank.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Get better.”

And hangs up.

They know the blue
Impala was followed yesterday, but they do not yet know that Avis has given up the license plate number. Even so, they are reluctant to drive the car again, or even to leave it where they’ve parked it on the mainland. They check the Yellow Pages under
CAR RENTAL AGENCIES
, find the nearest location for a Hertz place, and call to reserve a car for Clara Washington. It is Christine who arrives at the Henderson Grove outlet in a taxi that morning.

She shows the clerk behind the counter the same fake driver’s license, and charges the car rental to the same fake American Express card. The man from whom they purchased the credit card in New Orleans told them it was a “thirty-dayer,” his exact words, meaning it would be good for thirty days before Amex recognized it as a phony. He assured them that the driver’s license, however—which also cost them a sizable bundle—would never be challenged. Christine doesn’t know that the FBI has already flagged both the license and the credit card. But in any event, the Hertz people say nothing about her credentials, and she drives off in a sporty new red Ford Taurus.

There have been a lot of bank holdups in the state of Florida during the past year or so, and a big sign at the entrance to Southwest Federal cautions all customers to remove hats, sunglasses, or kerchiefs before approaching any of the tellers’ windows. Christine takes off her own sunglasses the moment she steps into the lobby. A uniformed guard at the door gives her the once-over, but she surmises he’s scrutinizing her boobs rather than her potential as a bank robber.

She chooses a black teller, a woman like herself.
HENRIETTA LEWIS
, her little name plaque announces in white letters on black. Sometimes choosing a sister backfires. You get a black with attitude, she’ll give another black more grief than any white person in the whole wide world. But this one greets Christine with a cheery smile.

Christine is carrying $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills, five of them in the bill compartment of her wallet. The cab driver who drove her to the Hertz place accepted one of those bills with a pained expression not half an hour ago, when he nonetheless made change for her. For his trouble, she gave him a big tip and a leg show as she got out of the taxi. She now removes three more of those bills from the wallet, slides them onto the marble counter, and says, “May I have these in tens and twenties, please.”

Henrietta smiles, and picks up one of the bills.

She notices at once that this is not one of the new hundreds with the oversized picture of Benjamin Franklin on it. There are still many of these old hundreds in circulation; it will in fact take years before they’re all replaced by the Federal Reserve. Henrietta checks these older bills more carefully than she does the Big Bens because she knows there are a lot of fakes out there. The American hundred-dollar bill is the most widely used piece of currency in the world, and hence the most counterfeited.

She holds it to the light to check the security strip along its edge, sees the repeated USA100USA100USA100USA100, picks up the second bill to perform the same check and then something catches her eye in the sequence of serial numbers, and she frowns slightly— which Christine catches even though it lasts for less than maybe five seconds.

“Excuse me one minute, miss, okay?” Henrietta says, and leaves the teller’s window, and goes to where a bald-headed white man wearing a blue seersucker suit is sitting behind a desk near the vault. Christine sees her handing one of the bills across the desk to him. She wonders if she should run. The white man looks over to where she’s standing. Henrietta is handing him the second bill now. Let’s get out of here, Christine thinks. Just walk slowly to the door, smile at the uniformed guard there, go out to where she’s parked the red Taurus, and split, sister!

The bald-headed manager, or whatever he is, gets up from his desk, smiles at Christine where she is still standing at the teller’s window, and goes to a paneled walnut door. He disappears from sight behind it. Henrietta walks back to the teller’s cage.

“Sorry, miss,” she says, “but Mr. Parkins has to run those bills through the machine.”

“What machine?” Christine asks.

“To verify them.”

“Oh dear,” Christine says. “Did someone pass me some fake money?”

“It happens,” Henrietta says, and smiles. “These supers are hard to recognize with the naked eye. But the machine will tell us.”

“Supers?”

“Super-bills. They’re made in Iran on intaglio presses the U.S. sold to the old shah. They print the bills on German stock. They’re really
very
good.”

“I see,” Christine says.

Her eyes are on that closed walnut door.

“But the Fed installed these machines in all our branches. Just like the ones they’ve got in D.C. I guess after 9/11, they’re more worried about people using fake money to do mischief.”

“I’ll bet,” Christine says.

“Did you read about all those bank accounts the terrorists had? Right here in Florida! Opened them with fake social security cards, can you imagine? You can buy all sorts of fake ID nowadays, no wonder there’s so much trouble in the world. Ah, here he comes now.”

Run, Christine thinks.

But something keeps her rooted to the spot.

The bald-headed man is smiling behind the bars of the teller’s cage.

“Miss,” he says, “I’m sorry, but these bills are counterfeit. We’ll have to confiscate them.”

“What does that mean?” Christine asks.

“By law, we’re required to send them to the Federal Reserve in Washington. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, but what do you mean,
confiscate
? Will I be out three hundred dollars?”

“I’m afraid so, miss. The bills are counterfeit.”

“I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine,” Christine says, and pulls a face.

“I’m sorry, miss.”

“I just don’t see why I have to suffer for somebody else passing phony bills.”

“I’m sorry, that’s the law. We can’t allow counterfeit currency to stay in circulation. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s fair,” Christine says.

Her heart is pounding in her chest.

She turns away from the teller’s cage, walks past the guard at the front door and the sign asking patrons to please not wear hats, kerchiefs, or sunglasses, puts on her sunglasses, and walks out to where she parked the Taurus.

What Henrietta and Mr. Parkins neglected to do this morning was check the Cape October police list of marked bills that was circulated to every bank and merchant in the state of Florida.

On that list were the hundred-dollar bills Christine just now tried to cash.

Luke Farraday is beginning
to wonder why so many people are so suddenly interested in who picked up the Glendenning kids on Wednesday afternoon. The one here now is from the Cape October paper, on Luke’s day off, no less, and he’s given Luke some cock-and-bull story about one of the kids, he doesn’t know which one, having a party, he doesn’t know what kind of party, and wanting to put an announcement about it in the social calendar, but he needs to have a cute little story to go with it. He thinks the story about them getting picked up after school and their mother thinking they missed the bus might be just the sort of human interest thing that would tickle his paper’s readers. Then again, Garcia looks like a Cuban to Luke, and maybe Cubans have different senses of humor than Americans have.

“What kind of car was it, would you remember?” Garcia asks.

It suddenly occurs to Luke that maybe there’s a bit of change to be made here.

The job he holds at Pratt Elementary is what the Cape October Department of Education officially calls a School Loading Area Director, a Level-4 position that pays $8.50 an hour, not a hell of a lot more than he could earn at the local Mickey D’s, if they were hiring anything but teenyboppers these days. Way Luke looks at it, the entire state of Florida is run by teenagers, if not the entire United States of America. So if there’s a few extra bucks to be picked up here for providing information to a journalist, well, why not take advantage of the situation? There were women who’d been raped by Martians who sold their stories to the tabloids for thousands of dollars.

“Why’s this of such importance to you?” he asks, and Garcia immediately recognizes that he’s about to be hit up.

“Give the story some interest,” he says.

“Get your facts right, you mean.”

“Kind of car, all that.”

“How much would your newspaper pay,” Luke asks straight out, “to give the story some interest? Get the facts right?”

“Let’s say that depends on the facts.”

“How much do you usually pay for facts of this sort?”

“Twenty bucks? Thirty?”

“How about fifty?” Luke says.

“Fifty’s cool.”

“The kids were picked up by a blue Impala driven by a blonde woman,” Luke says. “Avis sticker on the right rear bumper.”

“Thanks,” Garcia says.

In Cape October,
because the police force is so small, the Radio Motor Patrol officers ride one to a car. The single officer in the car usually hangs his hat on the back rest of the passenger seat, so that it looks as if there are two cops patrolling instead of just one. Everybody in town knows there’s just that one cop in the car, however, so the effect is somewhat diminished.