“These two women.”
“There are two of them?”
“Apparently.”
“Did you give them money?”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t wish to discuss with her sister the strategy the Cape October Police used, or are using, if in fact they’re doing a damn thing now. She can only hope that the $250,000 in false currency is truly so good nobody can tell it from the real thing. Otherwise, she has signed her own children’s death warrant.
“Are the police there now?” Carol asks.
“I don’t know where they are.”
“Well… what are you doing, Alice?”
“Waiting,” Alice says. “Just waiting.”
“Who’s helping you there?”
She does not know who’s helping her here. She has never felt so completely alone in her life.
“Have you called the FBI?” Carol asks.
“They’ve been and gone.”
“I’m coming down there,” Carol says. “Right this minute.”
“No, that’s not—”
“I’m getting in my car and driving down.”
“Carol…”
“Look for me, honey,” she says, “I’m on the way.”
And she, too, is gone.
They do not want to get the Tampa PD involved in this because in Captain Steele’s view, there are enough law enforcement people on the scene already. He didn’t like the FBI sticking its nose in this uninvited and unannounced, and he certainly doesn’t want any fresh representatives of the law marching in now.
The computer kicks up an Ernesto de Diego recently released from prison and regularly visiting a parole officer in Tampa, but he’s forty-three years old, and Maria told the detectives that her former boyfriend was only eighteen. So that rules him out, unless Mr. de Diego has a namesake son, which would make him Ernesto de Diego, Jr., but the computer has nothing at all on such an offspring.
In the Tampa phone directory, they find listings for a Dalia de Diego, a Godofredo de Diego, a Rafael de Diego, and a Ramon de Diego, but alas, no Ernesto. On the off chance that one of these de Diegos might be a relative of the Ernesto they’re looking for, they go down the list and hit pay dirt on the second call they make. A woman named Catalina de Diego tells Detective Saltzman that she is Godofredo’s wife, and that his brother Ernesto is presently living with them until he can find a place of his own. Belatedly, she asks, “What’s this about, Officer?”
At a quarter to one that afternoon, Detectives Saltzman and Andrews are on the de Diego doorstep, talking to Catalina again, in person this time. She tells them her husband and her brother will be home for lunch around one o’clock, and invites them in to wait. She serves them strong coffee and these tasty little cookies sprinkled with sugar. She tells them that both her husband and her brother-in-law work at an auto repair shop not far from here. “My husband got the job for Ernesto,” she says. She introduces them to her three-year-old son, Horacio, who immediately tells the detectives he knows how to “go potty.” Detective Andrews tells him, “That’s nice, son.”
So far, this does not look like a bunch of desperados who’ve kidnapped the Glendenning kids, but who knows? The quietest guy on the block is always the one who turns out to have killed his whole family and the goldfish, too, isn’t that so? Besides, Ernesto can’t be such a sweetheart, can he? Leaving a pregnant girlfriend back on the Cape?
The brothers get home at a little before one.
The detectives can hear them laughing up the front walk to the small house. They are both light-skinned, with brown eyes and curly black hair. Ernesto is a little taller than Godofredo. They look like a pair of hardworking guys who’ve just put in a long morning, and are ready now to wash up for lunch, but who knows?
The detectives tell them they’d like to talk to Ernesto privately, if that’s okay. They go out together into the yard behind the small house. There is a coconut palm in the yard, and several bird-of-paradise plants. There is a shell walkway and wooden lawn furniture painted pink. A nice cool breeze is blowing. Inside, they can hear Godofredo and his wife talking in Spanish.
“So what is this?” Ernesto asks. “Is she claiming the kid’s mine?”
“You mean Maria?” Andrews asks.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“You tell us,” Saltzman says.
“What’s there to tell? She fucked everybody in that high school, not only me. So now she says the baby’s mine. That’s a crock of shit, man.”
“She says you have a new girlfriend now, is that right?”
“What’s that her business?”
“It’s just what she told us.”
“It’s none of her business, what I have or I don’t have.”
“Do you have a new girlfriend?”
Ernesto gives them a long hard look.
He is suddenly suspicious. Suddenly tipping to the fact that this has nothing to do with Maria’s baby.
“You come all the way up from the Cape to ask me do I have a new girlfriend?” he says.
“Do you?”
“Yes. Why?”
“She doesn’t happen to be a blonde, does she?”
“What?” he says.
“Your girlfriend. Is she a blonde?”
“Is that what Maria told you?”
“That’s what she told us.”
“She should learn to keep her mouth shut.”
“Well, you knock her up, you disappear…”
“I didn’t knock her up! And I didn’t disappear, either! My brother got me a job here, so I moved up. I even called Maria to tell her where I was.”
“Nice of you.”
“I don’t owe her a fuckin thing!”
“Does she drive a blue Impala? Your blonde girlfriend?”
“What?”
“Your new girlfriend. Does she happen to drive a blue Impala?”
“No, she drives a white Jag.”
“What’s her name?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“What’s her name?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s married.”
“Oh?” Saltzman says.
“Well, well,” Andrews says.
“Anyway, what is this? Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“Tell us her name, Ernesto.”
“Jesus, what did she do?”
“Tell us where she lives, Ernesto.”
“She’s married, I can’t—”
“You want to take a ride to the Cape, or you want to give us your little married girlfriend’s name and address? Which, Ernesto?”
“Judy Lang,” he says at once.
Charlie Hobbs pulls into the driveway at twenty minutes past one that afternoon. Alice greets him at the front door, taking both his hands in hers and leading him into the house.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m glad you came.”
“She call yet?”
“Not yet. Charlie, I’m scared silly.”
“Don’t be. She’ll call.”
“You think?”
“I know she will.”
Charlie looks around the living room, takes in all the police equipment.
“So where are the masterminds?” he asks.
Alice shakes her head.
“Tell me everything that happened,” he says.
“Here’s what we’ve got,” Sally Ballew is telling her boss.
The agent in command of the regional FBI office is a man named Tully Stone, bald and rangy and mean as dog shit. It is rumored that shortly after the disputed Gore-Bush presidential election, Stone single-handedly rounded up a ring of anti-government protestors right here in the sunny state of Florida. Broke a few heads and cracked even more ribs, or so the story went, before all those bleeding-heart liberals decided it wasn’t right to go against the Supreme Court decision that made Bush president of these United States.