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.
Judy can’t tell them where she was Wednesday afternoon at two-thirty because at that time she was on the backseat of an Oldsmobile parked behind A&L Auto Repair, where Ernesto and his brother work, and where everybody else who works there knows that Ernesto fucks the nice Jewish lady at two-thirty every afternoon on the backseat of his brother’s car. A&L Auto is where Judy first met Ernesto when she brought the white Jag in for a tune-up a month ago, little realizing that Ernesto would soon be giving her regularly scheduled tune-ups the likes of which she has never before had in her life. But she can’t tell the detectives any of this, not while her beloved husband Murray is standing there glowering with a dead cigar in the corner of his mouth. She thinks again that throwing herself out the window might not be such a bad idea.