“So what’s happening here?” she asks.
Alice suddenly hugs her close.
“Hey, what?” Carol asks. “What?”
Christine figures one of the malls is the best place to go. No need to go driving all over town, all the shops are in one location here. In a Barnes & Noble, she buys the two latest Nora Roberts novels, and pays for them with one of the hundred-dollar bills. The man behind the counter doesn’t even bother to check the bill’s security strip. He makes change for her, smiles, and looks up at the next customer in line.
At a Victoria’s Secret, she buys two Balconette push-up bras at $19.99 each, one in the black hydrangea, the other in the cheetah print, and a pair of low-rise thongs, both in the leopard print at $5.99 each, and a black lace garter belt at $7.99, for a total of $59.95 before tax. She hands the salesperson a hundred-dollar bill and then wanders over to look at the sleepwear collection, choosing a red sequin-lace baby-doll nightgown and carrying it back to the cash register.
“Can you add this to the bill?” she asks, and the salesperson smiles and says, “Of course, miss,” adding $29 to the earlier total, for a grand total of $88.95, plus tax, and then counts out the change without a whimper.
Christine wonders if it’s time to press her luck.
Dustin Garcia is not a crime reporter as such, and he is not familiar with any of the cops downtown at the Public Safety Building. When he stops at the reception desk in the main lobby, he merely asks for the detective who’s handling the Glendenning kidnapping, and waits while the uniformed officer behind the desk plugs into one of the extensions.
“Anyone up there handling a kidnapping?” the officer asks into the phone. He listens, looks across the desk at Garcia. “Who’d you say?” he asks.
“Glendenning. Alice Glendenning.”
“I mean you,” the officer says. “Who’re you?”
“Dustin Garcia, Cape October Trib.”
“Dustin Garcia,” the officer says into the phone. “October Trib.” He listens again. “Third floor,” he says, “Detective Sloate.”
Just as Christine steps off the escalator on the second floor of the mall, she finds an electronics store selling Sony, Hitachi, Samsung, and Philips television sets. She does not know how far she should go here, how much she should risk to test her theory. The salesman is a guy in his sixties, she guesses, another one of the bored retirees down here. He tries at first to sell her a Philips 34-inch digital wide-screen, which, at $2,800, happens to be the most expensive set in the store. She is reluctant to go that high, not because she doesn’t have that kind of money — she is still carrying almost five thou in hundreds in her bag — but only because she doesn’t want any eyebrows raised.
The salesman figures she’s a deadbeat, maybe because she’s black, maybe because she’s relatively young, who the hell knows or cares? He immediately switches to pitching the cheapest set he has in the store, a Samsung 27-inch that goes for $300.
“If you don’t need top-shelf features like a flat screen or picturein-picture,” he says, “this little beauty’ll give you good picture quality. And it has an excellent remote control, and V-chip parental control, do you have any children?”
Two, she almost says. Temporarily.
“I had something a bit more upscale in mind,” she says.
“Then how about this?” he asks, brightening, and shows her a 32-inch Sony Trinitron Wega that he says is on sale for a mere $1,800.
“This model earned more votes than any other HD-ready model,” he tells her. “It can auto-switch to enhanced mode when it detects wide-screen sources, and the pull-down circuitry improves the picture quality of film-based material.”
“I’ll take it,” Christine says.
“It also comes in a thirty-six-inch version, on sale for $2,300,” the salesman says.
“No, I’ll take the thirty-two-inch,” Christine says.
She digs into her handbag.
She guesses he thinks she’s searching for a checkbook or a credit card. Instead, she comes up with a wad of hundred-dollar bills, and begins counting out $1,900.
“Will that be enough to cover the tax?” she asks.
“Florida sales tax is six percent,” he says. “That comes to a hundred and eight dollars. I’d need another eight dollars from you.”
She fishes a five and three singles from her wallet.
“I’ll write this up and be back in a minute,” he says, and walks to a door on the far wall, and enters what she assumes is someone’s office, possibly a manager’s. She waits with her heart in her throat. Are they checking the bills on a machine similar to the one the bank had? Will they discover the bills are counterfeit? Are they on the phone to the police this very moment?
She waits.
At last, the door opens, and the salesman comes out smiling.
“Here’s your receipt,” he says. “Someone’s bringing a fresh set down now. Will you need help carrying it out to your car?”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Garcia?” Sloate asks.
They are in his third-floor office.
A red baseball cap sits on his desktop.
“Are you the man handling the kidnapping?” Garcia asks.
“What kidnapping is that?” Sloate asks.
Garcia knows at once that he is lying. Anglos lie to him a lot. That’s because he looks like a Cuban. He has a dark complexion and straight black hair and the rednecks down here think of him as a Cuban-American even though he was born in this country, in this state, in fact. Which in his view makes him an American, right? An American who votes here, by the way, but not for Mr. Bush, thank you, and fuck little Elian Gonzalez, too. It’s Garcia’s parents who are so-called Cuban-Americans, which means they immigrated here from Cuba and became American citizens who also voted, but their votes for Bush outnumbered his vote for Gore by two to one, and besides the Supreme Court had the final say.
Sloate is lying to him, he knows that.
“The Glendenning children,” he says. “The little boy and girl who were snatched from school on Wednesday.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that case,” Sloate says.
“Then why’d you tell downstairs to send me up?”
“Courtesy to the press,” Sloate says, and shrugs.
“Why are you stonewalling this?” Garcia asks.
“Mr. Garcia, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t heard of any kidnapping here on the Cape for the past three years. If you think you have information…”
“The Glendenning kids have been out of school for the past two days.”
“Maybe they’re home sick.”
“No, I went there, they’re not home sick. The mother refused to let me in. If they were there, she’d’ve let me talk to them. They’ve been kidnapped, Detective Sloate. You know damn well they’ve been kidnapped.”
“Sorry,” Sloate says.
“Here’s what the Trib’s gonna do,” Garcia says. “We’re gonna run a big picture of Mrs. Rose Garrity on our front page tomorrow morning. She’s the woman who called in to say the Glendenning kids are missing and nobody’s doing anything about it. We’re gonna run her picture big as life, and we’re gonna tell her story. And when we turn inside to page three, we’re gonna see a big picture of the school guard who witnessed those two kids getting into a blue Impala driven by a blonde woman who definitely ain’t Mrs. Edward Glendenning, who isn’t blonde and who doesn’t drive a blue Impala. We’re gonna tell his story, too, his name is Luke Farraday, and we’re gonna tell the people that the police in this town aren’t doing a damn thing to get those two kids back! How does that sound to you, Detective Sloate?”