Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (2 page)

“That’s a lot of money,” he says.

“Not for this location.”

“For
any
location,” he says. “A million-six comes to more than five hundred dollars a square foot.”

“You’ve got to figure a million for the property alone,” she says. “You won’t find many other views like this one.”

“Well, I’ll have to think about it,” he says, and her heart sinks.

She gets back to
the office at a quarter past noon.

They exchange phone numbers, and Alice promises to have some new houses to show him by tomorrow morning at nine, when they’ll go out looking again. She hopes he might call before then with an offer on any of the three houses she’s shown him, but she knows this is unlikely.

He’d told her he was looking for something that would cost no more than a million, a million-five, and she’d assured him that getting an eighty percent mortgage would be no problem. That means he would have to come up with $320,000 in cash if he goes for the Healey house at a million-six. She knows for certain that Frank and Marcia Allenby will never budge below a million-six, never.

Of the seven percent commission on the sale, the agency will keep three and Alice will take home four, which comes to $64,000. She figures that will carry her a good year and more, even if she doesn’t make another sale, a likelihood in that she hasn’t made a sale thus far, and she’s already been working for Lane Realty for almost six months now.

She took the job at the end of November, when she realized she wasn’t going to be able to make it on the scant savings she and Eddie had managed to accumulate since their move to Florida. The house she still lives in with the kids is in a good school district, even if it does cost $1,600 a month, which at her present rate of cash flow she will no longer be able to afford come June, unless Mr. Reginald Webster or somebody or anybody
buys
something. Or unless, of course, the insurance money comes through. It was supposed to come through a month and a half ago.

She picks up the phone, dials a number by heart, and waits.

“Briggs, Randolph and Soames,” a woman’s voice says.

“Mr. Briggs, please,” she says.

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Alice Glendenning.”

“One moment, please.”

She waits.

“Hi, Alice,” a man’s voice says.

“Hello, Andy, how are you?”

“Good, thanks, and you?”

“Fine, Andy. Andy, I hate to keep bothering you about this…”

“It’s no bother at all,” Andy says. “I’m as annoyed as you are.”

“Have you heard anything from them?”

“They’re still stalling.”

“It’s been eight months now,” she says. “What proof do they
need
?”

“A certificate of death, they say. Which is absurd in this case. The man drowned at sea, his remains were never… forgive me, Alice,” he says.

“That’s all right.”

“But the facts…”

She knows the facts. Eddie took the sloop out for a moonlight sail. It was a small boat, the waters on the Gulf were very high that night. There was no one aboard when the tanker came across her the next morning, still under sail. Eddie had either fallen overboard or been washed overboard. Those were the facts.

“Garland has no right to withhold payment,” Andy says.

“But they are.”

“Yes, because there’s a lot of money involved here. And because they’re in trouble financially, this goddamn administration. With the double indemnity clause, the death benefit comes to two… by the way, no one at Garland is claiming that drowning at sea doesn’t qualify as an accident.”

“Well, they’d be foolish to do that.”

“They’re foolish to try wriggling out of this in the first place. Other insurance companies
are
paying the same sorts of claims, you know. It’s not as if nothing like this has ever happened before, Alice…”

“I know.”

“Some are taking more time than others, but they
are
honoring their obligations. Quite frankly, Garland’s position is contemptible.”

“So what do we do, Andy?”

“I’d like to give them till the end of the month. If they don’t settle by then, we’ll have to bring suit.”

“The end of the month,” Alice says.

“Yes. I’ll call them again on June first. Does that sound okay to you?”

“I suppose.”

“Alice?”

“Yes?”

“We’ll get the money, I promise you.”

“I hope so.”

“I promise.”

“Okay, Andy, thank you. We’ll talk soon.”

“I’ll let you know the moment I hear anything.”

“Thanks, Andy.”

“Talk to you later,” he says, and hangs up.

She holds the receiver in her hand for a moment, and then puts it back on the cradle, and suddenly she is weeping. She yanks a tissue from the box on her desk, blows her nose, and dries her eyes.

Well, she thinks, the first day of June is less than three weeks away, and I’ve certainly got enough in the bank to last me till then. But I don’t know what to do
after
June first, because by my calculation the account will be getting very low by that time. I suppose I can always get a job waitressing, she thinks, but that would mean having to pay Rosie even more than I’m paying her now. But at least I’ll have a steady salary and tips, and I wouldn’t have to count on commissions. So far, there has been what one might call a dearth of commissions. So far, the commissions have totaled zero,
nada,
zilch.

She picks up the phone again, dials her home number, and waits. Rosie Garrity picks up on the third ring.

“Glendenning residence,” she says.

“Rosie, hi, it’s me.”

“Hello, Mrs. Glendenning, how are you?”

“Fine, thanks. Everything okay there?”

“Yes, fine. What time is it, anyway?”

“A quarter to one.”

“Good. I want to bake a pie before the kids get home.”

Rosie comes in at noon every weekday, in time to clean the house and put it in order before the children get home at two-thirty, three o’clock, depending on traffic. By the time Alice gets home at five, Rosie has everything ready to put up for dinner. Rosie works full-time on Saturdays and Sundays, a broker’s busiest days.

“Did you see the chicken I left in the fridge?” Alice asks.

“Yes. Will you be wanting the spinach, too?”

“Please. And if you could get some potatoes ready for browning.”

“Sounds good. Can you stop for some ice cream on the way home? Go good with the pie.”

“What kind of pie?”

“Blueberry.” “Yum. I’ll pick some up.” “See you later.”

“Bye.”

It is almost one o’clock.

She decides to go to lunch.

Grosse Bec is a
man-made island that serves as a luxurious stepping-stone between the mainland and Willard Key. If Cape October can claim a Gold Coast shopping area, the so-called Ring on Grosse Bec is it. The rest of the town is all malls. Alice’s office is on Mapes Avenue, just off the circle that serves as Grosse Bec’s center.

She is just crossing Founders Boulevard, familiarly called Flounders Boulevard by the natives, when she hears a horn blowing, and then the squeal of brakes, and then a woman’s voice shouting, “Oh God!” She whirls in time to see the red fender of a car not six inches from her left hip. She tries to spin away again, too late, and then thrusts both hands at the fender in desperation, as if trying to push it off her, away from her. Bracing herself for sudden impact, she feels the bone-jarring shock of metal against flesh, and is suddenly hurtling backward off her feet, landing some three feet away from the car’s right front wheel. She feels agonizing pain in her left leg, tries to twist away from the pain, and then does in fact twist away from the car itself, as if it were still a menace.

“Oh God, are you all right?”

The woman is crouched beside her now. Alice looks up into an elegant face, long blonde hair trailing on either side of it, blue eyes almost brimming with tears.

“Are you okay?” the woman asks.

“No,” Alice says.

The woman’s looming face vanishes. Alice hears a car door opening. Then some clicking and beeping sounds, and then the woman’s voice again.

“Hello,” she says, “there’s been an accident.”

She is talking into a cell phone.

“Can you send an ambulance, please?”

The ambulance gets there some five minutes later.

The police still haven’t arrived by the time the paramedics load Alice and drive off with her.

The emergency room doctor
at October Memorial tells Alice she’s broken her left ankle. He tells her he will put her foot in a so-called cuff cast, which will look like an oversized white ski boot. He assures her she will still be able to drive because all she needs for the accelerator and brake pedals is her right foot. He tells her walking will be awkward and cumbersome, but he doesn’t think she’ll need crutches. He is smiling as he tells her all this. He seems to think she is very lucky.

It takes an hour and twenty minutes for them to clean the wound, and dress it, and put her foot and ankle in the cast. It is almost three o’clock when she limps out of the emergency room. Cumbersome and awkward is right.

The woman who knocked her down is waiting there for her.

“I’m Jennifer Redding,” she says, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

Alice guesses she is a good ten years younger than she herself, twenty-four or -five, in there, a willowy blonde wearing tight white bell-bottom pants with a thirteen-button flap like sailors used to wear, or maybe still did; Alice hasn’t dated a sailor since she was nineteen. The pants are riding low on Jennifer’s hips, a short pink cotton sweater riding high. In combination, they expose a good four inches of firm flesh and a tight little belly button as well.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Alice says. “I never got your insurance information.”

“Why do you need that?”

“Well, there’s been an accident…”

“There must be a card in my wallet someplace.”

“Didn’t the cops ask you for it?”

“What cops?”

“At the scene.”

“There weren’t any cops.”

“Didn’t you call the police?”

“No. Was I supposed to?”

Alice suddenly realizes she is talking to a ditz.

“Didn’t
anyone
call the cops?”

“What for? The ambulance came, you were already gone.”

“I hate to break this to you,” Alice says, “but if you drive away from the scene of an accident, it becomes a hit-and-run. If I were you...”

“But I wasn’t running from anything. I drove straight here to the
hospital.
To see how you were.”

“The police may look at that differently. Get on your cell phone again, dial 911, and tell them—”

“Is it broken?” Jennifer asks, looking down at the cast.

“Yes, it’s broken.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t have come around that corner so fast. There’s a stop sign there. You should have at least slowed down.”

“I did. But you walked right into the car.”

“I
what
?”

“You seemed to be in some kind of a fog.”

“Is that what you’re going to tell the cops? That I was in some kind of a fog?”

“I’m not going to tell the cops anything.”

“Well, I
am,
” Alice says.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve had experience with insurance companies, thanks. And there are going to be hospital bills, and I want to go on record about what happened here. Especially if you’re going to claim I was in a fog and walked into your car.”

“I even blew my horn at you. You just kept walking.”

“Jennifer, it was nice of you to come here, really, but I
am
going to report this to the police. You’d be smart to call them first. Otherwise you might find yourself facing criminal charges.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Jennifer says. “Have you got a ride home?”

“No, but I’ll call my office. My car’s—”

“I’d be happy to give you a ride.”

Alice looks at her.

“My car’s at the office,” she says. “On Mapes Avenue. If you can take me there…”

“Oh sure,” Jennifer says, and grins like a kid with a lollipop.

She doesn’t get back
to her house on the mainland until almost four that afternoon. She has extracted from Jennifer the promise that she will call the police, but she is eager to call them herself as well. She knows all about claims. She has filed enough insurance claims since Eddie drowned.