Flashfire p-19

by Richard Stark

  He had tried to count the number of estates down from Melander’s, driving here, and now he tried again to count, walking north, but wasn’t sure he’d seen them all in either direction. When he came to the one he thought was probably Melander’s, it showed toward the sea a seven-foot-high pale concrete wall. In the middle of the wall was a fairly narrow opening, in which a wrought-iron gate stood shut and locked, with concrete steps behind it leading upward, flanked by walls of more concrete.

  At the northern edge of the wall, it met the next property’s barrier, which was sea grape entwined with chain-link fence, stretching even higher than the neighboring wall. It looked to Parker as though the people who’d built the Melander place, if this was the Melander place, had put up this wall along the beach, and sidewalls back, then filled in behind it to make a high terrace at the same level as the road out front. Instead of that, the people next door had left the slope of the land as it was, down toward the sea, and merely fenced it.

  Chain-link fence is a ladder, even when encumbered with sea grape. Seeing only a few lights in the house behind the fence, Parker climbed it at the corner, moving slowly, not wanting to make a lot of noise and also not wanting to leave a trail for Melander and the others to notice tomorrow.

  When he was a few feet off the ground, he could see over the top of the wall, and it was lawn at that upper level, stretching back to the house. A few lights glowed inside the house, but there was no sound, no movement. An ornamental wrought-iron fence was fixed along the top of the wall, waist-high, and was most likely there to keep guests from falling off the lawn onto the sand seven feet below.

  Parker stepped over the fence onto the ground above and behind the wall, and crouched there, waiting for a response. He knew the kind of security this sort of place could have, but he doubted Melander and Carlson and Ross were keeping it up; they weren’t the type. Still, it would be better to be cautious, especially if he’d counted wrong and this wasn’t their place after all.

  What he waited for now was a motion sensor. That would be the first line of defense for these estates, and it should react to his presence as soon as he was on the property. If this house had such a thing, it would not only sound alarms, it would most likely also switch on floodlights around the exterior of the house, because the residents would be less interested in capturing anybody than in repelling them. If anything happened now, Parker would go over the wrought-iron fence, jump to the sand below, and move south, back toward the car.

  But nothing happened. He stood there, waiting, listening, and looked around. The ground where he stood had once been lawn, but hadn’t been cared for in a long time; ocean air had killed it, leaving hard crumbly earth. So this was probably the right house.

  It loomed ahead of him, pale in the starlight, centered on its property, with broad open swaths that had been lawn on both sides. Screens of tall ficus along both sides blocked any sight of the neighbors, but the ficus wasn’t being cared for; instead of the smooth wall-like appearance the professional gardeners would give them, the lines of trees had a messy, shaggy, unshaven look.

  After a long minute, Parker moved forward toward the house. It looked as though only two lights were burning in there, one upstairs and one down; almost a guarantee that nobody was home. The lights were dim, amber, deep in the house, but they showed the rectangles of windows and glass doors.

  Lawn gave way to stone patio closer to the house. There was no furniture, and sand scraped underfoot. Ahead, a line of glass doors like a theater entrance showed a large dim room. Parker stepped close to the glass to look in.

  The light in there came through a broad doorway at the far end. This had once been the main public room of the house, but now there was nothing in it but a piano, pushed at an angle into a far corner, with no bench or stool in front of it.

  The doors were locked; naturally. Would the alarm system be functioning, and would it connect with the local police station? Parker didn’t think Melander and the others would want police coming around, not for any reason, but there was no need to be hasty or careless.

  He stepped back to the outer edge of the patio to look at the second floor. There was a setback up there, and a terrace. And where the house was not glass it was large rectangular blocks of pale stone; not much harder to climb than a chain-link fence.

  Parker went to the right rear corner of the building and climbed the stones to the secondfloor terrace. Here there were signs of occupancy: three cheap chrome and strap chaises, an upside-down liquor carton used as a table, an empty beer bottle standing on the floor near one of the chaises.

  Glass doors led to three rooms up here. The center one had been a library and television room, but was now stripped, the shelves bare. Beyond its interior open door he could see the secondfloor light source: a chandelier at the head of a flight of stairs.

  The two side doors led to what had been and still were bedrooms, though now very simply furnished with nothing but mattresses. These doors were also locked, but the locks were a joke. Parker opened the one to the bedroom on the right, then stepped back to the outer edge of the terrace to wait for a response.

  Nothing. No lights came on, no alarm sounded. Two minutes, three minutes, and no sound of police sirens headed this way. The door he’d opened hung ajar.

  Parker crossed the terrace and entered the house. He closed the door behind himself.

  It didn’t take long to search the place. There were fifteen or sixteen rooms, but Melander and Carlson and Ross were only using five: three bedrooms upstairs, the kitchen and dining room downstairs. They were getting along with a minimal amount of furniture.

  And they weren’t here. The refrigerator was switched on, but it contained only half a dozen beer bottles, nothing perishable. There was almost no clothing in the bedrooms. There were no towels hanging in any of the bathrooms, though a stack of folded towels was on the floor at the head of the central staircase, as though they’d just come back from a laundry.

  So they’d moved in here, they’d established the place, and then they’d gone away. They wouldn’t come back until it was time for the heist. Parker could make his own presence here, be waiting for them.

  He found two alarm systems, the main one with its control pad by the door from the attached garage, and a supplemental one with a control box in a closet near the front door. Both were switched off. Parker rewired them so that, if they were armed, they would seem to be working but were not.

  He went out the front door, leaving it open. He studied the grounds, then went over to look into the Dumpster, which was the largest size, big as a longhaul truck. It was a third full of trash: broken chairs, mirrors, wadded mounds of curtains, things the previous owners had not wanted to take with them. There was no construction debris, though, from the road, this big container would make it look as though construction or reconstruction had to be going on.

  Back in the house, he shut the front door and went to the garage, big enough to hold three cars but now standing empty, except for a metal footlocker in a rear corner. The footlocker seemed strange, and was padlocked. Parker crossed to it and studied the padlock, which was new and serious. He lifted one end of the footlocker, and it was very heavy; something metal slid inside there.

  So this must be their stash of guns. Parker switched on the garage light long enough to study the footlocker and its padlock, then he switched the light off again, left the garage, left the house, climbed down the neighbors’ chain-link fence, and walked back to the Four Seasons. He walked toward the Jaguar, stashed among a dotting of other cars in the dim-lit parking area, then veered off, away from the Jag, moving around into another section of the lot.

  There was someone in the Jag. A dark mound, in the passenger seat.

  Parker, empty-handed, came slowly at the Jag from the rear, trying to keep out of any mirrors the passenger might see. At the end, he crouched against the rear bumper and moved his head slowly to the left until he could see the rearview mirror, see the reflection of the person, mov
e farther left, see the person better

  Lesley.

  4

  When he straightened and moved around to her side of the car, she saw him coming and reacted by opening the door. The interior light came on and she squinted, smiling up at him. ‘Have a nice walk?’ she said.

  He said, ‘Who knows you’re here?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said, still smiling, pretending to be unconcerned, but clutching tight to the handle of the open door to hide her nervousness. ‘I’m no threat to you,’ she said, ‘so you don’t have any reason to be a threat to me.’

  He said, ‘Who knows you’re here?’

  She was still in uniform, the beige suit and the dolphin pin. She shifted her legs to get out of the car. saying, ‘Buy me a drink at the bar over there.’

  He reached out and cupped his palm over the top of her head, feeling the tight blond curls. He didn’t exert pressure, just held her there, so she couldn’t go on getting out of the car. ‘Lesley,’ he said, ‘when I ask a question, you answer it.’

  She tried to move her head, to twist out from under his hand, so she could look up at him, but he wouldn’t let her move. ‘You’re hurting my neck,’ she said.

  He knew he wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. ‘Who knows you’re here, Lesley?’

  ‘No one! All right? No one.’

  He released her and stepped back a pace so she could get out of the car. She did so, tottering a bit as she got to her feet, leaving the door open so she could lean on it and there’d be some light. Sounding resentful and flustered, she said, ‘You want to know who I told your business, is that right?’

  That was half of it. The other half was, how complicated would it be if he had to kill her. He said, ‘What is my business, Lesley?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out,’ she said.

  ‘You smelled something.’

  ‘I certainly did.’ She was getting her self-confidence back, feeling they would deal in words now and words were her territory. She said, ‘Everything you did in the car today was almost right, al-most, but I didn’t buy it. Is Daniel Parmitt your real name?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Because you’re less than two months old,’ she said. ‘When we finished driving around today, I thought, That man doesn’t really want a house here, but he wants something, and the only thing he showed any interest in at all was the house Mr Roderick bought.’

  ‘Roderick.’

  ‘Also a Texan, or so he says,’ she reminded him. ‘And I looked into him, too, and he’s only six months old. The two of you, there isn’t a paper, not a line of credit, a history of any kind that goes back even a year.’

  ‘I’ve been out of the country,’ Parker said.

  ‘You’ve been off the planet,’ she told him. ‘Listen, do we have to stand here in the parking lot? If you won’t buy me a drink, I’ll buy you one.’

  He said, ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Me?’ She seemed surprised at the question. ‘With my mother and sister,’ she said, ‘over in West Palm.’

  He didn’t want a drink with her in a hotel bar, because it was seeming as though she might have to die tonight, and he didn’t want to have been seen with her just before. But visiting the mother and the sister in West Palm was also no good, and taking her to his room at the Breakers would be worst of all.

  On the other hand, hadshe talked to people about this strange new man? Had she left a note somewhere? He said, ‘Let’s go to your office.’

  That surprised her. ‘What for?’

  ‘You have keys, you can get in. We’ll have the talk you want to have, and we won’t be interrupted.’

  ‘I really do want a drink, you know.’

  ‘Later.’

  She frowned at him, trying to work him out.

  ‘Lesley,’ he said, ‘where’s your car?’

  ‘Over there,’ she said, and pointed generally toward the hotel.

  ‘I’ll meet you at your office,’ he said, and walked around to the driver’s side of the Jag.

  She hadn’t moved. She went on standing there, in the V of the open door, her beige suit bouncing the light, her face in semi-darkness as she frowned at him over the top of the car.

  ‘Shut the door, Lesley,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you at your office.’

  He got into the Jag, and she leaned down to look in at him. ‘Daniel Parmitt is not your real name,’ she said, and straightened, and shut the door at last, and walked away across the parking lot.

  He left the Jag in the other long block of Worth Avenue, among the very few cars parked there, and walked to the office, where she was waiting for him on the sidewalk. ‘You could have parked here,’ she said.

  ‘I like to walk.’

  She shook her head, turned away, and unlocked the office door. ‘We’ll use Linda’s office in the back,’ she said. ‘It’s more comfortable, and we won’t have to leave a lot of lights on in front.’

  ‘Fine.’

  An illuminated clock on the sidewalk, gift of an insurance company, served as the office night-light. In its glow, he followed her through the desks to a doorway at the back. She stepped through, hit a switch, and overhead fluorescents came stuttering on.

  He said. ‘Aren’t there better lights?’

  ‘Hold on.’

  The office was wider than deep, with a large desk on the right, filing cabinets across the back, and shelves and cabinets on the left. A dark brown vinyl sofa, with a coffee table, stood out from the cabinets, facing the desk across the way.

  While he stood in the doorway, she turned on a brass desk lamp, a tulip-globed floor lamp in the corner behind the desk like something in a funeral parlor, and a group of muted strip lights under the shelves. ‘You can turn the overheads off right there,’ she told him, pointing to the switch beside the door.

  Now the room was comfortable, illuminated in pools of amber. Crossing to sit on the right side of the sofa, he said, ‘Tell me what you think you’ve got so far.’

  ‘You’re a wooden nickel, that’s all I know right now,’ she said. ‘Linda usually keeps white wine in the refrigerator here. Want some?’

  She herself did, of course: keeping the tension held down below the surface was hard work. He said, ‘If you do.’

  She smiled. ‘At last, a human response.’

  The refrigerator, a low one, was in a cabinet behind the sofa. Real estate magazines and old news magazines were on the black Formica coffee table. She brought a bottle of California chardonnay and two water glasses and shoved magazines out of the way to put them down. The bottle was already open, cork stuck back in, not much gone. She pulled the cork and poured for them both. ‘To truth,’ she said, toasting him.

  He shrugged, and they both drank, and she sat at the other end of the sofa, knees together, holding the glass in her left hand, body angled toward him. ‘You’re new at your bank,’ she said, ‘you’re new at your house. One thing you get good at in this business is credit checks, and your credit doesn’t exist. You never owned or leased a car before the one you have now, never had a credit card, never had a mortgage, never had a bank account until the one you just started in San Antonio.’

  ‘I’m an American citizen,’ he told her, ‘but I was born in Ecuador. I don’t know if you saw my birth certificate.’

  ‘That isn’t one of the things I can get at.’

  ‘Well, you’ll see I was born in Quito of American parents. I’ve still got family down there, I’ve lived most of my life down there. The family’s in oil.’

  ‘Banana oil,’ she said. ‘Who is Roderick to you?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘That’s why you were looking for his house? That’s why you walked to his house in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Who says I walked to his house?’

  ‘I do.’

  He glanced at her shoes, which were medium-heel pumps, not much use on sand. ‘I just went for a walk,’ he said.

  ‘Coincidence, you headed
straight for Roderick’s house.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ he agreed. ‘You say you’ve got problems with this Roderick, too.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t have, until I started thinking about you and looking into who you really are. That led me to run the same thing on Roderick and he’s another guy out of a science-fiction movie, suddenly dropped onto the planet from the mother ship five or six months ago.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him about himself?’

  ‘I don’t know the man, I didn’t handle the sale. We carried the house, but it was a different broker made the deal.’ She sipped wine, put her glass down, leaned toward him. ‘Let me tell you what I know about Mr Roderick,’ she said.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘He wanted a presence here on the cheap. There was a house nobody wanted because it should be a teardown, but he wanted it, and now he’s got it, and he isn’t doing anything with it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. There’s a general contractor Mr Roderick was going to hire, to do the renovation work. I called him this afternoon, and Mr Roderick hasn’t got around to starting the work yet. Says he’s still dealing with his architect.’

  ‘Maybe he is.’

  ‘What architect? There’s nobody there. The place is empty. Nothing’s happening at all.’

  ‘Architects are slow sometimes,’ he said.

  ‘Particularly when they don’t exist.’ She finished the wine in her glass, looked at his, poured herself a second. Before drinking, she said, ‘Now you show up, and you want to know about Roderick, but you don’t want Roderick to know about you.’

  ‘You watch too much television,’ he told her.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘And I drink too much. And I worry too much. And I live with my mother and my sister. I’m divorced, and I don’t want that son of a bitch back, and I don’t need any other son of a bitch to take his place, in case you were wondering, but I want more than this.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I want more than driving obnoxious fat cats around to show them empty houses, fending off gropes from ninety-year-olds wearing white ascots oh, yes, white ascots, and they’re all wonderful dancers sitting at my goddam desk out there every day, waiting for my life when my life is over.’