Flashfire p-19

by Richard Stark

  ‘How clever you are, Alice,’ Jack said, and patted her shoulder before he went back around to his seat and his Wall Street Journal.

  She continued to smile at the necklace in the photo. ‘What a coup,’ she said. ‘To get that necklace cheap, and to wear it on everyoccasion.’ Like all very wealthy women, Alice had strange cold pockets of miserliness. Her eyes shone as she looked across the table at Jack. ‘It will be an absolute steal,’ she said.

  5

  Trooper Sergeant Jake Farley of the Snake River County sheriff’s department had never seen anything like thisbefore. Four dead, one dying, all questions, no answers. Nothing but frustration, all the way around.

  Starting with blowhard ‘Captain’ Robert Hardawl and his collection of retards and misfits that he called the Christian Renewal Defense Force. Hardawl and his scruffy gang had been a thorn in Sergeant Farley’s side for years, always threatening violence, never quite going far enough to get themselves busted up and put away where they couldn’t be an offense to decent law enforcement people anymore.

  Two, three times a year, Farley would sit down with Agent Mobley from the Miami office of the FBI to discuss the various hate groups and paramilitary loonies wandering around these swamps, and Hardawl and his crowd were always prominent in that discussion. And now they’ve gone ahead at last and killed two men, and there wasn’t one blessed thing Farley could do about it, because, goddammit, it was self-defense, and Hardawl had his own two dead bodies to prove it, shot with the same firearm that shot Daniel Parmitt.

  Who was another frustration. Who the hell was he? Some rich fella from Texas, that’s all, spending part of the winter in Palm Beach, grabbed up by two professional killers from Baltimore either because somebody wanted Daniel Parmitt dead to inherit his money, maybe? or because they got the wrong man.

  Being unable to ask Gowan and Vavrina who hired them because they’d been all shot to shit by Hardawl’s people, and being unable to ask Parmitt who might want him dead because he damn near wasdead, unconscious and slowly slipping away, meant Farley had nobody to ask anything except Hardawl and his pack of losers, who didn’t know anything. It was enough to make a man bite his badge.

  Four days. The Baltimore police and the Maryland state police had shared all the information they had on Gowan and Vavrina, which was a lot, but didn’t include the name of their most recent employer. The San Antonio police had passed on to Farley what they could find out about Parmitt, which wasn’t much: never been in trouble with the law, owned a house in a nice part of town, was loved by his bankers. The Breakers had sent along Parmitt’s possessions from the hotel, which consisted mainly of resort wear. He traveled with his birth certificate, which was about the only oddity Farley had seen in it all.

  Snake River County didn’t get much of what Jake Farley thought of as big-city crime, meaning gangland killings, professional armed robbery, that sort of thing, but what they did get was all his; he was the one man in the sheriff’s department who’d been through the FBI courses and the state CID courses and had even been sent off with the help of federal funding for a couple of courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice up in New York City; thathad been an experience.

  But even that hadn’t prepared him for this situation. He had the victim, he had the perps far too many perps, in fact he had the weapons, he had every damn thing, and yet he couldn’t have known less about what was going on if he was a brand-new baby boy. So here he was on the fourth day of the so-called investigation, seated at his corner desk in the bullpen at the sheriff’s department, trying to think of somebody to call, when his phone rang. He gave it a jaundiced look before he answered: ‘Farley.’

  ‘Meany here, Sarge.’

  Meany was the deputy on duty at the hospital, to report any change in Parmitt’s condition, so this was the one phone call Farley had definitely not wanted: ‘So he’s dead, huh?’

  ‘Well, no, sir. The reason I’m calling, he woke up.’

  Farley’s back lost its slump: ‘What?’

  ‘And there’s a woman here to see him.’

  ‘A woman? For Parmitt?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Read about it in the Miami Herald, she said, said she had to talk to him.’

  ‘Not before me,’ Farley said. ‘Hold her there, keep him awake, I’ll be right over.’

  The woman was a good-looking blonde of about forty with some heft to her; the kind of woman Farley was attracted to, in his off-duty hours. In fact, the kind of woman he was married to, which meant his off-duty hours were few and far between.

  And this wasn’t one of them. He entered the waiting room, saw Meany standing there, saw the woman rise from one of the green vinyl sofas, and crossed to her to say, ‘Trooper Sergeant Farley, sheriff’s department.’ He did not offer to shake hands.

  She said, ‘I’m Lesley Mackenzie.’

  ‘And you’re a friend of Daniel Parmitt’s.’

  ‘Yes. I’d really like to talk with him.’

  ‘So would I,’ Farley told her. ‘Rank gets its privileges here. I go first, then we’ll see if the doctor says it’s all right for you.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she said, ‘however long it takes.’

  So she was thatkind of friend, a little more than a friend but not quite family. Farley said, ‘You can probably tell me more about him. We’ll talk in a while.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  Farley turned away, giving Meany a quick frown and head-shake that meant don’t-let-her-leave, then went out and down the hall toward Parmitt’s room.

  This was only the second time he’d visited Parmitt, the first being shortly after the man was brought in, when visiting him was nothing but a waste of time. Parmitt was a real wreck then, shot, nearly drowned, and some of his ribs caved in.

  What had happened was, he’d been shot in the back, the bullet passing through his body, hitting nothing vital, missing the spine by an inch, nicking a rib on the way out. Then the killer rolled him into the water, unconscious, and by the time the war with Hardawl’s crew was over, the fella was drowned.

  One thing you had to give Hardawl credit for and Farley hated to have to admit it he did give his people good training, including drowning rescues and CPR. They knew enough to lay the man on his stomach, head to the side, somebody’s finger in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue, while somebody else did some heavy bearing-down on his back, in slow rhythmic movements, to get the water out and start the process of breathing again. This can crack ribs, the way it did this time, and this time was even worse, because that was rough treatment for a torso that had just had a bullet pass through it, but Hardawl had realized there was no choice. If you don’t get the water out, the man’s dead anyway.

  Well, he was a tough son of a bitch, Parmitt, and he survived the drowning rescue just the way he survived the shot and the drowning, but when they brought him in and Farley got that one gander at him, he sure did look like a candidate for the last rites. So what would he look like now?

  Not that much better. They had the upper half of the bed cranked partway up, to make it easier for him to breathe, and his entire torso was swathed in bandages. His eyes were deep-set and ringed with dark shadow, his cheeks were sunken, and that snaky little mustache looked like somebody’s idea of a bad joke, painted on him as though he were a face in an advertising poster. His arms, held away from his body because of the thicknesses of wrapping around his chest, were above the blanket, lying limp, the big hands half-curled in his lap. He was breathing slowly through his mouth, and when he saw Farley the look in his eyes was dull and without curiosity.

  A white-coated intern was in the room, looking at the patient, just standing there, and he turned to say, ‘Sheriff.’

  Farley never bothered to correct people’s use of titles; he was in the tan uniform of the sheriff’s department, so if they wanted to call him Sheriff or Deputy or Officer or Trooper or anything else, he knew it didn’t mean much more than hello, so why fret it. He said, ‘How’s our patient?�
�

  ‘Conscious, but barely. I understand you want to question him.’

  ‘More than you can imagine.’

  ‘Try to make it short, and if he starts to get upset, you’ll have to stop.’

  ‘I understand,’ Farley said ‘I’ve been at bedsides before.’

  There were two chrome and vinyl chairs in the room. Farley brought one over to the side of the bed and sat on it, so he and Parmitt were now at the same height. ‘Mr Parmitt,’ he said.

  The eyes slowly moved to focus on him, but Parmitt didn’t turn his head. Maybe he couldn’t. But it was a strange gesture; here the man was the victim, nearly dead, weak as a kitten, but in that eye movement he suddenly looked to Farley extremely dangerous.

  Which was foolish, of course. Farley said, ‘How do you feel, Mr Parmitt?’

  ‘Where am I?’ It was just a whisper, no strength in it at all. The intern, at the foot of the bed, probably couldn’t make out the words.

  So Parmitt gets to ask the questions first. Okay, Farley could go along with that. He said, ‘You’re in the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital, Snake River, Florida.’

  ‘Florida.’ He whispered it like a word he didn’t know, and then his brow wrinkled and he said, ‘Why am I in Florida?’

  ‘On vacation, like everybody else,’ Farley told him. ‘Don’t you remember? You’re staying at the Breakers, up in Palm Beach.’

  ‘I live in San Antonio,’ Parmitt whispered. ‘I was

  I was driving to my club. Was I in an accident?’

  And this was something Farley had seen before, too. In bad accidents, or after bad scenes of violence, often the victims don’t remember any of the events leading up to the trauma. Later on it would come back to them, maybe, but not right away.

  Unfortunate. Farley could see there was no point questioning the man now, he didn’t remember enough, and if he were told somebody out there was trying to kill him it just might put him into shock. So he said, ‘Yeah, you were in a kind of accident. You’re still getting over it, Mr Parmitt. We’ll talk again when you feel better.’

  ‘Was I driving?’

  Farley had to lean close to understand the man. ‘What? No, sir, you weren’t driving.’

  ‘I have

  an excellent safety record.’

  ‘I’m sure you do, Mr Parmitt,’ Farley said, and got to his feet, and said, ‘We’ll talk later.’

  Lesley Mackenzie was again seated on the vinyl sofa. She started to rise when Farley entered, but he patted the air, saying, ‘Stay there, Ms Mackenzie, we’ll sit and talk.’

  He sat at the other end of the sofa, half-turned to face her, and said, ‘You’re a friend of Mr Parmitt’s. Known him long?’

  ‘Only a few weeks,’ she said, and opened her purse on her lap. ‘I’m a real estate agent in Palm Beach,’ she explained, and produced her business card. ‘My card.’

  He accepted it, looked at it, tucked it away in his shirt pocket, looked at her.

  She said, ‘Mr Parmitt was thinking of buying in Palm Beach, and I showed him some places, and we started to date. In fact, we had an appointment to look at a house, not a date and when he didn’t show up, I didn’t know what to think. Then I read about the what is it? attempted murder in the Herald, and I came here as soon as I could get away.’

  Farley saw no reason to disbelieve the woman. She was who she claimed to be, and her relationship with Parmitt sounded about right. In fact, her hurrying down here all the way from Palm Beach suggested to Farley she’d had some idea of her friendship with Parmitt blossoming into something more. She wouldn’t be the first real estate woman in the world to wind up marrying a rich client. They walk into all those bedrooms together, and finally something clicks.

  Well, more power to her. Farley said, ‘I have to tell you, Ms Mackenzie, at the moment he doesn’t remember much. Doesn’t remember the shooting at all, doesn’t remember coming to Florida. Right now, he might not remember you.’

  The slow smile she gave him was startlingly powerful. ‘Trooper,’ she said, ‘or Sergeant. What do I call you?’

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said, pleased and grateful that she made the effort to get it right.

  ‘Sergeant,’ she said, ‘if Daniel Parmitt doesn’t remember me, I’m not half the woman I think I am.’

  Farley always found himself growing awkward and foolish when a woman talked dirty in front of him. He blinked, and tried a half smile, and said, ‘Well, you can go and have a word with him if you like. The only thing, the doctor said, try not to get him excited.’

  She laughed. After she left, he could feel the blush still hot on his face.

  6

  Lesley was shocked by the look of him. She hadn’t known what exactly to expect, but not this. He was like some powerful motor that had been switched off, inert, no longer anything at all. The look in his eyes was dull, the hands curled on his lap seemed dead.

  Wouldhe remember her? It had seemed to her that the best way to handle that sheriff sergeant was to give him the idea she and Daniel had something sexual going, because if that wasn’t the reason for her being here, what wasthe reason? Also, she could see that he was one of those men made uneasy by talk about sex from a woman, and it would probably be a good idea to keep him off balance a bit.

  But in fact, if Daniel was as harmed as he looked, maybe he really wouldn’t remember her, maybe her imprint wasn’t that deep with him.

  There was a white-coated intern in the room, seated in a corner on a chrome and vinyl chair, writing on a form on a clipboard. He nodded at Lesley and said, ‘You can talk with him, but not for long. You’ll have to get close, though, he can’t speak above a whisper.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  A second chair stood over beside the bed. Reluctant, wishing now she hadn’t come, that she’d merely telephoned to find out what his situation was though then she wouldn’t have found out what she needed to know about the three men she went over to that chair and sat down and said, ‘Daniel.’

  His eyes had followed her as she crossed the room, and now he whispered, ‘What day is it?’ The whisper was hoarse, rusty, and barely carried across the space between them.

  She leaned closer. ‘Monday,’ she said.

  ‘Four days,’ he whispered.

  ‘Four days? What do you mean?’

  ‘Auction.’

  ‘What? You aren’t still thinking about that.’

  He ignored her, following his own lines of thought, saying, ‘How do you know I’m here?’

  ‘It was in the Herald. You were shot and the people who shot you were killed by’

  ‘Herald? Newspaper?’

  ‘Yes. On Saturday. I couldn’t get here till now.’

  ‘Lesley,’ he whispered, ‘you’ve got to get me out of here.’

  Now she was whispering, too, almost as inaudible as him, because of the intern, who was paying them no attention. She leaned closer yet to whisper, ‘You can’t leave! You can’t even move!’

  ‘I can do better than they think. If I’m in the paper, somebody else could come to finish me.’

  This was the subject she really wanted to talk about, and the main reason for her trip here. The three robbers. She whispered, ‘It’s the people you want to steal from, isn’t it? Do they know about me?’

  ‘Different. Not them.’

  That was a surprise. She’d taken it for granted it was the three men planning the robbery who’d discovered Daniel and had him shot, and quite naturally she’d wondered if they also knew about her. She whispered, ‘There’s somebody else? Who?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t care. Just so I get out of here. Lesley.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The longer I’m here, the more the cops are gonna wonder about me. My background, my name. And I can’t have them take my prints.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She sat back, considering him. He was really in a terrible situation, wasn’t he? Battered, weak, being pursued by killers he didn’t seem even to know, trapped in this hos
pital with police all around, and now it turns out his fingerprints would lead the police to something dangerous in his background. And the only person in the whole entire world who could help him was her.

  This time, she wasn’t surprised by him, she was surprised by herself. She felt suddenly very strong. Her emotion toward Daniel Parmitt wasn’t love or sex, but it wastender. It was almost, oddly, maternal. Now, she was the strong one, she was the one who could help. And she wantedto help; she wanted him to know that when he asked the question, she would be there with the answer.

  She leaned even closer to him, one forearm on the bed as she gazed into his eyes, seeing they weren’t really as dull as he pretended. She whispered, ‘How bad off are you, really? Can you walk?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can try.’

  ‘In the paper, it said you weren’t expected to live. Won’t that make these other people wait?’

  ‘Awhile.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I’ll do it. I’ll see what I can arrange, and I’ll come back tomorrow.’

  He watched her leave. The intern sat in the corner, writing.

  7

  Mrs Helena Stockworth Fritz was an extremely busy woman, never more so than since the death of dear Miriam Hope Clendon. There were the foundation boards to sit on, the press interviews, the arrangements for the charity balls, the lunches, the shopping, the phone calls with friends far and near, the yoga, the aura therapist, the constant planning for this or that event; and now the auction of dear Miriam’s jewelry, right here at Seascape.

  And not merely on the grounds, but inside the house as well. Most times, charity occasions at Seascape were held out on the side lawn and the terrace above the seawall overlooking the Atlantic, but this time it was necessary to have the jewelry on display, and to have the auctioneer where all the attendees could see and hear him, and so it was necessary to open the ballroom at Seascape with its broad line of tall French doors leading out to the terrace and the famous view. So in the middle of all this frenzy of activity, the last thing Mrs Fritz needed was the delivery, three days early, of the musicians’ amplifiers.