Parker

by Richard Stark

  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 newsmagazines 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.”

  “Now you're watching too much daytime television,” he told her.

  “I would if I didn't have to work.” Her glass was empty again; she refilled it and said, “I look at you, and I say, what does this man want? He playacts to be somebody that belongs here, but he doesn't belong here. And Roderick doesn't belong here. So who are these people and what do they want?”

  “You tell me,” Parker said.

  “Palm Beach has only got one thing,” she told him. “Money.”

  “Sun and sand,” he said. “Parties. Charity balls. Shopping on Worth Avenue.”

  She laughed. “I'd like to see you shopping on Worth Avenue,” she said. “I really would. You could buy a white ascot.”

  “I might.”

  “Daniel—I'm going to call you Daniel, because I have to call you something, so, Daniel, what I need, to get out of here, to get a running jump on a new life, is money. And what you are here for, and what Roderick is here for, is money.”

  “You want me to give you some money,” he suggested.

  “Oh, Daniel,” she said, and shook her head. “Dan? No, Daniel. Daniel, I don't want you to give me money. Do you really think I'm stupid? Do you really think I don't know why you parked a block away and didn't want to be seen with me in a public place?”

  “Why's that, Leslie?”

  “Because if I'm a problem,” she said, and sat up straight, and looked evenly at him, “you intend to kill me.”

  “Leslie,” he said, “while you're watching all this television, I think you've also been smoking some weed.”

  She brushed that aside. “I'm being serious,” she said. “I want to earn the money. Do I go to you, or do I go to Roderick? I've met you—”

  “And Roderick isn't here,” he pointed out. “At least you tell me he isn't here.”

  “So here's what I'm telling you now,” she said. “Whatever you have in mind, robbery, I suppose, or maybe a kidnapping, kidnap one of these dowagers here, whatever it is, you need somebody who knows the territory.”

  “You.”

  “Why not me? I sell real estate, I've been in probably a third of the important houses around here, and I know the rest. I know the town, I can answer questions, and I can tell you what questions you're forgetting to ask. Roderick doesn't have anybody local, and I think you and Roderick are competitors, so if you have me you have an advantage over him.”

  He watched her, thinking about what she was saying, who she was, what she wanted.

  She gave him another level look; she didn't show any nervousness at all now. “To even find Roderick,” she reminded him, “you had to come play that roundabout game with me. And all it did was make me suspicious. How many people do you want wondering about you?”

  “None,” he said.

  “It's too late for none, but I can help you limit it to one.”

  He picked up his glass and sipped from it. She watched him, and then said, “One thing. I'm not talking about sex.”

  He looked at her. “I didn't think you were.”

  She said, “I find it a strain just to talk with you. I certainly don't ever want to take my clothes off in front of you.”

  “But you're going to have to,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No, I—”

  “I mean, you're going to have to now,” he said.

  She stared at him, panic leaching through. “I can't—I thought you—”

  “Leslie,” he said, “I have to know if you're wearing a wire.”

  She gaped, trying to make sense of the words. “What?”

  “A wire. I have to know. One way or another, Leslie, I have to know.”

&
nbsp; “You mean—” She was blinking a lot, catching up with the situation. “You mean you think I could be taping you?”

  “Come on, Leslie.”

  “But—I wouldn't, I don't—honestly, no.”

  “Now, Leslie. You stand up over there, and I'll sit here, and you'll show me whether or not you're wearing a wire.”

  “I'm not,” she said, her voice fainter.

  “Good. Show.”

  “And then what?”

  “If you're not wired, I leave here and walk back to my car, while you turn the lights off and lock the place. Tomorrow, you bring Linda another bottle of wine, and I'll be in touch. Now, Leslie.”

  She wasn't wearing a wire.

  5

  Her last name was Mackenzie. The phone book gave her a listing on Utica Street in West Palm Beach. The reverse phone book also gave a listing for Laurel Simons at the same address.

  Parker left the phone company building and drove the Jag across Flagler Bridge out of Palm Beach and through West Palm to the airport, where he left it in long-term parking and walked around the lot until he found a red Subaru Outback station wagon, a much less noticeable car than a yellow Jaguar convertible, in any neighborhood except Palm Beach. It had almost no dust on it, so it hadn't been here long. Breaking into it, he hot-wired the ignition and drove to the exit, where he turned in the ticket he'd just picked up.

  The tollbooth clerk, a Hispanic who looked or tried to look like Pancho Villa, frowned at the ticket: “You don't stay long.”

  “I forgot my passport,” Parker told him. “I've gotta go back and get it, screwed up my whole day.”

  “Tough,” the clerk said, gave Parker his change, and Parker drove to Utica Street.

  It was a neat but inexpensive neighborhood of single-family homes on small plots, most with an attached garage. Basketball hoops over the garage doors, neatly maintained lawns, tricycles and toys around some front doors. A lot of aluminum siding in shades of off-white or pastels.

  Number 417 was ranch-style, two stories on the left with the garage below and most likely bedrooms above, one story on the right. The garage door was closed, with a green Honda Accord parked at the edge of the blacktop driveway, out of the way of access to the garage. So Leslie's Lexus, being more important to their livelihood, got the garage, and the mother's car got the weather.

  Parker circled the block once, then stopped in front of a house half a block short of 417. There was a Florida map in the driver's door pouch; he opened it on the steering wheel.

  This was a working-class neighborhood, and everybody was away working. Very few cars drove down Utica Street, and no pedestrians appeared at all. It was now eleven-thirty in the morning; Parker was ready to wait until schoolchildren started to return this afternoon.

  But he didn't have to. At twenty to one, the front door at 417 opened and two women came out. One was an older, bulkier version of Leslie, with a harsher blond in her short hair and an angry thrust to her head and a similar conservative taste in clothing. The other was gross; she wore a many-colored muumuu and she waddled. Her black hair was fixed in a bad home permanent, a thousand tight ringlets like fiddlehead ferns, as though in a lunatic attempt to distract from the body. She tripped on the driveway, over nothing at all, and her mother snapped at her. The daughter cringed and lumbered on.

  The two women got into the car, the mother at the wheel, and drove away. After lunch, they go out and shop for dinner. Parker drove the Subaru closer, stopping in front of the house next door, then got out of the car, walked around to the back of the house, and forced the kitchen door.

  There wasn't much he needed to know—Leslie was hardly a mystery woman—and he found it all in fifteen minutes. Her former husband was named Gerald Mackenzie, he lived in Miami, and there was cold, correct, formal communication between them if something like old taxes caused them to make contact with one another.

  Leslie kept small debts going in several credit card and department store accounts. She didn't seem to have a man in her life, and maybe hadn't since the no-fault divorce from Gerald eight years earlier. She had occasional correspondence with a woman friend in New Jersey.

  She had not written anything anywhere about her discoveries concerning Daniel Parmitt. She didn't seem to own a gun, unless it was in the glove compartment of the Lexus.

  She was the alpha member of the family. Her room, facing the backyard from above the garage, was larger than the other two bedrooms up here, and had its own bath. She'd made an office out of a corner of the room, with a small desk and a low filing cabinet and a computer hooked to the Internet. She had done her best to make herself comfortable and at home here, and her mother and sister had done what they could to help, but it hadn't worked. Her room was impersonal, and she was willing to take a leap into the unknown rather than stay in this life.

  What she had said last night, about him needing somebody local to smooth the way, made sense. The question was, did she make sense? The move she'd made was a strange one; did it mean more strange moves ahead?

  Most people in Leslie's position wouldn't have been bothered by his Daniel Parmitt imitation, wouldn't have noticed anything wrong with it. Of the few people who might have picked up his errors, or seen a glimpse of his actual self under his performance, what were the likely reactions? First, most common, to do nothing, to chalk it up to eccentricity. Second, if really snagged by some false note somewhere, to mention it to a friend, somebody in the office, or a member of the family at home, and maybe even follow up with a conversation with a local cop; more likely if the person already knew a local cop. But the least probable reaction, Parker thought, was what Leslie had done: follow the ringer, try to figure him out, try to use him for her own purposes, which was to get out of this dead-end life and start over somewhere else.

  So she was quick, and she didn't let her fear hold her back. And she didn't intend to get cute and try to use sex as a weapon, as she'd demonstrated last night by her awkwardness and discomfort when she'd had to very briefly strip.

  So did all that mean she was reliable, or did it mean she was a loose cannon? There was nothing in her house to tell him for sure. For the moment, then, make use of her, but keep watch.

  Before he left the house, he phoned her at the real estate office. “Leslie, it's Daniel Parmitt.”

  “Oh, Mr. Parmitt,” she said. “I was wondering if I'd hear from you again.”

  “Today,” he said, “I'm interested in looking at some condos.”

  “Very different.”

  “Very. Around four o'clock? You have a nice one to show me?”

  “Does it need to be furnished?”

  “Doesn't matter.”

  “Good,” she said, sounding relieved. “There's a lovely two-bedroom in the Bromwich, ocean view. I could meet you in the lobby.”

  “Fine,” he said, and hung up, and drove the Subaru back to the airport. He left it in its old spot in long-term parking, picked up the Jaguar, and drove to the exit.

  This clerk was a Hispanic woman, chunky and bored, who said, “You come in today? This the long-term.”

  “I forgot my passport, gotta go back for it, screws up the whole day.”

  “Tough,” she said, and gave him his change.

  6

  The condos along the narrow strip of island south of the main part of Palm Beach yearn toward a better life: something English, somewhere among the landed gentry. The craving is there in the names of the buildings: the Windsor, the Sheffield, the Cambridge. But whatever they call themselves, they're still a line of pale concrete honeycombs on a sandbar in the sun.

  Parker arrived at the Bromwich at five after four. Two Hispanic gardeners worked on the long bed of fuchsia and impatiens along the low ornamental wall in front with the place's name on it in block gold letters. Signs at the entrance indicated residents’ parking to the right, visitors’ to the left. The visitors’ area was farther from the building.

  Parker drove to the gleaming blacktop expanse of the visitors’
parking lot and left the Jag next to Leslie's blue Lexus. He walked through the sun to the boxy cream-colored building, seeing none of the residents, though the other lot was full of their cars, mostly big old-fashioned boats, traditional Detroit iron.

  The lobby was amber faux marble with a uniformed black security guard at a long chest-high kidney-shaped faux-marble desk. The lobby seating was several round puffs of magenta sofa; Leslie rose from one of them. Today her suit was peach, her pin a gold rose. “Mr. Parmitt,” she said with her working-hours smile, and came forward to shake his hand. “Right on time.”

  “Afternoon, Ms. Mackenzie,” he said. Her hand was soft and dry and without pressure.

  She turned to the guard to say, “We're looking at 11-C, Jimmy.”

  “Yes, ma'am.” He gave Parker a disinterested look, then looked downward again. He had the Globe newspaper open on his desk, among the phone systems and security screens.

  The elevators were around behind the desk. As they rode up together, she said, “You don't want a condo, you want a place to talk.”

  He shrugged. “What else?”

  “So I'm hired,” she said with a bland smile, as though it hardly mattered.

  He said, “It doesn't work exactly that way.”

  “You'll explain it,” she said, and the elevator slowed to a stop.

  He waited for her to lead the way, but instead of leaving the elevator she held down the button that would keep the door open and said, “If you have to check me for a wire again today, we'll leave now.”

  He shook his head. “Once was enough.”

  “It certainly was,” she said, and led the way out of the elevator and down to unlock them into 11-C.

  It was completely empty, as bright and bare as the beach down below. Their shoes made echoing sounds on the blond wood floor, bouncing off the hard white walls and, in the living room, the uncurtained wall of glass doors that opened to the balcony. The place had been repainted, to make it ready for sale, and the smell of the paint was a faint tang in the air.

  Parker crossed to open the sliding balcony door. It was hot out here, but with a breeze. The afternoon shadow of the building lay on the beach down below, where no one sat or swam.