Parker

by Richard Stark

  Pink plastic-sheet walls on both sides shielded the view of the balconies to right and left, and openwork iron benches were built into both of those walls. Pointing to one of them, “We'll sit here,” he said.

  “You have to know,” she told him, “that wall isn't soundproof.”

  The outer edge of the balcony was a waist-high pink plastic-sheet wall, with a black iron railing along the top. Parker held to it, leaned forward, and looked around the outer edge of the privacy wall at the balcony next door. Potted plants filled the bench he could see over there, and the rest of the space was occupied by a white plastic table, four chairs to match, a gas grill, and a StairMaster. That apartment's glass wall was completely shielded inside with white drapes. There was no one on the balcony.

  He leaned back to turn and say, “There's nobody there.”

  She was wide-eyed, both hands pressed to her chest. “Don't do that,” she said.

  “Sit down, Leslie.”

  They sat side by side on the iron bench against the pink wall, he facing inward, she facing the view. He said, “I'm going to tell you what's going on.”

  “All right,” she said. Now she looked solemn, as though she were being inducted into somebody's secret rites, like the Masons or Cosa Nostra.

  He said, “Don't ask me any questions, because I'm only going to tell you what I want to tell you.”

  “I understand.”

  “All right. The guy you know as Roderick owes me some money.”

  She looked disappointed. “It's some kind of debt?”

  “Some kind. He's with two other guys. Have you seen them?”

  “I've never even seen Roderick.”

  “Well, the three came here with just enough cash to put the down payment on that house. Some of the cash they used was mine.”

  She said, “Do they intend to roll it over? Don't tell me they have a buyer.”

  “Leslie, listen,” he said. “What they are is thieves. I don't mean from me, I mean that's what they do, who they are.”

  “You, too,” she said.

  He said, “They want the house because there's a job going down and they know they can't get off the island afterwards.”

  “If anything big happens,” she said, “they raise all the drawbridges. And they patrol the Waterway very seriously.”

  “That's why they don't want to have to leave. They want to be established here, already known and not suspect. If I rented this condo here right now, and two weeks from now it happens, the cops would be at the door, they'd want to know all about me.”

  “And you two months old,” she said.

  “So that's why Melander—he's Roderick—that's why he wanted to be already in place, nobody wondering about him.”

  “They're going to do a big robbery,” she said, “and then go back to that house and wait for the excitement to die down.”

  “That's right.”

  “But they used your money to buy the house.”

  “A quarter of it.”

  “For the down payment,” she said. “So when they do this robbery, you're going to be there to get your part of the money back.”

  “To get it all, Leslie,” he said. “They shouldn't have taken my money.”

  She studied him. “You mean that.”

  “Of course I mean it.”

  She nodded, thinking about this. “So it's a lot of money.”

  “Yes.”

  “And some of it will come to me, because I'm not cheating you, I'm helping you.”

  “Yes.”

  “If they hadn't cheated you, you would take a quarter.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked past him, out at the ocean. “This is a little scarier than I thought,” she said. He waited, and she looked at him again. She said, “You're here to find out if you can trust me, and I'm here to find out if I can trust you, and if either of us guesses wrong, we're in trouble.”

  “That's right.”

  “But I think,” she said, “if I guess wrong, I can be in a lot worse trouble than you.”

  “Trouble is trouble,” he said.

  “Maybe so. What is this robbery?”

  “That's the first thing you can do for me,” he said. “You can tell me what the robbery is.”

  “You don't know?”

  “I know some things about it. I know it's a charity thing.”

  “There are charity events all season,” she told him. “There are balls here that are five thousand dollars a ticket. But that isn't cash.”

  “Neither is this,” he said. “It's a charity auction of jewelry. It's sometime probably in the next two weeks, and they told me the market value of the jewelry was twelve million dollars. Can you tell me what it is?”

  She looked surprised, and then she laughed. As though disbelieving, she said, “Mrs. Clendon's jewels?”

  “Is that it?”

  “That's it, oh, absolutely, that's it.” She seemed to find the whole thing very funny. “Oh, Daniel,” she said, “and I had such hopes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There's nothing there to help anybody, Daniel,” she said. “There's nothing for me, and there's nothing for you, and there's nothing for your friend Roderick.”

  “They're gonna do it.”

  “Then they're going to jail,” she said. “And if you're there, you'll go to jail.” She rose, stood facing him. “But I won't be there,” she said. “Don't worry, Daniel, I'm going to forget this entire conversation.” She turned away, toward the living room.

  He said, “Leslie.” When she looked back at him, he said, “Unless you want to go off the balcony, Leslie, you'll sit down.”

  She gave a frightened look at the air beyond the balcony railing. “They'd know you're in the building,” she said.

  “Let me worry about that.”

  They looked at each other. He was deciding to stand when she came over and sat beside him. “If I tell you about it,” she said, “and if you see it can't work, will you let me go?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Daniel,” she said, “I really wish it was something that could work. I could taste it, Daniel.”

  “Freedom.”

  “The new me.”

  Parker said, “Tell me about Mrs. Clendon, Leslie.”

  7

  The first thing you ought to know, Leslie told him, is that there are no basements in Palm Beach, the water table is too high. And the rich people are seasonal, they're never here between May and November, so they need somewhere to store all their valuables while they're gone, and for the last fifty years that place has been the First National Bank.

  The First National Bank doesn't just have safe-deposit boxes like other banks, they have entire vaults down under the bank. They store about three thousand fur coats down there every summer, and everything else people don't want to leave in their empty houses: rare wines, gun collections, paintings, silverware and goldware, even furniture, antique chairs and things like that.

  You don't want to break in there, believe me you don't; the bank is very serious about its responsibilities. The closest anybody ever came to robbing that bank was back in 1979, when a college student got into a crate and had himself shipped into the bank as antiques. His idea was to come out of the crate at night, fill it up with valuable things, and then wait to slip out of the bank during regular business hours. Then he'd come back later to get the crate. Except the bank is guarded at night, and he was found before he could get out.

  Even now, during the season, the bank is full of valuables. The rich women keep all their most expensive jewelry in the bank, and the bank opens up late every night that there's one of the important charity balls. They open so the women can come get their stuff, and then they open again later that night so they can bring it all back. Somebody told me the mirror down there by the vaults isn't regular glass; it's tinted gray because that makes people look better when they're trying on their jewels. So the bank takes very good care of its customers.

  On
e of the most important customers the bank ever had was Miriam Hope Clendon. On the Hope side, her family was important in transatlantic shipping up till the Second World War, when they sold everything and became the idle rich. The same thing on the Clendon side, except they were railroads out west.

  By the time you got to Miriam Hope Clendon, the money was so old it didn't have any bad suggestions of trade on it anymore; it was as though Miriam Hope Clendon had money only because God wanted her to. So naturally she was very important in Palm Beach, and important to the bank. And also she lived longer than anybody—she was something like ninety-seven when she finally died, in Maine, last August.

  Her family didn't live as long as she did, and most of her children didn't have children, or if they did the children died in accidents or suicide, so when she passed away she was the last of her line except for some very distant cousins, none of whom had ever even met her or had ever been to Palm Beach. Still, they'll get most of what she left.

  But not all of it. One of the assistant managers in the bank had become a kind of pal of hers in her last years, when she didn't have anybody else except employees, and he was very interested in raising money for the library here. It's only the last few years there even is a library in Palm Beach. He talked to Miriam about the library sometimes, and she contributed some money every once in a while, but it wasn't much of a big deal.

  But then she died, and in her will she left all the jewelry she'd kept in the bank to this manager, not for himself, but to do a charity auction and raise money for the library. They'd known each other in the first place because of her jewels, so that's what made her think about doing it that way.

  The auction and the ball—there has to be a ball, of course—were set up by a couple of the women who do all that sort of thing here, with the man from the bank to consult. Everybody wants some of the Miriam Hope Clendon jewelry, because she used to knock their socks off at the charity balls, glittering like a chandelier. And the ball is going to be a week from this Thursday, with the auction the next night.

  So right now, all that jewelry is still in the vault in the bank, and you aren't going to get at it in there, and neither is Roderick, or whatever his name is. On the Wednesday before the ball, the jewelry is all going to be transported by armored car to the Breakers, because the Breakers has the biggest ballroom on the island, and that's where it's going to be displayed, under heavy guard, during the ball on Thursday, so people can see it all, under glass and behind electrified fencing.

  Then on Friday, the display will be taken down and it will all be moved over to the Fritz estate, because now Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz is the most important person in Palm Beach society, now that Miriam Hope Clendon is dead, and Mrs. Fritz insisted the auction be held at her house. Hundreds of people are invited to the ball on Thursday, but to go to the auction on Friday you have to make a contribution to the library fund and you have to make a sealed bid on at least one piece in the collection. So no freeloaders.

  I'm not sure exactly when the jewelry's all going back to the bank, either late Friday night or early Saturday morning, but that's what's going to happen. The successful bidders won't get to take the jewelry home with them from the auction; they'll have to go to the bank the next Monday morning and show their bidding slip and collect their jewelry then.

  So what's going to happen is, this huge collection of very important and very valuable jewelry is going to leave the bank on Wednesday, under extremely heavy guard. It's going to the Breakers to be set up along the sides of the ballroom. Then after the dance it's going to be moved to Mrs. Fritz's house, still with the same armored car and guards, and it'll be guarded all the time it's there, and after the auction it's going back, all together, to the bank. I don't know what your friends have in mind, but if they're going to try to break into the bank, they'll be caught. If they try to steal it all from the Breakers or from Mrs. Fritz's house, they'll never get out. If they try to attack the armored car on any one of its three trips, they'll probably be shot. The people here know what Mrs. Clendon's jewels are worth—they're not going to just leave them lying around.

  I'm sorry to have to tell you this, Leslie finished, because I'd like them to get their money, so you can get your money, so I can get my money. But it isn't going to happen. Forget it.

  8

  The shadow of the building was a little longer, reaching out across the sand toward the sea. Out near the horizon two boats, widely separated, both slid south. Parker stood and paced, and she watched him. After a minute, he stopped and put his hand on the railing and looked out at the sea. He said, “This Mrs. Fritz's house. I'm thinking it's on the ocean but it doesn't have a beach.”

  “No, it doesn't,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “It's a seawall along there. It's not far from where that drifting cargo ship ran onto somebody's terrace a few years ago.”

  “I know these guys,” Parker said. “They're gaudy. They're going to like Mrs. Fritz's house because it isn't a commercial space, it's a private space, so control can never be one hundred percent. They're going to like it because they can come in from the sea, go back out to the sea, and duck right back in again down at their own place, while everybody's searching the Atlantic Ocean for them.”

  “It isn't that easy,” she insisted.

  “They don't expect it to be easy,” he told her. “They expect it to be tough, and that's why they'll be gaudy. I don't know what they have in mind, but it'll shake people up.”

  “If you mean scare them,” Leslie said, “it would take a lot to scare people in Palm Beach. Not so long ago, you had a militia of these octogenarians on the beach, still in their white pants, with their big-game hunting rifles, marching back and forth on the sand, drilling, ready to repel Castro.”

  “Good thing for them Castro didn't show up,” Parker said. “But the point is, Leslie, I'm not going to steal the package, Melander and the others are. I don't have to have a plan, I just have to know what theirs is. But I know them, I know what business they're in, I know they're sure enough of themselves to sink all their cash into this thing, and I know how their minds work. They won't mess with bank vaults, and they won't try to get into the middle of a huge hotel on its own acres of grounds. An armored car on this island is hopeless—where would you take it? So that leaves Mrs. Fritz, in a private house on the ocean with a seawall. That's where they're going to do it, so the question is when.”

  “After everybody's gone home,” she suggested, “and before the jewels are loaded back into the armored car.”

  “No. I told you, these guys are gaudy, they won't want to sneak in and out. A lot of rich people all dressed up in one confined place, wearing their own big-dollar jewels. That's the time to come in, when you can make the maximum trouble, the maximum panic. What are guards gonna do if there's a thousand important people running back and forth screaming?”

  “I don't know,” she said.

  “They won't do a lot of shooting,” he said.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  He said, “Show me Mrs. Fritz's house.”

  “I can't take you in there,” she said, surprised. “It isn't on the market.”

  “Drive me by it.”

  “You won't see much, but all right. We'll take my car. We'd better find a place where you can put yours in some shade.”

  “Good.”

  She stood and looked out at the ocean. “Are they really going to do that, do you think? Come in from the sea?”

  “That's their style.”

  “Like James Bond,” she said.

  He shook his head. “More like Jaws” he told her.

  9

  Mrs. Fritz's mansion was invisible from anywhere, except, probably, the ocean. Parker and Leslie drove past it twice, first northbound and then southward again, and both times she drove as slowly as she could when they went by, but there was nothing to be seen.

  An eight-foot-high stucco-covered wall in a kind of beige color, dappled with climbing ivies, faced the road
and ran back both sides of the property. In the dead middle of the road-facing wall a broad opening was filled by massive wood-beam doors, vertical planks held together with thick black bands of iron. These must be electrically operated, and would only be opened when Mrs. Fritz or some other acceptable person was going in or out.

  “You see what I mean,” Leslie said, the second time they drove by it.

  “Those doors will be open the night of the auction,” Parker said.

  “With security standing there and a Palm Beach police car in the driveway. You don't crash Mrs. Fritz's parties.”

  “Melander will.”

  She dropped him back at the Jaguar, in the corner of a real estate office parking lot where tall sea grape offered some shade. “What now?” she said.

  “We wait for party time,” he said, and got out of the car.

  To get where he was going next, he had to drive past Mrs. Fritz's estate one more time, and the thing was just impossible. There was no parking along here, no useful shoulder, nowhere even to stop. You couldn't find anywhere to sit and watch the place.

  Well, that wasn't Parker's problem. That was somebody else's problem.

  He drove over to West Palm, parked the Jag a little after five-thirty, and found a hardware store open, where he bought a cordless drill and an inch-wide metal-routing bit and a small hacksaw and a glass cutter and a pair of pliers and a roll of clear tape and two rubber suction cups with handles. Then he drove back to the Breakers and, in one of the shops off the lobby, bought a bright blue canvas shoulder bag with a flap. Everything from the hardware store went into it.

  That night, with the shoulder bag, he left the Jag in the Four Seasons parking lot and walked to Melander's house. This time he was armed, carrying the Sentinel in his hand so he could toss it into the sea if he had to.

  But he didn't have to, so when he got to the house he put the Sentinel in the shoulder bag with the rest of the tools. He went in through the same second-floor bedroom as the last time and then down to the kitchen, where the refrigerator was exactly as it had been before, nothing added or subtracted. So they hadn't yet come back.