Parker

by Richard Stark

  Particularly the body. Between the doctors and the dietitians and the personal trainers, it was possible, though not easy, to keep a hard youthful body forever, to offer an attentive young husband something interesting and responsive in bed. The face could be kept smooth and attractive, but never quite exactly girlish. The softnesses and roundnesses of youth can never be recaptured on the face, so the best you can hope for in that department is angular, slightly hollow, good looks, more striking than beautiful. But who could complain? At sixty-seven, to have a striking face above the body of a twenty-year-old wasn't bad. And a twenty-six-year-old brand-new husband.

  Why had she stayed so long with Habib?

  Jack broke into her thoughts by saying, “Somebody shot this fellow at the Breakers?”

  “No, dear, he's staying at the Breakers. They kidnapped him—”

  “What!”

  “—and took him into the Everglades and shot him there.”

  “Who? Why?”

  “Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity. They were professional killers, and whoever they were supposed to kill they took this man Parmitt by mistake.”

  “Now, that's what I call bad luck,” Jack said, and laughed. “And besides that, he doesn't get to go to the ball.”

  “Oh, that reminds me, the auction,” she said. “Dear, would you be a dear?”

  “Of course,” he said. He'd been just as attentive when he'd been an insurance company claims adjuster and they'd met after that silly automobile accident in Short Hills. Now, his bright blue eyes eager, he said, “What do you need, dear?”

  “My albums,” she said. “Not last year's, but the two years before that.”

  “Coming up,” he said. He rose, smiled, folded his Journal, put it on the chair, and went off to her study, leaving her in the cool and quiet breakfast room, all pink and gold, with its view over the sea grape at the limitless ocean.

  In a minute he was back with the two albums she'd asked for, both big thick volumes with padded pastel covers and glassine sheets within, inside which, every year, Alice inserted all photos and social-page stories involving her. Which meant, naturally, that most of the other important Beachers would also be seen in the various photos.

  “What I'm looking for … ,” Alice said, pushing her coffee cup aside and riffling through the first album, “what I want … is … yes! There, see it?”

  She had found a newspaper photo showing the three co-chairs of a charity ball from two years ago, the last year Miriam Hope Clendon had still been active in society. The three overdressed women were lined up in a row to face the camera, Miriam in the center, of course, being the grande dame, with Helena Stockworth Fritz on her right and Alice on her left. But this time it wasn't at herself Alice wanted to look, nor even at the rather portly and snout-faced Miriam, but at the necklace around Miriam's neck, on which she tapped a mauve false fingernail.

  Jack leaned attentively over her shoulder, smiling vaguely at the photo. “What am I looking at, dear?”

  “The necklace, Miriam's necklace. That's what I'm going to bid on. I've had my eye on that necklace ever since I first met Miriam, oh, some years ago.”

  “It's beautiful,” Jack said, and in his eye was the glint, though Alice didn't see it, of a man looking at a necklace he expects to inherit someday.

  “We have to do a sealed bid on something to get into the auction,” she said with satisfaction, “and that's what I'm after, and I believe I'll get it.”

  “Won't other people bid for it?”

  “Not for long,” she said. “It's extremely valuable, you know.”

  “Yes, it looks it.”

  “Most people, I believe,” Alice said, “will just go for the baubles, because they won't want to spend an awful lot of money this late in the season. Just so they take home some little thing. But I will bid on this necklace, and I'll bid low, and because it's so valuable it won't come on the block until very late, when everybody else will already have their little something, and I wouldn't be surprised if I get it for my opening bid.”

  “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 every occasion.” 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 this before. 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 was dead, 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; that had 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.”

  Fa
rley'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 Leslie 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 that kind 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 headshake 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.”

  Leslie 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?”
<
br />   “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

  Leslie 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.

  Would he 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 was the 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 Leslie 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.