Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

“Yes, I left it with the fellow out there. He gave me a — wait, here it is.”

“Yes, very good, thank you, sir. You keep this, you’ll show it to the doorman whenever you want your car.”

Parker held the ticket, frowning at it, then sighed and nodded and put it away in his trouser pocket. “I can do that,” he decided.

“And will you be needing assistance with your luggage, sir?”

“The fellow put it on a cart, over there somewhere.”

“Very good. Front! Do enjoy your stay with us, Mr. Parmitt.”

“I’m sure I will,” Parker said, and turned to find a bellboy at his elbow, who wanted to know what room he was in. Parker didn’t know until the bellboy helpfully read it aloud for him off the little folder containing his keycard.

“I’ll meet you up there, sir, with your luggage.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

He stood where he was until the clerk said, “The elevators are just over there, sir.”

“Thank you.”

He rode the elevator up, alone in the car, and strode down the quiet hall to his room. Entering, he faced a wide window, thinly curtained, with the ocean and the bright day visible outside. When he looked at the king-size bed, he thought of Claire, whom he would see again... when? In three weeks? Sooner? Never?

A rapping at the door meant the bellboy with the luggage. Parker went through the usual playlet with him, being shown the amenities, the luggage placed just so, lights switched on and off, then the bellboy accepting the rich tip Parker gave him and smiling himself back out the door.

About to start unpacking, Parker caught sight of himself in one of the several mirrors and stopped. He studied himself and knew that what he was doing was the thing to do, the way to be here without being seen, without causing questions to be asked, but still, it felt strange and it looked strange. This person, in these clothes, in this room, on this island.

Well. Whatever tactics he decided on in the next couple of weeks, he knew one thing for certain: he wouldn’t be intimidating anybody.

“This is my first time in Palm Beach,” Parker told the real estate woman, “and I find I’m taking to it quite a bit.”

The real estate woman was pleased. A round-faced blonde of about forty, an ex-cheerleader with padding, she wore a beige suit, matching shoes, paler plain blouse, a gold pin of a leaping dolphin on her right breast, and a simple strand of pearls at her throat. She was one of an interchangeable half dozen of such women in this spacious cool office on Worth Avenue, where the only difference was in the color each woman had chosen for today’s suit (skirt, not pants); there was peach, there was avocado, there was coconut, there was canary yellow, and there was royal blue. It was a garden of padded real estate women, and how did they decide each morning which one would be Kim, which Susan, which Joyce? The one talking with Parker had chosen to be Leslie today.

“Palm Beach isn’t for everyone,” she said, though still with her welcoming smile. “Those who will find it the place in their lives tend to know that right away.”

“I don’t know as how it could be the place for me,” Parker told her, leaning into the characterization, knowing he would never be as seamlessly plausible as Melander, talking about the little Mexicans, but thinking he could do it well enough to pass. “I have other places I like,” he explained. “South Padre Island. Vail. But Palm Beach has something that appeals to me.”

“Of course,” she said with that smile. Her teeth were large and white and even.

“To have a place here, oh, for a month a year, January or February, that might not be bad.”

She made a note, on the form on which she’d already filled in his particulars: name, home address, bank, staying at the Breakers. She said, “Would you be entertaining?”

“You mean, how big a place would I need. Yes, of course, I’d have guests, I’d want room to spread out.”

“Not a condo, then,” she said.

He already knew that much about Palm Beach. “Leslie,” he said, “the condos aren’t Palm Beach. They’re south on the island, their own thing, little places for retired accountants. I’d want something — well, you tell me. What’s the neighborhood I want?”

She opened a desk drawer, pulled out a map, and laid it in front of him. With a gold pen, she made marks on the upside-down map as she described the territory. “The most sought-after section, of course,” she told him, “is what we call between-the-clubs, because real Palm Beachers want to belong to both of the important clubs, so to have a place between them is very convenient.”

“Sounds good.”

“The Everglades Club, at the north, is here on Golf Road. Then the area of County Road and Ocean Boulevard here is the section I’m talking about, down to the Bath and Tennis Club, here where Ocean Boulevard turns inland at the Southern Boulevard Bridge.”

“These are all oceanfront?”

“Well, they’re both,” she said. “Lake Worth runs along here, on the mainland side of the island. Here, just below Bath and Tennis, where Ocean Boulevard curves in away from the sea, we have estates with ocean frontage, but some of them have tunnels under Ocean Boulevard to the beach on Lake Worth, so the property actually extends through from ocean to lake.”

“And the lake is more protected than the ocean.”

“Exactly.” Then she smiled and said, “One of our ladies, some years ago, to keep from being served papers in a divorce, ran through the tunnel to escape. Unfortunately, they were waiting on the other side.”

He saw that that was gossip that was supposed to make them more comfortable with one another, and that he was supposed to laugh now, so he laughed and said, “Too many people know about the tunnels, I guess.”

“Not that they aren’t secure ,” she assured him. “No one you don’t want could get in.”

“But if you go out,” he said, “they’ll be waiting for you.”

She smiled, a bit doubtfully. “Yes,” she said.

“But this area,” he said, running his finger along it on the map, “isn’t between the clubs, it’s south of them.”

“But very close,” she said. “It would be in the same range.”

“And what is that range? What are we talking about along there?”

“When something’s available, and nothing is at the moment, you could expect to pay fourteen or fifteen.”

Parker shook his head, looking solemn. “My bank wouldn’t let me do that,” he said. “For a month a year? No. I wouldn’t even raise the issue.”

“Then you’re not going to be between the clubs,” she said. She was very sympathetic about it.

“I understand that,” he assured her. “But there’s got to be something that’s not all the way up to these places but not all the way down to the condos.”

“But with ocean frontage, you mean.”

“Naturally.” He shrugged. “You don’t come to Palm Beach not for the water.”

“Well, you can go south of Bath and Tennis,” she said. “For quite a ways along there, you’ll find some very nice estates, mostly neo-Regency, on the sea, or some facing it across the road. Of course, the farther south you go, the closer you are to the condos.” As though to say, the closer you are to the Minotaur.

“I tell you what,” he said. “Take half an hour, show me these neighborhoods, give me some idea what’s out there.”

“That’s a good idea,” she agreed, and pulled her purse out of the bottom drawer of her desk. “We’ll take my car.”

“Fine.”

It took more than half an hour; they spent almost two hours driving up and down the long narrow island in bright sunshine. Her car was a pale blue Lexus, heavily air-conditioned, its back seat full of loose-leaf ledgers and stacks of house-description sheets, many with color photos.