Flashfire p-19

by Richard Stark

  Jeddings came with the news, to the parlor where Mrs Fritz was deep in concentration on her flower arranging. Jeddings looked worried, as she always did, and clutched her inevitable clipboard to her narrow chest as she said, ‘Mrs Fritz, deliverymen at the gate.’

  ‘Delivery? Delivering what?’

  ‘They say the amplifiers for the musicians.’

  ‘Musicians? We aren’t having musicians tonight.’

  ‘No, Mrs Fritz, for the auction.’

  The auction. Yes, there would be music that night, of course, dancing and the drinking of champagne before the auction began, to loosen up the attendees. But that wasn’t till Friday, the day after the ball at the Breakers when the jewelry would first be publicly displayed, and today was only Tuesday. ‘What on earth are they delivering amplifiers nowfor?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs Fritz, they say this is the only time they can do it.’

  ‘Let me see these people.’

  Mrs Fritz accompanied Jeddings to the vestibule, which was what they called the very well-equipped office at the front of the house, near the main door. Jeddings and two clerks operated from here, helping to keep all of Mrs Fritz’s many charities and social events and other activities on track, and the video intercom to the front entrance was here.

  Mrs Fritz stopped in front of the monitor to frown at the TV image there. Once again, as always, that stray thought came and went: Why can’t these things be in color like everything else? But that, of course, wasn’t the point. The point was that, stopped just outside the gate, half blocking traffic, was a small nondescript dark van, containing two men. The driver was hard to see, but the passenger, a burly man with a thick shock of wavy black hair, was half-leaned out his open window, where he’d been speaking on the intercom and was now awaiting a reply.

  ‘Tell him,’ Mrs Fritz said, ‘this is a very inconvenient time.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Fritz.’

  Jeddings sat at the desk, picked up the phone, and said, ‘Mrs Fritz says this is a very inconvenient time.’ Then she depressed the loudspeaker button so Mrs Fritz could hear the reply.

  Which was polite and amiable, but not helpful. Mrs Fritz watched the burly man smile as he said, ‘I’m sorry about that. I don’t like no dissatisfied customers, but they give us this stuff and said deliver it today, and we got no place to keep it. We got no insurance for this stuff. These amplifiers, I dunno how much they cost, I don’t wanna be responsible for these things.’

  Jeddings covered the phone’s mouthpiece with a hand and turned her worried face toward Mrs Fritz. ‘We could store them in a corner of the ballroom, Mrs Fritz. They wouldn’t be in the way.’

  Mrs Fritz didn’t like it, but she could see it was simply going to be one of those inconveniences one had to put up with, so grumpily she said, ‘Very well. But I don’t want to be tripping over them.’

  ‘Oh, no, Mrs Fritz,’ Jeddings promised, and spoke into the phone: ‘Very well. Come in.’ And she pushed the button to open the outer doors.

  Mrs Fritz could see that the burly man said something else, but this time Jeddings had not pressed the loudspeaker button. ‘That’s fine,’ Jeddings said, and hung up, and the big wooden doors out there began to roll open.

  Mrs Fritz said, ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said thank you, Mrs Fritz.’

  ‘Polite, in any event. That’sa rarity.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Fritz.’

  ‘I’ll come along, see where you intend to place these things.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Fritz.’

  They went out to the front hallway, with the double curving staircase and the pink marble floor, cool in the hottest weather, and Jeddings opened the front door as the van came crunching across the gravel around the curving drive to roll past the entrance and then back up. “Shore Fire Delivery” was not very professionally printed in white on the doors.

  The two men got out and came around to the rear of the van, the burly man smiling up at Mrs Fritz and saying, ‘Afternoon, ma’am. Sorry about the inconvenience.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said, to be gracious, though everyone present was well aware it was not all right.

  The driver was a smaller man, skinny, sharp-featured, with very large ears. The two were dressed in normal workman’s clothes, dark shapeless pants and Tshirts, the burly man’s advertising beer, the driver’s advertising the Miami Dolphins.

  Why did the underclass so enjoy turning itself into billboards?

  When the van doors were opened, two very large black boxes became visible inside, along with a hand truck, which the burly man brought out first. Then the two of them wrestled one of the boxes out of the van and onto the hand truck, and Mrs Fritz and Jeddings backed out of the doorway as the two men thumped the thing up the broad stairs and into the house. It had the usual dials and switches across the top, and black cloth across the front, and the brand name Magno in chrome letters attached to the front near the bottom.

  Jeddings led the way through the house, the burly man wheeling the hand truck ahead of himself, the driver walking beside him with one hand on the amplifier to keep it from falling over, and Mrs Fritz brought up the rear, looking to be sure their wheels didn’t hurt the parquet.

  Fortunately, the placement of the display tables for the jewelry and the auctioneer’s dais had already been determined, and tables and dais were now all in place. Mrs Fritz had not wanted to worry about details like thaton the day. So they’d be able to place the amplifiers where they would not be underfoot while the rest of the preparations were being made, and would not be in a spot where it turned out something else had to be put.

  It was the burly man, in fact, who suggested where to put the amplifiers. Pointing to the corner farthest from the display tables, he said, ‘Ma’am, if we put them over there, I don’t think they’d bother you.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, ‘do that, then.’

  They did, and repeated the operation with the second amplifier, placing it beside the first. Then they wheeled their hand truck back to the front door, the burly man smiled his way through another set of apologies Mrs Fritz was gracious again and then she went into the vestibule to watch on the monitor as the van drove away and the big doors were shut once more.

  Jeddings said, ‘Mrs Fritz, I’ll have staff put a tablecloth over them you won’t even notice them.’

  ‘Good. You do that.’

  Jeddings did do that, and the amplifiers disappeared under a snowy damask tablecloth, and nobody gave them another thought.

  8

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Loretta whined. Loretta always whined, but her whines were different, sometimes merely expressing her general attitude toward life, other times standing for specific emotions, like anger or fear or petulance or weariness. This one right now was her bullheaded stubborn whine, with that extra twang in it, and rumbles of mutiny.

  Time to put a stop to that. Lesley turned to her mother, across the table. ‘Mom,’ she said, ‘I don’t ask much.’

  Her mother, Laurel, put down her fork and frowned deeply, her leathery beige face creasing like a supermarket paper bag, because she never liked to have to mediate disputes between her daughters, between Lesley the quick one and Loretta the slow one, slightly retarded, badly overweight, never quite grasping what was going on.

  The three were seated together at the dinner table on Wednesday evening, and Lesley knew she had to force the issue now because tomorrow would be the last day to try to get Daniel Parmitt out of the hospital. She’d thought and she’d thought, and this was the only idea she’d come up with for a way to slip him out of there, and it just simply required Loretta’s cooperation. No other choice.

  But her mother was making trouble, as well. ‘Lesley,’ she said, ‘if only you’d tell us whyyou want to do this.’

  Which, naturally, she could not. But why should she have to? Shewas the provider in the family, she was the one who held it all together, how dare they question her?

  ‘Mom,’ she said, forcing hers
elf to be calm and reasonable, ‘this man is a friend. Not a lover, it’s not like that, a friend. He’s in trouble, and he asked me to help, and I’m going to help, and I need Loretta.’

  ‘I don’t want to get in trouble,’ Loretta whined.

  ‘You won’t get in trouble,’ Lesley told her, not for the first time. ‘You just do what I say, and it’ll be easy.’

  ‘Mom,’ Loretta whined.

  Lesley looked at her mother. ‘Or,’ she said, slow and deliberate, to let her mother know she was serious about this, ‘I could move out.’ She didn’t mention, nor at this moment did she more than barely think about it, that if this all happened the way it was supposed to, she’d be moving out anyway.

  Loretta looked stricken. She had only the vaguest idea what life would be like without Lesley in the house, but she understood it would be in some way horrible. Worse than now.

  Their mother looked from one to the other. She sighed. She said, ‘Loretta, I think you have to do it.’

  Loretta lowered her head to aim her put-upon look at the food on her plate. Her mother turned to Lesley: ‘What time will you want to leave?’

  ‘At four,’ Lesley said. ‘And it really will be easy, Mom. Nothing to it.’

  9

  Alice Prester Young knew she was a herd animal, and enjoyed the knowledge, because the herd she moved with was the very bestherd in all the world. For instance, here she was, at five-thirty on this Thursday afternoon, in her chauffeured Daimler, on her way to the bank with her new husband, the delicious Jack, to pick up just the perfectjewelry for tonight’s pre-auction ball, and she knew when she arrived at the bank she would be surrounded by her own kind, chauffeured and cosseted women with attractive escorts, all coming to the bank (the only bank one could use, really) because this particular bank stayed open late whenever there was an important ball in town, just so the herd could come get its jewelry out of the safe-deposit boxes. And the bank would open again, later tonight, when the same herd left the ball and returned to redeposit their jewelry all over again.

  The ritual of the bank was almost as enjoyable as the ritual of the ball itself, though shorter. The staff was quiet, methodical, servile without being obsequious. The herd cooed greetings to one another and exclaimed with pleasure over each other’s choice of which pieces to wear to this special occasion. The mirrors that the bank had installed in the rooms outside the safe-deposit vault were very special mirrors, not clear like common mirrors but tinted the most delicate gray, so that when the ladies of the herd looked at themselves as they put on their jewelry, they did not see as many wrinkles or age spots or other flaws as a common mirror might unfeelingly display. The bank cared about the feelings of the herd, and Alice Prester Young liked that, too.

  How was it phrased, in that little map and pamphlet the tourists could pick up? The people of Palm Beach were ‘those who feel they have earned the right to live well.’ Yes. Precisely. That’s exactly how Alice felt. She had somehow earned the right to move with this plump and comfortable herd, to ride in the Daimler with her brand-new husband, to the beach, to the ball, to the bank.

  Another glorious night!

  Five-thirty. Trooper Sergeant Jake Farley sat in a side booth at Cindy’s Luncheonette and drank coffee with FBI Agent Chris Mobley, a big spread-out Kentuckian with an easy grin and cold eyes. They were discussing, yet again, the wounded man from Texas, Daniel Parmitt.

  ‘I just don’t know where else to get at this thing from,’ Farley said. ‘The shooters are a blind alley, but every time I try to talk to Parmitt he gets all vague on me, can’t remember a damn thing. I asked him would he mind if I bring in a hypnotist, and he said yeah he did, so here I am, still stuck.’

  Mobley said, ‘Why’d he nix the hypnotist?’

  ‘Said he didn’t like ‘em, thought they were phony.’

  ‘If they’re phony,’ Mobley said, ‘they can’t do nothing to him.’

  ‘You can’t reason with a man in a hospital bed,’ Farley said. ‘I’ve learned that a good long time ago. Man in a hospital bed feels sorry for himself and sore at the world. You can’t reason with him.’

  Mobley sipped coffee and squinted toward the front of Cindy’s and the street outside. ‘You think he’s a wrong one somehow?’

  Farley frowned at him. ‘How’d you mean?’

  ‘Somebody shot him,’ Mobley pointed out. ‘Man gets shot, usually it means somebody had a reason. How come he don’t know what the reason is?’

  ‘He doesn’t remember the last week at all,’ Farley said.

  ‘Well, how about two weeks ago?’ Mobley asked. ‘Wouldn’t the people with a reason have a reason back that far?’

  Farley frowned deeper at that. ‘You think he’s fakin’? Lyin’? Stallin’?’

  ‘You’ve seen him, I haven’t,’ Mobley said. ‘But the man oughta know who’s mad at him, oughta know at least that much.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Farley said, and frowned at his coffee.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Mobley said. ‘Tomorrow, you run off a set of his prints, fax ‘em to me in Miami, we’ll check ‘em up at SOG.’

  Farley thought that over and slowly nodded. ‘Couldn’t hurt, I suppose,’ he said.

  Six o’clock. Lesley drove south on Interstate 95, Loretta an unhappy lump on the passenger seat beside her. Loretta was already dressed in the long tan raincoat and the wide-brimmed straw hat with the pink ribbon, and she was staring mulishly out the windshield. She wouldn’t look at Lesley and certainly wouldn’t talk to her. Loretta would go along with the plan, because she had no choice and she knew it, but she was definitely in a grade-A snit.

  Well, it didn’t matter, just so she did her part. Everything was falling into place, starting with this car. Another rep at Lesley’s firm, Gloria, was what is called a soccer mom, which meant she spent all her non-working time transporting masses of small children and all their necessary gear to sub-teen sporting events. For this purpose, her second car was this Plymouth Voyager, with the middle line of seats removed and a ramp installed that could be angled out from the wide side door to accommodate wheeled trunks full of basketballs or hockey sticks or whatever was needed. Lesley had arranged to borrow this vehicle from Gloria for this afternoon and evening, explaining she had to take her sister to a complicated medical procedure that would leave her unable to walk for a few days, and now they were on their way.

  She looked out ahead, far down the straight wide road, and said with surprise, ‘Well, there’ssomething you don’t see every day.’

  Loretta almost looked at Lesley, or asked what it was you don’t see every day, but she caught herself in time and went on being a lump.

  Lesley watched the fire engine down there, rolling north, moving very fast in the left lane, overtaking everything on the road. ‘It’s a fire engine, Loretta,’ she said. ‘A great big red fire engine. See it? I wonder where it’s going.’

  Loretta finally did focus on the fire engine, having to turn her head to keep watching it as they passed one another. She actually started to smile, but then became aware of Lesley observing her, and quickly frowned instead.

  ‘I like fire engines,’ Lesley said, expecting no response and getting none.

  ‘I like fire engines,’ Hal Carlson said as they highballed north.

  Seated beside him, Jerry Ross grinned. ‘What I like,’ he said, ‘is fire.’

  Seven-thirty. Mrs Helena Stockworth Fritz was not part of the herd. She was, in fact, above the herd, as the whole world acknowledged, and that’s why she did not, before each ball, pay a visit at the bank.

  The late Mr Fritz (munitions, oil, cargo ships, warehouses, all inherited) had, many years ago, during a spate of politically inspired financier kidnappings, installed a safe room in the middle of Seascape, which Mrs Fritz still used for her most valuable valuables. The safe room was a concrete box, twelve feet square and eight feet high, built underthe building, into the water table but sealed and dry. A dedicated phone line in a stainless-steel pipe ran underground fro
m the safe room to the phone company’s lines out at the road, though in fact that telephone had never once been used.

  If, however, some phalanx of Che Guevaras actually had launched an attack on Seascape back in those parlous times, Mr and Mrs Fritz would simply have locked themselves into the safe room, which included plumbing facilities and stored food, very like a fallout shelter from two decades before, and would have phoned the Palm Beach police to come repel the invaders.

  That had never happened, but the room was far from useless. It was impregnable and temperature-controlled, and in it Mrs Fritz kept her furs, her jewelry, and, in the off-season, much of her best silver. Which meant she never had to join the hoi polloi crowding around the gray mirrors at the bank.

  The mirror in the safe room, before which Mrs Fritz now stood, studying the effect she would make in thisgown, with thisnecklace, thesebracelets, thisbrooch, theserings, and thistiara, was not tinted a discreet gray, like the mirror at the bank. Mrs Fritz was a realist and didn’t need to squint when she gazed upon herself. (Nor would she ever stoop to buy a thirty-year-old husband.) She had lived a long time, and done much, and enjoyed herself thoroughly along the way, and if that life showed its traces on her face and body, what of it? It was an honest life, lived well. She had nothing to hide.

  Satisfied with tonight’s appearance, Mrs Fritz left and locked the safe room, then rode the stairlift up to the ground floor, where her walker awaited. Charles LeGrand was her frequent walker, a cultured homosexual probably even older than she was, neat and tidy in his blazer and ascot, smiling from within his very small goatee. Offering his elbow for her hand, ‘You look charmantetonight, Helena,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Charles.’

  They walked through the ballroom on their way to the car. Mrs Fritz noted with approval the ranks of rented padded chairs for the bidders, now in rows facing the auctioneer’s lectern, each with its numbered paddle waiting on the seat. The platform for the musicians was in place, the side tables were covered in damask but not yet bearing their loads of plates and glasses and cutlery, the portable bar-on-wheels stood ready for tomorrow night’s bartender, and all was as it was supposed to be.