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.
He switched lights on as he moved through the house to the garage, where he tipped the footlocker onto its face and drilled an inch-wide round hole through the metal as close as possible to the bottom right corner.
The rear of the footlocker was stiffened with bands of metal that divided it into six sections. Parker hack-sawed three sides of the lower right section, then peeled it open and looked inside at the six guns lying in a jumbled heap: three shotguns and three Colt.45 automatics.
One by one he snaked the guns out of the footlocker, then carried them all away to the kitchen. He put them on the table there, sat in front of them, and misaligned the firing pins on the automatics and drained the shot from the shotgun shells. Then he carried them all back to the garage and dropped them into the footlocker. He bent the opened flap down flush again and used the clear tape to put the round plug he’d cut out back into position. If anybody were to open the footlocker and study the interior, the cut would be obvious, but the three wouldn’t be looking at the footlocker, they’d be looking at the guns.