Mrs Fritz’s mansion was invisible from anywhere, except, probably, the ocean. Parker and Lesley 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,’ Lesley 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 hacksawed 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.
Back in the house, he went to the dining room, the only other downstairs room beside the kitchen that they’d furnished, with a simple black Formica Parsons table and three mismatched armless kitchen chairs, all probably bought used over in West Palm. Two floor lamps in the corners gave light, the original chandelier having been messily removed.
If he were in here with them, it would be because they were in control and they wanted a conversation. Would they sit and have him stand? No, they’d rather be the ones on their feet. On which side of the table?
There were three doorways in three walls in here, two broad ones opposite each other opening onto living rooms at the front and rear, and a narrower one with a swing door leading to the kitchen. They would want him with his back to the fourth wall because, without thinking about it, they wouldn’t want to be looking at escape routes behind him.
The good thing about a Parsons table is that it has a strip of wood all around, just under the top, that creates a recess. Parker taped the Sentinel to the underside of the tabletop, on the side where there was no door. Then he went looking for a window.
The exterior doors, upstairs and down, were all large expanses of plate glass, too big to be of use. But on the road side of the house, flanking the front door, were pairs of double-hung windows with panes, four over four. Going outside, he chose the corner window farthest from the door and the garage. First he fixed the suction cups onto the top right pane of the lower half of the window, then used the glass cutter to slice the glass through just inside the wooden sash bars, scoring it four times all the way around before he got completely through. Tugging on the suction cups, he removed the rectangle of glass, then made sure he could reach the lock inside. Then he put the pane back in place, fixing it there with small pieces of the clear tape. The suction cups he buried under the shrubbery along the footing.
Walking back along the beach toward the Four Seasons, one by one he threw into the sea the drill, the routing bit, the hacksaw, the glass cutter, the pliers, and the roll of tape. The shoulder bag he left on the ground in the parking lot; some tourist would take it home.
10
The question was Lesley. She’d been useful, but she was an amateur, and an amateur is never entirely reliable. Could she be useful again? Or could she be a problem?
So far, she was doing everything right. She came up with the answers he needed, and she didn’t ask a lot of her own unnecessary questions. She didn’t try to push herself closer to the job. She showed patience. All of these were rare qualities in an amateur and were keeping her alive.
So the real question was, how tight a leash should he keep on her until the day? He finally decided the answer was to keep no leash at all. If she kept herself to herself, as she’d been doing, fine. If she started phoning, or coming around, he’d deal with it.
