‘Getting warm,’ Ross said.
‘Fuck it,’ Melander said. ‘Nobody’s coming here, let’s go back.’
‘Like I said,’ Carlson said.
They didn’t want Parker to know they’d been there, in case he did happen to drop by before the Clendon job went down, so they put everything back the way they’d found it, including restashing the guns. There was a late snowstorm, which delayed them another day and got Melander’s back up even more, and then they drove south, grousing at one another most of the way. They usually got along together, but the wait this time was getting to them, and the complication of Parker just made everything worse.
They got back to the estate in Palm Beach at almost midnight and went through switching on lights, echoing through the empty rooms, all of them looking for signs of Parker’s presence, but none of them saying so. They met again in the kitchen and Ross said, ‘No change.’
‘Exactly like we left it,’ Carlson said.
Melander opened the refrigerator and got out three beers. ‘Well, wherever he is,’ he said, ‘at least he hasn’t been here.’
2
The funny thing is, she showed that condo two days later, the place where Daniel Parmitt as if that was his name told her about the three men who’d cheated him and who were going to steal Mrs Miriam Hope Clendon’s jewels. And the funnier thing is, Mr and Mrs Hochstein from Trenton, New Jersey, loved the condo, didn’t want to haggle at all, didn’t want to look at a thousand other places, loved the Bromwich, wanted to close right this second. The first place she showed them, and they were hooked, they were hers, which has never happened in the entire history of real estate. It was a sign.
Lord knows she needed a sign. Lesley hadn’t heard from Parmitt since their discussion at the condo, and she would dearly love to know what was going on, but knew better than to call him and ask. He was a very private person, Mr Daniel Parmitt. He would let you know how close you could get, and woe betide you if you crossed the line. She thought she understood Parmitt now, and how to deal with him. In a nutshell, he was everything that Gerry Mackenzie, her brain-dead ex, was supposed to have been but, it turned out, was not.
Gerry Mackenzie had been young Lesley Simons’s first attempt to break out of the third-rate life she’d been dealt, growing up poor in West Palm, right next door to the ultra-rich, but never being quite poor enough just to throw in the towel. No; all the time she was growing up, her mother’s favorite word had been ‘appearances.’ They had to keep up appearances, God knows why. They had to spend money for show, not for necessities. With a divorced mom who worked as a supermarket cashier and a slightly retarded older sister who was never going to be useful for anything and was never going to marry and become somebody else’s burden, this meant for the young Lesley Simons an endless life of dreary pretense.
Gerry Mackenzie, a wholesale salesman for a big computer company, a glad-handing upbeat guy full of talk about the latest advances in the ‘industry,’ full of expertise and inside dirt, as though he himself were just on the verge of becoming the next software billionaire, had seemed just precisely the right prince to rescue Lesley Simons from the dungeon of her life. Only after she’d married him had she discovered that her mother had been an amateurwhen it came to keeping up appearances; Gerry was the pro. It was all sparkle and flash with him, all salesman’s hype, all toothy grins and pay-you-back-next-week. It all came clear to her, one day in the second year of the marriage, when she’d heard two of Gerry’s fellow salesmen talking about him, and one said, ‘He comes on so great, but you know? He just can’t close.’
She understood there were salesmen like that, failed salesmen. (Not her, though; in real estate, she was a shark for closing.) As a talker, Gerry Mackenzie was a winner; as an earner, he was a flop. She got her real estate agent’s license during the marriage because somebody had to put food on the table, and after a while she realized all she was getting out of this deal was the opportunity to listen to Gerry gasbag all the time. Home wasn’t that great an alternative, but, until something else came along, it was better than Gerry. At least, she got to keep more of her earnings.
Was Daniel Parmitt the something else? Not to marry, God knows, or even to sleep with, but to make it possible for her to get outof here. On her own, this time. Far away from Palm Beach, far away from Florida entirely. Maybe the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she could kick back in her own little place and let the world go screw itself. On her own, strictly on her own.
Which had been the other thing she’d learned from marriage to Gerry Mackenzie: she didn’t much like sex. She never had, in the few times she’d tried it with other people before Gerry, but then she’d always assumed it was because she and the guy didn’t know each other well enough or weren’t compatible or whatever. With Gerry, they got to know each other very well, and Gerry certainly knew how to turn his salesman’s charm to the question of sex, so that was one area in which she couldn’t find him at fault.
No, it was her. She didn’t think she was a lesbian, she’d never had any interest in that direction, either. She thought it was just that she didn’t particularly need sex, so why go through with it? Messy, disorganized, and frequently embarrassing; the hell with it.
That was one of the good things about Daniel Parmitt; he didn’t mistake her interest for a sexual one, and he was too focused on his own plans to have time for irrelevancies like sex with his local girl guide. There were moments when she thought it might be interesting to go to bed with him just once, just to see what it was like, but then she’d remember how cold his eyes had been the time he’d made her strip so he could be sure she wasn’t tape-recording their conversation, and she knew that wasn’t the look of somebody interested in her body. Even today, Gerry Mackenzie would give her a better time than that, if that’s what she wanted.
It still surprised her that she’d been bold enough to go after Parmitt, before she’d known enough about him to know it was the right thing to do. Desperation, maybe, an antenna out frantically in search of a sign. Whatever it was, some instinct had grabbed her, that’s all, and said, This guy will get you out of here. He’ll get you out of here, and then he’ll get out of your life. Grab him.
Would he? Would the people he was mad at really steal Mrs Clendon’s jewels and get away with it? Would Daniel Parmitt really take the jewels away from them? And would he really share some of the profit with her?
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Did she have anything else going? Nothing. The commission on the Bromwich condo sale was very nice, but not what she needed. She’d known for a long time, you don’t change your life on commissions. You need a score. Somewhere, somehow, a score.
Keep healthy, Daniel Parmitt, she thought. I’ve bet the farm on you.
