He said. “Aren’t there better lights?”
“Hold on.”
The office was wider than deep, with a large desk on the right, filing cabinets across the back, and shelves and cabinets on the left. A dark brown vinyl sofa, with a coffee table, stood out from the cabinets, facing the desk across the way.
While he stood in the doorway, she turned on a brass desk lamp, a tulip-globed floor lamp in the corner behind the desk like something in a funeral parlor, and a group of muted strip lights under the shelves. “You can turn the overheads off right there,” she told him, pointing to the switch beside the door.
Now the room was comfortable, illuminated in pools of amber. Crossing to sit on the right side of the sofa, he said, “Tell me what you think you’ve got so far.”
“You’re a wooden nickel, that’s all I know right now,” she said. “Linda usually keeps white wine in the refrigerator here. Want some?”
She herself did, of course: keeping the tension held down below the surface was hard work. He said, “If you do.”
She smiled. “At last, a human response.”
The refrigerator, a low one, was in a cabinet behind the sofa. Real estate magazines and old newsmagazines were on the black Formica coffee table. She brought a bottle of California chardonnay and two water glasses and shoved magazines out of the way to put them down. The bottle was already open, cork stuck back in, not much gone. She pulled the cork and poured for them both. “To truth,” she said, toasting him.
He shrugged, and they both drank, and she sat at the other end of the sofa, knees together, holding the glass in her left hand, body angled toward him. “You’re new at your bank,” she said, “you’re new at your house. One thing you get good at in this business is credit checks, and your credit doesn’t exist. You never owned or leased a car before the one you have now, never had a credit card, never had a mortgage, never had a bank account until the one you just started in San Antonio.”
“I’m an American citizen,” he told her, “but I was born in Ecuador. I don’t know if you saw my birth certificate.”
“That isn’t one of the things I can get at.”
“Well, you’ll see I was born in Quito of American parents. I’ve still got family down there, I’ve lived most of my life down there. The family’s in oil.”
“Banana oil,” she said. “Who is Roderick to you?”
“Nobody.”
“That’s why you were looking for his house? That’s why you walked to his house in the middle of the night?”
“Who says I walked to his house?”
“I do.”
He glanced at her shoes, which were medium-heel pumps, not much use on sand. “I just went for a walk,” he said.
“Coincidence, you headed straight for Roderick’s house.”
“Coincidence,” he agreed. “You say you’ve got problems with this Roderick, too.”
“Well, I didn’t have, until I started thinking about you and looking into who you really are. That led me to run the same thing on Roderick and he’s another guy out of a science-fiction movie, suddenly dropped onto the planet from the mother ship five or six months ago.”
“Why don’t you ask him about himself?”
“I don’t know the man, I didn’t handle the sale. We carried the house, but it was a different broker made the deal.” She sipped wine, put her glass down, leaned toward him. “Let me tell you what I know about Mr. Roderick,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“He wanted a presence here on the cheap. There was a house nobody wanted because it should be a teardown, but he wanted it, and now he’s got it, and he isn’t doing anything with it.”
“No?”
“No. There’s a general contractor Mr. Roderick was going to hire, to do the renovation work. I called him this afternoon, and Mr. Roderick hasn’t got around to starting the work yet. Says he’s still dealing with his architect.”
“Maybe he is.”
“What architect? There’s nobody there. The place is empty. Nothing’s happening at all.”
“Architects are slow sometimes,” he said.
“Particularly when they don’t exist.” She finished the wine in her glass, looked at his, poured herself a second. Before drinking, she said, “Now you show up, and you want to know about Roderick, but you don’t want Roderick to know about you.”
“You watch too much television,” he told her.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “And I drink too much. And I worry too much. And I live with my mother and my sister. I’m divorced, and I don’t want that son of a bitch back, and I don’t need any other son of a bitch to take his place, in case you were wondering, but I want more than this.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I want more than driving obnoxious fat cats around to show them empty houses, fending off gropes from ninety-year-olds wearing white ascots — oh, yes, white ascots, and they’re all wonderful dancers — sitting at my goddam desk out there every day, waiting for my life when my life is over.”
“Now you’re watching too much daytime television,” he told her.
“I would if I didn’t have to work.” Her glass was empty again; she refilled it and said, “I look at you, and I say, what does this man want? He playacts to be somebody that belongs here, but he doesn’t belong here. And Roderick doesn’t belong here. So who are these people and what do they want?”
“You tell me,” Parker said.
“Palm Beach has only got one thing,” she told him. “Money.”
“Sun and sand,” he said. “Parties. Charity balls. Shopping on Worth Avenue.”
She laughed. “I’d like to see you shopping on Worth Avenue,” she said. “I really would. You could buy a white ascot.”
“I might.”
“Daniel — I’m going to call you Daniel, because I have to call you something, so, Daniel, what I need, to get out of here, to get a running jump on a new life, is money. And what you are here for, and what Roderick is here for, is money.”
“You want me to give you some money,” he suggested.
“Oh, Daniel,” she said, and shook her head. “Dan? No, Daniel. Daniel, I don’t want you to give me money. Do you really think I’m stupid? Do you really think I don’t know why you parked a block away and didn’t want to be seen with me in a public place?”
“Why’s that, Leslie?”
“Because if I’m a problem,” she said, and sat up straight, and looked evenly at him, “you intend to kill me.”
“Leslie,” he said, “while you’re watching all this television, I think you’ve also been smoking some weed.”
She brushed that aside. “I’m being serious,” she said. “I want to earn the money. Do I go to you, or do I go to Roderick? I’ve met you—”
“And Roderick isn’t here,” he pointed out. “At least you tell me he isn’t here.”
“So here’s what I’m telling you now,” she said. “Whatever you have in mind, robbery, I suppose, or maybe a kidnapping, kidnap one of these dowagers here, whatever it is, you need somebody who knows the territory.”
“You.”
“Why not me? I sell real estate, I’ve been in probably a third of the important houses around here, and I know the rest. I know the town, I can answer questions, and I can tell you what questions you’re forgetting to ask. Roderick doesn’t have anybody local, and I think you and Roderick are competitors, so if you have me you have an advantage over him.”
He watched her, thinking about what she was saying, who she was, what she wanted.
She gave him another level look; she didn’t show any nervousness at all now. “To even find Roderick,” she reminded him, “you had to come play that roundabout game with me. And all it did was make me suspicious. How many people do you want wondering about you?”