“Trouble is trouble,” he said.
“Maybe so. What is this robbery?”
“That’s the first thing you can do for me,” he said. “You can tell me what the robbery is.”
“You don’t know?”
“I know some things about it. I know it’s a charity thing.”
“There are charity events all season,” she told him. “There are balls here that are five thousand dollars a ticket. But that isn’t cash.”
“Neither is this,” he said. “It’s a charity auction of jewelry. It’s sometime probably in the next two weeks, and they told me the market value of the jewelry was twelve million dollars. Can you tell me what it is?”
She looked surprised, and then she laughed. As though disbelieving, she said, “Mrs. Clendon’s jewels?”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it, oh, absolutely, that’s it.” She seemed to find the whole thing very funny. “Oh, Daniel,” she said, “and I had such hopes.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nothing there to help anybody, Daniel,” she said. “There’s nothing for me, and there’s nothing for you, and there’s nothing for your friend Roderick.”
“They’re gonna do it.”
“Then they’re going to jail,” she said. “And if you’re there, you’ll go to jail.” She rose, stood facing him. “But I won’t be there,” she said. “Don’t worry, Daniel, I’m going to forget this entire conversation.” She turned away, toward the living room.
He said, “Leslie.” When she looked back at him, he said, “Unless you want to go off the balcony, Leslie, you’ll sit down.”
She gave a frightened look at the air beyond the balcony railing. “They’d know you’re in the building,” she said.
“Let me worry about that.”
They looked at each other. He was deciding to stand when she came over and sat beside him. “If I tell you about it,” she said, “and if you see it can’t work, will you let me go?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Daniel,” she said, “I really wish it was something that could work. I could taste it, Daniel.”
“Freedom.”
“The new me.”
Parker said, “Tell me about Mrs. Clendon, Leslie.”
7
The first thing you ought to know, Leslie told him, is that there are no basements in Palm Beach, the water table is too high. And the rich people are seasonal, they’re never here between May and November, so they need somewhere to store all their valuables while they’re gone, and for the last fifty years that place has been the First National Bank.
The First National Bank doesn’t just have safe-deposit boxes like other banks, they have entire vaults down under the bank. They store about three thousand fur coats down there every summer, and everything else people don’t want to leave in their empty houses: rare wines, gun collections, paintings, silverware and goldware, even furniture, antique chairs and things like that.
You don’t want to break in there, believe me you don’t; the bank is very serious about its responsibilities. The closest anybody ever came to robbing that bank was back in 1979, when a college student got into a crate and had himself shipped into the bank as antiques. His idea was to come out of the crate at night, fill it up with valuable things, and then wait to slip out of the bank during regular business hours. Then he’d come back later to get the crate. Except the bank is guarded at night, and he was found before he could get out.
Even now, during the season, the bank is full of valuables. The rich women keep all their most expensive jewelry in the bank, and the bank opens up late every night that there’s one of the important charity balls. They open so the women can come get their stuff, and then they open again later that night so they can bring it all back. Somebody told me the mirror down there by the vaults isn’t regular glass; it’s tinted gray because that makes people look better when they’re trying on their jewels. So the bank takes very good care of its customers.
One of the most important customers the bank ever had was Miriam Hope Clendon. On the Hope side, her family was important in transatlantic shipping up till the Second World War, when they sold everything and became the idle rich. The same thing on the Clendon side, except they were railroads out west.
By the time you got to Miriam Hope Clendon, the money was so old it didn’t have any bad suggestions of trade on it anymore; it was as though Miriam Hope Clendon had money only because God wanted her to. So naturally she was very important in Palm Beach, and important to the bank. And also she lived longer than anybody — she was something like ninety-seven when she finally died, in Maine, last August.
Her family didn’t live as long as she did, and most of her children didn’t have children, or if they did the children died in accidents or suicide, so when she passed away she was the last of her line except for some very distant cousins, none of whom had ever even met her or had ever been to Palm Beach. Still, they’ll get most of what she left.
But not all of it. One of the assistant managers in the bank had become a kind of pal of hers in her last years, when she didn’t have anybody else except employees, and he was very interested in raising money for the library here. It’s only the last few years there even is a library in Palm Beach. He talked to Miriam about the library sometimes, and she contributed some money every once in a while, but it wasn’t much of a big deal.
But then she died, and in her will she left all the jewelry she’d kept in the bank to this manager, not for himself, but to do a charity auction and raise money for the library. They’d known each other in the first place because of her jewels, so that’s what made her think about doing it that way.
The auction and the ball — there has to be a ball, of course — were set up by a couple of the women who do all that sort of thing here, with the man from the bank to consult. Everybody wants some of the Miriam Hope Clendon jewelry, because she used to knock their socks off at the charity balls, glittering like a chandelier. And the ball is going to be a week from this Thursday, with the auction the next night.
So right now, all that jewelry is still in the vault in the bank, and you aren’t going to get at it in there, and neither is Roderick, or whatever his name is. On the Wednesday before the ball, the jewelry is all going to be transported by armored car to the Breakers, because the Breakers has the biggest ballroom on the island, and that’s where it’s going to be displayed, under heavy guard, during the ball on Thursday, so people can see it all, under glass and behind electrified fencing.
Then on Friday, the display will be taken down and it will all be moved over to the Fritz estate, because now Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz is the most important person in Palm Beach society, now that Miriam Hope Clendon is dead, and Mrs. Fritz insisted the auction be held at her house. Hundreds of people are invited to the ball on Thursday, but to go to the auction on Friday you have to make a contribution to the library fund and you have to make a sealed bid on at least one piece in the collection. So no freeloaders.
I’m not sure exactly when the jewelry’s all going back to the bank, either late Friday night or early Saturday morning, but that’s what’s going to happen. The successful bidders won’t get to take the jewelry home with them from the auction; they’ll have to go to the bank the next Monday morning and show their bidding slip and collect their jewelry then.
So what’s going to happen is, this huge collection of very important and very valuable jewelry is going to leave the bank on Wednesday, under extremely heavy guard. It’s going to the Breakers to be set up along the sides of the ballroom. Then after the dance it’s going to be moved to Mrs. Fritz’s house, still with the same armored car and guards, and it’ll be guarded all the time it’s there, and after the auction it’s going back, all together, to the bank. I don’t know what your friends have in mind, but if they’re going to try to break into the bank, they’ll be caught. If they try to steal it all from the Breakers or from Mrs. Fritz’s house, they’ll never get out. If they try to attack the armored car on any one of its three trips, they’ll probably be shot. The people here know what Mrs. Clendon’s jewels are worth — they’re not going to just leave them lying around.