The ritual of the bank was almost as enjoyable as the ritual of the ball itself, though shorter. The staff was quiet, methodical, servile without being obsequious. The herd cooed greetings to one another and exclaimed with pleasure over each other’s choice of which pieces to wear to this special occasion. The mirrors that the bank had installed in the rooms outside the safe-deposit vault were very special mirrors, not clear like common mirrors but tinted the most delicate gray, so that when the ladies of the herd looked at themselves as they put on their jewelry, they did not see as many wrinkles or age spots or other flaws as a common mirror might unfeelingly display. The bank cared about the feelings of the herd, and Alice Prester Young liked that, too.
How was it phrased, in that little map and pamphlet the tourists could pick up? The people of Palm Beach were “those who feel they have earned the right to live well.” Yes. Precisely. That’s exactly how Alice felt. She had — somehow — earned the right to move with this plump and comfortable herd, to ride in the Daimler with her brand-new husband, to the beach, to the ball, to the bank.
Another glorious night!
Five-thirty. Trooper Sergeant Jake Farley sat in a side booth at Cindy’s Luncheonette and drank coffee with FBI Agent Chris Mobley, a big spread-out Kentuckian with an easy grin and cold eyes. They were discussing, yet again, the wounded man from Texas, Daniel Parmitt.
“I just don’t know where else to get at this thing from,” Farley said. “The shooters are a blind alley, but every time I try to talk to Parmitt he gets all vague on me, can’t remember a damn thing. I asked him would he mind if I bring in a hypnotist, and he said yeah he did, so here I am, still stuck.”
Mobley said, “Why’d he nix the hypnotist?”
“Said he didn’t like ’em, thought they were phony.”
“If they’re phony,” Mobley said, “they can’t do nothing to him.”
“You can’t reason with a man in a hospital bed,” Farley said. “I’ve learned that a good long time ago. Man in a hospital bed feels sorry for himself and sore at the world. You can’t reason with him.”
Mobley sipped coffee and squinted toward the front of Cindy’s and the street outside. “You think he’s a wrong one somehow?”
Farley frowned at him. “How’d you mean?”
“Somebody shot him,” Mobley pointed out. “Man gets shot, usually it means somebody had a reason. How come he don’t know what the reason is?”
“He doesn’t remember the last week at all,” Farley said.
“Well, how about two weeks ago?” Mobley asked. “Wouldn’t the people with a reason have a reason back that far?”
Farley frowned deeper at that. “You think he’s fakin? Lyin? Stallin?”
“You’ve seen him, I haven’t,” Mobley said. “But the man oughta know who’s mad at him, oughta know at least that much.”
“Mmm,” Farley said, and frowned at his coffee.
“I tell you what,” Mobley said. “Tomorrow, you run off a set of his prints, fax ’em to me in Miami, we’ll check ’em up at SOG.”
Farley thought that over and slowly nodded. “Couldn’t hurt, I suppose,” he said.
Six o’clock. Leslie drove south on Interstate 95, Loretta an unhappy lump on the passenger seat beside her. Loretta was already dressed in the long tan raincoat and the wide-brimmed straw hat with the pink ribbon, and she was staring mulishly out the windshield. She wouldn’t look at Leslie and certainly wouldn’t talk to her. Loretta would go along with the plan, because she had no choice and she knew it, but she was definitely in a grade-A snit.
Well, it didn’t matter, just so she did her part. Everything was falling into place, starting with this car. Another rep at Leslie’s firm, Gloria, was what is called a soccer mom, which meant she spent all her nonworking time transporting masses of small children and all their necessary gear to sub-teen sporting events. For this purpose, her second car was this Plymouth Voyager, with the middle line of seats removed and a ramp installed that could be angled out from the wide side door to accommodate wheeled trunks full of basketballs or hockey sticks or whatever was needed. Leslie had arranged to borrow this vehicle from Gloria for this afternoon and evening, explaining she had to take her sister to a complicated medical procedure that would leave her unable to walk for a few days, and now they were on their way.
She looked out ahead, far down the straight wide road, and said with surprise, “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”
Loretta almost looked at Leslie, or asked what it was you don’t see every day, but she caught herself in time and went on being a lump.
Leslie watched the fire engine down there, rolling north, moving very fast in the left lane, overtaking everything on the road. “It’s a fire engine, Loretta,” she said. “A great big red fire engine. See it? I wonder where it’s going.”
Loretta finally did focus on the fire engine, having to turn her head to keep watching it as they passed one another. She actually started to smile, but then became aware of Leslie observing her, and quickly frowned instead.
“I like fire engines,” Leslie said, expecting no response and getting none.
“I like fire engines,” Hal Carlson said as they highballed north.
Seated beside him, Jerry Ross grinned. “What I like,” he said, “is fire.”
Seven-thirty. Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz was not part of the herd. She was, in fact, above the herd, as the whole world acknowledged, and that’s why she did not, before each ball, pay a visit at the bank.
The late Mr. Fritz (munitions, oil, cargo ships, warehouses, all inherited) had, many years ago, during a spate of politically inspired financier kidnappings, installed a safe room in the middle of Seascape, which Mrs. Fritz still used for her most valuable valuables. The safe room was a concrete box, twelve feet square and eight feet high, built under the building, into the water table but sealed and dry. A dedicated phone line in stainless-steel pipe ran underground from the safe room to the phone company’s lines out at the road, though in fact that telephone had never once been used.
If, however, some phalanx of Che Guevaras actually had launched an attack on Seascape back in those parlous times, Mr. and Mrs. Fritz would simply have locked themselves into the safe room, which included plumbing facilities and stored food, very like a fallout shelter from two decades before, and would have phoned the Palm Beach police to come repel the invaders.
That had never happened, but the room was far from useless. It was impregnable and temperature-controlled, and in it Mrs. Fritz kept her furs, her jewelry, and, in the off-season, much of her best silver. Which meant she never had to join the hoi polloi crowding around the gray mirrors at the bank.
The mirror in the safe room, before which Mrs. Fritz now stood, studying the effect she would make in this gown, with this necklace, these bracelets, this brooch, these rings, and this tiara, was not tinted a discreet gray, like the mirror at the bank. Mrs. Fritz was a realist and didn’t need to squint when she gazed upon herself. (Nor would she ever stoop to buy a thirty-year-old husband.) She had lived a long time, and done much, and enjoyed herself thoroughly along the way, and if that life showed its traces on her face and body, what of it? It was an honest life, lived well. She had nothing to hide.