Free Condominium by John D. MacDonald

patrician ass.”
    “But … the rules say no children!”
    “I know. I know. That’s what I’d already told the Granlunds. The kids didn’t even stop to find out if they’d killed her. She claimed she wasn’t hurt at all. But it gave her a nasty little limp. And it turned them both off Golden Sands but good. I tried to retrieve the situation by marching them down to the manager’s office. Lorrie Higbee was very evasive at first. Finally she confessed that Julian rented an apartment on the sixth to two couples on vacation with small children, apparently for a nice fat figure.”
    “It’s illegal!”
    “Not really. The Declaration says no children under sixteen. But that’s for the owners who live in their apartments. Not renting to anybody with little kids is more like an unwritten rule, you know? Greg, dear, I tried. I really tried, but it was no way.”
    “Did you rent them anything?”
    “Elsewhere? As a matter of fact, I did. But, believe me, I am trying to fill yours first, God only knows why. You didn’t buy them through me, darling.”
    “I bought them predevelopment, from Marty Liss.”
    “I know. I know. Two years ago. But if you’d had your wits about you, you would have come to Loretta first and said, Loretta dearest darling, if I buy those three, will you keep them full or sell them at a profit, and I would have said, Greg, honey, my crystal ball says that the days of investing in condominium apartments have just about ended, and it will be a good way to get bruised.”
    “Bruised? I’m getting lacerations you wouldn’t believe.”
    “I can believe. There’s something else I want to tell you. When can you get away from those torts and writs and things? It’s important to you.”
    “You’ve had lunch? So’ve I. What say I stop by your office in … oh … forty minutes?”
    McKay’s secretary was watching her automatic typewriter clatter through line after line of boilerplate in a trust agreement, waiting for it to stop so that she could type in the specifics McKay had dictated.
    “I’ve got two stops to make,” he said. “I’ll be back by three or a little after. Okay?”
    “What about the admiral?”
    “When is he set for?”
    “Quarter of.”
    “Well, I’ll try to hurry and you try to keep him from having a heart attack.”
    Ten minutes later, as he turned onto Fiddler Key and drove south toward Beach Village, he was wondering if he should have tried to get some other realtor to handle the renting of apartments 2-D, 2-E and 2-F. Having a realtor at all was an additional expense. According to the management contract, ten percent had to go to the manager no matter what. And another ten to Loretta took a good bite out of any rental. On the other hand, she had found that January through March rental for 2-F, three thousand gross, twenty-four hundred by the time they finished cutting it up.
    He had been involved in several closings for clients where Loretta Rosen had been involved as a realtor. He had found her to be energetic, shrewd, handsome and funny. He guessed she might be even as much as ten years older than his thirty-four, but his guess was based on conversation clues, not on her looks. If she was that age, she worked very successfully to conceal it. She was a medium-tall slender lady with a long gleaming weight of dark blond hair. Her tanned face was very mobile and expressive, her pale gray eyes striking. She had a gravelly voice and salty turn ofphrase, and a hundred small nervous mannerisms, forever folding and unfolding her sunglasses, lighting one cigarette from another, fingering her hair back, tapping her teeth with a pencil eraser. She knew everybody. Her advertising logo said, S EE L ORETTA! She seemed to work twenty-six hours a day.
    He parked beside her little building on the outskirts of the Village. The front-office girls knew him. Loretta was waiting in her small office in the back. She sprang up from behind her desk and shook his hand, and waved him