The Green Eagle Score (14 page)

Rosemont Road curved gracefully back and forth among brick ranches and frame split levels, each on its own grassy lot, with its wide driveway, attached garage, TV antenna and sloped roof. It was almost three-thirty in the morning now, and every house they passed was completely dark, except that every now and then a night light showed faintly through a window.

Number sixteen was on the right, a split level with the garage in the lower part of the two-storey section. It was as dark as the rest of the neighborhood, a white frame house built up on a rise of land above the road, with a steep rock garden at the front of the lawn, a broad driveway that angled upward sharply, and a look of innocence and sleep.

Webb drove on until the curve of the road hid them from the Godden house, and then he parked. All three got out and walked back along the sidewalk, cutting across the lawn of the house next door in order to come at the Godden house from the back, on the garage side.

There was a door at the back of the house, leading into the garage. They approached it slowly, the darkness as deep as velvet all around them, the house a vaguely seen pale shape looming up in front of them. They were silent, moving on grass. They reached the rear wall and slid along it to the door.

Parker tried the knob. It clicked faintly, but the door was locked.

A voice said, “Roger?”

Parker flattened against the house.

The voice was above him, somebody in a second-storey window. It said, “I don’t want to hurt you, Roger.” It Was a male voice, but womanish and trembling with fear. Parker waited.

The voice said, “I have a gun. You’d better get away from here.”

Moving slowly, Parker turned his head. He could see that Webb was no longer there behind him, which was good. Devers, a few feet away, was pressed close to the wall just as Parker was.

The voice said, “You’ve got all the money, what more do you want?”

Whispers don’t have much individuality. Making his shrill, Parker whispered, “Ralph is still alive!”

“What do you want me to do about it?” The voice was getting shrill itself, the tension in it twanged like a plucked zither string.

“Help him,” Parker whispered.

“Help
him! Why
shoot
him? What’s the matter with you?”

“I need your help,” Parker whispered. “Let me in.”

“So you can kill me, too?”

 “Why would I kill you?”

“Why did you shoot Ralph? Roger, I’m sorry, I can’t trust you. Maybe tomorrow. What are we going to do about Ralph? I thought he was dead. I though I’d have to go back later and take him out and leave his body somewhere. But if he’s alive, I—” With sudden suspicion, the voice said, “Is he alive? How do you know?”

“I went back.”

“How did you know where to find me? Roger?
Is that Roger down there?”

“Yes.” If Devers was right, that Godden’s partners were probably patients of his, a little hysteria might be in order now. Parker suddenly rattled the doorknob loudly, whispering, “Let me in! I threw the gun away, I don’t want to kill anybody any more! Let me in! I need your help!”

“That isn’t Roger!”

Where the hell was Webb? “Help me!” Parker whispered, flapping his arms against the door, moving around like someone too agitated to stand still. Or like someone trying to be a bad target.

There was a sudden light from above, and Parker was in the middle of it. A flashlight. Parker dove for the darkness and above him a rifle sounded, loud and flat.

Parker landed on his shoulder, rolled, got to his feet in darkness, with the flashlight aimed out past where he was. He ran in close again, against the wall, and suddenly the flashlight dropped from the window and landed on the grass. It lay there, still lit, shining with great precision and clarity on a cone of green grass.

Parker saw the outline of Devers on the other side of the light, moving toward it. He whispered, “Keep away!” and Devers faded back again.

Nothing happened for almost a minute, and then Webb’s voice came from up above, softly, saying, “Clear.”

“There’s got to be other people in the house,” Parker said, speaking just as softly. “Cover them.”

“Right. I came in the garage window on the side of the house. People never lock that one.”

Parker and Devers went around to the side where there was a smallish window, now standing open. They climbed through, landing in a mass of garden hose, edged around some kind of long broad car, and went through a doorway and up a half-flight of stairs to a kitchen.

There was light now, filtering from another part of the house. Moving toward it, they left the kitchen through an arched doorway, turned right down a short hall, and went up another half-flight of stairs. There was another short hall up here, with light spilling from a doorway on the right.

It was a bedroom, done in colonial, with a canopy bed. Webb was standing by the foot of the bed, revolver in his hand. Sitting on the floor was a balding man of about forty-five, dressed in pajamas. There was a gash on the side of his head, bleeding slightly. He’d touched it at one point, and now there was blood on his fingertips. He looked frightened, and calculating.

When Parker and Devers came into the room, Webb said, ”Nobody else here. Empty kid’s room across the way.”

Parker said to the man on the floor, “Where’s your family?”

“I’m remarried. My children live with my ex-wife.”

“Where’s your new wife?”

“Visiting her brother. I didn’t want her around during—” He gestured vaguely.

Webb nodded and said, “Didn’t want to have to tell her where he was going at two o’clock in the morning.”

Parker said, “You’re Godden?”

The man nodded wearily. “Of course.”

“Ellen Fusco told you the caper.”

“Yes. And I tried to steal the money away from you.” He looked up, squinting. “I almost made it, too,” he said. “Except Roger went crazy.”

“Roger who?”

“Roger St Cloud. A local boy.”

“Like Ralph?”

“Is he really still alive?”

“He was when we were there. Maybe he isn’t now. Were they both patients of yours?”

“Yes. I didn’t have anything to do with killing your friends.”

Parker said, “It was all Roger.”

“He swore one of them reached for a gun. The tall thin one. He was guarding them while Ralph and I put the money cases in the car.” Godden shook his head, frowning. “I don’t know how he could have been reaching for a gun,” he said. “We’d already searched them all, we had their guns.”

Parker said, “What happened at the office?”

“We’d been arguing. I said he didn’t have to shoot all three of them, even if one did reach for a gun. We got to the office, and split up the money. We had suitcases there, we’d already each brought a suitcase and left it in the office. Everything was fine, and then Roger started up again, about how he’d been given the dangerous job, how I’d known those were dangerous men and they’d try something and he’d have to kill them. Blaming me, you see. And then deciding what I meant to do was turn him over to the police for murder, and then Ralph and I would split his share between us. It was all very obvious, justifying what he meant to do by blaming us in advance.”

Devers said, “Cut out the shoptalk, Doc. What happened?”

“Yes,” Godden said, and nodded wearily. “Ralph said something. I don’t know, something innocuous, Ralph was never anything but innocuous. Something about how Roger didn’t really mean all that. And Roger didn’t say a word. He just went over to the sofa and picked up the rifle and shot Ralph. Ralph came staggering back by the desk, still on his feet, and Roger shot him again. That’s how I got away. Without the money.”

Godden seemed done. Parker prodded him, saying, “What next!”

“I got the car and drove home. I didn’t think Roger would be able to find out where I lived, at least not tonight. I didn’t know if anyone had heard the shots, so I came home and put the car away and got ready for bed. In case the police showed up, you know, to say there was somebody dead in my office. So I wouldn’t know anything about it. But I couldn’t sleep, I kept prowling around in the dark in here, and then I heard you people at the back door. I thought it was Roger.”

Parker said, “You soured a very sweet operation tonight, Doctor.”

Godden peered up at him again. “You’re Parker, aren’t you?” he said. “Ellen described you very well.”

“Time for you to describe your boy Roger,” Parker said. “I want to know what he looks like, where he lives, and what he’s going to do next.”

“How should I know what he’s going to do next?”

“You’re his analyst. Analyze him.”

Godden managed a nervous smile. “It’s not that simple,” he said.

Parker turned to Webb. “You two look the place over. In case this bird got the boodle after all.”

”I really didn’t.”

As Webb and Devers left the room, Parker sat down on the edge of the bed. “Roger St Cloud,” he said. “Tell me about him.”

Godden licked his lips, touched again the still-oozing wound in his forehead. He sighed. “Roger’s twenty-two, about six feet tall, very thin. Acne on his face, very bad. His father’s a banker in town.”

“Address?”

“Uhhhh, 123 Haines Avenue.”

“Will he go there?”

“I don’t know. He’s very erratic, very unreliable. You see how badly I misjudged him tonight. I thought I could control him, but I couldn’t. He’d never had power before, you see. And there he was, standing there with the rifle in his hand and three men in front of him, completely in his power. He had to use it, he had to try it out.”

Parker said, “I want to know if he’ll go home. What was he going to do with his share, you ever talk about that with him?”

“He had different plans at different times. He was going to go to New York, or Hollywood, or Europe, he didn’t know where.”

“But he was going to leave town.”

“It wasn’t real to him,” Godden said. “He didn’t know what he was going to do.”

“Does he have a car?”

“A motorcycle.”

“Did he have it at the office tonight?”

“No. I picked him up in my car, near his house.”

Parker sat back and tried to figure it. There were three suitcases full of cash. This Roger wasn’t going to load all that on a motorcycle. The way the timing worked, he couldn’t have gotten out of the office more than about fifteen minutes before Parker and the others arrived. And he was on foot then.

With three suitcases?

Parker said, “Does his father have a car?”

When Godden didn’t answer right away, Parker looked at him and saw an odd expression on his face, startled, absorbed, as though he was seeing something in the middle distance that he didn’t at all like.

Parker said, “What is it?”

His voice hushed, Godden said, “I think I know what Roger’s going to do.”

”The doc called it,” Devers said.

They were on Haines Avenue, and they’d pulled to the curb a block from the house where Godden had said Roger St Cloud lived. Down there, a block away, at just about the right location to be house number 123, there was all the light in the world, contrasting with the darkness here where Parker and Devers and Webb sat in the front seat of the station wagon and looked out the windshield at all the activity.

There was plenty of activity. At the intersection between here and the St Cloud house there was a patrolman in uniform, standing in the middle of the street, prepared to divert all traffic from continuing on down Haines Avenue. Beyond him three police cars—one black municipal police car and two black and white State Trooper cars—were stopped at angles across the street, their doors hanging open. Beyond that there was a large searchlight mounted on a truck bed, the light on and beamed directly at the house that had to be 123. Uniformed policemen moved in vague spurts on the opposite side of the street, and every once in a while there was the isolated sound of a shot.

It was nearly four o’clock in the morning now, but a crowd had already formed on the sidewalks on this side of the intersection, jostling each other to get a better look. From a few cars parked along the curb, and the number of people in robes, they were probably still mostly neighborhood residents, most likely including people evacuated from the houses right around the St Cloud place. If there were local all-night radio a lot more people would be crowding around the perimeter of the action by now, turning Roger St Cloud’s death throes into live television.

What Dr Godden had said was, “He’ll kill his father.” And when Parker asked him why, Godden said, “That’s the only reason he needs power, to free himself from his father. He’s used clothing, the motorcycle, sarcasm, all limited forms of power, all aimed at his father. Now he’s got real power. He’s tested it, and proved it works. He has three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, which is another kind of power, his father’s kind of power, and he’s going to want to go away and try using that power, too, but first he’s going to want to use the power on his father.

Parker said, “The rifle.”

“Yes. The first thing he’ll do is go home and shoot his father. May I use the phone?”

“No.”

“But there may still be a chance to warn him.”

“You mean tip him.”

“The father I’m talking about.”

“The son I’m talking about,” Parker told him, and then they tied Dr Godden and left his house and drove here, and a block away a searchlight borrowed from the air base was flooding white light onto the St Cloud house, policemen crouched behind automobile fenders were shooting at an upstairs window, and a hundred people were standing on the sidelines and watching.

Webb said, “That’s it.”

“Wait a while,” Parker said.

Devers said, “Let’s get out, move a little closer.”

“We can see from here,” Parker told him.

Webb added, “Without anybody seeing us.”

Someone was using a loudhailer. They could hear it plainly, but just as noise, not broken into words. But they didn’t have to hear the words to know what Roger St Cloud was being told.

Several windows had been lit on this block when they’d arrived, and now that the loudhailer had started up more windows were springing into yellow light. The law couldn’t have gotten here more than five minutes before Parker and the other two. That was better than the other way around.

They watched for three or four minutes. The loudhailer spoke, was silent a while, spoke again, was silent again. Policemen dodged from car fender to car fender, with no apparent destination. It seemed as though everybody was just milling around.

“They’ll think of tear gas in a little while,” Webb said.

Parker nodded. “It’ll be on its way already.”

In the meantime there was sporadic gunfire, with long seconds of silence. The law was using different kinds of gun, revolvers and rifles and at least one riot gun that twice made its monkey jabber, hemstitching a line of bullets across the front of the house.

St Cloud was firing back, too. A policeman went running, crouching, zigzagging across a bit of open space, and then crumpled and somersaulted and lay spread out on the ground. There was a hail of answering fire, and under its cover two cops ran out, grabbed the fallen one by the arms and dragged him back out of the line of fire.

After that there was another period of silence, with here and there a shot as though just to keep up appearances.

Webb said, “Why don’t he hit the light?”

“He doesn’t want to get away,” Devers said. “He wants to kill people.”

Webb frowned. “Why?”

The loudhailer spoke again. When it was still they could hear another sound, high-pitched, twanging, shrill. Devers whispered, “That’s him. Listen to him.”

“It don’t sound human,” said Webb. He looked past Devers at Parker. “Let’s get out of here. He’s got our cash, he’s surrounded by cops, it’s all up.”

Parker said, “Look.”

They looked. Snow was fluttering out of an upstairs window in the house, paper snow, cascading out, glide-glide-gliding to the ground like leaves, green leaves, pouring and billowing out of the window.

Webb said, “Our money.”

“It’s what Godden said,” Devers said, as though to himself. “He’s using power.”

“What the hell is he trying for?” Webb wanted to know. He was getting mad.

“He’s buying them off,” Devers told him. “He’s crazy as a loon in there, he’s using up all his power at once, killing people, buying them off.”

A suitcase had come flying out of the window, spilling the rest of its cash, bills flapping down, tossed by breezes. The people held back at the intersection by the police line didn’t know yet what it was, they just kept watching.

More money came out of the window, and then a second suitcase, open like the first, shooting out of the window as though catapulted, turning over and over in the air, spewing money out in gobs and flurries.

Then nothing happened. Nothing at all.

The second suitcase hit the ground not far from the first, the money fluttered slowly downward through the air, that was all.

The shrill voice started again, its words as indistinguishable as the loudhailer’s, but the voice that drowned it out was as clear as glass. It was a voice from the spectators, and what it shouted was: “That’s
money!”

Everthing seemed to stop. The shrill voice kept on, saying whatever it had to say, but nobody was listening any more. Everybody was tensed, everybody knew what was going to happen, everybody was waiting for whatever the signal was going to be.

The policemen across from the house were all looking down this way now, toward the crowd, and in the harsh light their faces looked pale and tense and worried.

Webb said, “They ‘re going to—”

The crowd broke.

One second they’d all been back, standing there, straining forward but staying outside the perimeter the police had set up for them. The next second they were all in motion, rushing forward across the intersection and into the bath of light, down on their hands and knees, clutching handfuls of money, swarming on the lawn, the sidewalk, the driveway.

“That’s our money,” Webb said. He glared through the windshield at the mass of people.

Devers pointed higher. “Look at him!”

He was a black comma, leaning out a second-storey window, and the vertical line was a rifle. He was firing into the crowd under him, plinking away, quickly but methodically.

There were screams from down below now, and some people ran back out of the light, but most of them stayed there, scrabbling for the bills, ignoring everything else.

Parker looked across the street, saw a uniformed cop there with a rifle to his shoulder. He was damn finicky, under the circumstances, taking his time, being extra sure of his aim. With all the noise, Parker couldn’t hear the sound of the shot, but he saw the rifle kick in the cop’s hands. He looked back and saw St Cloud drop into the people. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Right.” Webb put the Buick into gear, made a tight U-turn, and they headed away from there.

Devers, disappointment thick in his voice, said, “What now?”

“Godden’s office,” Parker said.

Webb leaned forward to glance at him past Devers, then looked straight again, saying, “Why?”

“Because two suitcases went out the window,” Parker said. “There were three. He was on foot and two was all he could manage. The third one is hidden around there somewhere handy.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Webb, and leaned on the accelerator.