So it was Roger and Ralph. Dr Godden had gone through the list of his patients, had sounded a few of them out very gently and obliquely, and it had come down at last to Roger and Ralph.
Roger had been easy to convince; perhaps, from the sound of last night’s dream, he’d been too easy. But if Roger had any hidden doubts or apprehensions, Dr Godden prided himself he’d be able to contain them at least until the night’s work was over. Ralph, burly and cumbersome and self-doubting, had taken longer to persuade, but in the end his trust for Dr Godden had swung it, and now he was committed without question.
The same basic argument had been used on both of them; it would be therapy. To Ralph: “Here’s a chance to prove you are capable after all. With this accomplishment behind you, there’s no telling how much we’ll be able to unlock, how much more of you we’ll be able to free.” And to Roger: “You’ll never find a better opportunity to express all your independence and revolt at once. Do this, act out all your aggressions and resentments in this one action, do it successfully, and you’ll be well on your way to the independence we both know you need for self-fulfillment.”
Dr Godden’s own reasons were more mundane; he needed money. With a rapacious ex-wife bleeding him white for alimony and child support payments, with a second wife who didn’t know the meaning of the word economy, and with Mary Beth—a patient now become mistress—becoming more expensive every month, Dr Godden had been teetering at the brink of financial chaos for over a year now. And to top it off this man Nolan had reappeared, demanding money to keep his mouth shut, threatening to open up that business in New York again, to let the local medical society know his credentials weren’t entirely in order.
Fred Godden never intended to get into trouble or to break the law, things just happened around him. Like California, where he’d started out and where the brother-in-law of a patient had gotten him involved in that abortion business. He himself had performed no abortions, he’d only served as a middleman, but when that one girl died the investigation dragged in a lot of wriggling fish, Dr Fred Godden among them. The authorities had never quite accepted the idea that the dead girl—and three others they’d found—had all coincidentally come to him as psychiatric patients shortly before their abortions, but they hadn’t been able to prove anything. Still, it had seemed wisest to leave California, particularly since his first wife had chosen the blow-up as an excuse to divorce him, just as though it hadn’t been her free-spending that had driven him into the racket in the first place.
In New York he had developed a new practice and a new wife, but his taste in women seemed doomed not to change, and wife number two spent just as frantically as had wife number one, so when one of his patients came up with the drug suggestion he was ready for it.
How did they know, that’s what bothered him, how did these people always know he’d be open to their suggestions, weak enough to agree, to lend his respectable facade to their schemes. He’d studied his face in the bathroom mirror more than once, and as far as he could see he didn’t look shady. And he’d heard tape recordings of his voice; and he didn’t sound shady. So how did they know?
They knew, that’s all. As a doctor, he could get hold of drugs, especially the new chemicals, the psychedelics. As a doctor specializing in psychoanalysis, his cover was perfect for the people who needed someone to act as a source of supply and a base for distribution. And if one of the shuffling bearded oddballs who’d come to him for the yellow capsules hadn’t turned out to be a policeman, one of the New York City Police Department undercover narcotics men, he might still be there, in New York City, with the lucrative practice and the even more lucrative sideline, instead of here in this sinkhole.
He’d gotten out of it in New York, too, though he’d spent nine days in jail, in the Tombs, and had come out of it stripped of his credentials and legal permission to operate either as a doctor or an analyst. But how else could he made a living? That was why he’d moved up to this godforsaken area, where a man’s bona fides were unlikely to be very closely scrutinized, but where the number of patients—and their ability to pay—was depressingly low.
And then Nolan had showed up. One of the buyers back in New York, Nolan had known everything about Dr Godden’s connection with the gang, and now here he was in Monequois, demanding money as the price of his silence. How Nolan had found him Dr Godden didn’t know, any more than he had known at first where he could possibly find the money to pay him.
But hard on the heels of Nolan had come the sudden revelation from Ellen Fusco, and all at once it had seemed to Dr Godden that there was a way out after all, that he could see daylight at the end of the tunnel.
What he would do after tonight he himself wasn’t entirely sure. Would he merely pay off Nolan and all his outstanding debts, then tuck the rest away for the next crisis? Or would he pack his bags and leave the whole mess, start again somewhere else under another name, leave wives and children and mistresses and blackmailer and all? If that was what he wanted, there’d be money enough. Ralph and Roger, not having been told the true scope of the affair, were content to be receiving ten thousand dollars each. That meant almost the whole thing for Dr Godden, estimated by Ellen Fusco at four hundred thousand dollars.
Four hundred thousand dollars. To tackle people like Parker and Fusco and Devers and the others Ellen had told him about, to risk the precarious balance he now had, to take a chance on using these two poor incompetents, it was all worth it for four hundred thousand dollars.
He had thought about it often. He well knew the danger in seeking the Holy Grail, he’d seen it frequently enough in his patients. “If only X happens, everything will be all right” The belief in the easy one-shot panacea more frequently led to disaster than salvation. So he couldn’t allow himself to think of it in all-encompassing terms. Even with the four hundred thousand in his hands, he would still be Fred Godden, Dr Fred Godden, with a shady past and a penny-ante practice, with a wife and an ex-wife and a mistress and a certain bleak awareness of his own tendency toward erratic behavior when it came to women, and with a history of bad errors of judgment leading him into trouble. Nothing would change after tonight except his financial status. He would be wealthy, but he would still be the same man.
Knowing that, being sure not to forget it, he had studied the proposition, the possibilities, the dangers, the rewards, and at last he had made up his mind. An opportunity like this wouldn’t be coming his way twice. He’d be a fool to let this one slip by. Tonight.
Dr Godden looked at Roger and Ralph. His mob. They would have to do.
He took a deep breath, “I taped Mrs Fusco’s session just now,” he said. “She’s given us their plans from beginning to end. We’ll listen to them first, and then go over our own plans once more.”
Ralph and Roger looked alert, Dr Godden pressed the switch and the voice of Ellen Fusco, faintly metallic, began once more to drone.
Part Three
1
The Phone rang. Parker awoke at once, put the receiver to his ear, and the operator said, “Eleven o’clock, Mr Lynch.”
“Thank you.” It was Wednesday. The heist was tonight.
Parker got out of bed and padded nude to the bathroom. He showered and shaved, then dressed in black rubber-soled oxford shoes, black trousers, white shirt open at the collar. He left the room, locked it after him, and went across the highway to the diner where he’d had breakfast every day of his stay here. He knew now what was safe to order and what was not.
The waitress knew him, too. She came over smiling when he sat down, saying, “Good morning, Mr Lynch. Getting a late start this morning.”
“Leaving today,” he said. He would have preferred a waitress who minded her own business, but this was a cheery gregarious stocky woman and there was nothing to be done about it. Rather than have her remember him specifically as the customer who’d been surly to her, he’d maintained a small conversation with her every day, allowing himself to be just another salesman passing through, spen
ding a couple of weeks at the motel across the way. He would be much less specific in her mind then, and if the law did come around in a day or two her description of him would be that much more vague.
Now, “Sorry to lose you,” she said. “What’ll it be this morning?”
He ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice, black coffee, then sat and looked out the window at the trucks going by on the highway. He ate his food when it came, left an ordinary tip, paid the cashier at the door, and walked back across the road to the motel.
He went into the motel office and the woman at the desk looked at him brightly. “Yes, sir?”
“I’m checking out.”
“Yes, sir. What room number, please?”
“Eleven.”
“Do you have your key?”
“I’ll leave it in the room. My luggage is still there.”
“Very good.”
She opened a file drawer and got out his bill. “Any charges this morning? Phone calls, anything like that?” “No.”
“Very good.”
She slid the bill across the counter to him. One hundred forty dollars. He took out his wallet, began to slide some of Norman Berridge’s bills on to the desk.
“Cash?” she said in surprise.
This was a bad moment, and he knew it, but there was no way around it. To skip out on the bill would have the cops looking for him a day early. Have them looking for Devers’ Pontiac, which had been here often enough to be known in the last three weeks. But he couldn’t carry credit cards or a checkbook, at least not legitimately, and it was bad business to kite checks in the neighborhood of a score. Got the law on your trail too soon and too easy. So he was going to have to pay this motel bill, and the only way to do it was with cash.
He shrugged at the woman’s surprise, therefore, and said, “That’s what the company accountant says we have to do from now on. It’s something to do with taxes. I liked it better the old way. Hand over an American Express card and that’s it.”
“You’ll want a receipt,” she said.
“It’s the only way I get reimbursed,” he said. She stamped the bill paid, gave it to him, and scooped the bills off the desk. “Thank you for staying with us, sir. Do come again.”
Parker went back outside. It was a good day, sunny but with a bite in the air. He walked down the row to his unit and unlocked the door. The cleaning girl’s cart was two doors farther along. He went inside, left the door open, and packed his one suitcase, leaving out only a long-sleeve high-neck black pullover sweater, a dark gray sport jacket and a quiet blue-and-black tie. He put the tie in the side pocket of the sport jacket, set the closed suitcase on the floor and lay down on the bed with his eyes closed to wait.
He sensed when the light changed, meaning there was someone standing in the doorway. He opened his eyes and it was the cleaning girl. “I’ll be out of here by twelve-thirty,” he said, and she went away.
It was quarter past twelve when he heard the tires grate on gravel in front of his room. He sat up, saw the Pontiac coming to a stop out there, and got off the bed again.
It was Devers, on his lunch hour. He got out of the car as Parker stepped out into the sunlight, carrying his suitcase in his right hand, his sport jacket and sweater in his left.
Devers said, “You want to drive?”
“Why?”
Devers laughed and shook his head. “I’ll tell you the truth, it’s because I’m a nervous wreck. I’m really shaky today.”
Parker nodded. “I’ll drive,” he said. He put his gear in the back seat and got behind the wheel as Devers trotted around and came in on the passenger side.
Devers had left the engine running. Parker put it in reverse, backed it around in a tight half-circle, switched into drive and joined the thin stream of westbound traffic on the highway.
Devers said, “You get used to it after a while?”
“After a while,” Parker agreed. “Some guys always get flutters before. Some always get them after.”
“When do you get yours?”
“I don’t.”
He wasn’t boasting, it was the truth. The situation they were going into tonight would only make him colder and colder, harder and harder, surer and surer. He knew everything was organized, he knew the way it was supposed to come off, the step-by-step working out of the prepared script, and he was like a cold-blooded stage manager on opening night; no jitters, just a hard determination that everything would happen the way it was supposed to happen. He knew that the others, the actors, were all atremble, but that wasn’t for him. Stage managers don’t tremble.
Not even when something goes wrong. That was what he was there for tonight, just as much as his pre-planned actions. He was there also to be ready for the unexpected, to improvise if anything went wrong, to keep the production safe and moving no matter what. So he couldn’t get the flutters before or during, and it didn’t make any sense to get them after. So he just didn’t get the flutters.
Devers wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Boy, I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how you go about getting used to something like this.”
“You keep doing it,” Parker told him.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Just this side of North Bangor there was a white clapboard house with a sign hanging from a tree out front reading: TOURISTS. Behind the house were half a dozen cabins, miniature versions of the house. A black Buick station wagon was parked next to one of the cabins. Devers gestured a thumb at it as they drove by, saying, “They haven’t left yet.”
“They’ll be along,” Parker said.
“They” were the other three men, Jake Kengle and Philly Webb and Bill Stockton, all of whom had come into town on Monday, had listened to the outline of the caper, and had elected to be dealt in. The station wagon was Webb’s, and the only constant about it was its brand; it never stopped being a Buick. But it hadn’t been black more than a week or two, and would be some color other than black by the end of this week. And the Maryland license plates it sported now were only one of the many sets it had known in the past and would know in the future. Webb prided himself out loud on having attained the untraceable car, but Parker thought it likelier that Webb just liked to have something to play with.
He took the right turn before Monequois that bypassed the town and went directly out to the air base. He stopped before the main gate and Devers said, “See you tonight.”
“Right.”
Devers climbed out and walked away toward the gate. Parker turned the car toward Monequois.
He reached the Fusco house at one o’clock, and put the car in place beside the house. The day was beginning to warm up a little, but it wouldn’t get much above seventy before starting back down again two or three hours from now.
Parker went into the house. Fusco was seated at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. He called, “I’m babysitting. Ellen’s off to see her shrink. Said she’ll be back a little after two.”
Parker didn’t care where she was or when she’d be back. He said, “Did you get the coats?”
“In the bedroom closet.”
“Good.”
Parker left the living-room and went down the short hall to the master bedroom. It was neat and plain and functional and impersonal, like the rest of the house. It was Ellen Fusco’s room, and either she or he had managed to create a room that gave no sign of occupancy at all. The dresser top was bare, there was no clothing on the chair beside the bed, the nightstands held neat metallic lamps and clean ashtrays, the bed was anonymously and neatly made.
There were two closets. The one Parker opened first was full of the woman’s clothing, neat and rigid. The other one was Devers’, and it seemed sloppy by comparison, even though the clothing was all on hangers. But the shoes on the floor were not lined up in pairs, and the shelf was cluttered with stray objects.
In Devers’ closet were the coats. Tunics, really, like the white pullover tunics worn by some barbers and dentists. But thes
e weren’t white, they were glistening metallic gold, as bright as the gold foil around a chocolate candy, seeming to glitter and sparkle inside the closet with their own light. They had long sleeves, high hard collars and elastic wrists. They looked as though they should be worn by a team of Cossack acrobats on television.
Parker took one of the tunics out, looked at it in the light, nodded in satisfaction and put it back again. It had been worth Fusco’s trip to New York City, to a costume rental place there. These tunics had the right look to them.
He went back to the living-room. In the kitchen, Fusco was now rinsing out his cereal bowl. Parker called to him, “They look good.”
Fusco shut the water off. “You like them? I had to try three places.” He dried his hands on a dish towel and came into the living room. “You should see what they tried to give me.”
Parker sat down on the sofa. “You got everything of yours cleaned out of here?”
“Sure,” Fusco said. “There wasn’t that much. I sent off a package Railway Express this morning.” He’d checked out of his hotel Sunday morning, had been sleeping on the sofa here since then, except for last night when he’d slept at a hotel in New York.
“To an address?” Parker asked him.
“To Manhattan. To be picked up.”
“Good.”
“You want coffee? Something to drink?”
“Nothing.”
Parker shut his eyes. He knew most people tended to get jumpy the day of a score, knew that jumpy people like to talk. He didn’t want to be talked to, and the easiest way to avoid it was by keeping his eyes shut. People leave you alone if you have your eyes shut, even if they know you’re awake.
He sat there like that, waiting, not thinking about much of anything, giving stray thoughts to Puerto Rico and Claire, until Fusco said, “Here’s the boys.” Then he opened his eyes and got to his feet.
The station wagon was parked out front. Three men were walking toward the house, Jake Kengle in the lead. Behind him was Bill Stockton, a tall skinny guy with black hair and a loose-limbed, stooped way of walking. Bringing up the rear was Philly Webb, who owned the station wagon and who would be driving tonight. He was short, chunky, olive-complexioned, with the chest and arms of a weightlifter, giving him a vaguely apelike look.
The Green Eagle Score p-10 Page 9