'No name,' Parker told her. 'They'll know who it's from.'
'It has to have a name,' she said.
He leaned towards her, making the effort to be patient and friendly, and winked. 'It's a kind of gag,' he said.
'Oh.' She smiled. 'Very well.'
He paid for the telegram, and then went out and across the terminal to the restaurant. He had a meal that was too late to he called lunch, too early to be called dinner. He sat a while over his second cup of coffee, and then went out and wandered around the terminal awhile. At ten minutes to six he went and sat on the little stool in the phone booth.
She didn't call till five after the hour. Parker picked the receiver up on the first ring, and put it to his ear, but he didn't say anything. There was silence a few seconds, and then a voice said, hesitantly, 'Hello?'
He recognized her. He said, 'Yeah, it's me.'
'Oh,' she said. 'There you are.'
'You ready to leave that town?'
'No kidding.'
'Buy two tickets on the train to Omaha. Be sure you buy two.'
'And you'll reimburse me, won't you?'
'Don't worry about it. Take the next train down here. One leaves here at six-twenty, it gets here quarter to seven.'
'I'm not even packed yet.'
'So pack. Remember, buy two tickets.'
'I remember.'
He hung up, and left the phone booth, and waited. At twenty to seven he got his suitcase from the locker where he'd stashed it, and at quarter to she came up the ramp from the tracks and he fell in beside her.
She said, 'Don't tell me, let me guess. We came in together, right?'
'Right.'
'Together all the way, right?'
'Right.'
'So now what? Miami?'
'Tomorrow.'
'What about tonight?'
'I got us a hotel room.'
'Another hotel room,' she said.
'This one's different,' he said. He took her arm.
EIGHT
THERE were things Parker couldn't know, things that made the whole structure break apart.
The suicide note. It was a fine suicide note, except it wasn't accurate. When the law went to Dr. Rayborn, he denied everything for a while, and when he finally did break down he said that what he'd helped Younger cover up was a suicide, not a murder. Joseph Shardin had hanged himself, Rayborn said, and he wouldn't change the story.
Regan was running the investigation this time, the whole thing was his, and he wasn't about to let go. It took time, but he got a court order to have Joseph Shardin dug up, and when an autopsy was done the finding was that Shardin had committed suicide after all, but that he had, at some recent time prior to the suicide, been severely tortured.
If the Shardin murder wasn't a murder, but was a suicide, then the Younger suicide wasn't a suicide, but was a murder.
And there were other things. A shovel in Younger's office, just an ordinary shovel. But what was it doing there? Regan took to prowling around the Shardin house, and after a while he noticed where a part of the cellar had been dug up and filled in again, and when he had it dug up again there was a body in there, and it turned out to be the teenager from next door, a nineteen-year-old boy who'd supposedly left a note and gone away on a trip a few days before.
It began to seem to Regan that Charles Willis was the key to the whole thing. But Willis was gone, and so was the Samuels woman. Still, Regan wanted to talk to them.
There were fingerprints in the hotel room Willis had occupied his first night that matched up with fingerprints in the Shardin house, where Willis had lived the rest of his stay in town. It took a while to get the fingerprints and match them up, but when Regan had two good ones he sent them off to Washington to see what he could find out about Charles Willis.
Everything would have worked fine if Younger really had killed Joe Sheer, but he hadn't, and from that it just kept rolling and rolling, and finished with an answer from Washington, saying the man called Charles Willis was really Ronald Casper, wanted in California for jail-break and murder. Mug shots followed, but Parker had had
