“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.”
4
”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.
