Another reporter’s voice asked, “Doctor, did your wife have a history of heart disease?”
“Not at all.” Dr. Madchen could be seen to be overcome for just a moment as he lowered his head, dabbed the handkerchief against his eyes, and clung hard to the podium with his other hand. Then he took a deep breath, nodded out at the reporters, and said, “I was not my wife’s primary physician, of course. I’ve been on the phone with her regular doctor, and he did tell me things I hadn’t known. That he had counseled Ellen about her eating habits, for instance, and the lack of exercise in her life. I’d been aware of all that, but I had never— Ellen was so healthy, and then all at once—” And he lowered his head again.
Parker’s burger and fries arrived. As he ate and watched the press conference, he remembered what the good doctor had said, that time in his car when Parker and Dalesia had told him to stay away from Jake. “If this thing you two are doing doesn’t happen, I’m going to die. I can’t live. You’re my last hope.”
“Yes, the police phoned me at seven thirty this morning,” the doctor was saying. “They wanted to tell me to stay at home, because they were coming to interview me. They told me about poor Jake, but not at that time about those . . . things he was saying. I said I’d wait at home for them, and I went to tell Ellen, and that’s when I . . . I found her.”
Parker ate his lunch. As soon as Dr. Madchen had been told, in that phone call, that Jake had been picked up, he’d known, no matter whether the robbery worked out or not, there would be nothing in it for him. As he’d said, in that case, somebody was going to die. He’d thought he would be that somebody, but when it came down to it, he’d found a substitute.
Parker ordered coffee, and when he looked back at the screen, a commercial was ending, to be replaced by a black-and-white drawing of a head shot, faced forward, the kind of thing done by police artists based on the memory of eyewitnesses. Like all such drawings, the guy looked too mean to be true, glaring out at the television audience. Over the picture, a woman’s voice was saying, “One police officer in our area does seem to have encountered at least one of the robbers shortly before the crime took place.”
The television picture cut now to two women seated at a table, with a bank of television screens on a wall behind them, showing an array of news and sports scenes. The woman on the left, about forty, was metallically pretty, with ironed-on blonde hair, a lemon- yellow sports jacket, and pale yellow blouse. The woman on the right was the cop who’d braced Parker.
The first one made the introductions: “I have with me now Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa of Massachusetts CID, who seems to have tied together some of the loose ends in this case. Welcome, Detective.”
“Thank you.” Detective Reversa smiled, happy to be there, but showed she wasn’t going to be overly impressed by her moment of fame.
“Detective Reversa, your encounter with the alleged robber began with your investigation of what seemed to be a very different case, did it not?”
“Yes, Sue. I was assigned to investigate the shooting of Jake Beckham. In a case like that, where there doesn’t seem to be any reason for what happened, you want to talk to as many of the victim’s acquaintances as possible, and one of those was Elaine Langen.”
“The most astonishing character in the whole event,” the other woman said, with a big happy smile. “You could have had no idea, when you first went to interview Elaine Langen, that she was in the middle of a scheme to rob her own husband’s bank.”
“No,” Reversa said, with her own little smile, “that one was not going to occur to me. Nor that she was the one, in fact, who’d shot Mr. Beckham, who it turned out was a former lover of hers.”
“Elaine Langen’s gun had gone missing.”
“Yes, Sue, that was the first hint that the situation might not be as clear-cut as it seemed. And a car outside the house when I arrived she said belonged to a landscape designer. When I later saw that same car—”
“Which turned out to be stolen.”
“Yes, from New Jersey, but I didn’t know that then, I don’t think it had been reported yet. But since, by that time, I had the feeling there was something wrong with Mrs. Langen, although I didn’t yet know what, when I saw that landscape designer’s car at another time, I decided to take a look at him.”
The other woman chortled over this. “Some landscape designer, eh?” Then, looking at the camera, she said, “This is Detective Reversa’s memory of that landscape designer,” and the mug shot drawing came on again.
They think that’s me, Parker thought, and studied it, as the interviewer’s voice, over the picture, said, “This is almost certainly one of the robbers.”
An 800 number appeared, superimposed over the drawing. “If you see this man, phone this number. Rutherford Combined Savings has posted a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for the capture and conviction of this man and any other member of the gang, and the recovery of the nearly two million, two hundred thousand dollars stolen in the robbery.”
Parker looked up and down the counter. Half a dozen other people were gazing at the television set. None of them looked to be ready to go off and make a phone call. It seemed to him, if you told one of those people, “This picture is that guy. See the cheekbones? See the shape of the forehead?” they’d say, “Oh, yeah!” But if it wasn’t pointed out, they’d just go on eating lunch.
The screen showed the two women again. The interviewer said, “Detective Reversa, what was the result of your meeting with this man?”
“I obtained an identification, in the form of a New York State driver’s license, in the name of John B. Allen.” She spelled it.
The interviewer nodded, and produced another smile. “Detective, would you like to meet up with John B. Allen again?”
Reversa laughed. “If I had the appropriate backup.”
“Check,” Parker said.
He paid and started for the door, then stopped. Outside, off to the right, a police car was stopped behind the Dodge. Parker studied the newspapers in the rack beside the entrance, and the police car moved away to the right and stopped again, at the end of the lot, facing the road.
John B. Allen. One computer talks to another, and it doesn’t take long. He’d been moving through the roadblocks just ahead of the news. John B. Allen is wanted for robbery over here. John B. Allen rented a car over there. Let’s find the car, and wait for Allen to come back to it.
That was the only identification he had on him. He had cash, but nothing else. He couldn’t drive the Dodge away from here. He couldn’t walk away from the diner onto a rural road past those cops, because they’d want to have a word with him.
The diner’s parking area was across the front and both sides. The Dodge and the cops were to the right. Parker stepped out the door and turned left, walking as though to his car. When he made it around the corner of the diner and out of sight of the cops waiting for him, he looked ahead and saw that behind the diner was a patch of weedy ground, and then scrub trees like the ones McWhitney had hoped to hide his pickup in among, and then a slope upward into more serious woods, some of them already rich with fall’s yellows and reds.