Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  “Are you her new one?”

  I started to get angry. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Her new stud. Mister December.”

  “What’s the matter, fella? She didn’t like you hitting on her?”

  He swung around on his left elbow, so he was facing me. “Louise likes to be hit on, fella. Don’t you know that?”

  I stared at him.

  The bartender slapped his towel on the bar. He was an older man with a grey moustache and a heavily lined face.

  “Take it outside, mister,” he said to me. “Take it outside or I call the cops.”

  The guy in the tux laughed. “Forget about it, Pete. He’s not going to try anything.”

  But the bartender knew better. “Take it outside,” he said again.

  I swallowed the rest of my drink and left.

  ******

  I was working my way through the crowd, looking for Louise Pearson, when she found me. I heard a woman call my name, turned around, and saw her standing a few feet away, smiling.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling back.

  “Hi, yourself.”

  She was wearing a midnight-blue evening gown with a modest slit in the leg and a modest plunge at the breast. She looked terrific.

  “I thought I saw you go into the bar. In fact I was going to go in after you.”

  “I think we better steer clear of the bar.”

  She gave me a confused look. “Why?”

  “Not important. I don’t have anything new to report anyway. Go back to your party.”

  “I don’t feel like partying.” She stared at me for a second curiously, trying to make out what it was that was bothering me about the bar. Then she shrugged. “If you’re going to leave I’ll come with you. You can drive me home.”

  “You’re not going to like my car.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  Louise picked up a mink wrap in a cloakroom by the door. Together we walked out to the lot. As we made our way through the parked cars she passed her arm through mine.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Did somebody say something to you in the bar?”

  “Nope. It’s just been a long day, and I didn’t feel like a party.”

  “Neither did I,” she said with a dismal laugh. “I shouldn’t have come. I wouldn’t have come if Phil hadn’t insisted.”

  She got a peevish look on her face. “Phil always knows what’s best for other people. That’s why he’s in such good shape right now.”

  Her mood had obviously changed since the morning, back to the tensions of the previous day.

  “How’s he holding up?”

  “About the same,” she said indifferently.

  Louise eased her arm away from mine as if talking about her husband had made her feel self-conscious. She didn’t say anything for a while.

  “You must already know that we’re not the perfect couple. I mean you must have sensed that.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  When she saw the car she started to laugh. “God, you weren’t kidding about this thing.”

  “It’s old, but it’s game.”

  I opened the passenger side door and she slipped in. I got in on my side, started the engine, and headed up the access road to Madeira. Neither of us said a word as we drove back to Woodbine Lane.

  I pulled up in the driveway behind her husband’s Mercedes. Louise turned in the seat to face me.

  “Come in,” she said in her peremptory way. “We’ll have that drink.”

  “All right.”

  None of the downstairs lights was lit, but there was a lamp on upstairs in a front room. Louise glanced at it.

  “He should be asleep,” she said irritably. “He promised me he’d try to sleep.”

  “He’s worried,” I said.

  “He’s panicking,” she said with a trace of disgust.

  Louise unlocked the door and flipped on a hall light. “I’ll go up and put him to bed. You might as well make us some drinks. The lights in the living room are on the left and the liquor is in a red Chinese cabinet by the sideboard. Fix yourself whatever you want, and fix me a martini.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She went up the stairs to tend her husband.

  I walked down to the living room, found the lights and the liquor, and made a couple of drinks. I took them over to the red leather chairs by the fireplace, putting the martini down on an oval end table. The fire had almost burned out. I stirred it with a poker and got it going again, like the man of the house.

  Ten minutes passed before Louise came into the room. She had changed back to the outfit she’d been wearing that afternoon—white blouse and jeans. She looked just as good as she had in the evening gown. Maybe a little better because the denim suited her ripe body.

  “I think I’ve calmed him down,” she said, sitting across from me. She picked up the martini and took a sip, staring at me over the rim of the glass. “He won’t get much sleep, though. I don’t think he’ll really sleep until this is over.”

  I said, “You do know that there’s a strong chance it won’t work out.”

  “I’ve known that for years.”

  “I meant finding Ethan and Kirsty.”

  “I know what you meant,” Louise said drily. “By the way, Phil did remember that man, Talmadge. He was a patient at Rollman’s when Phil did his residency there in ‘75. Phil couldn’t remember anything specific about the case though.”

  “I looked into it this afternoon. Talmadge is dangerous.”

  She looked alarmed. “You mean dangerous to Phil?”

  “To the children.”

  “Christ, I pray it doesn’t come to that,” she said. “I’m half hoping that they’re just doing this to make Phil and me sweat.”

  “Why would they do that to you?”

  “Because they don’t like me very much,” she said with an unhappy smile. “Neither one has ever really forgiven me for trying to play Mom after Estelle died. I don’t really blame them, given the circumstances.”

  But her voice sounded resentful. She heard it herself and made a contrite face. “You didn’t bargain on a family like this one, did you, Stoner? We must look like lunatics to you.”

  “You have problems,” I said.

  “It’s worse than that, and you know it. We’ve screwed it all up, Phil and I.” Her beautiful face filled with disgust, and she took a quick drink to cover her revulsion. “This thing has sent us back thirteen years. Back to a place where I didn’t want to go. Back to feelings I don’t want to relive.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “You mean you want to hear more Pearson craziness?”

  “I want to hear about you.”

  She lowered the martini glass down and ran a finger around the edge, making it sing.

  “All right,” she said after a time. “I feel like talking. Just don’t analyze, okay? I’ve had my fill of that for one lifetime.”

  Louise set the glass down at her feet. “I wasn’t what you would call inexperienced when I met Philip. I’d been married before—to the wrong man. Frank was a beauty but he didn’t believe in work. At least, he didn’t believe that he should have to work. He wasn’t so fussy when it came to my time. After the divorce I started looking for someone else. Someone with a different set of priorities. Someone I could build a new life with. This kind of life.”

  She glanced approvingly around the handsome, genteel room.

  “Philip seemed like the one. He came from a wealthy family. He had a promising career. He could be sweet and smart and sensitive, even if he did sometimes act as if he owned the keys to everyone else’s psyche. And he was terribly unhappy with his marriage and talking divorce. He’d already gone through several affairs when we met. On the surface he looked like the perfect catch.”

  She sat back in the chair with a sigh. “But Phil wasn’t the strong, competent, sensitive guru he pretended to be. That part of his personality was designed to impress his clients fo
r one hour a week. The rest of him, the part I had to learn to live with, was still stuck in childhood like everybody else.”

  Her face bunched up, as if she didn’t like the carping sound of her voice. “Oh, hell, that’s not fair. It’s not Phil’s fault that he’s built the way he is. The past’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just there, like the moon and the stars. Phil’s good, rich family wasn’t a very happy one, that’s all. You’ve met Cora. She’s a prissy, spoiled woman, but she can be dealt with. At least, I can deal with her. It was her husband, Phil’s father, Arthur, who was the real joker.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “For years. Art was a weak, wifty drunk. He keeled over when Phil was just a teenager. But not before leaving his mark on Phil.”

  “His mark?”

  Louise looked over at the fire. “I’m not a hundred percent positive of this. I mean nobody’s ever said it outright, but I’m reasonably sure that Phil was abused by his father.”

  She shuddered down her spine. “Pretty awful, huh?”

  “It happens,” I said. “Even in good families.”

  “I’m sure it does. But when you marry someone who’s hiding that sort of thing in his past . . . it has an effect. Living with a man like Phil—a man with an overwhelming need to dominate in small matters and to be constantly reassured about the important ones—can wear you down, especially if you’re not well equipped to handle your own needs. I guess I’m strong enough to take it. At least, everyone has automatically made that assumption about me. But his first wife, Estelle, wasn’t.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “I feel like I did through talking to Phil and the kids, through living the same kind of life. Poor Estelle, she tried to accommodate Phil—dropping out of school, abandoning her career before it even got started, having children she probably didn’t want, nurturing Phil when he needed nurturing, eating his all-knowing psychiatrist’s crap when he didn’t. After ten years of that she finally broke apart.”

  She made it sound as if Pearson had caused the woman’s breakdown. “Estelle had emotional troubles all her life, didn’t she?”

  “That’s what Dr. Shelley Sacks would have us believe. But Phil was his friend, too, you know.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning maybe there was a little ex post facto rationalization there, to spare Phil some guilt. I don’t know. I know it hasn’t spared me any. You see Phil and I had just started our affair when . . .”

  Her face reddened, and she looked away from me.

  “When Estelle died.” I said it for her.

  She nodded, her face still turned. “She didn’t know, of course. She was too far gone by then to care, anyway. About me, or any of the others that had preceded me. The nurses and secretaries. But I knew. I was actually with Phil when he heard that her body had been found.”

  She shuddered again. “For a year or so after that we really did need each after. Then it was all guilt. We married to assuage the guilt. We’ve stayed together to hide it.”

  Louise turned back to me. “And now you know another one of our little secrets. I’ve tried to be a good wife, a good stepmother. I got what I wanted, didn’t I? All this.” She waved her hand around the room, then dropped it in her lap. “I have affairs. He has his work. You know the funny thing is he’s extremely good at his job—he has an instinct about other people’s weaknesses. It gives him the chance to be strong, to dominate.” She made a muscle and laughed ironically. “It isn’t like that upstairs.”

  She hadn’t mentioned the children. So I did. “His concern for Ethan and Kirsty seems genuine.”

  She nodded. “It is. Ethan wasn’t his fault. He lost him to Estelle when she died. It was her revenge on him, I think. But Kirsty . . . God, how he’s tried to make amends to her.”

  “Amends for what?”

  She shook her head. “Enough family history.”

  Leaning forward she kissed me softly on the mouth. I started to draw her to me, but she pulled away. She put a finger to my lips and ran it slowly down to my chin.

  “I like you,” she whispered. “After this is over we’ll have to do something about that. Until then . . . ”

  She came close again. “Keep this in mind.”

  She kissed me again passionately. Then she got up and walked out of the room, leaving me and the fire slowly burning down.

  16

  IT WAS a long drive back to the apartment on Ohio Avenue. I tried not to think about Louise. But it was hopeless. For better or worse she was part of it for me now—part of the strange legacy of the Pearson case. The case I wasn’t going to make personal.

  It was past twelve when I got to Ohio Avenue. As I was getting out of the car I remembered the envelope Sid had left for me, Estelle Pearson’s last remains. I picked it up off the backseat and took it inside, tossing it on the couch in the living room.

  The light on my answering machine was lit, but I didn’t play the messages back. I was too tired for business. I was too tired to think about anything. I sat on the couch, with poor Estelle sitting there beside me, and dreamed about the other Mrs. Pearson—the one who’d never quite been able to take her place.

  ******

  Sometime during the night I must have wandered into the bedroom, because that’s where I found myself when the telephone woke me. It was still dark outside, and it had turned very cold. Shivering, I fumbled for the receiver on the nightstand.

  “Stoner?” a half-familiar voice said. “It’s Al Foster.”

  “Yeah, Al,” I said groggily.

  “We’ve got something for you.”

  I struggled to sit up. I was still wearing my clothes—or trapped in them. My shirttail was wrapped in the bedding and I had to wrench it loose to straighten up. I glanced at the clock, which was showing 6:15.

  “You listening, Harry?” Al said.

  “I’m here, for chrissake. What?”

  “We found the car—the grey Volare. The Miamitown police came across it about fifteen minutes ago. It was parked on an embankment of the Miami River.”

  It took me a second to remember that Estelle Pearson’s body had been found in the Miami River. It took me another second to realize that Al hadn’t mentioned Kirsty and Ethan, that he’d only mentioned the car.

  “What about the Pearson children?” I asked.

  Al fetched a sigh that sent a chill down my back.

  “There’s some indication they may have run into trouble.”

  “What indication?”

  “Harry, I’m just relaying what I was told when this was called in a few minutes ago. If you want details you’re going to have to go out there yourself and talk to the examining officers.”

  He gave me an address on Miamitown Road and the name of a cop—Sergeant Larry Parker. Before hanging up I asked whether the Pearsons had been notified.

  “I don’t know what the Miamitown cops have done,” Al said. “But you’re the only person we’ve contacted.”

  “Keep it that way,” I told him. “At least until after I’ve had a chance to talk to Parker.”

  “It’s your case,” he said.

  ******

  It took me about thirty minutes to drive to Miamitown on the western side of Hamilton County near the Indiana line. It really wasn’t much of a town—just a flat stretch of road dotted with Quonset bars, brick storefronts, and one squat diamond-shaped municipal building with a flagpole and a plugged howitzer arranged in front of it like a place setting.

  There was enough light growing in the sky to backlight the pines on top of the tall forested ridge east of town. I knew that the Great Miami ran beneath the ridge, in a steep, overgrown embankment that was still sunk in darkness. The flashing squad car lights led me to the right spot, a cluster of them blinking like tiny blue Christmas ornaments netted in the pines. I had to turn onto a gravel access road to get to where the cops were parked, past a tin-roofed bait shop, down a short bumpy slope to a dirt clearing above the river.

  The Volare was at the
back of the clearing—its front wheel resting on some rocks beyond the dirt, where the hill began its slide to the embankment. The car canted down slightly as if someone had parked it there in a rush. Two Miamitown police cruisers were parked on either side of it, and a third cop cruiser was parked behind. I pulled in next to the third cruiser and got out.

  Even in the darkness I could see pale foot trails leading away from the clearing, down the hillside to the river. The packed dirt glistened in the half light like a length of bone. A couple of officers with flashlights were making their ways along the trails. The dirt must have been slippery, because the flashlight beams bounced and whirled crazily in the dark—lighting tree trunks, bits of scrap iron, the red staring eyes of a possum. I could hear the river beneath the clearing, coursing over rocks and fallen limbs, running fast and deep with winter snow.

  A third cop, a tall stocky man wearing a billed cap and gold patches on his down coat, was standing at the lip of the hill, directing the other two down the trails. He’d stopped to watch me when I got out of the car. After a time he walked over to where I was standing.

  “Unless you’ve got a reason to be here,” he said, “you’d best leave.”

  He had a deep voice—a tough voice. But some of its effect was lost to the bitter cold. He shivered as he stood there, shifting from foot to foot like a man holding his water.

  “My name’s Stoner,” I said to him. “I’m a P.I. Al Foster of the CPD just called about the Volare. The car is part of a missing persons case I’m working on.”

  “I thought the name was Pearson,” the man said suspiciously. “That’s the name we got on the APB.”

  “That’s the name of the family I’m working for. You can get in touch with Mrs. Pearson if you want to check me out.”

  “Already talked to her,” the man said, shifting feet.

  “Christ,” I said to myself. To the cop, I said, “Exactly what did you tell her?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Better see some ID first.” He glanced over at the squad car, as if it were a photo of home. “Maybe we should do it inside, where it’s light.”