Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  And warm, I said to myself.

  I followed him to the cruiser and got in on the passenger side. The man started the engine and flipped on the heater and the overhead light. I could see his name tag for the first time. It read “L. Parker.”

  I gave Parker my ID. He studied it for a moment then handed it back, flipping off the courtesy light with his other hand.

  “We found the car about a hour ago,” he said, nodding at the Plymouth. “One of the men was making a routine run down Miamitown when he saw headlights here in the hollow.”

  “The headlights were left on?”

  “A pretty good time, too,” the cop said. “‘Cause when he tried to start the car up she wouldn’t turn over.”

  “I take it the keys were in the car.”

  He nodded. “And these.”

  He reached into the backseat and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag with a pair of stained panties in it. I couldn’t tell in the darkness, but the stains looked like blood.

  My heart sank. “These were in the Plymouth?”

  “On the floor in the back. The panties got a tag in them from a Chicago store—Milady’s.”

  “The missing girl went to school in Chicago.”

  “That’s what the wife said.” He ducked his head guiltily. “She seemed like a nice woman. I hated like hell to break this news to her.”

  I hated it like hell, too. I could scarcely imagine how Phil Pearson had reacted to the news.

  “Have you dusted the car for prints?” I asked Parker.

  “We’re waiting for the State Patrol to send down a criminalistics team. Called it in a goddamn hour ago.” He shrugged. “But that’s State for you.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shaking one out and sticking it in his mouth in a single motion. He offered the pack to me and I said no.

  “I guess I should quit,” he said, flipping open a silver Zippo and lighting up.

  I stared through the windshield at the twisting flashlight beams, shooting up from below the lip of the hill. In the distance the dawn was starting to break above the ridge, purpling the horizon like a fresh, spreading bruise.

  “There was nothing else in the car?” I said. “Nothing that a man might have carried or worn?”

  Parker shook his head, breathing out a thick cloud of grey tobacco smoke. “Just the panties.” He gestured toward the windshield. “We’re looking down there now for anything else we can turn up. I doubt we’ll find much in the dark.” He squinted into the dawn light. “When the sun comes up we’ll call in some help.”

  17

  I DROVE straight from Miamitown to Indian Hill. By the time I got to Camargo Pike, it was full morning, grey and turbulent, with a sting of snow already in the air. As I neared Woodbine Lane, an ambulance blew past me, turning west on Camargo, blinkers flashing. I couldn’t see inside the ambulance, but I had the awful feeling it was racing Phil Pearson to the hospital.

  I knew I was right when I got closer to the Pearson house. Another ambulance—a red emergency vehicle—was parked in the driveway behind a green Porsche 935 and a tan Merc. The tan car belonged to Cora Pearson. I didn’t know who belonged to the Porsche.

  I parked on the street to keep from blocking the driveway, and walked slowly up to the front door. A tall, handsome man with tan skin and thick grey hair answered my knock. Behind him, down the hall, I could hear Cora Pearson crying.

  “I’m Harry Stoner,” I said to the grey-haired man. “I work for the Pearsons.”

  The man smiled as if he recognized my name, flashing a set of teeth so large and white and perfect-looking that I thought, at once, they must be caps. “I’m Saul Lasker,” he said in a deep, genial voice. “A friend of Louise and Phil’s. Friend and neighbor.”

  He nodded up the street to another estate house. All I could see of it was the red tile of its roof, billowing like a circus tent behind a protective screen of spruce.

  I’d heard of Lasker—at least, I’d seen his name on the financial pages. He was very big in real estate and investment banking. Very big, very rich, very Reagan-Republican. I didn’t like him on principle. His kind of money was always tainted with someone else’s pain.

  “What happened here, Lasker?”

  The man tried to stop smiling. But his face wasn’t used to bad news. “Phil had an attack about ten minutes ago.” He touched the place on his chest where his heart was supposed to be and fought with the smile some more. “I heard the ambulances and came over. He was in the living room when it happened.”

  “Do you have any idea how bad the attack was?”

  “Not good. Louise went with him to the hospital. I’m going to drive Cora over there in a few minutes and try to lend some support, although I guess there’s nothing we can do now but pray.”

  He said it as if it was something he’d heard in a movie.

  “What hospital did they take him to?”

  “Bethesda North, I think.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Bethesda North,” he said, sounding a little more like twenty million bucks.

  ******

  I caught the expressway to Reed-Hartman. The hospital was on the east side of the highway—a big glass-and-steel tower, rising out of an ocean of blacktop. I parked as close as I could to the emergency room, but it was still a good walk across the lot to the automatic doors.

  I didn’t see Louise inside. I figured she was in one of the examination rooms with her husband. I double-checked with a nurse to make sure that Pearson had been admitted, then went over to a waiting area and sat down with three anxious-looking strangers.

  Half an hour must have passed before Louise came out. I could tell from her ashen look that Pearson was in bad shape.

  “Oh, God, Harry,” she said, slumping beside me in a chair. She covered her face with her hands.

  “It’s my fault,” she said hoarsely. “It’s my fault.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  “You don’t understand. They found Ethan’s car. I had to tell him they found Ethan’s car.”

  “I know. I talked to the cops.”

  “You know?” Louise said with surprise. “Then why didn’t you call me? Why did you let me hear that from a stranger?”

  “I got there too late, Louise,” I said, feeling bad. “They’d already made the call.”

  She dropped her hands from her cheeks and stared queerly into space. “I didn’t want to tell him, but he knew it was the police. He heard me talking to them.” She turned to me with a guilty look. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “You had to tell him.”

  “He went crazy,” she said with a trace of horror in her voice. “I’ve never seen him get that upset, even when . . . even after Estelle. He said things to me. Dreadful things. We fought.”

  Her head fell to her chest and she sobbed. “They say he may die.”

  ******

  I sat there with Louise for about ten minutes, holding her hand tightly in mine. Lasker finally arrived with Cora Pearson. The woman looked awful, her face blasted, her gait doddering, as if she’d aged twenty years since the day before. Louise got up immediately, walked over to her mother-in-law, and took her in her arms.

  Cora Pearson sobbed. “He’s not going to die?”

  “It’s not in our hands anymore,” Lasker said.

  Louise flashed an angry look at him over Cora’s shoulder, and the man’s face reddened as if he’d been slapped.

  “No, he’s not going to die,” Louise said to her mother-in-law. She pushed Cora Pearson back and straightened her white hair as if she were grooming a child.

  The older woman smiled at her weakly. “You’re so good to me, Louise,” she said with deep feeling. “Always so good.”

  Cora walked unsteadily over to the waiting area and sat down on one of the plastic chairs.

  I couldn’t hear him, but Lasker apparently said something else to Louise, something well-intentioned and inept. She frowned dismiss
ively, and he backed out of the emergency room like he was leaving royalty.

  After Lasker left Louise came over to us. “Did you call Shelley?” she asked Cora.

  The older woman nodded. “He’s on his way.”

  Louise sat down beside Cora and put an arm around her shoulder. The woman leaned against her heavily. “Don’t worry, Mother,” Louise whispered. “I’m here with you.”

  It had come to me when I’d first met Pearson that Louise anchored his life. I was beginning to realize that she anchored the whole family—probably the children too, insofar as they could be reached. It was what she had meant the night before when she’d complained about people automatically relying upon her strength. But that strength was no illusion—it was real and impressive, especially at that moment.

  A nurse came into the hall and called Louise’s name.

  She patted her mother-in-law’s shoulder and stood up. “I’ve got to go,” she said to Cora.

  “Will I be able to see him?” the woman asked plaintively.

  “In a little while,” Louise said.

  She went over to where the nurse was standing and together they walked off down the hall to the emergency rooms.

  I didn’t want to leave Cora Pearson alone, so I waited for Shelley Sacks to arrive. The woman didn’t say much to me. Her shock was too deep, and there wasn’t anything to say.

  When Sacks came in, I got to my feet.

  The woman looked up at me suddenly. Her face was already red from crying, but the color that rose in her cheeks was more than despair or grief. “They did this to him!” she said in a strangled voice. “I hope they die for this—for what they’ve done.”

  She didn’t mean what she’d said. She might not have realized she was saying it. But the truth was that her curse could already have come true.

  18

  BEFORE LEAVING the hospital I called Sergeant Larry Parker from a pay phone in the lobby to see if the State Patrol forensic team had turned up anything new.

  “We haven’t found a body in the river,” he said grimly. “But State confirmed that the stains on the panties were blood. Type O negative. You might want to check with the Pearsons about the girl’s blood type. We’ve also got some positive lifts off the Plymouth’s steering wheel.”

  “Do you have a make on the prints?”

  Parker sighed. “Yeah, but you’re not going to like it. The prints belong to a convicted felon named Herbert Talmadge.”

  “Jesus,” I said aloud. The very fact that Ethan and Kirsty had ended up in that clearing with Talmadge—in the same spot where Estelle Pearson had taken her own life—defied logic.

  “You know the guy?” Parker said, responding to the pained sound of my voice.

  I thought about going into Pearson family history with Parker, then decided against it. It wasn’t going to help him find Talmadge. “No, I don’t know him.”

  “Well, he’s an honest-to-God bad man, Stoner. If your MPs ran into him, I’m afraid they chanced into serious trouble. State’s already put an APB out on him. So has Kentucky. The son of a bitch was released from Lexington the week before last. Ten days and he’s already . . . ”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew what he was thinking. Ten days and he’d already committed murder—or attempted to.

  “You don’t have any leads yet, do you?”

  “None. How ‘bout you—did you check on that Chicago store?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, I’d appreciate you finding out. And find out about the blood type, too. I’ll get in touch if anything else turns up.”

  ******

  I was in a bad mood when I hung up on Parker. And the mood kept deepening on the drive downtown to the office.

  Herbert Talmadge wasn’t the kind of guy who would take hostages or halfway measures. If the Pearson kids had found him as they apparently had, he’d brought their revenge fantasies to a quick, pitiless end—at best. I didn’t want to think about what he might have done at worst.

  The very fact that Kirsty and Ethan had found Talmadge galled me. They’d found him, and I hadn’t. All they’d had to go on was the newspaper article in the Post, and yet they’d found him in less than a day, while I was chasing blind leads and making time with Louise Pearson.

  I didn’t understand how it had happened, how the last chapter of Kirsten’s life might have ended up being written by a man with no connection to her own past, a man with no real connection to Ethan’s past—save for the brief moment that the boy might have seen him in the hospital ward where his father had once worked. And yet they’d all wound up in that clearing above the river like they were holding communion for the dead mother. For the second time in two days I had the weird feeling that there really was a sinister fatality at work in the Pearsons’ lives, leading them on to violent death.

  When I got to the office I picked up the phone and started making calls. I went back through the people I’d talked to in Chicago one by one. Art Heldman at the university. Jay Stein. Marnee Thompson at the girls’ apartment. And Hedda Pearson at her end-of-the-road motel. Not one of them had ever heard of Herbert Talmadge. Not one of them could explain how Kirsten or Ethan had known where to find him. The only thing I managed to learn was that Kirsty had in fact bought underclothes from Milady’s Shop in the Kenwood Plaza in Hyde Park.

  “Why is that important?” Marnee asked uneasily. “What’s happened to Kirsty?”

  I didn’t tell her what I knew. I didn’t tell any of them about the abandoned car and the bloody underwear. Not even Hedda Pearson, who had a right to know. I just didn’t have it in me to speak the truth.

  After finishing the Chicago calls I ran through my local connections again. Al Foster at CPD. The Kentucky cops. The State Patrol.

  By eleven-thirty I’d run out of people to call. I felt like I’d run out of luck too, like poor Kirsty and her brother. Then Lee Wilson, the manager at Ethan’s Ft. Thomas motel, phoned me. And things began to change.

  ******

  The Blue Grass Motel and Motor Court was on Hidden Fork Road, about fifteen miles south of the city off I-471. It was a well-tended place in spite of its out-of-the-way location. The stucco-and-glass office building looked newly painted. The dozen stucco cottages arrayed in a semicircle behind were just as fresh-faced and neat. A heart-shaped swimming pool sat to the side, covered with a tarp for the winter.

  I parked in a space by the pool and caught a whiff of stale chlorine as I walked over to the office building. Wilson was waiting for me inside—a dapper, balding man in his mid-forties with the pink, prissy face of a toady.

  “You must be Mr. Stoner,” Wilson said as I came up to the counter. “I’m Lee Wilson, the proprietor here.”

  He held out his hand and I shook with him.

  “I woulda called you sooner about this, Mr. Stoner, if I’d been on duty last night. I left your message with Roy, my clerk, but he didn’t bother telling me until today. That’s the trouble with hired help—you can’t trust them to follow up on things.”

  Wilson laughed mechanically. And when I didn’t laugh he stopped laughing too, as if he didn’t think it was funny either.

  “If I hadn’t been going through the receipts, I doubt as I would have seen it. Right there in black and white in the registration book.”

  I had the feeling that this one went through the receipts every hour on the hour. But I pretended it was the blessing he wanted me to think it was and asked to see the book.

  Wilson glanced down at the open register on the counter-top, scanning it critically as if he were totaling figures. His eyes stopped on a line midway down the page, and he pinned a finger to it like he was poking Roy the clerk in the eye.

  “Here it is.”

  He swiveled the book around to me, using his finger as a fulcrum.

  I glanced at the book, at the line above Wilson’s finger. “Ethan Pearson” was written on it in longhand, along with a check-in time of four p.m. Monday.

  “Why did Ethan both
er to sign in?” I asked, looking up at Wilson. “I mean he lives here, doesn’t he?”

  “We like to keep track of our guests,” the man said stiffly. “We always ask our semi-permanent residents to sign in fresh if they been away for more than a day or two. Saves us some problems and them some potential embarrassment. I mean lights come on in somebody’s cottage when they’re supposed to be out of town . . . well, you can see my point.”

  I glanced at the polished wood letterboxes behind the counter. Most of the cubbyholes had room keys dangling from them. But a few had notes and letters in them.

  “Did Ethan pick up any messages when he checked in?”

  “I asked myself the same thing this morning,” Wilson said with a self-congratulatory smile—the amateur detective. “But Roy says there weren’t no letters. Ethan did get a phone call, though. And I believe he made one himself.”

  There was a PBX to the right of the letterboxes, an old-fashioned switchboard with a dial receiver at the base and a headset and plug-in lines. Like everything else in the place it was shiny and neat.

  “No way to know who was calling in, is there?” I asked Wilson.

  He shook his head, no. “Roy said it was a woman, and the call came around eleven-thirty. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “Do you know who Ethan phoned?”

  The man smiled triumphantly, as if he’d caught me in a little trap of his own devising. “Got the number right here,” he said, pulling a piece of neatly folded paper out of his shirt pocket. “Don’t know who it is, but I got the number.”

  “When did the call go out?”

  The look of triumph faded a bit. “Ain’t exactly sure of that. Sometime before he left, I reckon.”

  “He left again around midnight?”

  Wilson nodded. “Like I told you on the phone. Right around midnight. ‘Least that’s what Roy told me.”

  The man gave me a conspiratorial look. “He had a woman with him,” he whispered. “And it wasn’t his wife.”

  “Did Roy tell you what she looked like?”

  “A young girl. Brown hair, glasses. She stayed in the car, Roy said, when the boy signed in.”