It sounded like Kirsten, but it didn’t have to be her.
I studied the man for a moment—his prissy face. “Think I could take a look in their room?”
Wilson pretended to be shocked. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending. He took himself fairly seriously.
“It would save me calling the cops,” I said. “Getting a warrant.”
The man’s shocked look deepened momentarily.
“I guess I could show you the room.”
I took out my wallet, pulled two twenties out, and laid them on the counter. “For your trouble.”
That swayed him. “We’ll go on down there right now. Just let me put the ‘Closed’ sign in the window.”
He picked up the twenties and started to turn away. I caught him by the shirt sleeve and he burped with fright, as if he thought I was about to arrest him for taking a bribe.
“The phone number?” I said, rubbing my fingers together.
Lee Wilson smiled with relief. “‘Course,” he said, handing me the square of paper. “Don’t want to forget that.”
19
WILSON WALKED me down to the Pearsons’ cottage, unlocked the door with a passkey, then backed away discreetly, as if he was leaving me alone with the casket. I pushed the door open and looked inside.
The motel room was dark, except for the arc of sunlight coming through the door. The sun lit up a slice of carpet, the top halves of two unmade beds, and a corner of blank white wall. What looked like fast-food wrappers were scattered on the sheets of the nearest bed. A tin ashtray glittered on the pillows of the far bed. The room stank of cigarette smoke and stale grease—like the smell of Kirsten Pearson’s bedroom in Chicago. I flipped on a table light and went inside, closing the door behind me.
It was a tiny room. Just the two twin beds. A nightstand between them. The lamp table by the door. A wooden bureau-desk on the far wall across from the bed. A door to a bathroom beyond the bureau.
I’d been expecting a few personal items. Photographs. Mementos. Books. But the only artifact in the room was the cheap oil painting of a farmhouse that Lee Wilson had hung above the beds. How Ethan and his wife could have called that spare, denuded place home, I couldn’t imagine.
I went through the room carefully, starting with the bureau-desk. There was a phone on top and a pad for messages. One of the sheets from the pad lay crumpled up at the foot of the desk chair. I picked it up and smoothed it out. Someone had written the word “Small” on it with a capital S, followed by a slash mark and the number 5. A phone number was printed underneath:
Small/5
555-1543
I wasn’t sure what “Small/5” meant. It could have been a dress or blouse size. If so, maybe the number was for a clothing store. It wasn’t the same phone number that Ethan had dialed the night before—that was certain. The one that Wilson had written down for me was 555-8200.
I pocketed the sheet of notepaper with the cryptic message on it and turned to the bureau drawers. There were still a few items of clothing in them. Some men’s underwear, a couple of tank-top T-shirts, several loose unmatched socks. A pair of boy’s pajamas for David. One of Hedda Pearson’s blouses, neatly pressed and wrapped in a Brockhaus Dry Cleaner’s paper band. I checked the size of the blouse, but it wasn’t a small and it wasn’t a 5.
I wondered if Kirsten Pearson wore a size 5.
I went through the nightstand drawer next and found a Gideon Bible, a passbook from First National here in the city, and a Greater Cincinnati phone directory with a pencil stuck in the Yellow Pages. The passbook was in the name of E. Pearson—a savings account with deposits made to it every three months for over ten years, from the time Ethan was about fourteen to less than a few weeks before he disappeared. The deposits were always the same—a thousand dollars—and the entire amount was always withdrawn a month or so after it had been put in the account. It was undoubtedly a record of the “blood money” that Louise had told me about—Phil Pearson’s pathetic attempt to buy his son’s affection and to assuage his own guilt. It was the only item in the room that connected Ethan with his family, a bankbook that the boy hadn’t even thought to take with him.
I put the book back in the drawer and opened the phone directory to the page marked by the pencil. It was a page full of RNs’ ads and listings. One of the ads had been circled—The Medical Pool with an address on Oak Street near the city hospitals in Clifton. Very near Rollman’s, too.
I started to jot The Medical Pool listing down when I realized that it was the same number that Wilson had given me. The same number that Ethan had called the night before. 555-8200. For some reason Ethan had phoned a nursing agency.
I went through the bedclothes and looked under the beds, but aside from a few wilted french fries I didn’t find anything. The cigarette butts in the ashtray were Winstons, Kirsty’s brand.
The bathroom was next. There was no medicine cabinet, just a flat mirror over the vanitory, a towel rack across from that, and a shower stall on the right. Someone had used the shower fairly recently, because there were fresh waterspots on the tile and long brown hairs in the drain. The plastic trash can by the vanitory had several Kleenex in it. I wouldn’t have noticed the tissues if a few of them hadn’t been stained with blood. There was also a small smear of blood in the porcelain washbasin, as if Ethan had knicked himself shaving.
I stopped at the motel office on the way out. Wilson was back at work, going through the books again with a vigilant look on his face. I pitied poor Roy the night clerk. His mistakes were Wilson’s meat.
“Thanks,” I said to the man, handing him the passkey.
“Por nada, as our friends south of the border say.”
I forced a smile.
“When does your clerk, Roy, come back on?”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Wilson said despairingly. “I just can’t be here all the time.”
“Ask him to give me a call, will you? And, of course, phone me if Ethan comes back.”
“Will do,” the man said with a grin and a Boy Scout salute.
He held the salute a moment too long. When I didn’t return it he dropped his hand quickly and wiped it on his pants leg, as if his fingers were wet with embarrassment.
******
As soon as I got back to the office I took out the crumpled piece of notepaper and called the number on it, 555-1543. I was half expecting to get the women’s wear department at K mart—some clerk who could explain the “Small/5” notation. But if it was a K mart they were damn busy, because no one answered the phone.
I put that call on hold and dialed the other number, the one that Ethan had called from the motel room, the one for The Medical Pool.
A woman answered as sweetly as if she were already sitting there by the rented bed, mopping my brow.
“You have reached The Medical Pool. How may we help you?”
“Hi,” I said to her. “My name’s Ethan Pearson. I called you last night, remember?”
“Of course, I remember, Mr. Pearson,” the woman said reassuringly. “Was Rita available?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Rita Scarne. The nurse you requested for emergency service. We paged her at home and transferred your call, don’t you remember?”
It appeared that Ethan had made two calls for the price of one.
“Yes, I did talk to her,” I said, jotting down the name “Rita Scarne” on a yellow pad. “But I seem to have misplaced her home number.”
“Not to worry. I can find it for you.” She went off the line for a second. “Are you ready?”
“All set,” I said.
“555-1543. Remember, if she’s not home, try at Holmes Hospital.”
“Thanks again,” I said, hanging up.
I’d just tried the number, thinking it was K mart. But it wasn’t K mart. It was a nurse named Rita Scarne. Since she obviously wasn’t at home I called Holmes Hospital. The patient information service told me that Rita Scarne wasn’t on duty that afternoon. They suggested I try
Rollman’s, where Nurse Scarne also worked part-time.
******
Rather than phoning Rollman’s I drove over to the hospital on Burnett. The attendant at the door recognized me from the day before.
“If you come back to see Dr. McCall, he ain’t here. Had a meeting to go to.”
“Nurse Rostow will do,” I told him.
He checked to make sure Nurse Rostow was at her station, then passed me through. I took the elevator up to the third floor and followed the arrows around the typing carrels to Sam McCall’s office. Ms. Rostow smiled at me as I walked up to her desk.
“I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon, Mr. Stoner.”
“I hadn’t expected to be back.”
The woman nodded at McCall’s door. “He’s gone to a board of directors meeting and won’t return today.”
“This may be something you can help me with.”
Ms. Rostow’s face lit up pleasantly. “I’ll certainly try. Have a seat.”
I sat down across the desk from her. “Do you know a nurse named Rita Scarne?”
“Of course,” she said smartly, as if it was the first round of a quiz show. “Miss Scarne has worked here since late 1974. On and off.”
“You mean she’s part-time?”
“I meant precisely what I said,” the woman said. “Miss Scarne was a full-time nurse here. In fact, she was chief of the nursing staff for a short while.
“A very short while,” she added.
“Something happened?”
Nurse Rostow hesitated this time before hitting the buzzer. I had the distinct impression that she didn’t care for Rita Scarne and would have told me why if her professional ethics hadn’t blocked the way.
“There was some trouble,” she said, feeling her way around the block.
“With a doctor?” I asked curiously.
“No,” she said. “Miss Scarne had . . . she didn’t behave professionally on the wards.”
Judging from the blush in old Ms. Rostow’s cheeks I had the feeling that the trouble had been sexual.
“I shouldn’t have told you that,” she said, looking embarrassed. “Rita’s an excellent nurse, who has been quite successful in private practice. She is very much in demand. The problem I referred to is old business. Very old.”
I changed the subject to spare her any more embarrassment. “When was Rita Scarne head nurse here?”
“In late 1975 and ‘76.”
“So she might have had contact with Herbert Talmadge?”
“I couldn’t say for sure. She was head nurse, so it’s quite possible.”
I was thinking of the transcript I’d read—the interview from 1976 in which Talmadge had made his awful confession. Isaac Goldman, the intern from St. Louis, had been Talmadge’s psychiatrist at the time. But throughout the interview Goldman had been assisted by someone else, someone with the initials R. S. I’d assumed R. S. was another psychiatrist, now it occurred to me that it might have been head nurse Rita Scarne. She had to have some connection with Talmadge—some connection that was obvious to Ethan Pearson—or I couldn’t see why Ethan would have phoned for her.
“Is Miss Scarne on duty today?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I can check, if you’d like.”
“Please.”
She picked up a phone, pressed a couple of buttons, and asked, “Is Nurse Scarne on duty?”
After a moment she hung the phone up daintily and said, “No, Miss Scarne is not here today.”
I sighed. “It’s important that I get hold of her.”
“Have you tried Holmes Hospital? Or her house?”
“She’s not at Holmes, and I don’t have her address.”
“I can help you with that,” Ms. Rostow said. She flipped through a Rolodex and scribbled an address down on a notepad. “Here.”
Rita Scarne must have made a good living, because her home was on Ridge Road in Amberley Village. That’s where I decided to go next.
20
RITA SCARNE’S house was in a wooded dell on the east side of Ridge Road—a two-story Colonial with rounded doors, Dutch windows, and a steep cross gable in front. A black-topped driveway led down to it through a small stand of oak trees. It was just a little past three when I got there, but the sun was already beginning to set. The slanting light caught in the bare limbs of the oaks, turning them gold. Heavy shadows enveloped the trunks, stretching across the yard and up the brick walls of the house.
The driveway terminated in front of a built-in garage. The garage door was open and a green Audi was parked inside. There was a sticker on the rear bumper—“Nurses Are the Best Medicine.”
It was a very expensive place—a little too expensive for an unmarried nurse, I thought. But for all I knew she had other sources of income.
I got out of the Pinto and followed a cement walkway to the front door. It was cold in the shady dale and so quiet I could hear the wind creaking in the maples like house noises in the night.
I peered through the small leaded-glass window in the front door before ringing the bell. All I could see was sunlight pouring through French windows at the end of a tiled hallway. When I pressed the buzzer, a woman appeared in the hall. I backed away from the window as she came up to the door and opened it.
“Yes?” she said in a husky, sensuous voice.
Rita Scarne, if that was who the woman was, was a tall, hefty blonde in her mid-forties, with an attractive sun-beaten face and slanting, plum-colored eyes. She was wearing a white mu-mu without much on underneath it, judging from the way the fabric clung to her large breasts and heavy hips. She’d made an early start on the evening, because her breath smelled of bourbon. Her sexy blue eyes looked a little clabbered with it.
“Rita Scarne?”
“That’s me. Who are you?”
“My name is Stoner, Ms. Scarne. I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute.”
“About what?” the woman said with half a smile. She ran one hand up the jamb of the door, rested the other on her hip and stared at me afresh, as if she liked my looks and didn’t care if I knew it.
“It’s a personal matter. I promise not to take up much of your time.”
“You’re not selling something, are you? Like encyclopedias?”
I smiled. “No. I just want to ask you a few questions.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“Maybe we could talk inside? It’s pretty cold out here.”
She closed her eyes thoughtfully then said, “Why not?” And waved me through the door.
“If you’re selling insurance, Mr. Stoner, I’m going to be very disappointed,” she said as we walked down the hallway to the back of the house. She turned right at a doorway, and I followed her into an enclosed patio, full of cane furniture. The back wall was all glass, and the sun pouring through it filled the room with light.
The woman sat down on a fan-back chair. I sat on a small pillowed sofa across from her. There was a bottle of Old Grand-dad on a small table to her right. Just the bottle—no glasses.
“So what is it you are selling, Mr. Stoner?” she said wryly.
“Nothing. I’m a private detective.”
“You’re kidding,” the woman said, looking aghast. She almost reached for the bottle but caught herself.
I took out my wallet and showed her the photostat of my license.
“I’m working for a man named Phil Pearson. A psychiatrist—”
“I know who he is,” the woman said sharply.
Rita Scarne gave me a cold, suspicious look—a far cry from the bedroom eyes she’d been making at the front door. “Why would Phil send you to me?”
“He didn’t send me. I came because of his kids, Ethan and Kirsty. They’ve been missing since last Thursday. Pearson hired me to find them.”
“I still don’t understand why you came to me.”
“There’s a strong possibility that Ethan Pearson tried to call you last night, Ms. Scarne. At least, he called your agency, The Medical Pool,
and they transferred his call to your number. He also received a return phone call from a woman.”
“Why would he call me? I haven’t seen Ethan or his sister or Phil in years.”
“He didn’t call?”
“I wasn’t even here last night. My sister was house-sitting for me.”
“She left no messages?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t call Ethan?”
She just stared at me.
“Do you have any idea why he would have called The Medical Pool for your number?”
She thought about it for a second. “I did work for Phil once. But that was a long time ago.”
“Doing what?”
Rita Scarne gave me an irritated look, as if she were offended by the question—by the idea of being questioned at all. “He hired me to look after his wife, Estelle, if it’s any of your business. The experience left a very bad taste.”
The woman pursed her lips as if she could still taste it.
“Was Estelle Pearson in your care in 1976?”
Rita Scarne hesitated a moment then nodded, yes.
“That would have been right before she died?”
“Yes,” she said bitterly, as if I’d pulled the admission out of her like a tooth. “I was her nurse when she died.”
“So Ethan would have remembered you from that time?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman said with a dull laugh. “He would have remembered me.”
“You had problems with him?”
“You could safely say that. Ethan was a very disturbed kid. It was difficult for me to do my job with him around. He was always spying on me, bossing me about, trying to catch me up. And when he wasn’t snooping he was getting in the way. He scarcely left me or his mother alone for a minute. It was exhausting—that kind of attention. And counterproductive.”
“You mean he kept you from doing your job.”
“I mean he kept driving his mother crazy,” she said, losing patience. “Look, the little bastard didn’t want Estelle to recover. If she recovered he wouldn’t have had her all to himself. When she was depressed she used to dote on his attentions. As she got better she had less time for him. And that really pissed him off. You could see it in his face—a cold, venomous rage.”
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