Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  The fact that Ethan’s Volare had ended up near the same spot as his mother’s VW, thirteen years after her death, was a damn strange coincidence, if it was coincidence and not something else. It had bothered me since Parker had tied Talmadge to the car. I could see Ethan driving to the river with Kirsty. What I couldn’t see was Herbert Talmadge going along for that ride. Not unless he’d been tricked or forced into coming along—or had followed the lads there on his own. But if he’d followed Kirsty and Ethan to the clearing, then my whole line of speculation went out the window. If he’d followed them, then it was conceivable they hadn’t found Herbie—Herbie had somehow found them.

  There was a third possibility—one that I’d been trying to shoot down since I first saw Ethan’s collection of clippings. But it kept popping back up like a duck in a gallery. Whether they’d found him or he’d found them, it was conceivable that Herbert Talmadge had ended up in that clearing because he’d been there before. Appearances to the contrary, suicides could be faked, although that raised a helluva lot more questions than it answered.

  “How soon after his mother’s disappearance did Ethan start talking about a murderer?” I asked Sacks.

  “Immediately, as far as I know. In fact, Phil called me on the day Stelle dropped out of sight to tell me that Ethan was throwing a violent tantrum. We both agreed it was a hysterical reaction.”

  “Did Pearson tell you what Ethan was actually saying about his mother’s disappearance?”

  Sacks drew back a little, as if he’d been offended by my question. “Ethan said he’d been watching Stelle from an upstairs window. He saw a man come out of the trees and get in the car with her.”

  “Talmadge?”

  “He had no name for this bogeyman.”

  “He didn’t associate Rita Scarne with the killer, did he?”

  The man sighed. “Frankly, Stoner, I never heard the boy talk about any of this. He didn’t like me, remember. He blamed me for not taking better care of his mother. I blamed me too. It was a terribly confusing time for all of us.”

  “Did the cops follow up on the kid’s story?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  It was easy enough to check. All I had to do was read through the police reports on Estelle Pearson’s suicide when I got back to the apartment.

  Sacks was beginning to look a little worn down by the conversation—by the terrible memories it invoked. He had too much else to cope with, so I decided to drop the subject of Estelle Pearson’s death.

  Before leaving I did ask him how it happened that Rita Scarne had been hired as Estelle Pearson’s nurse. Given the woman’s spotty employment record it was something that had bothered me.

  “Phil liked her,” he said simply. “So did Stelle. Rita has a no-nonsense manner that appeals to many people. And then Stelle worked with her once.”

  “I thought Estelle never practiced medicine.”

  “She didn’t. But for a couple of years she worked as a nurse. Phil was interning, and they needed the money desperately.”

  “She didn’t work at Rollman’s, did she?” I said, taking a wild shot. “Say in the mid-seventies?”

  “No. Stelle was a surgical nurse at General. In ‘68 and ‘69, I believe.”

  I sighed. For all I knew Talmadge was still in the army in ‘68 and ‘69.

  “Were you aware that Rita Scarne had some trouble at Rollman’s Hospital—trouble that got her fired in 1976?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Sacks said, looking surprised. “Phil did part of his residence at Rollman’s. If there was trouble, it couldn’t have been the kind that reflected on Rita’s professional competence or he would certainly have known about it.”

  “I guess that’s it then,” I said, starting for the door. “Tell Louise I’ll be in touch.”

  23

  COLD NIGHT had fallen by the time I got to my car in the hospital lot. Beyond the haze of the mercury lamps and the fluorescent glare of the fast-food joints on Reed-Hartman, a full moon, red as October, climbed the eastern sky. Shivering in the wind I stared at it for a moment—a harvest moon in a winter sky.

  I thought about paying Rita Scarne another visit. But until I could confront her with solid evidence connecting her to Talmadge she wasn’t about to talk to me. I headed back to my apartment instead—to see if I couldn’t find some of that evidence buried in the police reports of Estelle Pearson’s suicide, buried in the past.

  ******

  The manila envelope containing the photos of Estelle Pearson’s last remains was sitting on the living room couch—just where I’d left it the night before. Throwing off my topcoat I scooped the folder up, sat down at the trestle table in the bay window, and began to go through its contents, starting with the investigating officer’s first report. I was looking specifically for Ethan Pearson’s testimony—anything he might have said tying Rita Scarne to the man who’d kidnapped his mother.

  I didn’t expect to find much—maybe a sentence or two that would look different in light of what had happened over the past few days. But the cold fact was I didn’t find anything at all. Nothing about a black man hiding in the trees. Nothing about Estelle being kidnapped. Nothing about Rita Scarne. Nothing about Ethan himself.

  The cops had obviously taken their cues from Phil Pearson and Shelley Sacks and ignored the boy. I couldn’t blame them. The boy was hysterical, and there was real tragedy going on all around them. And yet cops were creatures of habit. Crazy or not, Ethan’s accusations should have been routinely logged if only to be dismissed. Which meant that someone had specifically requested that the boy’s testimony be omitted from the record—someone with a powerful interest in the case. Given the circumstances I figured that someone had to be Papa Phil Pearson.

  I could see it happening. If Ethan had been making a violent scene, Phil might have been small enough to feel it personally, as he had when Kirsty had her breakdown thirteen years later, as he had when he’d hired me. Moreover, he had reasons of his own for not wanting his kid to shoot his mouth off around the police. If the cops had been led too far afield, the investigation could have spilled over into the rest of Pearson’s life—exposing his affair with Louise, exposing any number of ugly family secrets. Louise had hinted that Phil had played a larger part in driving his wife crazy than anyone realized. Even if she’d been exaggerating, it would have been one more reason for Phil to hold the line, to limit the investigation to a suicide watch.

  Of course, it was just as possible that Phil Pearson had been trying to protect his son on that terrible September afternoon, doing the best that a man with his heightened sense of shame could do to keep Ethan out of the public eye. The truth was probably somewhere in between—where it usually was.

  I took a look at the coroner’s report after I finished with the police folder. A couple of grisly pictures of Estelle Pearson’s body were clipped to the front—one taken at the river, one at the morgue. After ten days in the Miami River the woman’s nude body was badly decomposed. The coroner found deep cuts on the face and neck and what he termed “severe accidents” to buttocks, anus, pubes, and pelvis. The injuries might have raised suspicions of rape—especially when coupled with the fact that her body had been found nude—had the woman not jumped into a flooding river. The Miami’s current was particularly strong that September, following a week of stormy weather. According to the coroner, driftwood and rock had done the damage to Estelle Pearson’s body and the strong current had torn away her clothes. Shreds of her skirt and blouse were later found downstream in a backwater.

  The coroner’s autopsy revealed traces of Thorazine and alcohol in Estelle Pearson’s blood. The Thorazine had been prescribed by Sacks. The booze was her own idea. After the autopsy the cops ran a cursory check of the bars in the Miamitown area on the off chance that someone had spotted Estelle tanking up. But she’d apparently done her drinking alone—perhaps as she sat in her car in the deserted field above the river. According to the coroner, the combination of Thorazine and liquor was prob
ably potent enough to kill her. However, there was water in her lungs, so she was alive when she jumped—even if she’d been close to unconsciousness.

  The only question raised at the coroner’s inquest was why Estelle had killed herself on that particular afternoon. Shelley Sacks testified that the woman had been making progress since her breakdown in June. But he went on to say that violent mood swings were typical of her manic-depressive illness, and that the combination of alcohol and Thorazine had probably precipitated a psychotic reaction.

  He was begging the question of why she’d taken all those drugs in the first place, but the coroner didn’t pursue it. It was pretty clear from the rest of his testimony that Sacks didn’t really know what had prompted Estelle Pearson to get high and throw herself in the river. As he’d once said to me and said to the coroner, she was simply “doomed” to take her own life.

  ******

  I didn’t know what to think when I finished the folder. By definition suicides always leave unanswered questions behind them, and Estelle Pearson was no exception. If you were convinced from the start that she’d killed herself, then you accepted the fact that those questions would never be satisfactorily answered. Which was precisely what the cops and the coroner had done. If like Ethan Pearson you were convinced that the woman had been kidnapped and murdered, the least you could say, on reading through the reports, was that the evidence didn’t rule out the possibility.

  The coroner hadn’t been thinking rape and assault when he examined the corpse, so some of the tests that would have normally been administered in a criminal investigation—tests for semen, tests for blood type, tests that would have been consistent with the woman’s injuries—simply weren’t performed. The cops hadn’t been thinking homicide either, which is why they hadn’t bothered to record Ethan’s testimony or come up with anything other than a spotty timetable of Estelle Pearson’s last few hours on earth. Perhaps self-protectively Shelley Sacks had convinced himself that his friend was hopelessly psychotic, so he didn’t really have to face the question of why, after several months of progress, the woman had suddenly decided to end her life.

  There was room for doubt, all right. And yet, even playing devil’s advocate, I couldn’t honestly say I believed Estelle Pearson had been murdered by Herbert Talmadge. The woman’s mental balance was very fragile. And even if the evidence of her suicide had a few holes in it, it was still persuasive. While Talmadge would help to explain the unexpected suddenness and violence of her death, his pattern of assaults didn’t really fit the case. He’d always picked on girlfriends—women he knew. If he’d attacked Estelle Pearson he’d stepped out of character and assaulted a virtual stranger. On the basis of the evidence I couldn’t see any reason why.

  ******

  I’d just finished with the transcripts when the phone rang. I was glad of the interruption—glad to get away from the pictures and the autopsy report. I dropped the folder on the table and walked over to the wallphone in the kitchen. It was Louise Pearson at the other end.

  “How’s Phil?” I asked after saying hello.

  “He gets a bypass tomorrow morning.”

  “And the chances . . . ?”

  “Not good,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “So am I,” Louise said sadly. “We haven’t had a happy marriage, Phil and I. Not a . . . happy marriage. But we’re tied to one another, nevertheless.”

  She cleared her throat. “Shelley said you needed to talk to me?”

  “A couple of questions about the kids.”

  “Why bother? It’s pretty clear that Kirsty and Ethan aren’t coming home, isn’t it?”

  “It looks that way,” I admitted.

  “Then why bother? Why bother about any of this hopeless mess?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” Louise said after a moment. “It’s been awful being in this goddamn hospital for ten hours. Dead time—time to think about all the mistakes. Phil and the kids. Frank.”

  “Your first husband.”

  “I was trying to remember why I married him.”

  “What did you come up with?”

  “I loved him, I guess,” she said with mild astonishment, as if it surprised her to admit it, as if the love itself surprised her. “At least I don’t have to cope with that anymore. It was pure business with Phil. He got what he wanted—me. And I got the life of the country club. It was a fair trade, I suppose. The country club set for Frank.”

  She cleared her throat again. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”

  Rita Scarne was on my mind—because of the police report—so I asked about her.

  “How in the world did you come up with that woman’s name?” Louise said with a laugh.

  “I didn’t. Ethan did. He tried to call her last night. At least, I think he did—sometime before he and Kirsty ended up with Talmadge in that clearing above the river. The Scarne woman claims he didn’t call.”

  “You’ve talked to her?”

  “Several hours ago.”

  “Rita was a hot ticket back in the old days,” Louise said.

  “You knew her?”

  “Phil and I would occasionally run into her at parties after we were married. She was always with someone new—and young. Rita had a bit of a reputation with the hospital personnel.”

  “For what?”

  “For being wild. You know, sexually uninhibited. It was rumored that she liked her sex rough.”

  “Rough enough to interest a man like Talmadge?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I shouldn’t have been repeating thirteen-year-old gossip in the first place.”

  “Phil hired her to look after Estelle, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. He’d worked with Rita at Rollman’s and though she was a competent nurse. I guess she was—I never heard anyone say different. I can’t see why Ethan and Kirsty went looking for her unless they associate her with Estelle.”

  “Or with Talmadge,” I said. “Herbie had a white girlfriend who was a nurse.”

  “It’s possible, I guess. What do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to have to talk to her again. Soon.”

  Before hanging up I told Louise that the cops wanted to know Kirsty’s blood type. “I know,” she said. “I’ve already spoken with them.”

  “When?”

  “Lieutenant Parker called here at the hospital about an hour ago. He also wanted to talk to you.”

  “Did he say what about?”

  “That man, Talmadge, I think.”

  24

  AFTER FINISHING with Louise I phoned Parker at the Miamitown PD—and got one of his deputies.

  “This is Stoner. I hear your boss is looking for me.”

  “Yeah, he is,” the cop said. “You got a pencil?”

  I took out my notebook.

  “Six forty-four Reading Road, Apartment five. Park’s there, and so are the Cincinnati police.”

  “What happened?” I said, writing the address down.

  “This guy you’re looking for—Talmadge. They found him about an hour ago.”

  ******

  Six forty-four Reading Road was right in the heart of the Avondale ghetto—a grimy four-story apartment house with a thirties Moderne facade of black marble window bands and smooth grey block. Small spotlights lit the walkway and the door. The building itself was dark, save for scattered lights in the apartments.

  It was past nine when I got there—full dark and cold. But in spite of the bitter weather a small crowd of onlookers had gathered in front of the building—men and women, all black, peering curiously at the cops in the foyer. There were cops everywhere, and patrol cars up and down the street.

  I made my way through the crowd into the apartment house lobby. A cop I knew—a patrolman named Klein—pointed me toward Sergeant Larry Parker.

  “He’s up on the second floor. Apartment five. That’s where most of them are.”

  I went up the staircase to the second floor.
The stairwell smelled of the dry rot that was eating into the banisters; the stairposts shifted in their sockets like loose teeth. From the landing I spotted Parker and Al Foster of the CPD, leaning against the wall outside number 5. There were several other cops in the hall—forensic specialists with evidence kits. A dozen neighbors crowded in doorways and stared wide-eyed at the activity.

  Inside apartment 5 a photographic strobe went off with a brilliant flash, spilling harsh white light through the open door. For a split second everyone in the hall was frozen in the glare. The detectives, the wide-eyed bystanders. Like one of Weegee’s midnight crime-scene specials. I didn’t want to think about what the cops inside the apartment might be photographing.

  I walked up to Parker and Foster.

  “I been trying to get you for an hour,” Parker said when he spotted me.

  “You’ve been here that long?”

  He glanced at a wristwatch. “Since a quarter of eight.” He looked at Al. “Isn’t that when the call first came in?”

  Al nodded. “Around then.”

  I said, “What have you got?”

  “What we got,” Al said, pushing away from the wall with his elbows and turning to the door, “is Herbert Talmadge’s apartment.”

  “What about Talmadge himself?”

  “Take a look,” he said, waving me in like an impresario.

  I walked through the door into a foursquare room, empty except for a single folding chair and a new-looking portable TV. The pine floors were swollen in ridges where the hot water pipes ran underneath them, giving the place a wavy, seasick feel. There was a stench, too. Not the dry rot smell of the stairs but a fecal smell of decay, like a dead animal in a wall, I didn’t know where the stink was coming from until I glanced to my left through a portal leading to a small kitchen.

  I couldn’t see him clearly because of the criminalistics men surrounding him like mourners at a visitation. But when one of the cops moved, I caught a glimpse of his legs, sprawled at angles as if he’d been struggling to get up. Then I saw his face—that devilish, V-shaped face—grotesquely purpled and swollen in rigor. Herbert Talmadge. Streaks of blood, turned thick brown like molasses, flowed from his body, from a wound I couldn’t see.