Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  I looked away, at the seasick room. There were no decorations on the peeling yellow walls. No pictures or papers. A bare mantel to the right with a small dusty mirror above it and a dead fireplace below, charred like a burnt pot. Blinded windows on the far wall, with a stertorous hot water radiator rattling beneath them. Like Ethan Pearson’s barren motel room it was the end of the road for Herbert Talmadge.

  When the smell began to get to me, I went back into the hall. Al was standing just outside the door.

  “You saw?”

  I nodded. “How long has he been dead?”

  “We won’t know for sure until the coroner gets him. But forensic is guessing about twelve hours—maybe a little less.”

  “So he died around six this morning?”

  Foster nodded. “Give or take an hour.”

  The Pearson kids had left the motel room at midnight Monday. Their abandoned car had been found at six that morning—and it had been in the clearing for an hour or two more than that, judging by the dead battery. That meant that Talmadge could have left his prints in the Volare anytime between midnight and four or five a.m. After that he’d apparently come home to be murdered himself.

  I stared uneasily through the door at the circle of cops standing around Herbert Talmadge’s corpse. “How did he die?”

  “Again, we’re not sure,” Foster said. “Drug overdose, we think. At least we found an empty bottle of Demerol on the floor—and enough drugs in the bathroom to have put him to sleep forever. But there’s a wound, too.”

  “What kind of wound?”

  “Somebody stabbed him in the heart. What we don’t know is whether the stabbing occurred before or after Talmadge was dead. Whoever stabbed him didn’t like him—that’s for sure. They twisted the blade back and forth several dozen times, like a drill bit.”

  In spite of myself I thought of Ethan and Kirsty Pearson. They had motive, God knew. And Talmadge had died as Ethan foretold in his poem—a knife blade in the darkness. “Did you find any evidence connecting Talmadge to the Pearson kids?”

  “We found a woman’s shoe in the fireplace,” Parker said. “Size eight. There was some blood on it. Right now we’re not sure whose blood it is. There was some other stuff in the fireplace, some paper—apparently he tried to burn it.”

  “Any idea what it was?”

  “Forensic’s got it. We’ll know in a day or so.” Parker took a breath. “There’s something else.”

  From the look on his face I knew I wasn’t going to like it. “What?”

  “The back room. There’s a mattress and . . . well, it looks like someone was tied down to it and pretty badly used. We found blood, hair, ropes, and a gag. Harry, the blood is type O negative. Same as on the panties.”

  “Kirsty,” I said.

  Parker nodded. “They must’ve found him in the apartment. He overpowered them and . . . When he was done he drove them out to the Miami and tossed them in like a sack of kittens. It almost looks like Talmadge was waiting for them. I mean, the ropes and gags.”

  I said, “Didn’t anyone in the building hear anything, for chrissake?”

  Parker shook his head. “No. At least no one’s saying they did.”

  “Who called the thing in?”

  “A neighbor-woman up the hall,” Al said. He pulled a notebook from his coat, flipped it open, and glanced at his notes. “When she got home from work today, she smelled that stink in Small’s room and phoned us.”

  “Small?” I said.

  “I mean Talmadge,” Al said, flipping the note pad shut. “Small’s the name she and the neighbors knew him by—the name he rented the apartment under. Herbert Small.”

  I glanced at the door to the apartment where a pitted brass number dangled from a nail. Number 5. Small/5.

  “How the hell did they find him?” Parker said with exasperation. “Why did he kill them? Why did he drive them to the river?”

  The only question I could answer was the first one—they’d found him because someone had phoned them at the motel and told them where to look. I didn’t let Parker know that. I didn’t want to.

  “The woman who called this in,” I said to Al, “You think I could talk to her?”

  He nodded. “Across the hall. Number seven.”

  ******

  Her name was Moira Richardson, and she worked as a cleaning woman in Roselawn. She claimed to have no particular interest in Herbert Talmadge, but after I started talking to her I got the feeling that she took an interest in everything that went on in the building—or on the block.

  She was a buxom woman with a shrewd, mobile, careworn face. She spoke very slowly as people do when they want to be taken seriously, when they take themselves seriously. A younger woman, her daughter I thought, sat in a rocking chair in a far corner of the room.

  I asked Moira Richardson when Talmadge/Small had moved in.

  “Monday a week,” she said. “Didn’t have no belongings. No furniture.”

  “Do you know if he had a job?”

  “That kind don’t never work,” the woman said, scowling. “In fact, I couldn’t figure out where he got money for rent. Bought him a TV, too. And a car. Now where’s a jailbird like that gonna get a TV, less he’s pushing drugs or got some woman on the street.”

  It was an interesting question.

  “Did he have any friends in the building?”

  “He didn’t ever say no more than two or three words to no one. Just come and go—mostly late at night. Girl down the hall said he asked to use her phone once. But she wouldn’t let him in. She was scared of him.” The woman threw her hand at me dismissively. “I ain’t scared of no woolly-headed monkey like that.”

  “Did you let him use your phone?”

  “He never asked me. Knew better than to ask me anything.”

  “Did you ever see him with anyone outside the building?”

  The woman shook her head. “No sir, I didn’t.”

  “I did,” the one in the rocking chair chirruped.

  She was a plump, pretty girl with soft brown eyes and a tiny, sparrow voice.

  “Wha’chu mean ‘you did’?” her mother said with massive suspicion.

  The girl squirmed in the rocker. At first I thought she was frightened, then I realized she was simply excited at being the center of attention—mine and her mother’s.

  “I did too see, Mama,” she said, twisting her head around and pouting at the far wall with her lower lip. “Saw him in the park with a white lady, last night.”

  The older woman fell back in her chair, stunned. “Well, I’ll be.”

  “What time last night?” I asked.

  “Time I’m coming home on the bus,” the girl said. “‘Bout six o’clock. They was in Prospect Park. Way back in the shadows, toward the apartment house.”

  “You’re sure it was Tal . . . Small?”

  “Purty sure.”

  As if someone had snapped his fingers, the mother came rocketing out of her trance, lunging forward in her chair and fixing her daughter with a savage look.

  “You didn’t see nobody in no park.”

  “Did too,” the girl said, shrinking beneath her mother’s doubt.

  “You wasting this man’s time with your foolishness.”

  The girl’s big brown eyes began to water. “I saw him,” she said with trembly lips. “With a white lady.”

  “What that lady look like?” the mother said, as if she had her now.

  The girl’s head sank to her breast. “Couldn’t see her face. It was too dark.”

  “You see,” the mother said to me triumphantly. “She didn’t see nothing. That’s why she didn’t tell them cops. She knew they’d catch her up on her lies.”

  “I ain’t lying,” the girl said, in tears now. “She was a white lady in a long brown coat. And she had on a white dress and white stockings and white shoes.”

  “Like a nurse?” I said, feeling a chill.

  “Yes, sir,” the girl said plaintively and looked up at me lik
e I was her savior. “That’s what I said to myself. He gone and got him a nurse from the hospital. You believe me, don’t you? Tell Mama you believe me.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  25

  I DIDN’T tell Parker or Al Foster where I was going when I left the apartment house. I wasn’t ready to tell them anything, yet. Not until I’d had the chance to talk to Rita Scarne without the law looking over my shoulder. I could always contact Parker—or threaten to contact him—if Rita wouldn’t cooperate. But in the mood I was in I didn’t think that was going to be necessary.

  It was almost ten-thirty when I turned into the driveway leading to Rita Scarne’s handsome house. I flipped off the headlights and coasted slowly down the hill, through the oak grove where the dark trees rustled in the wind. There was enough windowlight coming from the front of the house to guide me toward the garage. I parked the car at an angle in front of it, blocking off any exit. Getting out I walked up to the door, pressed the bell, stepped back into the shadows, and waited. After a time I heard someone fiddling with a bolt lock. The bolt slid free and the door opened a crack. I stepped forward immediately, leaning against the door with my shoulder and forcing it all the way open.

  Rita Scarne was standing just inside the hall. She was wearing a brown topcoat over a nurse’s uniform—the same outfit she’d worn for her meeting with Talmadge in Prospect Park. A small black leather satchel, like a doctor’s bag, sat on the hall floor where she’d dropped it.

  “What the hell is this?” she said, looking startled. “You’re not welcome here. I thought I made that clear.”

  “We’re going to talk, Rita,” I said, grabbing her by the arm.

  She tried to jerk away from me, but I pulled her back hard. “Don’t,” I said, waving a warning finger in her face.

  “You can’t do this!” she shouted.

  “Watch me.”

  Dragging the woman behind me I walked quickly down the hall to the glassed-in terrace. I yanked Rita Scarne through the door, spun her around and sat her down on the fan-back chair. She stared up at me savagely.

  “Now we’re going to talk Rita,” I said, bending over her. “No bullshit. The truth this time.”

  “The truth about what?”

  “About last night. You remember yesterday evening, don’t you? When Ethan called?”

  “He didn’t call.”

  “Don’t say that! I don’t want to hear that! Or about your sister who was house-sitting.”

  The woman’s face reddened furiously. “Well, what the hell do you want to hear? Tell me so we can get this melodrama over with.”

  “You called the motel and sent those kids to that fucking maniac’s apartment, Rita. You may even have told the son of a bitch they were coming. I want to know why. I want to know what those kids knew about you and Herbert Talmadge that made you send them to their deaths.”

  “Nothing!” she shouted. “There was nothing between me and Herbert Talmadge. I’ve already told you that.”

  “You were lying then. And you’re lying now. You were seen with Talmadge on McMicken Street before Estelle Pearson died and again Monday night in Prospect Park.”

  “That’s preposterous. Where are you getting your information—from that screwball Pearson kid?”

  “I’ll make this easy for you. You were fucking Talmadge back in ‘76, and Ethan found out. A snoopy kid who hated your guts, he saw you and Herbie doing it in the backyard, or the patio, on your lunchbreak, while Estelle was zonked out on Thorazine. Anyway he saw you.”

  Rita Scarne sneered at me. “Why would I screw a man like that?”

  “Because you like men like that, Rita. You always have. Big, brutal, dangerous men. Men who can make it hurt the way you like it. Men like Herbie.”

  Rita Scarne sat back in the chair and laughed contemptuously. “You’ve got me confused with somebody else, Stoner.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like you figure it out. Only you’re not talking about me.”

  She reached over to the table where the fifth of Old Grand-dad was still sitting. There was a scant shot left inside, and she swallowed it straight. The whiskey made her face flush again, all the way to the roots of her loose blond hair.

  “I don’t know anything about Talmadge or the Pearson kids.” She settled back in the chair, hugging the bottle to her breasts like a stuffed toy. “You can keep this up all night, and it won’t change that.”

  “You don’t understand, Rita. The cops have a witness who’ll swear she saw you in Prospect Park with Herbert Talmadge. They’ve got a record of the call Ethan Pearson made from his motel room to your agency—the call the agency forwarded to your house. They’ve got drugs that can probably be traced to that bag of yours. A TV your money paid for. And they’ve got a dead man in an Avondale apartment with a big hole in his chest that you made with your own little hands.”

  “A dead man?” Rita Scarne said. The fight drained out of her face, leaving the naked fear. “Who’s dead?”

  “Talmadge, Rita. Herb Talmadge. And Ethan and Kirsty Pearson. You killed them all this morning, don’t you remember? Herb did two for you, and you did Herb.” I bent down so my face was only a few inches from hers. “You killed them all and you’re going to die for it.”

  “Bastard!” Raising both hands, she tried to claw my face. I grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the arms of the chair.

  “He came after you, didn’t he, Rita? Thirteen years and he came after you the day he got out of Lex. What did he want? Drugs? Money? Some of that good, old-fashioned, hardball sex you specialize in? You couldn’t say no, could you? Not to Herb. What did he have on you? Something from your days at Rollman’s? Something about Estelle?”

  The woman looked away.

  I stared at her for a moment—at her red, averted face. “It was Estelle, wasn’t it? What did Talmadge do to Estelle?”

  And, suddenly, I didn’t have to ask anymore. “Good Christ.”

  I started to laugh.

  I let go of the woman’s hands—she wasn’t going anywhere—and sat down across from her on the couch, still laughing. It was such a grand joke. “Ethan was telling the truth. Your crazy, drugged-out boyfriend did show up at the house, looking for you. Only you weren’t there. You were sick. That’s it, isn’t it? What happened then, Rita? Did Herbie grab Estelle instead? Grab her, pour liquor into her, and rape her. Is that why she killed herself? Or did Herb do that, too?”

  Rita Scarne’s head sank slowly to her chest.

  I sat back in the chair, letting the last of my laughter die away. “And you were afraid to say anything—afraid you’d catch the blame. After all you’d just been fired from Rollman’s, so your credibility wasn’t so hot. Or maybe Herbie was the reason you got fired in the first place. A little hanky-panky on the psych ward. It’s easy enough to check out.”

  The woman raised her head weakly. “Getting fired had nothing to do with sex,” she said in a whisper. “I was fired because of . . . I did a favor for someone.”

  “What favor?”

  She looked at me squarely for the first time since I’d mentioned Estelle Pearson’s death. “I got the bastard released. Okay? They were going to send him away for good, and I got him released.” She looked down again—at the bottle in her arms. “I stole some drugs from the dispensary, too.”

  When I’d talked to him on the phone, Dr. Isaac Goldman had claimed he hadn’t authorized Talmadge’s release—that he’d recommended confinement at Longview. I thought he’d simply forgotten the facts. Now it seemed he’d never known them.

  “You forged Goldman’s signature?”

  “I waited until he left town, so they never knew about the release. It was the drugs that cost me the job. The old biddy, Rostow, found out I’d been taking them from the dispensary. The hospital board agreed not to press charges if I resigned my post.”

  “What kind of drugs did you steal?”

  “Painkillers. Demerol. Talmadge loved the shit. And . . . it made
him manageable.”

  “Manageable? Manageable by whom?”

  Rita Scarne sighed heavily. “A friend. She was . . . involved with him. She wanted him out of the hospital.”

  “Your friend was a nurse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Carla Chaney?” It was the only name that made sense.

  The woman jerked as if she’d been prodded. “You know about Carla?”

  “Just her name and the fact that she was your roommate.”

  Rita Scarne stared at me searchingly, then shook her head as if she hadn’t found what she’d been looking for. “You don’t know anything. You couldn’t.”

  She said it, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  “What is it I don’t know?” I asked. “Why did Carla want Talmadge out of the hospital? What did it have to do with last night?”

  “Last night?” She wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. She sat in the chair and stared fearfully out the window at the cold December dark.

  “What really happened thirteen years ago?”

  Rita Scarne blinked stupidly and stood up. The whiskey bottle slid off her lap, clattering to the floor. “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said in a desperate voice.

  “Not until we’re finished.”

  The woman clasped her hands together as if she was praying. “You don’t understand. It’s falling apart. All of it. I should have known when you first showed up.” She glanced through the window again at the dark woods behind the house. “I’m next. It won’t stop until no one’s left to tell.”

  “To tell what? For chrissake, make sense.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not now. Not until I’m sure it’s safe. Not until I’ve made it safe.”

  “How will you do that?”

  But she didn’t answer me. “Give me a few hours. Please, Stoner? A few hours to make it safe. Then I’ll talk to you about Carla . . . about all of it.”

  “What’s to keep you from running away?”

  “Where to?” she said. “I’ve got no place to run.” She sat back down on the chair and raised her clasped hands. “Please, Stoner. Just a few hours.”