Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

“I guess I was,” Steele said. “Not to put too fine a point on it Sy was boffing the hell out of her. I mean they were having a four-star affair. At one stage Sy even hinted that he was going to divorce Jeanne and marry Carla.”

  “But he didn’t get the divorce?”

  Steele shook his head. “He talked himself out of the idea—or Jeanne did. The truth was Sy was just a bad little boy, who liked to peek up women’s skirts. Jeanne knew that about him. When it came down to it, she also knew that Sy would never leave her.”

  “Why?”

  “Jeanne’s family had money. If he divorced her he’d lose his meal ticket. And Sy loved the good life too much to throw it away, even for a beauty like Carla. Jeanne knew that about him, too. We all did, except for Carla.”

  “So Chase broke the affair off?”

  Steele shook his head. “He didn’t have the guts to tell Carla it was over, so Jeanne did it for him. There was a scene—right here in the office. An ugly tiff. The next day the girl quit and Jeanne went to work in her place. She was trained as a nurse, but what she really wanted to do was keep Sy away from further temptation.”

  “Did it work?”

  Steele laughed dully. “Eventually. Sy kept seeing Carla for a short time after that. I know he gave the girl money out of the office account—to help her relocate in Cincy. It was the kind of thing Sy was always doing, instead of the right thing.”

  “You didn’t like Chase much, did you?” I said.

  “No, I didn’t,” the man said without reflection. “I took him into the practice as a favor to Jeanne’s father. But it was clear from the start that Sy was never interested in the life of a country physician in a town like Cedar Falls. He’d done his internship in psychiatry and fancied himself too well educated for general practice. Hell, he was too well educated to work. He was a weak man. A spoiled, self-indulgent man who thought only of his own needs. Frankly I could never figure out what Jeanne or Carla saw in him.”

  “Perhaps someone who could be easily manipulated,” I said, thinking of the “toys” in Carla’s apartment. Toys to punish bad little boys.

  “That’s not a good enough reason,” Steele said. “At least it wouldn’t have been for a woman like Jeanne. God, I wonder what really happened to her.”

  But I was thinking of what had happened to the other one—the one who had gone to Cincinnati.

  31

  BEFORE LEAVING the office I asked Steele about the accident that had killed Sy Chase—whether there had been any doubt that it was an accident. Suspicious deaths seem to follow Carla Chaney around, whether she’d had a hand in them or not.

  But Steele said there’d been nothing suspicious about Sy Chase’s death. One December night in 1975, on his way home from Cincinnati, he’d driven his car off an icy road and died instantly in the crash. The only possible connection Carla might have had to the accident was incidental—Steele thought he’d might have gone looking for the girl on the night he died.

  “At least Jeanne suspected that was what he was up to. She was pretty damn bitter about it, too. Sy swore to her that he’d given Carla up.”

  “Carla was still living in Cincinnati at the time of the accident?”

  “Yes. Like I said, Sy supported her for a while down there—until Jeanne found out about it. Then the money stopped. Carla took a job and that was the end of their affair.” He smiled. “Sy was damn bitter about it. You see, it didn’t take Carla long to find someone new. After she got the job she dropped Sy like a hot rock.”

  “When was this?”

  “In the fall of ‘75, I think.”

  That meant that Carla had probably been living on Sy Chase’s money throughout the summer when she’d roomed with Rita Scarne on Terrace Avenue. In the fall she’d found a different way to support herself—and a different boyfriend.

  It occurred to me that it would be damn convenient from my angle if Phil Pearson turned out to be Carla’s new employer—and lover. Louise said that Phil had had several lovers before her. Nurses and secretaries. Without question he would have looked like a real catch to Carla. A successful, unhappily married man who was talking divorce—that was how Louise had described him in late ‘76. He probably wasn’t much different in the fall of ‘75. Another Sy Chase, without a wife to rein him in.

  A short, passionate affair with a treacherous girl who loved money and had lethally dangerous friends—it could have led to murder. Although what Phil would have gained from killing off Stelle I didn’t know. What Carla had stood to gain was easier to figure: a rich husband. As for Rita, she would have settled for some of Phil’s cash.

  “Do you happen to know who Carla went to work for in Cincinnati?” I asked Steele.

  He rubbed the side of his nose. “Some doctor, I think. Sy probably mentioned his name. But after fourteen years . . . ”

  “It wasn’t a psychiatrist named Pearson, was it? Phil Pearson?”

  “Frankly I don’t remember. Could be I’ve got the name written down at home in one of my old date books or calendars.”

  I took out my card and handed it to him. “If you find it, give me a call.”

  ******

  It was past five when I got back to the office. The first thing I did was phone Nurse Rostow to see if Carla Chaney had gone to work at Rollman’s Hospital in late 1975—while Phil Pearson had been finishing his residency.

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell,” Nurse Rostow said. “I could consult our records if you wish.”

  “That would be fine.”

  While I was waiting for her call back I went through the messages on my answering machine. There was one from Larry Parker, telling me that the State Patrol hadn’t found the children’s bodies yet. And one from a man named Elroy Stenger. I dialed him up.

  “Elroy Stenger,” the man said, as if I should have placed his name immediately. “You know? Roy Stenger, out at The Bluegrass Motel?”

  “I thought a guy named Wilson ran the motel.”

  “He does,” Stenger said. “I’m the clerk. Wilson said I should call you.”

  “That was two days ago.”

  “I been sick. Ain’t gonna come in here sick, you know. No matter what that sumbitch Wilson says. He don’t pay me enough that I should come in here running no fever. Hell, I don’t feel a hunnert percent yet.”

  Roy Stenger had the whiney, sullen voice of a born loser, a man whose sole tactic was complaint. I could almost see him standing in front of me—thin as a rail, with an anchor tattooed on his arm, his back teeth pulled, a mean blue eye, and an attitude that never quit. I could understand why Wilson had felt like poking him in the nose.

  “All right, Roy,” I said wearily. “What’s up?”

  “Ain’t nothing up,” he said, as if I’d thrown him a curve. “Thought you had some questions you wanted to ask me.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You don’t want to know about them phone calls?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “There were two. One going out and one coming in. That kid made that first one a little after he and that girlfriend of his drove in on Monday afternoon, maybe ‘bout five or six o’clock. I got the number if you want.”

  “I already have it,” I said.

  “It was to some nursing agency, I think.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I listened in on the line. Got nothing better to do ‘round here most evenings.”

  “Did you listen to the second call, too?” I asked curiously. “The one coming in?”

  “Nope. The goddamn ice machine went on the fritz again ‘round eleven-thirty, so I missed most all of it.” He said it like it was a TV show he’d been planning to watch. “It was a woman, though. And she asked for Ethan Pearson by name.” He paused to clear his throat. “Maybe it was the woman who come by that night. She was wearing a nurse’s outfit. So likely it was.”

  I sat up in my chair. “What are you talking about?”

  “A woman come by the office, ‘bout ten o’clock Monday night. She was wear
ing a nurse’s outfit.”

  “Wilson didn’t mention that.”

  “I didn’t tell him is why. Don’t tell him everything that goes on ‘round here. No reason to.”

  “What did this woman look like?”

  “Didn’t see her face. She had on dark glasses and a scarf ‘round her head. But she was a good-size woman with blond hair.”

  It sounded like Rita Scarne.

  “What did she want?”

  “She left a package for the kid. Just an envelope with some papers or something in it I rung his room and he come picked it up a few minutes later, after the nurse done left.”

  “What was she driving, this nurse?”

  “An old-make Pontiac. Real beat up.”

  “You’re sure of that?” I said, thinking of Rita’s Audi.

  “Hell, yes I’m sure. Saw her again last night. ‘Bout three a.m.”

  I didn’t say anything for a second. “You saw this same car last night? Wednesday morning?”

  “Same car, same woman,” he said. “That boy must have given her his key, ‘cause she went in his room and come out and drove off. Out the back way, ‘round past the pool.”

  “Did you see her face this time?”

  “Nope. Is the boy sick or something? Got him the flu, maybe? Man could catch his death in this kind of cold.”

  I didn’t say it out loud, but that was what Ethan had caught all right, and Kirsty too.

  ******

  It took me thirty minutes to drive to The Bluegrass Motel.

  Stenger was waiting at the desk in the office. Tall and lean, with lax black hair combed straight down across his forehead and a scraggly moustache like a pencil scribble above his sullen mouth. He wore an open-collared white shirt with a plastic name tag pinned to the pocket. Elroy.

  It cost me forty dollars to get Wilson to give me the passkey to Ethan’s bungalow. Stenger came a good deal cheaper. Ten bucks and he slid the key across the counter with his forefinger.

  “Figured you’d be interested in that nurse,” he said, congratulating himself on his big score.

  “You figured right. This package of papers the woman dropped off on Monday—you didn’t happen to look inside, did you?”

  “‘Course not,” Stenger said, feigning outrage. “I don’t pry into nobody else’s business and I expect no man to pry into mine. She left that package for the Pearson boy and said to tell him it was from Rita. And that’s exactly what I done.”

  “You didn’t happen to catch the license number of Rita’s car, did you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not this morning, either?”

  Stenger drew back as if I was asking for the world. “You’re damn lucky I saw her at all—way she come sneaking ‘round the back entrance that early in the morning.”

  “You’re sure it was three?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Love Boat just come on Nineteen.” He nodded behind him at the grey, fulgent eye of a portable TV, sitting on the manager’s desk. “Saw her reflection in the tube. That white uniform.”

  “She the only one who paid Ethan’s room a visit this week?”

  “Just her and you, far as I know.”

  “No cops?” I said skeptically.

  Elroy Stenger drew back a step farther. “What’d cops want ‘round here?”

  From the way he said it, I figured he was in a better position to know than I was. Talking about cops killed off the little hospitality the ten dollars had bought me. Pocketing the bill Elroy turned his back on me and flipped on the TV.

  “Just drop that key on the counter when you’re through,” he called out as I left.

  I walked down the tar driveway that led from the office to the cottages. The drive ran past the heart-shaped swimming pool and behind the cottages to the highway. There were no overhead lights along the way, so it was just good luck—or Elroy Stenger’s persistent nosiness—that had led him to discover his early morning visitor.

  Whoever she was, she wasn’t Rita Scarne, who had been sitting dead in her car at three a.m.

  ******

  There was no police seal posted on Ethan Pearson’s motel room door—Stenger had been right about that. For Parker, Foster, and the Ohio State Patrol the case had apparently ended at first light with the discovery of Rita’s body. No one had even bothered to make a routine check of Ethan’s room.

  I fit the key in the lock and pushed the door open.

  At first glance the place looked the same as it had on Tuesday afternoon. The fast-food wrappers on the bed. The tin ashtray on the pillow. The phonebook sitting where I’d left it on the dresser. Hell, there wasn’t that much that could have changed. And yet Carla Chaney, or someone else, had taken a huge risk to revisit that room. I wanted to know why.

  I went through the place again. The bed, the bath, the nightstand, the bureau. And that’s when I found it.

  Ethan’s bankbook, the one listing his father’s regular thousand-dollar deposits to the savings account at First National, was missing from the bureau drawer. As far as I could tell it was the only thing missing.

  I sat down on the corner of the bed and stared stupidly at the bureau. There was no sense to it—to someone risking her life to steal a dead boy’s bankbook. There had been no money in the savings account—I’d checked. The last thousand-dollar deposit had been removed two weeks before Ethan disappeared—the money had always been removed several weeks after it was deposited.

  I reached over, picked up the phone, and dialed the desk. Elroy answered.

  “You gotta pay for any calls you make,” he said immediately, as if he could see the money coming out of his ten-dollar bonus.

  “I’ll pay,” I said. I took my notebook out of my jacket and flipped through it until I found the number for The University Inn in Evanston.

  “Long-distance gonna cost you extra,” Elroy said after I gave him the number.

  “Just dial the fucking thing.”

  I got The University Inn’s version of Elroy Stenger after a couple of rings. He put me though to Hedda Pearson.

  I hadn’t been sure that the woman was still at the motel. But she was there all right, still holding vigil in that little room, still waiting, as she told me she would wait, for Ethan to return home.

  “Is there news?” she asked nervously. “Have they found him?”

  “Not yet.”

  Hedda Pearson laughed a terrible laugh. “They think he’s dead, don’t they? And for what? For some neurotic, oedipal fantasy.”

  “Ethan’s story about his mother may not have been as fantastic as we thought.”

  Hedda Pearson sucked in her breath as if I’d slapped her. “Is that what you called for? To tell me that I don’t know my husband? That I couldn’t tell truth from fantasy?”

  “I called because I need to know about Ethan’s savings account at First National—the one his dad deposited money to every three months.”

  The woman laughed wretchedly. “Are you insane? First you say this absurd story of Ethan’s is true. Then you ask me about imaginary bankbooks.”

  I stared down at the bureau, at the empty drawer. “You’re telling me that you don’t know anything about a savings account or a passbook?”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m telling you. There was no savings account. No money from Ethan’s father. He wouldn’t have accepted money from his father if it had been offered. Don’t you know that?”

  I told the woman I would call her when I had word about her husband. But from the sound of her voice when she hung up, I knew that she would just as soon never hear from me again—or anyone else who took Ethan’s fantasies seriously. She’d been more upset by the possibility that she’d been wrong about them than by the possibility that he was dead. But then his obsession had given form to her life for the past four years—it had shaped her relationship to Ethan. Without it she lost her identity as his victim.

  After hanging up on Hedda Pearson I phoned Al Foster at the CPD and asked him to do me another favor.

&nb
sp; “I need a check run on a savings account at First National Bank, under the name of E. Pearson. I’d like to know who actually owns the account, who deposits to it, and who withdraws from it.”

  After that morning’s scene with Parker I’d expected him to say no—especially to the bank inquiry, which would require a court order. But he didn’t.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Why so cooperative?” I asked curiously.

  “Let’s just say that things aren’t working out exactly as expected at this end.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  “When the time is right,” Al said.

  32

  AFTER AL hung up I sat in the motel room for a little while longer, thinking about the missing bankbook that hadn’t belonged to Ethan Pearson. Someone must have given it to him on Monday night—probably the nurse who had come to the motel. The nurse who wasn’t Rita Scarne. Presumably the same woman had returned on Wednesday morning, after the boy and his sister were dead, to take the book back. Roy Stenger claimed the nurse had her own key to the motel room, but I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He was pretty damn corruptible when it came to passkeys—that was how I’d gotten in. The only other way Carla—or whoever the nurse was—could have gotten a key was to take it off Ethan Pearson’s dead body in Talmadge’s apartment. Or off Talmadge’s body on Tuesday morning.

  Whether Carla had done all that or not, it figured that the account book had something to do with Stelle Pearson’s death. Finding and punishing their mother’s murderer was all that Ethan and Kirsty had been interested in.

  I picked up the phone again and told Roy to dial Dayton information. Rita Scarne’s sister, Charlotte, had mentioned bankbooks with money in them—part of the grim inheritance that Rita had left her on Wednesday morning. I wanted to know whether they connected to Ethan’s missing account book.

  I got Charlotte’s number from information and had Roy dial it.

  “This is Stoner, Charlotte.”

  “Yes,” she said stiffly. “I recognize your voice.”

  “I need to talk to you about Rita.”

  It took her a while to speak. Given my part in the tragedy of her sister’s death, I understood why. “What about Rita?”