Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  “Do they?” I said uneasily.

  “I’ve got an address if you want to get in touch with her.”

  “That would be fine,” I said.

  “Eighty-nine fifty Kenwood Road. There’s no phone listed.”

  ******

  I went from the bank to the underground garage where the car was parked. It was past five when I got onto 71-North. The rush-hour traffic was heavy, and it was close to six when I got off the expressway at the Kenwood exit.

  I’d tried not to think about that damn bank account on the way out—about what it meant. Some of it was obvious. Phil Pearson hadn’t been paying Rita Scarne off—at least not directly. Jeanne L. Chase had. Which meant that Jeanne L. Chase had access to a lot of money—her own or someone else’s. The fact that the account had been established in Ethan’s name suggested that Phil was still the likely source.

  That’s as far as I let myself take it. But I sure as hell didn’t like the direction it was going.

  The development that Jeanne L. lived in on Kenwood Road only made me more nervous. Eighty-nine fifty was a luxe little complex, a couple miles from the Kenwood shopping district, a couple more miles from Indian Hill. The condos were single units shingled in cedar shakes that had weathered to a seaside grey. They had tall smoked-glass windows and fenced grounds and built-in garages, and each one was twisted like a different letter of the alphabet—or the same letter drawn in a slightly different hand. Stylish hideaways for those who could afford them. Like Phil Pearson.

  The sun was down by the time I got to the complex. I flipped on the lights and coasted down a tar drive, past those big block letters. The ground floors were fenced off in front, so all you could see were the second story windows with their dark glass panes reflecting the twilight.

  Eighty-nine fifty was the last lot on the street. I knew which one it was without having to hunt for the number. Shelley Sacks’ grey Merc was parked in front.

  I pulled up behind the Merc and got out. The wind was blowing hard, and I ducked my head against it as I walked toward Jeanne L. Chase’s condo. As I got closer to the fence I heard a creaking noise. The fence gate had been left ajar and was swinging in the wind. I looked around—at the other condos on that part of the block. The nearest one was a good thirty yards away—across the drive. There were no lights coming from it. No lights at all on that part of the street. Looking back at the fence I opened the gate fully and went in.

  There was a stone walkway inside, cutting across a small yard to the front door of the condo. I walked up to the door and knocked. When no one answered I tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.

  The house was completely dark. Without the twilight to guide me I had to stand in the doorway for several moments while my eyes dark-adapted. Eventually I found a dimmer switch on the wall and pressed it. A row of recessed lights came on overhead, lighting a carpeted hallway with a large lacquered mirror on the right-hand wall and several framed Japanese and Indian prints on the left. The place looked just as posh as could be, until I glanced at one of the prints. They were artily framed but what they pictured were perverse sexual acts—some of them involving children.

  I began to notice a stale smell in the hall. A smell like dirt and old sex mixed together with something else—something fresh and terrible.

  I walked quickly to the end of the hall. It forked to the right and left—right into a large living room, decorated with Italian leather furniture, left into a stairwell, leading to the second floor. The living room was dark, so I couldn’t see the framed pictures on the walls. But I could guess what their subject matter was. Something on an end table gleamed in the hall light—a water pipe, I thought.

  I looked up the dark stairway to my left. The bad smell seemed stronger there. There was a switch on the wall. I flipped it on and immediately flipped it off again.

  It was a gut reaction—a twitch. There was blood on the stairs. A good deal of it.

  I turned the light back on and started up, stepping over the dark, glistening spots of blood. The smell of sex and death grew much stronger as I neared the landing. Sex and death and flowers. Her scent.

  The top floor looked to be one large room, with a tall, A-frame ceiling. A ceiling fan dangling from the center beam had been left on. It slowly revolved above the brass bed on the floor beneath it. The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room. It gleamed in the semidarkness—the brass fittings, the stained silk sheets. A body lay on the bed—Sheldon Sacks’ body. He was naked, bloody from the waist down, and very, very dead.

  I didn’t examine the body. I didn’t want to look at what she’d done to him. He had come there to confront her—perhaps he had summoned her there on the phone after I left the office. Who knows what he had in mind. But he’d been no match for Carla.

  Neither had I.

  39

  I DROVE back to Sacks’ office. I didn’t even bother to call the cops. There would be time for the cops later.

  I’d found the key to his building in his trousers and a key to the alarm box. I used one to get in and the other to give me some time with his files. It took a few hours. I’d guessed most of it anyway. I was a damn good guesser by then.

  I took her employment file with me when I left.

  ******

  It was almost midnight when I got to Indian Hill—to the unmarked street in the midst of the woods. I pulled up in the driveway and sat there for a while, wondering if she’d come out again, wrapped in silk, to play in the moonlight.

  But she didn’t come out.

  I opened the car door and walked across the lawn.

  The front door was open. I went in. Down the hall to the sitting room, where she was waiting by the fire. Behind her the stale Christmas tree winked red and blue.

  I sat down across from her on the leather captain’s chair.

  For a while she looked at the fire—her hand to her cheek, her face sleepy-looking in the firelight, her eyes heavy with sleep. She’d had a long day.

  “Shelley told me you’d be coming,” she said.

  “I just saw him.”

  She laughed—her teeth red in the firelight. “Did you?”

  “What do you have planned for me?”

  “For you?” she said. “Oh, I see. You made a joke.”

  “It’s no joke, Louise, Carla, Jeanne. Which do you prefer?”

  “Carla is right,” she said, letting her head loll against the chair. “Carla is first.”

  “So I’ve seen.”

  “Don’t be mean, Harry,” Carla Chaney said. “I’ve seen enough cruelty in my life. Now I want it to stop. I want it all to stop. I’m through.”

  She showed me her hands—both sides, as if she’d cleaned them real good, cleaned them for me. “See.”

  But I didn’t see.

  “I guess I understand about Tallwood and Talmadge. But your own son?”

  “That was Talmadge,” she said bitterly. “I didn’t want that.”

  “And Jeanne Louise Chase? What did you want him to do with her?”

  “She was a vindictive bitch, who would have destroyed me if she could. I didn’t let her.”

  “Which brings us to Stelle—poor Stelle. Without her money and her house and her friends—Phil was just a weak man with no future. And she was going to take it all away from him. Either that or he was going to go back to her and beg her forgiveness. Either way you were screwed. So you got Talmadge out of the hospital, and Rita . . . well, she was already on hand. Or did you recommend her for the nursing job, too? Whisper her name in Phil’s ear? Tell her to call in sick on the day you scheduled the job?”

  “Something like that,” Carla Chaney said.

  “Why Shelley? Why the stepkids?”

  She smiled sleepily. “Why not you, last night?”

  I shuddered where I sat. “That’s no answer.”

  “Shel had been fucking me off and on since I met him—whenever he could get it up, whenever he felt like it, whenever he wanted a dirty thrill. That was what t
he condo was for—a love nest. What Shel didn’t know was that I took every guy I slept with there. He was fucking Stelle, too, before she died—the good doctor. Phil’s close friend.” She laughed, baring her teeth. “Tonight he wanted to fuck me one more time before he turned me in. I let him do me—in the ass. Then I gave him what he deserved.”

  She said it as if that was what every man who had ever laid a hand on her in violence had deserved—the long line of abusing men, from Tallwood to Sacks.

  “Why Ethan and Kirsty? What did they deserve?”

  “Herb was going to kill me,” she said simply. “I’d set him up for Jeanne’s murder. Rita and I did. I had to do something after he got out of prison. When Kirsty called Shelley on the way to town on Sunday night, I saw a chance.”

  “She called Sacks?”

  “From a phone booth outside Indianapolis. He wanted to keep it a secret—to let Kirsty work the thing out therapeutically. That was his vanity.” Carla Chaney smiled. “He couldn’t keep a secret from me.”

  “Then it was you who made the call to the motel on Monday and told them where to find Talmadge?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t think Kirsty was still with Ethan. I really didn’t. She told Shel on Sunday night that she was going to go back to Chicago. I guess it was just bad luck that she didn’t.”

  I stared at her and she turned away.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered. “I’m no monster.”

  “You told Talmadge they were coming, for chrissake! In Prospect Park on Monday night.”

  “No, I gave him drugs. So he’d be asleep when they came. But he didn’t take them until later, until after . . . ” Her mouth trembled. “I didn’t want Kirsty to die. She was a little . . . like me.”

  For a split second I saw a look on her face that I’d never seen before, save on the faces of desperate men. “I killed him for her, too.”

  “C’mon,” I said heavily. “We’re going to the cops.”

  Carla shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere. I took some pills about fifteen minutes ago. Fifteen minutes from now . . . I’ll be asleep.”

  “For chrissake, Louise!”

  She stared at me almost pityingly. “Don’t do anything . . . okay? Just stay here until I fall asleep. That’s all I ask. I don’t like to be alone in the dark. You know that.”

  “Louise . . . ”

  “I won’t try any tricks. I could have done you last night. I could do you right now. I could make it look like an accident. Believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  “But I’ve given up. I tried to explain it in the car today.” She got to her feet. “Just stay here until I’m asleep. Then you can call the police.”

  Louise unbuttoned her blouse as she walked over to the door. I saw her body again—beautiful in the firelight.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked her.

  “Because I’m tired.” She smiled sadly. “I’ve lived too many lives.”

  I didn’t say it but, in truth, it had only been the one.

  “I’m going upstairs to the bedroom,” she said as she walked from the room. “In ten minutes or so, come up and . . . kiss me good night.”

  THE END

  Enjoy all of Jonathan Valin’s HARRY STONER series, as both Ebooks and Audiobooks!

  **********

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  Natural Causes: Harry Stoner Series #5

  Life’s Work: Harry Stoner Series #6

  Fire Lake: Harry Stoner Series #7

  Extenuating Circumstances: Harry Stoner Series #8

  Second Chance: Harry Stoner Series #9

  The Music Lovers: Harry Stoner Series #10

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