Shelley Sacks would have called it “fate,” because it was messy the way fates always are. But it wasn’t random enough for me. Not with the whole family lying dead. I had no proof, just a guilty feeling that I’d missed it somehow—that we all had. And I couldn’t live with that feeling—even if Louise and Parker could.
29
AFTER LASKER’S call, I started making phone calls of my own—to anyone who could possibly help me locate Carla Chaney. I tried the nursing agencies first—to see if she was still working locally—and drew a blank. I tried the hospitals and hospices in both Dayton and Cincinnati, without any luck. I tried Nola Chaney again in New Mexico—and got no answer.
Around two I tried Al at the CPD. All he’d come up with was a driver’s license application from 1974. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
The address on the application was 678 Aviation Road in Dayton. It sounded like a Wright-Pat address. According to Carla’s mother Nola, ‘73 was the year Carla had moved to Ohio from New Mexico—the year her husband, Bobby Tallwood, had been assigned to Wright-Patterson AFB. Carla applied for the license in November 1974 under her maiden name, Chaney. Perhaps she’d been divorced by then—that was what Nola Chaney had expected. Charlotte Scarne hadn’t mentioned Carla’s husband or kid either. I decided to find out what had happened to them.
******
It took me forty-five minutes to drive to Wright-Pat. I used my old D.A.’s deputy badge to get onto the base, and followed the signs to the headquarters building. One of the streets I passed was Aviation Road. I stopped at the corner, just to take a look.
It was a barracks street lined with neat frame Quonsets, row upon row of them like painted lunchboxes on a shelf. A tall wire fence spackled with ice ran behind the houses, separating them off from the huge cantilevered hangars and long tar airstrips. The roar of jet engines was constant. The ground trembled with it like a low-grade earthquake. I supposed you got used to that after a time. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe all you wanted to do was serve your time and get away from it—and the life inside those nondescript huts.
The yellow-brick headquarters building was a few streets north of Aviation Road. There was a flagpole out front and a stone guardhouse. I showed the MPs the pass I’d been issued at the gate, and they waved me through.
There were more guardposts inside the building—a whole series of them. By the time I got to the adjutant’s office, three or four different tags hung like battle ribbons from my coat.
I told the adjutant I was looking for an airman named Tallwood, and he referred me to Personnel. It took a couple of more tags to get into the Personnel Office, and that was where I finally found someone to talk to.
His name was Olkiewcz, and he was a top sergeant with a square-jawed, implacable face straight out of Steve Canyon. He’d been stationed at Wright-Pat since the early seventies, and he knew most of the men who had served there by name.
He remembered Airman Tallwood, all right. But he refused to talk about him until I’d stated my business. Since Olkiewcz thought I was from the Cincinnati D.A.’s office, I figured Tallwood had a reputation for off-the-base trouble. But I was wrong.
“He’s not wanted for anything,” I told Olkiewcz. “I need to speak to him in connection with a missing persons case.”
The sergeant allowed himself a tight little smile the size of a baby’s fist. “That’s funny,” he said without sounding amused. “‘Cause you could say that Bob’s a missing person, too.”
“He’s AWOL?”
“Permanently. He’s dead, mister.”
“When?”
Olkiewcz ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair like a four-pronged comb. “October 9, 1974.”
“What makes you remember the date?”
“It wasn’t something you were likely to forget—the way it happened, I mean.”
I stared at him curiously. “You want to tell me about it?”
“I don’t see no reason why I should,” Olkiewcz said. “You got your answer—he’s dead.”
“Look, Sergeant. His wife, Carla, is in some trouble. I’m trying to locate her, and any information I can get about her past could be crucial.”
This time he gave me a curious look. “What’d she do? Kill somebody?”
“Possibly.” I said it because I had the feeling that was what he wanted to hear. His eyes had filled with hate when I’d mentioned Carla’s name.
Olkiewcz leaned back in his chair and stared at me coolly. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m going to do it anyway. ‘Cause I wouldn’t want that two-timing bitch to get away with it again.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning she killed her husband and her kid.”
Olkiewcz smiled his tight smile again, then wiped it off his face with his right hand as if it was something that had dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. “Oh, she didn’t actually pull a trigger. But she sure as hell drove that boy over the brink. Made him so crazy he killed that little kid of theirs, then turned a shotgun on himself.”
“Tallwood killed his son and himself?” I said.
“That’s was the way it looked—and nobody could prove different.”
“Did anybody try?”
“Sure. The adjutant tried. We all did. Everybody knew the bitch was running around with a nigger. That it was driving Bobby nuts, the way she and the nigger carried on—right there in front of the kid. Crazy little coon. Just as sick as she was. Got four-effed right after it happened.”
“This guy was a soldier on the base?”
Olkiewcz nodded. “A psycho. P.T.’d a half-dozen times for attacking nurses. That’s how the bitch met him—on the psych ward at the base hospital.”
“Carla worked there as a nurse?”
He nodded. “I don’t know what she saw in the nigger—he sure as hell didn’t have rank or dough. Everybody told Bobby to kick her ass back to New Mexico. But he wouldn’t do it. He just kept looking the other way till the day he snapped. The joke is the bitch ended up with his insurance. Ten thousand dollars’ worth.” Olkiewcz hawked up an oyster of phlegm and spat it into a trash can beside the desk. “No woman’s worth that. I don’t care how good the pussy.”
“The black soldier Carla was screwing, do you remember his name?”
I just wanted to hear him say it. And he did.
“Talmadge. Airman Third Class Herbert Talmadge.”
******
Olkiewcz’s story was so obviously tainted with prejudice that I decided to stop at the base hospital where Carla Chaney had worked to double-check it. One of the doctors on the surgical ward, a major named Carson, remembered Carla Chaney fairly well. Carson was a tall, heavyset man in his mid-forties, with the patchy, red-eyed face of a heavy drinker. He wore a pair of extremely thick, government issue glasses. His bleary eyes swam behind them like huge, bewildered fish.
Carson confirmed the bare bones of Olkiewcz’s story. Tallwood had killed himself and his son, in October 1974. But he had a different recollection of the wife.
“Carla,” he said nostalgically. “Christ, she was a dish. Half the doctors on the ward followed her around with their tongues hanging out. She could have had any one of them—any of us—in a minute. But she stayed married to Bob Tallwood—why I don’t know. The son of a bitch used to beat her up every other day. He beat his son up, too.”
“Olkiewcz left that part out,” I said.
“Olkiewcz is a racist thug. Just like Bob Tallwood was. And then Carla never gave Olkiewcz a tumble, and that probably stuck in his craw.”
“You seemed to have gotten along with her.”
Carson smiled. “She didn’t give me a tumble either, if that’s what you mean. But yeah, I wanted her. I guess she liked me well enough. We’d talk occasionally on the ward, and I treated her on the QT a couple of times after Bob beat her up. I even tried to talk her into leaving the son of a bitch. But she said Bob would kill her before he gave her a divorce. And if she left him he’d just com
e after her—and make things that much worse.”
“It was lucky for her that he killed himself then, wasn’t it?”
“Some people looked at it that way. I didn’t.”
I asked Carson about Herb Talmadge, but he couldn’t place the name.
“For all the attention paid Carla, I never saw her get halfway serious about anybody except Sy Chase. She spent a lot of time with him on the ward and off.”
“Chase was a doctor?”
He nodded. “An intern who served here in ‘73 and ‘74. He was politically connected somehow, or his wife’s family was. That’s why he ended up at Wright instead of in ‘Nam. I thought he was an asshole, but Carla went for him.”
“How serious was it on Chase’s part?”
“I think he would have divorced his wife and married Carla in a minute if she’d been free. But he never got the chance. His hitch was up in June of ‘74. He left the base a few months before Tallwood shot himself. Never saw him again after that.”
“When Tallwood died, was there any hint that Carla might have had a hand in it?”
“There are always rumors after a suicide,” Carson said dismissively. “No one ever uncovered any evidence to support them. Bob Tallwood was a vicious man with a violent temper. He’d beaten Carla and his son up plenty of times before. He just went too far on that particular night and killed the kid. Afterward he started drinking and ended up eating a shotgun. I think the rumors about Carla started because she’d been out that night—because she hadn’t been killed too. And then she didn’t show much emotion when she was told what had happened. Not even about the little boy.” The man shook his head. “I don’t think Carla had much feeling left after living with Bob. I think he’d killed that part of her for good.”
“Meaning she was a sociopath?”
“Meaning like most people who live with constant abuse she was deeply scarred.”
“You said she was out on the night of the suicide. Do you know where?”
“She’d gone to stay at a house of a friend, as I recall. A civilian nurse who occasionally worked here on the base.”
“Do you remember this nurse’s name?”
Carson scratched his head thoughtfully. “I’m sorry. It’s just been too many years.”
“It wouldn’t have been Rita Scarne, would it?”
His big, bleary eyes lit up with recognition. “I think it was Rita Scarne. At least the name rings a bell. How did you know that?”
“Just a lucky guess,” I said grimly.
30
CARSON DIDN’T know what had become of Carla Chaney after she left Wright-Pat in late ‘74. Neither did the Records Department at the base hospital, although they confirmed the facts that she and Rita Scarne had been employed as psychiatric nurses at Wright-Pat and that Airman Herbert Talmadge had been one of their patients. They also managed to dig up an office address for Dr. Sy Chase, the man Carson had linked to Carla Chaney. The address on Gallatin Avenue in Cedar Falls, Ohio, was fourteen years old. But Cedar Falls wasn’t far out of my way, and I was willing to make a side trip to find out just how serious Carla had been about Sy Chase—whether she’d been serious enough to commit murder. And a terrible murder, at that.
The possibility was there, undeniably. Another suspicious suicide with the same cast of characters who’d popped up in the Pearson woman’s case. Only Tallwood’s death had been no accident—not with a ten thousand dollar payoff at the end of it, the very amount that Rita Scarne had collected in blood money. If Tallwood hadn’t committed suicide, there was a chance he’d been deliberately murdered by Talmadge at Carla’s behest, with Rita providing the alibi. And that chance made me rethink what had happened to Estelle Pearson.
I’d assumed that Herb Talmadge had mistaken Stelle for Rita on that September afternoon in 1976—that whatever he’d done to her had been unplanned mayhem, later covered up by Phil Pearson. But the circumstances surrounding Bob Tallwood’s death suggested a more sinister scenario. It now seemed possible that Estelle Pearson had been deliberately murdered, too. It would explain why Carla had gone to such lengths to get her hitman Talmadge out of the hospital in June of ‘76, why Rita had stolen drugs to keep him “manageable” throughout the summer, why Herb had shown up at the Pearson house on the one day of the year that Rita called in sick.
It was possible, all right. And if it was true there had to be another payoff—for Rita and Carla and Herb. The original ten thousand would hardly cover a second homicide. There had to be a payoff and a man to pay it. The only person I could think of with that kind of money and a connection to Stelle was Phil Pearson. I didn’t know why he’d want his wife dead or how he’d come to pick Rita, Carla, and Herb to do the job. But if Estelle had been murdered Phil was behind it—no matter what Louise said.
******
There wasn’t much to Cedar Falls, Ohio. Just a numbered exit off 74-West, emptying into a short commercial drag lined with two-story brick storefronts—half of them built in the thirties by the WPA. A frayed red-and-white banner of Santa Claus and his reindeer was strung between telephone poles at the head of Main Street. There were no other decorations in store windows or on the sidewalks. Even the banner didn’t look festive. The winter wind had dogged it to tatters.
I drove under the torn-up Santa, around a small, deserted park at the end of Main, into the meager fringe of suburbs outlying the town. A raw-faced boy at a Clark service station directed me to Gallatin Street.
Dr. Sy Chase’s office was the very last house on Gallatin, a tired frame bungalow with a converted first floor. Beyond Chase’s office building the town simply died off into flat, snowy farmland and distant pines glittering in the sun. I parked in a lot beside the building, got out, and walked up to the porch. A sign with a physician’s caduceus on it was hanging above the door. I went in.
There was a small glassed-in office immediately to the right of the door and a waiting area to the left. The waiting area was empty, although someone had left an overcoat and purse on one of the chairs. A red-haired nurse with a freckled, sharply featured face was sitting on a stool inside the office. She watched me intently, as if she was half afraid I planned to snatch the purse.
“I’d like to see Dr. Chase,” I said, smiling to soothe her nerves.
The alert look on the woman’s face turned to confusion. Wrinkling her nose she said, “Why, don’t you know that Dr. Chase doesn’t work here anymore?”
“He moved?”
“He died. Thirteen, no, fourteen years ago. He had a car accident and died.”
“I see,” I said with disappointment.
“You were a friend of his?”
“A friend of a friend’s.”
“I guess you could talk to Dr. Steele. He used to be Dr. Chase’s partner.” She glanced down at an appointment book on the ledge in front of her. “Doctor doesn’t have any patients for the rest of the afternoon. It’s always slow like this around Christmas.”
“Dr. Steele would be fine.”
“Your name?”
“Harry Stoner.”
The nurse showed me down a short hall to a white-walled examination room. After a moment Steele came into the room—a short, bony man in his early fifties, with thin grey hair and a lean, fleshless face, grooved like nutmeat at either cheek. He was wearing a white doctor’s smock and carrying a styrofoam cup of coffee in his right hand.
Steele took a sip of coffee and eyed me speculatively.
“So you were a friend of Sy’s?”
He had a flat, nasal voice with a trace of caution in it—a good voice for a small-town doctor.
“I never met the man,” I told him.
Steele looked taken aback. “I thought Sylvie said—”
“I’m searching for someone Dr. Chase used to know. A woman named Carla Chaney.”
Steele gave me a long look. “Are you a policeman?”
“Does her name make you think of cops?”
“Frankly, you make me think of cops,” Steele said.
I grinned at him. “I’m a P.I. working on a missing persons case. Two kids from Cincinnati.”
“And you think Carla is involved?”
I nodded.
He stared at me again. “After fourteen years it’s hard to imagine how you would end up in Cedar Falls, looking for Carla Chaney. But I guess that doesn’t matter. The short and sweet of it is I have no idea where she is. I haven’t seen her since the spring of 1975.”
“Then she used to live in Cedar Falls?”
“No. She lived in Dayton and commuted to work for a couple of months back at the end of ‘74 and the beginning of ‘75.”
I assumed those were the months that Carla had spent at the Minton Street house with Rita and Charlotte Scarne, the months before she’d moved to Terrace Avenue.
“What kind of work did she do here?”
“Officially she was Sydney’s nurse.”
“And unofficially?”
Steele flushed.
Taking another sip of coffee he sat down on a leather stool beside the mirrored cabinet. “I guess it won’t matter if I talk about it now. They’re all gone anyway. Dead or gone. Even Jeanne.”
“Jeanne?”
“Sy’s wife,” he said. “She left town about a year after Sy was killed in the accident. And no one seems to know what became of her. It’s quite a mystery, really. Her parents even hired a detective like you to look into it but . . . no luck.”
He said it with deep regret. He had obviously liked the woman. In fact talking about her disappearance made him eye me anew, as if he was considering asking me to look into Jeanne Chase’s disappearance.
I said, “You were going to tell me about Carla,” to head him off.
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