Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  “You mentioned some bankbooks that she gave you. I’d like to have a look at them.”

  Charlotte Scarne took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think maybe you should,” she said, sounding relieved.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There was an article in the Daily News today—about Rita and those children you were looking for. The Pearson children. It said they were presumed dead and that Rita might have played a part in their murders.”

  “No one’s completely sure.”

  “It’s horrible,” the woman said, shaken. “So horrible.”

  At first I thought she meant the accusation itself, but she didn’t. “Mr. Stoner, I think Rita did kill them.”

  “Why?”

  “The bankbooks. The ones that you’re talking about. Some of them have Ethan’ and Kirsten Pearson’s names on them.”

  ******

  I didn’t put it together until I got inside the woman’s house, past the frozen ice on her stairs—ice that still bore my footprints and Rita’s—past the frozen, accusatory stare on Charlotte Scarne’s face when she answered the door. The black bag was already sitting on the dusty table in the center of the dusty sitting room. I went straight over to it while Charlotte hovered nervously in the hall. There were four bankbooks inside the bag, two in Ethan’s name, one in Kirsty’s, one in Rita’s. I looked at the ones with Ethan’s and Kirsty’s names on them first—passbooks for three savings accounts at three different Cincinnati S & L’s. City Bank, Constellation, and First National. The one from First National bothered me—it looked like the same book I’d found in Ethan’s motel room.

  “When did Rita give you this book?” I said to Charlotte.

  “Last night. You were here, don’t you remember?”

  I let that pass and took a look inside the other two books. Like the one I’d found in Ethan’s drawer they’d been deposited to at three-month intervals for almost a decade—thousand-dollar deposits, circulated among the three accounts so that one of them always had money in it every month of the year. The cash was regularly withdrawn a week or two after the deposits were made. I only had to glance at the single passbook with Rita’s name on it to see where that money had gone. The books balanced perfectly. Every penny from the three Ethan and Kirsten Pearson accounts had ended up in Rita’s name. One hundred and twenty thousand dollars, paid out over ten years in one thousand dollar monthly increments.

  It helped explain Rita’s fancy house and car. It helped explain a lot of things.

  “She was stealing from that boy and his sister,” Charlotte Scarne said in a feverish whisper.

  I shook my head, no. “She wasn’t stealing from them.”

  The woman looked confused. “Then why did Rita have their passbooks—and all that cash!”

  I sat down on the tuxedo sofa and stared at the black bag full of money. Blood money. “They weren’t Ethan’s and Kirsty’s passbooks, Charlotte. Ethan and Kirsty didn’t know a thing about them—at least, they didn’t until a few days ago. Those accounts were established by someone who was using their names to launder money.”

  “Launder?” the woman said.

  “To make the deposits look legitimate. To make it seem as if the money was going to Ethan or Kirsty, when it was really being paid to Rita.”

  “Over a hundred thousand dollars!” Charlotte cried. “Who would do such a thing?”

  I could only think of one person with the means. One person who could plausibly use Ethan’s and Kirsty’s names to hide illegal transactions. He’d died that afternoon. “Phil Pearson.”

  Charlotte stopped her pacing and sank into a chair beside an octagonal table full of knickknacks. “I don’t understand this at all. Wasn’t he the one you were working for? Why would he secretly pay Rita money?”

  “For something she did for him thirteen years ago,” I said, thinking aloud. “Something she and Carla and Herb Talmadge did.”

  “What?” the woman said with appetite.

  “They planned and covered up a murder. Estelle Pearson’s murder.”

  Charlotte Scarne fell back in the chair with a groan. “Oh, God, I knew it! I just knew Rita killed someone!” She threw her hands to her face and sobbed melodramatically, although I detected a bit of triumph mixed with the tears.

  Looking around the room, at the dusty furnishings that hadn’t changed in three decades, I could see why. Fourteen years before, Rita had run off with a woman she had loved better than her own sister, leaving Charlotte to lead a drab life with her drab parents in that drab house. The woman was owed a little vindication. Perhaps she had felt she was owed more than that.

  “Why didn’t you show me these passbooks on Wednesday morning, Charlotte?”

  The woman stopped sobbing and pulled her hands slowly away from her eyes, drawing down the pink flesh beneath them.

  “I didn’t look at them myself until after Rita had died.”

  I shook my head. “That isn’t true. It can’t be.”

  She laughed nervously, dropping her hands from her cheeks to her lap. “Are you accusing me of lying?” she said, as if the very notion was preposterous—as if I had the wrong sister.

  I got up and walked over to the doctor’s bag. Reaching inside I took out the First National passbook. “I found this in the Pearson boy’s motel room on Tuesday afternoon. Someone gave it to him on Monday night and picked it up again early this morning. Someone dressed as a nurse. Now it’s here in your house. How’d that happen?”

  The woman blanched. “I . . . I don’t know. There must have been another book.”

  I shook my head again. “If there were more than three of these account books, the deposits to them would have been staggered differently. The books wouldn’t balance to the penny. There would be missing months, missing deposits made to the fourth book. No, I think there were just three accounts in Ethan’s and Kirsty’s names. But I can always check with First National—if you force me to.”

  “Of course, you could,” she said dully, as if that was something that hadn’t occurred to her. “You could check the bank.”

  I asked her again, “When did you get this book, Charlotte?”

  The woman’s face slowly changed. Age and bitterness came over it, greying the pink, girlish flesh, turning the weak smile into something that looked like it might fall out of her mouth and shatter. Raising her right arm woodenly Charlotte Scarne swept the top of the octagonal table beside her, knocking the mementos—the yellowing picture of Mom and Pop, the crystal trout blowing bubbles in its crystal cube—onto the floor. The picture frame cracked in two. The crystal cube exploded with a loud pop, splashing glass shards against the far wall.

  Charlotte Scarne brought her arm back across the table, laid it in her lap and stared at it curiously as if it was something not quite under her control. After a time she looked up at me.

  “I took the bankbook to the boy’s motel on Monday night,” she said in a deadened voice. “I was at Rita’s house when his call came in. I knew about the accounts with their names on them. I . . . I wanted to help them.”

  “You knew about Stelle’s murder?”

  “I knew about the accounts,” she said sharply. “I’d known about them for years. I thought Rita was stealing money from that boy and his sister. I mean why else would she have books with his name on it? Why would she have a house like that? And a car? And so much cash to spend? She’d done something terrible to that boy and his sister. She and that dreadful bitch, Carla. For years Rita had gotten away with it. Why should she keep getting away with it? Lording it over me when Dad died. Making me look small with her dirty money. Even Mother . . . ”

  Choking with anger Charlotte fixed me with a savage stare. “The boy and his sister deserved to know what Rita had done.”

  But what she really meant was that her sister deserved to be punished. She still felt that way even though Rita was dead.

  “So you told Ethan that Rita had been stealing from him.”

  “I thoug
ht he and his sister would take the book to the police. I didn’t know that they would end up dead. I swear to Jesus I didn’t.”

  She dropped her head heavily to her chest. “After you came here I got panicky. I was afraid the police would find the passbook and trace it to me. I already had all the money that she’d given me. I thought they might think, that you might think I was . . . that I had something to do with the blackmail. So I went back to the motel after you left and got the book.”

  “How did you get into Ethan’s room?”

  “The man at the desk,” she said miserably. “I gave him money—and he gave me a key.”

  She looked too damn guilty to be lying. But then she’d lied to me before about the bankbooks and, more importantly, about what she’d suspected Rita and Carla had been up to—thirteen years past.

  “I never knew what the money was for, Mr. Stoner,” Charlotte Scarne said as if she was reading my mind. “I just knew Rita was getting it for something bad. Rita was bad.”

  She started to sob. “Bad,” she cried again, like a tattling child.

  As I watched her weeping bitter tears that weren’t for Rita, I wondered just how large a part Charlotte herself had played in her sister’s suicide and, maybe, in the Pearson kids’ deaths. I couldn’t be sure about what she’d said to Rita or to Ethan on Monday night. I did know that someone had told those kids where to find Talmadge—someone who’d known where to find them and Herb. And Rita had had that black bag of blood money packed before I showed up on Wednesday morning—ready to take to her sister in Dayton. At the very least there was an ugly possibility that Charlotte had done a little blackmailing of her own. But then the Pearson case was full of ugliness and simmering vengeance. And murder.

  “Did you tell your sister that the Pearson boy had called her, Charlotte?” I said, when she’d calmed down.

  She shook her head. “No. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “And you didn’t call Ethan back on Monday night?”

  She said no, again.

  “Somebody called them,” I said uneasily.

  “It wasn’t me,” Charlotte said, coming out of the chair with a horrified look on her face. “I didn’t know about that man, Talmadge.”

  “He never showed up at the house, when Carla was living here in ‘74 and ‘75?”

  “Never. The men she saw—they were always . . . respectable-looking.”

  “Do you remember any of their names?”

  “One of them was a doctor,” the woman said. “I think Carla worked for him.”

  “Sydney Chase?”

  “Yes, he came here. A lot.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “There were other men,” Charlotte Scarne said vaguely. “It’s been so many years.”

  “Was one of them Phil Pearson?”

  “I don’t recall the names.”

  “Tall, dark hair, blue eyes.”

  The woman stared at me blankly. “I just don’t remember.”

  33

  I TOOK the bankbooks with me when I left the house on Minton Street. I didn’t give Charlotte a choice, but the truth was that she didn’t really care about the money. Just about Rita—evening things up with Rita. Revenge was almost as much of a theme in her life as it had been in Kirsty’s and Ethan’s. And it had almost poisoned her life to the same extent.

  Before driving off I checked the garage beside the St. Louis. An old brown Pontiac, the car described by Roy Stenger, the motel clerk, was parked inside.

  ******

  I stopped at a Stuckey’s on my way back to Cincinnati and had a cup of coffee and a sandwich. It was past ten and the papery sandwich was the first food I’d eaten all day. I sat there for about fifteen minutes, drinking coffee and thinking about Ethan and Kirsty Pearson.

  Getting that bankbook from Charlotte would have confirmed what the kids already suspected—that Rita Scarne was heavily involved in their mother’s murder. If they’d used their heads the account book would have told them something else—something they didn’t know. That their father had been involved in it, too.

  I wasn’t sure if Al Foster had looked into the ownership of the savings account yet—I’d check that out when I got back to town. But I would have been very surprised if it didn’t belong to Phil Pearson—or jointly to Pearson and Rita. Who else would have used Ethan’s and Kirsty’s names to cover up a payoff? The names of his kids. It was what Shelley Sacks would have called “sublimation.” It was what I called smart thinking.

  Louise had already told me that Phil regularly sent Ethan money—“blood money,” she called it ironically. Blood money it was. But not paid for Ethan’s imaginary complaints or to assuage Phil’s guilt, as Louise had thought. Paid to cover the cost of a very real murder. And the money would have been untraceable, if Charlotte Scarne hadn’t taken a hand.

  But she had. And the two kids had discovered that Papa Phil was involved in Mama’s murder. They might have acted on that discovery if someone hadn’t called them at the motel and told them where to find Talmadge. I’d thought that someone had been Rita Scarne. But after talking to Charlotte I was no longer sure. If Charlotte was telling me the truth, Rita really hadn’t known that the kids had called her on Monday night. She hadn’t known that Ethan and Kirsty were at The Bluegrass Motel, plotting revenge.

  But someone else had known they were there on Monday—the same person who had known where to find Herb. What I couldn’t figure out was how that someone—Carla or whoever she was—had come by that knowledge, if it wasn’t through Charlotte or the kids themselves.

  ******

  It was ten-thirty when I got back to the Riorley Building. The answering machine on my desk was blinking in the twilight, its one yellow eye. I played back the messages while I put Rita Scarne’s bagful of money in the office safe. The first one was from Louise, asking me to come to the house later that night.

  “I’ve never felt so alone,” she said. “Please come here, after eleven, after the others have left. I need you.”

  Her voice was weighted down with a desperate loneliness. A burden I was bound to add to if the path I was following led to Phil. I didn’t know how I was going to handle telling her that I was still working on the case, still trying to prove her dead husband was a murderer. I didn’t know how I was going to handle Louise herself. She wasn’t inviting me home to talk. I knew that. I also knew that I wanted her badly enough to go, even on that night.

  I played back the other messages and tried not to think about Louise. But it was no good—the sound of her voice had started something inside me. I was reaching for the phone to call her when it rang.

  It was Thelma Jackson. Who’d thought I was like Magnum—good, decent, and pure. The sort of man who would never fuck a dead man’s wife on the day he died.

  “That ofay nurse you asked me about?” She paused dramatically. “I found somebody who remembers her real well. Her and Herbie, both.”

  “Who is that?” I said.

  “Old friend of mine from back on McMicken, used to work in the coffee shop over at Jewish Hospital. She seen this girl with Herbie a couple of times.”

  “I already know who the girl is,” I said wearily. “What I need to know is how to find her.”

  “Sarah don’t know where she is now,” the woman said. “She ain’t seen her since ‘76.”

  I sighed.

  “Ain’t you gonna come over and chat?” Thelma Jackson said disappointedly, as if she was looking forward to the company.

  “I’m pretty tired, Thelma.”

  Thelma put her hand over the receiver and I heard her say, “He ain’t coming,” to someone else in the room.

  “Tell your friend I’ll call her tomorrow about Carla.”

  “Carla?” Thelma said. “Who’s that?”

  “Herbie’s girlfriend.”

  “Her name wasn’t Carla,” the woman said. “Was it, Sarah?”

  She went off the line again and I heard her say something to her friend. When she came back on she wa
s full of confidence. “She wasn’t no Carla. She was a Jeanne. Jeanne Chase.”

  ******

  It was past eleven by the time I got to Thelma Jackson’s bungalow on Anthony Wayne. The air near the distillery smelled of peaches that cold December evening. I took a big whiff of it as I crossed over to the house, and caught a hint of gasoline drifting up from the expressway.

  Thelma was standing in the front door as I came onto the porch. Another black woman in her sixties, with a small, gnarled face and a slightly humped back, stood a few feet behind her in the shadows of the living room. The second woman watched shyly while Thelma ushered me in.

  “This here’s Sarah Washington,” Thelma said, turning to the other woman.

  “Pleased,” Sarah Washington said in a squeaky little voice.

  Thelma grinned at her shy friend. “You wouldn’t believe it to look at her, but Sarah was wilder than me in her day.”

  “You hush,” Sarah Washington said, looking embarrassed.

  I went over to the floral-print couch. The women sat down on chairs opposite me. Both of them were wearing floral-print dresses. Thelma filled hers out impressively, while Sarah’s hung from her skinny shoulders like a coat from a hook.

  “Ain’t he good-looking?” Thelma said to her friend. “Too good-looking for an old woman like me.”

  She snapped her girdle, and the other one clucked her tongue mournfully. I had the feeling that Thelma Jackson was going to keep snapping and her friend was going to keep clucking all night long—that that was the way they related to each other.

  “You remember the nurse that Herbie Talmadge was seeing, Ms. Washington?” I said, trying to steer the conversation toward business.

  “Yes, uhm-hm,” Sarah Washington said, nodding until I thought her neck might break. “She worked in the Jewish Hospital Doctors’ Building back in ‘75 and ‘76. I believe her name was Chase. Jeanne Chase.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  The woman ducked her tiny head. “Not for absolute sure.”

  “It couldn’t have been Chaney, could it? Carla Chaney?”