Second Chance

by Jonathan Valin

  “I’m purty sure her last name was Chase. Somebody told me she come down from a Dayton hospital, but I never did know that for a fact.”

  “She was an RN?”

  “No, no.” The woman shook her head in the opposite plane. “A receptionist.”

  “Y’all got to quit that shaking,” Thelma said irritably. “Make the rest of us dizzy.”

  The woman gave her an ugly look.

  “Who’d she work for?” I asked.

  “I ain’t for sure. One of the doctors in the Jewish Hospital Building.”

  “You tell him what you saw,” Thelma prompted.

  “I saw her and Herbie Talmadge together,” Sarah Washington said, drawing herself up in the chair. “Saw them a couple of times—out in the parking lot.”

  I said, “By together, you mean . . . ?”

  “I mean what I said. They weren’t doing more than talking, far as I could see.”

  She gave Thelma Jackson a quick, sharp look.

  “Are you sure this is the same woman that you saw on McMicken Street?” I said to Thelma.

  She nodded. “Has to be. Big blond white girl. ‘Bout twenty-four, twenty-five years old.”

  “Is that what she looked like?” I said to Sarah Washington.

  The woman bobbed her head like a fighter ducking a bag. “Yes, sir.”

  Jeanne Chase sounded an awful lot like Carla Chaney, with a new name. Sy Chase’s wife’s name. It struck me as a kind of grim joke—Carla taking the name of the woman who’d spoiled her chance to become the real Mrs. Chase.

  “Did you ever talk to this woman?” I asked Sarah Washington.

  “Never did talk to her but once,” the woman admitted. “She was in the coffee shop and I waited her table. She acted kind of high-strung, I remember that. Kind of uppity. I figured her for one of those college girls who come and go. You see them all the time. Only reason they work is to snare them some young doctor. And when that don’t happen, they just drift on to something else. Stopped seeing her in the spring. And never did see her again after that. Never saw Herbie but one time after that, either. In the fall of that year.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “Out front of the hospital.”

  The woman shook her head with what I thought was a dismal accent. It depressed me that I was beginning to understand the code of her gestures. In fact I’d started to bob my head a little, too.

  “I thought the boy was waiting on a bus,” Sarah Washington said, “but this fancy car come along and picked him up. Big, black car. Doctor’s car.”

  “Did you see who was driving it?”

  “Just the license. Had MD on it. I remember that.”

  34

  AS SOON as I finished with Thelma I went looking for a phone. I found a neon-lit convenience store on North Bend Road, blazing in the dark as if it had been doused with cognac, and called Dr. Steele’s office from a booth on the wall. I half expected to get an answering machine, but he answered the phone himself like a good country physician used to night calls.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” I said, “but I’ve got a funny situation here. Jeanne Chase, Sy Chase’s wife . . . can you describe her for me?”

  “Why?” the man said, perking up. “You haven’t found her, have you?”

  “I’ve run across her name.”

  “She was a green-eyed redhead, about five-four, one-twenty. A tough little Irish girl. Real pretty and real smart.”

  She certainly didn’t sound like the woman that Sarah Washington had seen with Talmadge. The woman Sarah Washington had seen still sounded like Carla Chaney.

  “Christ,” Steele went on eagerly, “if you do find anything about Jeanne you’ve got to call her folks. When she disappeared their lives virtually ended.”

  “When did she disappear?”

  “In October ‘76. She’d gone to Cincinnati to interview for a nursing job. She just couldn’t stand to work up here anymore without Sy. And she was the type who needed to work. I remember that the detective her folks hired traced her as far as the hospital where the interview took place.”

  “Do you know which hospital that was?”

  “No. It would be in the report the detective made—I’m sure. I do remember that she called her folks that afternoon and told them that she wouldn’t be coming home right away. That she’d run into an old friend and would be staying in town a few more days.”

  “Did she identify the friend?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “You think you could get me the name of the detective who worked on the case? I mean without working anybody up.”

  “Of course. A doctor gets used to watching what he says.”

  I dug another quarter from my pocket and phoned Al Foster at CPD.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t have any news on the Pearson kid’s bank account.”

  “Well, I do,” I told him. “Rita Scarne was drawing money out of it to the tune of a hundred and twenty grand. Someone was paying her off and using the Pearson kid’s account to launder the cash.”

  “Got any idea who?”

  I did but I wasn’t ready to tell the cops yet—not until I had Pearson’s motive for murder pinned down. “It would help if you could find out who was depositing to the account.”

  “I’ve done enough work for the day,” Al said wearily. “Your friend, Carla, I’ve dug up something on her. You’re not going to like it, though.”

  “What?”

  “You sitting down or standing up?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “She’s dead, Harry.”

  Behind me an ice machine made a thump, like a sack down a laundry chute.

  “That can’t be true,” I said, wishing I was sitting down.

  “I don’t want it to be true, either. Parker would be pissed as hell if I told you this but we’ve got a couple of slots that your Carla was tailor-made to fit. It turned out that the nurse in Prospect Park, the one that black kid saw with Talmadge, definitely wasn’t Rita Scarne. We did some checking and the Scarne woman was on private duty until eleven p.m. Monday night. Plus criminalistics lifted a pair of prints off the damn shoe we found in Herb’s apartment that don’t match Talmadge or Rita. Parker doesn’t think it’s enough to queer the case for a grand jury, but it’s making him sweat.”

  “You’re sure the Chaney woman’s dead?”

  “For thirteen years. Talmadge killed her. It’s why he went to jail. For raping and murdering Nurse Carla Chaney.”

  ******

  It was all there in black and white, in a folder that had been sitting on a parole officer’s desk for better than a week. Al had found out about it early that evening after running Carla Chaney’s name past Newport CID.

  “Hall Scott, Talmadge’s parole officer, called to follow up on Herb’s murder,” Foster said as we sat across his desk from each other in the homicide office of the CPD Building. “We got to talking about the son of a bitch. And the Chaney girl’s name popped up. Talmadge must have hated her guts, because he really did a number on her. Beat her up so badly they had to rely on a piece of physical evidence to identify the corpse—a wedding ring on the woman’s hand. And then she’d been in the Ohio River for three weeks, which didn’t help.”

  “He dropped her body in the river?”

  “Helluva coincidence, huh?” He pushed the manila folder across his desk to me. “Take a look at who made the ID.”

  I flipped open the folder and scanned the report. The woman’s nude body was found on November 10, 1976—about two months after Estelle Pearson was pulled from the Miami. The body—what was left of it after three weeks in the water—was identified by one Rita Scarne, a nurse and friend of the deceased. According to the report Scarne claimed Carla Chaney had been Talmadge’s lover and that she’d been missing since mid-October. There were no relatives listed for Carla. Husband and child, mother and father, were said to be deceased. Without Rita and the ring Carla would have been just another Jane Doe.

&nbs
p; “Did Rita testify against Talmadge at the trial?”

  “There wasn’t any trial,” Foster said. “Herb copped a plea—second-degree murder. That’s why he was released ten days ago instead of spending another ten years in jail. The Scarne woman must have been scared to death when she read he was going to be paroled. Scared enough to use those kids to try to kill him, scared enough to do it herself when the scheme backfired.”

  Only Rita Scarne hadn’t known about the kids. I was beginning to wonder whether she’d known about Talmadge’s release. The person she’d been afraid of—the person who phoned the kids at that motel—was a lot more dangerous than Herb. And a lot harder to pin down.

  “See what you can dig up on an MP named Jeanne Chase,” I said to Al. “She disappeared close to the same time that Carla went in the water.”

  “How close?” he said, perking up.

  “I’ll find out.”

  I went back to my office and phoned Dr. Steele again. He had the name of the detective for me by then—Jim Sanchez out of Dayton. And something else—something I hadn’t expected.

  “I came across the name of that doctor that Carla went to work for in Cincinnati. I’d written it down on an old calendar.” Steele laughed. “I keep stuff like that around. My wife says forever. Anyway the name wasn’t Pearson. It was Sacks—Sheldon Sacks.”

  “No shit!” I said with surprise.

  Steele laughed. “That’s what it says here. Sheldon Sacks, Jewish Hospital Doctors’ Building.”

  That helped to explain how Carla/Jeanne had come in contact with Phil Pearson, Sacks’ closest friend. And as receptionist to Shelley Sacks, Carla would have had access to Sacks’ files—to all that useful information about Stelle and Phil’s rotten marriage. Information that it was high time I had a look at, too.

  I phoned Dayton information and got Jim Sanchez’s number. I didn’t figure he’d be in his office at ten-thirty on a Friday night. But I was wrong. Like me he was working on a case that troubled him—a missing child. Talking about Jeanne Chase didn’t improve his mood.

  “I tried like hell on that one,” Sanchez said unhappily. “I mean I liked the family, the folks. I wanted to deliver for them. But once Jeanne left that hospital she simply dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “What hospital was that?”

  “Holmes. She’d gone there for an interview with a doctor who’d advertised in one of the nursing journals. You know Jeanne was trained as a nurse.”

  “Do you remember the doctor’s name?”

  “I’ve got it in my files. Hold on a minute.” He went off the line for a couple of minutes then came back on, with a sound of papers rustling. “The doctor’s name was . . . Morse. Carl Morse. He was a psychiatrist, looking for a nurse who could also act as a receptionist and keep the books. He’d had a girl who did those things for him, but she’d retired the month before.”

  “Dr. Steele told me that Jeanne called her folks after the interview to tell them she was going to stay in Cincinnati for a few days. She said she’d run into an old friend at the hospital.”

  “Not a friend. I mean she didn’t use the word ‘friend.’ What she said was . . . ” I heard him rustle through the papers again. “She saw somebody at the hospital—someone she knew. Her parents had the impression that seeing this person upset Jeanne. At least, they thought something had upset her.”

  “Jeanne didn’t say who this person was, did she?” I asked.

  “No,” Sanchez said. “But I tried like hell to find out. The interview was held in the afternoon. And you know how busy hospitals get. There were scores of people around. It could have been any of them.”

  “Morse didn’t have any idea who Jeanne might have seen, did he?”

  “No. He claimed no one else came into his office during the interview. I went up and down the hall to every office on the floor and no one recalled seeing her. Christ I got a list of names a mile long. Flaigler, Thomas, Galaty, Pearson—”

  “Hold up,” I said. “Phil Pearson?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Dr. Philip Pearson. He was down the hall from Stein. Is that material?”

  It could have been, if Phil Pearson had been meeting with Sacks’ secretary.

  “What day did Jeanne disappear?”

  “Wednesday, October 19, 1976.”

  I jotted the date down on my desk blotter. Almost three weeks to the day before “Carla Chaney’s” body was found in the Ohio River.

  “I may have something for you on this,” I said.

  “Christ, that would be terrific. The thing has eaten at me for thirteen years.”

  “What I need is a photograph of the Chase woman, her dental records, and a description of any distinguishing scars or marks.”

  “You’ve found her body?” he asked.

  “The cops found a body,” I said carefully. “Thirteen years ago, three weeks after Jeanne disappeared. At the time the body was identified as someone else, but I’ve got reason to think that it may have been misidentified. Deliberately.”

  “Why?” Sanchez said eagerly.

  But I didn’t know why—not for sure. What I thought was that someone had been impersonating Jeanne Chase for almost a year—someone who looked very much like Carla Chaney. If Carla had been visiting Phil Pearson that October afternoon, the Chase woman could have seen her, could have found out that she had a double. A woman masquerading as the late Dr. Chase’s tony wife. A woman whom the real Jeanne Chase had a terrific grudge against. If Jeanne had confronted Carla with what she knew, it could have cost her her life.

  Stelle was only one month dead at that point, and Carla wouldn’t have wanted anyone prying into her affairs—especially someone with a score to settle. Plus eliminating the real Jeanne Chase had some extra benefits: Carla would no longer have to worry about exposure, or about crazy Herb Talmadge, who had obviously been set up to take the rap for Jeanne Chase’s murder.

  It was beginning to look like Carla Chaney had left a whole string of corpses behind her in her metamorphosis from Nola’s squalid daughter to the snooty girl that Sarah Washington had seen in Jewish Hospital to whatever she’d become after Phil dumped her for Louise. All it had taken to turn the tide of the past was a half-dozen murders and two accomplices who were willing, for drugs or sex or money, to go along with the mayhem. And Phil Pearson, of course, to finance the deal.

  For thirteen years she’d probably lived comfortably in her new identity—off Phil Pearson’s money. Just as Rita had. In fact it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that there were three more phony accounts in the kids’ names at three more Cincinnati banks, with regular monthly deposits to and withdrawals from them. It would have stayed a nice life if Herb had not gotten out of prison, bringing the past back with a vengeance. But he had gotten out, dragging the Pearson kids in his wake.

  Somehow Carla had found out about Ethan and Kirsty and tracked them down to the motel. Talmadge had already made himself known to her—Carla had even bought him a TV to keep him quiet. Looking for a way out she’d callously pitted Kirsty and Ethan against Herb, and when that didn’t work she’d done the job herself with a handful of pills and a butcher knife.

  If Carla Chaney hadn’t changed her name again I might be able to find her through Shelley Sacks, who’d hired her in the fall of ‘75 under the name Jeanne Chase. It was time to talk to Sacks, anyway. There was too much that he’d been concealing for too long. Motives and memories that could help me explain why Phil wanted Stelle dead—and why thirteen years later Kirsten Pearson had joined her brother on their strange ride toward death.

  35

  IT WAS almost one when I finished with Jim Sanchez. I knew that Shelley Sacks wouldn’t be in his office. If he was anywhere other than at his own home he’d be with Louise. I went ahead and phoned the Pearson house, knowing full well that she’d expected me to come to her—that she was still expecting it.

  Louise answered on the second ring. As soon as I heard her voice I knew why I’d resisted making the
call.

  “Hello, Louise.”

  “Hello, Harry,” she said stiffly. “It was nice of you to check in.”

  “I’m sorry, Louise.”

  She laughed. “Of course you are.”

  “What do you want me to say?” I said, feeling the same deadly mix of lust and guilt I’d felt about three hours before. Knowing deep down that the lust would win out.

  “What I want clearly doesn’t make any difference to you.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  Her voice dropped to a wounded whisper—so full of pain that it hurt me. “I needed you, damn you. And you didn’t come. You left me alone.”

  I didn’t answer her. I didn’t know how to answer.

  After a moment’s silence she found her voice again. “What is it you wanted?”

  “Shelley Sacks,” I said guiltily. “Is he there with you?”

  Louise laughed again. “He went home about two hours ago. They’ve all gone home hours ago.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Two twenty-five Camargo Pike. Is that it?”

  She hung up the phone before I could answer her.

  ******

  I got in the car and started for Sacks’ house. Out I-71 into that rich preserve of mazey woods and hidden drives. But somewhere along the way I got lost in the dark, and it was Pearson’s house I found myself parked in front of. There were no lights on. No other cars in the driveway. I sat there for a long time, listening to the December wind rattling the icy branches of the ginko trees, without the guts to go in, without the guts to leave. I don’t know how much time passed before a light came on above the front door—fierce and white as a spot.

  The door opened and I saw her look out. She was wrapped in a silk robe that seemed to have no color at all in the fierce white light. Louise herself didn’t look quite real in the blazing light. She stared out at me for a long moment. Then the light went out. All I could see in the sudden darkness was the glimmer of her white wrap, trailing across the moonlit lawn like an afterimage.

  I got out of the car and went after her. She was shivering when I caught up to her. She looked at me wild-eyed, as if she didn’t recognize my face. All around us the wind chimed in the trees.