But I wouldn’t have stopped at that moment for anyone.
She knew it, too. Dropping her hand to her side, she stared miserably through the window. “You’re not going to stop.” She said it hollowly, like I’d passed a judgment on her—or her powers of persuasion.
Louise laughed bitterly. “What are you going to find at the end of this, Harry?”
“Carla Chaney.”
“I thought you said her name was Chase.”
“They’re one and the same.”
Louise looked surprised. “All right, say you do find her—Chase or Chaney. You think she’s just going to let you cart her off to prison for the rest of her life? What are you going to do—shoot her?”
“If necessary.”
“Bravo!” she said with heavy sarcasm. “You’ll kill the killer and then everyone comes back to life. Phil and Stelle and Ethan and Kirsty. Our big happy family.”
“There were others.”
“And you’re going to avenge them all.” She laughed again. “You’re a fool, Harry. A dangerous fool.”
“Why dangerous?”
“Because you’re trying to change things that can’t be changed—histories that were built up like limestone over years. You blame Carla Chaney-Chase for all this trouble. But you’re wrong. Each one of us Pearsons is equally to blame for what happened here. The whole damn family.”
She stared at me a moment and then sighed defeatedly. “Oh, hell, go find your woman. Be a hero. Who knows—maybe she’s ready to die, too.”
******
It was almost three when I got to Shelley Sacks’ office in Clifton. I pulled up in the lot, parked beside his silver Merc, walked around a hedge to the front of the duplex, then upstairs to the second-floor waiting room. There was no one else in the waiting room. Even the nurse was gone from her cubicle. I wondered if Sacks had gone out, too. But I found him in his office, sitting behind the desk.
He looked up as I came in. The desk lamp reflecting off the lenses of his glasses hid his round blue eyes, but the rest of his face looked drawn.
“Hello, Stoner,” he said wearily.
“Where is everyone?”
“I closed the office today. I didn’t feel up to other people’s problems.” Tenting his fingers in front of his face, he said, “This has been the worst week I can remember since . . . ”
“Estelle died?”
He nodded.
I sat down on a chair across from him. “Why don’t we start there, then. With Stelle and Phil.”
Sacks shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Stoner, I’m not going to discuss certain things. I’ve told you that. I promise my patients confidentiality.”
“Even when they murder each other?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean Phil Pearson killed your friend, Estelle—and then covered up her murder.”
“That is a dreadful accusation,” Sacks said, unfolding his tented fingers. “A terrible accusation. The man just died, for chrissake.”
“I have proof. Records of money paid to Rita Scarne by Phil Pearson—a thousand dollars a month for over a decade, paid out to cover up the murder of his wife. A murder that Phil planned with the help of Rita and two of her friends.”
Sacks leaned back in the chair and the reflections in his glasses went out like snuffed candles. I saw his eyes for the first time, troubled, rimmed with red.
“He was paying Rita a thousand dollars a month?”
“To conceal murder.”
Sacks shook his head, no. “You’re wrong. There was no murder. If Phil was paying the woman money it was for something else.”
“Like what?” I said.
He was going to balk. I could see it in his face. I pounded the desktop with my fist, making him jump.
“I don’t want to hear about your ethics again, Sacks. Those two kids are dead. The State Patrol found their bodies today in the Miami River.”
“Oh, my God,” Sacks said, going pale. “Kirsty?”
“Dead,” I said harshly. “Ethan is dead. The Scarne woman is dead. Talmadge is dead. Because of something that was covered up thirteen years ago. Something you’ve been helping to cover up with your silence ever since Ethan told you what he saw that September day. I’ve read the transcript of the coroner’s inquest. You didn’t mention a word about Ethan, Doctor. You blamed what happened on bad luck—you’re still blaming it on bad luck.”
“To an extent that’s what it was,” the man said defensively.
“Why? Because Phil Pearson wanted it to look that way?”
“Christ, no.”
Sacks took off his glasses and pitched them on the desk. Pinching the bridge of his nose he shut his eyes and rocked back against the window, crumpling up the blind. Sunlight filtered through the gap, powdering his shoulder and neck with pale, golden light. Sacks touched at his neck as if he could feel it like a chill.
“Phil didn’t try to conceal anything from the police, Stoner. I was the one who told the officers to ignore Ethan’s story.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He laughed lamely. “What earthly good would it have served to raise suspicions of murder on the basis of a child’s hysteria? I knew Estelle had killed herself. I even knew why. But the police might have seen the situation differently. At the very least, Phil’s career would have been ruined. I saw no reason to take that chance.”
“How would letting Ethan tell his story have jeopardized Pearson?”
“The police are dogmatists,” Sacks said. “Once they started thinking in terms of a murder they look for motives. In this case . . . they might have concluded that Phil had a reason to get rid of Estelle.”
I leaned forward eagerly in the chair. Phil Pearson’s motive for murder was at the heart of the case. It was the one of two large blanks left in the story—his motive and Carla. “What reason did he have to murder Estelle?”
“You’re not listening to me,” Sacks said sharply. “I said he didn’t have a motive to be rid of her. It was she who wanted to be rid of him. If things had worked out differently, Estelle would have divorced Phil that winter.”
“She would have divorced him?” I said confusedly. “I thought Pearson intended to divorce Stelle. That’s what Louise told me.”
Sacks shook his head. “That was wishful thinking—probably fostered by Phil himself. Believe me, he would never have divorced Stelle or married Louise if fate hadn’t taken a hand. Phil simply depended on Stelle too deeply and in too many ways. Emotionally, physically, financially.”
“Financially?”
“All the money was Stelle’s. Phil didn’t start making a decent living until a couple of years after she died. In fact he was very poor for those years, because her estate was tied up in probate.”
I didn’t say it to Sacks, but that would explain why the payoffs to Rita had begun three years after Stelle’s death.
“Money wasn’t the real issue, anyway,” Sacks went on. “Phil would never have divorced Stelle if for no other reason than he needed her forgiveness so badly.”
“Forgiveness for what?”
Sacks took a deep breath. “Do you know anything at all about Phil’s family history, about his father in particular?”
“Louise told me that his father was a drunk. She also said that she thought Phil might have been abused by him, sexually.”
Sacks nodded. “Abuse is such a dreadful thing, and at the same time so commonplace. More often than not it goes undiscovered. And even when it is discovered, it is usually hushed up by the family or ignored. Unless the children can work through the trauma therapeutically, they invariably have serious emotional problems for the rest of their lives. They simply can’t love anymore, not as adults. They can only love dependently—or cruelly. As victims or persecutors. Tragically that means that many of them end up as abusers themselves.”
Suddenly I knew Phil Pearson’s ugly secret. Knew why he’d been so afraid of exposure, so evasive about his past and his children’s
pasts, so terribly afraid of what his son and his daughter might accidentally reveal about him—and themselves.
Hearing Sacks say it aloud only underlined the horror of it.
“In the spring of 1976, Stelle discovered that Phil was . . . that he’d been sexually abusing Kirsten.”
“He abused his daughter,” I said, feeling it fully.
“It broke Stelle down. Broke both of them down, really. Phil just managed the break differently.”
“You mean Louise?”
“And his work. Stelle didn’t have his support system. She was quite fragile anyway, with long-standing emotional problems. Problems of self-worth, problems of sexual identity. This thing hit her precisely where she was most vulnerable. She worshiped Phil when they first married. But she had always feared that Phil didn’t love her back—that he’d married her for money and social connections. Discovering that he’d been abusing Kirsty simply destroyed the little ego she had left.”
Sacks’ lips trembled violently, and he put a hand to his mouth to cover them. “I tried so hard to make her well. But as the depression waned, the manic stage began. Her anger welled up, and all she could think about was hurting Phil as he had hurt her. She wanted to expose him, to divorce him, to take his money and his name. Above all she wanted to take Kirsty and Ethan away from Phil forever.”
“You don’t think that’s a motive for murder?”
“You’re missing the point,” Sacks said irritably. “He was so racked with guilt himself he thought he deserved to be murdered. I think he would have welcomed it.”
“I suppose that’s why he threw himself into an affair.”
“Phil was constantly having affairs. Louise was hardly the first. They were never particularly romantic things, anyway. He just wanted someone to talk to—to ease his loneliness, to assert his manhood. But none of his women, not even Louise, could absolve him for what he’d done to Kirsty. Only Stelle could do that. Phil knew that, Stoner. Stelle knew it, too. She knew Phil would do anything to make amends.”
“Did that make a difference to her?”
“It might have—over time. If she’d had the chance to work it through. She never got that chance.”
For a time neither one of us said anything.
“The abuse,” I said. “That was what Kirsty had been repressing?”
“Yes. The affair Kirsten had with her teacher last spring, you know about that, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“And you know about the lesbian roommate?”
“I know about Marnee,” I said, although frankly I hadn’t thought of her as part of Kirsten’s psychodrama.
“Kirsten was reenacting this childhood trauma with both of them—symbolically reenacting it. An older man who used her sexually and then rejected her. A woman whose love Kirsty couldn’t accept because it was tinged with jealousy and possessiveness. Even her search for this imaginary killer was part of the reenactment—a displacement of her guilt about her father and her rage against her mother onto a convenient stranger.”
I thought of the girl’s face, floating in the frozen river like a stone flower.
She hadn’t gone on that journey with Ethan to kill an imaginary stranger. In her own mad way she’d made an effort to face the reality of her past. To face the violence inflicted upon her and the violence that had been done to her mother. She hadn’t been looking for a scapegoat. She’d been looking for the truth—and for a measure of justice that was long overdue.
“Talmadge wasn’t imaginary, Doctor,” I said heavily. “Phil used him to kill his wife and then paid Rita to cover it up.”
“Use your head, Stoner,” Sacks said. “If Rita Scarne was blackmailing Phil, it was over his abuse of Kirsty—not Stelle’s death. Rita was there, after all, almost every day. Part of the family. She could easily have picked up on this. Stelle didn’t hold much back, except around the children.”
But I wasn’t convinced. Money, prestige, career—not to mention his children. Those were damn good reasons for homicide. Sacks was simply blind to the possibility that Stelle hadn’t killed herself. And I thought I understood why. He needed Stelle’s suicide the way Ethan Pearson had needed her murder. Because he’d loved the woman and felt he’d failed her. Clinging to the idea of her suicide was a way of both punishing and excusing himself, by injecting an element of fatality into a situation that he couldn’t control.
There was no point in debating it with him. Besides there was something else I wanted to know. “Blackmail or murder, two other people were involved in this thing besides Phil and Rita. Two people who had killed once before and disguised it as suicide. You know about Talmadge. You don’t know about a nurse named Carla Chaney. Do you remember her?”
The man stared at me blankly. “Why should I?”
“She worked for you in 1975 and ‘76. In the Jewish Hospital Doctors’ Building.”
“For me?” Sacks shook his head decisively. “I never hired anyone named Chaney in 1975 or any year.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Quite sure.”
“How about a woman named Chase?”
Sacks looked startled. “Chase? What would she have to do with it?”
“She and Carla are the same person.”
“You’re imagining this,” he said nervously. “You must be imagining it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s impossible, that’s why. The woman you’re talking about is a friend.”
“She was a friend of Phil’s, too, wasn’t she? In fact I’d be willing to bet that they had a torrid little affair back in late ‘75 or early ‘76. Maybe he kept seeing her after he and Louise began their ‘platonic’ relationship. Because, believe me, Doc, Carla was not a platonic lover. She was an ice-cold bitch who had killed to get ahead—and who probably put the idea of killing in Phil’s addled head.
“The woman you know as Jeanne Chase is Carla Chaney, Doctor. And Carla Chaney is a borderline psychotic—a woman who arranged to murder her own family and to murder the real Jeanne Chase and to murder Stelle Pearson.”
“I don’t believe you!” he shouted. “There was no murder!”
But he no longer looked or sounded convinced of that. Jeanne Chase had changed his mind.
38
ALTHOUGH I pressed him hard, Sacks refused to answer any more questions about Jeanne Chase. I had the feeling he was no longer holding back out of principle, but because he wanted to confront the woman himself. And that was a bad idea. He was angry and he was upset—so much so that his voice had begun to shake with emotion and his brow to pop sweat. He looked, for all the world, like a man betrayed by a lover. It was that kind of deep, personal hurt.
“Doc,” I warned him, “don’t try anything stupid. Carla is very dangerous.”
Sacks stared at me for a long moment. “I have been a very great fool,” he said in a voice that was just barely under control. “And I will handle this.”
I started for the door.
“Stoner?” he said.
I looked back at him.
“She worked here when Stelle had her breakdown. She had access to the files.” He took a deep breath and added: “To Phil’s file, too.”
The thought had already occurred to me. But I didn’t like the way he put it. It was almost as if he was telling me what to do, if something should happen to him.
******
I sat in Sacks’ parking lot for a full fifteen minutes before starting the car and driving back to the Riorley Building. Even then I didn’t feel right about leaving him alone. He’d had a doomed look on his face when I left the office. And he was a man who believed in fate.
I phoned Al Foster as soon as I got to the office—to see if he had a lead on Jeanne Chase or the bankbooks. But a desk sergeant told me that he was out. I couldn’t just sit there, waiting for Al to get back. And I had no way to find Jeanne Chase, save through Shelley Sacks. What I did have was the bankbooks. I decided to do something about them.
Th
ere was a First National branch office right across the street from the Riorley. I walked back down to the lobby, crossed over Vine, and went into the bank. The managers’ desks were at the back in a mahogany-paneled alcove set off from the barred cages of the tellers by a short mahogany fence. I sat down on a bench outside the fence until one of the assistant managers came out to collect me.
The tag on his desk said “Steven Moran.” And it was clear that Steven Moran was relatively new to the bank and not yet hardened in the ways of commerce. An ordinary, unbusinesslike grin kept flirting across his face, and he kept fighting it back like a drunk playing sober. There’d come a time when he wouldn’t have to work so hard at looking like a banker.
Getting Steven Moran was a break for me. He wanted to help—he thought that was what they’d hired him for.
I took out Ethan’s bankbook and told him my story: “A customer left this damn thing in my manager’s office last week. Now my manager’s gone on vacation and the rest of us can’t quite figure out who it belongs to. Nobody remembers an ‘E. Pearson’ coming in, and we don’t have him on file. One of the secretaries suggested that I pop over here and see if you could help with a phone number or an address.”
“I can try,” Steve Moran said earnestly. “Let me take a look.”
I handed him the book and he examined it. Biting his lip he turned to a computer on his desk. The screen was facing away from me so I couldn’t see what he was up to. But I heard him punching the keyboard.
“That’s odd,” he said to himself.
“You have something?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t say E. Pearson.” For just a second I could see him wondering whether I was on the level. I smiled affably, and that grin of his came back on. He should have been playing softball instead of sitting behind a desk.
“According to the computer the account is owned by a woman. Jeanne L. Chase.”
“No E. Pearson?” I said, trying not to look too confused—although the fact that Phil Pearson wasn’t the owner of the account did, in fact, throw me.
“The account’s in the name E. Pearson,” the kid said, looking a little confused himself. “But Jeanne L. Chase owns it.” His grin came back on, as if he’d had a brainstorm. “Maybe she’s a relative of the kid’s—or a friend of the family. People do that sometimes when a kid is underage.”
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