Second Chance (21 page)

"Small?" I said.

"I mean Talmadge," Al said, Hipping the
note pad shut. "Small's the name she and the neighbors knew him
by—the name he rented the apartment imder. Herbert Small."

I glanced at the door to the apartment where a pitted
brass number dangled from a nail. Number 5.
Small/5.

"How the hell did they find him?" Parker
said with exasperation. "Why did he kill them? Why did he drive
them to the river?"

The only question I could answer was the first
one—they'd found him because someone had phoned them at the motel
and told them where to look. I didn't let Parker lmow that. I didn't
want to.

"The woman who called this in," I said to
Al. "You think I could talk to her?"

He nodded. "Across
the hall. Number seven."

* * *

Her name was Moira Richardson, and she worked as a
cleaning woman in Roselawn. She claimed to have no particular
interest in Herbert Talmadge, but after I started talking to her I
got the feeling that she took an interest in everything that went on
in the building—or on the block.

She was a buxom woman with a shrewd, mobile, careworn
face. She spoke very slowly as people do when they want to be taken
seriously, when they take themselves seriously. A younger woman, her
daughter I thought, sat in a rocking chair in a far corner of the
room.

I asked Moira Richardson when Talmadge—Small had
moved in.

"Monday a week," she said. "Didn't
have no belongings. No furniture."

"Do you know if he had a job?"

"That kind don't never work," the woman
said, scowling.

"In fact, I couldn't figure out where he got
money for rent. Bought him a TV, too. And a car. Now where's a
jailbird like that gonna get a TV, less he's pushing drugs or got
some woman on the street."

It was an interesting question. "Did he have any
friends in the building?"

"He didn't ever say no more than two or three
words to no one. Just come and go—mostly late at night. Girl down
the hall said he asked to use her phone once. But she wou1dn't let
him in. She was scared of him." The woman threw her hand at me
dismissively. "I ain't scared of no woolly—headed monkey like
that."

"Did you let him use your phone?"

"He never asked me. Knew better than to ask me
anything."

"Did you ever see him with anyone outside the
building?"

The woman shook her head. "No sir, I didn't."

"I did," the one in the rocking chair
chirruped.

She was a plump, pretty girl with soft brown eyes and
a tiny, sparrow voice.

"Wha'chu mean ‘you did'?" her mother said
with massive suspicion.

The girl squirmed in the rocker. At first I thought
she was frightened, then I realized she was simply excited at being
the center of attention—mine and her mother's.

"I did too see, Mama," she said, twisting
her head around and pouting at the far wall with her lower lip. "Saw
him in the park with a white lady, last night."

The older woman fell back in her chair, stunned.
"Well, I'll. . ."
 
"What
time last night?" I asked.

"Time I'm coming home on the bus," the girl
said. " 'Bout six o'clock. They was in Prospect Park. Way back
in the shadows, toward the apartment house."

"You're sure it was Tal . . . Sma1l?"

"Purty sure."

As if someone had snapped his fingers, the mother
came rocketing out of her trance, lunging forward in her chair and
fixing her daughter with a savage look.

"You didn't see nobody in no park."

"Did too," the girl said, shrinking beneath
her mother's doubt.

"You wasting this man's time with your
foolishness?

The girl's big brown eyes began to water. "I saw
him," she said with trembly lips. "With a white lady."

"What that lady look like?" the mother
said, as if she had her now.

The girl's head sank to her breast. "Couldn't
see her face. "It was too dark."

"You see," the mother said to me
triumphantly. "She didn't see nothing. That's why she didn't
tell them cops. She knew they'd catch her up on her lies."

"I ain't lying," the girl said, in tears
now. "She was a white lady in a long brown coat. And she had on
a white dress and white stockings and white shoes."

"Like a nurse?" I said, feeling a chill.

"Yes, sir," the girl said plaintively and
looked up at me like I was her savior. "That's what I said to
myself. He gone and got him a nurse from the hospital. You believe
me, don't you? Tell Mama you believe me."

"Yes," I said. "I do."

25
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I didn't tell Parker or Al Foster where I was going
when I left the apartment house. I wasn't ready to tell them
anything, yet. Not until I'd had the chance to talk to Rita Scarne
without the law looking over my shoulder. I could always contact
Parker—or threaten to contact him—if Rita wouldn't cooperate. But
in the mood I was in I didn't think that was going to be necessary.

It was almost ten-thirty when I turned into the
driveway leading to Rita Scarne's handsome house. I flipped off the
headlights and coasted slowly down the hill, through the oak grove
where the dark trees rustled in the wind. There was enough
windowlight coming from the front of the house to guide me toward the
garage. I parked the car at an angle in front of it, blocking off any
exit. Getting out I walked up to the door, pressed the bell, stepped
back into J the shadows, and waited. After a time I heard someone
fiddling with a bolt lock. The bolt slid free and the door opened a
crack. I stepped forward immediately, leaning against the door with
my shoulder and forcing it all the way open.

Rita Scarne was standing just inside the hall. She
was wearing a brown topcoat over a nurse's uniform—the same outfit
she'd worn for her meeting with Talmadge in Prospect Park. A small
black leather satchel, like a doctor's bag, sat on the hall floor
where she'd dropped it.

"What the hell is this?" she said, looking
startled. "You're not welcome here. I thought I made that
clear."

"We're going to talk, Rita," I said,
grabbing her by the arm.

She tried to jerk away from me, but I pulled her back
hard. "Don't," I said, waving a warning finger in her face.

"You can't do this!" she shouted.

"Watch me."

Dragging the woman behind me I walked quickly down
the hall to the glassed-in terrace. I yanked Rita Scarne through the
door, spun her around and sat her down on the fan-back chair. She
stared up at me savagely.

"Now we're going to talk Rita," I said,
bending over her. "No bullshit. The truth this time."

"The truth about what?"

"About last night. You remember yesterday
evening, don't you? When Ethan called?"

"He didn't call."

"Don't say that! I don't want to hear that! Or
about your sister who was house-sitting."

The woman's face reddened furiously. "Well, what
the hell do you want to hear? Tell me so we can get this melodrama
over with."

"You called the motel and sent those kids to
that fucking maniac's apartment, Rita. You may even have told the son
of a bitch they were coming. I want to know why. I want to know what
those kids knew about you and Herbert Talmadge that made you send
them to their deaths."

"Nothing!" she shouted. "There was
nothing between me and Herbert Talmadge. I've already told you that."

"You were lying then. And you're lying now. You
were seen with Talmadge on McMicken Street before Estelle Pearson
died and again Monday night in Prospect Park."

"That's preposterous. Where are you getting your
information—from that screwball Pearson kid?"

"I'll make this easy for you. You were fucking
Talmadge back in '76, and Ethan found out. A snoopy kid who hated
your guts, he saw you and Herbie doing it in the backyard, or the
patio, on your lunchbreak, while Estelle was zonked out on Thorazine.
Anyway he saw you."

Rita Scarne sneered at me. "Why would I screw a
man like that?"

"Because you like men like that, Rita. You
always have. Big, brutal, dangerous men. Men who can make it hurt the
way you like it. Men like Herbie."

Rita Scarne sat back in the chair and laughed
contemptuously. "You've got me confused with somebody else,
Stoner."

"Like who?"

"Like you figure it out. Only you're not talking
about me."

She reached over to the table where the fifth of Old
Granddad was still sitting. There was a scant shot left inside, and
she swallowed it straight. The whiskey made her face flush again, all
the way to the roots of her loose blond hair.

"I don't know anything about Talmadge or the
Pearson kids." She settled back in the chair, hugging the bottle
to her breasts like a stuffed toy. "You can keep this up all
night, and it won't change that."

"You don't understand, Rita. The cops have a
witness who'll swear she saw you in Prospect Park with Herbert
Talmadge. They've got a record of the call Ethan Pearson made from
his motel room to your agency—the call the agency forwarded to your
house. They've got drugs that can probably be traced to that bag of
yours. A TV your money paid for. And they've got a dead man in an
Avondale apartment with a big hole in his chest that you made with
your own little hands"

"A dead man?" Rita Scarne said. The fight
drained out of her face, leaving the naked fear. "Who's dead?"

"Talmadge, Rita. Herb Talmadge. And Ethan and
Kirsty Pearson. You killed them all this morning, don't you remember?
Herb did two for you, and you did Herb." I bent down so my face
was only a few inches from hers. "You killed them all and you're
going to die for it."

"Bastard!" Raising both hands, she tried to
claw my face. I grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the arms of the
chair.

"He came after you, didn't he, Rita? Thirteen
years and he came after you the day he got out of Lex. What did he
want? Drugs? Money? Some of that good, old-fashioned, hardball sex
you specialize in? You couldn't say no, could you? Not to Herb. What
did he have on you? Something from your days at Rollman's? Something
about Este1le?"

The woman looked away.

I stared at her for a moment—at her red, averted
face. "It was Estelle, wasn't it? What did Talmadge do to
Este1le?"

And, suddenly, I didn't have to ask anymore. "Good
Christ." I started to laugh.

I let go of the woman's hands—she wasn't going
anywhere—and sat down across from her on the couch, still laughing.
It was such a grand joke. "Ethan was telling the truth. Your
crazy, drugged-out boyfriend did show up at the house, looking for
you. Only you weren't there. You were sick. That's it, isn't it? What
happened then, Rita? Did Herbie grab Estelle instead? Grab her, pour
liquor into her, and rape her. Is that why she killed herself? Or did
Herb do that, too?"

Rita Scarne's head sank slowly to her chest.

I sat back in the chair, letting the last of my
laughter die away. "And you were afraid to say anything—afraid
you'd catch the blame. After all you'd just been Bred from Rollman's,
so your credibility wasn't so hot. Or maybe Herbie was the reason you
got fired in the first place. A little hanky-panky on the psych ward.
It's easy enough to check out."

The woman raised her head weakly. "Getting fired
had nothing to do with sex," she said in a whisper. "I was
fired because of . . . I did a favor for someone."

"What favor?"

She looked at me squarely for the first time since
I'd mentioned Estelle Pearson's death. "I got the bastard
released. Okay? They were going to send him away for good, and I got
him released." She looked down again—at the bottle in her
arms. "I stole some drugs from the dispensary, too."

When I'd talked to him on the phone, Dr. Isaac
Goldman had claimed he hadn't authorized Talmadge's release—that
he'd recommended confinement at Longview. I thought
he'd simply forgotten the facts. Now it seemed he'd never known them.

"You forged Goldman's signature?"

"I waited until he left town, so they never knew
about the release. It was the drugs that cost me the job. The old
biddy, Rostow, found out I'd been taking them from the dispensary.
The hospital board agreed not to press charges if I resigned my
post."

"What kind of drugs did you steal?"

"Painkillers. Demerol. Talmadge loved the shit.
And . . . it made him manageable."

"Manageable? Manageable by whom?"

Rita Scarne sighed heavily. "A friend. She was .
. . involved with him. She wanted him out of the hospital"

"Your friend was a nurse?"

"Yes."