Second Chance (28 page)

"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 himdred 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 knick-knacks. "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
some thing 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 thought 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."

"Sydney Chase?"

"Yes, he came here. A lot."

"Anyone e1se?"

"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."

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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.