Second Chance (13 page)

Pearson's notes weren't any different from any of the
other examining psychiatrists'. He referred to Talmadge's
intelligence, his denial of guilt, his refusal to speak in detail
about psychotic episodes. There was some speculation about Talmadge's
childhood, with the strong suggestion that incest with his mother may
have precipitated his psychosis.

I had hoped to find that Pearson was still the
attending psychiatrist during Talmadge's last stay at Rollman's, in
the spring of 1976. But he wasn't. A Dr. Isaac Goldman had taken over
the case. Either Goldman was more persistent than Pearson or just
plain smarter, because for the first time in three years of being
shuffled in and out of psychiatric wards Herbert Talmadge spoke
freely about himself. Most of his confession seemed to have been
dictated to Goldman and another doctor with the initials R.S.

HT- I ain 't got nothing against woman in
general. But some women just ain't right.
IG:
How do you know when they're 'not right'?
HT-
You shouldn 't try to trick me into talking about her.
RS.- Were not trying to trick you, Herbert You
told me you wanted to talk about her.
HT-
She won't like it
RS: I would though.
HT- All right. Its my mama that tells me these
things. She knows.
IG: Why does she
know?
HT- 'Cause of her own
wickedness.
IG: Your mother was
wicked?
HT- What you call it? Making
me do that stuf to her?
IG: What
stuff?
HT- You damn well know what
stuff. You read my mind anyway. You see it yourself I see it in you.
IG: What do you see in me?
HT-
Same wickedness in me. I see some bitch wanta spend my money, take my
manhood. Party! Well, all right then. Lets party. I put that fist in
her ass; she don't party so good. When it start to hurt I get. . .
IG: What?
HT- I
just want to . . . go all the way, man. Rip it up. All the way.

There were six or seven more pages like that, some of
it a lot worse.

After plowing through thirty or forty pages of
denials and silence I was astonished that Talmadge had opened up as
he had. Perhaps Goldman or the other doctor, R.S., had given him
Pentothal. I didn't know. But once he started talking Talmadge didn't
want to stop. And what he had to say should have been enough to have
him committed for life—sent to Longview or some state hospital for
the criminally insane.

And yet he hadn't been committed. Instead he'd been
released by Goldman a month later. I stared at the release form,
signed by Goldman, initialed by R.S., and couldn't quite believe my
eyes.

Six or seven months after that Talmadge had brutally
murdered a woman in Newport, and this time he didn't get sent to
Rollman's. This time he'd gone to a Kentucky prison for thirteen
years. Thirteen years in a cell, with all that craziness cooking
inside him.

I was no longer bothered by why Ethan Pearson had
happened to pick Herbert Talmadge's face out of the crowd. A child
would have had no trouble sensing what was going on behind that face,
even if he'd only seen it staring at him, dead·eyed and numb, from
behind a barred window. What bothered me a lot was that he had
chanced to pick that face—that he and his sister were now looking
for the man with that face. I could only hope they didn't find him or
that the cops or I found him first.

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When I finished I took Talmadge's folder out to the
reception desk and handed it to McCall's grey-haired secretary, A Ms.
Rostow.

"Thank your boss for me."

"I will," she said.

She spun around in her chair and socked the folder
away in a drawer, slamming it shut as if she was filing her
resignation.

"How long have you worked here, Ms. Rostow?"

"Since l965," she said, swiveling back
around to face me.

"Do you know Dr. Isaac Goldman?"

"Certainly."

"Is he still on staff here?"

"He never was," she said. "Dr. Goldman
and several of his colleagues rotated through here in the
mid-seventies, as part of an intern-exchange program with Washington
University in St. Louis."

"Do you happen to remember if either of his
colleagues had the initials R.S.?"

"No, they did not. The other two interns from
St. Louis were Stanley Lee and Calvin Minard."

"Can you think of another staffer from around
that time with those initials?"

The woman laughed fecklessly. "We've had a lot
of staff changes in thirteen years, Mr. Stoner. You can't expect me
to remember all of them. Is it important?"

"Probably not. Did Goldman go back to St. Louis
after interning here?"

"Yes. He has a practice in Creve Coeur. We get a
card from him each year at the holidays."

The woman pointed to the tinseled dwarf pine
decorated with Christmas cards.

"All of our doctors
remember us at Christmas," she said with a pleasant smile.

* * *

It was almost eight o'clock when I left Rollman's. I
headed east to I-71 and Indian Hill. It was a thirty-minute drive to
Louise Pearson's country club on Camargo, which meant I was going to
be a bit early for our meeting. But I didn't feel like sitting in a
chili parlor for an extra half hour, brooding about Herbert Talmadge.
I needed to move around, I also needed a drink.

The club was in a woods off Camargo Pike. I had
probably passed it a couple of hundred times the day before, when I
was looking for Woodbine Lane. The guy manning the gate had my
name—and my number, judging from the way he eyed me and the beat-up
Pinto. He made me show ID before waving the car through.

The clubhouse was about a half-mile past the gate,
down a tar road that cut between the ninth and tenth holes of a
moonlit golf course. I heard music before I saw the building—a jazz
combo playing "Sentimenta1 Journey." The horn echoed across
the golf course, cutting through the cold clear night like taps in a
drill yard.

I parked the Pinto in a crowded lot, squeezing in
between a Mercedes and a Bentley. As I walked up to the clubhouse I
passed a couple making out in a dark car. He was wearing a tux and
she was wearing a chiffon evening gown, pearls, and a fur wrap. Aside
from that they were doing it pretty much like the rest of us do.
Though when I went by the woman winked invitingly—so I might have
been wrong.

The club was large and preposterous-looking, half
field-stone Romanesque and half redwood A-frame, like a dowager with
a fade haircut. The stone and masonry part abutted the golf course.
It had been around for a long while, probably since the twenties. The
A-frame part, where all the music was coming from, fronted the road
and was obviously a new addition. Two silver spruces, twinkling with
colored Christmas lights, flanked the tall A-frame door.

I stepped through that door into a Christmas party.
The vaulted atrium was decorated with streamers and filled with men
and women in evening dress. They didn't exactly stare as one when I
came in. But I got enough funny looks to send me scurrying to the far
end of the room, where the glow of a lighted bar caught my eye.

The bar was actually in a separate room, through
smoked-glass doors that shut out most of the buzz of conversation and
too much of the music. It was dark and cozy and empty in the bar. I
sat down on a leather stool and asked the red-vested bartender for
The Glenlivet, straight up. Up the rail from me a tall, stocky,
red-faced man in a tux, the only other person in the place, toyed
with a bowl of Spanish peanuts and stared at me openly."

I'd been in enough bars in my life to know when a guy
was looking for trouble. The one in the tux was.

"You're not a member here, are you?" he
said after a time. His voice was loud and officious-sounding.

I turned in his direction. "You taking a poll?"

He pretended to laugh. "I'm just wondering what
you're doing here, that's all."

He was probably having trouble with a woman. And if
he wasn't he deserved to be. But it was his bar, so I kept it
polite."

"I'm waiting for someone."

The man parked his elbows on the bar behind him and
stared at me across his left shoulder. "Who?"

"Who, what?"

"Who are you waiting for?"

I glanced at the bartender but he looked away
quickly, as if he didn't want any part of trouble with the guy in the
tux.

"I'm waiting for Louise Pearson. Dr. Phil
Pearson's wife."

The man threw his head back slightly and opened his
mouth as if he was going to laugh. But no sound came out. He stood
like that for half a second, gape-mouthed, staring at the ceiling.
Then he closed his mouth and looked back across his shoulder at me.

"
Are you her new one?"

I started to get angry. "What's that supposed to
mean?"

"Her new stud. Mister December."

"What's the matter, fella? She didn't like you
hitting on her?"

He swung around on his left elbow, so he was facing
me.

"
Louise likes to be hit on, fella. Don't you
know that?"

I stared at him. The bartender slapped his towel on
the bar. He was an older man with a grey moustache and a heavily
lined face.

"Take it outside, mister," he said to me.
"Take it outside or I call the cops."

The guy in the tux laughed. "Forget about it,
Pete. He's not going to try anything."

But the bartender knew better. "Take it
outside," he said again.

I swallowed the rest of my drink and left.

I was working my way through the crowd, looking for
Louise Pearson, when she found me. I heard a woman call my name,
turned around, and saw her standing a few feet away, smiling.

"Hi," I said, smiling back.

"Hi, yourself."

She was wearing a midnight-blue evening gown with a
modest slit in the leg and a modest plunge at the breast. She looked
terrific.

"I thought I saw you go into the bar. In fact I
was going to go in after you."

"I think we better steer clear of the bar."

l She gave me a confused look. "Why?"

"Not important. I don't have anything new to
report anyway. Go back to your party."

"I don't feel like partying. " She stared
at me for a second curiously, trying to ma.ke out what it was that
was bothering me about the bar. Then she shrugged. "If you're
going to leave I'll come with you. You can drive me home."

"You're not going to like my car."

"I'll take that chance."

Louise picked up a mink wrap in a cloakroom by the
door. Together we walked out to the lot. As we made our way through
the parked cars she passed her arm through mine.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "Did
somebody say something to you in the bar?"

"Nope. It's just been a long day, and I didn't
feel like a party."

"Neither did I," she said with a dismal
laugh. "I shouldn't have come. I wouldn't have come if Phil
hadn't insisted."

She got a peevish look on her face. "Phil always
knows what's best for other people. That's why he's in such good
shape right now."

Her mood had obviously changed since the morning,
back to the tensions of the previous day.

"How's he holding up?"

"About the same," she said indifferently.

Louise eased her arm away from mine as if talking
about her husband had made her feel self-conscious. She didn't say
anything for a while.

"You must already know that we're not the
perfect couple. I mean you must have sensed that."

I didn't say anything.

When she saw the car she started to laugh. "God,
you weren't kidding about this thing."

"It's old, but it's game."

I opened the passenger side door and she slipped in.
I got in on my side, started the engine, and headed up the access
road to Madeira. Neither of us said a word as we drove back to
Woodbine Lane.

I pulled up in the driveway behind her husband's
Mercedes. Louise turned in the seat to face me.

"Come in," she said in her peremptory way.
"We'll have that drink."

"All right?

None of the downstairs lights was lit, but there was
a lamp on upstairs in a front room. Louise glanced at it.

"He should be asleep," she said irritably.
"He promised me he'd try to sleep."

"He's worried," I said.

"He's panicking," she said with a trace of
disgust.

Louise unlocked the door and flipped on a hall light.
"I'll go up and put him to bed. You might as well make us some
drinks. The lights in the living room are on the left and the liquor
is in a red Chinese cabinet by the sideboard. Fix yourself whatever
you want, and fix me a martini?