Second Chance (23 page)

I thought of Herbert Talmadge—a man after Carla's
own heart.

"Your sister said she did a favor for Carla that
she'd been paid money for. Did she give you any hint what that favor
was—if it might have involved a man named Talmadge?"

"All she said was that someone had died as a
result. And that she was afraid she might die, too."

"Why?"

"I don't know," the woman said helplessly.

"Did she mention Kirsty and Ethan Pearson?"

"Who are they?"

"The children of a woman Rita once worked for. A
phone call from them last night might have triggered this whole
thing. You don't know anything about that, do you?"

"Why would I know anything?" the woman
said, looking confused.

"Your sister claimed you were house-sitting for
her last night. And the agency Rita works for forwarded the Pearson
kid's call to Rita's house."

"I don't know anything about any call," she
said flatly.

"And Rita never mentioned the Pearsons to you?"

"She didn't mention them." Charlotte Scarne
shuddered from head to foot. "Mr. Stoner, Rita acted as if she
deserved to die. Whatever she did, it must have been a pretty
terrible thing to make her feel that way."

Although the woman was talking about something in
Rita's past, I couldn't help thinking of Herbert Talmadge, lying on
that kitchen floor with his heart cut out. Of the deserted,
blood-spattered Plymouth, sitting above the river where Estelle
Pearson had died. Terrible things indeed.

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Charlotte was still staring dully at Rita Scarne's
satchel when I left the house on Minton Street. To her the money was
tainted by death. Tainted also by her own ambivalence toward Rita—the
prodigal who had run away from home, leaving Charlotte to live a life
of dismal rectitude in that dismal house. No matter that it was
probably the life that suited her best. It was less painful to blame
Rita. And perhaps Rita had felt some of that blame was deserved. Ten
thousand tax-free dollars certainly would have given Charlotte a
fresh chance.

It took me forty minutes to get back to Cincinnati
and another ten to wend my way up the snowy Amberley Village side
streets to Ridge Road and Rita Scarne's house. It was after three in
the morning by then, past the time I had set for my meeting with the
woman. No matter the time I intended to talk to her.

Because of the snowfall I had trouble finding the
entrance to the driveway. I might not have found it at all if it
weren't for a pair of fresh tire tracks veering off Ridge and leading
down the hill to the house. The treadmarks were a doubly good
sign—they meant Rita Scarne had come home.

After she'd run to her sister's house in Dayton, I
was a little worried that she might keep going—out of the city, out
of the state. But she'd decided to come back. With all those bad
memories in her head, maybe she didn't have it in her to go anywhere
else.

I, followed the tire tracks through the oak grove
into the snowy dell, and found the green Audi parked in front of the
garage. At least I thought it was parked there. But as I got closer I
saw grey smoke trailing from the tailpipe. The engine had been left
running. The parking lights were on too, throwing a faint yellow wash
up the side of the dark house. The fact that there weren't any lights
on in the house itself bothered me. Even if the woman had dashed
inside, intending to come right back out, there should have been
lights on somewhere.

I pulled up behind the Audi and realized with a start
that Rita Scarne was still sitting in the car. I could see her head
and shoulders in the beam of my headlights. I could see something
else too. The passenger-side window of the Audi had a spiderweb
fracture—the kind that comes from a gun shot.

"Christ," I said aloud.

Leaving my headlights on I got out into the cold and
walked slowly up to the woman's car. The Audi's radio had been left
on. I could hear it singing softly over the idling engine. 'I`here
was a sharp smell of cordite in the air, and something else.
Something that wasn't gunpowder or exhaust fumes. Taking a breath I
bent down and looked inside the car.

The driver-side window was open, and a bit of snow
had blown through it, dusting the shoulder of Rita Scarne's coat and
what was left of her face.

She'd been shot in the temple—at very close range
because the powder burns had singed her blond hair above the left
ear. The bullet had apparently gone through her skull, exiting the
right side of her head and breaking the passenger-side window. There
was no question Rita Scarne was dead. Half her brain was lying beside
her in the passenger seat.

There was enough light coming from my headlights and
the Audi's dashboard instruments for me to make out a gun—a
snub-nosed .38—lying in the woman's lap next to her outstretched
hand. There was a sealed envelope on her lap too, spotted with blood.

I stood up and looked around the car. Two sets of
footprints, a woman's shoe, stretched from the driver-side door to
the front door of the house and back again—as if Rita had gone
inside for a moment. There were no other footprints, man's or
woman's, in the front yard snow and no other tire tracks in the
driveway, save for those from the Audi and my Pinto.

I glanced back at the woman—at the blood-spattered
envelope in her lap. She'd been deeply depressed that night. Talmadge
was dead, probably at her hands. The Pearson kids were also dead with
her connivance. An ugly thirteen-year-old secret—a secret full of
blood and money—was coming back to haunt her. With me and the cops
breathing down her neck, she could easily have decided to end it. In
fact she'd told her sister she'd deserved to die no more than an hour
before, after giving away all she had left to give.

It was probably a suicide, all right. And yet I
couldn't quite buy it. Maybe because I hadn't been prepared to find
her dead. Maybe because she'd left me with too many unanswered
questions. Maybe because I'd half believed her earlier that night
when she'd begged me to give her time to make things right. She'd
been afraid of someone. Not me or the cops but someone from her past,
someone who had paid her the "blood money," someone who had
marked her and Estelle, Talmadge, and the two Pearson kids for death.

Suicides could be faked—it was like a theme running
through the case. The open car window could have meant that she'd
been approached in the driveway by someone who had carefully covered
his tracks. It could also have meant that she'd wanted a breath of
air before pulling the trigger—a breath of air and some elbow room
to hold the gun to her head. Finding the truth of it was a job for a
forensic team and a coroner.

Reaching through the window I flipped off the engine
and pulled the keys out of the ignition. The sudden silence in the
dell was dramatic enough to send a chill down my back. I looked
around the yard again at the dark house and darker woods beyond it.
If there was someone out there looking back at me, I couldn't see
him. But I wanted to get inside the house anyway—away from that car
and my own paranoia.

The house key was on the ring with the car keys. I
found it, unlocked the front door, and went inside.

There was a phone on a
stand in the hallway. I picked the receiver up and dialed Al Foster
at the CPD. While I waited for him to come on the line I thought
about going back outside and getting the envelope from the car. But I
knew the forensic cops wouldn't like me tampering with evidence. I
had enough to answer for already.

* * *

We were in the kitchen on the south side of the
house—Parker, Foster, and I. Through the icy windows we could see
the forensic men packing up their gear. It was almost six-thirty, and
grey morning light had just begun to spill down the hillside,
wrapping itself around the oak trunks and turning the pitted snow in
the yard to lead.

The coroner had taken Rita Scarne's body away about
ten minutes before. And now it was just the routine work of cleaning
up after a suicide. That was what the coroner called it when he'd
finished the preliminary exam. The woman's prints were on the gun
butt. A paraifin test had turned up gunpowder on her fingers. The
angle of the bullet was such that only she—or someone bending down
beside her and holding the gun right to her skull through the open
window—could have pulled the trigger. And there were no other
footprints by the car. The ones leading to and from the door were
definitely Rita's. And if that wasn't enough there was the note,
sealed in the envelope.

I got to see it myself after Parker and Foster had
read it—a typed confession on a page of Rita's stationery. It sat
between us on the kitchen table, like a dividing line. I picked it up
and read it again while we waited for the forensic team to
finish—Rita Scarne's last testament. I

I am responsible for the deaths of
Herbert Talmadge and Estelle, Ethan and Kirsty Pearson. May God
forgive me for what I've done and what I'm about to do.

There was no signature. She'd signed it in that car
with the gun.

I laid the thing back down on the table. I didn't
feel any different than I had the first time I'd read it. Which was
to say I didn't know what to think. She hadn't explained anything.
And I said so out loud.

Larry Parker eyed me balefully across the kitchen
table.

"
What is your problem, Stoner? This wasn't her
life story. It was a suicide note. She'd been caught red-handed
committing murder, for chrissake. Or she would have been caught if
you'd obeyed the law."

It wasn't the first time we'd gone over that ground
in the past few hours, and I was getting a little tired of it and of
Parker, who'd started to act very much like a small-town cop.

"There was someone else involved," I said
to him. "Someone who'd paid Rita off thirteen years ago. Someone
she was afraid of."

"Like who?" Parker said irritably. "And
what difference would it make? You heard the coroner. The Scarne
woman wasn't murdered—she killed herself."

"It makes a difference if you're interested in
why she did it."

"I'm interested in solving three murders.
Period. And we've got the evidence to do that."

He held up his right hand and started ticking things
off on his lingers. "The shoe we found in Talmadge's apartment
is the same size that the Scarne woman wears. There are a couple of
bottles of Demerol in her medicine cabinet upstairs just like the
ones we found in Herbie's apartment. We got a witness who saw her
talking to Talmadge on Monday night. We got a phone call from Ethan
to her agency, as well as a note from the motel room, with a name and
address that could only come from her. And, lest we forget, we have a
fucking confession, typed on her typewriter, on her stationery."
Parker dropped his hand to the table. "We got it all."

"Except for the reasons why."

Parker got a pained look on his face. "She'd
been making time with this guy, Talmadge, thirteen years ago. The
Pearson kid saw them together and remembered Herbie's face. Thirteen
years later Talmadge gets out of jail and looks old friend Rita up.
She can't say no to him because he's dangerous. Plus he's got
something on her—something connected  to Estelle Pearson's
suicide or to that other woman you mentioned, the Chaney girl."

"Like what?" I asked.

"How do I know what?" he snapped. "Christ,
it was your idea. You tell me what. Whatever the reason Rita's scared
to death of Talmadge but doesn't know how to get rid of him until the
Pearson kids blunder onto the scene. The boy calls her up, and she
sics them on Herbie. And when that backfires she gets Talmadge stoned
and does the job herself. Case closed."

"What about the ten thousand bucks? Who paid her
that kind of money, Parker? And why? She said someone died because of
it."

"She said a lot of things," Parker said
easily. "Christ Almighty, she was headed for death row. She got
fired for stealing drugs, didn't she? Maybe the money came from
drugs—or from some other deal she cooked up. Who the hell knows?"

"Or ever will," I said, "if you don't
ask a few more questions."

He glared at me. "Well, we can't ask Rita now,
can we? Thanks to you."

"We can try to find Carla Chaney," I said.
"At least we can try to find out what happened to her."

"You try to find her." Parker got up and
lumbered over to the door. "I'm going home to get some s1eep."
He glanced back over his shoulder at me and Foster. "It'l1 come
to gether. Over the next few days, it'll all fit. Even the money
thing. We'll keep dredging the river, but I already know what we're
going to find."

"We don't know they're dead," I said.

"I do," Parker said. "The blood on the
panties we found in the Plymouth and the blood on the bed in the
apartment was Kirsten's. We've confirmed it."

"How?"

"The stepmother gave me the girl's blood type
last night when I called the hospital looking for you. Type O
negative."