Second Chance (29 page)

"She ain't seen her since '76."

I sighed.

"Ain't you gonna come over and chat?"
Thelma Jackson said disappointedly, as if she was looking forward to
the company.

"I'm pretty tired, Thelma."

Thelma put her hand over the receiver and I heard her
say, "He ain't coming," to someone else in the room.

"Tell your friend I'll call her tomorrow about
Carla."

"Carla?" Thelma said. "Who's that?"

"Herbie's girlfriend?"

"Her name wasn't Carla," the woman said.
"Was it, Sarah?"

She went off the line
again and I heard her say something to her friend. When she came back
on she was full of confidence. "She wasn't no Carla. She was a
Jeanne. Jeanne Chase."

* * *

It was past eleven by the time I got to Thelma
Jackson's bungalow on Anthony Wayne. The air near the distillery
smelled of peaches that cold December evening. I took a big whiff of
it as I crossed over to the house, and caught a hint of gasoline
drifting up from the expressway.

Thelma was standing in the front door as I came onto
the porch. Another black woman in her sixties, with a small, gnarled
face and a slightly humped back, stood a few feet behind her in the
shadows of the living room. The second woman watched shyly while
Thelma ushered me in.

"This here's Sarah Washington," Thelma
said, turning to the other woman.

"Pleased," Sarah Washington said in a
squeaky little voice.

Thelma grinned at her shy friend. "You wouldn't
believe it to look at her, but Sarah was wilder than me in her day."

"You hush," Sarah Washington said, looking
embarrassed.

I went over to the floral-print couch. The women sat
down on chairs opposite me. Both of them were wearing floral-print
dresses. Thelma filled hers out impressively, while Sarah's hung from
her skinny shoulders like a coat from a hook.

"Ain't he good-looking?" Thelma said to her
friend. "Too good-looking for an old woman like me."

She snapped her girdle, and the other one clucked her
tongue mournfully. I had the feeling that Thelma Jackson was going to
keep snapping and her friend was going to keep clucking all night
long—that that was the way they related to each other.

"You remember the nurse that Herbie Talmadge was
seeing, Ms. Washington?" I said, trying to steer the
conversation toward business.

"Yes, uhm—hm," Sarah Washington said,
nodding until I thought her neck might break. "She worked in the
Jewish Hospital Doctors' Building back in '75 and '76. I believe her
name was Chase. Jeanne Chase."

"You're not sure?"

The woman ducked her tiny head. "Not for
absolute sure."

"It couldn't have been Chaney, could it? Carla
Chaney?"

"I'm purty sure her last name was Chase.
Somebody told me she come down from a Dayton hospital, but I never
did know that for a fact."

"She was an RN?"

"No, no." The woman shook her head in the
opposite plane. "A receptionist."

"Y'all got to quit that shaking," Thelma
said irritably.

"Make the rest of us dizzy."

The woman gave her an ugly look.

"Who'd she work for?" I asked.

"I ain't for sure. One of the doctors in the
Jewish Hospital Building."

"You tell him what you saw," Thelma
prompted.

"I saw her and Herbie Talmadge together,"
Sarah Washington said, drawing herself up in the chair. "Saw
them a couple of times—out in the parking lot."

I said, "By together, you mean . . . ?"

"I mean what I said. They weren't doing more
than talking, far as I could see."

She gave Thelma Jackson a quick, sharp look.

"Are you sure this is the same woman that you
saw on McMicken Street?" I said to Thelma.

She nodded. "Has to be. Big blond white girl.
'Bout twenty-four, twenty-five years old."

"Is that what she looked like?" I said to
Sarah Washington.

"The woman bobbed her head like a fighter
ducking a bag. "Yes, sir."

Jeanne Chase sounded an awful lot like Carla Chaney,
with a new name. Sy Chase's wife's name. It struck me as a kind of
grim joke—Carla taking the name of the woman who'd spoiled her
chance to become the real Mrs. Chase.

"Did your ever talk to this woman?" I asked
Sarah Washington.

"Never did talk to her but once," the woman
admitted.

"She was in the coffee shop and I waited her
table. She acted kind of high-strung, I remember that. Kind of
uppity. I figured her for one of those college girls who come and go.
You see them all the time. Only reason they work is to snare them
some young doctor. And when that don't happen, they just drift on to
something else. Stopped seeing her in the spring. And never did see
her again after that. Never saw Herbie but one time after that,
either. In the fall of that year."

"Where did you see him?"

"Out front of the hospital."

The woman shook her head with what I thought was a
dismal accent. It depressed me that I was beginning to understand the
code of her gestures. In fact I'd started to bob my head a little,
too.

"I thought the boy was waiting on a bus,"
Sarah Washington said, "but this fancy car come along and picked
him up. Big, black car. Doctor's car."

"Did you see who was driving it?"

"Just the license. Had MD on it. I remember
that."

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As soon as I finished with Thelma I went looking for
a phone. I found a neon-lit convenience store on North Bend Road,
blazing in the dark as if it had been doused with cognac, and called
Dr. Steele's office from a booth on the wall. I half expected to get
an answering machine, but he answered the phone himself like a good
country physician used to night calls.

"Sorry to bother you again," I said, "but
I've got a funny situation here. Jeanne Chase, Sy Chase's wife . . .
can you describe her for me?"

"Why?" the man said, perking up. "You
haven't found her, have you?"

"I've run across her name."

"She was a green-eyed redhead, about five-four,
one-twenty. A tough little Irish girl. Real pretty and real smart."

She certainly didn't sound like the woman that Sarah
Washington had seen with Talmadge. The woman Sarah Washington had
seen still sounded like Carla Chaney.

"Christ," Steele went on eagerly, "if
you do find anything about Jeanne you've got to call her folks. When
she disappeared their lives virtually ended."

"When did she disappear?"

"In October '76. She'd gone to Cincinnati to
interview for a nursing job. She just couldn't stand to work up here
anymore without Sy. And she was the type who needed to work. I
remember that the detective her folks hired traced her as far as the
hospital where the interview took place."

"Do you know which hospital that was?"

"No. It would be in the report the detective
made—I'm sure. I do remember that she called her folks that
afternoon and told them that she wouldn't be coming home right away.
That she'd run into an old friend and would be staying in town a few
more days."

"Did she identify the friend?"

· "Not that I recall."

"You think you could get me the name of the
detective who worked on the case? I mean without working anybody up."

"Of course. A doctor gets used to watching what
he says."

I dug another quarter from my pocket and phoned Al
Foster at CPD.

"No," he said. "I don't have any news
on the Pearson kid's bank account."

"Well, I do," I told him. "Rita Scarne
was drawing money out of it to the tune of a hundred and twenty
grand. Someone was paying her off and using the Pearson kid's account
to launder the cash."

"Got any idea who?"

I did but I wasn't ready to tell the cops yet—not
until I had Pearson's motive for murder pinned down. "It would
help if you could find out who was depositing to the account."

"I've done enough work for the day," Al
said wearily.

"Your friend, Carla, I've dug up something on
her. You're not going to like it, though."

"What?"

"You sitting down or standing up?"

"Just tell me."

"She's dead, Harry."

Behind me an ice machine made a thump, like a sack
down a laundry chute.

"That can't be true," I said, wishing I was
sitting down.

"I don't want it to be true, either. Parker
would be pissed as hell if I told you this but we've got a couple of
slots that your Carla was tailor-made to fit. It turned out that the
nurse in Prospect Park, the one that black kid saw with Talmadge,
definitely wasn't Rita Scarne. We did some checking and the Scarne
woman was on private duty until eleven p.m. Monday night. Plus
criminalistics lifted a pair of prints off the damn shoe we found in
Herb's apartment that don't match Talmadge or Rita. Parker doesn't
think it's enough to queer the case for a grand jury, but it's making
him sweat."

"You're sure the Chaney woman's dead?"

"For thirteen years.
Talmadge killed her. It's why he went to jail. For raping and
murdering Nurse Carla Chaney."

* * *

It was all there in black and white, in a folder that
had been sitting on a parole officer's desk for better than a week.
Al had found out about it early that evening after running Carla
Chaney's name past Newport CID.

"Hall Scott, Talmadge's parole officer, called
to follow up on Herb's murder," Foster said as we sat across his
desk from each other in the homicide office of the CPD Building.

"We got to talking about the son of a bitch. And
the Chaney girl's name popped up.  almadge must have hated her
guts, because he really did a number on her. Beat her up so badly
they had to rely on a piece of physical evidence to identify the
corpse—a wedding ring on the woman's hand. And then she'd been in
the Ohio River for three weeks, which didn't help."

"He dropped her body in the river?"

"Hel1uva coincidence, huh?" He pushed the
manila folder across his desk to me. "Take a look at who made
the ID."

I flipped open the folder and scanned the report. The
woman's nude body was found on November 10, 1976—about two months
after Estelle Pearson was pulled from the Miami. The body—what was
left of it after three weeks in the water—was identified by one
Rita Scarne, a nurse and friend of the deceased. According to the
report Scarne claimed Carla Chaney had been Talmadge's lover and that
she'd been missing since mid-October. There were no relatives listed
for Carla. Husband and child, mother and father, were said to be
deceased. Without Rita and the ring Carla would have been just
another Jane Doe.

"Did Rita testify against Talmadge at the
trial?"

"There wasn't any trial," Foster said.
"Herb copped a plea—second-degree murder. That's why he was
released ten days ago instead of spending another ten years in jail.
The Scarne woman must have been scared to death when she read he was
going to be paroled. Scared enough to use those kids to try to kill
him, scared enough to do it herself when the scheme backfired."

Only Rita Scarne hadn't known about the kids. I was
beginning to wonder whether she'd known about Talmadge's release. The
person she'd been afraid of—the person who phoned the kids at that
motel—was a lot more dangerous than Herb. And a lot harder to pin
down.

"
See what you can dig up on an MP named Jeanne
Chase," I said to Al. "She disappeared close to the same
time that Carla went in the water."

"
How close?" he said, perking up.

"I'll find out."

I went back to my office and phoned Dr. Steele again.
He had the name of the detective for me by then—Jim Sanchez out of
Dayton. And something else—something I hadn't expected.

"
I came across the name of that doctor that
Carla went to work for in Cincinnati. I'd written it down on an old
calender", Steele laughed. "I keep stuff like that around.
My wife says forever. Anyway the name wasn't Pearson. It was Sacks
—Sheldon Sacks."

"No shit!" I said with surprise.

Steele laughed. "That's what it says here.
Sheldon Sacks, Jewish Hospital Doctors' Building."

That helped to explain how Carla/Jeanne had come in
contact with Phil Pearson, Sacks' closest friend. And as receptionist
to Shelley Sacks, Carla would have had access to Sacks' files—to
all that useful information about Stelle and Phil's rotten marriage.
Information that it was high time I had a look at, too.

I phoned Dayton information and got Jim Sanchez's
number. I didn't figure he'd be in his office at ten-thirty on a
Friday night. But I was wrong. Like me he was working on a case that
troubled him—a missing child. Talking about Jeanne Chase didn't
improve his mood.