Second Chance (12 page)

She shook her head. "Didn't want to know. Didn't
want to have nothing to do with Herbie, after that one time."

"Is there anyone who might know? A friend of his
from back then?"

"Herbie didn't have no friends," the woman
said with a dry laugh. "He just have himself."

"Did he have a job?"

"Got him some money from the Vets, I think. Most
times he got hard up, he'd just go on back to the hospital. Rest of
the times he'd lay up in his room, stoned on them painkillers he got
from the doctors."

"Finding him is important, Ms. Jackson. Is there
anything else you can remember that would help me?"

"I can poke around,"
she said gamely. "See what I can dig up. Meantime, you check
with that hospital. They gotta know something 'bout him, seeing how
he was practically a permanent guest."

* * *

I didn't take Thelma's advice about checking at
Rollman's. Not that it wasn't a good idea. I just knew from
experience that no one at a hospital was going to talk to a private
cop without word from somebody higher up. So I went searching for
that word at Sheldon Sacks' office on Burnett, a couple blocks east
of the psychiatric hospital and just a few blocks north of where I
used to live in the Delores.

Sacks' office was on the second floor of a duplex he
shared with another psychiatrist. 'There was a hall at the top of the
stairs, with office doors opening off it to the left and a small,
glassed-in receptionist's room to the right. I gave the secretary my
name and she told me that she'd buzz Sacks when his four o'clock
appointment was up. In the meantime I took a seat in a wainscoted
waiting room, beside a couple of middle-aged women who were doing
their best to keep from screaming.

Just sitting there made me queasy. When the secretary
finally called my name, I jumped. She led me back down the hall to
one of the office doors and knocked. Sacks called out, "Come
in."

"
Sorry to have kept you waiting, Stoner,"
he said as I came through the door.

He waved me over to a stuffed leather chair then sat
down behind a large desk. There was a half-empty box of Kleenex on an
end table by the chair. Half-full or half-empty—I could never see
the fucking difference. There were a dozen Kleenex on the floor, as
if his last patient had had a real crying jag.

The room was paneled in oak and lined with
bookshelves on two walls. There was a psychiatrists couch on the
third wall with a framed steamship floating above it. Sacks' desk was
on the far wall, in front of a bank of louvered windows.

Just enough sunlight was filtering through the slats
to back-light his head and throw his face into shadow.

"What can I do for you?" he asked.

I told him about Herbert Talmadge. He listened
intently, moving forward in his chair so that a bit of his round face
came into the desk light.

"When did you say he was treated at Rollman's?"

"l976. Possibly earlier."

"That's odd," he said thoughtfully. "I
think Phil did part of his residency at Rollman's, in '75."

"Perhaps he treated Talmadge?"

"It's possible," Sacks said, joining his
hands.

I waited for him to say something more, but he
didn't. He just sat there with his hands knitted together and a blank
look on his face, as if he hadn't drawn any conclusions from what
he'd said.

"You and Pearson are close friends?"

He nodded. "Since med school. He and Stelle and
I were in the same graduating class."

"She was a psychiatrist, too?"

"She never started her internship. She married
Phil in 1966 right after we graduated. She had Ethan at the end of
that year."

"She didn't go back to school?"

He shook his head. "She wanted to, but her
emotional problems made it impossible."

"She was never hospitalized at Rollman's, was
she?"

"No. At Jewish and at Holmes."

He wasn't comfortable talking about the woman, and he
wasn't trying to disguise it. Given the circumstances, his reticence
irritated me.

"Is there a reason you don't want to talk to me
about Estelle Pearson?" I said.

The man sighed. "No one likes to talk about his
failures, Mr. Stoner. Especially when that failure involves people
whom you love."

He leaned back in his chair, tenting his fingers in
front of his face. "It has been thirteen years since Estelle
died, and in all those years I don't think a day has passed that I
haven't thought about her. Estelle wasn't just my patient. She was my
friend."

I was wrong about Sacks. It wasn't professional
reticence, at all.

"I am sorry," I said.

"You have no reason to be. You're just doing
your job. But for Philip and Louise and me, this is a very painful
thing. A tragic thing."

"Pearson seems to blame himself for what's
happened," I said.

"He has his reasons, Mr. Stoner," Sheldon
Sacks said without elaborating.

I changed the subject back to Ethan and Kirsten. "The
picture that Ethan drew in 1976 looks very much like this man
Talmadge."

"Perhaps it was Talmadge," the doctor said.
"Ethan may have visited his father at Rollman's. He may have
seen Talmadge in the halls or on the grounds."

"Yes, but why would he associate the man with
his mother's death?"

"Ethan was very close to Estelle. And she, to
him. Right before her death Estelle went through an extended manic
period, which lasted almost two months. During that time she appeared
to regain a good deal of her energy and focus. To the boy it must
have seemed as if she was recovering—that he himself had made a
difference in her recovery, as in fact he probably did. The manic
stage ended abruptly and the depression returned with a vengeance.
Estelle's death following so hard upon that brief period of apparent
recovery made Ethan feel as if he had somehow failed his mother. It
was my feeling then, and it is my feeling now, that his obsession is
his way of making amends for letting his mother down. He has
sublimated his own guilt and projected it onto this man, Herbert
Talmadge."

"But why Talmadge?"

"Why not?" Sacks said. "His face may
have frightened Ethan. It stuck in his memory. In his confusion over
the loss of his mother he made it the face of his own guilt."

It was neat and logical. But I wasn't sure I believed
it. In my experience people didn't generally remember anonymous faces
in that kind of detail—not unless there was a strong emotional spur
to prod their imagination. Like a loaded gun, or the threat of one.

I didn't debate it with him. I didn't feel confident
enough to debate. But I did ask him if he could arrange for me to
talk with the staff at Rollman's about Talmadge. And he said that he
would call them immediately.

Before leaving I asked one last question. It had
bothered me since Marnee Thompson had mentioned it, and although
Kirsten was still his patient I asked him anyway.

"Kirsten told a friend of hers that you gave her
some Pentothal this srunmer while she was in therapy. Apparently the
drug made her remember something about Estelle—something that
really shook her up."

"But her memory wasn't about Estelle," the
man said with an open look of fascination. "It was about
Philip."

"I don't suppose you'd like to tell me what it
was?"

The open look vanished like a dent closing in dough.

"I guess not," I said.

"She's my patient, Mr. Stoner," Sacks said.

I nodded. "She may not be anyone's patient much
longer, Dr. Sacks."

But he didn't say anything.

14
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I gave Sacks about half an hour to make his calls to
Rollman's. At five-forty I walked across Burnett to the Rollman
grounds. Up in one of the barred third-story windows I could see a
bald man in a white hospital gown watching me cross the lawn. His
queer, drugged-looking face was lit strangely by the last of the
sunset. Even at that distance I could see his dead eyes following me
as I walked into the l shadows at the front of the building.

I wondered if I could remember that face in detail, a
few weeks or months from that moment. Maybe if I was an
impressionable ten-year-old kid, I could have. Maybe I could have
anyway.

From the front Rollman's looked like a high
school—red-brick facade, oblong windows with white trim and glass
double-doors. But the windows were barred and meshed, and the doors
had buzzers on them. I pressed one of the buzzers and an orderly
peered out.

"Visiting hours over, mister," he said.

"My name's Harry Stoner," I said. "Your
director should know who I  am."

The orderly gave me a suspicious look, as if he
thought I might be an escapee. He closed the door and walked down the
hall. When he reappeared, the suspicion was gone from his face.

"Come on," he said, holding the door open.
"Dr. McCall says you can go up."

I followed him down the tile hall. There were tall
barred windows at the end of it. The last daylight pouring through
them was so bright that both of us had to shield our eyes against the
glare.

"You take this elevator up to three," he
said, pointing to a grey elevator beside the windows. "Nurse
upstairs, show you where to go."

I got in the elevator and pressed three. I hadn't
noticed it in the lobby hall, but the elevator smelled ripely of
disinfectant and stale, recirculated air. The third floor was an
administrative area, judging from the empty typing carrels off the
elevator. I followed an arrow sign around a bend in the hallway to
the Director's Office. An elderly nurse with grey hair and a stern,
wrinkled face was sitting at a desk in front of the office door. A
Norfolk pine decorated with tinsel and greeting cards sat on the
floor beside her.

"You're Mr. Stoner?" she said, looking up
at me.

I nodded.

"Dr. McCall will see you. just go through
there."

I went into the office. It was a large room, mostly
taken up with file cabinets and bookshelves. A red-haired man with a
horsey face, horn-rim glasses, and buck teeth was sitting behind a
desk at the far wall. He was wearing a doctor's smock with a
stethoscope hanging from one of the side pockets. His pale skin was
lumpy with ancient acne scars. He fingered one of the lumps idly as I
walked up to him.

"You're Stoner?" the man said in a
businesslike voice.

"Yes." I

"Sam McCall."

McCall motioned me to a wooden chair.

There was a manila folder on his desktop. He put two
fingers on top of it as if he was taking its pulse.

"This is what you came for, I think," he
said, jabbing the folder. "You know we're not supposed to let
you see this. We're not supposed to show it to anyone other than a
physicians."

"I guess Dr. Sacks told you it's an unusual
case."

McCall nodded. "I'm a friend of Phil Pearson's,
too. That's why I'm going to let you read through this. But if the
matter should somehow end up in court, nothing that you see in here
is admissible evidence. Notl1ing."

He jabbed the folder hard to emphasize his point. He
came out from behind the desk. "I'm going to make nightly
rounds. That usually takes a couple of hours. When I come back, the
folder goes in the file cabinet. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I said.

"If you need anything else, ask my receptionist,
Nurse Rostow."

He went out of the room, leaving the manila folder on
his desk.

It took me about an hour and a half to go through
Herbert Talmadge's file. Parts of it I couldn't decipher—pages of
notes written like a prescription in a doctor's crabbed hand. But a
good deal of it had been transcribed by a typist, and those parts
made chilling reading.

Talmadge had first been admitted to Rollman's in
December 1974, after beating and sodomizing a teenage girlfriend. The
examining doctor's diagnosis was acute schizophrenia.

Subject is an intelligent black man, 28 years old, a
high school graduate with three years military service. Subject
released from military in 1974, after suffering anxiety attacks and
hallucinatory episodes. Subject referred to Veterans Administration
Hospital, November 1974, diagnosed as schizophrenic, and allowed
disability pension.

Subject was remanded to RPI by court order, 3
December, 1974, after attacking a woman friend with a handsaw.
Subject has no memory of the attack. Subject maintains the woman is
lying, that he has never harmed a woman . . .

Subject fantasizes himself a ladies' man and claims
he only does what women want him to do. Subject refuses to speak in
detail about hallucinatory episodes.

Talmadge was committed to Rollman's four more times
over the next year—each time following a sadistic attack on a woman
friend. He was invariably released after a week of
observation—perhaps because the girlfriends had dropped the charges
against him, perhaps because they had no room for him at Rollman's or
no real interest in his care and cure. In August of 1975, he was
committed to Rollman's for a fifth time by Thelma Jackson, his
landlady. The interesting part of the '75 episode was the fact that
the attending psychiatrist was Phil Pearson, then a senior resident
at Rollman's.