Second Chance (25 page)

Shelley Sacks would have called it "fate,"
because it was messy the way fates always are. But it wasn't random
enough for me. Not with the whole family lying dead. I had no proof,
just a guilty feeling that I'd missed it somehow—that we all had.
And I couldn't live with that feeling—even if Louise and Parker
could.

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After Lasker's call, I started making phone calls of
my own—to anyone who could possibly help me locate Carla Chaney. I
tried the nursing agencies first—to see if she was still working
locally—and drew a blank. I tried the hospitals and hospices in
both Dayton and Cincinnati, without any luck. I tried Nola Chaney
again in New Mexico—and got no answer.

Around two I tried A1 at the CPD. All he'd come up
with was a driver's license application from 1974. It wasn't much,
but it was better than nothing.

The address on the application was 678 Aviation Road
in Dayton. It sounded like a Wright-Pat address. According to Carla's
mother Nola, '73 was the year Carla had moved to Ohio from New
Mexico—the year her husband, Bobby Tallwood, had been assigned to
Wright-Patterson AFB.

Carla applied for the license in November 1974 under
her maiden name, Chaney. Perhaps she'd been divorced by then—that
was what Nola Chaney had expected. Charlotte Scarne hadn't mentioned
Carla's husband or kid either. I decided to find out what had
happened to them.

It took me forty-five minutes to drive to Wright-Pat.
I med my old D.A.'s deputy badge to get onto the base, and followed
the signs to the headquarters building. One of the streets I passed
was Aviation Road. I stopped at the corner, just to take a look.

It was a barracks street lined with neat frame
Quonsets, row upon row of them like painted lunchboxes on a shelf. A
tall wire fence spackled with ice ran behind the houses, separating
them off from the huge cantilevered hangars and long tar airstrips.
The roar of jet engines was constant. The ground trembled with it
like a low-grade earthquake. I supposed you got used to that after a
time. Or maybe you didn't. Maybe all you wanted to do was serve your
time and get away from it—and the life inside those nondescript
huts.

The yellow-brick headquarters building was a few
streets north of Aviation Road. There was a flagpole out front and a
stone guardhouse. I showed the MPs the pass I'd been issued at the
gate, and they waved me through.

There were more guardposts inside the building—a
whole series of them. By the time I got to the adjutant's office,
three or four different tags hung like battle ribbons from my coat.

I told the adjutant I was looking for an airman named
Tallwood, and he referred me to Personnel. It took a couple of more
tags to get into the Personnel Office, and that was where I finally
found someone to talk to.

His name was Olkiewcz, and he was a top sergeant with
a square-jawed, implacable face straight out of Steve Canyon. He'd
been stationed at Wright-Pat since the early seventies, and he knew
most of the men who had served there by name.

He remembered Airman Tallwood, all right. But he
refused to talk about him until I'd stated my business. Since
Olkiewcz thought I was from the Cincinnati D.A.'s office, I figured
Tallwood had a reputation for off-the-base trouble. But I was wrong.

"He's not wanted for anything," I told
Olkiewcz. "I need to speak to him in connection with a missing
persons case."

The sergeant allowed himself a tight little smile the
size of a baby's fist. "That's funny," he said without
sounding amused. " 'Cause you could say that Bob's a missing
person, too."

"He's AWOL?"

"Permanently. He's dead, mister."

"When?"

Olkiewcz ran the fingers of his right hand through
his hair like a four-pronged comb. "October 9, 1974."

"What makes you remember the date?"

"It wasn't something you were likely to
forget—the way it happened, I mean."

I stared at him curiously. "You want to tell me
about it?"

"I don't see no reason why I should,"
Olkiewcz said. "You got your answer—he's dead."

"Look, Sergeant. His wife, Carla, is in some
trouble. I'm trying to locate her, and any information I can get
about her past could be crucial."

This time he gave me a curious look. "What'd she
do? Kill somebody?"

"Possibly." I said it because I had the
feeling that was what he wanted to hear. His eyes had filled with
hate when I'd mentioned Carla's name.

Olkiewcz leaned back in his chair and stared at me
coolly.

"I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm going to do
it anyway. 'Cause I wouldn't want that two-timing bitch to get away
with it again."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning she killed her husband and her kid."

Olkiewcz smiled his tight smile again, then wiped it
off his face with his right hand as if it was something that had
dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. "Oh, she didn't
actually pull a trigger. But she sure as hell drove that boy over the
brink. Made him so crazy he killed that little kid of theirs, then
turned a shotgun on himself."

"Tallwood killed his son and himself?" I
said.

"That's was the way it looked—and nobody could
prove different."

"Did anybody try?"

"Sure. The adjutant tried. We all did. Everybody
knew the bitch was running around with a nigger. That it was driving
Bobby nuts, the way she and the nigger carried on—right there in
front of the kid. Crazy little coon. Just as sick as she was. Got
four-effed right after it happened?

"This guy was a soldier on the base?"

Olkiewcz nodded. "A psycho. P.T.'d a half-dozen
times for attacking nurses. That's how the bitch met him—on the
psych ward at the base hospital."

"Carla worked there as a nurse?"

He nodded. "I don't know what she saw in the
nigger—he sure as hell didn't have rank or dough. Everybody told
Bobby to kick her ass back to New Mexico. But he wouldn't do it. He
just kept looking the other way till the day he snapped. The joke is
the bitch ended up with his insurance. Ten thousand dollars' worth."
Olkiewcz hawked up an oyster of phlegm and spat it into a trash can
beside the desk.

"No woman's worth that. I don't care how good
the pussy."

"The black soldier Carla was screwing, do you
remember his name?"

I just wanted to hear him say it. And he did.

"Talmadge. Airman Third Class Herbert Talmadge."

Olkiewcz's story was so obviously tainted with
prejudice that I decided to stop at the base hospital where Carla
Chaney had worked to double-check it. One of the doctors on the
surgical ward, a major named Carson, remembered Carla Chaney fairly
well. Carson was a tall, heavyset man in his mid-forties, with the
patchy, red-eyed face of a heavy drinker. He wore a pair of extremely
thick, government issue glasses. His bleary eyes swam behind them
like huge, bewildered fish. Carson confirmed the bare bones of
Olkiewcz's story. Tallwood had killed himself and his son, in October
1974. But he had a different recollection of the wife.

"Carla," he said nostalgically. "Christ,
she was a dish. Half the doctors on the ward followed her around with
their tongues hanging out. She could have had any one of them—any
of us—in a minute. But she stayed married to Bob Tallwood—why I
don't know. The son of a bitch used to beat her up every other day.
He beat his son up, too."

"Olkiewcz left that part out," I said.

"Olkiewcz is a racist thug. Just like Bob
Tallwood was. And then Carla never gave Olkiewcz a tumble, and that
probably stuck in his craw."

"You seemed to have gotten along with her."

Carson smiled. "She didn't give me a tumble
either, if that's what you mean. But yeah, I wanted her. I guess she
liked me well enough. We'd talk occasionally on the ward, and I
treated her on the QT a couple of times after Bob beat her up. I even
tried to talk her into leaving the son of a bitch. But she said Bob
would kill her before he gave her a divorce. And if she left him he'd
just come after her—and make things that much worse."

"It was lucky for her that he killed himself
then, wasn't it?"

"Some people looked at it that way. I didn't."

I asked Carson about Herb Talmadge, but he couldn't
place the name.

"For all the attention paid Carla, I never saw
her get I halfway serious about anybody except Sy Chase. She spent a
lot of time with him on the ward and off."

"Chase was a doctor?"

He nodded. "An intern who served here in '73 and
'74. He was politically connected somehow, or his wife's family was.
That's why he ended up at Wright instead of in 'Nam. I
thought he was an asshole, but Carla went for him."

"How serious was it on Chase's part?"

"I think he would have divorced his wife and
married Carla in a minute if she'd been free. But he never got the
chance. His hitch was up in June of '74. He left the base a few
months before Tallwood shot himself. Never saw him again after that."

"When Tallwood died, was there any hint that
Carla might have had a hand in it?"

"There are always rumors after a suicide,"
Carson said dismissively. "No one ever uncovered any evidence to
support them. Bob Tallwood was a vicious man with a violent temper.
He'd beaten Carla and his son up plenty of times before. He just went
too far on that particular night and killed the kid. Afterward he
started drinking and ended up eating a shotgun. I think the rumors
about Carla started because she'd been out that night—because she
hadn't been killed too. And then she didn't show much emotion when
she was told what had happened. Not even about the little boy."
The man shook his head. "I don't think Carla had much feeling
left after living with Bob. I think he'd killed that part of her for
good."

"Meaning she was a sociopath?"

"Meaning like most people who live with constant
abuse she was deeply scarred."

"You said she was out on the night of the
suicide. Do you know where?"

"She'd gone to stay at a house of a friend, as I
recall. A civilian nurse who occasionally worked here on the base."

"Do you remember this nurse's name?"

Carson scratched his head thoughtfully. "I'm
sorry. It's just been too many years."

"It wouldn't have been Rita Scarne, would it?"

His big, bleary eyes lit up with recognition. "I
think it was Rita Scarne. At least the name rings a bell. How did you
know that?"

"Just a lucky guess," I said grimly.

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Carson didn't know what had become of Carla Chaney
after she left Wright-Pat in late '74. Neither did the Records
Department at the base hospital, although they confirmed the facts
that she and Rita Scarne had been employed as psychiatric nurses at
Wright-Pat and that Airman Herbert Talmadge had been one of their
patients. They also managed to dig up an office address for Dr. Sy
Chase, the man Carson had linked to Carla Chaney. The address on
Gallatin Avenue in Cedar Falls, Ohio, was fourteen years old. But
Cedar Falls wasn't far out of my way, and I was willing to make a
side trip to find out just how serious Carla had been about Sy
Chase—whether she'd been serious enough to commit murder. And a
terrible murder, at that.

The possibility was there, undeniably. Another
suspicious suicide with the same cast of characters who'd popped up
in the Pearson woman's case. Only Tallwood's death had been no
accident—not with a ten thousand dollar payoff at the end of it,
the very amount that Rita Scarne had collected in blood money. If
Tallwood hadn't committed suicide, there was a chance he'd been
deliberately murdered by Talmadge at Carla's behest, with Rita
providing the alibi. And that chance made me rethink what had
happened to Estelle Pearson.

I'd assumed that Herb Talmadge had mistaken Stelle
for Rita on that September afternoon in 1976—that whatever he'd
done to her had been unplanned mayhem, later covered up by Phil
Pearson. But the circumstances surrounding Bob Tal1wood's death
suggested a more sinister scenario. It now seemed possible that
Estelle Pearson had been deliberately murdered, too. It would explain
why Carla had gone to such lengths to get her hitman Talmadge out of
the hospital in June of '76, why Rita had stolen drugs to keep him
"manageable" throughout the summer, why Herb had shown up
at the Pearson house on the one day of the year that Rita called in
sick.

It was possible, all right. And if it was true there
had to be another payoff—for Rita and Carla and Herb. The original
ten thousand would hardly cover a second homicide. There had to be a
payoff and a man to pay it. The only person I could think of with
that kind of money and a connection to Stelle was Phil Pearson. I
didn't know why he'd want his wife dead or how he'd come to pick
Rita, Carla, and Herb to do the job. But if Estelle had been murdered
Phil was behind it—no matter what Louise said.