Second Chance Page 9

  “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 summer 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

  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 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—redbrick 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.”

  “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 physician.”

  “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. Nothing.”

  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.

  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: We’re 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. It’s 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 stuff 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. Let’s 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.

  15

  WHEN I finished I took Talmadge’s folder out to the reception desk and handed it to McCall’s grey-haired secretary, 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 1965,” 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 “Sentimental 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.