Chance (11 page)

The air had improved somewhat since his last stroll in this part of the city, though here and there the occasional surgical mask was yet in evidence. He seemed of late to be counting them for no good reason he could think of. He found Janice at an outdoor table beneath a small sycamore.

“I’ve taken you for my ally,” he said, sitting opposite.

“So I see,” Janice told him. She was a slight middle-aged woman with the dress and manner of many Bay Area lesbians, though in point of fact her sexual orientation was, even after all the time they’d known one another, something of a mystery. They’d met while both were on staff in the teaching hospital at UCSF and had remained friends. She had over the years become something of a de facto therapist and one of the few people to whom he had confided with regard to certain aspects of his past.

Their talk on the phone had been brief. He’d done little more than announce the subject of their meeting. She brushed at some ash that had fallen near a plate of cookies. A masked cyclist passed in the street.

“Was this stupid, us meeting here?” The question was his.

“I don’t know. Was it?”

“Being outside, I mean. It’s been weeks already.”

“Yes, I know, and I have no idea. Avoid strenuous exercise, they say. I don’t think this counts.” She looked to the sky. “We’re waiting for the rains. Now tell me about this plan of yours. You were quite mysterious on the phone.”

Chance watched as the cyclist vanished in the haze, ordered iced tea from the waitress, and turned his attention to the woman before him, noting that the amount of gray in her hair seemed to have increased since their last meeting. Well, he thought, she’s like me. Time flies when you’re having fun. “She’s got no chance,” Chance said finally. “Not with that man in her life.”

“And yet she stays, here, in
his
city.”

“She says that if she left he would find her.”

“And you believe that?”

“We’ve seen what he’s capable of.”

“Yes,” she said. “We have seen that.”

“Nor should she
have
to run. Her life is here. Did you know she has a daughter?”

“Yes, she told me.”

Chance took this as a good sign, allaying at least some of the apprehension generated by her confession in the café. Janice was waiting for him to go on. “She needs two things,” Chance said.

“Only two?”

“She should continue with some form of therapy and she needs a friend.”

“Sounds like she has one.”

“Hey, now . . . I thought we were on the same side.”

“If you mean thinking this guy she’s hooked up with is a monster and that she ought to have the chance to work through her shit, then yes, we’re on the same side. But I’m thinking there’s more to it. Let me rephrase. I’m afraid there might be more to it. Assuage my fears, why don’t you.”

He told her about his attempt to ingratiate himself with the Oakland DA, his theory of well-positioned friends.

She was longer than he would have liked in getting back to him. “Are you kidding me?” she asked finally. “I mean . . . if he’s everything
she says . . . how is he not going to get hip to you poking around?”

“It’s a big department. I will be dealing directly with the DA’s office. Blackstone can’t have his finger on every little thing that happens over there. Plus, he’s a homicide detective. What they’re going to want from me are profiles, judgments regarding testamentary capacity. Cases should be all over the map. Might not be a homicide in the bunch.”

“You’ve already begun then.”

“A phone call was all that took, a little back-and-forth online, a couple hours. It’s not like they’re drowning in expertise over there.” He went on to tell her about the first case he’d been asked to evaluate, that of Bernard Jolly.

“Poor boy,” she said.

He took her to mean Bernard and not himself.

“Well . . .” she said finally. “Whatever. Just don’t say I never warned you. What’s more concerning to
me
is the degree to which you are
involving
yourself in all of this. I just can’t see that it’s the best thing, for either of you.”

She was not one to mince words and he liked that about her, yet he inclined toward the combative. “Of course,” he said. “
Involving
is such a dirty word. Implying as it does the getting off of one’s ass.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”

“Janice . . . We do something or we don’t, it’s that simple.”

A moment passed. Janice looked to the street. “So . . . you’re going to find her a friend. That’s one thing.”

“She tutors kids in math, kids Nicky’s age. I’m thinking I could have her come to my apartment. You could meet her there, continue therapy.”

“Did she tell you how she found her daughter?”

Chance was surprised by the question. “She said only that they had reconnected.”

“The husband found her. Excuse me, the cop.”

Chance waited.

“It was a closed case, meaning that when she signed the papers to put the child up, she agreed never to attempt contact.”

“She was seventeen years old.”

“Yes, and those types of closed cases were more common then than now. Still . . . Do you know how she met her cop? She was being stalked by some guy, someone she’d gone out with, apparently. She called the police. Guess who showed up?”

“She wouldn’t be the first to trade one abusive man for another.”

“Or maybe it’s more about finding one man to save her from another. Maybe it’s what she does, consciously or unconsciously . . .”

“Maybe that’s where Jackie Black comes in.”

“If you’re willing to go there. Have you ever met her, this Jackie Black?”

“Not that I know of.”

“That’s a lame answer, but neither have I, and some would say you don’t diagnose a true dissociative identity disorder without having actually made contact with at least one alter.”

“You doubt her whole story then?”

“I don’t know yet. She’s complicated. Her story is atypical . . . late in life for the development of a secondary personality, if that’s what this is. And of course, if you really are willing to go down that particular rabbit hole it’s possible there are others . . . personalities
she
is not even aware of, earlier patterns of abuse not yet brought to light.”

“Well . . . however many of her there are, or aren’t, I can’t imagine that any of them would want to go on getting beaten.”

“I guess that would depend on how sick she is.”

Chance said nothing.

Janice softened a little. “I am on her side, Eldon. You know that. I like her. I think she’s a bright woman who may someday be whole. Or not. She has a difficult past and she’s developed what I’d call a dangerous strategy by way of coping. But I felt we were making progress. I was angry when this happened, as you know, being the one I called to vent. And of course I thought it would be good for you to look in on her, make sure they weren’t missing anything at that zoo they call a hospital. But I would never have asked you to involve yourself in this way.” She gave it a beat. “There,” she said. “I used it again, your dirty word. But I would still say it’s appropriate here. I would not have asked that
of anyone and especially not you. You were right the first time, sending her to a therapist. You were right to choose a woman.”

Chance watched as the sun moved from behind one of the high-rise buildings to the east, still enough ash in the sky to shift its light toward the red end of the spectrum, allowing for the apocalyptic hues he had not only come to expect, but rather to enjoy. “I met the husband. Did I tell you that?”

“No, you didn’t. What was that like?”

“Creepy, is what it was like. It would be hard to abandon her to him.”

“Yes,” she said. “I imagine it would. I’d imagine something else too. I’d imagine that’s what she’s counting on.”

“She won’t be seeing me. She’ll be seeing you.”

“In your apartment.”

“We don’t have to provide the student and it doesn’t have to be in my apartment. The point would be to set up some cover by which you and she could continue to meet. How about this? How about I put it to her? Maybe she will know someone.”

“I don’t know, Eldon. I really don’t. I will have to think about it.”

“We’re back to our two choices,” Chance told her. “We take some extraordinary measures in an extraordinary case. We intervene or we do nothing and hope for the best. I think we both know how that ends.”

Janice sighed and looked to the street.

“Would that be a yes or a no?” Chance asked.

I
T WAS
a yes finally, with reservations, but who didn’t have those. And they would definitely pass on his apartment. “I’ll ask her today,” Chance told her.

“I’m sure you will,” she said, then added upon rising that as a general rule she was opposed to subterfuge.

“Aren’t we all?” Chance asked.

She left without saying more.

Chance made the call from his cell phone, still seated in the restaurant.

“This isn’t a good number,” Jaclyn Blackstone told him. “Give me five, I’ll call you back.” His phone rang in ten.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I’ve got something.” They’d spoken only briefly the night he’d called. He’d mentioned a plan but stopped short of details, asking that she give him a couple of days. “Is this a good time?”

“You mean now?”

“Now, later, whenever would be convenient for you.”

There was silence on the line, the clatter of something in the background,
music from a distant radio. “I’m at work right now,” she said. The radio was turned off. “There’s a lecture tonight on the campus. I was planning to go. It’s in the math department. One of the graduate students is lecturing on ‘The Axiom of Choice.’ ” Another moment passed. “If you’d like to come?” she said without quite finishing.

Her quality of voice along with the way she’d formulated the invitation gave the impression that her doing so had not come without cost and he was reminded of her vulnerability, recalling at just that moment the delicate architecture of the hand that had opened and closed on the sky blue blanket as he’d sat by her side in the dismal room, the city draped in gloom upon a far horizon. “I’m afraid it would all be lost on me,” Chance said and not without some cost to himself. He had not counted on her asking to meet. She didn’t say anything right away and Chance waited, the phone to his ear. Traffic passed in the street. “There is a little Thai place on Shattuck not far from the campus,” he said suddenly. “Do you know it?” It was an oddly fractured moment in which he seemed to be both speaking and listening at the same time.

“We could meet there after.” Her voice had dropped to something scarcely above a whisper.

“We could.”

“At seven?”

“Seven it is.”

They hung up.

Chance paid his bill and headed down Market Street, elation at war with apprehension; nothing like a clandestine meeting to put a new slant on the day. He thought about her and he thought about the lecture she had invited him to, “The Axiom of Choice.” What could be more fitting than that? He imagined visiting his furniture as a way of calming his nerves.

He could hear Carl on the phone as he entered. The old man, in a dark brown suit and brilliant yellow scarf, was pacing between an
armoire of the late French Modernists and a sculptural coffee table of Japanese design. The one-sided conversation was indistinct but animated, the still bandaged old man turning upon his toe in the manner of some brightly plumed fowl, his free hand in conduction of an invisible orchestra. Taking note of Chance’s presence, he paused just long enough and with such hand movements and facial gestures as might indicate to Chance that he was to proceed on his own to the rear of the building. Or so Chance was willing to interpret the elaborate combination of head feints, grins, and fluttering eyebrows. In passing, it seemed to him that the old man was just giddy enough with excitement to suggest a new leather boy had entered his life, this or the use of stimulants.