Chance

De Clérambault syndrome

“Sup, brother?” D asked. Not only was the big man always around, he was always up, in the same old cargo-style khakis with all manner of crap stuffed into many pockets, sleeves cut from the black T-shirts he seemed to favor, and the old black military-style boots worn open at the top, most often untied, laces flapping as he walked.

“Do you ever sleep?” Chance asked.

“That why you’re here, to find out if I’m asleep? Fucking Wee Willie Winkie. Aren’t you supposed to have a little candle or something?”

Not forty-eight hours had passed since Chance’s last visit. They were standing now as they had then, one in the warehouse, one in the alley. “Sorry, man. I need to talk. The shit has hit the fan.”

Not surprisingly, D invited him in.

Too rattled for small talk, Chance went directly to an Eames chair with his laptop computer for a brief display of the kiddie porn before moving on to the incriminating material. D wanted to know if the stuff was legit.

“The kiddie porn? You’re asking me if the kiddie porn is legit? I’ve never looked at such hateful crap in my life.”

“Pull yourself together, Doc. I meant the rest of it. What we looked at just now.”

“Have you ever seen that movie Blue Angel?”

“Not really.”

“It’s old. With Marlene Dietrich. She’s a dancer in a club. The movie is set in Berlin. This aging professor becomes obsessed with her. I won’t bore you with the entire plot. Suffice it to say the obsession proves his undoing. It was kind of like that only I wasn’t a professor and we weren’t in Berlin. We were in Boston. I was doing a residency in psychiatry and I was a bit younger than her. But she was a dancer. She was also a patient…”

“Would this be your way of telling me the arrest report and restraining order are the real deal?”

It was maybe the second time Chance had seen D give evidence of surprise. He went on with his story. “She came into the psych ER one night when I was on call. She’d gotten hold of some bargain basement ecstasy or something, released on her own recognizance within a couple of hours. But that was all it took. I’d seen something in her, the bird with the broken wing, and I knew where to find her. At first, I just thought I was in love then it got a little more fucked up. There were missed appointments, late papers, failing grades. Family money had been set aside for my education… She was big on gifts. I was big on giving. The thing had me by the throat.

“I drank a little in those days, indulged in a little pharmacological research, no more than what the age appeared to demand. She made it worse, of course. For a while there… I thought maybe that was it, that if I could quit all of that I could quit her too. But it was something else with her and of course I was convinced she felt as I did. It was thought later to be a variant of de Clérambault syndrome, delusional erotomania. Not by me necessarily, but that was the name they hung on it. Everyone feels better when a thing has a name, but I digress. There came a point at which she wanted us to go to Arizona, so we did, for me at the expense of family, friends, money, education… Unhappily, when the money ran out so did she. Seems there was another man in Arizona that had been there all along, that I’d known nothing about. I didn’t take it well, hence the restraining order and arrest. I later experienced what, in the parlance of our time, might be thought of as a nervous breakdown. I’ve always thought that ultimately… the real casualty of the entire episode, all things considered, was my relationship with my father. He was an educator and a man of the cloth. I’d always looked up to him. I’d always been very careful about what I did… very mindful of how it might reflect on him. We stopped speaking. He died of a heart attack within a year. I blamed myself. Eventually I got myself back on track, came west, opened a practice, but he never knew it. He died thinking I was an incurable fuck-up. As for all of this…” He looked at the paperwork. “Let’s just say I’ve lied a little now and then. I mean, someone asks if you were ever arrested, and they don’t all that often, it’s pretty easy to just say no. And of course the more remote a single incident becomes…”

A moment passed in which neither man spoke.

“And now, if all this came to light… What would that look like? You lose your license? They kick you out?”

“No, no… aside from being hugely embarrassed, I’d still be a doctor, but it would change drastically the nature of my practice. The thing now is… the thing I’ve built… The majority of my work is in court. I’m retained as an expert witness. The people that hire me have agendas, money at stake. They don’t want the waters muddied. The mere possibility of the waters being muddied, the slightest whiff of impropriety, past or present, and they will hire someone else.” The image of Leonard Haig appeared before him, complete with mocking grin. “I would have to start over, from scratch, at a time when I’m barely making ends meet as it is. It would not be a pretty sight.”

They sat for a moment in silence.

“And that’s not taking into account the porn,” Chance said. “You add that to it, all bets are off. Done deal. Fait accompli.” He might have continued but it was not making him feel any better. He studied his hands on his knees, a pair of found objects, better suited he thought for scuttling across ocean floors.

“That’s fucked up,” the big man said.

“Sadly yes. How does this even happen?”

“Time bomb.”

Chance just looked at him.

“You get access to someone’s computer, either by hacking or by getting your hands on it and you input information, hide it and rig it to open on a certain date. The day comes… the file opens, populates the computer. You can also rig it to go to e-mail. Everybody you know could wind up with this stuff. It’ll look like a mistake of course, but people will think it was your mistake. They’ll think this is how Doc Chance gets off. And it will be everyone you’ve ever traded e-mails with.”

“Jesus Christ,” Chance said. He felt set upon by a new wave of panic.

“You check your Sent box?”

They looked together. There was no indication that this had happened.

“Your laptop always with you? Was it in your car the other night in Berkeley?”

“My car wasn’t there. I was on foot.”

“Then I’d say you got hacked. I’m not the expert, but it can be done, the guy is good enough.”

“I’d say the guy was good enough.”

“Blackstone?”

“Who else?”

“How about someone at your office. Someone you pissed off in court. A crazy patient.”

“It’s him, D. He’s out to crush me. And there’s one other thing…” He told him about the Jollys. He’d filed his assessment of Bernard with the DA’s office before leaving for Los Angeles.

“Christ, Doc. It’s always one other thing with you. You think of that one by yourself ?”

Chance admitted that he had.

“Well… if you’re right about Blackstone… whatever flipped his switch… he’s not out to crush you, he’s out to let you know he can crush you. There’s a difference.” The big man seemed to be warming to the entire mess, a rosy glow lighting his cheeks, the great dome of his head beneath fluorescent bulbs. “But here’s the other thing he’s doing… if he was behind that shit with your daughter… and now this? That tells you something. It’s like fighting. Every time you throw a punch you’re open to a counter. Coming at you this hard? He may be fucking with you, but he’s also creating exposure for himself, and he’s not dumb. He might not think you’re capable of acting on it but he knows what he’s doing. My question would be why?”

“Because he can.”

D shook his head. “He’s the bad boy your lady friend says he is… he could have you hit. End of story. But he’s trying to scare you instead. That tells you something. My guess… you’re scaring him a little, maybe a lot, but that’s what you need to find out. You need to know more. You need to find his frozen lake.”

“Seems I already have.”

A city dump truck passed in the alley, its mechanical arms at work with the Dumpsters, the landslide of city refuse, and then it was gone.

“The other night… You said the guy was outside your apartment.”

“I said I thought it was him.”

“Let’s say it was. Crown Vic’s an easy car to break into. Pop the taillight with a screwdriver… gives you access to the trunk. Hand drill gets you into the backseat. You’d need to do a little surveillance. Trail him for a few days. He shouldn’t be hard to find. You know where he works. Maybe there’s a bar he likes. Good to get him on his way from work ’cause he’ll probably have his laptop and that’s what you want. Take a thumb drive… download his files. He’ll never know you were there and maybe you get something on him. You wanted to mess with his head a little… you could give him back some of his own, time-bomb the fucker. Give him some kiddie porn. Or how about this? How about some radical Islamic shit? That’ll go over good, get it on his e-mail? That’s not bad. That’s pretty good, in fact. That’d probably get him investigated right there.” D was rolling now. God forbid he suggest a walk.

“I don’t want to mess with him,” Chance said. “It’s not a game. The idea would be to get something, pass it on… an anonymous tip… I don’t want to go crazy with it.”

He worried for a moment the big man might take offense but D just laughed at him. “Right,” he said. “But here’s the thing about that. There’s a whole bunch of people out there who think the world is some kind of orderly place, that if things get weird they can run to the cops, hire an attorney… They’re the ones who think it’s a game. They even think there are rules. Go to the cops with what you’ve got right now and see where it gets you. Rules favor the people who make them. Only time you or I mean anything to those fuckers, they’re looking for cannon fodder, or a vote. I’m not saying it was ever much different. World’s the world. Tour of duty’ll put a new slant on things… you want to talk about going crazy. Now there are of course people for whom the fucked-up thing never happens… live their entire life in that happy bubble we call civilization. But really… what I think… you look at the big picture, it’s relatively fucking few. People like you maybe, no offense, doctors, lawyers, and such. I’d say Indian chiefs but I’d guess those fuckers’ve known the score since pretty much day one.”

Chance had fallen to thinking about his patients and how it was with them—the light they hadn’t seen, the horn they hadn’t heard, the blind alley, the sleeper wave, the mutating cell—boned beyond all recognition in the blink of an eye, and not a cloud in the sky. He’d never been on a field of battle but he’d seen something about the frailty of things and was willing to concede the big man had a point.

“So then,” D said. He was absently using one hand to pop the knuckles of the other. “We ready to talk numbers?”