Chance

A few good men, and hard to find

Recovery was a slow boat to a questionable port. Some days were better than others. All were spent in his apartment. Some were spent beneath the covers. Some were spent in fashioning small sheaths of heavy paper with staples passing for wires, practicing with a kitchen knife… how many times the sheath stays in his pocket versus how many times it falls out, or comes out partway, so that it might come out the rest of the way later on… in a forty-foot tumble say, to the sands of Ocean Beach. Hours were spent in worrying about the men in the Mercedes and what if anything they would ever say if they were ever caught. Additional hours were spent worrying about the blood but there was something D had said to him once… that even as he was being struck, a man might turn from the blow, that a blade might catch on bone or otherwise be made to miss its mark, and before long Chance is beginning to feel it like that… striking and falling and Blackstone spun, so that any blood spray is going away from Chance and not toward him. And then of course there was that other bit, Blackstone’s bit—the thirty downhill feet it had been necessary for the detective to traverse before reaching his car, the very long city block he’d had to drive, then managing by some force of will Chance can only imagine to get to the room and then to a chair and finally to kill the man who would have killed her and Chance thinking that at least one of his hallucinatory memories was at least partially correct, that seen in a particular light, Blackstone really had, when all was said and done, gotten the better of him—if only there had been someone to stab him through the heart every day that he lived.

As for anything more concrete, which is to say anything that might have passed for recovered memory with regard to things as they had actually transpired on the cliffs above Ocean Beach… that room was bare and continued so… as the days passed, as Detective Newsome failed to come, which was not, of course, to say that he never would, but in the end, one can only worry about such things for so long. Blackstone was dead and Chance was alive, as in the city beyond his windows the long hot summer was grinding finally to an end and the Doc Billy case was coming at last to trial.

It was Lucy who at last helped him down the stairs of his building and into the street. He was equipped with a walking stick and temporary back brace. “You know,” she said, “you really don’t have to do this.”

“Au contraire,” Chance told her, adding that he was called upon to act, if only as a soldier of the heart.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“It’s the least I can do.”

“I asked if you were all right?”

Chance nodded. There was a longer answer to that question but it would have to wait, time being of the essence.

She drove him to the main courthouse near City Hall in downtown San Francisco. At question was Dr. William Fry’s overall mental health, both neurological and psychiatric, but most particularly his susceptibility to undue influence and how all of these factors when taken together might or might not impact upon his testamentary capacity, which would in turn affect his Mexican lover’s ability to keep the considerable amount of money he’d given her, or for that matter, whether or not the two might continue united, a restraining order on the part of attorneys for the Oregonians having prevented this from the date of Chance’s original reports. If the court were to rule in favor of the plaintiff, for whom Chance was being called, Doc Billy would no longer continue as the master of his fortune, pecuniary and otherwise. His Mexican lover would, in all probability, be facing either jail time or deportation as she had been living in the country on a temporary work visa.

They were all there of course, Mr. Berg and Mr. Green, the relative from Oregon Chance had only spoken to once or twice on the phone and whom he liked even less in person. The questions he was asked while seated on the stand were very much like the questions he had been asked at the time of his deposition. He was asked to read from notes made prior to his deposition and asked if those notes generally expressed the opinions he was ready to testify to under oath. He was only too happy to lie copiously on behalf of the star-crossed lovers, at times going so far as to blatantly contradict some of his earlier findings, saying simply that upon reflection this and upon further reflection that. He demurred and deflected, hedged and equivocated. He was at times vague, at others intentionally opaque, to the point that Mr. Berg, acting on behalf of the plaintiffs, appeared upon the brink of some cerebrovascular event.

Chance did all of this without fear of repercussions or reprisals. If pressed at some later date in some later proceeding… he was positioned, he thought, quite nicely to blame events in his own recent past for any failure of memory or even mental acuity. It might of course be a good long while, once word had spread, before anyone in need of an expert witness came knocking but then he was pretty certain that he was pretty much done with all of that.

He could, from time to time, see Doc Billy grinning at him like an ape from a corner of the room and at one point even suffered the momentary fear that perhaps the old man was already lost to dementia. In the end, he chose to interpret the grin as more sly than apelike, conspiratorial as opposed to simply deranged and went so far as to imagine for the first time just what the doctor’s last stand might look like. He was thinking Mexico, the lovers’ mad flight… He was, after all, at just this moment, buying them a bit of time and it wasn’t like they were short on cash. He had begun to think of a song. He imagined Chet Baker singing “Let’s Get Lost” as the couple streaked for the border. The exercise lifted his spirits, higher really than they had been in quite some time, so much so that when the attorneys had at last had their way with him and he had been asked, somewhat unceremoniously, to leave the stand and perhaps the country, he suggested to Lucy, waiting for him at the back of the room with an odd expression on her face, that they should drive just up the street to their old offices, that it was a terrific-looking day and he was curious to see if any of Jean-Baptiste’s infamous death-defying photographs might yet have been delivered.