Chance

The plot thickens

Of D’s other books, the ones Chance came home with, one was entitled The Virtues of War, by Steven Pressfield. It was a novel of Alexander the Great, as told by the great man himself, and Chance saw that D had underlined certain passages. The willingness to die and out of that a sanctification for the willingness to kill scored well, as did any passage celebrating the glory of combat and what the book’s author took as the “seminal imperative of mortal blood.”

The second book, Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod, was a collection of cartoon drawings accompanied by aphoristic observations on the nature of creativity, principally on the willingness to carve out one’s own path, a celebration of the road less traveled. Somewhere near dawn, Chance put the books aside to sleep fully clothed, albeit fitfully, on his living room couch, his reading lamp still on.

He woke to the din of traffic beyond his window and drove directly to his bank, where he withdrew five thousand dollars in cash, Big D’s fee and no second guessing allowed, before arriving late to the office. One might say it was becoming a pattern.

“How did it go?” Lucy asked. “Any more on who sent you that stuff ?”

It took him a moment to realize she was asking about the lecture and the mysterious package she had forwarded to the hotel. He’d been thinking about what he had just done, Big D on the case, this and the “seminal imperative of mortal blood, as ineradicable within man as in a wolf or a lion, and without which we are nothing.”

“That bad?” she asked.

It occurred to him that he still had not answered. He was stopped between her desk and his office, in full view of Jean-Baptiste’s prideful, demented woman absolutely lost in thought. “Nothing new on the package,” he told her. “As for the lecture… let’s just say I was feeling a bit distracted.”

“Was?” Lucy asked. He supposed she was alluding to his present condition but chose to ignore the comment. He was thinking about sleep deprivation and wondering if that was how it had started when it started before, so long ago with the red-haired dancer. There had been a drug-fueled run to Martha’s Vineyard, just the two of them, on the family money, days on the road. He could remember that much. He went to Lucy’s desk where he took up a pen and began to write. What he wrote was the name of Jaclyn’s former therapist. “Let’s see what we can find out about her,” he said. “She was in the Bay Area somewhere, now deceased.” With D set to begin surveillance, Chance thought it time to look into the fate of Myra Cohen and the records she was sure to have kept.

Lucy gave him a long look. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Anything you can find. Was she a partner? Are the offices still there? Maybe something about the cause of death.”

Lucy nodded but he could feel her watching him as he crossed to his office, where he passed the morning alternately reading about Alexander the Great and napping at his desk, each instance now accompanied by some intrusive recollection of the Tenderloin, a man’s face sheared off at the edge of a city Dumpster. He took this as indicative of post-traumatic stress, the glory of battle eluding him altogether.

His first call of the day was to his wife. There was not much to add to her original message. Nicole had a boyfriend and that was all she knew. She’d never met him. She hadn’t a name. He was supposedly older and lived somewhere in San Rafael. She’d learned all of this from Shawn’s mother, who’d heard about it from Shawn and thought Carla should know.

“What’s Nicole have to say?” he asked.

“She won’t talk to me about it. I don’t know what to do.”

“Where is she now?”

“At school.”

“And when was this, that she spent a night?”

“The night you left.”

“Where were you?”

“I was here, right here.”

“And you never heard her leave?”

“She’s getting sneaky, Eldon. I don’t like it.”

“Nor do I. I told her to stay close. She said she would.”

“Well,” Carla told him. “There you have it.”

Chance said he would talk to her.

“That’s just great,” Carla said and hung up. Accusations and words left unsaid—there was a reason they were no longer together.

His second call was to Janice Silver. Appointments had been arranged and he was eager to discover how it was all working out, a couple of weeks by now having passed.

The therapist answered at once. “There’s been an incident,” she told him, even before he’d asked, then paused dramatically.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. She stole something.”

“And you were going to wait how long to tell me this?”

“I was trying to decide exactly how to break it.”

“You’re certain it was her?”

There was a moment of silence. “No,” she said finally. “I asked her. She denied it, but all the evidence points her way.” She paused once more. “We’re talking about some cash, which makes it hard to trace, or find. I didn’t want to involve the police, for reasons I’m sure you can understand.”

“How much cash are we talking about?”

“Just over two thousand dollars. The girl she was tutoring… her dad’s got his own company. He makes a lot of money, and he keeps a lot around, in cash. There was five thousand dollars just lying on a counter in the kitchen. Half of it disappeared. It was noticed just after one of our sessions…”

“And nobody else had access? Maids, friends of the daughter, the daughter herself ?”

“House cleaner’s been with the family for fifteen years. The girl doesn’t have any friends. It was all I could do to keep them from calling the police. I told them I would talk to her. It’s lucky the guy is loaded. He’ll never miss it but I’m done. No more subterfuge. I should never have let you talk me into it. This case is more complicated than either of us guessed. I think now that we have been irresponsible, to proceed in the way we have.”

“What other way was available?”

“I don’t know, Eldon. I can only tell you that this is not going to work.”

“So tell me again… what exactly did Jaclyn say?”

“She says she doesn’t know anything about it.”

“Maybe she doesn’t.”

“Maybe lots of things, Eldon. Maybe Jaclyn doesn’t know. Maybe Jackie does. Could be, Jackie doesn’t want Jaclyn to get well. Might even be there are a few more out there, waiting in the wings, folks you and I have yet to meet, you’re willing to entertain the high drama of multiple personalities. Did you know she cuts herself ?”

“I had no idea.” The thought sickened him.

“I went to see her about the money…”

“You went to her condo?”

“I did.”

“A little risky, for you both.”

“Yes, and I’ll get to that. I just felt that I had to. I needed to see her face. She was in there painting one of those bits of furniture she likes to paint, working in a T-shirt and jeans, and I saw the scars on her arms. She wasn’t expecting me. Some were fresh. Others were not. It’s a whole new ball game, my friend.”

“What does she say?”

“That she doesn’t always know what happens, that there are periods of time for which she has no memory. Could be you were on to something with your impromptu sniff test… that makes you feel any better. But guess what? These kinds of cases are not my forte.” She gave it a beat. “Nor are they yours. Christ, Eldon, you barely even see patients, and certainly not as a therapist.”

“So what else happened? How did it proceed?”

“Like what you might expect in a patient with some form of dissociative identity disorder, with periods of amnesia. Jaclyn was extremely upset. She was either extremely upset or she’s a very good actor. But then that’s always part of it with this stuff, isn’t it, and why there are people who specialize?”

“What do you think?”

“Does the term borderline ring a bell?”

“As an actual diagnosis or an easy out?”

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

There was a moment of silence on the line.

“I think she needs a different therapist and a different type of therapy. I think she needs to get with someone who specializes in difficult cases and is willing to take her on. Why don’t we just leave it at that and preserve our friendship?”

“And how do we imagine that she will do this?”

“We don’t, Eldon. I’m happy to help her find someone, but she’s going to have to want that and be willing to go see the person I come up with. No more of this running around.”

“Kind of gets us back to where we started.”

“There’s one other thing,” Janice said. “You asked about my going to her apartment, whether or not that was dangerous, and I said I’d get back to it. When I left, I found that someone had broken into my car, stolen a camera, and slashed both rear tires.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“Disturbing gets you about halfway.”

“A random act or he’s having the place watched.”

“Which would seem to be his style.”

“Any idea how it went with her, after you left?”

“None at all. I’m sorry, Eldon. Really. We tried. I think that’s the best we can do.” When he did not respond right away she went on. “I use the word we advisedly. This is not a person you should be spending time with. Can I be any more direct?”

Chance said he understood. Janice said good-bye.

Lucy came in before leaving for the day. She’d found out something about Dr. Cohen. Myra Cohen had not died of natural causes. She had been raped, mutilated, and murdered by an intruder who was never found.

“For Christ’s sake,” Chance said.

“Does the plot thicken?”

Chance just looked at her.

“Sorry.” She started to leave then turned back. “I was friendly to Jean-Baptiste today,” she said, apparently by way of cheering him up. “I’m letting him bring in some more of those god-awful pictures.”