Chance

Chance and the happy hour

Before she was raped, mutilated, and murdered by her unknown assailant, Myra Cohen had worked out of a small group of offices just off San Pablo Avenue in Northwest Berkeley that she had shared with two other doctors. When he drove to the address what he found was a vacant lot. When he spoke to the owner of a nearby house, he was told the place he’d come to see had burnt to the ground almost two years ago to the day. He was able to track down one of the doctors who had been part of the original practice. The man was now working out of an office in South Berkeley near the hospital. Chance called from his car. He got through by announcing himself as Dr. Chance for Dr. Miller. In the end, however, Dr. Miller had little to add. He knew very little of Myra’s patients, and no, the name Jaclyn Blackstone did not ring a bell. The circumstances of Dr. Cohen’s death were indeed tragic. As for any medical records… the old offices had been a complete loss. As to whether or not Myra had kept backup files at another location, he simply could not say. As far as he knew she had lived alone, her home sold shortly after her death. Chance asked if he knew who sold the house, if perhaps there were relatives and if so where. Dr. Miller said that he was sorry but that was the best he could do. Chance thanked him and hung up.

At this point he might well have returned to the city. There was after all no lack of things to do. For starters, he had promised Carla that he would speak to Nicole and so he would, though in truth he found the prospect terrifying. She was growing up and the world would have her. What on earth could he offer save words while his own life fell apart and her there to see it? And then of course there was his office, Lucy Brown at her desk, the voluminous amounts of paperwork certain to precede each and every forensic evaluation piling up by the hour and him already behind. This ought to have been cause for alarm yet here he was, still parked before the empty lot, Chet Baker on the stereo, “Let’s get lost” wafting from his open window on the dusty summer air.

The day seemed washed in a brilliant light rendered excessively harsh before the blackened hills that seemed now to dominate the landscape east of the bay. The houses bordering the empty lot were of a type he generally found pleasing, well-kept Spanish-style homes dating to before the war, but on the day in question he found their whitewashed walls difficult to look at in the unpleasant light. Once he dozed. Sleepless at night, he was finding that he could, at any other time, sleep almost anywhere and at any hour, in broad daylight on a busy street… the buzz of activity providing for the anonymity denied him in the dark confines of his apartment. And then, finally, there was the truth of it. If not on the street where she lived, he was at least on her side of the bay, near a place she once must have visited with some regularity before… And there, he thought, was the question, before what? Before Raymond Blackstone had gotten wind of it and shut it down, in a way that would pretty well qualify him as some variation on the Prince of Darkness? He could not rule out the possibility but he couldn’t quite go there either. It was all just a bit too much, in spite of everything. He supposed that he might ask her, but then one might also ask a delusional patient suffering from schizophrenia if she was being followed. In lieu of anything more productive, he elected to try for what he knew to be happy hour at Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto.

The restaurant had been there since the turn of the century, a real old-time San Francisco Bay fish house with dark polished wood, the brass accoutrements lifted from ships shimmering in the muted light, and old photographs mounted on walls. The photographs were of boats and docks, the latter spilling over with great glittering mounds of fish and of the men who had caught and killed them—real men, by God, men who no doubt knew a thing or two about the seminal imperative of mortal blood and all of this in stark contrast to the crowd that filled the place just now as Chance drank at the bar, for it was no longer even the student crowd of his first days in San Francisco, but a sad gathering of what seemed to be drunken tourists dressed for whale watching.

He drank martinis as shadows lengthened beyond an open door, finally setting out near sunset for the street where she lived. He found her neighborhood dark and without event. Willing to take Janice’s experience as evidence the place was being watched, willing to believe almost anything, really, he parked as far away as he was able while still managing to maintain visual contact and settled in. He was admittedly a little drunk.

His actions, he concluded, while bordering on the patently insane, were not altogether pointless. He was hoping to see her leave, hoping to follow at a distance, long enough at least to ensure that he was alone in doing so and then to find some opportune moment to make good his approach. He felt that they needed to talk, in light of what had transpired at the student’s house, in light of what he had learned about Myra Cohen. They needed to talk and it needed to be in private and this was about half of what he was doing there, at the wheel of the old car, at the dark end of the street. It was the half that explained well, or at least better than the other half that ran to the obsessive-compulsive and didn’t explain worth shit.

It occurred to him that there had been a time and it was not so long ago when he might well have gambled on the system, gone to the police, laid out his entire case, from the beating of Jaclyn to the death of Myra and everything in between. He was after all a respected member of the medical community. He even managed the short-lived entertainment that such might yet be the case. It died with the last of the light at the feet of ravaged hills. The past he’d thought to hide had found its way into his present. Add to this an acrimonious divorce, his battle with the IRS, his daughter’s drug-related school problems… There was even, God help him, his phony French furniture and the boys of Allan’s Antiques. His days of respectability were behind him. There was no getting around it and none of his present endeavors were likely to bring them back. A more balanced individual, on the heels of such insights, might have elected to call it a day. Chance stayed where he was. His watch said eight o’clock.

At around eight thirty he saw her leave her apartment. She was in her car, a small gray Honda, ordinary to the point of near invisibility. He followed as far as the campus where she parked and got out and entered the grounds. He parked too. He could find no sign that she had been followed by anyone other than himself and after what felt to be some appropriate amount of time, he left his car and went in after her.

He came upon her at the koi pond in a part of the campus known as the Oriental Garden, alone on a small bridge, looking down into the dark water. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved top. He stood watching her then crossed the garden, lit only by a number of small lanterns hung among the trees, and came onto the bridge. She turned at his approach, eyes widening. He came to her straightaway, taking her hands in his own. His impulse was to turn them palms up, to see the scars for himself. What he did instead was launch into a tortured apology for what had happened with Janice, for his coming upon her unannounced. “I want you to know I’m not quitting on you,” he said.

“You can’t be here,” she told him, surprise giving way to something more like panic. “He has my daughter…”

“What do you mean by ‘has’?”

“They can’t find her. She hasn’t been to classes but I know it’s him. He’s got her somewhere. Or they do.”

“They?”

“The mob, the Romanian mafia. Whatever you want to call them. I’ve told you he was dirty, that he has friends, that he can have things done… If he finds out that you’re still in the picture…”

“You were at my apartment,” he said.

She ignored this. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

He squeezed her hands. “I need you to do one thing for me. I want a letter of consent, allowing me access to Myra Cohen’s files.”

The name registered. “She’s dead.”

“I know.”

“It was horrible…”

“I want to try something,” he told her.

“You were trying something before.”

“This is something different. I’ve never known a therapist who didn’t back up their files. I want to find out who sold her property. It was probably a family member. There may be a way…”

She put an end to it by stepping toward him, her cheek coming to rest on his chest, her hair brushing his lips, her scent in his face. “You’re so good,” she said. When she pulled back there were tears in her eyes. “But there’s nothing you can do. I’m his. I know you want to help. You’re just not strong enough. No one is.”

“You’re better than this,” he told her.

“It’s what you want to think.”

“Wanting is where it starts. We can find a way. There’s always a way.”

“I guess you know better than that.” There was mostly sadness in her face, that and something like pity that cut to the bone.

“Tell me about Myra Cohen.”

“You already know.”

“I don’t know what you talked about. I don’t know if he knew. I don’t know why she died. I don’t know if it was a random act of violence or something else. I’m asking what you think.”

The expression on her face did not change. “What does it matter?” she asked. “You can’t fix this, and you can’t fix me. I’m too broken.”

“There are no victims, Jaclyn, just volunteers.” The line with which he had so recently quarreled seemed suddenly to fit. She laughed in his face before reining herself in. “This won’t end how you think.” She let go of his hands and stepped back.

He began again but she was already walking away. When he took a step in her direction she seemed to hear it and began to run. There was a part of him that wanted to run after her, to what end was another matter. He went back in the direction from which he had come, this time crossing with a young man who might have been a student. He was of that age. But there was something about him… the lithe athletic physique, the fashionably ragged clothes… so that Chance was seized by the sudden and jealous certainty that what he had really done just now, coming upon her in the way that he had, was to thwart some clandestine and romantic meeting. So strong was the feeling that he actually did turn around and began to run after her. Forget that she was on to him. He went headlong, as if propelled by some force beyond his reckoning, all the way to the koi pond where he found her gone. Nor was there any sight of the man.

The night so ended, he was at Allan’s Antiques the following day. It was late afternoon. Nearly two full days had passed since D’s hire. One might, in the wake of the disastrous East Bay outing, have thought him discouraged but like the man said, there’s a time for everything under heaven. Hypomania no doubt exacerbated by sleep deprivation came to mind but why go there? Half a dozen soporifics came to mind as well but he was eager to see if the big man was getting anywhere. He would not have been surprised to find him out and on the job. He found him in the alley at work on the Starlight coupe.

“Yeah…” D said, giving the word time to breathe when Chance had raised the subject. “Needed to finish up on a couple of things around here.”

“It’s been two days,” Chance said.

D nodded. “Maybe you could hand me that socket wrench.” He was pointing at a toolbox near Chance’s feet.

Chance handed him the wrench. “I guess I don’t understand. I thought you were ready to go on this.”

D examined a spark plug before setting it into the block and giving it a turn with the wrench. “Start right now if you’re up for it?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Chance said once more. “I thought we had started.”

D just looked at him.

“I’ve given you the money.”

“Oh yeah… we’re cool with that… just a little short on wheels right now and the old man’s down with the flu.”

Chance was a moment in assimilating the statement’s various and sundry implications. “Are you telling me you don’t drive?”

“I’m not saying that,” D told him. “I used to drive all over the fucking place. It just didn’t go well.”