Chance

Bob Marley

There were three of them altogether. Chance could not say the sight was unexpected but this did not make it any easier to take. Passing from the hallway and into the outer waiting room of his office, it occurred to him that he was at that very moment in possession of Big D’s thumb drive and the files of Detective Raymond Blackstone, lifted from his laptop computer on the day of a murder and he exchanged what must have appeared, at least to her eyes, a look of pure terror with Lucy behind her desk. She responded with a raised eyebrow then stood to make the introductions.

One of the men, the youngest of the three, was a Shorthand Reporter, certified as such by the state of California. The other two men were attorneys. There was a Mr. Berg, appearing as counsel on behalf of the plaintiff, in this case a Mr. Chad Dorsey of Eugene, Oregon, and Mr. Green, counsel for the defense, Dr. William Fry, retired. Charges of elder abuse and undue influence were at long last being brought against Lorena Sanchez and the agency that had sent her to Dr. Fry. To ensure the future safety of whatever was left in Dr. Fry’s numerous accounts, Mr. Dorsey, a distant nephew, was seeking a ruling by the court that would have Dr. Fry declared incompetent with regard to testamentary capacity and thereby grant the power of attorney to his heirs, in this case the aforementioned Mr. Dorsey. Dr. Fry had chosen to fight. Much to his chagrin, Chance had been asked to appear as an expert witness on behalf of the plaintiff. Things being what they were, the entire proceeding, on the books now for at least two weeks, had slipped his mind.

“Are you all right?” Lucy asked, her voice at a whisper. She was standing at Chance’s shoulder. He had just seen the men into his office. The question seemed to have become a standard one of late. Given his current circumstances, any interest in his well-being from any quarter was more than welcome. “I’m good to go,” he told her. “But thank you. Thank you for asking.” A moment passed between them. “You’ve changed your hair,” he said. “There’s more red in it today.”

“Umm, for about two weeks now.”

“Really? I’m sorry I didn’t notice.”

Lucy just looked at him. She seemed torn between laughter and a call to 911.

“I like it. Did I say that?”

“You did, just now.”

Chance nodded.

“Doctor…” She looked toward the room, the waiting men.

“Well,” Chance said. “It’s very pretty.”

Depositions were dreadful enough things, the tedious answering of the same tedious questions that had become his meat and potatoes, the barrier he had erected to save him from the Jaclyn Blackstones of the world. This particular day’s proceedings were even more dreadful than most as Chance was soon made witness to an attenuated pissing match between the two attorneys, it being Mr. Green’s contention that with respect to Dr. Chance there was a distinction to be made between a consulting expert and a retained expert. He was no doubt hoping to keep certain of Chance’s original comments, made in his original report to the family regarding a possible neurodegenerative condition, out of the courtroom. Mr. Berg had never heard of such a ridiculous assertion. Nor would he hear of it now. And so it went. By the three-hour mark Chance was not yet fully deposed. “I wonder,” he asked, “if I might take five minutes to use the men’s room?”

“Good idea,” said Mr. Green, and they all went out together. Chance finished first. He left Mr. Berg and Mr. Green, along with the state-certified recorder, whose every act, urination included, seemed carried out in complete silence, arguing the merits of some particular golf course somewhere south of the city. The two were apparently old friends.

Chance found Lucy waving him over as he reentered the waiting room and he crossed to her desk. “She keeps calling,” Lucy said.

“Who?” he asked then realized he had spoken before she’d finished with whatever it was she had to say.

She gave him a look before consulting her pad. “Delores Flowers. She says it’s very important that she talk to you. She says you will know what it’s about.”

He could only wonder if his relief was apparent. “Ah… yes… Ms. Flowers. She and I had a little run-in east of the bridge. You must tell her that you are my office manager and that you have my proxy. Anything she wishes to say to me, she can say to you. There is the matter of a bill for some work that will be done to her car.” He gave her his credit card. “Have her tell the shop or garage or whatever it is to call here. Have them charge this account. That doesn’t take care of things, tell her I will call her after work.”

The remainder of the day was spent in the company of Mr. Berg and Mr. Green. It was, all things considered, the longest, most tedious deposition of them all. The day’s only bright spot was that neither attorney seemed privy to any part of Chance’s history, so recently unearthed. He was left to imagine that, failing conviction for accessory to murder, his career as an expert witness was yet intact.

When the gang of three had gone and he was at last alone, he lay on the floor at the foot of his desk watching the late light at play among clouds through the wonderful old glass of his office windows. “ ‘Lord, it is time…’ ” he said aloud then, skipping from the beginning to the end, “ ‘Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone now, will stay alone.’ ” He’d once been able to recite the poem in its entirety, in the language in which it had been penned. “ ‘Wer jetzt kein Haus hat…’ ” His recitation was interrupted by Lucy calling in from the front desk. “You might want to come out here,” she said.

“Delores Flowers?”

“No, it’s something else.”

He went out to find Jaclyn Blackstone in jeans and a red T-shirt with a picture of Bob Marley on the front beneath a black leather jacket. Her hair appeared fashionably tousled, freshly cut. She was deep in conversation with the tragic Jean-Baptiste, who, perhaps emboldened by Lucy’s becoming friendlier, had come in broad daylight for the hanging of yet one more of his dreadful photographs, an act that till now might just as well have been carried out by a cat burglar operating in reverse.

Chance moved as quickly as possible to separate them, with apologies to Jean-Baptiste for interrupting a conversation he was loath to even imagine while taking Jaclyn by the elbow and steering her into the hall. He had no idea about where to begin. She saved him by going first. “Raymond’s been hurt,” she said. “He caught someone trying to break into his car. Last night.” She took a breath. “The guy threw a knife. He’s in the hospital with a collapsed lung. Another man was murdered.”

“A cop?”

“Some kind of bouncer at this place where they were, a massage parlor in Oakland. I think Raymond may have an interest in it.”

“You know that, for a fact?”

“I don’t know anything for a fact when it comes to him. No one does. And I wouldn’t say that to anyone else. If he even thought I thought it, I would be in trouble.”

“But you do think it.”

“I hear things now and then.”

“What do the police know? Are there suspects?”

He was aware of being perhaps too eager and the question hung fire between them. “They won’t really tell me anything but I don’t think so.” Another moment passed. “Anyway, he says he’s got it.”

Chance was aware of some movement beneath him, the floor perhaps, tilting beneath his feet. “Has what?”

“The investigation, revenge… I have no idea. It was all he said. I was with him last night, and then again this morning, before work. At some point I need to go back. He says he’s going to handle everything himself, when he gets out.”

“Well…” he began but wasn’t sure where to go with it.

She found his hand with her own. “Come with me,” she whispered.

Chance hesitated.

Her grip tightened.

“Go to the café. Give me twenty minutes.”

Returning somewhat unsteadily to the confines of his office, he passed Lucy on her way out. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You sent her to the café.” He might have responded but she was already gone, waving at him over a shoulder with the tips of her fingers, nails of crimson.

Jean-Baptiste was adjusting the new photograph as Chance made his way back into the waiting room. Chance had not actually seen Jean-Baptiste in some time. He heard that his illness had taken a turn. Another man had been filling in, parking cars beneath the building. “What a remarkable woman,” was how Jean-Baptiste greeted him. “That one I was talking to just now. Is she a patient?”

Jean-Baptiste was scarcely more than five feet in height, nearly as big around as he was tall. In this respect one might say that he was perfectly proportioned. Chance guessed him to be no more than fifty, putting them at roughly the same age. The Frenchman wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses and was possessed of an imposing head of black hair streaked with gray that he wore pulled back into a ponytail half as long as himself. It was his complexion Chance thought that gave him away, making him look older than his years—the papery quality of the skin, the faint yellowing one might associate with some form of ill health.

“Professionally speaking,” Chance said, “I saw her one time for an evaluation, then sent her to a therapist, Janice Silver.”

“One time is not so bad.”

“One time is still one time.”

Jean-Baptiste was a moment taking him in. “Is this me you’re talking to, or are you now speaking to yourself, one of your enemies from within, perhaps?” The question was followed by a little wink. Of Jean-Baptiste, it was said that he’d cut rather a wide swath with the ladies upon his arrival in the city by the bay.

“Both, would be my guess,” Chance told him. “I sent her to the café on the corner.”

“Good for you.”

“You’re hoping to see me disbarred?”

“Nonsense. A slap on the wrist, and that’s if someone complains. I’m assuming you didn’t make love to her on the floor of your office at the time of your lone evaluation.”

“Hardly.”

“Too bad. That’s one attractive woman. She is also smart and sexy. How crazy is she?”

“I don’t know. A history of memory lapses, at least one secondary personality…”

“Ah yes,” Jean-Baptiste said. He managed the tone of someone recalling with some fondness another age of the world.

Chance knew him to be a skeptic with regard to convention but he was not looking for a fight. Nor were his own views on the subject entirely clear, even to himself. “She remains caught in an extremely stressful and abusive relationship,” he said. “Very debilitating. If she could free herself from that…”

“This other might go away.”

Chance shrugged.

“Or not.”

“Or not,” Chance admitted.

“And you’re trying to help.”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s like Orpheus and Persephone in the cool gray city. And who can blame you? I, for one, am all for it.”

“All for what?”

“Oh, come on. The woman is taken with you. It’s as plain as day. And you’re taken with her. How long since you’ve gotten laid?”

With Lucy gone, there were just the two of them there, them and Jean-Baptiste’s infamous subjects. The one in the photograph Jean-Baptiste was just now finishing with was a man probably no older than seventy, the apparent victim of Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. He was dressed in what appeared to be a large cloth diaper with a ribbon about his chest that read CAPTAIN AMERICA in bold letters. The man was standing on a plain wooden chair before a long, empty table as if preparing to hang himself in what looked to be some kind of communal dining room. What made the photograph especially arresting was the gleam in the man’s eye, at once unsound yet full of what one might only call a fierce, unyielding light.

“Knowing you’re about to die affords certain freedoms from convention,” Jean-Baptiste was saying. Chance remained fixed upon the man on the chair in the new photograph. “The thing about one’s last act… without recourse to an afterlife…”

“I was under the impression that you were not a believer in last acts,” Chance said, cutting him off. “I thought that was one of your things.”

“I’m giving it to you straight,” Jean-Baptiste told him. “Without further possibilities to become. There’s only what you are. You should think in terms of your Nietzsche, the eternal return.”

Chance managed to free his gaze from that of the demented man. “Janice Silver seems to think she may be borderline.”

“Yes, well… there is always that. And I’m sure she would know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course not. Who ever does? But it’s not a bad out.”

Chance just looked at him.

“She is borderline, there’s nothing you can do, you or anybody else. She is what she is, the product of whatever tragic beginnings and fucked-up set of circumstances she had the great misfortune to be born into. What’s Beckett’s line? It’s a hell of a planet? My advice, make love to her while you still can. Make wild, passionate love and move on, onward and upward as they say, but tell me all about it, will you? Details, please.” When Chance said nothing, Jean-Baptiste continued with this latest train of thought. “You know how they say getting older means settling for less. It’s a good deal more dire than that, my friend, it’s staring the gray rat in the eye and refusing to blink.”

Chance looked once more to the man in the diaper, Captain America, aware of a fresh insight into his old friend’s work. “Is that what he’s doing?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s no doubt about it.”

“It’s what you look for… in all of them…” His eye swept to Lucy’s favorite, the old lady in her Indian headdress.

“That certain spark, yes… the immediacy of it. Unflinching, I suppose would be another way of saying it.”

“And how do you differentiate unflinching from purely mad?”

“Ah…” Jean-Baptiste said, warming to the subject. “Therein resides the tale, my friend. But I let the viewer decide about all of that. Frankly that part doesn’t interest me all that much. It’s the light that I’m after, a moth to the fucking flame, that and a few vicarious forays into the land of the living. It’s what remains and I’m counting on you to deliver.”

Chance smiled at him, in spite of everything. He couldn’t quite help it. If details were what he was after… Chance had details.

“ ‘Go under young man…’ ” Jean-Baptiste said. He was quoting now, from the man whose likeness perched upon Chance’s desk, Big D’s main man. Christ, Chance thought, there’s no escaping the fucker. But Jean-Baptiste’s eyes were cast to the heavens, his voice possessed of a theatrical tone in the lower register. “ ‘I love him whose soul is deep, even in being wounded… I love all those who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning and as heralds they perish.’ ”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Chance said.

“My point exactly,” Jean-Baptiste told him.