Chance

Jane’s addiction

He was back at Allan’s Antiques within the hour, having done little more than follow the car’s hood ornament, the lumbering beast apparently knowing the way. All things considered, it was probably not the best of ideas. If one was looking for a level head in the midst of catastrophic decline, then Carl Allan was hardly your man. What the brief visit produced were complementary forms of paranoid ideation lapping up against one another like wavelets on a stony shore, each feeding off the intensity of the other.

“It’s like the Kennedys,” the old man kept saying. “They had that poor girl lobotomized.”

“Much more difficult to bring that off these days,” Chance assured him, the old practitioners having vanished into the mists of legend. He was thinking primarily of Walter J. Freeman, the last of the cowboy lobotomists. It was also true that a new crop of psychosurgeons many times more sophisticated were gathering in the wings but he kept this to himself.

It hardly mattered. Carl went right on as if Chance hadn’t spoken. “It was all because she liked to fuck black jazz musicians,” he said.

“I think we’re safe on that score.”

“Speak for yourself on that score,” Carl told him. “And you don’t know the family.”

“Right,” Chance said. “But I have seen his medical history. And I met some of them today, at the hospital.”

“Hovering like carrion fowl?”

“Hovering at least.” He was trying to imagine how best to articulate his impressions of Norma Pringle and her strange son. In the end, he gave up, stating rather simply that it was the mother and some kid.

“Some kid indeed. Happy to see you, were they?”

“Not the first word that comes to mind.”

“Listen,” Carl said. He put a hand on Chance’s arm. “They’ll try to pull something. They’ll have him put away. We’ll never see him again.” The old man’s eyes were tearing up, his grip tightening.

“They can’t,” Chance said. “He’s an adult.”

“What if they drug him, get him to sign something?”

“He can argue he was drugged.”

The old man appeared unconvinced. Chance sighed and tried again. “It is almost impossible,” he said, as deliberately as he was able, “in this day and age, to gain that kind of conservatorship over someone against his or her will…”

“You don’t know the father. He’s a wealthy and powerful man with friends in high places. And he hates his son.”

“That may be, but disinheriting him is one thing, putting him away is another.”

“You’re a gift from the Almighty,” Carl said suddenly, his voice filled with conviction.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Chance said.

“Nonsense. You’re a doctor. You know how the game is played. Imagine if it were just he and I.”

Chance was a moment in imagining it, Carl and D. Could it be they were actually a couple? Or was it simply that D was the son Carl never had and the reverse true for Heavy D? Could it possibly matter? Live and let live would be Chance’s position, though he remained for a moment or two in the grip of the situation’s seemingly limitless permutations, it being his experience that few things in the realm of human interaction ever qualified as simple.

“Hates him for what he did to him,” Carl said.

Chance took him as once more on the subject of D’s father. “Yes, or hates himself for having allowed it.”

“But takes it out on D either way.”

“Maybe, but I really don’t think the old man is what we have to worry about just now.”

Carl lifted a brow.

“It’s this business in Oakland,” Chance said. “He didn’t tell you?”

“He was out cold when I found him.”

“Right.”

“There was a hiccup, then, east of the bay?”

“One might say.” He proceeded to bring the old man up to speed on the exact nature and proportions of the hiccup in question. Carl received the news with a surprising measure of his old equanimity. “You’re worried that his being in some form of custody… he might be linked to events in the East Bay.”

“I’m worried the massage parlor may have surveillance cameras. I’m worried about digital images. There just aren’t that many that would fit the description, if you catch my drift.”

Carl did and they stood with that. On a nearby stoop an emaciated woman of indeterminate age was attempting unsuccessfully to right herself.

“Well,” Carl said finally, “I suppose if you’re going to go there … there are any number of things he is in danger of being found out about.”

As to what exactly this might mean, Chance was not in a hurry to know. Nor did he feel inclined to comment on what Jaclyn had said, about how Blackstone was going to handle things himself. The old man had his hands full imagining dire moves on the part of D’s family and Chance saw no point in burdening him further. This last was his to bear and bear it he did, in the dark confines of his apartment, in the still dark of one more not yet dawn as the din of the streets faded and the distant drumroll of the Ocean Beach surf rose to take its place. The old man had his worries. Chance had his.

There was, however, a place where Carl’s fears of familial machinations bumped up against the business in Oakland and before long he’d managed to find it. If someone were to tie D to the Oakland murder, and if what Carl believed was true, that the good professor really did want to put his son away, then possibly, if you wanted to get really paranoid about it, and why wouldn’t you, to undermine any such charges as D might one day bring for child abuse and parental neglect… then D as a convicted killer might serve and a permanent home in the Napa State Hospital for the Criminally Insane not so far beyond the pale as Chance had at first surmised. And how then the clock did tick, with Blackstone convalescing, not only expected to recover but with minions to aid his revenge. To wait on him was to be again the receiver and it was not just Chance at risk, it was D and Carl and Jaclyn and maybe even his own daughter, and it was up to him to think for them all.

It was to this end that he took D’s thumb drive from the dresser drawer where he’d hidden it away beneath his socks and looked at it for the first time since the night of its acquisition. In saying that he looked at it, it should be stipulated that the drive was not yet in his computer. He was not looking at its contents but rather at the drive itself, an absurdly small device when viewed in consideration of all that it had cost, a pale plastic obelisk, a retractable plug at one end, a tiny silver ring at the other.

The thought occurred while sitting there, the device in hand, the overwhelming desire really… that it might be good to speak with her, for any number of reasons, and he called her cell and it really was the first time he had done so since their night together, only to be greeted by a recorded message informing him that the number was no longer in service, a crushing enough turn though not entirely unexpected for reasons he thought it best not to dwell on at length. It was perhaps his desire to avoid doing just that which prompted at last the lifting of his own computer from its case, his opening it upon his kitchen table, his inserting of the device.

But even then he did not begin to read or even to open the files. Given the recent slant of things, who could say that by doing so he would not inadvertently send up a flare or some other thoroughly unexpected and fucked-up thing? Add to this the question of what he actually hoped to find. Incriminating data? Really? The guy was supposed to be smart for Christ’s sake and the more Chance thought about it all, the more absurd it all became, yet more evidence of his own unsound judgment, as if further evidence were required.

Suffice it to say that a kind of paralysis set in. Time passed. Somewhere near dawn, however, a renewed sense of purpose fueled by a cheap cabernet having trumped inertia, Chance sat finally looking into the work of Raymond Blackstone himself, the man in his own words, in black and white.

Sirens had thus far not gone off. There were no red lights from the street or footsteps upon his stairs. In the downstairs apartment the programmer and his invisible lady friend had begun to fight. This was not unexpected. What was unexpected was the sense of intimacy the files provoked. They consisted almost entirely of reports, that is reports on crimes the detective had or was investigating and were in their way not unlike Chance’s own reports, for he found in them the trajectories of the utterly clueless, the flat-out unlucky, and hopelessly fucked up.

There was the eighteen-year-old drug addict who kills a friend over a stolen sound system in a moment of drug-addled rage, is afterward unable to remember the incident but charged nonetheless with home invasion, armed robbery, and murder, charges which, if successfully prosecuted, and why wouldn’t they be given the boy’s certain reliance on public defenders, are bound to carry with them a mandatory sentence of life in prison. There was the troop of homeless heroin addicts who buried one of their own, dead from an overdose, then got to thinking about what they had done. Sensing a missed opportunity, they exhumed the body, removed the head with a tree saw stolen from a local Home Depot, and attempted to sell it to a number of equally homeless Satanists for thirty dollars. The Satanists were keen on the head but short on cash. A terrible fight ensued. There were injuries and one fatality when one of the head peddlers was stabbed through the eye with a screwdriver. The perpetrator of the crime, a twenty-seven-year-old homeless veteran of the war in Iraq, was now in custody.

It was the kind of stuff you couldn’t make up and yet it was everywhere in every turning of the world and Raymond Blackstone had borne witness. And so had Chance. Their combined reports spoke to the absolute absurdity and utter frailty of things, to the shining truth that lay beneath what they were trying to sell and he wondered if the detective had ever been worn down by it or had wanted in some way of his own to strike through, to break free, to go under that he might rise above, before time and circumstance came for him as they will come for us all, never guessing, as people never do, that in a darkened alley behind the European Massage Parlor, yet one more of the walking wounded, skilled beyond reckoning in the art of the blade, was waiting to say hello.

It was not long upon the heels of this particular revelation, time-worn as it might appear, that he came upon the file that would claim his imagination in ways the others had not. The file detailed an investigation, or at least the beginning of one, into the death of a certain Gayland Parks:

…Gayland Parks was found murdered inside of his condominium in a high-rise building overlooking the harbor in the city of Oakland. I, along with Homicide Team 1, responded to investigate the incident…

There were a number of things about the case. The first was the date. While the other reports were more or less current, this was several years old. The file was incomplete in that there was a beginning but no apparent end. More current reports either were works in progress or were accompanied by arrest records and so told a little story complete with endings in which perpetrators were brought to justice, or at least to trial. In the Parks case there were but three interviews with two individuals of interest and that was it. There was no record of what would seem the obvious next step and no records of any arrests.

And then there was the case itself. Gayland Parks was a retired psychoanalyst from San Diego who, until the time of his murder, had been living in Oakland, where he’d opened a practice as a life coach. He died in the nude, handcuffed to his bed, shot full of heroin, and finally bludgeoned to death with a glass dildo that was found nearby. Clearly, Chance thought, it was a case possessed of all the right ingredients. How could a man in his own circumstances fail to relate? But that was only the beginning.

During the investigation of the above-listed crime, we discovered the decedent had a cellular phone that was believed to be missing or taken during the murder.

Parks’s cellular phone number was determined to be an Oakland number. Detective Cesar Lopez researched the phone and discovered that calls were still being made on Parks’s phone. I reviewed phone records and noticed that on May 8th six calls were made to another cellular phone and that this was a number with a San Diego prefix. Also, a phone call was made on the same date to a second San Diego number. Detective Lopez obtained warrants for both telephone numbers. The first number belonged to T-Mobile cellular service and the subscriber was described as Mari Hammond.

The second number was a Pacific Bell Telephone Company number belonging to the residence of Mari and Woody Hammond, located at 1345 Sixth Street in the city of Normal Heights, California.

Based on the numerous calls made to Mari Hammond’s cell phone and residence, it was believed Mr. and Mrs. Hammond were possibly involved in the crime or knew the person using the decedent’s cell phone.

Using various Police Department computer systems, I conducted a records check on the Hammonds and their residences. I discovered the Hammonds did have contacts at 350 Green Street in San Diego. Furthermore, I noticed on one of the contacts that Mari Hammond worked for the Sunrise Travel Agency in San Diego, located at 3535 Camino de los Mares, Suite 400, in the city of San Diego where she was employed as a travel agent.

Further records checks of Mari Hammond revealed that she had recently received a traffic ticket. The ticket was issued by the San Diego Police Department. I noticed that Hammond was driving a ten-year-old tan Honda Civic. I believed this was possibly Mari Hammond’s vehicle.

Detective Lopez and I obtained permission to travel to San Diego to investigate the Hammonds and their possible involvement in the murder of Gayland Parks. We left the following morning.

On that same afternoon I drove to 3535 Camino de los Mares to look for Hammond’s vehicle. Parked in front of the building I noticed a tan Honda Civic. License plates revealed it to be Hammond’s vehicle.

At 1600 hours I walked up to the Sunrise Travel Agency building located at 3535 Camino de los Mares, Suite 400. I asked the receptionist if Mari Hammond worked in the office. The receptionist told me Mari Hammond did, in fact, work in the office, and walked me to Mari Hammond’s desk.

At approximately 1620 hours, I met Mari Hammond at her desk. I identified myself as an Oakland police officer and asked Hammond if I could speak with her. Hammond told me that she was just shutting down her computer and getting off of work. Hammond and I then stepped outside and spoke.

I explained to Mari Hammond that I needed to talk to her in reference to a homicide case. I asked Hammond if she would voluntarily come to the police station and talk with me. Hammond explained to me that she had to pick up her three-year-old daughter at the day care center located in Normal Heights. Mari Hammond told me that she had no other family members or friends who could watch her daughter. I asked Hammond if she would be willing to come to the San Diego police station with her daughter after she picked her up. Hammond and I agreed that I would follow her to the day care center located at the intersection of Blake and Ward streets in Normal Heights and then go to the police station.

I followed Mari Hammond to Normal Heights, where she picked up her daughter, Julie, at the day care. I then asked Hammond if she and her daughter wished to eat prior to going to the station. Mari told me that she had eaten something at work but that her daughter had not eaten. Hammond also stated that she did not have any money to buy dinner. I provided Hammond with a twenty-dollar bill and told her she could buy her daughter something to eat on her way to the station. Hammond then drove to a Burger King and bought her daughter dinner. Hammond then followed me to headquarters.

It was here Chance stopped short, as if by a shadow fallen across the room, a sudden felt presence as palpable as his own, that of Raymond Blackstone, the injured detective: “I provided Hammond with a twenty-dollar bill and told her she could buy her daughter something to eat.”

The woman said she’d eaten, and yet without ever having met her or been present at the time, Chance had the distinct impression that this was a lie, and that, what was more, it was an impression that Blackstone must have shared. She wanted food for her daughter but Blackstone gave her a twenty, more than enough for them both if the destination was to be a Burger King. Now there might of course have been some ulterior “motus” in the detective’s actions. One could always hope for an ulterior “motus.” It was Doc Billy’s word but Chance had grown fond of using it at every available opportunity. Maybe this Mari had been a babe. Maybe Blackstone had been looking to score. The weird thing was, he couldn’t quite get there. His head suggested the possibility. His gut held out for a different reading, the one in which she really was just a single mom down on her luck and the detective really was looking out for her just a little because… Well, because in the end, he was pretty much just like every other fucked-up specimen on the planet and there really were marks on both sides of the ledger—a discouraging enough proposition for a man in Chance’s position.

The pursuit of Gayland Parks’s assailant of course continued, Chance’s reservations and Blackstone’s humanity notwithstanding. Mari Hammond had stated that she had no idea who might have called either one of her two lines on a dead man’s phone and that the name Gayland Parks did not ring a bell. She did, however, go on to state that while both lines were in her name, one line was used exclusively by her brother, a disabled veteran who also lived with her from time to time and might well have taken calls on one or both lines. Her brother’s name was Woody Hammond. Woody, several years older than Mari, had served in the military at the time of the Gulf War and had not come whole from the experience. He had suffered serious burns over a good portion of his body, including his face. He suffered as well from long-standing post-traumatic stress disorder that he had sought to alleviate with alcohol and drugs. He was, however, and this according to his sister, now clean and sober, spending at least half his time in his own apartment, and had gone back to school in hopes of becoming a drug counselor. He received disability checks each month from the federal government. Detective Blackstone had gone in search of him.

On June 1, at approximately 1600 hours, I went to 320 Ocean Street in San Diego to locate Woody Hammond. I contacted the apartment manager for 320 Ocean Street. The apartment manager confirmed to me that Woody Hammond lived alone in apartment #6 and that he had seen Woody Hammond approximately two hours earlier. The apartment manager told me Woody Hammond was driving a green Ford Explorer and that Hammond was in parking space #6.

I located parking space #6 and saw a green Ford Explorer. I positioned myself in the parking lot, where I could surveil the vehicle.

At approximately 1645 hours, Woody Hammond got into the vehicle and left the apartment complex. I followed Hammond. Hammond drove to Northwestern College in San Diego. Hammond parked his vehicle and walked to the college campus. I continued to follow Hammond into the college to building #300.

Hammond turned around, looked at me, and greeted me. I could see at once the burn scars across much of his face that his sister had alluded to. Hammond told me he received a telephone call from his landlord telling him that a detective had been to the building to ask about him. I told Hammond that I was a detective with the Oakland Police Department. Hammond immediately told me the only “bad” thing he does is meet with prostitutes in Tijuana, Mexico, and that it is the only bad thing he does. He told me he did not know why a homicide detective would want to talk to him.

I explained to Hammond that I wanted to question him at the headquarters of the San Diego Police Department and that I felt the college was not the appropriate place for an interview. I asked Hammond if he would voluntarily go to the SDPD headquarters building for an interview. Hammond told me he would. Hammond also told me he had no problem with taking a polygraph exam and that I could search his vehicle if I wanted.

At approximately 1830 hours Detective Lopez and I interviewed Hammond inside the SDPD Homicide interview room. The described interview was video and audio recorded. This report is not intended to be a verbatim representation of his statement. This is an “in essence” report.

Detective Lopez explained to Hammond that he was not under arrest and was free to leave at any time. Paraphrasing, the following represents Hammond’s statement in response to questions Detective Lopez and I asked him.

“I like Mexico. I go to Mexico once a week, sometimes more. I like to go to the racetrack at Agua Caliente and to the offtrack betting. I like going in the daytime because it is not so crowded. I go during the week. Sometimes I go to the red light district. I go to the Zona Norte. I go to The Alley in the red light district. The Alley is a club in the Zona Norte. I like The Alley because it seems clean and it is not too expensive.

“About six months ago, I met a girl in Tijuana. Her name is Jane. I met her in front of The Alley but, to be honest, I am not even sure if that was where she worked or not. I have been going to Tijuana for several years and had never seen her there before till that point. Her complexion is very fair. I always assumed that she was of mixed blood. We had drinks there once or twice but usually we would walk back across the border and go to my apartment. She had some kind of work visa and her English was better than mine. It has been a while since she called me, about a month. She would call me just to be friends. I have her phone number in my cell phone. Jane was nice. Some of the girls don’t like to go with me so much, because of the scars. But this Jane didn’t care about that. She was different from the other women I had met there. She is educated. She told me she was a teacher. I assumed she taught English in Mexico. But then once, when I was having trouble with this algebra class I had to pass for one of my breadth requirements, she helped with all of my math homework, to the point that I received an A-plus in the class.”

It began to blur a bit after that. The night ran to cold sweats and spasms, moments of lucidity bordering on the hallucinatory. Chance read on.

… I would pay her for sex and then a little more for helping me with my homework. I think it was about fifty dollars… for both things… She said she was doing what she was doing because she needed money to leave the country… She’s strung out on heroin… She has a daughter who lives with her mother in Ensenada… She is about thirty years old… She is about 5'6"… She has light hair… and light-colored eyes… She has a nice figure… The last night that I saw her… we met at The Sports Book near the racetrack… We were going to cross… We were going to walk back to my apartment… She got scared… she became very paranoid… An incident had occurred… It was this kind of wild story… not sure how much to believe… but she was definitely scared and wanted to leave the country… She thought maybe my sister could help as I had told her that my sister is a travel agent. She said she had met this guy… he had money and was a doctor… he took her to somewhere in the Bay Area… an expensive place with a view of the water… some kind of doctor like I said and he was going to help her get off heroin but all he really wanted was a sex slave… he’d found something out on her… that there was a warrant in the state of Texas… She was pretty wired and it was pretty hard to understand… He wanted to tie her up but she talked him into letting her tie him up instead then busted him on the head and got away… That’s all she told me and that’s all I know. I am willing to cooperate… to help you in any way… to find Jane…

Blackstone’s reports on the murder investigation of Gayland Parks ended there. A handful of newspaper articles found online, and Chance was at some pains to seek out as many as he could, had little to add. There were some salacious details concerning the psychotherapist-turned–life coach. A stash of child pornography, mostly pictures of underage boys, had been found in his condominium along with what was described as a “rather large collection of women’s clothing.” Details regarding the detectives’ trip to San Diego in search of the mysterious prostitute who was also good with math had apparently been kept from the press. A “mentally disturbed” homeless man under investigation for the rape of two high school girls in the city of Oakland, according to the articles Chance found, was being considered as a suspect.

And that was pretty much it. As to whether or not detectives Blackstone and Lopez had ever escorted Woody Hammond across the border to look for Jane, there was no record of it in Blackstone’s files. One could, Chance supposed, track down Woody Hammond and ask him. His address was after all right there in the report. Whether or not one could do this without rousing the kind of suspicion that might send Woody back to the police was another matter and Chance saw little point in risking it. Jaclyn Blackstone was now thirty-six. She was, according to Chance’s own reports, exactly five and a half feet tall. She had a nice figure and light hair and light-colored eyes. She was good at math. Her English was not half bad either.

In certain of the literature on dissociative identity disorder it has been observed that nearly twenty percent of multiple-personality patients have worked as prostitutes. It is also the case that many prostitutes have dissociative disorders and that prostitutes with such disorders, who are also victims of childhood abuse, are often amnesic with regard to their prostitution. But that was in the literature and Chance felt no great need to go there. Sometimes you just knew a thing.