Chance

Chance and the bleeding heart

The better part of a week and his doctors were ready to discharge him. He was brought by a male nurse to the front of the building in a wheelchair, dressed in the baggy gray sweat suit Lucy had picked out and delivered to his room along with the pair of red felt house slippers he was also wearing that she had declared to be cool and a real find. Romeos, she had called them. Any remainders of the clothes he had come with were apparently languishing in a police lab in some quarter of the city and there still had been no word regarding what if anything had been found in his pockets. His shoes on the other hand had been inexplicably returned and rode now in his lap along with his overnight bag and a magazine promoting men’s health, the promise of six-pack abs in thirty days.

The gland and broken fingers were in pretty good shape but the ribs and vertebrae still hurt like a bastard when the pain meds wore down and he was still subject to the odd moment of vertigo. Lucy had gotten the Cutlass out of compound and ordered a hospital bed installed in his apartment. She was proving invaluable and he was expecting her there to pick him up when he noticed a woman he didn’t recognize entering the main waiting room and walking in his direction. The woman had what looked to be very short, strawberry blond hair beneath a bright turquoise scarf and oversized dark glasses like something Jacqueline Onassis might have worn. He was expecting her to turn to one side or the other and was surprised to find her walking directly to him. “Look at you,” she said, in a voice at once strange and familiar and he saw that it was Jaclyn Blackstone.

There are times when it is good to be seated, if even in a wheelchair and this was one of them. Jaclyn told the nurse she would “take it from here.” And from there rolled him into the harsh light of what he took to be midday. “I like your slippers,” she said.

“Lucy picked them out,” he told her, but it was like talking at altitude where they were stingy with their oxygen.

She pushed him to the street where the Oldsmobile was waiting and asked if he needed help getting in but Chance told her that he could manage. She next wondered if he would need the wheels to get into his apartment. He reminded her of the stairs then waited in the passenger side of the front seat while she returned the chair and came back to the car.

“How is this possible?” he asked finally. They’d ridden for half a mile in stone silence during which time his pulse had returned to a somewhat more normal count.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “this for starters,” meaning her and his car.

“Your assistant and I reached an agreement,” she said.

“Should I ask about what?”

“Probably not.”

“And what about the rest?” he asked at length. “Should we talk about that?”

She didn’t say anything at all for another city block and then she did. “I remember some of it,” she told him. “He came back after he’d left to find you… and there was a knife sticking out of his chest… I could see it moving in time to his heart… I was still cuffed to the bed but the guy he’d left to watch me walked over and looked at it, and when he bent down, Raymond pulled out this special gun he carries and shot him with it, under his chin. It wasn’t that loud, really, but you could see part of his head come off. And then… before he could say or do anything else… the knife stopped and he was dead.”

“My God.”

“How does something like that even happen?”

“The heart’s a muscle,” he said after a good long beat. “It could do that… knot up around the blade. But the heart rests inside this membranous sack called the pericardium. The sack would fill with blood, constricting the heart. Imagine a small bird gripped in a hand, trying to spread its wings.”

They were both, he supposed, a moment in trying to imagine it.

“The condition is called cardiac tamponade—obviously fatal if left untreated. The severity of the bleeding, the speed at which the pericardium fills would determine how much time one has,” is what he said. This was me … is what he thought. He had missed the money shot, by which death would have come in a hurry, and hit the heart. There remained the question of why Blackstone had driven back to the motel and not tried for a hospital, or called for paramedics.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The guy he left there was supposed to have killed me if no one came back.”

Chance stared between the buildings that flanked them to a sliver of pale blue sky the color of Blackstone’s shirt.

“He always said he would protect me.”

“And you were still on the bed.”

“That’s when this big guy with a spider on his head showed up. He took the knife and he let me go. I asked if it was you but he gave me a look and I shut up. He’s a little scary. Where did you find him?”

“He fixed my furniture,” Chance told her.

“Right. But that’s a good answer. How is your daughter?”

“A little older, a little wiser, but otherwise whole. How is yours?”

Her hand moved to make some minor adjustment to her glasses before returning to the wheel. “She’s good. He never had her, you know.”

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

“Are you certain of that?”

She appeared to give this one some thought. “I know it’s strange… you look at everything else… but he was never much of a liar.”

Chance thought about that and what if anything there was to even say about it. The subject felt exhausted somehow and he fell to watching her instead. She had a funny way of holding herself as she drove, tilting her head up as if she were too short to see across the car’s hood, which of course she was not. She was five foot six and a half for Christ’s sake, with a good figure… and a bit tentative behind the wheel, which was somehow unexpected given every other thing he knew about her. She was, among other things, slow from red lights and got herself honked at on three separate occasions between the hospital and Chance’s apartment by which time he had stopped counting, lost in a study of her profile, the bones of her wrists as her hands opened and closed atop the wheel, the sunlight on her skin and he was trying to decide which one she was—not exactly the shyly flirtatious one from the Berkeley bookstore, but not the broken one from that first day in his office either, and certainly not Jackie Black. “Are you coming up?” he asked.

She all but laughed at him but it was good-natured enough, a little flirtatious even. “Really?” she asked. “You haven’t had enough excitement for one day?”

Two hours ago, a nurse carting away his bedpan, he could not have imagined that he would so soon be so dizzy with wanting… in spite of… because of… He supposed it written all over him.

She smiled again but it turned a little sad as she looked to the entrance of his apartment and Lucy seated on the stairs in front of the metal door where he and Jackie Black had once vied for his member. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” she told him, and got out.

Chance opened the door and using it for leverage managed to stand, first in the gutter then on the sidewalk, still bracing himself upon the car. There was a good breeze blowing in off the breakers at Ocean Beach where perhaps his very own surfing attorney was even now at play in the fields of the Lord and he could feel it stirring the hair on the top of his head where it had begun to thin and imagined that he must look very much like how he felt, a scarecrow in Romeos and baggy sweats. As she came around to his side of the car he saw that there was a manila envelope in her hands and that she wanted him to have it. “I decided this was something you should see,” she said. “It’s the least I can do.”

He wanted to ask if he would see her again but she had removed the dark glasses and the answer to that was written in her eyes as very suddenly she pulled him close, pressed herself against him, and was gone, fixing her glasses and walking briskly toward the coast before rounding a corner at the end of the block, and then she was really gone and there was only the sunlight pooling where she had been and then even that lost to the first traces of what he knew in very short order would turn to a dense and impenetrable fog. He might still have run after her, had it not been all he could do to remain vertical. And then there was Lucy to help him inside. “Don’t even ask,” she said.

Chance waited until she had gone before opening the manila envelope, alone now in the room where they had once been together, recognizing at once the work of Raymond Blackstone…

On May 5, Gayland Parks was found murdered inside his apartment in the city of Oakland. I, along with Homicide Team 1, responded to investigate the incident.

Phone records obtained at the time suggested that Parks’s cellular phone was still in use and that calls were being made to parties in San Diego, California. Detective Lopez and I obtained permission to travel to San Diego to question the parties involved.

During the initial investigation, it was also learned that the victim, Gayland Parks, was a collector of Empire State Buildings. The buildings were made from a variety of materials, including paper. Many were quite elaborate and worth considerable money. Many of these collectibles were still in the original boxes or in plastic display cases.

After two days in San Diego Detective Lopez returned to Oakland in response to a family emergency. I traveled alone to Tijuana, Mexico, to meet with Detective Raul Moreno of the Mexican State Police. Detective Moreno was familiar with the case and informed me that Jane, whose real name was Jo Ann Patterson, had been picked up on the previous day in the Zona Norte region of the city and brought to police headquarters, where she had confessed to the murder of Gayland Parks but stated that it was in self-defense. She further stated that she had stolen several of the collectible Empire State Buildings from the Parks condominium and taken them to her mother’s address in Ensenada, Baja California, and that her mother’s name was Gladys Patterson. According to Patterson, her mother lived at 1416 Calle Nuevo in Ensenada, Mexico. (See Jo Ann Patterson Arrest Report and Interview of Jo Ann Patterson.)

Detective Moreno and I spoke to Gladys Patterson shortly thereafter and obtained permission to search her residence in Ensenada. According to Mrs. Patterson, the collectibles were in Jo Ann Patterson’s daughter Sky’s bedroom at that location.

The same day, at approximately 1530 hours, Detective Moreno and I met with Mrs. Patterson at her residence in Ensenada. Mrs. Patterson directed us to a bedroom where items belonging to Gayland Parks were recovered.

It should be stated that these items were no longer in their original condition but had been cut apart, reassembled, and joined with additional materials to make what appeared to be a dollhouse of elaborate proportions. The work, while of interest in and of itself, effectively destroyed the value of Parks’s original collection.

Mrs. Patterson informed us that Jo Ann often brought gifts to the room and in fact the room was filled with all manner of items, everything from dolls and dollhouses to jewelry and children’s clothes. When I inquired after Mrs. Patterson’s granddaughter, Sky, I was further informed that Sky had died at birth some eleven years prior to our visit to Ensenada.

Mrs. Patterson broke down at this point and began to cry. She told me that her daughter would have been a good mother but that drug addiction had ruined her life, then went on to give us further details regarding her daughter.

Jo Ann’s father, now deceased, had served in the Foreign Service for the United States government and had spent considerable time in Central and South America. Mrs. Patterson stated that she and her daughter often accompanied Mr. Patterson and that at the age of thirteen, while living in Lima, Peru, Jo Ann had been kidnapped by a guerrilla faction of the Shining Path and held for nearly a month, during which time she was subjected to torture and rape. Her father later committed suicide. As a teenager Jo Ann became promiscuous, having at least two abortions for which she later felt guilty. Her first husband was a musician. Both Jo Ann and her husband became addicted to drugs. He died of an overdose. She had a daughter she named Sky who was born addicted to drugs and who died in the hospital… Her mother says that in her opinion, her daughter was never the same after the kidnapping and that there were instances of cutting and other “strange” behavior.

During the conversation I asked Mrs. Patterson to explain to me when and how the various items were brought to her granddaughter’s bedroom. Mrs. Patterson essentially told me the following:

My daughter, Jo Ann, has, over the years, come here from time to time to live. I made her her own front apartment unit attached to the house. She sometimes works in Tijuana and comes and goes. As far as I know, Jo told me she is on her feet a lot and that she works for a flooring company.

I did notice that my daughter wears gloves whenever she comes to the house. She told me that she wears the gloves because she is always cold. I noticed she has been very fidgety lately and nervous. I suspected she might be using drugs again. I really didn’t want to know what was going on. Jo Ann spent about a year in a drug rehab center in New Mexico prior to this.

I’m not sure exactly when Jo Ann brought all the items to Sky’s room. I think it was about a month or a month and a half ago. She showed up with two duffel bags. She told me someone owed her some money and gave her what was inside instead of the money. She put the items in Sky’s room then spent considerable time constructing the dollhouse, which I thought was kind of strange but I also have gotten used to her doing strange things, and I guess I just did not want to know any more about it.

When, at one point, I asked Mrs. Patterson if, in the wake of Jo Ann’s childhood ordeals, any psychiatric help or evaluation had ever been sought, Mrs. Patterson informed me that this was something she did not wish to discuss further.

This concluded Gladys Patterson’s statement.

At exactly 0800 hours on the following morning, I drove to the headquarters of the Mexican State Police for the purpose of taking custody of Jo Ann Patterson. What I found there was a scene of considerable commotion and confusion. Federal soldiers had been called in and were present. A shooting had occurred hours before my visit. The shooting had taken place on the grounds of the headquarters and was believed to have been carried out by a newly formed splinter unit of the Tijuana Cartel. Three officers of the state police had been murdered. The station house was in a very chaotic state. I was informed that Detective Moreno was one of the officers who had been shot and that Jo Ann Patterson was no longer on the premises. It was unknown what had become of her. It was unknown if she had been hurt. It was unknown whether she had been abducted, or had simply found a way to walk away at the height of the confusion.

I spent one more day in Tijuana, but as the state police were occupied in dealing with the aftermath of the gun battle, and as Jo Ann Patterson was now very much aware of her situation and probably already gone from the city, there seemed little point in remaining. I returned to San Diego.

It was difficult, Chance thought, to know where the truthfulness of Blackstone’s final report ended and began, why he had kept it, whether or not it had ever been filed or really, when one thought about it, if he was even its author. She was after all handy with both language and math. But even if one were to take the report at face value, there remained the matter of the detective’s final hours in Tijuana and Blackstone’s claiming them as uneventful—most certainly the beginning of the great long lie that would one day do him in. For if it was true that Jo Ann Patterson had vanished into Mexico, it was equally true that Jackie Black had come home with Raymond Blackstone and Chance was at least thirty seconds in trying to imagine what all of that must have looked like before abandoning it in favor of sleep. What did it matter now, the thing that had taken place between them, the cop and the whore? Already, he felt it slipping away—one more bit of chicanery, of which the planet was already filled to overflowing.