Chance (90 page)

 . . . 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.

T
WENTY-FIVE HUNDRED
dollars bought for him the Austrian-made Swarovski EL 10x50 SwaroVision binoculars. A Japanese salesperson of no more than twenty assured him they were the best his money could buy and that he would never need another, alternately referring to them as either bucket list or lifetime binoculars, to Chance’s mind an unfortunate choice of words. He had presented himself as an avid bird-watcher and world traveler. Neither of course could have been further from the truth. The cash he placed upon the glass counter before him, a small portion of the ill-gotten gains from the recent sale of his furniture, was hardly his to keep as somewhere out there in the gloomy San Francisco morning an IRS agent was undoubtedly waiting, numbers in hand. And that was if things went well.

An hour later found him at the wheel of the Cutlass, parked in front of the Mongolian Grill at a long diagonal across a gutted parking lot from the European Massage Parlor where he had gone to case the joint. He was thinking of D’s concerns regarding surveillance equipment, this in concert with what Jaclyn had said about Blackstone saying he would
handle things
. What did this mean? What did the man know? What had
he seen? Perhaps, with the high-powered glasses, Chance would see something that D had missed in the poor light with the naked eye. If nothing else, it was a place to start and the best he had, save of course seeing patients, filing reports, preparing for his coming court appearance on behalf of the Doc Billy estate, meeting with attorneys to further his divorce proceedings, or sitting with the IRS to hear their number. The thing about all of that . . . it was too sedentary is what it was. It was
time . . .
to ponder the mystery of Big D and every other fucked-up thing that had gotten him here, time to think about Jane and Jaclyn and Jackie and the things he had read in Blackstone’s files. And as of just now, he was running on empty, tapped dry by some weird type of information/sensory overload and sedentary was the last thing he needed. Movement was the thing, the engagement in something requiring his full attention, a high stakes distraction. It didn’t help that Jaclyn was unavailable for comment.

He had no idea what Lucy must be thinking. They had not spoken in days. And then there was the matter of Carla’s calls. Nicole was not doing well. She had missed another day of school then spent an entire weekend, in direct violation of Carla’s orders, in the company of the new boyfriend Chance had yet to meet somewhere in West Marin, or so it was believed.

Chance invariably learned of such transgressions after the fact, sometimes long after, Carla calling at odd hours, clearly in the midst of some internal stew, suddenly deciding it was time for Chance to
do
something, yet never clear about what exactly this might be while at the same time rejecting any and all advice he was inclined to offer. At least this was how it
felt,
the full extent of his current involvement in his daughter’s life.

In the beginning she had spent more time with him. Recent complications had served to make this less than desirable but that was about to change. He would find the place in Berkeley, a house perhaps where she might have her own room. He went so far as to envision the acquisition of a small pet. He would encourage her enrollment in the
Berkeley school system. These things were not beyond the pale. It was within his power to make them happen and yet here he sat, with his expensive binoculars, looking for hidden surveillance cameras in the dredges of Oakland. He was racking focus on his new binoculars when Carla called for the second time in as many days.

“Where have you been?” she asked, the rancor evident in her voice.

Chance let the question go unanswered. Married, divorced, it was the same old song.

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“Errands I needed to attend to.”

“For two days?”

Chance brought the shabby building into sharp relief, the Austrian glasses turning stucco walls to a landscape of cracks and crevices, craters worthy of the moon. “Listen,” he said. “Clearly this is a person she needs to stop seeing.” He had taken to searching beneath the eaves.

“Good luck with that.”

“Carla . . .”

“I’m not going to go around with her chained to my foot.”

“There’s two kinds of pain in life,” Chance told her. “The pain of discipline and the pain of remorse.” He was quoting Big D but only half there, lost in speculation on the mysteries of the human heart. Why had Blackstone kept those few reports in the dated file and why not anything at all of what had most certainly followed? Perhaps, he thought, there were other files on other hard drives—readily assembled should the need ever arise.

“You need to talk to her,” Carla said.

“I have, but yes, you’re right, I will again. In the meantime you need to keep her close.”

“Have you heard anything I just said?”

“What I hear is this, you have a boyfriend and you don’t want to be bothered.” It was, he supposed, a mean thing to say and only half true.

“You’re an asshole,” she told him.

“
Some 
one has to pay for it all,” Chance said.

“Right. And that’s what you’re doing, just now?”

Chance of course said nothing. He was thinking about being an
asshole and looking for cameras, but the lengthy pause was enough to push yet one more of Carla’s many buttons. “You don’t want to hang up on me,” she said, apparently believing that he had hung up. “Don’t you even think about hanging up on me.”

Chance sighed, loudly enough for her to hear. He was about to speak. He was about to start in on his plans for the new place east of the bridge. He was about to sing the praises of the Berkeley public school system, the proximity of the UC campus, of lecture halls, of concerts beneath the trees, but then failed to do so, the words turning to ashes in his mouth. The problem was, having been here for not more than half an hour, he had just now spotted a woman with short dark hair but looking remarkably like Jaclyn Blackstone exiting the massage parlor in the company of what he could only imagine to be a john and a fair amount of oxygen had just been sucked from the air. “We’ll have to talk later,” Chance said, and ended the call.

The mystery woman’s back was to him. Still, there was something in the curve of her hip and the way she carried herself, leaning upon the arm of the man at her side, even before showing Chance her profile and the high plane of a cheekbone giving her away, the short dark hair notwithstanding. Chance’s heart strokes rattled in his ears. Music spilled from a passing car, a ghetto rumble above a baseline throb. She put the man into some sort of high-end, bloodred sports car parked before a liquor store at the far end of the lot and saw him off before starting back in the direction of the parlor.