Kem Nunn - Chance

“We don’t, Eldon. I’m happy to help her find someone, but she’s going to have to want that and be willing to go see the person I come up with. No more of this running around.”

“Kind of gets us back to where we started.”

“There’s one other thing,” Janice said. “You asked about my going to her apartment, whether or not that was dangerous, and I said I’d get back to it. When I left, I found that someone had broken into my car, stolen a camera, and slashed both rear tires.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“Disturbing gets you about halfway.”

“A random act or he’s having the place watched.”

“Which would seem to be his style.”

“Any idea how it went with her, after you left?”

“None at all. I’m sorry, Eldon. Really. We tried. I think that’s the best we can do.” When he did not respond right away she went on. “I use the word we advisedly. This is not a person you should be spending time with. Can I be any more direct?”

Chance said he understood. Janice said good-bye.

Lucy came in before leaving for the day. She’d found out something about Dr. Cohen. Myra Cohen had not died of natural causes. She had been raped, mutilated, and murdered by an intruder who was never found.

“For Christ’s sake,” Chance said.

“Does the plot thicken?”

Chance just looked at her.

“Sorry.” She started to leave then turned back. “I was friendly to Jean-Baptiste today,” she said, apparently by way of cheering him up. “I’m letting him bring in some more of those god-awful pictures.”

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.