Chance (19 page)

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “There hasn’t been time for us to talk to her yet about where the marijuana came from . . . but we’re thinking this today . . .”

Chance just looked at her.

“The marijuana had to come from somewhere. Did she get it from someone on campus, and if not, then where? Might that have been where she was today, after school? Could there have been more in her
purse? Might someone have known about it? Might
that
have been what the thief was after?” She paused once more. “I don’t know the answers to these questions and I’m not accusing her of anything save what we already know. I also know this has been a rough day . . . and I am so glad she is okay. But I felt that you needed to hear this. And I wanted to say it to
you
. Not them.” She looked to the closed door of his office, allowing him to guess that the “them” in question was the uniformed officer now at his dining room table. Who would have thought?

He questioned Nicky himself, later that night. The report had been filed. The police were gone. They were seated on the front step of the porch, a place where they had often sat together when she was very young, in another age of the world.

“What difference does it make if my grades are shitty?” Her starting position. “I’m not going to be there anyway.”

“I’m guessing you’re not serious.”

Nicky looked to the darkness at the foot of the hill.

“You just got smacked and your purse stolen. So let me be blunt. Was there marijuana in your purse? Was there money to buy it? Is that what you were up to?”

She looked at him as if he’d been the one to strike her. “I was on my way to get yogurt. This guy just came at me, out of nowhere.”

“I’m sorry, Nicky, but I had to ask that.”

“Is that was
she
thinks, Ms. Fatass?”

“Be happy she said it to me and not the cops. That’s called cutting you a break. Where did you get it?”

“At school. Everybody has it.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hands. “This is such bullshit.”

“To a point, yes, but it’s the bullshit we all have to live with. Better to learn how than to rail against it.”

She said nothing and they sat for some time in the soft light of the porch. The night had taken on the salt smell of the ocean. “You know what I remember, sitting here?” Chance asked. He was tired and looking
for some happier note on which to end. “I remember the day . . . you must’ve been about three, and we were sitting here and you said the words
outer space
out of the blue. Do you remember that?”

Nicky nodded. “Yeah, sort of. I said it was down there.” She pointed toward the end of the street.

Chance laughed. “Yes. I thought it was so strange and funny that you would just come up with a phrase like that, something I’d never heard you say, and when I asked you where outer space was, you pointed down the hill and you said it was down there.” A moment passed. “I remember that like it was yesterday.”

“I guess that’s where I thought it was,” she told him.

He’d pushed her no further on the subject of the stem in her art box. Her final position was the one she’d begun with, that she’d gotten it from someone at school, but would not say whom. “Now or ever.” He was inclined to believe her. Which left the guy coming out of nowhere to slap her and take her purse, either as a random act of violence or because someone had put him up to it, someone who never got his own hands dirty but who got things done. Talk about a fucked-up twenty-four. On the sleepless night that lay before him there could be no consolation in the axiom of choice. The very
idea
that Raymond Blackstone had reached into his life and touched what was most precious ruled that out, that and pretty much all other consolations as well.

One more letter from the IRS was waiting when he returned to his apartment. And why not? It had been that kind of day. He tossed it unopened upon a small pile of other unopened mail he knew to contain bills from attorneys. There had been times of late, and this was one, when he felt himself to be in the midst of some profound disintegration, as if the mental construct that had been Eldon Chance, cheap trick to begin with, was about to disappear altogether, nothing in its wake but the faint odor of a spoiled egg. He felt the need to confide
in someone, to lay bare his fears, to talk about what, if anything at all, could possibly be next, but he had no idea who would want to hear it. Nor could he imagine anyone he knew having anything worthwhile to say on the subject. As far as that went, he had no
real
idea about who would even take his call at such an hour without thinking him delusional; a pathetic enough admission but there it was. Dwell too long on that, there might well be brains on the ceiling by first light, a brief notice in the
Chronicle
. Fearing the worst, he broke from his room near midnight and set out by car in the general direction of Allan’s Antiques.

T
HE FRONT
of the old warehouse was dark and Chance went round to the alley where a pale light could be found issuing from the storage door he knew to be D’s and knocked softly. He soon heard the tumble of locks, the door rolling on its iron rail, enough for D to look out. The big man was fully dressed, clearly awake and not at all, it would seem, surprised to find Chance at his door in the dead of night. “I was in the neighborhood,” Chance told him.

A pair of black leather Eames chairs complete with footrests had been arranged sociably enough in D’s space and they seated themselves in these. “Nice,” Chance said. He slapped an armrest with the flat of his hand. He guessed them fresh from the showroom floor.

“Sup?” D asked. They were just like two regular guys, Chance thought. “Hell if I know,” he said, and he didn’t. But he proceeded to talk. He talked about many things, his divorce, his wife and daughter, the IRS, the practice of medicine, the inequities of a broken system. He may even have mentioned Bernard Jolly, Mariella Franko, and/or Doc
Billy for all he could remember about it later on. Eventually of course he got to the reason he was there, Jaclyn Blackstone, a.k.a. Jackie Black, and her former husband, the homicidal homicide detective Raymond Blackstone.

D proved a good listener. He listened right up to the part where Chance had gone to the restaurant expecting Jaclyn and getting Raymond. At which point D stopped him.

“This was an arranged meeting?”

“Yes, I’d planned to meet this woman.”

“And this guy shows up?”

“Indeed he did.”

“How do you think he knew about it?”

“I’ve given that some thought. He overheard something, found a note. One cannot rule out the possibility she tipped him off in some way . . .”

“She would do that?”

“Depends on how sick she is,” Chance said, echoing Janice.

“Well,” D said. “Big picture . . . it doesn’t really make any difference how he found out. Just being there is a threat.
Unless . . .
it’s some kind of game the
two
of them play and they’re setting you up for something. You’ve thought of that?”

“Yes, but what I think more likely is that he just found out, or that if she did in some way
allow
him to find out, it was an unconscious thing.”

“You’re the doctor,” D said. “Anyway . . . there he is . . . in the restaurant. What I would do now . . . I’m him . . . I’d be very fucking friendly. That’s how you scare someone. Was he friendly?”

“To a point. She came in. It got a little weird.”

“Define ‘weird.’ ”

“Good. Okay. Tense. Let’s just say it was tense.”

“But he never made any overt threats?”

“He got into this weird bit about my daughter, how it was tough being a parent in a predatory world. Something to that effect.”

“That’s not so good.”

“No. And he gave me his card.”

“You still have it?”

Chance produced it.

D sat looking at it. “And now you wonder if he was behind this thing . . . with Nicole.”

“It’s what I wonder.”

“Could be some trouble she’s gotten into on her own.”

“It could be.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I think it was
him,
making a point about coincidence. Letting me know what I have to look forward to if I don’t back off.”

“He’s smart then.”

“He’s half a gangster, you hear her tell it. Never gets his hands dirty but he gets things done.”

“Like putting this woman in the hospital.”

“Like that.”

“Like this, with your daughter.”

“It’s what worries me.”

D returned the card. “Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into something, Doc.”

“That’s a terrible way of putting it. But I think you may be right.”

“There’s no right or wrong about how you put it. It is what it is. A guy like this can be a problem.”

“He knows how to game the system.”

“He
is
the system.”

A moment passed during which the big man, who had till now treated pretty much everything with a rather Buddha-like equanimity, became suddenly more animated. It was the mention of
the system
that seemed to have done it. His face colored. The hand that lay upon the armrest nearest Chance rolled itself into a fist the size of a lunch pail. “This is bullshit,” D said finally. “This cheap fuck . . . gun and a badge . . . tough guy. I’d like to see him meet
me
someplace.”

“There’s one other thing,” Chance said.

“What’s that?”

“Last night . . . after the restaurant . . . she came to my apartment. He
may
have followed her.” He told D about the unmarked Crown Vic.

“Let’s walk,” D said.

It wasn’t exactly the response Chance was expecting. But then it wasn’t really a question, either. Chance didn’t ask where and D didn’t say. Given the strangeness of the past forty-eight, the idea of going for a walk with Big D at two in the morning seemed to make about as much sense as anything else.