Chance (52 page)

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.

R
ECOVERY WAS
a slow boat to a questionable port. Some days were better than others. All were spent in his apartment. Some were spent beneath the covers. Some were spent in fashioning small sheaths of heavy paper with staples passing for wires, practicing with a kitchen knife . . . how many times the sheath stays in his pocket versus how many times it falls out, or comes out partway, so that it might come out the rest of the way later on . . . in a forty-foot tumble say, to the sands of Ocean Beach. Hours were spent in worrying about the men in the Mercedes and what if anything they would ever say if they were ever caught. Additional hours were spent worrying about the blood but there was something D had said to him once . . . that even as he was being struck, a man might turn from the blow, that a blade might catch on bone or otherwise be made to miss its mark, and before long Chance is beginning to feel it like that . . . striking and falling and Blackstone spun, so that any blood spray is going away from Chance and not toward him. And then of course there was that other bit, Blackstone’s bit—the thirty downhill feet it had been necessary for the detective to traverse before reaching his car, the very long city block he’d had to drive, then managing by some force of will Chance can only imagine to get to the room and then to a chair and finally to kill the man who would have killed her
and Chance thinking that at least one of his hallucinatory memories was at least partially correct, that seen in a particular light, Blackstone really
had
, when all was said and done, gotten the better of him—if only there had been someone to stab him through the heart every day that he lived.

As for anything more concrete, which is to say anything that might have passed for recovered memory with regard to things as they had actually transpired on the cliffs above Ocean Beach . . .
that
room was bare and continued so . . . as the days passed, as Detective Newsome failed to come, which was not, of course, to say that he never would, but in the end, one can only worry about such things for so long. Blackstone was dead and Chance was alive, as in the city beyond his windows the long hot summer was grinding finally to an end and the Doc Billy case was coming at last to trial.

It was Lucy who at last helped him down the stairs of his building and into the street. He was equipped with a walking stick and temporary back brace. “You know,” she said, “you really don’t have to do this.”

“Au contraire,”
Chance told her, adding that he was called upon to act, if only as a soldier of the heart.

“Are you
sure
you’re all right?”

“It’s the least I can do.”

“I asked if you were all right?”

Chance nodded. There was a longer answer to that question but it would have to wait, time being of the essence.

She drove him to the main courthouse near City Hall in downtown San Francisco. At question was Dr. William Fry’s overall mental health, both neurological and psychiatric, but most particularly his susceptibility to undue influence and how all of these factors when taken together might or might not impact upon his testamentary capacity, which would in turn affect his Mexican lover’s ability to keep the considerable amount of money he’d given her, or for that matter, whether or not the two might continue united, a restraining order on the part
of attorneys for the Oregonians having prevented this from the date of Chance’s original reports. If the court were to rule in favor of the plaintiff, for whom Chance was being called, Doc Billy would no longer continue as the master of his fortune, pecuniary and otherwise. His Mexican lover would, in all probability, be facing either jail time or deportation as she had been living in the country on a temporary work visa.

They were all there of course, Mr. Berg and Mr. Green, the relative from Oregon Chance had only spoken to once or twice on the phone and whom he liked even less in person. The questions he was asked while seated on the stand were very much like the questions he had been asked at the time of his deposition. He was asked to read from notes made prior to his deposition and asked if those notes generally expressed the opinions he was ready to testify to under oath. He was only too happy to lie copiously on behalf of the star-crossed lovers, at times going so far as to blatantly contradict some of his earlier findings, saying simply that upon reflection this and upon further reflection that. He demurred and deflected, hedged and equivocated. He was at times vague, at others intentionally opaque, to the point that Mr. Berg, acting on behalf of the plaintiffs, appeared upon the brink of some cerebrovascular event.

Chance did all of this without fear of repercussions or reprisals. If pressed at some later date in some later proceeding . . . he was positioned, he thought, quite nicely to blame events in his
own
recent past for any failure of memory or even mental acuity. It might of course be a good long while, once word had spread, before anyone in need of an expert witness came knocking but then he was pretty certain that he was pretty much done with all of that.

He could, from time to time, see Doc Billy grinning at him like an ape from a corner of the room and at one point even suffered the momentary fear that perhaps the old man was already lost to dementia. In the end, he chose to interpret the grin as more sly than apelike, conspiratorial as opposed to simply deranged and went so far as to
imagine for the first time just what the doctor’s last stand might look like. He was thinking Mexico, the lovers’ mad flight . . . He was, after all, at just this moment, buying them a bit of time and it wasn’t like they were short on cash. He had begun to think of a song. He imagined Chet Baker singing “
Let’s Get Lost
” as the couple streaked for the border. The exercise lifted his spirits, higher really than they had been in quite some time, so much so that when the attorneys had at last had their way with him and he had been asked, somewhat unceremoniously, to leave the stand and perhaps the country, he suggested to Lucy, waiting for him at the back of the room with an odd expression on her face, that they should drive just up the street to their old offices, that it was a terrific-looking day and he was curious to see if any of Jean-Baptiste’s infamous death-defying photographs might yet have been delivered.