it?”
D shrugged. “The kid knew me.” He pulled the plastic top off his Diet Coke and examined the inside of the cup, apparently wanting to be sure that he’d gotten the last of it. “One of his pals thought he’d try his luck with a baseball bat.”
Chance laughed out loud. He was thinking about the BMW driverin the street, that and Detective Blackstone, entertaining his fantasies. “Not a good idea, you’re telling me.”
“He should’ve stuck to baseballs.”
“So what then?”
D got to his feet, tossing his trash into a nearby Dumpster. “Then he went away,” D said, as matter-of-factly as ever.
Chance gave it a moment to see if D would say more, but D seemed done and was now peering into the Dumpster as if he’d found something there to interest him. “When you say he went away . . .” Chance started but let it drop. He was thinking maybe it was one of those “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of things. And what, after all, did he know?
In the end, Chance signed his papers and left. Funny, he thought, once more in the street, preternaturally quiet, it seemed to him now, striking for its absence of loitering youth, how these little trips to the old furniture store could put a new slant on one’s day. He returned by way of city streets to his office to find Jaclyn Blackstone in his waiting room, staring pensively at the clouds beyond the window, a silver splint on her nose, bruises not unlike the old antiques dealer’s fading beneath her eyes, which for the first time, he noted, were a rather beautiful shade of golden brown, almost yellow, he thought, like those of a cat.
The office visit
C HANCE SHARED the suite of offices on Polk Street with three other doctors, Salk, Marks, and Haig. Jacob Salk was a psychiatrist, an authority on mind control, cults, brainwashing, and vulnerability to undue influence. David Marks was a neuropsychologist Chance knew from his days at UCSF. Like Chance, he was married and a father. Unlike Chance, he was still married. And finally there was Leonard Haig. At forty-five, Haig was already the most dramatically prosperous of the group, a neurologist of private means who’d managed a specialty out of defense work for the big insurance companies. He had recently purchased a house in the South of France. He was said to be an exceptionally fine tennis player and successful womanizer. If not crossing paths as dueling expert witnesses in a court of law, as had happened on a number of occasions, Chance and Haig rarely spoke. Yet it was Haig who alerted him to the presence of Jaclyn Blackstone in the building.
“I have just directed a patient to your waiting room,” Haig told him. They were standing in the hallway before a black-and-white photograph of a clearly deranged elderly woman seated in a tiny windowless room. The room was bare as a prison cell save for a string of paper dollies by some means suspended above the woman’s nearly hairless head.
Chance did little more than lift his eyebrows. It seemed to him highly irregular that Haig should find the directing of anyone anywhere as anything other than a task beneath his station.
“She was in mine by mistake,” Haig told him. “I thought of keeping her, but what the hell. She wanted you.”
“Well . . . I guess I should thank you then,” Chance said.
“Or at least return the favor.” Haig inclined toward the demented woman Chance recognized as the work of the building’s chief parking attendant, Jean-Baptiste Marceau.
Formerly of Paris, France, Jean-Baptiste had once been a student of anthropology and medicine. A head injury at twenty-four with resultant scarring along the motor strip near the back portion of the frontal lobe had made of him an epileptic, subject to partial as well as complex or frontal lobe seizures in the manner of Saint Paul and in the wake of which he had abandoned his formal studies for paths less traveled. One of his interests was photography and he had, in the
D shrugged. “The kid knew me.” He pulled the plastic top off his Diet Coke and examined the inside of the cup, apparently wanting to be sure that he’d gotten the last of it. “One of his pals thought he’d try his luck with a baseball bat.”
Chance laughed out loud. He was thinking about the BMW driverin the street, that and Detective Blackstone, entertaining his fantasies. “Not a good idea, you’re telling me.”
“He should’ve stuck to baseballs.”
“So what then?”
D got to his feet, tossing his trash into a nearby Dumpster. “Then he went away,” D said, as matter-of-factly as ever.
Chance gave it a moment to see if D would say more, but D seemed done and was now peering into the Dumpster as if he’d found something there to interest him. “When you say he went away . . .” Chance started but let it drop. He was thinking maybe it was one of those “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of things. And what, after all, did he know?
In the end, Chance signed his papers and left. Funny, he thought, once more in the street, preternaturally quiet, it seemed to him now, striking for its absence of loitering youth, how these little trips to the old furniture store could put a new slant on one’s day. He returned by way of city streets to his office to find Jaclyn Blackstone in his waiting room, staring pensively at the clouds beyond the window, a silver splint on her nose, bruises not unlike the old antiques dealer’s fading beneath her eyes, which for the first time, he noted, were a rather beautiful shade of golden brown, almost yellow, he thought, like those of a cat.
The office visit
C HANCE SHARED the suite of offices on Polk Street with three other doctors, Salk, Marks, and Haig. Jacob Salk was a psychiatrist, an authority on mind control, cults, brainwashing, and vulnerability to undue influence. David Marks was a neuropsychologist Chance knew from his days at UCSF. Like Chance, he was married and a father. Unlike Chance, he was still married. And finally there was Leonard Haig. At forty-five, Haig was already the most dramatically prosperous of the group, a neurologist of private means who’d managed a specialty out of defense work for the big insurance companies. He had recently purchased a house in the South of France. He was said to be an exceptionally fine tennis player and successful womanizer. If not crossing paths as dueling expert witnesses in a court of law, as had happened on a number of occasions, Chance and Haig rarely spoke. Yet it was Haig who alerted him to the presence of Jaclyn Blackstone in the building.
“I have just directed a patient to your waiting room,” Haig told him. They were standing in the hallway before a black-and-white photograph of a clearly deranged elderly woman seated in a tiny windowless room. The room was bare as a prison cell save for a string of paper dollies by some means suspended above the woman’s nearly hairless head.
Chance did little more than lift his eyebrows. It seemed to him highly irregular that Haig should find the directing of anyone anywhere as anything other than a task beneath his station.
“She was in mine by mistake,” Haig told him. “I thought of keeping her, but what the hell. She wanted you.”
“Well . . . I guess I should thank you then,” Chance said.
“Or at least return the favor.” Haig inclined toward the demented woman Chance recognized as the work of the building’s chief parking attendant, Jean-Baptiste Marceau.
Formerly of Paris, France, Jean-Baptiste had once been a student of anthropology and medicine. A head injury at twenty-four with resultant scarring along the motor strip near the back portion of the frontal lobe had made of him an epileptic, subject to partial as well as complex or frontal lobe seizures in the manner of Saint Paul and in the wake of which he had abandoned his formal studies for paths less traveled. One of his interests was photography and he had, in the
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