Fever: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (3 page)

She didn’t try to hide it. Apologized and made the usual empty promises about quitting, seeing a therapist that specialized in neurobiologic addictions, joining Gamblers Anonymous. Instead she kept on betting larger and larger sums—and kept right on losing.

For a time she grew more clever about covering up the drain on their finances, but Krochek found out anyway and there was a big blowup. That was the first time she walked out on him. When she came back, he cut off her access to their various accounts. All that did was make her more devious. She began to pawn or sell jewelry and
other possessions, to steal money out of his wallet. The cashing-in of one of their insurance policies led to another blowup, another walkout. More apologies, more empty promises. Forged checks this time, the probable secret borrowing from a loan shark, the phone call that Krochek swore was threatening. The final blowup, the final walkout. To finance this one, she’d sold her Lexus at a price well below Blue Book and everything in their house that was small enough and valuable enough to turn into quick cash.

Her total losses over four years, as near as Krochek was able to estimate: more than $200,000.

But for all of that, he claimed still to love her and to want to give her another chance. His prerogative, his money; we don’t have to agree with a client’s motives to take on a job. He knew going in that it was likely to be futile. Just find her, make sure she was all right, talk to her.

I felt sorry for him. Sorry for her, too; she was sick and sick people deserve pity, not censure. And sorry for myself because now I had to go tell him that there was no more hope for their marriage and not much hope for her.

Tamara had it right: people and their screwed-up lives.

M
itchell Krochek’s company, Five States Engineering, had its offices on Jack London Square in Oakland. I put in a call to him as soon as Tamara and I got back to the agency offices. He was in, but about to go into a meeting and not inclined to discuss his wife’s situation over the phone. Could we get together sometime after five o’clock? I said we could, and given the circumstances of what I had to tell him, I offered to drive over there rather than have
him come to the city. We settled on 5:30 at the bar of a restaurant called the Ladderback.

While I was talking to him, Tamara ran a check on the license plate number Jake Runyon had given her. Technically, private investigative agencies are no longer permitted access to Department of Motor Vehicles records; a high-profile Hollywood murder case several years ago had led to a new law that kept them sealed to all but city, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. But there are ways around any law, and if you use them sparingly and judiciously, we had no qualms about it. Ethical compromise. You do what you have to in order to work a case, but you don’t abuse your position of trust to clients or the public at large. The agency had a strict rule that all information gleaned through quasi-legal corner-cutting methods was kept confidential.

Tamara had established a DMV pipeline; she already had the information by the time I finished talking to Krochek. The plate number and the new Cadillac belonged to Carl M. Lassiter, with a San Francisco addresss—Russian Hill, no less. Tamara ran a cursory check on Lassiter without turning up anything. No personal history, no employment record. She asked another contact, a friend of hers, Felicia, who worked in SFPD’s computer department, for a quick file search on Lassiter’s name. No criminal record, no outstanding warrants of any kind. Mystery man.

That was as far as she took it. We could probably find out who Lassiter was with a deep background check, or through other sources if he was a bookie or loan shark or worked for one or the other, but there was no need unless
the client specifically requested the information. We’d found Janice Krochek, we’d talked to her, and she didn’t want to go home again—the job we’d been hired to do was finished. It was her business how badly she was jammed up with loan sharks or gambling interests. If Mitchell Krochek felt otherwise and wanted to try to contact Lassiter or Lassiter’s employer, even without her consent, that was up to him. But if he asked me, I’d try to discourage him. In the long run it was a dead end proposition. Just like his marriage. Just like his wife’s fever.

K
rochek was already waiting in the crowded Ladderback bar when I walked in. I’d left the city early, because of the heavy eastbound commute traffic on the Bay Bridge, but it hadn’t been too bad tonight; it was only 5:15 when I got to Jack London Square, fifteen minutes ahead of meeting time. He’d been there for a while, too, judging from the fact that he’d gotten a table and from the array of glassware in front of him—two bottles of Beck’s and two shot glasses, one empty, one half-full.

His greeting was solemn; so was his handshake. Handsome guy, Krochek—blond, tanned, the tennis-and-handball type, but he didn’t look so fit tonight. His lean, ascetic face was sorrowful, shadowed under the eyes, etched with stress lines. Working too hard, worrying too much.

He said, “So you found her. And the news isn’t good,” repeating what I’d told him on the phone. “She doesn’t want me to know where she’s living.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Refuses to see me, try to work things out.”

“No reconciliation, she said.”

“Adamant about that, I suppose.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“She use the D word?”

“Divorce? Yes. Seems to be what she wants.”

“Has she seen a lawyer?”

“Apparently not yet.”

“But she’s going to.”

“Yes. Soon, she said.”

“Throwing all her money down the gambling rathole, that’s why she hasn’t found herself some sleazebag already,” Krochek said. “She’s already blown what she got from selling her car by now, sure as hell.”

“She didn’t say anything about that.”

“What’s she doing for cash until she can squeeze more out of me? Or can’t you tell me that, either?”

“Unverified, so I’d rather not say.”

A waitress stopped by the table. I ordered a bottle of Sierra Nevada. Krochek said, “Another Beck’s, skip the whiskey this time.” That was good; at least he wasn’t going to sit here and get maudlin drunk and make things even more difficult for both of us.

When the waitress went away I said, “You haven’t asked how your wife is.”

“All right, how is she?”

“Healthy enough. Holding herself together.”

“Tense, angry, fidgety?”

“Pretty much.”

“Drinking?”

“Not in front of us.”

“Sure she is. Means she’s betting and losing heavily. Janice doesn’t touch a drop until she starts losing.”

“I think she may be in debt to a loan shark.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” He frowned. “You mean she’s being threatened again?”

“She says no, but there’s a good chance of it.”

“Christ, she’s stupid! You have any idea who he is?”

“Not exactly. The name Carl Lassiter mean anything to you?”

“Lassiter, Lassiter … no. Who’s he?”

“We’re not sure. Could be a shark or an enforcer for one.”

“Terrific. Enforcer. A legbreaker, you mean.”

“Not necessarily. Collection by coercion works just as well.”

“Can you find out who he works for?”

“Probably. But if you’re thinking of making direct contact to arrange to pay off her debts …”

“I’m not. Not anymore. It wouldn’t stop her from divorcing me, now that her mind’s made up. I don’t want a divorce. I can’t afford it.”

Our drinks arrived. I had a little of my ale; he sat there staring into his half-full shot glass.

“Have you seen a lawyer, Mr. Krochek?”

“Yes, of course. He tells me there’s nothing I can do, legally, if she files. Goddamn no fault, community property laws.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She’ll get half of everything. What’s left in the brokerage and savings accounts. Half of what the house and
property are worth. I love that house, I worked my ass off to buy it and furnish it.” He tossed the whiskey down, grimaced, and slugged a chaser from one of the Beck’s bottles. “Why the hell did I ever marry her?” he said, more to himself than to me.

All of this was a different tune than the one he’d sung in my office. Then it had been the worried husband wanting his damaged wife back so he could protect her and help her deal with her addiction. Now it was the woe-is-me, she’s-going-to-take-me-for-half-of-everything lament. Janice Krochek had said he was no saint, that he was motivated by self-interest; she knew him, all right. Not that you could blame him, really, after all the financial losses he’d already suffered, but still it lowered him a notch or two in my estimation.

“You’d think the divorce courts would take something like a gambling sickness into consideration,” he said. “All the crap she’s pulled, all the money she’s blown already. But my attorney says no. The law says no fault, community property, that’s it. No extenuating circumstances. She gets half of whatever I can’t hide from the shyster she’ll hire, and I get screwed.”

Down another notch. Maybe you couldn’t blame him for hiding assets, either, but it’s illegal, and his telling me about it, making me an unwitting possessor of guilty knowledge, didn’t set well.

“Is that fair?” he said bitterly. “After all she put me through?”

“Life can be unfair, Mr. Krochek.”

“I don’t need platitudes,” he said. “I need a way out. Or
at least an edge of some kind. I don’t suppose there’s any way I can convince you to tell me where she’s staying?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“I’d pay well for the information.”

I let that pass. He was starting to piss me off.

“Isn’t there anything more you can do?”

“Such as what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “talk to her again, try to arrange a meeting so we can work something out before the lawyers get into it.”

“I could make the effort, but it would be a waste of your money. I doubt she’d agree to another discussion, and even if she did, there’s nothing I could say that would change her mind. It’s made up, she made that plain.”

“Bitch,” he said. Then he said, “All right, can’t you get something on her, something I can use in court? She’s running around with lowlives, she could be mixed up in something illegal, couldn’t she?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You don’t think she’s mixed up in anything we could use?”

“I meant that it’s not an investigative course we’d care to pursue.”

“Why the hell not? You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

“With a selective list of services. Digging up dirt for use in divorce cases isn’t one of them.”

“So don’t dig it up. Couldn’t you just happen to stumble onto something somewhere? You know the kind of thing it would take—”

I was already on my feet. “End of conversation, Mr. Krochek. And end of our working arrangement.”

“Wait a minute. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … Look, I’m desperate here, you can see that. Grabbing at straws.”

“I understand and I sympathize, up to a point. You just passed that point. Good luck.”

“For God’s sake …”

I said, “You’ll get our final report in the mail,” and put my back to him and walked out.

He had a heavy caseload that week. The Krochek skip-trace, an employee background check for Benefield Industries, a suspicious wrongful death claim for Western Maritime and Life, and a domestic case that Tamara had taken on pro bono. That was the way he preferred it—the fuller the plate, the better. Weeks like this one, he could put in a fair amount of overtime as well as a full workday. He seldom asked for overtime pay, or even mentioned the extra hours; meals, gas and oil, and parking fees went onto the various expense accounts, that was all. Money wasn’t the reason he worked long and hard. It was the activity, the need for movement and business details to occupy his time and his mind. Downtime meant the cold, empty apartment on Ortega Street and old movies on TV that did little to keep him from thinking about Colleen and the two decades
they’d had together, or feeling the bitter frustration of his estrangement from Joshua.

His life wouldn’t be quite so bad now if Joshua would understand that his mother’s poisonous vilification had been a product of alcoholism and revenge and had no basis in fact; unbend a little, make room for some forgiveness. But that wasn’t going to happen. For a time, while Runyon was investigating the gay-bashing of Joshua’s unfaithful lover, he’d thought that there was a chance of establishing cordial relations, if not a reconciliation, but Andrea’s brainwashing had been too complete. No contact in months now, his few phone calls unanswered; the one time he’d gone to Joshua’s apartment, the partner had refused to let him in. Hopeless. If it weren’t for the job, the support he’d gotten from Bill and Tamara, his move down here from Seattle would’ve been a total waste.

By Friday, when Tamara handed him the pro bono case, he had the rest of the load well in hand. A one o’clock interview in Hayward to finish up the employee background check was all for the afternoon; he said he’d be back in the city no later than four. So Tamara set up an appointment for him to meet with the new client, Rose Youngblood, at five at her home in Visitacion Valley.

It was a worried mother job: son or daughter gets into a hassle that can’t or won’t be taken to the police, so mom goes the private route. The agency seldom handled that kind unless the client was well-heeled, and then with reluctance, but recently they’d started taking on selected cases involving African-Americans, Latinos, and other minorities who needed investigative services but couldn’t afford them.

Tamara’s idea. Give a little something back to the community, now that the agency was solidly in the black. It was all right with Runyon. Clients were clients, corporate or individual, rich or poor.

Rose Youngblood was a black woman in her fifties, widowed and living alone in the home she’d bought with her husband thirty years ago. Employed in the admissions office at City College of San Francisco. Active in community service and church work. She hadn’t contacted the agency directly; she’d been referred by Tamara’s sister, Claudia, a lawyer who did some pro bono work of her own in the African-American community.