Fever

10

The musty furniture in the lobby of the Hillman had one occupant today, an elderly woman knitting what appeared to be a white shawl or afghan with an air of bright-eyed, scowling concentration, like one of the French Revolution ladies waiting for the guillotine blade to lop off another head. The same rusty-haired clerk was behind the desk, playing solitaire with a chewed-up deck. When I got close enough I could see that the backs of the cards were mildly pornographic. He gave me a bored look and made no effort to hide his playthings.

I said, “Ginger Benn. Is she in?”

“Nope.”

“Know where I can find her?”

“Nope.”

“She works as a waitress. You must have some idea where.”

The bored look modulated into one of wariness; he’d recognized me. He quit fiddling with the cards, laid his hands flat on top of them. “You’re that cop who was in here last week.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“No? That’s what you said.”

“Wrong. That’s what you assumed. I’m a private investigator.”

“Oh, one of those,” he said with a half sneer.

“We were talking about Ginger Benn.”

“You were talking about her, not me.”

“What’s your name?”

“… My name? What you want to know that for?”

“So I can report you to the management for being uncooperative. Or to the police for withholding information, if it comes to that.”

“Hey,” he said, “hey.”

The knitting woman had been listening; she made a cackling sound. I turned away from the desk and said to her, “Excuse me, ma’am.” She looked up from her clicking needles. “What’s this man’s name?”

The clerk said, “Don’t tell him.”

The woman said, “Mister Phil Partain. He’s an asshole.”

“Hey,” he said again.

“Something wrong with the heat in my room,” she said. “That’s why I’m down here. Mister Partain won’t have it fixed.”

“Not my problem, Mrs. Grabowski. I told the management about it last week.”

“Says he told the management,” the woman said to me. “Probably didn’t. Doesn’t care if old people like me freeze to death.”

“Nobody ever froze to death in this hotel.”

“Not yet, Mister Partain. No thanks to you.”

“Old bitch,” he muttered under his breath.

Nice place, the Hillman. Homey.

“All right, Phil,” I said. “One more time. Ginger Benn.”

He hesitated, and I looked hard at him until his eyes shifted. Then he said, “Benjy’s Seven. North Beach.”

“Topless club?”

“I never been there, I wouldn’t know.”

“Okay. Now let’s talk about Janice Stanley.”

“Who?”

“Ginger Benn’s roommate. The woman I came here to see last week.”

“What about her?”

“Last time you saw her was when?”

“I don’t remember. Couple of days ago. Why?”

“Saturday?”

“Might’ve been.”

“Sunday?”

“I don’t work Sundays.”

“Monday morning?”

“No.”

“Was Ginger Benn here Monday morning?”

“They come in, they go out. Half the time I don’t even see ’em.”

“Ginger say anything to you about her roommate moving out?”

“No. She don’t talk to me much.”

“So as far as you know, the two of them are still sharing her room.”

“Far as I know. Management doesn’t care, as long as the tenants pay their rent on time.”

“Management doesn’t care,” Mrs. Grabowski said, “and you don’t care, either. That’s for sure.”

Partain said, “What’s the idea of all the questions anyhow?”

“You know a man named Carl Lassiter?”

“Who?” His blank look seemed genuine.

“Big, heavyset, well-dressed, tough-looking. He was here to see Janice Stanley right before I came last week.”

“I don’t remember him.”

“You remembered me.”

“You were with a black chick and that other guy,” Partain said. “That who you mean, the guy you were with?”

“No. Carl Lassiter.”

“I see a lot of people and my memory’s not so good.” He ran the cards together into a stack and began to shuffle them. “You satisfied now?”

The hell with him. We’d rankled each other long enough. I put my back to him and headed out past the knitting woman.

“Told you he was an asshole, didn’t I?” she said.

M y cell phone rang as I was driving to North Beach. I pulled over into a loading zone before I answered. Tamara. I’d called her on the way back from the East Bay, to fill her in on the situation with the Krocheks and to ask her to do some background checking on Krochek, Deanne Goldman, and Ginger Benn, see what else she could find out about Carl Lassiter.

“First thing,” she said. “Remember I told you about the piece of paper I found in Mrs. Krochek’s coat? La Farge, s. 1408.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure it stands for Hotel La Farge, suite 1408. Number 9 underneath was probably a time-nine p.m., Saturday or Sunday. Could be the guy who beat her up.”

“Who occupied that suite on the weekend?”

“Man named Jorge Quilmes. Businessman from Argentina. Big bucks-suites at the La Farge don’t go for chump change.”

“Find out anything about him?”

“Not much yet. Checking.”

“He wouldn’t still be registered, would he?”

“As of a few minutes ago. They wouldn’t tell me for how long.”

“I’ll check it out. Anything else?”

“One new thing on Lassiter,” she said. “His Caddy is registered to him, but he doesn’t own it.”

“No? Who does?”

“QCL, Inc.”

“Address?”

“That’s the interesting part. I can’t find an address or phone number, or anything else about them.”

“Out of state?”

“Could be. So far it’s just a name.”

“Okay. Anything on Krochek?”

“Not much. He was married once before.”

“Is that right? When?”

“Ninety-four. Mary Ellen Layne. Lasted ten months.”

“He file for the divorce?”

“Her. Not the usual irreconcilable differences, either.”

“Wouldn’t be because of abuse, would it?”

“Uh-uh. Infidelity.”

“Krochek contest the settlement terms?”

“Nope. Man didn’t have many assets back then. You want me to BG check Mary Ellen Layne?”

“If you have time. What about his girlfriend?”

“Deanne Goldman? Haven’t gotten to her yet.”

“How about Ginger Benn?”

“Two arrests, one conviction for prostitution. One arrest for possession of a controlled substance-cocaine. No connection with Janice Krochek that I can find so far. How they hooked up, I mean.”

I told her where I was headed next. She said, “North Beach strip club, huh? Watch out for those topless dancers.”

“I won’t even notice.”

Tamara laughed. “Yeah, sure. You’re not gay and you’re not dead. You’ll notice, all right.”

N orth Beach has been called the heart and soul of San Francisco. You won’t get any argument from me on that assessment. It’s one of the city’s oldest districts, named for a beach that became landfill in the 1800s, and it has a colorful history and a number of famous landmarks-Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, Coit Tower, Washington Square, the section of Lombard known as the world’s crookedest street. It’s old San Francisco and new San Francisco; it’s much of the best and some of the worst that the city has to offer. The Barbary Coast was born, grew up wild and corrupt, and died there in the 1906 earthquake. The Beatnik counterculture was founded in North Beach and the neighborhood still retains much of the old Bohemian atmosphere established by Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, and the rest.

For me, it’s a place that stirs nostalgic memories. I remember when it was called Little Italy, in those long-ago days when its population was largely made up of Italian immigrants and there were large numbers of Italian social halls and bocce ball courts and opera cafes and family-style restaurants that served the finest meals on the west coast. I remember attending mass with my mother and her relatives at the Saints Peter and Paul Church, and afternoon festivals and picnics in Washington Square. I remember the hungry i, and Enrico’s, the city’s first outdoor cafe. And I remember the gaudy nightclubs that once lined Broadway-Big Al’s, the Roaring Twenties, Finocchio’s-and the furor over the topless craze started by Carol Doda at the Condor Club in the early sixties.

Broadway east of Columbus is still the center of adult entertainment, but all the memorable old clubs are gone now and the ones that have replaced them don’t have the style or the flare. They’re all loud music and blinding neon and aggressive shills and in-your-face sex, with interchangeable names and programs and attitudes. Tourist traps and sleaze palaces, for the most part. Benjy’s Seven, just off Montgomery, was one of that breed. I knew it would be even before I tuned out the shill at the door and walked inside.

Dark except for flashing strobe lights, music blaring from hidden speakers, a horseshoe-shaped bar, and seven small, round, raised dancer’s platforms spotted at different heights among the tables spread throughout. Benjy’s seven. At peak hours, topless dancers would do their thing on the little platforms, wrapping themselves around the brass poles that jutted up phallically from the center of each one. Now only two were in use-one Asian woman, one black woman, both lethargic in their gyrations. There were less than a dozen customers, all male, all grouped around the two dancers, staring with eyes that seemed glazed and zombielike in the swirl of colored light. Places like this, particularly in the afternoon, strike me as bleak and depressing. Men with no lives, no commitments or goals, sucking down cheap liquor while they watched dull-witted women of the same ilk expose their bodies and simulate indifferent sex. It was all about as stimulating and erotic as a visit to a stud farm.

Two scantily clad waitresses worked the tables, neither of them very busy. I went over to the bar, paid too much for a bottle of beer-flavored water, and waited for one of the waitresses to come up to her station. She wasn’t Ginger Benn. “You want me to send Ginger over?” she asked. I said yes, and she went away, and pretty soon the other waitress sidled up.

Mid-twenties, blond, busty, big without being fat. Old, cynical eyes sized me up, decided I was nobody she knew, and took on the same blank look as the male customers. Her smile was thin and professional. “I’m Ginger,” she said.

“I’m Bill.”

“We don’t know each other. Somebody give you my name?”

“Not exactly. I’m looking for Janice Stanley.”

The smile didn’t quite go away. “She doesn’t work here.”

“I know. But she’s a friend of yours.”

“Who told you that? I hardly know her.”

“Then how come you let her move in with you a month ago?”

Now the smile was gone; the overpainted mouth was drawn tight. “Look, mister, you want to make a date with Janice, go ask somebody else.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to make a date with her.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I told you. I’m trying to find her.”

“Why?” Then, warily, “You some kind of cop?”

“A friend of her husband’s.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know where she is.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Few days ago. Friday.”

“Heard from her since?”

“No.”

“Not even curious why she disappeared all of a sudden?”

“None of my business. I got enough troubles of my own.”

“The two of you didn’t get along, is that it?”

“We got along. She was just crashing with me for a while, okay? Now why don’t you leave me alone, let me do my job?”

“Somebody beat her up on the weekend,” I said.

The words stung her enough to make her head jerk, her eyes widen. “Beat her up?”

“That’s right. Badly enough to send her back home for a couple of days. Only now she’s disappeared again, under suspicious circumstances.”

“… What’s that mean, suspicious circumstances?”

“You have any idea who smacked her around?”

“No. How would I know?”

“Or where she might be now?”

“No.”

“Friends of hers, people she might go to?”

“We didn’t talk much. Didn’t see each other much.”

“What did she do when she wasn’t staying in your apartment?”

Shrug. “Her business, not mine.”

“You ever do anything together?”

“Like what? Double dates? No.”

“How about gambling?”

“Her thing, not mine. I don’t gamble.” The shape of her mouth around the word was bitter. “I hate gambling.”

“But you took in a compulsive gambler as a roommate.”

“I told you-Never mind, forget it. You all done taking up my time now?”

“Not yet.” I made a little show of opening my wallet, taking out a twenty, letting her see it before I creased it down the middle lengthwise. “A few more questions.”

She licked her lips, her eyes fixed on the creased bill. Waitresses in places like this don’t make much money, rely heavily on tips. Call girls don’t get to keep a large percentage of their fees, either, unless they run their own service, and Ginger Benn didn’t look shrewd enough for that. She wanted that twenty. What she didn’t want was to get herself in trouble by talking too much to a stranger.

“I told you, man,” she said, “I don’t know anything about Janice getting beat up.”

“I believe you. But you didn’t answer my question about her being your roommate. How’d that come about, if you’re not friends?”

“Oh, shit. Okay. A favor, okay?”

“But not to her.”

“A friend. A favor for somebody we both know.”

“What’s the friend’s name?”

“Hey, Ginger.” That was the bartender; he’d moved down and was leaning across the bar. “Drinks waiting, customers waiting. Shag your ass.”

“Yeah, I’m on it.” She didn’t look at him; her eyes were still coveting the twenty. “Wait here,” she said to me. “I’ll be right back.”

I waited while she put a pair of drinks on her tray, delivered them to one of the tables. The bartender glared at me. So did a young, beefy type with a shaved head at the far end of the bar. Bouncer. I ignored both of them.

Ginger came back with a clutch of bills, handed them over to the bartender. Nobody was allowed to run a tab in a place like this. She hesitated before she came back to where I half-sat on one of the stools. Reluctant, but unable to resist the lure of the twenty dollars.

Her eyes made sure I still had the bill in my hand. Then she moved around so that her back was to the bartender and the bouncer. “You going to give me that? Better do it now if you are.”

I dropped it onto her tray. She made it disappear into the shadow between her breasts in a movement as quick and deft as a magician’s.

“Okay. But make it quick.”

“You were going to tell me the name of the friend of yours and Janice’s you did the favor for.”

“No, I wasn’t. It’s none of your business.”

“It might be if he knows something about what happened to her.”

“What makes you think it was a guy? It wasn’t.”

A lie. I said, “Carl Lassiter?”

“I don’t know any Carl Lassiter.” That came out fast-too fast. He was somebody she knew, all right. And the tightening of muscles around her mouth, the flicker of emotion in her eyes, said he was somebody she was afraid of.

“How about a man named Quilmes, Jorge Quilmes?”

“Who?” The puzzlement sounded genuine. “Never heard of him.”

“Like you never heard of Carl Lassiter.”

“That’s right.”

“How about QCL, Inc.?”

She couldn’t quite stop herself from flinching. QCL, Inc. was something else she was afraid of. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do,” I said. “Lassiter, Janice, you-all connected to QCL.”

“No. You’re wrong.” Her voice had risen. “Look, why don’t you just leave me alone?”

“Let’s talk about QCL. I’ve got another twenty in my wallet-”

“I don’t want any more of your money. I don’t want any more of you!”

Half shriek, that last sentence. As loud as the music was in there, the bartender heard her and hand-signaled the bald-headed guy. The bouncer came our way, not too fast, in a kind of hard glide. At the same time Ginger backed off from me. I took a step toward her, saying, “Wait,” but she turned and hurried away into the section where the Asian dancer was simulating sex with the brass pole on her platform. In the next second the bouncer was between us and not quite in my face, like a wall.

“You don’t want to bother the girls,” he said, low-key.

“I wasn’t bothering her. Just a friendly conversation.”

“Didn’t look so friendly to me. Suppose you have a seat, buy yourself another beer, enjoy the show.”

“I’ve had enough warm beer.”

He said, with iron in his voice this time, “Then why don’t you go someplace else, pops.”

“Yeah, sonny, why don’t I.” I stayed put, locking gazes with him, just long enough to let him know he wasn’t intimidating me, and then took my time walking out of there.