Fever

15

The auto body shop where Jason Benn worked was on San Jose Avenue near where it intersects with Mission Street. Outer Mission District, the neighborhood where I’d been born and raised. The big, rambling house I grew up in had been only a few blocks away, in what in those days was a little Italian working-class enclave. Gone now, the enclave and the house and the big walnut tree in the backyard where I spent a lot of solitary afternoons, everything torn down and ripped up to make way for a cheaply built apartment complex that was already going to seed.

I don’t feel nostalgia when I come out here, as I do when I visit North Beach. Too many sad, painful memories overshadowing the good ones of my mother, a big, sweet-faced woman who had borne heavy crosses with a cheerful smile and heart full of love. Ma. Close my eyes and I can still see her in the kitchen, the one room in the house that was completely hers, making focaccia alla salvia, torta pasqualina, trippa con il sugo di tucco-all the other Ligurian dishes from her native Genoa. I can still smell the mingled aromas-garlic, spices, simmering sauces, frying meats, baking breads and cakes and gnocchi. Good memories, those, savored memories, but the rest… no.

My old man is one among the rest. My sister Nina, dead of rheumatic fever not long after her fifth birthday, is another. Black hair, black eyes, so thin her arms and legs were like bare olive sticks-that’s all I can remember of Nina. I can’t dredge up the slightest image of what my father looked like, but I remember him, all right, the son of a bitch. He was a drunk. Tolerable when he was sober, if a little cold and distant, but grappa and wine and whiskey turned him into an abusive terror. He drank most of the time when he wasn’t working, and when he wasn’t working was most of the time. He lost one longshoreman’s job after another until nobody would hire him anymore, not even relatives. His other vice was gambling-lowball poker and the horses-though it never reached the destructively addictive stage of pathologicals like Janice Krochek. From the time I was old enough to understand about money, I wondered where he got enough every week to pay the bills and feed his habits. It wasn’t until the year before I graduated from high school that I found out he was mixed up in a black-market operation on the Embarcadero.

The liquor destroyed his liver, finally put him in the hospital, and killed him within a week of his admission. Ma stood by him to the end, in spite of the abuse. But it took a deadly toll on her. The more he drank, the more she ate for solace and escape; she weighed nearly 250 pounds when she died, too young, at the age of fifty-seven. I hated him for what he did to her. But his selfish, uncaring, drunken ways did me one favor; they helped shape the man I grew into. I don’t drink hard liquor and I don’t steal and cheat and I don’t hurt the people close to me. In all the ways that count, I’m not my old man’s son.

No, I don’t feel nostalgia when I come back to the old neighborhood. It was all such a long, long time ago, yet the memories still have the capacity to hurt and to bring the sadness flooding back …

Crouch’s Auto Body was housed in an old, rundown, grimy-fronted building flanked on one side by an industrial valve company and on the other by a fenced-in automotive graveyard piled high with unburied metal corpses, their skeletal bodies and entrails plundered by the Crouch ghouls. Waves of noise-hammers, mallets, hissing torches, power tools-rolled out at me from the droplit interior. Smells, too, dominated by petroleum products and hot metal. Three men were working in there, one with an acetylyne torch on the battered front end of a jacked-up SUV. The first one I approached directed me to the man with the torch. I stood by, watching Jason Benn work, waiting until he was done before I approached him.

He was weightlifter big, heavy through the shoulders but going soft in the middle. Tattoos curled up both forearms; another, some sort of sun symbol, was visible between the collar of his workshirt and black hair long enough for a ponytail. From all of that I expected a loutish face and dim little eyes, but when he finally shut down the torch and took off his protective goggle mask, I was looking at plain, heavy, but alert features and the dark eyes of a man who has lived through his share of hell.

He didn’t react when I told him who I was, showed him the photostat of my license, or when I said, “I’m investigating the disappearance of a woman who goes by the name of Janice Stanley.”

“What’s that have to do with me?” Not hostile, just mildly curious. “I never heard of her.”

“She was your wife’s roommate for the past month.”

“Yeah? I still never heard of her.”

“You and your wife don’t talk much, I take it.”

“Not much. We’re separated.”

“So I understand. I had a talk with her yesterday.”

“And she sent you to me?”

“No. She didn’t mention you.”

“Then what makes you think I know anything about this missing woman?”

“Janice Stanley has a gambling problem,” I said. “The serious kind.”

His eyes narrowed. He didn’t say anything.

“And she’s involved with a man named Lassiter, Carl Lassiter, and a Las Vegas outfit called QCL, Inc.”

Long, steady stare. His face grew hard; you could see it happening, like time-lapse photography run at maximum speed. One of the other workmen fired up an electric sander, set it screaming against the Bondoed door of a crash victim. Benn frowned at the sudden noise, stepped toward me, and mouthed the words, “Let’s take a walk.”

We went through the garage, out a side door into the automotive graveyard. Cracked asphalt with weeds growing up through it; nobody around, just cars passing on the street beyond the fence. Pale sun rays filtering down through a milky overcast gleamed off the surfaces of the decaying corpses, struck micalike glints from broken glass and patches of rust. Benn shut the door to cut off the interior noise, turned to face me.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you know about Lassiter and QCL?”

“QCL stands for Quick Cash Loans. Moneylenders to addicted gamblers at high interest rates. Lassiter’s their San Francisco agent.”

“That all?”

“No. They’ve got a sideline. Prostitution, the call-girl variety.”

“Goddamn it,” he said, but the heat in the words was not directed at me. “She tell you all that? Ginger?”

“No.”

“Then how’d you find it out?”

“I’m in the detective business. Finding out things is what I do.”

Benn half-turned away from me, turned back again, and slapped one fisted hand into the palm of the other. But it wasn’t an aggressive gesture. Frustration mixed with anger.

“She’s hooking again, isn’t she?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t bullshit me, man.”

“Straight answer: I don’t know.”

“Sure she is. This woman you’re looking for, you say she’s got the fever and Ginger took her in. She wouldn’t do that if she wasn’t hooking for QCL again.”

“Why would she start hooking again?”

Smack. Smack. “She promised me, she swore she wouldn’t let them pressure her anymore.” Smack. “Goddamn it. I make enough now, I’m handling the payments. What the hell’s the matter with her?”

“How much do you owe them?”

“Never mind how much, that’s my lookout. I’m clean now, I’m dealing with it. She don’t have to do that shit anymore.”

“Maybe she isn’t. You don’t know that she is.”

“You don’t know she isn’t. I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me the truth if I beat the crap out of her.”

“Is that how you got her to promise to quit?”

“What?”

“By beating the crap out of her.”

“No. Hell, no. You think I’m that kind? Well, you’re wrong, buddy. I said ‘if.’ I wouldn’t hurt Ginger, never. I love her, she loves me.”

“Then why’d she walk out on you?”

“She didn’t walk out, we made a deal. Live apart for a while, I stay clean and make the payments regular, she quits hooking for those bastards.”

“Her apartment at the Hillman,” I said. “Who pays the rent?”

“She does. What, you think QCL set her up?”

“Isn’t that how they operate?”

“No. All they do is arrange dates and take the money, every fuckin’ dime.”

“Lassiter, you mean.”

“Yeah, Lassiter. I told her stay away from him, I begged her, why didn’t she listen to me.” Smack. “I ought to pay him a visit. Bust him in half, the son of a bitch. But then where I’d be? Still up shit creek, that’s where.”

“What would Lassiter do if one of the women couldn’t make the loan payments and refused to go out on any more dates?”

“Do?”

“Slap her around? Beat her up?”

“Not him, not that bastard. He don’t operate that way. QCL don’t operate that way.”

“You sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure. They’re too smart for that.”

“Somebody beat up the woman I’m looking for,” I said. “I thought it might be Lassiter.”

“He wouldn’t dirty his hands. Not him. Mr. Cool. Mr. Clean, all dressed up in his expensive suits.”

“Nonviolent.”

“Yeah.” Smack. “He ever touched Ginger, I’d’ve killed him. He knows it, too. He don’t want a piece of me.”

“So how do he and QCL operate?”

“Pressure, that’s how. Oh, yeah, they know how to put the pressure on once they got their hooks in you. You don’t make your payments, they dangle more cash, give you betting tips, set you up in a game somewhere, get you thinking maybe you’ll hit a lucky streak-drive you right back down again. Then you got no choice. You work for them one way or another.”

The subtle, insidious kind of pressure. No need to use force. The addiction was enough, the offer of a fast loan and the lure of a quick score that would pay off the debts and put the addict back in the driver’s seat. Most of the time the losers lost and the hook got set even deeper. If one of them won once in a while, that’d be okay with QCL. Same principle the casinos operated on; good business when somebody beat the house because it tantalized the losers, made them bet more and more trying to be the next winner.

“Not me, not anymore,” Benn said. “They can’t drive me back into the gutter. I’m clean, I’m making my payments right on time. They got no more leverage with Ginger. Unless… She didn’t lose her job, did she? That lousy T amp; A club where she works?”

“No.”

“Then she’s got no reason to start hooking again. She hated doing it-hated it. Did it for me, that’s how much she loves me. And I let her. Shitheel Jason let her.”

“I don’t think she’s hooking anymore, Benn.”

“No? You said you didn’t know.”

“I don’t. Just a feeling I have after talking to her.”

“Then why’d she let this woman, this gambling junkie, move in with her?”

“Pressure,” I said. “Just a little. Keep her in line in case you backslide.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be just like Lassiter. Only I’m not gonna backslide. Never again.” He wiped the back of a grimy hand across his face, leaving a faint dark smear on one cheek. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I just jumped the gun about Ginger. Ah, God, I can’t stand the idea of her selling herself. It drives me crazy thinking about it.”

“She loves you, you love her. Give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“Yeah,” he said. Then he said, “Carol. She’ll know. Ginger don’t have no secrets from her.”

“Who’s Carol?”

“Her best friend. They’re like sisters. She hates my guts, not that I blame her.”

“What’s Carol’s last name? Where does she live?”

“Why you want to know that?”

“Maybe she knows something about what happened to Janice.”

“Yeah.” He put a hand out, not quite touching the sleeve of my jacket. “You ask her about Ginger, too, huh? Make sure about her, let me know what she says?”

“Sure. Put your mind at ease.”

“No lie? You’ll let me know one way or another?”

“I’ll let you know.”

He nodded. All the hardness had gone out of him; he looked relieved. And sad and hurting and lost and vulnerable-a man who had hit bottom and was clawing his way back up, inch by painful inch.

“Carol Brixon,” he said. “She’s a bartender at the Rickrack Lounge on Columbus. Day-shift, same as Ginger.”