Fever

17

The big hype is that cell phones are one of the wonders of the modern age. Bells and whistles galore. You can talk to others, receive voice and text messages, send text messages, take photographs, play music and games, access your e-mail, and, for all I know, track the progress of herds of elephants on the African veldt. All in one self-contained little unit that fits in your shirt pocket and the palm of your hand. Some people seem to worship the things; they’re the ones you see every day on streets and highways and sidewalks and in public buildings with cells glued to their ears and rapt, satisfied expressions on their faces. Instant telecommunication orgasms delivered by your choice of jaunty, sappy tunes and other fun electronic noises.

Not for me.

For me, they’re a sometimes useful business tool and a pain in the ass.

No photograph has ever been taken or text message sent on mine. I don’t have e-mail to access-Tamara and Kerry take care of my needs on that score-or interest in any of the other options. And I’ve never felt the desire for constant connection to my loved ones, business acquaintances, casual friends, and total strangers. A phone, in my old-fashioned world, is an instrument that provides necessary-emphasis on the word necessary- access to another person for a definite purpose. It is not a toy. It is not a source of public auditory (or visual) masturbation. Above all, it should not be, but too often is, an annoying, attention-distracting, accident-causing, self-indulgent plaything used at others’ expense.

Two other negative aspects of cell phones. The battery usually runs down when you need it the most and you’re someplace far away from the charger, and the thing then beeps and burbles at you until you shut it off-if you can figure out how to shut it off. And it invariably rings at the most inconvenient time. All phones ring at inconvenient times now and then, but cells seem to be the worst offenders by far. Mine is, anyway. Mine is controlled by gremlins. If I’m at the office or at home, or someplace waiting quietly for a call, it never rings. It seems to go off only when I’m in the car driving. If I get ten calls a week, that’s when nine of them will come in. This doesn’t seem to bother most drivers; you see them everywhere with one hand clapped to an ear, mouths moving like mental cases muttering to themselves in locked rooms. There was a new law in California against this, as there is in New York and other states, but it had yet to be enacted and even when it was, the cell phone junkies would ignore it and the law would play hell trying to enforce it. Once you give people a fancy new toy, you’d better not try to take it away from them; it produces tantrums, and in adults tantrums can sometimes be accompanied by guns, knives, and other deadly weapons.

What set me off on this frustrated internal rant was not one, not two, not three, but four incoming calls while I was making the cross-city drive from the Outer Mission to North Beach. Time-consuming, every one, because I refuse to talk while driving and so I had to pull over each time to answer. I could have let the calls go onto voice mail, but I’m not made that way, either. Phone rings, you pick up. Might be important. You never know.

I was on Mission near Army, headed east, when the first one came in. Mitchell Krochek. He’d gone to his house on his lunch hour, he said. Still no sign of his wife, still no messages. Had I found out anything yet? No? He started in on another of his this-waiting-is-driving-me-crazy laments, and I cut him off, not as tactfully as I might have, in the middle of it.

No sooner had I pulled out into traffic and beat a yellow light at the intersection than the phone rang again. Tamara this time. She said, “Guess who just called?”

“The idiot in the White House. He wants my input on gay marriage.”

“Funny, but wrong. Guess again.”

“Enough guessing. Who called?”

“Carl Lassiter.”

“Well, well,” I said. “So word got back to him. Quilmes, probably.”

“Looks that way.”

“What’d he have to say?”

“Wanted to talk to you. I told him you were out of the office and unavailable. So he asked me why we were investigating him and QCL, Inc. Not hostile-real polite and businesslike. I told him we weren’t, just that their names’d come up in the course of another investigation.”

“And he asked what that was and you said it was confidential.”

“You got it. Wanted to know when could he see you. I told him I didn’t know, I’d have to call him back. Gave me his cell number and said ASAP.”

“That’s all right with me. But let’s dangle him a little. Tell him not until five o’clock, so he has to fight the rush hour traffic.”

“Here?”

“Nowhere else. Make him come to us.”

The third call arrived about four minutes later, as I was trying to maneuever around a stalled Muni bus on Mission and Twenty-second. The thing jangled five times before I could get around the bus and into a yellow zone on the next block. I growled a hello, and Kerry said, “Well, don’t bite my head off.”

“Sorry. I’m in the car fighting traffic. What’s up?”

Nothing was up. The late-scheduled meeting at Bates and Carpenter had been canceled, so she’d be able to pick up Emily at her music class after all. Okay by me. Parenthood for the first time at our ages carries a lot more responsibility, compromise, and time-juggling than you consider going in, even when one of the parents is supposed to be semiretired. Semiretirement, for me these days, seemed to mean working as many hours as I had when I ran the agency single-handed.

I was downtown when the damn phone went off for the fourth time. Somebody from the Blacklight Tavern who didn’t give his name. One-line message: Mr. Kinsella was in his office now and he’d see me anytime before three o’clock, the sooner the better, he was a busy man.

Yeah. Me, too. But all right. North Beach and Carol Brixon could go on hold. I don’t like jumping when men like Kinsella snap their fingers, but I was the one currying favor here. Bite the bullet and get it over with.

T he Blacklight Tavern was on San Bruno Avenue, off Bayshore west of Candlestick Park. One of the city’s older residential neighborhoods, working-class, like the one I’d grown up in. During World War II, and while the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard humped along for twenty-five years afterward, it had been a reasonably decent section to raise a family in. But then the shipyard shut down, and mostly black Hunters Point began to deterioriate into a mean-streets ghetto. Now, with the gang-infested Point on one side and the drug deli that McLaren Park had degenerated into on the other, the neighborhood had suffered badly. Signs of decay were everywhere: boarded-up storefronts, bars on windows and doors, houses disfigured by graffiti and neglect, homeless people and drunks huddled in doorways.

Kinsella’s domain fit right in. From a distance it looked like something that had been badly scorched in a fire. Black-painted facade, smoke-tinted windows, black sign with neon letters that would blaze white after dark but looked burned-out in the daylight. No graffiti. None of the neighborhood taggers would dare deface those black walls. Nick Kinsella had a big, bad rep out here; even the drug-dealing gangs left him and his people alone.

I parked in front and locked the car out of habit. It was safe enough here, this close to the Blacklight; in the next block it would’ve been fair game for anybody who thought it contained something tradeable for a rock of crack or a jug of cheap wine. Inside, the place might’ve been any downscale neighborhood bar populated by the usual array of daytime drinkers. A couple of the men and one of the women gave me bleary-eyed once-overs, decided I wasn’t anybody worth knowing, hustling, or hassling, and turned their attention back to the focal point of their lives. The bartender, a barrel-shaped guy with a head like a redwood burl and a surly manner, was the same one who’d been on duty the last time I was here. If he recognized me when I bellied up, he gave no indication of it. All he said was, “Yeah?”

“Nick Kinsella. He’s expecting me.”

“Name?”

I told him. He said, “Just a minute,” and used the phone on the backbar. When he came back he said, “Okay. First door past the ladies’ crapper.”

“I know where it is.”

I went and knocked on the door and walked in. Mostly barren office that reeked of cigar smoke and had two men in it, Kinsella and one of his enforcers, a lopsided, balding guy with the build of a wrestler whose name I didn’t know. Kinsella sat bulging behind a cherrywood desk. He’d grown a third chin since I’d last seen him, added another junk-food inch or two to his waistline.

“Long time, Nick.”

“Long time,” he agreed. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Short, like always.”

He thought that was funny. The enforcer didn’t crack a smile.

Kinsella said, “So what brings you around this time? Don’t tell me you got money troubles?”

“Not your kind.”

“So?”

“Just some information. Maybe I can give you some in return.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“About one of your competitors.”

One bushy eyebrow lifted. “Who’d that be?”

“QCL, Incorporated.”

“Never heard of ’em.”

“Carl Lassiter.”

“Never heard of him.”

Good. Trade material. It’s always easier to deal with the slimeball element when you know something they don’t. I said, “All right if I sit down?”

He waved a fat hand at the only other chair. “Sure, sure, sit.” And I when I was on the chair, “So what about this guy Lassiter?”

“He works for QCL. Quick Cash Loans. It’s a Vegas outfit.”

“Vegas?”

“With branch reps in half a dozen other cities, including S.F. High-interest loans to gamblers and prostitution on the side.”

“The hell you say.”

“So this is all news to you.”

“Yeah, news. Tell me more about this outfit.”

I told him all I knew. He soaked it up; you could almost see the wheels turning in his head.

“Sounds like a smart operation,” he said. “Low pressure, no overhead. Big profits, huh?”

“Probably.”

“But they only work the gambling trade. That don’t cut much into my profits, not the way they work it. No real competition.”

“But you’re glad to know about them.”

“Oh, yeah. Always glad to know about the competition.”

“And maybe if you put out the word, you could find out a little more.”

“Maybe. That what you’re after, more info on this QCL?”

“One of the reasons I’m here, yeah.”

“What’s the other one?”

“Different case. One of your customers.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Brian Youngblood.”

“Names,” Kinsella said. “I got a lot of customers, I’m no good with names.”

“Black guy in his twenties, works in computers, lives on Duncan Street. Five-figure borrow.”

His face showed me nothing. He leaned back in his chair, clasped his sausage fingers behind his neck. “Maybe I know him, maybe I don’t. How come you’re so interested?”

“He’s in over his head. We’re trying to find out how deep.”

“Working for him?”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“Confidential, Nick.”

“Better not be if it’s got something to do with me.”

I hesitated. But you couldn’t pry information out of Kinsella by holding out on him. “All right,” I said. “His mother.”

Kinsella’s lips twitched. Don’t laugh, you bastard, I thought. He didn’t; he sat forward again. “I don’t like to talk about my customers. Bad for business.”

“Only if word gets out. I’m a businessman, too, Nick. You know I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

“Just a couple of business types schmoozing, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“No hassles?”

“Not from me. Just trying to help a client, that’s all.”

He thought about it, shrugged, and said, “Okay. So what you want to know?”

“Amount of the initial borrow, if he came back for more, how much he’s into you for now. And whether something can be worked out in the way of accident insurance.”

“Kid already have an accident, did he?”

“Just last week. Bruises and a broken rib. Laid him up for a couple of days.”

“That’s too bad,” Kinsella said. “But you got to expect something like that when you don’t pay attention to your debts.”

The fat son of a bitch was enjoying himself, playing this little game. Maybe someday I’d have a chance to play a different kind of game with him; it was a good thought and I held onto it. “The original nut,” I said. “How much?”

“I’d have to check my records.”

“Would you do that?”

He grinned at me. There was a computer on his desk: Nick Kinsella, the ultra-modern bloodsucker. He fired it up, looked over at me-I turned my head the other way-and then did some tapping on the keyboard. Pretty soon he said, “Five figures, right. Ten K.”

“That’s a big nut. What’d he use for collateral?”

“Personal property and income records. I had one of my people take a look, I was satisfied.”

“What does he owe you now, with the vig and the missed payments? Thirteen, fourteen K?”

“Five.”

“… Wait a minute-five thousand? How’d he get it down that far?”

Kinsella’s smug grin flashed again. “Your boy walked in here couple of days ago, laid eighty-five hundred on me. Cash. He’s a good boy, your boy. Teach him a lesson, he learns real quick. He don’t need any accident insurance, not for a while anyhow.”

“Where’d he get the eighty-five hundred?”

“Who knows? He don’t say, I don’t ask.”

Not from another shark, I thought, not given the size of the original nut from Nick and the fact that Kinsella had had to send out an enforcer to collect overdue payments. Loan sharks are like their saltwater relatives: when one spills some bad blood, the rest smell it and keep their distance.

“What about the five-thousand balance?” I asked.

“What about it?”

“If his source is dry, he’ll start missing payments again. Then he will need that insurance.”

“Not if he shows up next week with the full five K plus the week’s interest.”

“He told you he was going to do that?”

“Guaranteed it.” Kinsella laughed. “Swore it, in fact. You want to know what he swore it on?”

“No.”

He told me anyway. “His mother. Your boy swore it on his love for his sweet old mama.”