Fever(43)

I went back into my office and called Kinsella’s private number at the Blacklight. Somebody who didn’t give his name answered, said that Mr. Kinsella wouldn’t be in until later. I gave him my name and asked for a callback, ASAP. A small favor, I said, that might turn out to be mutual. I don’t like dealing with human parasites like Kinsella; if it were up to me, the fat son of a bitch would be occupying a prison cell with the bail jumper. But sometimes you have to wallow in the gutters they live and work in to get what you need for the greater good. Detective work is a little like modern politics in that respect.


Tamara came into my office a short time later, while I was wrapping up a report on a routine skip-trace. Runyon and Chavez had both gone and I still hadn’t heard back from Kinsella.

“QCL, Incorporated,” she said. “Las Vegas, sure enough. QCL stands for Quick Cash Loans.”

“Surface-swimming sharks.”

“Yeah, and their meat is the gambling industry. From all I can find, they specialize in loans to gamblers.”

“The steady-loser type. Problem gamblers who can’t get a loan anywhere else.”

“Right. At humongous interest rates.”

“Who runs it?”

“Listed CEO is a dude named Adam O’dell. Nothing on him yet.”

“Carl Lassiter?”

“On the Board of Directors, along with five others—none of ’em with Vegas addresses. San Francisco, L.A., San Diego, Phoenix, Seattle, Denver.”

“So that’s the way they work it,” I said. “Not too hard to figure the prostitution angle now. Loan cash to compulsives like Janice Krochek, and when they can’t pay off on their own, force them into prostitution to do it.”

“And if they’re men—their wives and girlfriends.”

“Yeah. Coercion or threat of bodily harm.”

“Ginger Benn?”

“Could be. The johns, most of them anyway, are high rollers who visit Vegas regularly and live or have business interests in the cities you named. Men like Jorge Quilmes.”

“Some sweet little racket,” Tamara said.

“Some vicious racket, and not so little. Question is, how violent are QCL’s methods? How far will they go when somebody balks or steps out of line?”

“Carl Lassiter can answer that.”

“So can somebody else, maybe. Ginger’s husband, Jason Benn.”





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.