Fever(44)
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.”