Fever: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (10 page)

“There’s not that much. It could be anybody’s.” He massaged his face again. “Christ. You really think she’s dead?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure I care if she is … no, that’s not true, of course I care. I don’t know what I’m saying. I just want this nightmare to be over with.”

“What is it you want me to do, Mr. Krochek?”

“Find Janice. Find out what happened here.”

“I don’t know that I can do that. It may not be possible.”

“But you can try. You can try.”

His eyes pleaded with me. He was close to the edge of panic; you could see it in the twist of his expression, the tautness of his body, the compulsive face-rubbing. I didn’t much like the man—weak, selfish people leave me cold—but from his actions and emotional reactions I was pretty sure he wasn’t responsible for whatever had gone down here yesterday or last night. And he did seem to have some feelings left for his wife and her safety, despite all she’d put him through. I had sympathy for him, as I did for any poor
schmuck who found himself backed into a corner through the actions of others. I could not walk away from him, much as I would have liked to.

“I can try,” I said. “On three conditions.”

“What conditions?”

“First, that everything you’ve told me is the truth. If you lied about any of it, if you’re withholding anything, I’ll find out. And that’ll be the end of it.”

“I’ve told you the truth, I swear it. One hundred percent.”

“Second condition. You don’t clean up any of those bloodstains in the kitchen. Leave them just as they are. Cover them up with something if you can’t stand to look at them.”

“All right.”

“Third condition. Your wife may be dead; we both know that. If I find any conclusive evidence of foul play, or if her body turns up somewhere, I’m obligated to go straight to the police and tell them what I know. I could lose my license if I didn’t.”

“Where would that leave me?”

“With a choice. Do the right thing and I’ll back you up. Otherwise you’re on your own.”

He agonized over it, but not for long. “Agreed,” he said. Then, “So what do we do now?”

“Call the hospitals first. If she’s not in any of them, find out if any of your neighbors saw or heard anything and what time. Call me right away if there’s anything I should know—I’ll give you my cell phone number. After that, stay put for the rest of the day.”

“I don’t know if I can stand to be cooped up here any longer …”

“Force yourself. For all we know, your wife could walk in any minute. If that happens, or you hear from her, or if there are any calls for her, let me know right away.”

“What’ll you be doing?”

“The best I can,” I said, and let it go at that.

Before I left, I let Krochek give me five hundred dollars in cash and had him write me a check for another five hundred. Money isn’t everything, but on a lousy case like this, on a lousy hump day, I figured it was a matter of entitlement.

T
he 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.”