Fever: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (2 page)

We flashed our licenses.

“Mitch must be desperate,” she said. “Is he out there with you?”

“No. Mind if we talk inside?”

She said, “Of course I mind,” but the protest had no teeth in it; the chain rattled again, and I heard it drop down against the inside panel. When I pushed on the door, it opened inward and she was walking away across the room in quick, jerky strides. Tamara and I went in and I shut the door.

Two-room apartment, bedroom and sitting room. Not large, not tidy, the furniture old and scratched up, the carpet threadbare. The dominant smell in there was tobacco smoke, thick and acrid; my chest tightened almost at once. Janice Krochek sat down on an open, unmade sofa bed and reached for a package of Newports on an end table.

I said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t smoke.”

She said, “I live here, you don’t,” and put one of the cancer sticks in her mouth and fired it with a cheap lighter. “How’d you find me?”

“It wasn’t too hard,” Tamara said.

“You don’t look like detectives. Either of you.”

“You don’t look like what you are, either.”

I gave Tamara a warning look. She’s young and she can be less than tactful; she needs to work on her people skills. We’d decided that she should do most of the talking, woman to woman, but if necessary I’d have to take over. There was nothing to be gained in allowing the situation to turn adversarial.

Janice Krochek laughed—an empty, sardonic sound. She was not at ease sitting there. High-strung type, but it was more than that—a sense of nervous expectancy, not for what we had to say to her but for something else. As late as
it was, she might have just gotten out of bed. She wore a loose man’s shirt over a pair of jeans, her feet were bare, and her short brown hair was uncombed. She was thirty-three, but in the dim light, and without makeup, she looked older; you could see the stress lines around her mouth and eyes. Addiction will do that to you, no matter what type of addiction it happens to be.

She said, “Why did Mitch hire you? He couldn’t possibly want me back after all this time.”

Tamara said, “He could and he does.”

“Well, then, he’s a damn fool.”

“Lots of damn fools running around these days.”

That didn’t bother her, either. “I suppose he told you all about me.”

“He told us enough.”

“All about my ‘sickness.’ That’s what he calls it.”

“What do you call it?”

“The sweetest high there is,” she said. It was not a natural or spontaneous response, but the kind of phrase a person hears somewhere and likes enough to appropriate and repeat as their own. “He wants it cured. I don’t.”

“Even though you keep losing, getting in deeper and deeper.”

“I don’t care about that. The money isn’t important, winning or losing. Either of you ever gamble for high stakes? Poker, craps, whatever?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t understand any more than Mitch does. The action, the excitement … there’s nothing else like it. I’d rather gamble than fuck.”

That last was intended to shock, but neither of us reacted. Tamara said, “One supports the other now, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We know what you’ve been doing for money since you left home.”

I nudged Tamara this time, from where Janice Krochek couldn’t see me doing it. Krochek started to say something—and there was a sudden melodic jangling from across the room, the kind of programmed tune fragment that substitutes for ringing in modern cell phones. She came off the sofa and went after it blur-fast, like a cat uncoiling to chase a mouse. The brown eyes were avid—the first real animation she’d shown. Before the phone rang again she had it out of her handbag and flipped open. She said, “Yes?” and then listened with her body turned away from us.

The conversation didn’t last long. I heard her say, “That’s too bad, I was hoping … okay, if that’s the way it has to be. Later, then? Right.” She dropped the phone back into the bag, and when she turned, the avidity and animation were gone. She recrossed the room in the same jerky strides as when she’d let us in.

She didn’t sit down again. Bent for another Newport, blew a thick stream of smoke, and said through it, “Well? What happens now?”

“That’s up to you, Mrs. Krochek,” Tamara said.

“Stanley, Ms. Janice Stanley. I like that name better.”

“You’re still married to the man.”

“You can’t force me to go back to him.”

“That’s right, we can’t.”

“Already tell him where to find me?”

“No. You want us to?”

“Christ, no. It’s all over between us. I made that clear to him before I left.”

“Man’s willing to pay all your outstanding debts if you give the marriage one more try.”

“Sure he is, so I won’t divorce him. That’s the real reason he hired you. Lot cheaper for him to pay off my debts than give me half of everything he’s got.”

“Everything he’s got left,” Tamara said pointedly.

“It was mine as much as his, then and now. You think he’s some kind of saint?” Bitter and angry now. “Well, he’s not. Far from it. He’s looking out for number one, same as I am.”

“You don’t believe he wants what’s best for you?”

“I don’t care if he does or doesn’t. I like to gamble. And I like my freedom.”

“How about selling your body? You like that, too?”

If there was any shame left in the woman, she had it well hidden behind the wall of her compulsion. She said flatly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Real hard way to support yourself and that habit of yours.”

“What I do for money until the divorce is my business.”

“Not when it’s against the law.”

“So what’re you saying? You’re going to report me to the police? You can’t prove I’ve been hooking and neither can they.” “Not unless they catch you at it.”

Time for me to step in, try a different tack. I said, “Have you seen a lawyer, Mrs. Krochek?”

“Lawyer? About the divorce? No, not yet.”

“Why not, if you’re so dead set on it?”

“That’s my business.”

“It doesn’t cost that much to hire one.”

“Never mind about that. If Mitch doesn’t file, I will—soon. You tell him that.”

“How much do you owe Lassiter?”

She didn’t like that question; it made her even more edgy. She took a quick drag on her cigarette before she said, “Who?”

“The man who came to see you a little while ago.”

“How do you know about that? Spying on me?”

“It’s a reasonable question.”

“I don’t owe him anything.”

“Whoever he works for then. Loan shark?”

“That’s none of your damn business.”

“The same shark you borrowed from before? The one who threatened you?”

A muscle jumped in her cheek. “Mitch’s fantasy. He listened in on a phone call and misinterpreted what he heard, that’s all.”

“That’s not what he says.”

“Well, I’m telling you the way it was.”

“So no threats then and none now. No pressure.”

“That’s right. No heat at all.”

“Okay. Your business, your life.”

“Now you’re getting it. You going to tell Mitch where I’m living or not?”

“Not without your consent.”

“I figured as much. Suppose he tries to pry it out of you? Offers to pay you extra?”

“We don’t operate that way.”

“So what are you going to tell him?”

“We found you, you seem to be in reasonably good health, you say you’re not in any danger, you don’t want to reconcile, and you’re going to file for divorce any day.”

“And to leave me the hell alone from now on.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Exactly what I want. So go tell him.”

I laid a business card, the one with both my name and Tamara’s on it, on the stained top of a cabinet. “In case you have second thoughts or want to talk some more.”

“I won’t. Now get out.”

Gladly, I thought. The damn smoke in there was bothering my lungs, making my throat feel scratchy. As soon as Tamara and I were out the door, Krochek came over and put the deadbolt and the chain back on. Locking herself away in her carcinogenic cocoon, to nurse her fever and wait for the phone to ring again.

In the elevator Tamara said, “Well, that was fun.”

“Yeah. Pretty much what I expected.”

“You know what I wanted to do in there? Bitch-slap that woman upside the head.”

“Wouldn’t have done any good. Hitting somebody with her kind of sickness never does.”

“Guess not. I didn’t do such a good job on the woman-to-woman thing, did I.”

“No, but I didn’t do much better.”

“You think she really believes all that stuff she said? About the sweetest high and not wanting to be cured?”

“Convinced herself it’s what she wants. She’s a textbook case.”

“She was lying about nobody threatening her.”

“Lying or pretending. She didn’t seem scared.”

“Riding for a big fall, you ask me. Straight down the toilet.”

“It’s her life,” I said. “She’s the only one who can save it.”

Y
ou hear a lot these days about drug addiction and alcohol addiction, but not so much about the equally widespread and growing problem of compulsive gambling. I’d come into contact with it peripherally over the years—when you’ve been an investigator as long as I have, you brush up against just about every kind of addiction, felony, misdemeanor, social issue, and human being there is—but I hadn’t confronted it head on until Mitchell Krochek walked into the agency offices eight days ago. What he’d told me, and what Tamara had found out on an Internet search, amounted to a real eye-opener.

Gambling is a national pastime and a national mania. Las Vegas, Reno, the entire state of Nevada. Nearly two hundred and fifty Native American casinos on tribal lands in twenty-two states and more being built every year. Upwards of eighty riverboat and dockside casinos in six states. Horse tracks, dog tracks. Twenty-four-hour card rooms and private poker clubs. The Super Bowl and the World

Series and the NCAA basketball tournament and fantasy sports leagues and any number of other sporting events that fatten the bank accounts of legal sports books and illegal bookie operations in every city of any size in the country. State lotteries. Dozens of online sites devoted to poker and other games of chance designed to separate bettors from their hard-earned money. Even those old standbys, slot machines, were making a comeback thanks to the budget woes of local governments.

All but two states in the union have some form of legalized gambling, with an estimated annual take for the industry of $75 billion. California alone approaches $15 billion in annual gambling revenue, owing in large part to the sixty Native American casinos currently operating in the state, with more to come.

That’s a lot of lure and a lot of money. Most people who succumb to one form of gambling or another are casual bettors—people like me, who play poker now and then, who buy lottery tickets or spend a few days a year making the rounds of the Vegas glitz palaces. Then there are the professionals, the high rollers, who earn a living from tournaments or private games and who have learned when to ride a streak and when to quit. And then there are the addicts like Janice Krochek. Men and women who don’t have the skill to consistently beat the odds, who can’t quit when they’re losing, whose constant need for the thrill of the bet is as addictive as any drug. The estimated number of them is staggering—as many as ten million adults in the U.S. alone, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. Combined, adult pathological gamblers and
problem gamblers cost California nearly a billion dollars annually.

Most start out in small ways: lottery tickets, poker games, a day trip to one of the tracks, a weekend getaway to some casino that features electronic slots and bingo games. A few dollars here, a few dollars there, and enough wins to whet their appetites for more. That was how it had been for Janice Krochek.

She hadn’t had the fever when she married Mitchell Krochek eight years ago. Hadn’t had any interest in or experience with gambling at all. He’d been the gambler then, in a mild and controlled way. He liked to play blackjack and the horses once in a while; he’d introduced her to the bright lights of the Las Vegas strip, the weekend races at Bay Meadows, and the county fair circuit. Just occasional innocent fun for both of them. Until she got hooked.

Most compulsive gamblers have high underlying levels of negative emotionality: nervousness, anger, impulsiveness, feelings of being misunderstood and victimized, lack of self-discipline. Janice Krochek had all of those traits, plus what doctors call an intense dopamine cycle and an uncontrollable desire to experience the thrill that high-stakes betting provides. The psychological term is “chasing the high.” Same principle, in effect, as a nymphomaniac chasing orgasm.

It was a while before Krochek realized how bad her gambling mania was. He had a fairly high-paying job as a consulting engineer and had invested in an aggressive portfolio of stocks and bonds, and he didn’t keep a careful check on account balances or expenditures; she had a full complement
of credit cards and did most of the bill-paying. Easy enough in the beginning for her to indulge her growing compulsion. Horses were her initial passion. She made regular visits to Bay Meadows, where she’d pore over
the Racing Form
and bet heavily on every race there as well as races at Hollywood Park and other tracks—all made easy by electronic touch screens, banks of TV screens in the trackside bar, and ATMs to supply her with more cash since she wasn’t much good at picking winners or playing odds. But it didn’t matter to her how often or how much she lost; the action was everything.

But Internet gambling was what really hooked her. Stud poker, Texas Hold ’Em, you name it, and all done quickly and quietly from the privacy of her own home. Instant gratification. And a pervasive trap of steady losses and increasing outlay to try to recoup. It didn’t take long for the trap to close tight around her; inside of a year she dropped nearly fifty thousand dollars. That was when her husband noticed and confronted her.