Fever nd-33 Read online

  2

  You 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.

  She didn’t try to hide it. Apologized and made the usual empty promises about quitting, seeing a therapist that specialized in neurobiologic addictions, joining Gamblers Anonymous. Instead she kept on betting larger and larger sums-and kept right on losing.

  For a time she grew more clever about covering up the drain on their finances, but Krochek found out anyway and there was a big blowup. That was the first time she walked out on him. When she came back, he cut off her access to their various accounts. All that did was make her more devious. She began to pawn or sell jewelry and other possessions, to steal money out of his wallet. The cashing-in of one of their insurance policies led to another blowup, another walkout. More apologies, more empty promises. Forged checks this time, the probable secret borrowing from a loan shark, the phone call that Krochek swore was threatening. The final blowup, the final walkout. To finance this one, she’d sold her Lexus at a price well below Blue Book and everything in their house that was small enough and valuable enough to turn into quick cash.

  Her total losses over four years, as near as Krochek was able to estimate: more than $200,000.

  But for all of that, he claimed still to love her and to want to give her another chance. His prerogative, his money; we don’t have to agree with a client’s motives to take on a job. He knew going in that it was likely to be futile. Just find her, make sure she was all right, talk to her.

  I felt sorry for him. Sorry for her, too; she was sick and sick people deserve pity, not censure. And sorry for myself because now I had to go tell him that there was no more hope for their marriage and not much hope for her.

  Tamara had it right: people and their screwed-up lives.

  M itchell Krochek’s company, Five States Engineering, had its offices on Jack London Square in Oakland. I put in a call to him as soon as Tamara and I got back to the agency offices. He was in, but about to go into a meeting and not inclined to discuss his wife’s situation over the phone. Could we get together sometime after five o’clock? I said we could, and given the circumstances of what I had to tell him, I offered to drive over there rather than have him come to the city. We settled on 5:30 at the bar of a restaurant called the Ladderback.

  While I was talking to him, Tamara ran a check on the license plate number Jake Runyon had given her. Technically, private investigative agencies are no longer permitted access to Department of Motor Vehicles records; a high-profile Hollywood murder case several years ago had led to a new law that kept them sealed to all but city, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. But there are ways around any law, and if you use them sparingly and judiciously, we had no qualms about it. Ethical compromise. You do what you have to in order to work a case, but you don’t abuse your position of trust to clients or the public at large. The agency had a strict rule that all information gleaned through quasi-legal corner-cutting methods was kept confidential.

  Tamara had established a DMV pipeline; she already had the information by the time I finished talking to Krochek. The plate number and the new Cadillac belonged to Carl M. Lassiter, with a San Francisco addresss-Russian Hill, no les
s. Tamara ran a cursory check on Lassiter without turning up anything. No personal history, no employment record. She asked another contact, a friend of hers, Felicia, who worked in SFPD’s computer department, for a quick file search on Lassiter’s name. No criminal record, no outstanding warrants of any kind. Mystery man.

  That was as far as she took it. We could probably find out who Lassiter was with a deep background check, or through other sources if he was a bookie or loan shark or worked for one or the other, but there was no need unless the client specifically requested the information. We’d found Janice Krochek, we’d talked to her, and she didn’t want to go home again-the job we’d been hired to do was finished. It was her business how badly she was jammed up with loan sharks or gambling interests. If Mitchell Krochek felt otherwise and wanted to try to contact Lassiter or Lassiter’s employer, even without her consent, that was up to him. But if he asked me, I’d try to discourage him. In the long run it was a dead end proposition. Just like his marriage. Just like his wife’s fever.

  K rochek was already waiting in the crowded Ladderback bar when I walked in. I’d left the city early, because of the heavy eastbound commute traffic on the Bay Bridge, but it hadn’t been too bad tonight; it was only 5:15 when I got to Jack London Square, fifteen minutes ahead of meeting time. He’d been there for a while, too, judging from the fact that he’d gotten a table and from the array of glassware in front of him-two bottles of Beck’s and two shot glasses, one empty, one half-full.

  His greeting was solemn; so was his handshake. Handsome guy, Krochek-blond, tanned, the tennis-and-handball type, but he didn’t look so fit tonight. His lean, ascetic face was sorrowful, shadowed under the eyes, etched with stress lines. Working too hard, worrying too much.

  He said, “So you found her. And the news isn’t good,” repeating what I’d told him on the phone. “She doesn’t want me to know where she’s living.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Refuses to see me, try to work things out.”

  “No reconciliation, she said.”

  “Adamant about that, I suppose.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “She use the D word?”

  “Divorce? Yes. Seems to be what she wants.”

  “Has she seen a lawyer?”

  “Apparently not yet.”

  “But she’s going to.”

  “Yes. Soon, she said.”

  “Throwing all her money down the gambling rathole, that’s why she hasn’t found herself some sleazebag already,” Krochek said. “She’s already blown what she got from selling her car by now, sure as hell.”

  “She didn’t say anything about that.”

  “What’s she doing for cash until she can squeeze more out of me? Or can’t you tell me that, either?”

  “Unverified, so I’d rather not say.”

  A waitress stopped by the table. I ordered a bottle of Sierra Nevada. Krochek said, “Another Beck’s, skip the whiskey this time.” That was good; at least he wasn’t going to sit here and get maudlin drunk and make things even more difficult for both of us.

  When the waitress went away I said, “You haven’t asked how your wife is.”

  “All right, how is she?”

  “Healthy enough. Holding herself together.”

  “Tense, angry, fidgety?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Drinking?”

  “Not in front of us.”

  “Sure she is. Means she’s betting and losing heavily. Janice doesn’t touch a drop until she starts losing.”

  “I think she may be in debt to a loan shark.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.” He frowned. “You mean she’s being threatened again?”

  “She says no, but there’s a good chance of it.”

  “Christ, she’s stupid! You have any idea who he is?”

  “Not exactly. The name Carl Lassiter mean anything to you?”

  “Lassiter, Lassiter… no. Who’s he?”

  “We’re not sure. Could be a shark or an enforcer for one.”

  “Terrific. Enforcer. A legbreaker, you mean.”

  “Not necessarily. Collection by coercion works just as well.”

  “Can you find out who he works for?”

  “Probably. But if you’re thinking of making direct contact to arrange to pay off her debts…”

  “I’m not. Not anymore. It wouldn’t stop her from divorcing me, now that her mind’s made up. I don’t want a divorce. I can’t afford it.”

  Our drinks arrived. I had a little of my ale; he sat there staring into his half-full shot glass.

  “Have you seen a lawyer, Mr. Krochek?”

  “Yes, of course. He tells me there’s nothing I can do, legally, if she files. Goddamn no fault, community property laws.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She’ll get half of everything. What’s left in the brokerage and savings accounts. Half of what the house and property are worth. I love that house, I worked my ass off to buy it and furnish it.” He tossed the whiskey down, grimaced, and slugged a chaser from one of the Beck’s bottles. “Why the hell did I ever marry her?” he said, more to himself than to me.

  All of this was a different tune than the one he’d sung in my office. Then it had been the worried husband wanting his damaged wife back so he could protect her and help her deal with her addiction. Now it was the woe-is-me, she’s-going-to-take-me-for-half-of-everything lament. Janice Krochek had said he was no saint, that he was motivated by self-interest; she knew him, all right. Not that you could blame him, really, after all the financial losses he’d already suffered, but still it lowered him a notch or two in my estimation.

  “You’d think the divorce courts would take something like a gambling sickness into consideration,” he said. “All the crap she’s pulled, all the money she’s blown already. But my attorney says no. The law says no fault, community property, that’s it. No extenuating circumstances. She gets half of whatever I can’t hide from the shyster she’ll hire, and I get screwed.”

  Down another notch. Maybe you couldn’t blame him for hiding assets, either, but it’s illegal, and his telling me about it, making me an unwitting possessor of guilty knowledge, didn’t set well.

  “Is that fair?” he said bitterly. “After all she put me through?”

  “Life can be unfair, Mr. Krochek.”

  “I don’t need platitudes,” he said. “I need a way out. Or at least an edge of some kind. I don’t suppose there’s any way I can convince you to tell me where she’s staying?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “I’d pay well for the information.”

  I let that pass. He was starting to piss me off.

  “Isn’t there anything more you can do?”

  “Such as what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “talk to her again, try to arrange a meeting so we can work something out before the lawyers get into it.”

  “I could make the effort, but it would be a waste of your money. I doubt she’d agree to another discussion, and even if she did, there’s nothing I could say that would change her mind. It’s made up, she made that plain.”

  “Bitch,” he said. Then he said, “All right, can’t you get something on her, something I can use in court? She’s running around with lowlives, she could be mixed up in something illegal, couldn’t she?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You don’t think she’s mixed up in anything we could use?”

  “I meant that it’s not an investigative course we’d care to pursue.”

  “Why the hell not? You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

  “With a selective list of services. Digging up dirt for use in divorce cases isn’t one of them.”

  “So don’t dig it up. Couldn’t you just happen to stumble onto something somewhere? You know the kind of thing it would take-”

  I was already on my feet. “End of conversation, Mr. Krochek. And end of our working arrangement.”
/>   “Wait a minute. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… Look, I’m desperate here, you can see that. Grabbing at straws.”

  “I understand and I sympathize, up to a point. You just passed that point. Good luck.”

  “For God’s sake…”

  I said, “You’ll get our final report in the mail,” and put my back to him and walked out.

  3

  JAKE RUNYON

  He had a heavy caseload that week. The Krochek skip-trace, an employee background check for Benefield Industries, a suspicious wrongful death claim for Western Maritime and Life, and a domestic case that Tamara had taken on pro bono. That was the way he preferred it-the fuller the plate, the better. Weeks like this one, he could put in a fair amount of overtime as well as a full workday. He seldom asked for overtime pay, or even mentioned the extra hours; meals, gas and oil, and parking fees went onto the various expense accounts, that was all. Money wasn’t the reason he worked long and hard. It was the activity, the need for movement and business details to occupy his time and his mind. Downtime meant the cold, empty apartment on Ortega Street and old movies on TV that did little to keep him from thinking about Colleen and the two decades they’d had together, or feeling the bitter frustration of his estrangement from Joshua.

  His life wouldn’t be quite so bad now if Joshua would understand that his mother’s poisonous vilification had been a product of alcoholism and revenge and had no basis in fact; unbend a little, make room for some forgiveness. But that wasn’t going to happen. For a time, while Runyon was investigating the gay-bashing of Joshua’s unfaithful lover, he’d thought that there was a chance of establishing cordial relations, if not a reconciliation, but Andrea’s brainwashing had been too complete. No contact in months now, his few phone calls unanswered; the one time he’d gone to Joshua’s apartment, the partner had refused to let him in. Hopeless. If it weren’t for the job, the support he’d gotten from Bill and Tamara, his move down here from Seattle would’ve been a total waste.