“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.
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.”
“Sure she is. This woman you’re looking for, you say she’s got the fever and Ginger took her in. She wouldn’t do that if she wasn’t hooking for QCL again.”
“Why would she start hooking again?”
Smack. Smack. “She promised me, she swore she wouldn’t let them pressure her anymore.” Smack. “Goddamn it. I make enough now, I’m handling the payments. What the hell’s the matter with her?”
“How much do you owe them?”
