“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.”
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.
