Fever: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (12 page)

Pretty soon he said, “I fly to San Francisco once a year for business purposes, but not always directly from Buenos Aires. I often spend a few days in Las Vegas.”

“The acquaintance who arranged your date with Janice wouldn’t happen to be headquartered there, would he?”

“That is of no consequence. I still fail to see how my recreational activities are connected to the disappearance of this young woman.”

“Janice is a gambler. A compulsive gambler. That’s why she sells her body—to pay for her habit and her debts.”

“A pity. But what connection does this have to me?”

“Do you gamble while you’re in San Francisco?”

“Seldom,” Quilmes said. “Not at all on this visit.”

“Do you know any gamblers here?”

Another slight hesitation before he said, “I do not.” Territory he didn’t want to be breached. He finished his drink, placed his hands flat on the table. The planes of his face had a solidified look, like skin molded too tight over bone. “I did not meet Janice at a gambling establishment. I had never seen her before Saturday night, as I told you. I know nothing of her life or her disappearance. Are you satisfied now?”

“Unless you have anything more to tell me.”

He said with a kind of harsh dignity, “I have allowed myself to be stripped naked in front of a stranger. There is nothing more for you to see or know.”

“I hope not, Señor Quilmes. Thanks for your time.” The black eyes followed me as I got to my feet, moved away. I could feel them on my back, the cold hate in them, all the way out of the lounge.

I
t was nearly five by the time I got back to the agency. Tamara was alone in her office, involved with somebody on the phone. I closed the connecting door between our offices, sat down at my desk. Time to check in with Mitchell Krochek.

He must have been draped over his phone; he answered in the middle of the first ring. He sounded less frantic than he had when I’d left him earlier. Booze was the calming influence; he didn’t exactly slur his words, but they had a kind of liquidy glide. Yes, he’d followed my instructions, stayed home all day. For nothing. He hadn’t heard from Janice or anybody else; no calls, no visitors.

“I talked to some of the neighbors,” he said. “Made up a story to explain why I was asking. None of them saw Janice or anybody else around here on Tuesday. I even called her sister in Bakersfield. They’re not close, but I thought maybe … you know. Ellen hasn’t heard from her in months.”

“Did your wife ever mention a company called QCL, Incorporated?”

He repeated the name. “I don’t think so. No, never heard of it. What kind of company is it?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Then why’re you asking me about it?”

“Carl Lassiter either works for QCL or owns it.” That was as much as I was going to tell him at this juncture. If he
needed to know about his wife’s prostitution, I’d give him the information when the time came.

“You talk to this man Lassiter?” Krochek asked.

“Not yet.”

“Crissake, why not? He must be the one who beat her up-”

“Not necessarily. And he doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with what happened in your kitchen.”

“Who the hell else then?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to find out,” I said. “I’ve asked you this before, but are you sure you don’t know any of her gambling associates? Any local poker club or casino where she was a regular?”

“Positive,” Krochek said. “She never talked about it. Hell, I didn’t want to know any of those people or places. Why should I? I couldn’t make them stop her from throwing my money away.”

“Would any of her friends know? The nongambling variety, I mean.”

“I doubt it. She cut them off, what few she had, when she caught that goddamn fever of hers.”

“Call them, see if they can tell you anything. Anything at all that might help.”

“All right.”

“One more question. You and your wife made trips to Las Vegas together. Do you know if she went there alone after she got hooked?”

“Yeah. Once, at least, a couple of years ago. Supposed to be visiting an aunt in Seattle for a few days, but she went to Vegas instead. I found the used airline ticket in the trash.”

After we rang off, I opened the connecting door and poked my head into Tamara’s office. She was off the phone and she had a few things to tell me.

“No QCL, Inc. registered in California,” she said. “No address, either, except for Carl Lassiter’s on the Cadillac registration. Could be just a dummy name he uses. Or else he’s a local rep for an out-of-state company.”

“Try Nevada. Las Vegas, specifically.”

“Why Las Vegas?”

I told her about my conversation with Quilmes. “He goes to Vegas regularly and I got the impression he knows Lassiter and QCL, Inc. And Janice Krochek spent some time in Vegas.”

“Some sort of gambling outfit?”

“Connected to gambling in some way. I’d bet on it.”

She laughed. “Dangerously close to a pun there,” she said.

“What is? Oh.”

“There’s another gambling connection, too. Ginger Benn’s husband, Jason Benn. Compulsive gambler for years. Owned a big auto body shop, got in so deep he lost it and went bankrupt in ninety-nine.”

That explained her bitter hatred of gambling. “You didn’t say ex-husband. Still married?”

“Separated.”

“How long?”

“Two years. Man ran up a new bunch of debts and she walked.”

“Where’d he get the money to keep betting? From Ginger?”

“Could be.”

“If she has been supporting his habit, or helping him pay off his debts, or both, it has to be from hooking. She can’t make much at that waitressing job of hers.”

“Another reason they’re separated, maybe.”

“Where’s he living, did you find out?”

“Daly City,” Tamara said. “Works for an auto body shop on San Jose Avenue in the Outer Mission.”

I took down both addresses. Could be he knew something about QCL, Inc. that I’d be able to pry out of him. The outfit, whatever it was and whoever was behind it, not only had a gambling connection but judging from what I’d learned from Quilmes, one to prostitution as well. No surprise if it was Vegas-based; the two vices go hand in hand down there. And yet, there was so much of both running wide open in the Nevada desert, there didn’t seem to be much need for a shadowy operation like this one seemed to be. More to it than gambling and prostitution, possibly. Drugs, smuggling of goods or humans—all sorts of possibilities.

But the one thing I couldn’t figure was how and why this QCL was operating in San Francisco, and apparently in the person of just one man. Carl Lassiter had the answers, but I didn’t have enough information or enough leverage to try bracing him. Or, for that matter, enough probable cause that he was responsible for those kitchen blood smears and Janice Krochek’s latest disappearance.

The scarf woman’s name was Bryn Darby.

He found that out Tuesday night, on his second canvass of the Taraval neighborhood, from a garrulous woman who ran an arts and crafts store near the Parkside branch library. “Oh, yes,” she said, “Mrs. Darby. Her first name is Bryn, B-r-y-n, isn’t that an odd name? Poor woman. So much tragedy in her life.”

“What sort of tragedy?”

“Well, her deformity. And her husband leaving her. She didn’t tell me that, but it’s what I heard.”

“What sort of deformity?”

“Well, I don’t know. Something to do with the right side of her face. I’ve never seen it and she won’t talk about it, not that I blame her a bit even if she has become a bit standoffish since it happened.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, it must have been about a year ago. Until then she was attractive and very friendly, we had some lovely chats about art. She’s an artist, you know. Watercolors and charcoal sketches. I’ve seen some of them, she’s quite talented.”

When he got to the apartment he booted up his laptop and ran a quick check on Bryn Darby. Her address was 2511 Moraga Street, just a few blocks away. Age 33. Born Bryn Christine Cordell in Marin County. Married in 1995 to Robert Darby, an attorney with offices on West Portal. Divorce filed by her husband, March of this year. One child, a boy, Robert Jr., age 9. Primary custody granted to the father.

That was as far as he let himself dig. What the hell was he doing, following a crazy compulsion like this? Invading a stranger’s privacy, gathering information on her, without any justification. Wrong-headed, unprofessional. Illegal, like the goverment and their covert spying. Like a damn stalker.

Cracking up.

Sometimes, lately, that was just how he felt—as if he were coming apart again, slowly, one little crack at a time, the way he had after Colleen died.

I
t was Wednesday afternoon before he got back to the Youngblood pro bono case. He preferred to move ahead quickly on his investigations, get them wrapped up ASAP, move on to the next. But other cases, higher-priority cases, kept interfering. One of those, the wrongful death claim for Western Maritime and Life, had taken a couple of new turns that kept him hopping all day Tuesday and Wednesday
morning. At least he was busy, a lot of his time accounted for. The busier you were, the less you had to interface with your private demons.

Aaron Myers worked as an office manager for an outfit called Fresh To You Frozen Foods in South San Francisco. Runyon made the mistake of driving down there instead of calling ahead to make sure Myers was on the job today. He wasn’t. Out of the office, no reason given. Expected back tomorrow.

He drove back into the city by way of Army Street and stopped at Myers’s apartment building in Noe Valley. More wasted time. Nobody answered the bell. He wrote “Call me, please” on the back of one of his business cards and dropped it through the mailbox slot that bore Myers’s name.

It was two o’clock when he walked into Bayside Video on Chestnut Street. Youngblood’s friend and chess partner, Dré Janssen, was there but busy with a customer. Runyon browsed through the section marked CLASSICS while he waited.
Casablanca
, one of Colleen’s favorites.
The Searchers
, one of his in the days when he’d cared about movies as more than just noise producers and time passers.
Young Frankenstein.
Funny film; he remembered Colleen breaking up every time somebody said “Frau Blücher” and horses started whinnying off-camera. It wasn’t until after they’d seen it that he found out why the horses kept freaking, that
Blücher
is the German word for glue. Ron had told him—Ron Cain, his former partner, his friend, dead twelve years now in the high-speed chase that had bitched up Runyon’s leg and caused him to take an early retirement from
the Seattle PD. Colleen, Ron, people he’d cared about-gone. Andrea, too, even though it had been a long time since he’d had any feelings for her. The only family he had left was Joshua, and his son alive was as irretrievably lost to him as all the rest were dead …

The customer was leaving now. Runyon went over, introduced himself, and explained why he was there. Janssen’s response was a heavy sigh blown through both nostrils. He was tall, thin, freckles like dark spots of rust sprinkled across his cheeks and one of those patches of chin whiskers popular among young men these days. On his lean, ascetic face the whiskers looked like nothing so much as transplanted pubic hair.

“So Brian’s in trouble,” he said.

“His mother thinks so. So do I.”

“Well, I’m not too surprised. But I don’t know that I can tell you much—I haven’t seen or talked to him in months.”

“Mrs. Youngblood told me you and Brian play chess regularly.”

“Used to. All in the past now.”

“How come?”

“That’s the way he wanted it.”

“He tell you why?”

“No. You know somebody most of your life, you think you know them pretty well, right? Then all of a sudden something happens to them and they weird out and you realize you didn’t know them at all.”

“When did Brian start to weird out?”

“More than a year ago.”

“In what ways?”

“Well, it started with him not going to church anymore. He used to be real devout—we belong to the same church.”

“His mother didn’t say anything about that.”

“She doesn’t know. He told her he was going to a different one, in my neighborhood, but he wasn’t. I asked him why and all he’d say was that he had his reasons.”

“You think he lost his faith?”

“Must have, somehow. Didn’t seem to want anything to do with religion anymore.”

“What else happened with him?”

“Well, he started buying things,” Janssen said, “expensive computer hardware he didn’t really need. High-quality stuff, all the latest advances. Last time I saw him he had four PCs, three laptops, five printers, three twenty-two-inch screens hooked together, modems, motherboards, CD burners, camcorders, all sorts of anti-spy software, you name it.”

“How did he explain it to you?”

“He didn’t even try. Just said he needed to keep upgrading his system and it wasn’t any of my business anyway.”

“How else did he change?”

“Distant, withdrawn,” Janssen said. “Started holing up in his flat. Wouldn’t answer e-mails or acknowledge chess problems I sent him. Wouldn’t return phone messages.”

“Did you know he was in debt, not paying his bills?”

“Yeah, I heard. I can tell you part of the reason: he lost two of his best consulting jobs.”

“How did that happen?”

“He wasn’t doing the work. Just didn’t seem to care anymore.”

“When did this happen?”

“Four or five months ago.”

“He tell you this?”

“No. Another friend of his, Aaron Myers.”

“Do you know Myers well?”

“Not very. Met him through Brian, but we didn’t hit it off. I ran into him later on at a computer trade show at Moscone and we got to talking. He was worried about Brian, too. But neither of us knew what to do about it.”

“Might’ve contacted his mother.”

“Myers did that, or started to, but Brian found out and threw a fit, told him to mind his own business. I thought about doing it on my own, but … you know, I didn’t want to make things worse by sticking my nose in. I figured he’d talk to her on his own if things got bad enough. But he didn’t?”