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“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. 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.