Death and Taxes (11 page)

I walked out past the Inspiration Hotel next to Moon’s studio and sat in my car staring at it: a clapboard affair from the 1940s that might have been apartments or flats but was now passing as a hotel. But there were really two hotels. The dilapidated building I saw and the bed and breakfast that existed in the minds of its owners. Which was the real Inspiration? And which Philip Drem was the true Drem—the bulldog or the faithful, loving pet?

But unlike the hotel, Drem wasn’t an either-or question. Drem was a habitué of the Film Archives. Over the months there a faithful pet would have made friends at the Swallow Café next door. A bulldog wouldn’t have set jowl over the doorway. I had just time to make it to the Swallow.

T
HE
S
WALLOW IS LIKE
a diner that’s moved up in the world. Specials run to ratatouille and pizza rustica, fruit spritzers and
caffè lattes
, blondies (caramel brownies) and slices of Chocolate Decadence. Instead of booths, there are small tables, and out the window is the graded grassy yard of the University Art Museum. Had it still been light, I could have sat on a bench and contemplated the three-foot metal ball with the hole in the middle. I’d named it Cannonball Karma.

I asked the guy at the counter if he had worked Friday. He hadn’t. Nor did he know who had. So I switched to the reserve plan and sat in the café, drinking my
latte
and eating a salad—I consume a vegetable every now and then to remind myself why I don’t more often—and eyed the other patrons, trying to get a line on who might be theater regulars, people who could have known Philip Drem, film aficionado, aka family pet.

I checked bejeaned legs for bicyclists’ leg clips or ridges left from them. When I spotted “ruffled” cuffs on the beige cords of a guy reading the
East Bay Express
, I smiled, picked up my
latte,
and walked over. “Do you know Phil Drem?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Cyclist. Medium height. Wiry brown hair. He’s here most Fridays.”

“No, I wouldn’t. My
shiatsu
group meets on Fridays.”

No fast fix here. I chose a spot along the window rail and sat nursing the
latte
, letting my mind drift in that dusky halflight of wired sleepiness. In that grayness you make connections that the glare of alertness would burn through. I found myself watching for potential witnesses and thinking about my grandmother’s house, that small, crowded gray frame house in a neighborhood of small, shabbier houses. It looked nothing like Howard’s house. I couldn’t really summon up a picture of it, no more than its aura. But I felt all the muscles of my back clenching.

I sipped the
latte
and glanced at the pantlegs of three newcomers, but there were no clamp marks. The reason I couldn’t “see” the house was that it was always behind me in all those early memories. Ahead of me our white Chevy sedan was pulling out of the driveway. My brother Mike was in the backseat waving, my parents in front, driving off to the new house in the new town my father had talked about for months, where everything would be new and exciting and fun, where life would be Technicolor. I clung to the car with my eyes till the white blur was long gone.

A guy with a bike helmet walked in. I called to him. He’d been here Friday, but he didn’t remember Drem.

By seven, I’d finished a piece of chocolate cake and a second
latte.
The dinner flock was thinning. Now people were rushing in for espressos before the film started. But they were in groups—chattering, excited, or intense—closed units that would have neither drawn nor admitted Drem. It was just as well. Two l
attes
have their effect. I had just time to make it to the ladies’ room before the opening credits.

When I opened the ladies’-room door, I spotted her. Maria Zalles her name turned out to be, but it could have been Tori Iversen. There are people in Berkeley who believe that every person lives many lives simultaneously, that each time you choose between two paths, life strolls on from both of them, a family tree of the potential self.

Maria Zalles looked like the Tori Iversen who had decided not to go to the studio the day the gas jet blew. She was healthy, even a bit plump, with shiny blond hair brushing her shoulders, blue eyes shaded with enough eye shadow and mascara to make Tori sick for a month, and clothes bright enough to be a kindergartner’s dream. I stared, stunned. The reality of what Tori had lost struck me anew. No way could Philip Drem have resisted Maria Zalles.

She was washing her hands when I asked if she knew him.

“Philm? Sure.” Even her voice was like Tori’s, or what Tori’s might have been if she’d had this woman’s energy and enthusiasm. My skin was quivering from caffeine, and sorrow, and the futility of it all. “I call him Philm,” she explained, “because he’s here so much.”

Cute. Tori wouldn’t have dealt in cute. “Did you see him last night?”

“Oh yeah. Actually, I almost didn’t. It was a Greek movie, and I’m not crazy about them, but my roommate was having her boyfriend over to watch basketball, and I can’t handle that, you know. I mean you see the last two minutes, you’ve seen it all, right? And subtle—no way. So I came on here.”

One of the stall doors swung open, and a woman hurried out. It reminded me why I’d come in here and how serious my need was after those
lattes.
Professional that I am, I focused on Maria Zalles. “But Phil likes Greek movies?”

“Phil will watch anything set outside the continental United States. I’ve told him he might as well stay home with
National Geographic
for all the discrimination he has about art.” She pulled a towel loose and began drying her pudgy hands.

I could picture Drem looking at those hands, contrasting them to the thin, cracked hands Tori had been pressing against the chair arms. Tori said she had encouraged Phil to see other women and he had refused. I wondered. “How did Phil take being called bourgeois?”

“He laughed.” She tossed the towel in the waste-basket.

I eyed the empty stalls, but there was no way I could take the chance of Maria Zalles leaving, catching me with my pants down, literally. I stood very still. “Maria, I have bad news about Phil. He’s dead.”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?” Her face had gone as pale as Tori’s.

“I’m afraid not. He died last night. I’m with the police, and—”

She let out a scream “No!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, glancing at the door, expecting to see it fly open and every film buff in the lobby race in and demand to know what I’d done to this woman.

“How could he—” She burst into dry sobs, jamming her fists into her eyes and wailing so her whole body shook. The picture flashed in my mind of Tori Iversen, letting out that one shriek and never allowing her hand to touch her face.

It was five minutes before Maria Zalles was calm enough for me to lead her back to the café. I got her a cappuccino; for myself I couldn’t even bear to have a cup of liquid in front of me.

She wrapped her hands around the cup, oblivious of the hot ceramic. Her face was flushed, and despite rinsing and dabbing with towels, smears of turquoise and black ringed her eyes. “He was here Friday. We sat in our seats, in the back row, and watched the whole movie. He was right here,” she said accusingly.

“And then what happened? When you left the movie?”

“Nothing,” she choked out. She sniffed back sobs and began pulling the napkin apart. There were people at the next table six inches away, but their only reaction was a momentary pause in conversation. The California commitment to giving people their space has its good points.

I put a hand on her arm and said softly, “Nothing?”

“No. He just went home.” She wadded up the remainder of the napkin and rubbed it across her eyes. The blue and black makeup streaked like a raccoon mask, but if she suspected the effect, she couldn’t be bothered to check it. The absolute inverse of Tori. Philip Drem
had
to have been seduced by her.

I waited till she was quieter. “He didn’t go home.”

“Well, I don’t know what he did
. I
went home.” There was an edge to her voice I hadn’t noticed before.

“And that was unusual—for you two to leave like that?”

“We always had coffee or something. We always talked about the movie afterward. I mean, that’s the reason you go to movies with someone, so you can talk about it, right?”

One of the reasons. “But you were more to him than just a friend. I can see that.”

She hesitated as if she understood I was manipulating her, then, as if she couldn’t be bothered worrying about that either, said, “I don’t know what I was to Phil. I used to think that we were at the beginning of something, you know? I mean he was so seductive.”

“How so?” The Philip Drem I’d heard about couldn’t have attracted an escapee from a convent. And Maria Zalles was the kind of trusting, cuddly girl—more girl than woman, though I would have guessed her to be about twenty-five—who’d have men lined up to protect her. I couldn’t picture Tori Iversen ever being that innocent.

Maria brushed the rubble of paper shards to the floor and wrapped her hands around the cup again. It would have fit her image better if the cup had held cocoa instead of strong coffee. Gazing into it as if it held her memories, she said, “He was so intense. And he really listened. He was interested in everything. He found out I’d done some scuba diving, and he wanted to know all about it, not only the mechanics but how I felt underwater, was I scared, and stuff like that. Sometimes he just stared at me as if that would help him take in what I was saying. Other times he sat with his eyes half closed as if that let him focus all his attention on listening. And then occasionally, when we were in a place with a mirror, I’d think he was looking away, and I’d find him staring in the mirror, watching me, watching us both.”

I felt a tug of sorrow for Maria Zalles, so entranced by the illusion of being cherished. And for Philip Drem. It was easy to imagine Philip Drem looking in the mirror at the couple he and Tori might have been. What had it been like for him when he went home to the real Tori? “Maria, how long had you been seeing him like this?”

“A little over a month.”

“That’s a long time for things not to go anywhere.”

“Well, I was just getting over a relationship, and I didn’t want to get involved with anyone, and so I probably put up some barriers.”

Compared to the walls Drem was used to, Maria Zalles’s barriers must have been like doorsills. And yet there was something about Maria Zalles that didn’t fit. She thought the relationship was going somewhere; she was confused about Drem’s reluctance; she was holding off. I kept trying explanations, like Halloween costumes, looking for the right one. Had she just moved to town and was trying to adjust? Was this air of innocence no more than a veil she’d chosen to wear for Drem, or for me? Or had the shock of Drem’s death juggled her reactions so none seemed quite real? Like most survivors, she was going through the “Fun House” stage of death recognition, riding along the tracks of the present, dealing with my questions when suddenly out of the blackness up popped a skeleton: “Phil is dead!” Was it just that? I couldn’t tell.

I hesitated a moment, deciding which path to take. Only one of my choices was going to have a life. I decided to go with my hunch. “But you thought Phil was about to make a move.”

“Thought? Hoped? I don’t know. It had been a big deal when he suggested we have coffee on the Avenue last week. When we walked there, he put his hand on my shoulder. I felt like I did when I was twelve years old with my first boyfriend.” The skeleton took her by surprise. Tears gushed again. She ignored them.

For Drem, the draw of this illusory Tori would have been overwhelming. When he reached out for her his hand had touched not cold window glass but her soft body. Drem had alleviated his misery by deceiving Maria. I was using her too. That didn’t make me feel any better, about me, or him. “Maria, you are such a warm, outgoing person, I can’t imagine you just waiting passively to see what he’d do.”

She wiped her eyes and looked up. “It doesn’t sound like me, does it? I’ve moved in with guys and back out in less time than that. But there was something about Phil, or maybe the aura of the films and just meeting Friday nights. Until real recently, it was a game. Like a movie, a foreign movie. I wondered if he was married, but I didn’t ask. I don’t know what he did for a living. It was like watching a movie where you just take what you’re given and make your conclusions on that.”

Wonderful! The one witness with the chance to know Drem, and she makes no effort. Or had she made that effort but was too stunned to draw up the subtleties of her conclusions? Or unwilling to tell them to a stranger and a police officer? “But, Maria, last night you left right after the movie. How come? Is that what Phil wanted?”

“Yeah.” She wiped her finger around the inside edge of her cup, gathering the ring of pasty coffee. Then she sucked it from her finger. “He said he had to see a guy.”

“About?”

“I don’t know.” She stared down at the cup, nervous, thinking now. “Phil didn’t say. I did ask. It was the first time I’d broken my rules. I guess I expected an answer that would make it up to me for forfeiting the game.”

“And you didn’t get it?”

“I got nothing. He said he couldn’t talk about it, that it was something to do with work.”

I could feel my shoulders tensing with excitement. “Did you buy that?”

“Hardly.”

The path forked again. The top tine said she went home; the bottom, she hung around. I chose the bottom. “What did he do?”

“I don’t—”

I put a hand on her arm, and smiled. “Maria.”

“Okay, so I left and got halfway home. Then I thought, Shit, who does this guy think he is? Maybe he had a wife and she was picking him up. So I came back. He must have been waiting inside here because he walked out just as I came back. It was nine thirty. His bicycle was still out there then.”

“So it would have been out of his sight all that time?”

“Unless he came out and looked at it, yes. But when he did come out, he didn’t pay any attention to it. He just paced up and down in front of the gate. And at ten he got on his bike and pedaled like mad up the street.”