Death and Taxes (14 page)

“He’s been here once, maybe twice,” he said, as if that dismissed it.

“And paid?”

“I don’t know. I’m not usually here at night.”

“Simonov, I’m running real low on patience. You rented him that room for a cut rate, right?”

“Okay, yeah.”

“So you make a habit of renting out that room, the one reserved for Social Service.”

He held his hand out palm up, as if he were holding the last ball of common sense. “If we didn’t let these guys stay here, they’d be out on the street, and Social Service would have to put them here!”

“So why didn’t you just tell me that? I don’t object to people sleeping inside instead of in doorways.”

“Because you’re going to report it, and Social Service is going to feel called upon to make a fuss and maybe want their money back, and frankly we’re running too close to the edge here to pay back anything. Look, all four of us owners had to squeeze to make the down payment here. We were real marginal as far as getting a loan.” His voice was calmer now. “Every one of us contributes something to the place—”

“What?”

“Lyn’s a carpenter. She’s done a lot of work. I’ve got a lot of connections, and I coordinate getting skilled guys to do the renovation. Like I said, Scookie is the night receptionist. And Mason does the books.”

“Mason Moon is your bookkeeper?” I asked, amazed. Only in Berkeley would a hotel have a plop artist do its books.

“Yeah, he used to be a bookkeeper.” Sensing the shift of focus, Simonov paused and grinned at me. “Mason said that bookkeeping was too uncreative.”

I let a moment pass, recalling my original reason for coming here. Stretching speculation into fact, I said, “Philip Drem was headed here when he died. What was he coming for? This time I want the truth.”

Simonov paled. There was no questioning the authenticity of that reaction. The man was shocked. His hand was still extended, and now he stared down at it as if peering into that illusory ball of common sense for the answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “I almost don’t want to know.”

“Was he auditing the hotel?”

“No. Mason would have told us if he was. Mason doesn’t take well to tragedy, and for him to have to spend hours and hours hunched over the books playing out a scene to Philip Drem’s directions would have been worse than solitary confinement. You can believe we’d have heard about it. All of Berkeley would know. The publicity possibilities …”

Ignoring that, I said, “Philip Drem was at the Swallow to meet someone who failed to show up. He waited an hour, and then he headed here. It looks to me like he expected that person who didn’t show up to be here. And the person on the desk that night was you.”

“If I’d said I’d be there, I’d’ve been there. I don’t renege. I make a deal, I stick to it.”

“Maybe you changed your mind.”

“I make a deal, I don’t change my mind. A deal’s a deal.”

Obviously I’d hit a sore point with the swap king. And as obviously, he realized that he’d strayed down his own path. He smiled, the trader’s smile. “But you’re not asking about my ethics. You’re after who Drem was looking for. Could have been anyone here. There were guests in all our rooms too. Maybe he was meeting one of them.”

“What might they have told Drem?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing to tell.”

“Then why was he coming?” I pressed.

“Curiosity. Perversity. The hope that there’s some small thing he could pick up and use against someone. Who knows with someone like that?”

I closed my notepad. I hadn’t written in it. I’d have to make notes when I got to the car. I leaned an elbow on the counter and waited till I caught Simonov’s eye. “Ethan, there’s still something you’re not telling me. I’m hunting for Drem’s murderer, not for building-code violations. The more you do to help me find him, the fewer times I have to come back here.”

He looked as if he might say something, then changed his mind and smiled. “I don’t mind your coming back. I rather like it.”

I let a beat pass. “So much the better.” Before he could answer, I walked out to the car.

I finished a couple of pages of notes, started the engine. Heading to the Inspiration was an odd choice for Philip Drem. I’d suspected it, but I hadn’t been sure until Ethan Simonov failed to disagree. Simonov, I was sure, knew a lot more than he was admitting. And I was also sure that knowledge was somehow connected to the hotel.

I was almost home when I remembered that it was Scookie Hogan that Simonov had been subbing for last night. If Philip Drem had been headed to the Inspiration, he might have expected to find not Simonov but her.

What had Simonov said about her when I asked if she’d ever cook again? “Not after what happened to her.” Dammit, what
had
happened? Did it have something to do with the hotel and Philip Drem? I didn’t know that, but I did know where she’d be in the morning. I’d seen her there often enough.

I started toward home, thinking of Tori Iversen and Maria Zalles, and Mason Moon, and Ethan Simonov. Trying to find a common thread.

Many nights I’d talked out cases, Howard and I eating pizza, chewing on possible leads. They had been good times. The memory made the chill of our distance today seem all the colder.

It also made me hungry. Late as it was, I veered north into El Cerrito and picked up a Thai pizza, family size. Howard could be counted on to put away half of it, no matter what he’d had for dinner or how recently. And with the tenants away, if a couple of slices were left, they wouldn’t disappear from the fridge like lambs at the Brotherhood of Wolves banquet.

As I neared Howard’s house I found myself remembering Howard glaring at me in the half-dark living room last night. And Tori Iversen behind her glass walls. And that prized azalea of Howard’s I’d dug up. Had Howard ever felt so torn with any of his stings? If it failed, there’d be nothing left for us. I knew that. And still, I felt a rush of excitement.

I
PULLED INTO THE
driveway. Howard was probably on the phone to whatever restaurant he’d been to for the Nob Hill dinner, demanding to know how many mushrooms had been in their Stroganoff and subtracting their cost from his charitable deductions. Or, since I knew how he got once he’d started nibbling into some injustice like this charitable-deduction business, he might be talking to the wholesaler who delivered the overpriced mushrooms or the farmer who grew them. Or God, I thought, smiling. Maybe he’d have forgotten about the azalea. I’d be relieved, and yet …No, the issue of freedom the jogger brought up was too basic. I was handling it in an almost flip way, I knew.

But Howard and I had a tacit understanding. No heavy talks, deep thrashing of souls, at home. We spent too much time dragged into other people’s misery. We needed lightness at home. It was an unpopular philosophy in the land of “relationships,” one I’d given up trying to defend. But it had worked—until now. Until we banged into this issue that was too baffling to him, too integral to me. Was I asking too much of him?

And if he couldn’t understand it? I felt suddenly stiff and icy. It was this issue—my brother’s camping trip and my mother’s comment, “You can’t do that; you’re a girl”—that jolted me to the realization that I wasn’t
home
there. Not just not in Tenafly, New Jersey, the town of that moment, but not home in my home, in my family. Briefly I’d thought I’d found home with Nat, my ex-husband. I’d been wrong, real wrong. As far as belonging went, Berkeley was the only place, and Howard was as close as a person had come. If I’d planned to put everything on the line, it wouldn’t have been the line that led to the azalea. But it was too late to back out of the sting now.

And the pizza was getting cold.

When I opened the door, Howard wasn’t on the phone haggling about mushrooms. He was seated on one end of the sofa, beer in hand, and Connie Pereira was at the other. They were both facing forward, silent. On the coffee table were piles of papers, and the telltale blue-and-white forms of the IRS. Howard looked as if he were envisioning every serving of mushroom, mashed potato, and cup of creamed corn for the last year dumped on the table. Pereira looked as if with the slightest encouragement she’d toss those dinners in his face. Neither of them perked up at the sight of me, or the pizza box—a definitely ominous omission.

“Well, I think that’s all we can do tonight, Howard.” Pereira jumped up.

“Impossible,” Howard muttered. I couldn’t tell if he meant the tax forms or her.

Pereira grabbed her jacket. “See you in the morning,” she said as she headed past me and the pizza. Pereira passing up food was like Attila the Hun skirting the Roman Empire.

I could have asked what had happened here, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to get drawn into it. I followed her to the door. “When you get in tomorrow, I need you to run a background on Maria Zalles.”

“Who’s Zalles?” Howard growled. It was more demand than question.

“Philip Drem’s wife’s look-alike. Dorian Gray, except the other way around.” He was in the foulest humor I could remember. And, I noted, Pereira might have already left for all the attention he paid her.

“I’ll do it first thing,” she said to me. The smell of curry filled the room. Pereira, apparently untempted, reached for the door.

“What’s new on Drem?” Howard asked.

“He was headed to the Inspiration Hotel when he died.”

That stopped Pereira. She was torn between escape and curiosity. She had the same look she did when eyeing my coffee and donut. Finally she grabbed: “Had Drem started in on the hotel’s books, then?”

“Not according to Ethan Simonov.”

She laughed with a scorn worthy of Howard and pried up the top of the pizza box. “Not yet, you mean. Smith, Drem was like an anteater after termites. He wouldn’t have left a basement till he’d stuck his snout into every hole and sucked it dry.” She pulled out a slice of pizza.

“Maybe he wouldn’t have questioned anything in the hotel books,” Howard said.

“Pigs may fly”—she poised the steaming slice an inch from her mouth—“but they’d make unlikely birds.”

I walked over to the sofa and put the pizza on the floor. There was no room on the coffee table. Howard grabbed a piece. Already I could see one source of communal irritation here: hunger. I couldn’t imagine what had kept these two from food so long. I took a slice of pizza and settled on the couch.

“Still,” Howard insisted, “maybe Drem wouldn’t have been able to come up with anything, no matter how many holes he sniffed out.” He was looking at Pereira.

She hesitated, then stalked back into the living room and plopped down on the floor next to the pizza. “Look, IRS regulations are open to such wide interpretation that even their own advice is wrong a third of the time. IRS does not stand behind the advice their own employees give out on the phone. You do what they tell you, and they’re wrong—tough for you. If their own people make mistakes, you can believe the taxpayer will.” She chomped down on her pizza, staring at Howard. Then she helped herself to his beer. I took this as a sign of truce.

Or partial truce. Pereira’s statement had a hefty undertone of “see!” And clearly Howard was not about to rebut it. For Howard—ever on the lookout for new stings; intrigued by each new wrinkle of perfidy the opposition created; vitalized by the new, the different, the exciting—for Howard, wading through bureaucratic regulation was like trudging across the swamp of the shadow of death.

“I wouldn’t put money on the hotel books being above question either,” I said. “Their bookkeeper is Mason Moon.”

A lesser person would have choked. But Connie managed to hoot
and
swallow her pizza, with only one gulp of Howard’s beer.

Howard got up and headed to the fridge. “But, Connie,” I said, “surely Drem wasn’t coming to peruse the hotel books at ten o’clock at night. Even IRS must have some standards.”

“Right. Field agents don’t make unannounced calls. Only special agents do that, and they carry guns and have FBI training. They usually work in pairs with the FBI. They arrive out of the blue, and they’re ready to take you to jail. Compared to them, Drem was Santa.”

“Rick Lamott said it was a game for Drem.”

“A game where only he had access to the rulebook. He’d call you for penalties you didn’t know exist and tell you ignorance was no excuse. It’s Kafkaesque, all right. But there are some rules. And everyone agreed that Philip Drem would never break an agency rule. That was part of the game for him.”

Howard handed us each a beer, settled back on the sofa, and nodded.

He didn’t say it, none of us did, but we all understood Drem’s view. When we interrogated suspects we needed to break, truth was pliable, threats and promises redeemable only as much as we needed to protect our own credibility. (I’d promised a guy who’d beaten his crippled uncle everything from plea bargain to a Big Mac. But I would have seen him eat his uncle’s cane before I ordered out for him.)

“There have to be some rules,” Howard said, retrieving his beer. “No rules, no victory.”

Pereira glared at the pile of papers on the table. “Remember that when you insist the Nob Hill dinner wasn’t worth the forty dollars the caterer charged them.” Clearly, this was an area the two of them had been over more than once.

“Jill”—Howard was not about to be deterred from his argument—“I’ve already called the distributor who sold the caterer the ingredients.”

That he was directing this explanation to me was not a good sign. It meant he’d tried it on Pereira and failed. I asked, “What did they say?”

“They laughed. How could they remember what peas cost six months ago? Maybe there was a pea sale that week and they paid less. They thought I was crazy.”

Pereira nodded. She didn’t say “I told you so,” not in words.

Howard glared at her. “So then, Connie, if there was a special on peas, do I get a bigger deduction? Suppose I didn’t eat my peas? Do I still have to subtract them? Suppose I had sixty peas and only ate twelve?”

Pereira pushed herself up and stood, hand on hip. (The other hand was still clutching pizza. Even in pique, Pereira has her priorities straight.) “Howard, stop trying to make sense. This is the biggest unchallenged bureaucracy in the country. IRS makes the rules, and there’s nothing you can do about them.”