Death and Taxes (16 page)

“Did you end up paying a lot?”

“Three hundred forty-seven dollars and twelve cents. Not what’s going to save the nation from bankruptcy, is it. Probably about seven dollars an hour for his time. I mean the IRS
lost
money on the deal. But it cost me my business. By the time he finished, all my suppliers and my customers had deserted me.”

“So why was he after you like that?”

“I don’t know. He was like a bulldog who’s got you by the scruff of the neck and starts shaking. If no one pulls him off, he’ll shake you till your neck snaps.” Once again she stared full at me. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Drem described as a bulldog. “With the IRS, no one pulls them off. And no matter what an agent does, you can’t sue them. With them, you’re gallows material unless you can prove yourself innocent.”

“But why—”

“What did I do? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? Everyone assumes you’ve done something to bring this on yourself. They can’t believe—maybe they don’t want to believe—it can just happen. You can lose everything that mattered and end up looking at a hypodermic in the psych ward at Herrick Hospital.” Her face was flushed, her hands shaking.

Around us I could hear forced conversation. Scookie reached for her cup and could barely manage getting her fingers around the handle. The cup rattled against the saucer. When she finally did lift it, she smacked it into her lip. She was fortunate the coffee was gone.

I said, “Tell me where you were last Friday night after dinner.”

“Friday,” she said, putting the cup down with surprising control. “You mean when the slime was killed? Mason called me. He thought I’d be delighted. But he was wrong. I was here the whole evening. I’m here most nights. Only a block away from all the action. I could have seen Drem lying in the street. I would have liked that part. But I’m not happy he’s dead. Death’s too easy. Death’s nothing compared to knowing you had one chance and it got snatched away from you and now it’s too late.” She smiled unpleasantly. “Maybe I’ll try to work up a belief in hell.”

“Was there anyone else here that evening who might remember you?”

Her eyes widened. “Ah, just like Drem. ‘Can you document your existence here?’ Well, Philip goddamned Drem got every bit of documentation I am going to do. So if you want to know, you find out. If you can’t, take me to jail.”

Slowly I said, “The police aren’t the IRS. We do have rules—and the police-review board if you feel they’ve been broken. I need your help—”

Her smile grew wider but not more pleasant. “But you see, Officer, I don’t want to help.”

I stood up and left her my card anyway. You never know when people will change their minds. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Arab saying goes. But I didn’t see how I could ever manage to seem like I hated Philip Drem enough to become the swing enemy in Scookie Hogan’s eyes.

I stopped in the bathroom and took a minute longer in the stall than I needed to. Sometimes witnesses are so pleased to see me leave, they don’t pay attention to where I’ve gone. They wander in after and start talking to a friend. But when I left the bathroom, Scookie Hogan was still at her table by the wall. A tall thin man I didn’t recognize was standing next to her. She’d forgotten about me. She was looking up at him with that same eerie smile in place. I veered toward them.

“Well, congratulations on your twenty-seven points,” he said to Scookie. “Azrael commends you.”

It wasn’t till I got back to the station and hauled out my dictionary that I realized Azrael was the Hebrew angel of death.

“A
ZRAEL COMMENDS YOU,” THE
man had said to Scookie Hogan. The angel of death praises you. Now, back in my office at the station, I wished I had paid more attention to the angel’s messenger. Five feet eight, long brown hair, bald dome, army-surplus raincoat. If I came across him again, I’d recognize him, but I couldn’t put out a call for him. With a description like that, Patrol could pick up half of Telegraph Avenue.

I ran the name Azrael through files. In Berkeley I wouldn’t have been surprised to find priors or warrants on a flock of fallen angels. But if we had angels, Azrael wasn’t among them.

On the way back from the file room I stopped by Eggs and Jackson’s office. Outside, the fog had thickened, the wind had picked up, and tree branches scraped the windows. The overhead light was on, and it reflected off Eggs’s pale dome. In another few years what he referred to as a receding hairline would have spread like the Sahara, banishing all life across its sandy knoll. Jackson, who would have a forest of wiry hair long after he was dead, loved to tease Eggs with the prospect of one long strand crisscrossing his scalp like jeep tracks in the desert.

Now Jackson leaned back in his chair, phone propped between shoulder and ear, as he drank coffee, took notes, and grumbled into the receiver. “Hey, man, whole nations have emerged and deceased while you dangle a theory about how long this corpse was in the water. Now you think that the currents brought it from San Francisco, Treasure Island, or out from Oakland and back in to us?” Jackson reached for a paper bag, extricated an enchilada, and picked up the phone.

Across the desk Eggs put down his Mazda brochure and fingered his bifocals.

I settled myself against the windowsill. “Jackson giving the lab a hard time again?”

“You bad-mouthing me, Smith?” Jackson put down the phone. “Enchiladas don’t clog the ears, you know.”

I laughed. “Jackson, you’ve been on that guy at the lab ever since he won the Raiders bet. Rarely has one guy paid so dearly for his hundred bucks.”

“Careful, Smith.” Eggs slid his chair between us. “Just because Al Davis made a fool of the city of Oakland and the old football fans when he dangled the illusion of the silver and black coming back … Just because the gullible really believed—”

Jackson glared. He had a reputation as a cop who took no guff, a guy you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Now his round face narrowed, his dark brown eyes seemed to pierce into Eggs’s maroon tie. He put down his enchilada and said to Eggs, “Bald.”

Eggs and I burst into guffaws. The 1980s defection of Jackson’s beloved Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles had been the receding hairline of his life. When the team had agreed to return to the Bay Area, he’d had a miracle regrowth. But when they reneged at the eleventh hour, Jackson was left without a figurative hair on his head. And with hundreds of dollars of debts to cynical friends delighted to profit from his credulity. Eggs, who’d been hearing about his pale pink dome for years, was number one. And Jackson, I noted, laughed with the same enthusiastic insincerity as Eggs on
his
touchy subject.

“You guys have been around for a while,” I began.

Another time, Jackson would have tossed in a comment about baldness as a sign of age, but the new parity of jibes must have stopped him.

“Ever heard of Azrael?”

“Hebrew angel of death, you mean? You getting religion, Smith?”

“Just facts, for now, Jackson.” I recounted the interchange with Scookie Hogan. “Any ideas?”

He shook his head.

“Aha!” Eggs pounced. “Another game the hirsute one misjudges.”

Jackson occupied himself with his enchilada. He had a comeback for everything. The Raiders was the only subject that silenced him. It made me uneasy. But Eggs didn’t seem to notice.

“Game?” I prompted, hoping to steer to neutral ground.

“The death game, Smith.”

“There’s a death game, and we in Homicide don’t know about it?”

“
Some
of you,” Eggs pronounced. “Neither of you’ve heard of it? Well, I’m not surprised that the well-thatched one missed it. Maintaining all that cover consumes a great percentage of the scalp’s nutrients. But you, Smith …” He settled back to enjoy his triumph.

“Eggs,” I said, “either you spit it out, or you see a round of this death game played locally.”

“Amen,” Jackson muttered.

“Okay, innocents, there’s the national death game and the local branch. The national one was written up in the
Express.
I’m surprised you two don’t keep up with the commentary on your city. But no, that’s okay—ignorance of the news is always an excuse.” Before I could speak, he held up a hand. “In the death game the players each make a list of sixty-nine people they expect to die within the year. The nominees have to be nationally known, or known well enough to have their obituaries in the
New York Times.
For each person who dies, the player gets points. The younger the deceased, the greater the points. So if somebody over ninety goes, it’s hardly worth the cost of buying the
Times.
Over ninety equals one point. Someone between eighty and ninety is two points, and so on.”

Jackson put down his enchilada. “So if I dispatch a pedagogical skindome in the lobby of the
New York Times,
I’d get five points for offing you?”

“You lose again, well-tufted one. As in law, even here you can’t gain from your own misdeed. Or at least on the national level.”

“It’s different locally?”

Eggs laughed. “It’s always different here. Even in the death game, the Berkeley players did not feel constrained by national rules. God forbid a self-respecting Berkeleyan should conform. What do they care about the death of a nationally known soprano or a Canadian hockey player? The pleasure they want is to see their enemies
here
die. So here the rules are a bit different. The age rule still holds. But there’s an arcane system of ratings. For instance, for politicos, they give an extra point for dead Republicans.”

“Because there aren’t any?” Jackson asked.

“No. Lists can contain names of anyone in the state. Plenty of Republicans down there in Raider-land.”

“Because Republicans are less likely to be assassinated?” I asked.

“Right, Smith. A number of tries, but few successes. So it’s two points extra for Republicans, one for Democrats, and zero for Berkeley Citizens Action.”

“What about professions?”

“Oh yeah, there’s a rating systems there too. The national group has to clarify some point every couple of years. The Berkeley Obit Band—the BOBs, they call themselves—confers each year to stay on top of complaints.”

I pushed up from the windowsill and paced to the far side of their desks. “Eggs, Scookie Hogan got twenty-seven points. Could that be for Philip Drem?”

“The IRS guy? How old?”

“Thirty-two.”

He made a show of counting down on his fingers. “That’d be seven for age. The IRS isn’t popular, but it’s not like being a fireman or a marine, either. I’d think Drem would be classified as a civil servant, which would probably be worth about five points, because the worst that’s likely to happen is the county car stalls in an intersection and he gets hit. That’s still only twelve.”

“Damn. You sure?”

“Not sure. Not with the BOBs.”

Jackson paused, enchilada halfway to mouth. “Dome, I can’t believe there’s not some more local spin.”

“You mean like the corpse urged Oakland not to take the Raiders back and keep fifty thousand drunks off the freeways on Sundays?”

Jackson didn’t respond. He didn’t react at all.

“But Drem’d go with an extra five points because he was murdered, Smith,” Eggs went on.

“Ta-da!”

“What? Do they get a bonus if we close the file?” Jackson demanded, surprisingly out of humor.

“Who would know whether Scookie picked him, Eggs?” I asked.

Eggs glanced at Jackson questioningly and then, apparently finding no answer to Jackson’s chilliness, plunged back into his topic. “As you might imagine, the death game is a pretty secret organization. I mean Chief Larkin or the priest at the Episcopal church isn’t likely to admit he’s a player. All the players have game names, so they don’t even know who the others are.”

“What’s the point of winning if you can’t lord it over your fellow players, if you don’t even know who they are? Is there a cash prize?”

“Zip.”

“Eggs, somebody has to know,” I insisted. “Games like this have a game master who keeps the official lists.”

He nodded.

“Okay. So the game master would have to be someone all the players trusted. A person with a job he or she wouldn’t lose if he were found out. Someone who everyone believed was reliable and who’d be able to keep up on who died.” I took a step toward the door. “Do you know any of the players?”

“Not anymore. The guy I heard this from died. Went for twenty-four points. He would have loved it.”

“Eggs! How do you know that?”

“In his twenties. Eight right there. Worked as a copy editor—next thing to a bureaucrat—four points. In his own home, so he didn’t even have the dangers of commuting—an extra two.”

“And the other ten?”

“Well, only his ex-wife got those points. Probably nobody else picked him.”

“Family members get extra points?” Jackson pulled his hand back from his food. “Hey, man, this is close to the marrow, even for Berkeley standards.”

Eggs flushed. In all the years I’d been in the department, I couldn’t recall ever seeing his skin any color but so white that his lips seemed rouged. Now, as he stared at Jackson, his cheeks were an odd shade of orange. Could Eggs be a part of this game? Would I be greatly surprised? Eggs fit the requirements for game master as well as anyone I could think of: solitary, fair, knowledgeable, reliable. I could picture Eggs sitting in his Morris chair in front of his fish tank discussing the rule changes with his fantail fish. The death game was just the sardonic view of things that would appeal to Eggs. Being game master would suit him. I could see him in wizard’s garb. Would Eggs have made that rule—extra points for close relations? There the wand faltered. That, I had to admit, would surprise me.

Eggs was facing the window, but I could see out of the corner of his eye he was concentrating on Jackson. “Jackson, it’s only a game. We see a dozen corpses done more casually than these.”

“Not family.”

“Look, I’m sorry I—”

“Forget it, man.” Jackson picked up his enchilada, took a last bite, and threw the wrapper in the trash. “I’ll be back around four.” He grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.