Death and Taxes (18 page)

“And you’re not sorry he’s dead?”

“I’m going to tell you something, for free. I’m not a death-game player, and, Smith, I don’t wish death on anyone.”

I didn’t disbelieve him. That kind of fairness was part of Ott’s code. He was too much mired in the sixties ethic. I glanced around his depressing office, drops from the fog streaking down its sooty windows. I looked through the doorway to the mire of blankets, newspapers, books, clothes, and God-knows-what that covered the floor. Many of Ott’s clients were Avenue regulars who’d been strung out on drugs and probably would be again when it came time to pay up, or they were forever on the short end of life, Avenue street artists who’d move on or felons who’d find him expendable as soon as he delivered. No one who wasn’t guided by that naive hope of the sixties could live Herman Ott’s life.

“Drem audit you?”

Ott hesitated again. He really did hate to give information to the police.

“More than once?”

Still he didn’t say anything.

“More than twice?”

He yanked the
Daily Cal
back over his Schedule D. “Smith, this is not part of our deal.”

I stood up. “Ott, I’m going to tell you something that may amuse you.”

“It won’t change the balance between us.”

“A gift, Ott.” Seeing his small pale eyes narrow into the folds of his face, I said, “Okay, a gift, and let’s just say I’m open to any return gesture. So here, Ott. Your acquaintance, Philip Drem, a man who made it onto a number of death-game lists on the strength of his professional offensiveness, had not only a wife but a girlfriend.”

Ott prided himself on not showing reactions. But here pride failed. His eyes opened wide, and his fleshy arms hung loose from his narrow shoulders. “Two women tolerated him?”

“Right. You know about his wife?”

Ott gave no reply. I took that for a yes. I didn’t doubt that when Drem audited him, he had audited Drem’s life. I waited, watching his inner struggle, till he said, “And the other one?”

“Here’s the interesting thing, Ott. The girlfriend looks like a healthy likeness of his wife. Maybe you’ve seen her—Maria Zalles?”

Again Ott didn’t answer. But this time I was surprised. If he’d known nothing, he would have had some reaction—anger, bewilderment, or amusement (such as that might be for the humorless Ott). But this careful lack of response was significant.

“You know Maria Zalles?”

Ott reached for the doorknob: “We’re through, Smith.”

I didn’t move. “She seems like a nice girl. She gave me a phony address. She’s going to get herself in a lot of trouble. If you know her, you’ll be doing her a favor by telling her to call me.”

He pulled the door open.

“Ott, for her, it’s like innocents dealing with the IRS. They think the government will forgive them because they just overlooked something. They’re wrong. You’ve been audited. You know that.”

He gave just a small sigh. I wondered how many dollars that exhalation reflected. But I didn’t pause. “Ott, Maria Zalles thinks dealing with the police is like fussing with the housemother at school, like a good story will make everything okay. Or maybe it’ll all be all right after spring vacation. We know that’s not true. Interfering with a murder investigation is a crime. Help her, Ott.”

“Out.”

“She calls me by the end of the day, she’s off the hook.”

M
AYBE
H
ERMAN
O
TT WOULD
get Maria Zalles to turn herself in. Probably not. But there was nothing I could do about it till I gave him time. What I could do was stop by the Inspiration Hotel and see what my visit last night had stirred up. I could ask Ethan Simonov about the books. I pictured Simonov leaning over the desk as he had last night, elfin eyes gleaming with readiness to battle the city council or organize an expedition or create a party game. If I’d had to nominate someone for death-game master, Simonov would be high on the list.

It was just before noon when I walked out of Ott’s building. The smell of tomato sauce, oregano, and garlic wrapped around my nostrils like a nose ring and drew me into the pizza shop. The dense fog had emptied the Avenue, but those who had braved the danger of wet had done it for food. The tiny pizza joint was packed. Inside, the smell of tomato sauce battled with the stench of wet wool. Students in rugby shirts, shorts, and goose-bumpy legs huddled by the stand-up shelf along the soda and sauce-stained wall stuffing deep-dish pepperoni in their mouths and mumbling about on-line access or the Cal Bears season. Discarded sheets of wax paper were mashed into the floor, and muddy tendrils marked the lines of ingress and egress.

I ordered a slice of ham and pineapple (it’s better than it sounds) and stood along the counter half-listening to conversations, hoping to overhear something worthwhile, the other half of my mind thinking about the Inspiration Hotel. Had Philip Drem been over the hotel’s tax return to verify Lyn Takai’s? Was Drem headed to the hotel when he died?

I finished the Coke, wadded up the pizza paper, and ran across the street to the patrol car. In the fog the car needed to idle a bit. I always forgot that. Warming up the VW bug never made any difference. Either it stalled or it didn’t; the choice was its own. I listened to the squeals coming over the radio as I drove down beside the campus past Sproul Plaza, the counterculture Hyde Park of Berkeley. My favorite of the haranguers had been the spaceman selling square inches of real estate on the moon. This year’s entry was a bald man in a pink tube suit giving away condoms.

I drove the few blocks and parked across the street from the Inspiration. Thick fog suited the hotel. The whir of an electric saw came from one of the yards. Like the sound of the sawmill near my grandmother’s. I stared at the vague outlines of the hotel and in front of it, the cattails poking up from the hard, stamped dirt. I remembered my grandmother’s front yard—I still couldn’t picture the house. I saw that prickly yard as I had then, looking out the front window. Looking at it from inside, where it was safe. Inside the closed windows and closed doors. My stays had always been in summer, the air conditioner whirring but the air still moist, thick, deadeningly hot. A soggy straitjacket of air. I could remember the door opening and the searing light cutting across the sill, the smell of fresh-cut wood from the mill taunting me. But I couldn’t picture myself outside, not without her dry fingers on my shoulder. Keeping me safe, she’d said, glancing pinch-eyed at the neighbors’ houses and forcing me back inside to …

I found myself clutching the steering wheel, foot poised on the gas pedal. I couldn’t recall a clear picture of the outside of that house because I’d spent those endless months inside. But I couldn’t see the inside of the house either. Why was I blocking that out? But this was hardly the time. The taxpayers don’t pay for self-discovery.

I hurried across the street to the Inspiration. Once inside, I could hear hammering in the back. The sawing had stopped. The lobby was empty but for the couple behind the desk. Had I not known their raison d’être, I would have taken them as an illustration of
ill-suited.
Mason Moon’s bushy brown hair still showed a hat line from his floppy felt chapeau, and his orange goatee held a smattering of wood flecks. Obviously, he’d been dragged in here from his studio.

When I’d first seen Moon, he’d been flamboyantly playing to the crowd. Now he was huddled as small as his plump five-ten frame could get, like a wad of insecurity stuck atop the hotel records.

Standing over him was the reason—Connie Pereira. Dressed in her lightweight tan uniform in this winter-cold room, Pereira was sweating. Her blond hair, which never appeared uncombed at any hour of day or night, showed tracks of fingers drawn through it in frustration. The pounding in the back of the hotel was louder, more irregular.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

In unison, Pereira and Moon shook their heads.

“This is a ridic—”

But Pereira overrode him. “To call this assemblage of scribbles financial records is like mistaking
him
for Henry Moore.”

With an orbital spread of the arms, Mason Moon, the plop-artist sculptor, thrust himself up and glared at Pereira. “Spare me the persecution of the hirelings of the bourgeoisie!”

I stepped between them. “I take it the records are not in order. How do you prepare your taxes, Mr. Moon?”

“With pain.” He slumped into the chair. But that slump did not end in the normal droop of the head over the chest. In Moon’s case his cotton clouds weren’t squeezed, nor was the silver moon creased. A careful slump.

“You’ve been a CPA, haven’t you, Mason?” I asked. Pereira stared, as amazed as if I’d suggested he’d been a diva.

“Another life,” Moon muttered.

“Believe it,” Pereira said. “Not only does he have no coherent record of expenses—he’s got utility bills mixed in with permit payments and rooms rented with no names of clientele. I’ve seen people keep piggy banks with better records than this.”

I looked down at the scraps of paper strewn over the desk. Although there were a number of obvious, answers there, I asked Moon, “Why did you leave accounting?”

“Being an accountant is like spending your life blowing the stuffing into pillows. Your best hope is that you avoid disaster. Life should be about more than avoidance.”

Pereira opened her mouth, but I gave her the “stop” look before she could speak. I knew her well enough to foresee a lecture on creative financial planning, stocks, options, and esoteric but legal ways of keeping, expanding, or hiding money that were beyond my level of comprehension or interest.

I said to Moon, “Surely you knew the limitations of accounting before you chose it.”

He shrugged, a theatrical gesture aimed at the back row of the empty lobby. “I erred. The job’s boring, and the competition’s a nightmare. It’s like selling toilet paper. One brand’s pretty much like another. The only things you can sell are price differences or extras. So you spend half your time trying to convince housewives that their friends will think better of them if they have violets on their roll. Or bathroom jokes for Christmas.”

“And what are the bathroom jokes of the accounting world?”

“Guarantees. Audit insurance. Your accountant will stand not just by you but in front of you all the way to San Quentin.”

I glanced at Pereira. She hesitated, then, realizing that I wouldn’t know about such assurances—with no income but salary, no property, no investments, I’d never had anything worthy of an accountant—she nodded. Her expression suggested she was beginning to lump me in the same pile with Moon.

“What kind of guarantees?” I persisted.

“Well, the audit insurance and—” Moon hesitated. “Well, okay, here’s the latest. There’s a rumor that Rick Lamott—he’s the new hotshot in Berkeley—will be doing a money-back guarantee, guaranteeing that certain of his accounts will not be audited.”

“Money-back?” Pereira said, horrified. Clearly, money-back was a concept held in poor esteem in all financial circles.

For a guy who’d been in the business only a few years, Rick Lamott had certainly commanded attention. He was, in his way, not unlike Mason Moon. I could picture Lamott whipping around a corner in that red Lotus sports car of his and thumbing his nose at the IRS office. Just as he’d parked in the red zone in front of the police station.

Pereira gave a snort. “When the IRS finds out about that, it’ll be his business in ruins.”

Moon grinned the same evil look he had when he started to make demands of me by Drem’s body. “Yeah, it’s a quick ticket to the problem-preparer’s list.”

“Yeah, Moon, you’d better hope Lamott has no talent for sculpting. ’Cause he’ll have plenty of free time to learn.” Pereira laughed.

“Hey, wait up here,” I said. “What’s the problem-preparer’s list?”

Moon leaned back in his chair. It was an old wooden armless swivel, the type of chair that would have been at home in Herman Ott’s office. The spring for the backrest was loose, and Moon had to catch his feet under the desk to keep from flailing backward. Regaining equilibrium, he pushed off and rolled to the rear wall where he could face both Pereira and me. “After a trip to this rugged nation, Vita Sackville-West—or her husband, Harold Nicolson—pronounced: ‘All Americans are more or less vulgar.’ To the minions of the Internal Revenue Service, ladies, all taxpayers are more or less thieves. It galls the minions that they can’t catch every one and make them pay. If they find that you went to a police meeting in San Francisco and deducted your travel expenses and then went to the symphony that night, it doesn’t just irk them—it gnaws all the way to their marrow. If they had the manpower to comb through every return, they’d disallow the whole trip because you had symphony tickets and would have gone to the City anyway. They hate stuff like that.”

I could have told him the department would have paid the rapid-transit fees, but I decided not to distract him. Moon leaned forward and made an inward circle with his arms, as if sweeping us into his confidence. “They hate taxpayers who cheat. More than that, they hate people who don’t report income at all. But the people they hate the most are the tax preparers who show you how to get away with overdeducting or not reporting. There are crooked accountants, of course, and, alas, incompetents. Incompetents cause them a lot of work. But the ones they’re after are the guys who find loopholes they
know
shouldn’t be in the law but are. The clever guys. The guys who beat the Service at its own game. It galls them.”

Moon reached up by his forehead, then let his hand drop. He’d intended to tip the floppy hat to accentuate his performance, but he was bareheaded. Undaunted, he went on. “So what they’ve got for the whole lot of these guys is something called the problem-preparers list. Of course, they’d never admit it exists. It’s like a blacklist of accountants. They watch these guys. They can audit their clients year after year. You don’t have any way of knowing if your accountant is on it, not until the third year your taxes are audited for no apparent reason.”

I eyed Pereira. She nodded. “Rumor is, they’ve run guys out of business. You can imagine, Smith, that when the word gets around that all of Lamott’s clients are being audited, he’s not likely to pick up new business. Or keep the old.”