Death and Taxes (22 page)

“Like where?”

“Good question. People used to go to Arizona for their health, but now with the copper smelting they
get
allergies there. In Alaska I’d be indoors all the time, surrounded by housing synthetics. There’s nowhere on the continent that would be safe. Phil started thinking about islands in the middle of the ocean.” She laughed, a scratchy sound. “Of course, he got obsessed. He has a ton of vacation days. So he was going to check out an island off Samoa.”

“When?”

“Some time this week—he didn’t know which day it’d be. He picked up the ticket on his lunch hour Friday.”

“Which airline?”

“I don’t know. It never came up.”

I asked for the name of his travel agent. No travel agent. He’d taken BART to the airport for it. But if Drem had gotten his ticket Friday, it would have been in his briefcase when he died. Where was that briefcase? And despite Tori Iversen’s certainty, I couldn’t help wondering if Philip Drem wouldn’t have found a week or so in Samoa more pleasant with a companion, particularly one who was the next thing to Tori. And the last person known to have seen that briefcase.

But a ticket to Samoa wouldn’t be cheap. And if the islands worked out for Tori—something I doubted—surely a chemical-free paradise would be a tourist mecca and become chemical-full within a year. But if the plan did work, how would Drem have supported the couple once they moved there? I asked.

“Phil made decent money. And there’s not much we spend it on.”

That answer showed her financial innocence more than anything else. But Drem wouldn’t have thought that way. I tried another tack. “Tori, when did Phil start looking for places to move?”

She lifted her foot and rested it on the edge of the chair. “I had a bad attack a couple of months ago. Phil panicked. He said anything was worth a try rather than watching me die here.”

“A couple of months ago. Winter. Is that a normal time for an allergy attack?”

“I don’t have ‘normal’ times. And that attack might not have been so bad, but Phil was away that week, and I let it go on longer than he would.”

“He was in Fresno, IRS meeting, substituting for his group manager?”

“Right.”

“Did he talk about the TCMP when he got back?”

“Only that they set the local standards for a couple of things, like business meals. Nothing interesting. Phil hated the meetings even more than he hated the job normally.”

But he had come home from that meeting and begun to think about expensive travel.

“D
REM DIDN’T USE A
travel agent,” I said to Pereira, Acosta, and Leonard. “He picked up his ticket from the airport. If he wrote a check, he didn’t record it.”

“An IRS agent?” Pereira asked, amazed.

“If he paid with a credit card, he could be in Samoa in less time than it would take us to track that down. So where is that ticket?”

Pereira was sitting on Howard’s desk. Leonard was propped against the wall between desk and door with a stance so out of kilter that he could have slid into the Avenue scene without a ripple. Acosta stood on the other side of the door in the narrow space between the ends of the desks and the walls. Nothing on his person touched desk or wall; there was just the suggestion of a flare to his chiseled nostrils.

“Drem picked up the ticket Friday at noon. It’s not in his desk at work.”

“Smith,” Acosta said, “obsessives don’t leave their papers around. Trust me on this.”

I glanced at Acosta. There was the slimmest suggestion of a smile on his angular face. He went on. “Ten to one, Drem had his ticket in his briefcase, and whoever lifted that has it. It’ll just be a matter of going to the airport and seeing who comes as Philip Drem.”

“Or Philippa Drem,” Leonard offered.

I said, “The last person who saw Drem with his briefcase was Maria Zalles. Zalles is missing. Chances are, she’ll be Philippa Drem. What airline would put up a fight against the argument that their agent had misheard Ms. Drem’s name?”

“Let’s hope she’s not flying out of San Francisco. If there is one place you could lose a suspect flying out, that’s it,” Pereira said. “A flight to Hawaii, in a foggy April, with passengers who’ve chilled their butts all winter … It’ll be jammed. More flights than from Oakland, thus more flyers, more friends, relatives, kids running through crowds, toddlers wandering around the waiting areas—just try setting up a chase there. Luggage carts, cabs coming and going, hotel vans, buses, and cars. And rush-hour traffic on the freeway—”

“Enough!” I said. “I take your point. If I can get the whole department over there, maybe I have a chance. I need to find Zalles before she leaves town.”

“If she hasn’t already,” Acosta said. “The woman had a free room at the Inspiration Hotel. She’s been gone from there for days.”

Leonard leaned forward. He looked as if he would have liked to clamber up on Howard’s desk, but Pereira already occupied most of that. “Zalles could have taken the connector van to the airport Saturday right after you left her and gotten a room at one of the hotels.”

“With an alias. She is not a stupid woman, so by now”—Acosta glanced down at his watch—“she has checked out and gone to the airport.”

Leonard moved in closer, virtually arm-to-arm with Pereira. “She could be at the gate for any flight on any airline, in any concourse. Just another passenger. When one flight boards, she moves to another, and another, see?” Leonard grabbed Pereira’s arm, shaking it with enthusiasm. “If she didn’t need to sleep, she could live out there at SFO the rest of her life.” Pereira extricated her arm, but Leonard didn’t notice. “In O’Hare she could probably do it, sleep and all.”

I sighed. “I can’t tell you what a comfort this is to me. If Zalles is still in Berkeley, we’ve got a chance to catch her here on our own turf and avoid the airport horrors you’ve all been kind enough to describe. Acosta, you call the airlines and have them check reservations.”

“For how long?”

“All week. We only know Drem was leaving this week. Then start on the airport van companies, have them check the last two days for Zalles or Drem. Give them her description too. Chances are, she’d have left from the Durant Hotel pickup. Leonard, try the airport hotels—your reward for the suggestion. We need to have another go at anyone who might know her whereabouts. Connie, you take the Inspiration Hotel crew—Simonov, Moon, and Takai.”

Leonard nodded his shaggy head, turned, and started out, his gun slapping against his tan pantleg. “Leonard,” I said as he reached for the door, “what’s the word on the street person who said he saw a patrol officer at the Drem scene?”

Leonard shrugged. “Vanished. Probably boosted a better bike and pedaled off into the sunset.”

“No one on the Avenue has an idea where he went?”

“Not that twenty bucks would buy. Unless I’m wrong, fifty wouldn’t do it either. I’d say Sierra just decided Berkeley was too hot and split.” He waited a moment, then walked out.

Leonard was so at home on the Avenue, he’d know whom to trust, whom to get rid of. He’d been at the scene. He … I pushed back the suspicion. Leonard had been a veteran when I was a rookie. You don’t toss away your career for a trip to the South Pacific.

“What about you, Jill?” Pereira said. “Who’re you checking out?”

“Scookie Hogan.” I paused. “And if that doesn’t pan out, Herman Ott.”

“How is your favorite PI involved in this one?” Acosta looked down the length of his perfectly straight nose, wrinkling it just a bit at the thought of Ott. It amazed me that immaculate Acosta had chosen this messy profession. There is a saying my Zen friend told me: “Exist in muddy waters with the purity of the lotus flower.” I couldn’t help imagining Acosta rinsing Berkeley off his stems each night. I wondered if his very compulsiveness made his partner Leonard so laid back.

I grabbed a donut on the way out of the station. It was maplenut, the brussels sprouts of the donut world, but there was no other choice.

By the time I got to Telegraph, the sky was gray again. Strong winds off the Pacific push the summer fog inland every afternoon and let it ease back over the ocean around ten in the morning. But winter fogs are land fogs, scummy gray layers that dim the sky and mute life beneath them. April this year clung to winter.

I left the car in a red zone off Telegraph and ran around the corner to the Med. The Med is too much an old Lefty place to have bourgeois patio seating. It does have a wall of windows that make life on the Avenue an extension of the room. But today there was nothing to see outside except people pulling their sweaters tighter and hurrying up the Avenue. Inside, the place smelled of smoke, coffee, and wet wool.

Scookie Hogan was at the same table she’d been at two days ago.
Her
table? But in contrast to the drab sixties cottons she’d been wearing then, today she sported a soft violet sweater and one of those scarves that cost more than sweaters.

I got a cappuccino and sat down at her table. “Celebrating the bonus you got for Philip Drem’s death?”

“How did you know?” she asked, amazed.

“I’m a cop, Scookie. I’ve got connections all over town.” Before the implications of that statement could fade, I said, “Where is Maria Zalles?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maria was the hotel maid. When she disappeared, you took over. You’d done that job before, right?”

“Well, yes. Someone has to.”

“You trained Maria, right?”

“It’s not a difficult job. I—”

“You were close to her. Of all the people at the hotel, you were the closest, weren’t you?” Pereira would be using this same line with Moon or Takai about now.

“I suppose.”

“When she came looking for the job, you arranged for her to have a room at the hotel, right?”

Scookie hesitated, then nodded a bit too quickly. She looked relieved. There was a step, a slant, something, I’d missed here. What? But I couldn’t afford to slow down to worry about that. The quick pressure was forcing her answers. “What did she say when she left?”

“She didn’t. She just didn’t show up for work.”

“You don’t not show up for work when you work where you live.” Maria hadn’t been in room 3 Saturday. The workman had had it. “Did she sleep in another room at the hotel Saturday night?”

“No.” Again the answer was too quick.

I leaned closer. “Scookie, you are the one person we know of who profited by Phil Drem’s murder. In more ways than one. You got your bonus points.” I shushed her with my hand. “I know you don’t kill just for that, but you liked the idea of Drem dead so much that you singled him out as the person you most wanted to die. Juries are swayed by odd things, and I can promise you, Scookie, a bonus choice in the death game will be a killer with any jury.”

Her face paled.

I went on. “I’ll give you another chance to be straight with me. Where is Maria Zalles?”

She drew her shoulders in protectively. The fringe of her violet sweater shook. I let her think, let her contemplate the ominous possibilities. Finally she said, “She was scared. She came back Friday night and said she was going to get out of town. Go back home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Jersey. Someplace in Jersey.”

I nodded. Then I let her create a story of how Maria Zalles had planned her departure and trip. I grew up in Jersey. I may not be able to spot every ex-Jerseyan, but I can sure as hell tell a woman who has never lived in or near the state. Maria Zalles had a bit of an accent. It wasn’t from Jersey.

I gave Scookie the normal warning about not leaving town. Then I left my cup at the counter, stepped into the bathroom, and peered out through the crack in the door. Scookie Hogan was hiding something. I was betting what she was hiding was Maria Zalles. Chances were she’d take advantage of my absence and rush out to find Maria. If not, I’d have to wait outside until she decided it was safe to leave.

But the door had barely closed when Scookie headed for the street.

T
ELEGRAPH
A
VENUE IS NEVER
an easy place on which to tail. On sunny days street artists’ tables and display cases line the curbs. Browsers meander beside them, half-looking at mushroom-shaped candles or braided bracelets, half-averting crashes with other distracted browsers. Pressing in against the tables, potential customers finger piles of Peruvian sweaters, displays of feather earrings lavish enough to have turned parrots into fryers, or stars-and-stripes long johns. Shopping is serious business here. And we on the force can make a month’s worth of enemies barging between stained-glass panels and potential buyers.

But today, in the fog, the Avenue was as barren as the day after a closeout sale. Nearer to campus there’d be a sprinkling of the hardier or hungrier street artists and their wares, but here only a few students hurried to coffeehouses or bookstores. I might as well have had a blinking red light on my head and a sign:
Police Tail.
My only camouflages were my gray jacket and Scookie Hogan’s obliviousness. I wouldn’t even have tried with anyone less glazed than she.

I stood in front of the Med and watched as she meandered bareheaded across the street as if experiencing the first spring day after a Minnesota winter. The mist-laden fog coated her long gray-streaked hair; it matted into her violet sweater. She strolled on, oblivious. At the corner she turned and looked around. I stepped back into the Med’s doorway, brushing against a guy with a cup of espresso who was watching the scene.

“Hey, you want in or out?” he demanded.

“Sorry,” I muttered irritably, wiping a drop of his coffee off my sleeve. I couldn’t afford to get involved in a territorial dispute here. I looked back at Scookie. She was crossing Haste Street and heading toward campus. When she stepped up on the sidewalk kitty-corner from me, she took another look, and then, satisfied she wasn’t being followed, moved on at a faster clip.

I darted through traffic to the other side of Haste Street and hurried along the empty Telegraph sidewalk. There are no convenient doorways there. I had to count on the meager camouflage of my jacket. Single-man tailing is a sucker’s job. On the force we always use at least two officers. I’d had no chance to call in help, but that didn’t make me feel any better.