Death and Taxes (6 page)

Heling, one of the patrol officers, recounted the latest altercation of the People’s Park free box. “Berkeley’s answer to the Bavarian Christmas Pageants,” she said. “Just as reliable, but more frequent. Citizens leave clothes in the box, street people come to get them, the university starts hauling off the box, a mob forms, Campus Patrol hauls off the demonstrators in the park, we pick up the ones on city land. In a day or two the university relents, and the box returns. At least there were no injuries this time. But tonight’s Saturday night,
and
virtually the full moon. It could mean another round.”

I was listening to Heling but watching Pereira, illogically hoping she had taken the squeal on a bank robbery or collared the guy who’d been boosting Mercedes sedans all over the East Bay—anything but bad news on the body I’d last seen being shoved into the ambulance. But when she spoke, it was about Philip Drem. Drem had died in the emergency room. That panicked expression of his flashed somewhere in my consciousness. Not bewildered, as a man would be if he were suddenly taken ill, but terrified, as if his worst fears had come true.

“Drem was the most hated of the hated, the bulldog of the IRS auditors, to quote Rick Lamott, the hotshot of tax accountants,” Pereira said. “But as far as PIN and CORPUS go, he’s clean.” PIN is the Police Information Network, with data on warrants statewide. CORPUS lists arrests in the county. Drem’s showing up on neither was no surprise. Most law-abiding citizens wouldn’t.

“But on Records Management, Philip Drem was a star.”

I waited for Connie to go on. The Records Management system is where we keep note of everyone who has had any dealings with the department. You complain about your neighbor’s dog barking, you make it into Records Management.

“Two citizen’s arrests of responsibles who smoked in nonsmoking sections.”

“Oooohhh,” Griseki chided. “Wha’d he do, find the last two smokers in town?”

“That’s not all. He accused a Chinese restaurant of using MSG. They advertised that they didn’t. We told him that was a civil matter. But it didn’t stop him. The next week, he complained that the bakers of a chocolate fudge cake had sneaked in espresso beans.”

Griseki shook his head. “How will Berkeley survive without this guy? We’ll never take another easy breath or bite.”

“Yeah, but we’ll file our ten-forties a lot happier,” Eggs put in. There was an unusual edge to his voice.

“Anything else, Pereira?” Chief Larkin reined in the Saturday looseness.

“No dependents. His doctor said we should all be in such good health.”

“And it’s your case, Smith?” the chief asked.

I nodded.

Then the meeting was over. They’re short on Saturdays. I glanced over at Howard, hoping we could avoid being in our office at the same time. At the best of times the former closet is cramped, but when Howard and I are arguing—or worse, avoiding argument—it’s as if the air were cement. Now Howard was on the far side of the meeting room talking to his inspector and Chief Larkin. He’d be occupied long enough for me to get down to the office and eat my donut.

“Five minutes?” I called to Pereira. I needed the details on Drem. And if Howard was in our office when she arrived, she’d provide a diversion.

“Give me twenty and I may have a surprise for you, Smith.”

“What kind of a surprise?”

“A good one.”

For that I could wait another fifteen minutes. There’s never a danger of idle hands in DD. We’ve always got paperwork. I headed down the tan corridor to my office. At the stairs, Eggs, my fellow Homicide officer, caught up with me. Eggs was unfortunately nicknamed. Eggenburger had been shortened to Eggs for as long as I’d known him, but it had been only in the last couple of years that he’d lost his hair. Right now, his expression suited a grumpy hard-boiled. With bifocals.

“Bad time with your in-custody?” I asked.

“Nah.” He braced an arm against the wall. “Good thing Drem is yours, Smith. If he were mine, I’d be tempted to congratulate the perp.” He pushed off and turned toward his office.

I grabbed an arm. “Wait a minute here. Let’s have a little background on that one.”

“For cause of death you don’t have to consider heart attack. With Philip Drem, there’d be nothing to attack.” Eggs was grinning.

“Eggs! Stop gloating over the dead and explain!”

“Can’t now. I’ve got the DA’s liaison due in … Hell, he can wait. Come on.”

I followed him to his office,
the
Homicide office. When I’d been promoted to detective, he and Jackson had already been settled in there, in the corner office with the ledge that the Homicide squirrel visited daily for tribute. The room was three times the size of the dark hole Howard and I shared. Such were the perks of longevity, Eggs had insisted. Jackson’s desk was forever strewn with reports, pictures of his wife and kids, the morning newspaper, thermos and coffee cup, and scraps of paper with notes that went back years. On Eggs’s desk every square inch of blotter would be visible. When Eggs went to the men’s room, his desk looked better than Jackson’s when he’d taken his kids to Texas for two weeks.

“Shh!” Eggs opened the door slowly and pointed to the window. Porter, the squirrel, was on the ledge. Eggs walked over, settled in his chair, and placed his glasses on the desk. Then he extricated a pouch, pondered the contents, and selected a hazelnut for Porter.

Porter showed no such deliberation. He grabbed and carried. When the culinary consultation was completed, I said, “So, Eggs, what’s the story on Philip Drem?”

He reached for a Mazda brochure in his IN box and handed it to me. “What do you think of this one, the RX-Seven?” he asked with a mixture of pride and reservation.

I glanced down at the sleek convertible and back up at Eggs. What was
with
those car-model letters—RX-7, XL, DX? Did the Y chromosome lust after these X’s? Dismissing the speculation, I said, “Going to spruce up your image, eh?”

“I’m going to take the RX-Seven for a test drive after lunch. Want to come?” He bounced a still-shelled walnut in his hand. It was the most excited I’d ever seen reserved, analytical Eggs, the tan-sedan man. I was kind of sorry to miss this drive.

“Can’t. I’m nowhere with this Drem case. I can’t cut out now. Take me for a ride after you’ve bought the RX.”

Eggs smiled. “Okay. You’ll be the first.”

“I’m honored. Now, tell me about Philip Drem.”

Eggs leaned back, pulled open his drawer, and glanced at his handcuffs inside. He was wearing his standard wash-and-wear pale-blue shirt, his standard dark-blue tie hanging over his shoulders like loose suspenders. I could more easily imagine him on Drem’s bicycle than in a twenty-five-thousand-dollar sports car. He said, “You remember when I got divorced five years ago.”

I nodded. It had been a year or two before my divorce, long enough before that I wasn’t drawn to the topic. The reason I recalled the event at all was that I’d been so amazed Eggs had ever been married. He seemed like one of those men who padded through life and at some point realized they’d overlooked marriage.

He pulled open the handcuffs and clicked them shut. “Justine and I had been married since college, seventeen years. I was surprised when she wanted the divorce. Nothing had happened. She said that was the reason. We hadn’t grown apart, we’d faded apart.” He shrugged. “It was true. I didn’t mind much when she left. Mostly the problem was new inconveniences—keeping food in the house, doing the laundry. I found I liked having the place to myself. I liked to sit and listen to symphonies and watch the fish in the tanks.” The clicking stopped. He looked up, suddenly embarrassed. He’d said more about his divorce now than in the previous five years.

I nodded, appreciating the freedom of that empty apartment. If my sting with Howard didn’t work …

“My point is, Smith, that we had an amicable divorce. Justine hadn’t worked in years. She needed time to train for a decent job. I didn’t want her working in a dime store, or waiting tables, or whatever a B.A. in English qualifies you for seventeen years later. So I agreed to pay alimony while she went to school.” He’d begun working the cuffs again, pull-click, pull-click. “Most of her expenses were coming right away. She had to move, pay first and last, buy furniture, pay tuition, get her car fixed so she wouldn’t be stranded in a parking lot after a night class. She needed money right away.” He snapped the cuffs faster. “I did the decent thing. I arranged to give her the whole year’s allotment. I had to take a loan to do it, but I figured so what? So I gave her the check. But the day I put it in her hand, the day she deposited it, was one day before the divorce was final. I didn’t think about that.” He pulled the cuff arms hard and didn’t click them back. “But the next year, when Philip Drem was circling over the pickings looking for the unsuspecting divorced who might make mistakes he could latch on to, he found me and that alimony payment. Guess what, Smith?”

“What?”

“Alimony’s not deductible if it’s not ordered by the court.” He smacked the cuffs back together. “And it’s not ordered by the court until you’re legally divorced. And since I’d been decent enough to pay it early, no go. No deduction.”

“But surely he could understand your intent—”

“He didn’t give a shit about intent. Either it fit the rules or not.”

“But—”

“And before you ask, Smith, he told me every time I asked that agents don’t interpret the rules—agents only enforce them.”

“Like newspaper machines? Only take your coins and give you a paper.”

Eggs smacked the cuffs into the drawer. “Or take the money and give zip. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“But IRS agents have to have some discretion. Otherwise, the government would use computers instead of people,” I insisted.

“Sure. Agents can decide whether you are lying or not. But Drem had already made that decision. Dealing with him made me sympathize with the guys we get with rap sheets long enough to cover their beds. Drem was willing to give me the same benefit of the doubt.” He slammed his drawer shut. “Between the loan costs, the extra taxes, the interest on those taxes, and the penalties, it took me three years to get back to the point of having extra money. By then, car prices had shot up.” He stood up. Slowly a smile took hold and sat awkwardly on his long sallow face, as if the muscles were pulling in unaccustomed ways. “But now justice has prevailed. I’m going to be test-driving an RX-Seven, and Drem is dead!”

I hadn’t been shocked by Mason Moon’s comments on Drem or Lyn Takai’s, but Eggs’s dance on Drem’s grave brought home just how despised my victim was.

I followed Eggs out of his office and walked downstairs to mine. The one small window badly needed cleaning. Porter wouldn’t deign to visit our window, even if we had a ledge, which we didn’t.

The sun was out, but not much light had made it through the small grimy window, just enough to show the spots on the green paint where we’d mopped at sprayed coffee. Our metal desks faced opposite walls with three feet of space between. Over my desk was a bulletin board with a collage of notices. The city’d run out of corkboard by the time Howard moved in, so he’d been left to decorate with Scotch tape. Memos and announcements were forever pulling his tape loose, leaving beige rectangles in the green and sheets of paper on desk and floor.

There were still five of Pereira’s twenty minutes left. My donut was still on my desk, so I knew she hadn’t come by early. I had it half unwrapped before I thought of Raksen, the lab tech. He had Drem’s bicycle. There was just time to call him. With each thing I heard about Agent Drem, an innocent fall off a bicycle seemed less and less likely. I rewrapped the donut, got pencil and paper ready, and called the lab. Raksen was off duty. Few others would I have risked calling at home on their morning off, but for Raksen talk of scratches and toxins was as exciting as a stolen caress. Besides, if he’d planned a passionate morning, he’d have turned off his phone.

On the third ring, Raksen said groggily, “Yes?”

“It’s Jill Smith in Homicide. I’m sorry to get you up.”

“You’re calling about the bicycle?” His voice sounded middle-of-the-day.

“Right.”

“Was it you who spotted the tears in the seat?”

“Right.”

“Good move, Smith. Place where those two seatpads come together, fabric was torn. Metal cylinders been wedged between. Some kind of copper alloy.”

“How long a cylinder?”

“Well …” Raksen was tapping his teeth. He was a short, wiry terrier of a guy whose teeth were sharp and pointy, ready to snatch a scrap of information so he could race off and chew on it. “Couldn’t’ve stuck up much higher than the seats; deceased would’ve spotted it. But, no way to tell.”

“No way” was a big admission for Raksen, for whom an unanswered question was a bone dangling out of reach. But Raksen didn’t sound defeated. “So, Raksen, what did you find?”

“Residue of a central-nervous-system depressant. Can’t say which one. Could take weeks to run enough tests to find the right one.”

“So what do you think was wedged in between the seats—a miniature hypodermic?”

“I don’t like to guess.” Raksen
hated
to guess.

“I just need a hint.”

“Well … based on very preliminary examination”—cases had gone to court on less evidence than Raksen considered very preliminary—”my guess, just a guess, is a small needle filled with the depressant solution. Some trigger mechanism to set it off when the victim sat down.”

A needle in the seat might appeal to someone who wanted to kill a pain in the ass. But it would be asking a lot to expect that pain to sit down on it and pay no attention when the needle penetrated his butt. “Do you bicycle?” I asked, though it was hard to picture Raksen enjoying such an imprecise, unscientific pastime. Terriers seldom cycle.

“No. But I did call a friend in the Berkeley Bicycle Club.” I’d never known a case where Raksen didn’t have a friend who was an expert or knew an expert. “Some riders start off standing, pedaling to pick up speed. But they sit as soon as they can.”

“But surely Drem would have felt it when the needle went in.”

“Maybe. But, Smith, street paving isn’t Berkeley’s forte.” A couple of weeks ago Raksen had lost a case of samples to a pothole. Clearly he still hadn’t finished the grieving process. “On a bicycle, a man gets a lot of sensory input, particularly in the butt. And my guess—don’t repeat this till I have something solid—is the needle was embedded in a soft plaster-of-paris mixture, made to fall away after the initial pressure. But don’t quote me.”