Death and Taxes Page 4

  Howard’s sting had been half a block from Drem’s accident. Could the crowd left over from Drem have derailed Howard’s plan? Surely Pereira and the backups had gotten them dispersed well before midnight. Surely … “What happened?”

  He sucked in air through his clenched teeth. “Okay. You know the setup. Castillo’s already in People’s Park with the regulars there. He’s got his sleeping bag and a backpack full of gear. All the guys in the park—the street people, the homeless guys, the winos, the addicts, the runaways—they all think Castillo’s a regular too. He’s spent a month of his life sleeping in shelters, or in the park, or in alleys. He’s eaten in soup kitchens. He’s worn the same stinking clothes for a week at a time. I mean, I could barely stand to talk to him. You can imagine what his wife thought.”

  I didn’t have to imagine. Eve Castillo had been to a party with us. She decreed Castillo celibate until he’d been steam-cleaned.

  “So, everything is set. I’ve cleared and recleared with the campus cops.”

  I nodded. The university owned the land People’s Park occupied; their police patrolled it.

  “I’ve planned this baby down to the minute. Damon Hentry’s convinced Castillo’s the go-between. Hentry’s supposed to be there on the stroke of midnight. Hentry’s the kind of dude midnight in the full moon would appeal to. I’ll tell you, Jill, I could get a research grant for the amount of background I did on Damon Hentry.”

  “You’re an artiste,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze. He’d talked about the sting between azalea runs and consultations with roofers. I’d caught glimpses of the old Howard. “Castillo’s spent the day acting crazy. The park guys are giving him a wide berth, like they do with crazies. At eleven thirty he’s sitting in the wet grass by the garbage cans, waiting. I’m in an unmarked across the street. Everything’s perfect. I can just about feel Damon Hentry’s wrists as I click the cuffs on him. I can smell his shock. I’ve never had a setup go so smoothly.” His eyes softened. A wistful smile creased his cheeks. I could see the sting through his lenses, feel the heady rush of triumph.

  The smile vanished. “And then, Jill, this goddamned jogger comes tooling along. Eleven thirty at night, for godsakes! Out jogging as if she doesn’t have a home to go to.” Howard turned and glared at me. “Everyone knows how the park is. Even the homeless are nervous there. They complain about the dealers.”

  Suddenly the smoke seemed thicker. I breathed in through my mouth. “And there was quite a crowd around there tonight?” Surely we’d gotten the crowd from Drem’s accident dispersed before …

  “Buncha guys, buncha drugs, and one goddamned woman jogging in skintight Day-Glo Lycra like she’s a gift from another planet.”

  “No matter what you’re wearing,” I said, feeling my shoulders tighten and hearing the edge to my voice, “People’s Park’s not a wise spot to run by. You don’t think she was Hentry’s lure, testing the waters?”

  “No. And she didn’t run by. Through. She came from the far corner, and when I spotted her, she was in the middle of the park with five guys on her tail.”

  “Oh shit!”

  “You can believe, Jill, that I did not want to go plowing into the park, advertising Police Presence. I know Damon Hentry too well. He had someone watching the park since sundown. As soon as his man spotted me opening the car door, the deal would be off, and the slime would be a whole lot more slippery the next time we tried to set something up. So I’m sitting tight, pulling for the damned woman to make it through. And she almost does. She’s fifteen yards from the fucking sidewalk when one of the guys grabs her shoulder and knocks her down.” He stopped, took a breath, and stared straight at me with a look so hostile, I barely recognized him. “So I get out and run across the street. Castillo’s slipped back under the trees with the rest of the homeless. No need in both of us blowing our cover. By the time I get there, the woman’s standing up, surrounded by these guys.”

  “Who? Transients?”

  “Three guys I didn’t recognize and a couple of crackheads. I’ve busted these two before. I know what they’re capable of. To them rape would be just the beginning. So I come up and plant myself between her and one of the crackheads. I ask what’s going on. Calm, authoritative, Mr. By-the-book. The crackhead tells me it’s none of my fucking business. And then the chorus starts.”

  Howard didn’t need to describe events in greater detail. I’d seen enough crowds feeding on each other, buoying up leaders, egging them on to do stupid macho things. By eleven thirty, it was a safe guess that the crackheads would be high or crazy, or both, the winos way up or way down.

  “So everybody’s mouthing off. I’m trying to keep order and get things calmed down before guys are coming out of the shrubbery and up off the Avenue. Before we’re the top of the bill. But the crackheads get the pack of them wired. Guys who would have been slinking off are shoving and yelling ‘Who the hell do you think you are, telling us what to do? This is our turf.’ They’re closing in around me. And her.”

  “And no way to call backup.” He’d have been counting on Castillo to get to a phone.

  “And then she starts in on them, yelling at them to keep their fucking hands off her. Riling them up. That’s the last thing I need. The crackheads’re already straining at the leash. The whole situation’s ready to blow. I’m yelling at the bunch of them to knock it off, but things are so far out of control that I’m just adding to the noise.” He waited till I nodded. “So I did the only thing possible.”

  “Which was?”

  “I removed the provocation.”

  Textbook crowd management. Defuse the crowd first.

  “I told her to get in the car. She balked. I said to her, ‘Lady, you see these guys? Do I have to spell things out?’” Howard shook his head. “It was like she grew up on another planet. She planted her Day-Glo legs and said she goddamn well wasn’t going anywhere. She has just as much right to be in this park as anyone else. By this time, I can see shadows moving toward us. I say, ‘Lady, get in the patrol car now!’ She digs in her heels. I don’t have time to argue. I grab her arm and yank her across the grass. The pack follows. I get the door open. She braces against the side of the car. I shove her in. I’ve still got the mob to deal with. It’s a full minute or so before another car pulls up. Took Castillo that long to get to a phone.”

  “So the whole sting’s blown, and Castillo’s cover too?” I said woodenly.

  “Oh, yeah. Castillo’s shot to hell. He might as well be the dealer’s poster boy. But that’s not the end of it, Jill. As soon as patrol gets there, I get back in the car. And what do I get—thanks for saving her ass? Not hardly. Fucking bitch is still screaming at me. Why have I arrested her? Why not the men? By then, they weren’t the problem. She was.” He turned and glared at me. “What kind of idiot woman gets out in the middle of the night in feel-me-up clothes, leaves her house where she’s safe, to run through—”

  “She should be able to run when she pleases,” I said, my voice cracking with anger.

  Howard stared. “Jees, Jill, you of all people—”

  “If a guy parks his Maserati on the street overnight, we don’t throw him in the cage because it gets stolen.”

  “And when he gets tired of worrying about being ripped off, he can get a Ford. You tell that to a woman who gets raped and ends up with AIDS. She can’t trade in her body.”

  “So what—she should stay inside every night and be safe? Be a prisoner!” I was yelling.

  “Common sense—”

  “Common sense is the status quo. Common sense says the world stays as it is—”

  “Well, you can’t—”

  I jumped up and glared down at Howard. “Common sense says men go where they please and women huddle inside and hope none of those men decide to break into their supposedly safe houses.”

  He let a beat pass before saying, “I can’t go wherever I please.”

  “When was the last time you couldn’t walk across campus alone at night because wo
men might be aroused? When did you change out of your cutoffs because your legs looked too good? When did you not stop in a bar by yourself?”

  “I don’t go to the Oakland housing projects.”

  “Hardly the same thing.”

  “No, but I understand—”

  I stood up and glared down at him. “No, you don’t, Howard. You’re six foot six, and a cop. All the streets lead outward for you. You don’t know what a roadblock is. Or a prison.”

  “Jill, I can’t believe you—”

  “Believe it!” I stalked to the door, opened it, stepped out, and slammed it. The cold air iced the sweat on my face. I breathed in hungrily till my lungs couldn’t take any more air. It had been as if I’d been breathing through a thick towel before.

  I slid into my VW and backed out of the driveway, feeling the rough fake leather of the steering-wheel cover, inhaling the thin smell of gasoline from the spill on the side of the car. I’d loved that smell as long as I could remember. And when I shifted into first, I could see the road winding endlessly ahead of me. I turned the radio to blare and stepped on the gas.

  I didn’t want to be tied down by the house, or by Howard.

  It was probably less than half an hour later when I realized I had no idea where I was going. It was 2:00 A.M. I was cold and tired, and I felt that queasy mixture of anger and sorrow that I always do when I lose my temper, as if I’d burst free for a few minutes, only to find myself in a bigger cage. The cage of the police department where I was the only woman in Detective Detail, where the rules were made to suit men and I was judged on how well I adapted. Or maybe it was the larger cage of society and its view of women.

  Howard had hit a nerve with the jogger. I felt as I had when I was fourteen years old when my older brother, Mike, drove across country, camping. I’d thought that trip the ultimate adventure. I’d started to plan my own trip to follow my graduation when my mother said, “You can’t do that. You’re a girl.”

  But how much of this was my reaction to Howard and the time he spent on the damned house? I sat, shivering, considering that. I hadn’t been just angry when I was yelling at him; I’d been panicky, caged in that house just like the jogger in the patrol car. Just as I had when I’d been left at my grandmother’s for months while my parents moved. I jolted. I hadn’t made that connection before. Odd, the things about your life that would be so obvious to anyone else. I’d never liked my grandmother, a brittle woman in a house so cluttered, every step was potential disaster. I’d hated being abandoned there when my parents and Mike went off to settle in our new house in Newark, Delaware; Frederick, Maryland; Plainfield, New Jersey. But her tiny house near the sawmill bore no resemblance to Howard’s. Why would it …

  But I was too tired to try to find the answer. The only thing I could think of now was bed—the one place I wasn’t about to go. Instead I dragged a blanket out of the trunk, folded down the backseat, and curled up on the scratchy convex surface.

  I could have driven the car back into Howard’s driveway and been safe. But I was damned if I’d do that. I tucked my purse with my revolver under my head, pulled a blanket over me, and fell asleep, thinking how glad I was to have a car to be in.

  About five-thirty I woke up with the remnants of a dream of an infant in an overflowing tub. It didn’t take an analyst to decipher that one. And now after a bit of dream clarification I knew I wasn’t about to throw the baby Howard out with the dirty bathwater of what he had never had to experience enough to understand.

  It wasn’t till I pulled up in front of the house that I saw the form my own sting would take. The ideal sting would have started with raising Howard’s house onto wheels and carting it off, but in an imperfect world, idealization isn’t always possible. Slightly less satisfying would be the Azalea magnifica sting.

  Gracious woman that I am, I didn’t dig up his Azalea magnifica, not entirely. Just halfway. The roots were still in the ground. But it would take neither a gardener nor a detective to jump to the conclusion the magnifica had been imperiled.

  I washed and dried the shovel, put it back in the garage, and headed to the house for my swimming gear.

  CHAPTER 5

  I KEEP MY SWIMBAG packed so I don’t find myself toweling dry later with no underwear or makeup to put on. I don’t eat before swimming—too much to drag around the pool. So all I have to do is slide into my sweats and VW. The bug almost drives itself.

  I left the house before Howard woke up, closing the door silently, passing the Azalea a bit less magnifìca, tilting inebriately half out of its hole.

  The pool is always crowded at 6:30 A.M. In the fast lanes, if you swim too slow, someone taps your foot and sprints around you. It’s humiliating to be the tappee, and for the tapper infuriating to have to break pace. Swim instructors tell you to take the first laps slowly. Doing that would be like pulling onto the freeway in first gear. The difference is that on the freeway it might get you killed, but at least you wouldn’t have to face the people you’ve held up day after day, afterward—when you’re naked in the shower. I’ve got my diver’s watch (good to 150 feet below, about 135 more than I’m likely to go). I set the stopwatch, and I go all out till my mile is done.

  I was standing at the end of lane 3 adjusting my goggles when Howard walked out on the deck. Lane 4, the other fast lane, was twice as crowded, but he didn’t even waver toward mine. Nor did he give any indication of having noticed the azalea. I pushed off, kicking full out for the next 5,280 feet.

  I was out of the pool and in the redecorated women’s shower before it occurred to me to wonder if Philip Drem had made it through the night.

  Saturdays, Inspector Doyle takes off. Today I was up; I subbed for him. It was 7:35 when I got to the station, which meant no time to do anything but snag a donut from the dispatcher’s box and check the In-Custody tray. Only two prisoners still in from last night. I stashed the donut in my office, gave one of the in-custodys to Al “Eggs” Eggenburger, and hunted up the rap sheet for the other, one Erin Williams.

  Williams had a couple of priors in Contra Costa County to the north. True to form, the rap sheet listed the arrests but not the outcome. I’d have to call Martinez, the county seat in Contra Costa County, for that. In the meantime there were the patrol officers’ reports to scout up. I found them in the patrol sergeant’s box; got the file to the court liaison officer at 7:43, and slid into my chair for Morning Meeting just as Chief Larkin settled in his. Jackson, my fellow in Homicide Detail, passed me a mug of Peet’s coffee, liquid adrenaline.

  “Bless you,” I mouthed.

  Chief Larkin had already started the meeting by the time I spotted Pereira. Beat officers don’t come to Detectives’ Morning Meeting unless they have something germane to report. Griseki, from Vice and Substance Abuse, summarized a cocaine bust on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, but the chief didn’t call on Howard to report his disaster. I took that as a good sign.

  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.

&nbs
p; “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.