Death and Taxes Page 6

  But she was doing none of those. The stove and refrigerator stood untended, the tuliped sink lay on its side, and the cracked sink was gone. A healthy set of police raps on the door convinced me Lyn Takai was gone too.

  Disgusted, I drove back to the station, called in a favor from Tim, the DD clerk, and got him to move the background on Takai to the top of the pile. I didn’t expect much. What could a woman who displays her appliances in her front yard be hiding? Takai seemed like someone who’d consciously opted for a life with little excess. Yoga, I gathered, was called the eight-fold path; it was a safe guess that that path rarely led to riches.

  While I waited, I checked the reports Pereira had collected. She’d sent Acosta to Drem’s apartment on Milvia Street. No one was home, and a canvass of the ground-floor tenants in the fourplex indicated that Drem lived alone and pursued the type of life that would make him eligible to represent accountants in any 1950s movie—no entertaining, no loud music, and most of all no women (in fact, no friends at all). Drem’s flat was on the second floor next to a female hermit whom neither of the ground-floor tenants had ever seen. According to them, Drem’s only interests were bicycling and badgering them about car emissions. One suggested Drem could improve his image by imitating his next-door neighbor.

  Acosta’s report indicated he hadn’t found Sierra, the street person Mason Moon had fingered as having seen the “cop” by Drem’s bike. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for a street person to transfer himself to another street. I was sure Acosta would find him and discover Sierra hadn’t seen the patrol officer at all. But I’d feel a lot more comfortable when the question was closed.

  I filed Pereira’s report and tried Lyn Takai’s phone number. No answer. I called Tim. He growled something about patience. Something else about half an hour. There are few tyrants like a clerk.

  I walked out to the squad room looking for Pereira. She’d signed out an hour and a half ago. She’d been on Evening Watch last night—3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. With Drem’s death, she couldn’t have gotten home before 2:00 A.M. And up for Morning Meeting. It didn’t take a wizard to figure what her plans would be today—sleep, with the phone turned off.

  The tax accountant she’d quoted on Drem was a Rick Lamott. I dialed his number. On the Saturday before April 15 I expected a secretary to answer, but the voice said, “Rick Lamott. What can I do forya?”

  “Detective Smith, Berkeley Police. I need some background on the IRS.”

  “You know Connie Pereira?”

  “She’s the one who suggested you.”

  “Well, for Connie. Whataya need?”

  “Tell me about TCMP, DIF, and Philip Drem.”

  “Pothole and paving roller. You got an hour?”

  “It’ll take that long?”

  “You look like Connie?”

  “Not a bit,” I snapped.

  “Okay, so I’m superficial. Slide down the surface, and you get to the bottom faster.”

  “You must have a pretty raw butt.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, and a flock of feds who’d like to make it a lot redder. Hey, it’s lunchtime. I’ll buy you lunch. I’ll be by in ten minutes.”

  “Make it noon. Front desk. Ask for Detective Smith.” I hung up. The guy sounded like the one who made you say never again to blind dates. But he wasn’t a date; he was a source. It’s wonderful not to be a teenager anymore, to be a cop with a gun. Still, I ran him through files before he came. No priors, no warrants.

  I sent Heling to reinterview Drem’s neighbors on the ground floor of his fourplex. They might have a clue about Drem’s relatives, hobbies, or habits. If Drem ended his workday at Lyn Takai’s, that still left a lot of time before he died. Maybe he’d stopped home. Maybe he’d stayed at Takai’s. That would be a good explanation of why she’d lied and why she wasn’t to be found at home now.

  I tried Takai again. Still no answer. I was just about to dial Tim when he pushed open my door and poked a sheaf of papers at me. “Voila!”

  “Thanks, Tim. We’re square.”

  He grinned. “Which means you are once again ripe for the picking.”

  I read through the report. I’d been right and wrong. Right that Lyn Takai didn’t own much. Wrong in thinking of it as nothing. She rented her studio. No reportable assets, except for one. Lyn Takai owned a property on Carleton Street called the Inspiration Hotel, in partnership with Mason Moon, a Selena Hogan, and an Ethan Simonov. The quartet had an eighty percent mortgage and a ten percent second. Nothing murder-inducing about that.

  It took me a moment to recall the Inspiration, a shabby, transient-type place that was in the process of being renovated.

  And as for Mason Moon being one of the co-owners, I wasn’t so surprised about that. Berkeley is the town to which the sixties retired. Aging hippie on the outside and successful entrepreneur underneath was hardly an unknown combination. There just wasn’t a catchy name for it yet. What amazed me was that Moon would be involved in a renovation project that required sustained work.

  But Tim hadn’t stopped with the background on Takai. He’d also run detailed background checks on the trio and turned up a better than average number of entries. Selena Hogan had two warrants outstanding in Nevada (speeding—not uncommon for those racing up to Reno to get rid of their excess money. And having left their cash there, few rushed to pay the traffic tickets they associated with their rotten weekends). Mason Moon was the star on the Records Management System that lists citywide contacts with the department: trespassing, disturbing the peace, failure to disperse—the plop artist’s roll of honor. And Simonov had been indicted in Oregon for tax evasion. Tax evasion—now that was interesting. I moved Simonov up on my list of prospects.

  A yogi, a plop artist, a racing gambler, and a felon. Just what kind of property did these people own together? I was just about to head out to find out when the phone rang. Rick Lamott was in the lobby.

  Rick Lamott had probably been waiting fifteen minutes when I opened the double doors to Reception on the second floor. From the main door downstairs two wide staircases lead upward, hugging both pale-beige walls. A WPA Tara. The stairs end at a balcony-hallway that forms Reception: a row of plastic chairs facing the desk clerk’s window. The only thing that makes Reception tolerable to our guests is the knowledge that their next stop may be worse.

  Now the chairs were occupied by a white teenager in a down jacket that smelled of long-term sweat and dirt, an elderly black woman with a cloth shopping bag between her feet, and a leather-jacketed eighth-of-a-ton-er who looked like an over-the-hill Hell’s Angel. The kid and the woman were seated as far away from him as possible.

  But planted in front of him, only slightly taller than the seated Angel, was a sandy-haired guy in an expensive chocolate-brown suit wagging a finger at the bearded face. “They call it tax evasion. But you don’t have to put up with that crap. We’d label it tax avoidance. Avoiding taxes is every citizen’s right under the Constitution.” He turned to look at me. “Smith?”

  If I hadn’t seen the scene, hadn’t known the background, I would have assumed from his tone that he’d had his secretary summon me here to his meeting.

  Before I could answer, he turned back to the ersatz Angel. “Get yourself a good accountant. You can’t afford me, but you can do a lot better than what you’ve got now.” Then he made for me, grinning anxiously. “Come on. My car’s double-parked.”

  “You double-parked in front of the police station?” I asked, amazed. “Did you want to save us the tow?”

  “I won’t have a ticket. Trust me.” He was already three stairs down.

  Anyone else I would have cut short, but I wasn’t about to miss the scene by his car, or more likely the empty spot where his car had been. At the front door I caught up with him, racing through like an engine with the idle turned up too high. He was a little guy, not quite my height, and his face had an aerodynamic look: light-brown hair blown back, narrow face, sharp cheekbones, long nose, slash of eyes yellow as a cat’s—a
sports car of a man.

  He hit the street not running but with one of those Manhattan walks that could trample six unwary tourists and still break the four-minute mile. He made a sharp left. I didn’t have to ask where he was headed. The crowd was already there—five or six uniformed officers huddled around a red sports car. Closer up, it was clear that this car, designed to look like it was going sixty sitting still, was the automotive equivalent of Lamott. When we were within ten feet of it, he slowed and strolled proudly forward, ready to accept kudos.

  What he did accept was a parking ticket. Berkeley is a city of many inefficiencies. Delivery of parking tickets is not one.

  I was still laughing when he grumbled his last answer to the uniformed enthusiasts. He held open the door of the red convertible, and I swung in.

  “While the cat’s away, Smith?” It was Redmon, from Vice and Sex Crimes, Howard’s detail.

  “Research,” I said and shut the door, a not wholly effective move since the top was down. But then the cat had only the afternoon off. He wasn’t likely to be farther away than the nursery buying another azalea.

  “Lotus Elan SE,” Lamott said, starting the engine. “Zero to sixty in six point seven seconds.”

  “Great. The guys on Traffic will appreciate the chance for as close a look as Parking Division had.” Lamott revved the engine, obliterating the quiet of the noon hour.

  Ignoring the patrol car pulling into the parking lot, Lamott hung a U and headed south toward Ashby. I’d done that maneuver often enough myself, but it was class-A illegal, and I hated to think that Traffic was letting Lamott off because he was with me.

  “Tell me about TCMP,” I said.

  “Taxpayers Compliance Measurement Program, or how the IRS uses you to screw others.” He hung a left onto Martin Luther King Jr. Way, raced through the yellow light at Bancroft, and jammed on the brakes at Haste. In front of a funeral home. It seemed apt.

  “How so?”

  “Well, Jill, they’ve got to know who to audit, right? How would ol’ Phil Drem, the defunct, know if you claimed too much for, say, casualty and theft losses? How does Drem know whether to believe you when you tell him you’ve had leather coats stolen out of your car six times this year because your job takes you into bad neighborhoods?” He hit the gas and then had to brake before the next corner.

  “The lights are staggered here, set for rational drivers.”

  Ignoring that jibe, he said, “So what the IRS does is pick at random a small number of unfortunates and audits them. Not the normal audit, nothing that easy. No, these poor suckers, who haven’t done a thing except have the wrong social security number, have to hunt up proof for every item on every line of their returns, down to birth certificates and marriage licenses.”

  “Why?”

  “So the agency can figure what the average legitimate deduction is for each item. So when you file, Jill, and you claim thirty-five hundred dollars for lost coats, the computer will see that’s twenty-four hundred dollars in excess.”

  “And bump me to Audit?”

  The light at Ashby and Martin Luther King was green. Two lanes of cars crossed toward us. A pickup signaled for a left turn. Facing it, Lamott cut left in front of a cement mixer with inches to spare and a blare of horn from the mixer.

  “How large a carpet do you see this car as?” I asked. With another driver, I would have been out of the car back at Haste, but there was something fun about cocky little Rick Lamott. I had the feeling he was used to pushing the limits but not crashing through them. It was a kick riding in the new red sports car with the top down and the windows up and the breeze catching the top of my hair. Just like high school. All options open, no doors closed, and thousands of miles of highway calling.

  He braked at Adeline. “You don’t go straight to Audit for one offense. The system’s cumulative. Computer gives you black marks for each excess. You get enough, it kicks you out.”

  “And then I get audited?”

  “Nope. Then classifiers for Ogden, Utah, send the batch of you to district offices. The group chief there divides the files between agents.” He hit the gas, but now the traffic was too heavy for anything more than normal tailgating. “Then the agents go over the records, and they choose the cases they think will generate revenue. They’re in the business to make money.” Lamott glared at the line of cars, then cut left in front of an AC Transit bus onto Hillegass—my street.

  Pereira had said the district IRS powers met in Fresno to set local figures. “And the figures are adjusted to reflect different spending in different areas, right?”

  “Right. If they had one national figure, they’d end up pulling files, spending hours on them, and then making a No Change. They hate that; wastes their time. They don’t care about yours.”

  We passed Howard’s house. As I’d expected, the azalea was once again centered in its hole. Howard was nowhere in sight, but the curtain nearest the newly planted azalea was pulled back.

  To Lamott I said, “So what are these area figures?”

  Lamott laughed. “Jill, they don’t make them public. That’s why there are guys like me, who can outwit them.” He pulled sharply around the corner and screeched to a stop. A cement barricade blocked the street. Traffic diverters—Berkeley’s big on them. City fathers see them as traffic erasers rather than driver annoyers.

  I expected Lamott to be one of the seriously annoyed, but he was already backing back into Hillegass before it occurred to me he hadn’t paid enough attention to be bothered. “See, Jill, it’s a game for them. It’s a game for me. Their weapon is the audit. Scares the pants off the average TP. But not me. Let them audit. I’ll go to their audits, eat up their time. I’ll take them to court. You know the system, you like the game, you can beat the bastards. And, Jill, I love it.” He hit the gas and raced forward.

  In your face barely did justice to this guy. The IRS must have hated him. “What about Philip Drem?”

  “God, I’m sorry the bastard bought it!”

  I almost gasped. “That’s one of the most heartfelt—”

  “Don’t think I liked the asshole. He was a first-class prick. The tightest, most niggling, goddamn line-by-line …” He shook his head. “It just won’t be the same dealing with the nearly normal ones they’ve got left. It’s like asking Joe Montana to play against the second string.”

  Now I did gasp. I understood the sports car; I realized Lamott was taken with himself and his image. But to see himself as Joe Montana! That was as close to sacrilege as we come in this secular corner of creation.

  Thinking of Lyn Takai, I said, “What odds would you give about Drem sleeping with one of his auditees?”

  Lamott slammed on the brakes at the stop sign. He was laughing. He turned to me. “Assuming one of his victims could still stand to be in the same room with him, much less naked? Not unless he could find a necrophiliac.”

  My beeper went off. “Damn. I’ll have to get back.”

  “Let it go.”

  “Lamott, I’m the police. We don’t beep to impress people. Make a left.”

  “Hey, they’ll find someone else.”

  “Not as good as me.”

  He looked over, caught my eye, and grinned. The route to the station didn’t take us back past Howard’s house, which was just as well.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Lamott said as he squealed to a stop and I jumped out.

  “If you’re alive,” I called, already racing inside. We’re not profligate about calling officers in the field. I took the steps two at a time, panting by the time I reached the dispatcher.

  “Memo on your desk,” he said before I could ask.

  I ran back down the stairs and yanked open the office door. The memo was from Heling: “Philip Drem married to Victoria Iversen, the ‘hermit’ next door to him.”

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN A MAN’S WIFE becomes a hermit, it doesn’t speak well of him.

  It had been fourteen hours since Drem’s accident. I hated to think
what shape she might be in now. I got her phone number, called, and let the phone ring. If there’s one thing you should be able to count on with a hermit, it’s that she is home.

  “Yes?” The voice was faint. She’d picked up the phone on the sixth ring. How long had she been sitting there, wondering why Drem hadn’t come back, worrying, embroiled in that awful combination of grief and uncertainty?

  “Victoria Iversen?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Detective Smith, Berkeley Police. Has one of our officers contacted you yet?”

  “No.” I could hear the dread in her voice. I felt that familiar mix: a dread at having to break the news, yet a quickening of excitement to see her reaction and fit it with what I knew of the deceased. It wasn’t the type of thing I’d admit to my mother. But it was during those moments of shock that survivors had given me evidence they would never have divulged later. “I need to ask you some questions. I can be at your door in ten minutes.”

  “What is this about?”

  I’d been hoping to avoid giving her the news over the phone. “I’m afraid your husband has been in an accident.”

  “On his bicycle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ll be right out.”

  She gasped, a small shrill sound. Then she put down the receiver.

  I grabbed my coat, flicked on the answering machine, and headed for a patrol car.

  Victoria Iversen’s and Philip Drem’s addresses were on Milvia Street, site of one of the city’s latest ecological idiosyncrasies. Milvia used to be a normal residential street that ran parallel between Shattuck and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, two of the cross-town thoroughfares. A handy shortcut in a city where automotive convenience is anathema.