Death and Taxes (13 page)

“It was a half swap. She didn’t renege. She still owes me a dinner. If I’d thought to bring the book I was reading, I would have come out ahead. Scookie’s a great cook.”

Scookie Hogan I had met a number of times. She had run a stand near campus that sold “scookies”—a scone-and-cookie mix—to which I had been virtually addicted. She too had had her flash of fame—a story in the
East Bay Express
, an interview on KPFA—but she had shown none of Simonov’s nonchalance about publicity. She’d pasted the
Express
article on the front of her booth.

“Do you think Scookie will ever cook again professionally?”

“Nah. She’d never take the chance. It’s like she had one shot to make and it’s gone. Sad. But you can see why I’m not grieving over Drem.” He gave his imaginary goatee another pull. “Heard Drem went from a prod in the ass. I like that. Whoever did it has flair.”

It was like listening to an art critic. “
Flair
is a word I’d associate with Mason Moon.”

He pulled at his chin again. At the rate he was going, in a few years he’d have a goatee of skin. “Too subdued. How would Mason have killed the weasel of the paper trail? Let’s see. For Mason it would have to have been something big, splashy. If Mason had killed him, everyone in Berkeley would still be talking about it. They’d have forgotten Drem and just be applauding Mason’s lethal concept. Maybe he’d have rigged up a vacuum cleaner in one of the sewer grates on the Avenue and waited for the right moment.” He shook his head. “No. Waiting isn’t Mason’s strong suit. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

I could have given him the decision for round one; clearly he’d won. I knew there was something going on here, but he’d played the scene well enough that I couldn’t get a handle on what. Witnesses hide things for a number of reasons. Illegality is only one. I handed him my card. “If you come up with anything useful.” I didn’t say I’d be back. We both understood that.

I
SAT IN THE
patrol car shivering, though it wasn’t much colder out here than it had been in the Inspiration lobby. The wind had picked up, clearing any residue of cloud. The moon loomed low over Berkeley, exerting its pull on the waters of the Bay and the aberrations of the crazies. Plane-tree branches brushed the streetlights and the corner lights on the sides of the hotel. All else melted into shades of dark.

I’d been chummier with Ethan Simonov than the manual would encourage. There was something about that make-me attitude that always hooked me. As a police officer, I’d learned not to come at it head-on, the way tough guys did. My strength was not bulling through but slicing in at an angle, like a small, slippery running back who splits tackles and is ten yards downfield before the defensive linemen realize he has the ball.

I reached for the ignition key, then changed my mind. I should be honest with myself—it wasn’t just that the oblique run was efficient; it was that I hated bullying. I’d been in Berkeley, the seat of the underdog, too long. I had power, of course, though not the power held by departments in cities without police-review commissions and nothing near that of the Goliath IRS. But Berkeley is a city of Davids, and like virtually everyone who chooses to live here, I appreciate the well-aimed stone.

Unless it hits my own eye. And I knew, if things got tough, Ethan Simonov would aim his there. And when I faced him down, he’d look for every judgment mistake I’d made. He’d be his own review commission, auditing my every hour at work, and if those failed to provide ammunition, he’d be checking out the rest of my waking and sleeping hours. Sometimes I felt as if the whole city were review commissioners. Or Philip Drems.

And yet, oddly enough, I wouldn’t have changed it. There was something about the pervasive skepticism of the city that comforted me. I suspected it was the municipal expression of my own outlook. Growing up, I’d lived in eight towns in five East Coast states and never felt a part of any of them. They were just way stations before the next, better town, the one with the clean slate and sunburst of opportunities, the town that turned out to be another rest stop. Berkeley was the only place I’d ever felt at home.

And Howard was the only man I’d really felt at home with. Or I had before I’d moved into his house. Before the jogger, before my sting. But I couldn’t let myself think about Howard, not now. Instead, I sat listening to the wind snap the leaves against each other, feeling the fog-cold air ice my feet.

I sat staring across at the muted light coming from the Inspiration Hotel. And the blank darkness around it.

But the dark wasn’t monolithic. I squinted. A man was crossing the hotel lawn. Male Caucasian, five-ten, 155 pounds, shoulder-length brown hair, black jacket, jeans, carrying two stuffed plastic bags. He glanced back at the hotel door, then rounded the corner of the building and headed down the gap between it and its neighbor. Textbook suspicious. I got out, pressed the door shut, and moved as quietly as I could across the street.

To the Inspiration’s right was Mason Moon’s garage studio. I started down the narrow alleyway between. It was more like a tunnel with the roof rotted away. The garage wall had that old-wood-and-moss smell. From the ground came the stench of decaying leaves and urine. The only light was from the shaded windows of the hotel. I could barely make out the clumps of melting cardboard and mounds of debris in time to step over them. I could have brought a flashlight, but I didn’t want to announce myself.

From the yard came staccato taps, cutting through the rustle of the wind. At the end of the passage I paused and glanced into the shallow backyard and down along the side of the building. The guy in the black jacket was twenty feet away, standing about two feet from the wall, arms hugged to his chest, round plastic bags hanging from his hands. Wind flapped the plastic and picked at his hair. He took no notice. For a moment I wondered if he was one of the Avenue crazies who’d been turned out of the state institutions in the Reagan-era economy moves. For years they’d wandered the Avenue in their own universes. When their universes collided with ours, we picked them up, but mostly we left them their space. Left them staring into space, like this guy.

But he was not one of them. He adjusted his bags, leaned forward, and rapped on the window. Now the window shade lifted, and I could see clearly his quivering hands and the thin cotton jacket blown against his ribs. The window opened. He grumbled something and stepped inside.

Inside the room right behind the front desk that Ethan Simonov had told me was empty, waiting for a Social Service emergency to fill it. The guy with the bags I didn’t care about; Simonov I did. I ran back around the building, in the front door, to the desk. Ethan Simonov looked up from his book.

“Simonov, you’ve got two tenants in that ‘empty’ room of yours.”

“You’re kidding!”

He was lying. I ran past him into the hall.

“Hey, whadayou think you’re doing?”

I knocked on the door under the stairs. Next to it I could feel the heat from the boiler. That might make this room undesirable to some, but to the shivering guy I’d followed, it must seem like heaven. Simonov had just come up behind me when I called, “Police! Open the door. And don’t try the window. We’ve got men out there.”

The door didn’t open. But two down the hall did.

“You’ve got cops all around my hotel?” Simonov demanded. “You can’t do that!”

I pounded on the door. “Come on, open up!”

“Hey, whadayou want with them?” A guy the size of a linebacker leaned out of the far door. At the other end of the hall, doors opened. Damn. Here I was Goliathing in front of a crowd anxious to see my eye knocked out. For guys who had nothing better to do with their Saturday nights than stay in their rooms at the Inspiration, my arrival was better than renting a movie. But there was no way for me to back off now.

I pounded on the door. “Police!”

The linebacker stepped into the hall. At the other end, a door banged. Simonov put a hand on my shoulder. I shook it off and banged the door. “Open it
now
!”

I could hear the knob before I saw it turn. The door opened a crack. No one was visible. The linebacker was behind Simonov. The stench of dried sweat filled the hall. There were others behind him. I didn’t look at them. Careful not to touch the door, not to force entry, I said, “Open it all the way.”

Simonov stepped in front of me, his tool belt jangling. “Hey, you can’t—”

“Don’t interfere with a police officer!”

He took a step back.

I moved forward toward the doorway. The door was open all the way now. The room and its two inhabitants were visible. The guy I’d followed was still in his black jacket, his arms wrapped around his thin ribs. I’d seen him on the Avenue. He wasn’t a street person in the sense of being homeless night after night. He was one of the marginal ones. His host—young, blond, in torn jeans and a sweatshirt—was steps above that, too clean and well fed to be a street person.

“Okay, what’s the story?” I said. “The landlord”—I eyed Simonov—” told me this room was empty. You break in here?”

The street guy shrank back toward the closed window. Cops rousting him wasn’t a new situation for him. He was cringing automatically. The blond wasn’t cowed. He moved on Simonov. “What the hell is this, Si? We had a deal, and—”

“What kind of deal?” I demanded.

“Look, it’s—”

“Wait,” I stopped Simonov. “Let him tell me.”

Behind him, feet shuffled. The show was winding down; the other tenants knew the rest of the script. That meant that this situation was one they’d all seen before.

“Glad to tell it.” The blond crossed his thick arms over his chest. “He say I was freeloading? No way, lady. I spent the whole fucking day digging in the crawl space so the hotshot exterminators can get to the dry rot tomorrow. No sense in paying the exterminators to dig, that’s what you said, right, Si? Bad enough you paid me ten bucks an hour and threw in a room for the night. Maybe I was figuring you ran a real hotel with rooms that had two beds instead of one bed and every scrap of wood whoever you snookered into doing your carpentry left around. You got a nerve asking me to sleep in this place. And now you’re calling the cops on me! Listen—”

I held up a hand. Turning to Simonov, I said, “Is this right?”

He glanced nervously down the hall at the linebacker, who stood straddling his doorsill, watching from a safe distance but waiting, I guessed, to see if there were any unexpected twists. “Yeah. So?”

“So it’s not what you told me.”

“I don’t need to clear my business with you.” A murmur of approval came from the hall.

“In this case you do.” I looked past the blond at the stacks of two-by-fours. They took up nearly half the floor space. Playing to the hallway, I raised my voice. “Simonov, Social Service pays you to hold a room for their clients. You take their money. You’re not holding a room. You’re keeping a woodshed.”

The murmur of approval was louder.

“It’d take ten minutes to clear it out if I had to,” Simonov insisted.

“That’s ten minutes too long.” I looked at the blond, ready to tell him he was off the hook. He was leaning back on his heels enjoying the show. But the guy in the black jacket stood next to the window, still shivering from cold or fear. I felt bad about him. To Simonov I said, “I asked you a simple question earlier, and you chose to lie. Now I want the truth.”

His elfin face adjusted, and I had the sense that I could see it pulling back warily and then shifting to attack. He eyed the shivering man, and then, as if reading my guilt, said, “It’s too windy to stay outside. These guys need a place to sleep. We’ve got twelve hundred homeless in Berkeley and nowhere near enough beds for them. The city should be grateful I’m willing to let them stay here free. It’s not like I’m charging them money. Even if I were, the city ought to be glad.”

From down the hall a guy yelled, “Right on, man!” The momentum had shifted again. Simonov understood this crowd every bit as well as I did.

The blond stepped forward. “Hey, I’m not free-loading here. I worked my damn ass off under this place today. I deserve a lot better than sleeping with the scraps. I ache from my neck to my knees. And for that I get a cot that’s so small, I can’t turn over.”

Simonov had had enough. He jabbed a thumb at the blond’s companion. To the blond he said, “If it’s so small, how come you brought him in, huh?”

“He needed a place. Hey, man, you said it yourself. There’s a hurricane out there.”

The murmur from the hall was uncertain. I could feel the tension mounting, heading toward anger as it does in a game where you can’t decide which team you’re rooting for. In a minute they’d clump all of us together and give their frustration its head. To Simonov I said, “Let’s discuss this at the desk.”

He gave a quick nod. “Okay, Ron. I’ll deal with this.”

But Ron was no fool. He looked over Simonov’s head into the hall. “The hell you will. You don’t come here bullshitting me like this and then just walk off.”

Simonov didn’t move. He let a beat pass and said softly, “You want to work for me again, Ron?” Without waiting for a reply, he said, “We’ll talk later.” He turned and walked back into the lobby, took up his post at the desk, and glared at me. “You cops have nothing better to do than stir up trouble? I thought you were supposed to be hunting down a murderer.”

Ignoring that, I took out my notepad and laid it on the counter, open. “So why the song and dance with me? What are you hiding?”

He shrugged. This time the movement had none of its earlier bravado. Now he looked like a dog staring up at the rolled newspaper. But hangdog was unnatural for him, and I could already see the beginnings of resurgence. “I figured Social Service might create a stink if they knew I kept stuff in the room.”

“Stuff and people in the room.”

“I could clear it easy. If I needed to, I’d take Ron back to my place for the night. Ron and his friend if I had to.”

I waited. Odds were, I wasn’t getting the full story—police detectives rarely do on the first try—but I suspected that Ethan Simonov was one of those suspicious sorts who never tells it all, regardless of how innocent it might be. When Simonov didn’t offer more, I took a shot, “The other guy’s been here before. He didn’t pay any twenty-five dollars a night. What’s your arrangement with him?”