Death and Taxes (21 page)

T
HE FOG WAS BEGINNING
to clear by the time I got to Tori Iversen’s flat. Tori peered out the window. Recognizing me, she said, “Go on to Phil’s place.”

On the other side of the building two days’ mail was poking out of Philip Drem’s box like a welcome flag for thieves. I pulled it out and carried it inside, stepping over his bicycle in the middle of the living-room floor. As I was dropping the mail on his desk beneath the
Ban Styrofoam
and
Clean Up Toxic Waste
posters, the curtain to the window to Tori’s living room pulled back.

Tori’s living room was unchanged—bare wood, white cotton sofa, the wooden-slat chair nearly touching the window to Drem’s flat. That chair must have been there since yesterday afternoon when I told her her husband was dead, with its back to the room, facing a curtain no one would open again.

“How are you holding up?” I asked.

“Okay. I’ve had to make some arrangements. It’s taken time, but I’ve got plenty of time.”

In fact, Tori looked okay. Her skin seemed less dry and wan than it had before. Her light hair looked less dry too. Maybe that was because she had the overhead light on in the dimness of the foggy morning. But when I looked more closely, I realized she hadn’t washed her hair. Because, I suspected, she assumed no one would be coming home to see it. Again the awful aloneness of her caged life struck me—days that faded into nights that became days, with no change but the amount of light. Like being dead. Entombed. I swallowed hard, pushed the thought away. And I wondered how often Philip Drem had been taken unawares by thoughts like this and shoved them away.

Tori was standing behind her chair. Her hands tightened on the top slat of the back, and her voice was shaky as she said, “Have you found Phil’s killer?”

I’d seen that mixed reaction from other survivors. They were anxious to know who the villain was. But the investigation was the last extension of their husband’s, wife’s, lover’s life, and just as desperately, they did not want that to end. “No, Tori. I’ve come to clarify a few questions.”

She nodded slowly, then walked around the wooden chair and sat.

I took the place in Phil’s chair facing her, so that our knees almost met at the window glass. “Are you sure Phil didn’t blame Mason Moon for the accident?”

“I told him often enough. Mason was a victim too.”

I leaned forward. “Tori, suppose Phil did get the chance to harass Mason Moon?”

“Phil wouldn’t do that.”

That didn’t convince me. I was sure it wouldn’t have reassured Moon. I wondered just how far Moon would go to keep Agent Drem from his hotel books.

“Tori, let’s try a different tack. Have you heard the names Lyn Takai, Ethan Simonov, or Scookie Hogan?”

“No,” she said slowly.

“How about Maria Zalles?”

There was no hesitation there. “Never heard of her. Who are these people?”

“The first three are taxpayers Philip either was or might have been auditing.”

“Phil never talked about his work,” she said quickly.

“Never?” I asked, amazed.

“I told you Phil hated his job. He sold them his forty hours, no more.”

“So what did you talk about?”

She leaned back against the hard slats. “Phil told me about bicycling, the races, the courses, his training. He was proud of his times. He really was a good racer. And then there was the news—what was going on in the legislature, how antismoking bills were progressing, what congressmen needed to be lobbied about genetic research. Phil was always on top of who we had to write or who I should call the next day.”

For the first time today I picked up a thin whine in her voice. “Who
you
should call?”

“Well, he couldn’t be calling Sacramento from work, could he? But I was here all day with nothing to do.” The whine was clearer.

I said, “Did you talk about your illness too?”

“Oh, yeah. It was always the first thing Phil asked when he got home: How was I today? Any reaction to the newsprint? Or to the dyes in the tissues or the chemicals they use to decaffeinate coffee?”

“You drink coffee?” The question came out before I could censor it.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re just like Phil! I’m not a porcelain statue, for chrissake. If Phil had had his way, he would have found a mechanism for me to stop eating and breathing altogether. He would have wrapped me in cellophane and taped the package safely shut.” She laughed bitterly. “Except that I react to petroleum products.”

“He wanted you to be safe,” I put in.

“Mummified!” She sank back farther in the chair, shaking her head. “You’re right, of course. He just wanted me to be safe.”

I began to see their relationship more clearly now, all too clearly. “You’ve already had to give up so much, it must be wrenching to forgo anything else, particularly coffee,” I said with feeling, “especially if it’s not doing you any harm.”

She leaned forward. “But see, we can’t be sure it’s not. If I get an attack a day later, how do we know the coffee, the residue of caffeine, or the uric acid didn’t combine with something else and set things off?”

“But you could say that about anything.”

She held up a finger. “Now you’re beginning to see. Once your immune system goes, everything out there is potentially lethal. It’s like this: You’re wearing a tweed suit. One kind of thread in it makes you itch. You don’t know which one. You narrow the choices and pull the blue thread. But maybe by that time the irritants have rubbed off on the yellow threads next to the blues, and now the yellows seem like bad guys, so you pull them. But you don’t get any better. You start over pulling tan and azure and mauve, thread after thread. But you don’t feel better. In fact, you’re worse because now you’ve been stressed out from the allergy and worrying about it, and trying to find the lethal thread. But you can’t stop. You’ve got to find the thread. And so the whole process keeps going on and on until you’re naked and freezing.”

I shivered. I wished I could reach out to her, but of course the glass separated us. Glass, and the murder, and my gut-level fear of a life like hers. I said, “It’s really hard when you don’t know what you’re looking for. Or what you’ve done. Like you’re playing a game without having been told all the rules.”

She nodded, as people do when you’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. I waited for her to fill me in on the ice beneath the water, but she didn’t. Again I was impressed with how controlled she was. I thought about her and Drem and the coffee. And about Howard and me. Howard and I had handled our frustrations by stomping out. Tori couldn’t do that. She couldn’t even pull her curtain and be assured Drem wouldn’t yank it back open. She could never do much more than she was doing right now—purse her lips and block him, or me, out.

It took me a moment to formulate my question. I understood her situation so well, it made it all too easy for me to poke into the open sore. I glanced quickly at Tori’s tense, controlled posture, her tight lips. In a flat, emotionless voice I said, “Philip changed his whole life because of your illness. How could you continue to drink coffee if it would aggravate your allergies and make you more of a burden to him?”

Her hands flew up from the armrests. “Why didn’t I just fucking kill myself, right? And let poor Phil out from under!” She smacked her fist against the glass. I jolted back.

“Do you know what it’s like living with a martyr?” she demanded. “He brought my food, he opened my packages, he showered three times, then waited till I went into the bathroom and came over and vacuumed. He never wanted thanks, never accepted it. There was nothing I could ever do to repay him. Every day I got further in debt!” She stood up, stalked around to the back of her chair, and plopped her arm atop it. “What could I give him?”

“Love?”

“If you mean sex, it was too dangerous. I had an attack two years ago, right afterwards.” She shook her head. “No, nothing so simple for Philip. You want to know? Look around you.”

I turned and stared at the office like room with its posters.

“Phil was always an obsessive. I just didn’t realize it before I got sick. Before that, he was caught up in travel, in our plans to go around the world, to make the trip last as long as possible. That’s a socially acceptable obsession. But then the explosion burned out my immune system, and no more travel. So Phil got into bicycle racing and environmental illness. If he’s not out on a timed course, he’s protesting perfume sales, or chemicals in new carpeting, or fumes from copy machines. Or car exhaust, or motorcycles. It became his goddamn life!”

I said softly, “Mentally, he was as imprisoned by your illness as you are?”

“He chose to be.” She held out a hand. “That sounds crass, doesn’t it? He devotes his life to me, and I shrug it off. But look, the thing is, it wasn’t me he was devoted to. He was a disciple of my illness. After a while it was like I was merely the host body for these allergies. Look at those posters: smoke, fumes, Styrofoam. They’re not my causes. They were his.” She sank back against the slats of her chair. “I was a stained-glass artist. I loved creating beautiful windows—the planning, the buying glass, sketching the patterns on oil paper, cutting the paper, scoring the glass, tapping the line till it broke. I loved the soldering. The whole process. I’ll never even be able to have a window like that in my house, much less make one again. Gone, forever. Okay, I’ve accepted that. I’ve given up going out. Being able to touch other people. Feeling any material but cotton. I know I’ll never again taste Coca-Cola, chocolate, alcohol, bread, cheese, meat—anything that makes eating more than a chore.”

“And then Phil starts on the coffee.”

“Yeah, the coffee. And if I’d given that up, he’d have moved on to some other poison.”

Her hands were shaking, but still she kept them on the chair arms. By now, I would have killed for a cup of Peet’s coffee. Drem had audited her life and disallowed her everything but her illness. Or was his constantly recharged anger about environmental assaults his way of avoiding the bottom of the iceberg—because he couldn’t bear to see her life through her eyes?

Slowly I said, “You’d given up everything and had nothing but your illness, and he co-opted that.”

Her look told me I hadn’t seen the bottom of the ice either. “There was a point when I realized Phil had gotten so caught up in environmental illness that he’d forgotten me altogether. He was like sediment that hardened around a bird’s egg millennia ago. The fossil is still there, but the egg’s decayed and disappeared, nothing more than a hole in the fossil.” Tears ran down her face. It was the first time I’d seen her cry, and I knew it wasn’t for Drem but herself. I swallowed hard, wishing I could reach out to her, knowing no one could, ever. Finally she dragged her hand across her face, wiping away the tears, a rough movement she would never have allowed herself in front of Drem. “I haven’t cried for years,” she said softly. “I don’t know whether I was more caged by the illness or his protectiveness of it.”

Caged!
I sat forward, shocked out of my emotions. Like a bird in a cage. A canary in a cage. “You’re Canary’s Keen, aren’t you. You’re the death-game master.”

Probably another time she would not have admitted it. Even now she hesitated, balancing the Homicide detective against the confidante. She searched me with her eyes.

I watched her as she laughed, and her whole body relaxed as if the varnish of tension had dissolved. She’d given up so much. What more could I do to her? Imprisoned behind her glass, she was free.

Finally she said, “It’s one of the few hobbies I can do like a normal person.” She laughed sardonically. “Or maybe I just like celebrating that others are worse off than I.”

I restrained a sigh. I’d tried hard to feel what she felt—police-manual writers would call it getting overinvolved. I was relieved it had paid off. As game master, she’d have copies of every death-game player’s list. I said, “Phil was on a few lists. Whose?”

She shook her head. “I can’t betray my players. It’s just a game. The rules clearly state that you don’t get points for a death you’re involved in. No San Quentin branch.”

Normally I would have reminded her that it was her husband’s murder we were dealing with. But I knew that wouldn’t work here. Asking her to betray the game meant taking that too away from her. Drem taking it away. I didn’t think she was ready to be that free. I said, “I could get a warrant and force you to show me those lists.”

She nodded.

“Scookie Hogan, Mason Moon, Ethan Simonov, Lyn Takai. Who among them were players?”

She sat tapping her teeth, deciding. “You won’t ask me any more names, just these?”

“Deal.”

“Okay, among them, just Scookie.”

“She got a lot of points for Phil’s death. Was he her bonus choice?”

“Yeah. But to be fair to her, Phil was another person’s bonus choice. It was a real shock to find how well known a minor bureaucrat could be.”

“A tax agent,” I reminded her.

“I was wrong about not having cried for years. I cried the day those forms came in.” She walked stiffly around the chair and leaned over the back. “Phil was a wonderful guy once. He wanted to go everywhere, see new things, let them stretch his mind. Instead, my illness chained him here to a job he loathed and shrank him down to a despot.” Tears rolled from her eyes, but she seemed not to notice them.

Was it worse, I wondered, to have the man you loved die or to find he’d changed so much that only memory reminds you you once loved him? I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders. “I have to ask you this. Are you sure he never got involved with other women?”

She shrugged. “As much as I can be.”

“Did he have no other outlet? Nothing to look forward to? No long bike trips, for instance?”

“No. Racers don’t ride for scenery. Phil rode to win. It was like everything else he did, a contest. His reward was when he got a restaurant to go all nonsmoking, or a company to install windows that opened.”

I nodded. Nothing in Drem’s flat suggested otherwise. “But still, your immune system could regenerate. You might get better.”

“Maybe. We both gave up thinking about that a couple of years ago. Phil even started looking around for a place we could live that would be free of irritants.”