Death and Taxes (24 page)

I signaled Leonard to drive. After they’d dealt with Zalles’s luggage, Pereira would go back with Acosta, an arrangement I suspected would appeal to both. However, that was not my focus. What I wanted from this was the back of Leonard’s head right beyond the mesh of the cage, his thick gray hair, his muscular neck, an image that said “no give.”

I climbed in beside Zalles. She looked terrified. I didn’t blame her. At the best of times, being in the back of the patrol car is degrading. Cigarette smoke settled into the upholstery years ago; every surface is coated with grime that the occasional departmental cleaning only smears; windows are stained on the inside and streaked on the out. And even in spring you feel that bottom-of-the-well cold that makes you sure you’ll never be warm again.

Leonard’s hair was dark in the back; it hung a bit over his regulation collar. I couldn’t ask for anything more official, more “cop.” I thought of Sierra, the street person—the street person Leonard couldn’t find—and shivered.

Blotchy bumps stood out on Maria’s arms. Later I would give her my jacket or put the heat on. Now the cold suited my purpose. I pushed aside any sympathy for the shivering girl and focused on the woman who had run, the murder suspect. “You thought this was a game, Maria. Philip Drem was murdered. You were the last person to see him alive—”

Her blue eyes widened. “But I wasn’t. He was waiting for someone else.”

I motioned Leonard to start the car. “So
you
say. You lied to me Saturday night. You didn’t show up when you agreed to Sunday morning. Now you’re trying to leave the country. Why should I think your word is worth anything?”

“But he
was
waiting for someone. Honest. Look, I know I wasn’t straight with you. But I was so shocked. I never expected Phil to be killed. Half the time I was talking to you that night I was trying to figure out if you were part of a joke.”

“A joke?” I let my scorn come through. “Who would play a joke like that?”

“I don’t know. I was just hoping you were an actress, maybe a friend of Ethan’s. Maybe he’d swapped you a room for your performance or a voucher for something someone else in the swap club did. I just couldn’t believe Phil was dead.”

An interesting take on our conversation indeed. Leonard pulled sharply right onto the freeway on ramp. Gusts off the Pacific rattled the car windows and made the chill in here colder. Maria was clutching her arms; there were white spots on the skin around her fingertips.

I said, “Tell me about your meeting Phil. You were an actress, right? Playing the part of a potential”—I chose my term carefully—“admirer.”

She looked up, a hint of a proud smile flickering on her pale lips. “No. I’m no actress. I mean, not a professional.” She hesitated. “I’m an investigator.”

I laughed. “An investigator? Licensed?” In California a licensed private investigator needs five thousand hours of experience. Pigs may fly, as Pereira had said, but they’d have a greater likelihood of getting a pilot’s license than Maria Zalles a PI’s.

“Well, no.”

“If you’re not licensed, you’re not an investigator. You’re just dishonest.”

“No. Look, I was going to start working for an investigator. He’ll tell you. I checked with him about Phil. For background, you know.”

Only a triumph of will kept me from laughing. Scruffy, grumpy Herman Ott with a young, pretty blond assistant was a concept that would tickle half of Berkeley. No wonder Ott had reacted so defensively when I told him about Maria. Later I would find out from Ott exactly what their “professional relationship” was or if it existed only in Maria Zalles’s mind.

“I’ve already talked to Herman Ott,” I said, letting her jump to the conclusion that he’d already enlightened me. “You were about to tell me how you met Philip Drem.”

“I never meant for him to die. Honest.”

“Start from the beginning.” I let my voice slide into a friendlier tone. I wanted to give her my coat—she was pressing her teeth together to keep them from chattering—but it was still too soon. We were almost to Candlestick Park, where the 49ers and the Giants play. The flags above it were snapping in the wind. Looking past it, I suspected Maria could see her future snapping about in reaction to forces she could no longer control—if she was ever in charge of them.

“I’ve only been in Berkeley since New Year’s,” she said. “Christmas was a bummer in Portland, and I decided to split and see how things went here. I had a little money, not much, but you can always find something to do, right? I got a temp job right away.” She relaxed a bit, recalling things she had controlled. “I can transcribe. But that office wasn’t a place to make friends. I mean, when you’re a temp, you’re invisible. None of the regulars even notice you, much less treat you like a person. But I’ve moved around enough to know that. If you want to meet people, you’ve got to go out, take classes, go to places like the Film Archives, or lectures, or work on some environmental project or something. I mean, I’m sorry I never had a drinking problem; AA’s supposed to be one of the hot social spots.”

“Drem?” I prompted.

“I’m getting to that,” she said with almost normal irritability. “I just wanted you to see where I was coming from. I couldn’t just be sitting home. So I took a yoga class.”

“Lyn Takai’s?”

“Right. She’s real good.”

“And did Lyn mention Philip Drem?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not Lyn. It was another student. I was surprised. I mean, I was looking for friends, but I’ve been around enough to know that yoga classes aren’t great spots for friend-making. I mean, you’d think they would be—all that doing poses together, working in partners, and stuff. But people are too into what’s going on in their own bodies, whether they’ve stretched their left leg as much as their right, if their headstands are straight. Teachers don’t like you to talk, you know. And then at the end they have the
savasana
, the relaxation. You’re lying on the floor, sort of letting relaxation wash through you. It almost puts you to sleep. By the time you leave, it’s too much of an effort to talk to anyone.”

“But this other student did talk to you.”

“Yeah. I noticed her in the middle of the class looking at me. I mean, she wasn’t just glancing over like you do if someone’s got on an interesting T-shirt. She was staring, not even trying to hide it. I mean, for a while I wondered if she was hot for me. So I wasn’t surprised when she came up to me at the end of the class. When she invited me for coffee, I figured I was probably right. But what did I have to lose, see?”

A black sports car squealed, braking frantically beside us. Maria paused but didn’t turn, as if she were afraid looking away would mean abandoning what little safety she had in the story that bound us. The driver paralleled us, taking time to read the logo on the side of the patrol car, and then, clearly infuriated he’d broken stride for a car that was not Highway Patrol, hit the gas.

“So we went to the Med,” she said quickly, “and got a table along the far wall, and she made small talk—she hadn’t seen me around before, how long had I been here, what kind of work did I do? It took me a while to realize that she wasn’t just trying to get to know me; she was sizing me up. And when she discovered I was new and had a temp job and was open to other things, she made her offer. She said I was almost a dead ringer for another woman, the wife of the man who had ruined her life. She’d already told me about the cookie business and how that was the only thing she’d ever done herself and how Phil had destroyed it.”

Maria reached up for a clump of hair and began running her finger and thumb back and forth across the blond strands. “It sounds dumb to get that upset because you can’t operate a cookie stand, but I could feel for Scookie. I mean, she grew up in times when women couldn’t even get credit in their own names. She’d been a housewife for years and no one, not even she, thought she was competent enough to do anything more. And then she goes out and creates this business. And suddenly she’s being written up in the newspapers. She’s going to expand and open a shop. She’s legitimate, a success. And then Drem comes along and basically says to her, ‘What you’re good at doesn’t matter. The only thing that counts is columns of figures and lots or receipts.’ She’s an artist, an artist with her stove, right brain all the way. You can’t expect her to suddenly be left brain and catalog every receipt. But Drem did, and he screwed her.”

It was unconscious, but she was so wrapped up in Scookie’s story that she saw Phil as “Drem,” and she spit out the hated syllable just the way Scookie Hogan did.

“What did she offer you?”

“A room at the hotel. I figured it had to be better than where I was staying. And free.”

“In return for?”

“Cozying up to Drem. Finding out what was as important to him as Scookie’s business was to her. Investigating,” she said proudly.

“And?”

“Nothing. That’s it.”

“Maria, if that was it, it wouldn’t have mattered what you looked like.”

For the first time she smiled. “Not true. Anybody else would have had to approach him. Phil wasn’t much in the friendly department. I think maybe Scookie tried with someone else, and it didn’t work out. But I looked so much like his wife that all I had to do was be someplace he was. I didn’t have to compromise my role. Phil came up to me.”

I was sure I knew the answer, but I asked, “And what did you decide was indeed the most important thing to Drem?”

“His wife.”

Was Maria right, or had she merely found the superficial answer and not yet uncovered the truth as Tori saw it—not “his wife” but “his wife’s illness.” But for Scookie Hogan’s purpose it didn’t make much difference. If Drem lost Tori to anything other than death, he lost his claim as the avenger of her illness too. If she divorced him, he’d become just another spouse who couldn’t handle illness—and I was willing to bet that was a group of people Philip Drem had despised. For him to think people might assume he was one of them would have been the ultimate humiliation. I wondered if Scookie could have come to that conclusion.

“So then what, Maria?”

“Nothing.”

“The truth! The most important thing to Drem was his wife. You look like her. He was attracted to you, right?”

“Oh, yeah. In his way.”

“Don’t ask me to believe Scookie could pass up that combination. What did she ask you to do?”

Maria hesitated.

“Go on a trip with him, like this one to Samoa?”

She twisted the blond hairs around her finger—an effective ingénue move. “Well, yeah. I mean, I had some qualms. I mean, Phil was nice to me. He was a little stiff, but you know, he really did care about his wife, and he cared a whole lot about getting the air pure again. And when he started talking about going away someplace and living simply and stuff, I could kind of see what he must have been like before her illness.”

The skin around her eyes tightened. I believed Maria really had had some concern for Drem. I could picture her sitting opposite him in the Swallow drinking cappuccino, with that look of sympathy drawing him out. “I’ve done enough temp work to know what it’s like to hate your job. He didn’t talk about his job, and I didn’t ask, because I wasn’t supposed to know. But he said enough for me to realize that he gave it the least emotional energy possible.”

She paused, waiting for me to acknowledge her Berkeleyan observation. “But you know, that type of thing gets you. It backfired on him. It was like he walled himself off from the people he audited, but once he got the wall up, he couldn’t get it back down when he wanted. You know what I mean?” she asked, more secure in the scene she’d created—two colleagues comparing notes about Drem.

I nodded. I hadn’t asked her whether the ticket she was using was one Drem had given her money for or his, altered to Philippa. There was a big difference, legally for Maria, emotionally for Tori, and for me—knowing how deep Drem’s loyalty was would affect my strategies. But I held off, saving the question for the right moment. I didn’t need that big a gun to shoot down Maria’s security now. “Tell me about Friday night.”

She let go of the hair she’d been twisting and pressed her arms close around her. “I did tell you! That was completely true. I mean, when I found out Phil got killed right after he left the Archives, I was too scared to lie.”

I couldn’t help but believe her. Which left me with the same nagging question I’d had for days. “Who was Phil waiting for at the Film Archives?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you do want to help us,” I said, pausing to let the implicit offer prod her. “You watched him for the better part of an hour. What kind of person was he looking for? Was he watching the street for a car? Was he looking at men or women? Blacks, whites, Asians?”

She glanced at the metal mesh of the cage, then back at me, her face pale. “He wasn’t out on the street looking. He was waiting in the courtyard. The only thing I know is that he was planning to sell something, and that’s what was going to make this trip possible.”

I tensed. “What was he going to sell?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he have it with him? Think.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t give up.” I could hear the tightness in my voice. “Did this meeting he was planning seem like it would be the final one, the culmination of the sale?”

“Well, it had to be. He already had the airline ticket. It cost a lot. He had to get money.”

“Okay, so whatever he was selling he had with him. He was carrying his briefcase. Was his briefcase bulkier than normal?”

“No. It was more like a manila folder with a zipper. He couldn’t have had anything more than papers in there.”

He’d have had Lyn Takai’s tax return, his airline ticket he’d picked up that day, and probably just one more piece of paper. Drem had one particularly valuable bit of information to sell, the thing he’d gotten by a fluke the same weekend Tori had had her last attack. “Maria, I’m going to ask you again. Who was he waiting for? Was he looking for a car? Did you see any cars slowing down like they were looking for him?”

She made an odd squeak. It took me a moment to realize it was a laugh escaping from a tense mouth and throat, reminding me that in that area of town drivers are always moving slowly, on the lookout for friends, girls, boys, or even more rare and desirable, an on-street parking spot. “A car,” I persisted, “that slowed just in front of the museum? Or double-parked across the street?”