Death and Taxes (8 page)

“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.”

W
HEN 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.

In the seventies the city installed bike lanes and barricaded intersections (thus creating routes for bicyclists and rude shocks for drivers). “Too little,” environmentalists claimed. And a decade and a half and half a million dollars later were born seven blocks of the Milvia Slow Street: a series of speed humps (humps are more gentle than bumps) interspersed with cement peninsulas, each holding a sapling and extending six feet out from the curb—two to a block on each side of the street,
not
across from each other. Skirting these odd peninsulas of curb, the white line waves back and forth. It’s not a street for one given to motion sickness.

Bicyclists loved it. It was the perfect street for Philip Drem. Normally I liked it. Driving in first and second gear, bouncing slowly over the speed humps, swaying back and forth, was almost surrealistic. To put it more mundanely, it forced me to calm down. But now, hurrying to a woman whose reaction I couldn’t gauge, lurching around the trees and hurtling over the bumps (
humps
) at twice the posted 15 mph was infuriating.

The apartment house, built when stucco box was modern, would have been ugly anywhere, but here it seemed less out of place. This block was something of a throwback to Berkeley before real-estate inflation made every dwelling an investment. In the 1970s foxtails, foot-long brown grass, and bare dirt were not so much a sign of slovenliness as an indicator that residents had other priorities. Now, perhaps, it was a statement of drought consciousness. Or maybe that interpretation put too Berkeley a spin on it. Maybe the owners were just lazy.

Drem’s building stood behind four parking slots. The two on the right held not cars but lines of planters with nothing growing in them. More water conservation? Or maybe the tenants were just lazy.

I left the patrol car in the driveway behind the bare boxes and climbed the cement-slab stairs on the right. The second-floor landing ran around the front corner, creating a few square feet of balcony over the parking spaces. A picture window looked out on the whole unappealing scene, and the window was covered in plastic. Back east, plastic was the poor man’s storm window, but in California, with neither hurricane winds nor gusts of snow, I couldn’t imagine what Victoria Iversen was protecting herself against.

The door was on the side by the stairs. I was surprised it wasn’t already opened or that it didn’t fly open as soon as I rang the bell. But nothing happened. I was about to knock when I heard a tapping on the nearest window.

An intercom crackled: “Are you the policewoman?”

The interior light was off. The window was covered with plastic. And all I could make out of the speaker was that she was a slight woman with no color in her face, hair, or clothes. “I’m Detective Smith.”

“You’ve come about Phil?” When she said his name, her voice caught, just as any concerned wife’s might. It took me a moment to realize that her reaction was not extreme; it was just the first mention of Drem that had not been spit out in anger, disgust, or glee. “I don’t want to talk here. Go around to Phil’s place, up the stairs on the other side of the building. His key is in a fake stone in the corner of the planter nearest the house.”

“Ms. Iversen, why don’t you just let me in here.”

“I can’t. Trust me—this is the best way.”

Strange. But that went with the hermit territory. I headed down, extricated the key from the planter, and hurried up the south steps.

Drem’s flat shared an interior wall with his wife’s. It looked to be the mirror image of hers. The curtains were drawn. I unlocked the door, walked into the darkened room, and nearly tripped over a bicycle tire. Irritably, I flipped on the light, reminding myself that it wasn’t as if Drem had invited me. He hadn’t planned to die and have an unexpected guest wander into his living room.

If
living room
was the right choice of words. Men I’ve known have had eccentric tastes in parlor furnishings. I wasn’t at all surprised to find the bicycle tire in here, the rest of a racing bike hanging from hooks on the wall, an open kit for bike repair, or even a variety of bike helmets, special shoes, and a pile of those black stretch shorts I’d seen cyclists wearing. I was quite willing to accept that Drem got dressed to ride as he rushed out the door.