Death and Taxes

by Susan Dunlap

  When I opened the ladies’-room door, I spotted her. Maria Zalles her name turned out to be, but it could have been Tori Iversen. There are people in Berkeley who believe that every person lives many lives simultaneously, that each time you choose between two paths, life strolls on from both of them, a family tree of the potential self.

  Maria Zalles looked like the Tori Iversen who had decided not to go to the studio the day the gas jet blew. She was healthy, even a bit plump, with shiny blond hair brushing her shoulders, blue eyes shaded with enough eye shadow and mascara to make Tori sick for a month, and clothes bright enough to be a kindergartner’s dream. I stared, stunned. The reality of what Tori had lost struck me anew. No way could Philip Drem have resisted Maria Zalles.

  She was washing her hands when I asked if she knew him.

  “Philm? Sure.” Even her voice was like Tori’s, or what Tori’s might have been if she’d had this woman’s energy and enthusiasm. My skin was quivering from caffeine, and sorrow, and the futility of it all. “I call him Philm,” she explained, “because he’s here so much.”

  Cute. Tori wouldn’t have dealt in cute. “Did you see him last night?”

  “Oh yeah. Actually, I almost didn’t. It was a Greek movie, and I’m not crazy about them, but my roommate was having her boyfriend over to watch basketball, and I can’t handle that, you know. I mean you see the last two minutes, you’ve seen it all, right? And subtle—no way. So I came on here.”

  One of the stall doors swung open, and a woman hurried out. It reminded me why I’d come in here and how serious my need was after those lattes. Professional that I am, I focused on Maria Zalles. “But Phil likes Greek movies?”

  “Phil will watch anything set outside the continental United States. I’ve told him he might as well stay home with National Geographic for all the discrimination he has about art.” She pulled a towel loose and began drying her pudgy hands.

  I could picture Drem looking at those hands, contrasting them to the thin, cracked hands Tori had been pressing against the chair arms. Tori said she had encouraged Phil to see other women and he had refused. I wondered. “How did Phil take being called bourgeois?”

  “He laughed.” She tossed the towel in the waste-basket.

  I eyed the empty stalls, but there was no way I could take the chance of Maria Zalles leaving, catching me with my pants down, literally. I stood very still. “Maria, I have bad news about Phil. He’s dead.”

  “You’re joking, aren’t you?” Her face had gone as pale as Tori’s.

  “I’m afraid not. He died last night. I’m with the police, and—”

  She let out a scream “No!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, glancing at the door, expecting to see it fly open and every film buff in the lobby race in and demand to know what I’d done to this woman.

  “How could he—” She burst into dry sobs, jamming her fists into her eyes and wailing so her whole body shook. The picture flashed in my mind of Tori Iversen, letting out that one shriek and never allowing her hand to touch her face.

  It was five minutes before Maria Zalles was calm enough for me to lead her back to the café. I got her a cappuccino; for myself I couldn’t even bear to have a cup of liquid in front of me.

  She wrapped her hands around the cup, oblivious of the hot ceramic. Her face was flushed, and despite rinsing and dabbing with towels, smears of turquoise and black ringed her eyes. “He was here Friday. We sat in our seats, in the back row, and watched the whole movie. He was right here,” she said accusingly.

  “And then what happened? When you left the movie?”

  “Nothing,” she choked out. She sniffed back sobs and began pulling the napkin apart. There were people at the next table six inches away, but their only reaction was a momentary pause in conversation. The California commitment to giving people their space has its good points.

  I put a hand on her arm and said softly, “Nothing?”

  “No. He just went home.” She wadded up the remainder of the napkin and rubbed it across her eyes. The blue and black makeup streaked like a raccoon mask, but if she suspected the effect, she couldn’t be bothered to check it. The absolute inverse of Tori. Philip Drem had to have been seduced by her.

  I waited till she was quieter. “He didn’t go home.”

  “Well, I don’t know what he did. I went home.” There was an edge to her voice I hadn’t noticed before.

  “And that was unusual—for you two to leave like that?”

  “We always had coffee or something. We always talked about the movie afterward. I mean, that’s the reason you go to movies with someone, so you can talk about it, right?”

  One of the reasons. “But you were more to him than just a friend. I can see that.”

  She hesitated as if she understood I was manipulating her, then, as if she couldn’t be bothered worrying about that either, said, “I don’t know what I was to Phil. I used to think that we were at the beginning of something, you know? I mean he was so seductive.”

  “How so?” The Philip Drem I’d heard about couldn’t have attracted an escapee from a convent. And Maria Zalles was the kind of trusting, cuddly girl—more girl than woman, though I would have guessed her to be about twenty-five—who’d have men lined up to protect her. I couldn’t picture Tori Iversen ever being that innocent.

  Maria brushed the rubble of paper shards to the floor and wrapped her hands around the cup again. It would have fit her image better if the cup had held cocoa instead of strong coffee. Gazing into it as if it held her memories, she said, “He was so intense. And he really listened. He was interested in everything. He found out I’d done some scuba diving, and he wanted to know all about it, not only the mechanics but how I felt underwater, was I scared, and stuff like that. Sometimes he just stared at me as if that would help him take in what I was saying. Other times he sat with his eyes half closed as if that let him focus all his attention on listening. And then occasionally, when we were in a place with a mirror, I’d think he was looking away, and I’d find him staring in the mirror, watching me, watching us both.”

  I felt a tug of sorrow for Maria Zalles, so entranced by the illusion of being cherished. And for Philip Drem. It was easy to imagine Philip Drem looking in the mirror at the couple he and Tori might have been. What had it been like for him when he went home to the real Tori? “Maria, how long had you been seeing him like this?”

  “A little over a month.”

  “That’s a long time for things not to go anywhere.”

  “Well, I was just getting over a relationship, and I didn’t want to get involved with anyone, and so I probably put up some barriers.”

  Compared to the walls Drem was used to, Maria Zalles’s barriers must have been like doorsills. And yet there was something about Maria Zalles that didn’t fit. She thought the relationship was going somewhere; she was confused about Drem’s reluctance; she was holding off. I kept trying explanations, like Halloween costumes, looking for the right one. Had she just moved to town and was trying to adjust? Was this air of innocence no more than a veil she’d chosen to wear for Drem, or for me? Or had the shock of Drem’s death juggled her reactions so none seemed quite real? Like most survivors, she was going through the “Fun House” stage of death recognition, riding along the tracks of the present, dealing with my questions when suddenly out of the blackness up popped a skeleton: “Phil is dead!” Was it just that? I couldn’t tell.

  I hesitated a moment, deciding which path to take. Only one of my choices was going to have a life. I decided to go with my hunch. “But you thought Phil was about to make a move.”

  “Thought? Hoped? I don’t know. It had been a big deal when he suggested we have coffee on the Avenue last week. When we walked there, he put his hand on my shoulder. I felt like I did when I was twelve years old with my first boyfriend.” The skeleton took her by surprise. Tears gushed again. She ignored them.

  For Drem, the draw of this illusory Tori would have been overwhelming. When he
reached out for her his hand had touched not cold window glass but her soft body. Drem had alleviated his misery by deceiving Maria. I was using her too. That didn’t make me feel any better, about me, or him. “Maria, you are such a warm, outgoing person, I can’t imagine you just waiting passively to see what he’d do.”

  She wiped her eyes and looked up. “It doesn’t sound like me, does it? I’ve moved in with guys and back out in less time than that. But there was something about Phil, or maybe the aura of the films and just meeting Friday nights. Until real recently, it was a game. Like a movie, a foreign movie. I wondered if he was married, but I didn’t ask. I don’t know what he did for a living. It was like watching a movie where you just take what you’re given and make your conclusions on that.”

  Wonderful! The one witness with the chance to know Drem, and she makes no effort. Or had she made that effort but was too stunned to draw up the subtleties of her conclusions? Or unwilling to tell them to a stranger and a police officer? “But, Maria, last night you left right after the movie. How come? Is that what Phil wanted?”

  “Yeah.” She wiped her finger around the inside edge of her cup, gathering the ring of pasty coffee. Then she sucked it from her finger. “He said he had to see a guy.”

  “About?”

  “I don’t know.” She stared down at the cup, nervous, thinking now. “Phil didn’t say. I did ask. It was the first time I’d broken my rules. I guess I expected an answer that would make it up to me for forfeiting the game.”

  “And you didn’t get it?”

  “I got nothing. He said he couldn’t talk about it, that it was something to do with work.”

  I could feel my shoulders tensing with excitement. “Did you buy that?”

  “Hardly.”

  The path forked again. The top tine said she went home; the bottom, she hung around. I chose the bottom. “What did he do?”

  “I don’t—”

  I put a hand on her arm, and smiled. “Maria.”

  “Okay, so I left and got halfway home. Then I thought, Shit, who does this guy think he is? Maybe he had a wife and she was picking him up. So I came back. He must have been waiting inside here because he walked out just as I came back. It was nine thirty. His bicycle was still out there then.”

  “So it would have been out of his sight all that time?”

  “Unless he came out and looked at it, yes. But when he did come out, he didn’t pay any attention to it. He just paced up and down in front of the gate. And at ten he got on his bike and pedaled like mad up the street.”

  “Up the street? East?” To go home, he would have coasted down, west. “Which way did he go on College?”

  “Right.”

  Right—south—away from home. “Did he sit on the bicycle seat?”

  “When he turned, yes. It’s a downslope on that street.”

  So Philip Drem had waited for someone who didn’t show up. Then he rode off in a huff, in the opposite direction from his flat. But where was he going?

  “What about his briefcase?” He hadn’t been home or back to the office since he’d stuck that briefcase in his basket and pedaled away from Lyn Takai’s.

  Maria picked up the ceramic cup and drained the coffee. Her hands were shaking.

  “Did he have the briefcase when he got here?”

  “Yeah. He always had the damned briefcase. I teased him about it. I mean, here we are fantasizing a carefree month in Samoa”—she clunked the cup down—“or Lisbon, or Paris, and he’s clutching his briefcase like he can’t be away from his work for an hour. It’s like his anchor to his job, his life here, whatever. Like it kept him from being washed away with me.”

  “When he left on his bicycle, did he still have the briefcase?”

  “If he went to the men’s room, he took it. To be separated from it, he’d have to have been … dead.” Her breath caught. Behind us the clattering of china and silver seemed suddenly louder. Her voice was shaky as she said, “He stuck it in his basket, unlocked his chain, and rode off. Didn’t you find it?”

  “No. Who would have wanted it?”

  “No one. When I asked him about it, he said there was nothing that would interest anyone, least of all me.”

  That might have been, what he said, but his actions certainly told a different tale. I said, “I’ll need a written statement from you. You can come in to the station tomorrow.”

  She nodded. “The movie’s over. Tell me about Phil. He was married, wasn’t he?”

  I nodded. We don’t tell witnesses more than they need to know. This time I was glad. I could have said that I didn’t think marriage per se explained Philip Drem’s behavior, but I didn’t think she needed that black-and-white version. For tonight at least, she was better left with her soft-colored memories.

  CHAPTER 11

  I TOOK DOWN MARIA Zalles’s address and phone number and arranged for her to come to the station at 10:00 A.M. the next day. When I left her, she was still sitting in the Swallow, her cappuccino cup empty but for the coffee stains.

  I started on the route Drem had taken from here. He’d left the Swallow at ten, ridden the half block up Durant (a one-way street), turned right on College Avenue (two-way), cut down either Channing or Haste, and turned left again till he got to Dwight and elected to loop down half a block of Dwight against its one-way eastbound traffic. (In the secondhand report we had, the witness spotted him on that part of Dwight.) Then Drem turned onto Regent Street to die.

  The only reason he would have taken that route was to get to Regent. And my guess was he would have chosen Regent as a route to cut across Telegraph (also a one-way, the wrong way) only if he was headed to Carleton and the property owned by Moon, Takai, et al.

  Since I had to obey the one-way signs, it took me a bit longer to get there. It was dark now. Deciduous trees already had full complements of leaves, branches hanging low over the streetlights. Sidewalks were empty, street traffic light for a Saturday night. Of course, this was the last weekend before April 15.

  Berkeleyans, never ones to pay the government more or earlier than absolutely essential were home sweating over their 1040s. Howard, I suspected, was sitting home with one eye on his charitable deductions and the other on his azaleas. An uncomfortable picture, any way you looked at it.

  I hung a U and pulled up across from the group’s property, the fifty-year-old cheap hotel that could have as easily been cheap apartments. Inspiration Hotel, the sign said. Presumably the inspiration had yet to be fulfilled. The outside lighting was minimal. I doubted that had been an aesthetic decision, but the result must have pleased the neighbors (and any housebreakers with meager enough standards to bother with this place).

  Lyn Takai and her partners had had the Inspiration only a year, and whatever improvements they might have made were clearly not on the facade. What had possessed a pair as indigent as Takai and Moon to invest in a long-term project like this? I walked up the cracked cement path to the door and pushed it open.

  The lobby was shaped like the box of a size 15 AAA shoe and decorated about as imaginatively: a pine counter, two elderly flowered sofas, and the staircase that led up from the front door. No carpet, coffee tables, or lamps. The only light was from the overhead fixture. Not that there were any newspapers or magazines to read by it. This lobby was not a place where people would choose to wait.

  “Can I help you?” The man behind the desk had an elfin look—curly dark hair caught in a ponytail that disappeared into the collar of his tan shirt, skin a little wrinkly, dark eyes with the twinkle of experiences not taken too seriously. A tan beaked cap sat on the counter, a captain’s cap. Or was that admiral’s?

  “Detective Smith, Berkeley Police.”

  “Ah, the one who talked to Lyn.” The most innocent of people are usually unnerved by the unexpected arrival of a police detective, particularly one they know to be in Homicide, but this man was not impressed. He was leaning forward over the counter as if he were ready to peruse a trinket I’d brought in. I gu
essed him to be Ethan Simonov, but I asked anyway. He was.

  Simonov had been indicted for tax evasion in Oregon. Had this not been a weekend, I would have gotten the details of that case. I’d heard Simonov’s name around town. It was on Howard’s well-worn “in case of emergency” list of plumbers, electricians, foundation workers, roofers, and so on. The notation beside Simonov’s name had been: “finder.”

  I said, “Tell me about the tax-evasion indictment.”

  He leaned toward me as if I had laid a pouch of contraband on the counter and was ready to trade. “You don’t mess around, lady.”

  “A tax indictment is serious business. You get caught evading, IRS makes you pay. They don’t send you to jail unless there’s a pile of money involved—”

  “Or they want to make an example of you,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “So what did they get you for?”

  “Stupidity. Or more to the point, sloppy business practices.” He stood up and tapped a finger on the counter as if waiting to see what I had to barter. When I didn’t bite, he went on. “It was the kind of stupidity that comes from living in Berkeley too long, then moving away and forgetting where you are. If I’d been the swap king of Berkeley, they’d never have done more than dun me for a few bucks.”

  “The ‘swap king’?”

  “Yeah, that’s what the papers called me.” Simonov gave a little snort, but he failed to hide a little proud smile. “It was up in southern Oregon. I ran the biggest swap club in the state. A trombone player needed his roof reshingled, he called me. I got him in touch with a roofer who wanted a band for his high school reunion. They swapped jobs.”

  “And paid you a fee?”

  “Yeah, though sometimes it was work instead of money.”

  “Didn’t you pay taxes on it?”

  “I did. I wasn’t that stupid,” he said, clearly put out. “It was my clients who didn’t. Not my fault, is it? I tell the people I deal with now, they better pay.”