Death and Taxes

by Susan Dunlap

  I picked up another piece of pizza and looked down at the tax forms. “How much difference can it make? A few dollars? Your time and sanity are of some value.”

  Howard glared at the forms with the same look he’d had when first pondering Damon Hentry, the drug dealer. “I’ll be up anyway. I’ll get the IRS while I wait for the plant thief.”

  I said nothing.

  “Some asshole dug up my magnifica. In broad daylight.”

  I took a bite of my pizza.

  “Broad daylight,” Howard repeated. “Something must have freaked him. Why else would he leave the plant only half dug-up?”

  Actually, the digging had been only cosmetic because I’d been concerned about the plant, about Howard, and about me when Howard found out. And because I didn’t want to have to dispose of a big azalea at 2:00 A.M.

  “Howard, you’re going to stay up all night?”

  “He comes back again, I’m going to get him.”

  Howard was falling in with the sting so well that if I hadn’t known I was the only one in on the plan, I’d have suspected a leak. But pulling a sting on a drug dealer is one thing. Doing it to your guy is another. It didn’t feel real good. “What about your taxes?”

  “I slept this afternoon.”

  I almost protested. I wasn’t going to have to show Howard what it was like being a prisoner of society. He was doing it to himself.

  I shrugged and moved on. From the stairs I tossed down “It’s really infuriating when the threat of danger forces you to stay on guard.”

  If Howard caught the irony, he didn’t react. He looked tense, tired, angry. I had second thoughts about the whole sting. Second thoughts; fifteenth thoughts.

  I headed upstairs to bed.

  I don’t know when he decided thieving hours ended. Howard was asleep when the alarm went off. I had to shake him awake and then agreed to reset the clock for an hour later. The whole process of his grumbling, my statements of fact, and what passed for negotiating took time, and I was still in Howard’s hand-me-down T-shirt (my nightwear) when Pereira called.

  “I did the background check on Maria Zalles,” she said without preliminaries. “No priors, no warrants, and no building at the address listed in the files.”

  “A fake address?”

  “I wouldn’t have picked up on it, but Murakawa was in running a perp, and he knows Zalles’s street. He’s got a Feldenkreis class there. He was sure the numbers didn’t go above twenty-one fifty. So I took a pass by and …” We both knew the rest. Murakawa is a great observer. It’s as if he could stop time and inspect every image he sees under his mental microscope. I’ve asked him how he does it, but it’s so natural for him that he can’t explain.

  “Rats,” I said. “What’s with this woman? She gives me this song and dance about how upset she is that her almost lover is dead. Did you try reversing the numbers?”

  “Of course.”

  “A phony address. Why?” I glanced at my watch: 9:32. “She’s supposed to be at the station in half an hour. What do you think are the chances?”

  “About the same as Drem being nominated for the Nobel peace prize.”

  By ten I had showered and was at work. Maria Zalles hadn’t shown. I spent some time trying to come up with a reason why she lied. But I knew too little about her—and too much about the extraneous dealings witnesses perjure themselves to hide. Maria Zalles may have held the key to the Drem case, or she may simply have been afraid I’d discover an ounce of pot in her underwear drawer. If the latter was true, I was out of luck. If it was the former, then Maria Zalles was one hell of an actress and a woman to consider a lot more seriously than I had so far. I left word with Patrol to check with their sources and pick up Zalles the moment they spotted her.

  Then I did the practical thing. I pushed aside what I didn’t have (Zalles) and went with what I did. If Drem had been going to the Inspiration, chances were, it was to see Scookie Hogan. Why would he have left Pacific Film Archive, the PFA, after the person he was waiting for didn’t show and headed to the Inspiration? To find the person who’d stood him up?

  Things were looking up. Scookie was a regular at the Med. I could ask her there, over a cup of cappuccino.

  CHAPTER 14

  SCOOKIE HOGAN WAS INDEED in the Mediterraneum Caffè, one of the old standards of the Avenue. I don’t know how long it’s been there—longer than any other establishment on the Avenue, I’d guess. The Med is a coffeehouse that wouldn’t be out of place in San Francisco’s North Beach, near the railway station in Florence, or in Greenwich Village. It’s a cold-weather Italian place—long-yellowed walls, metal chairs and marble tables, the smell of smoke and roasting espresso, strident voices smacking against one another territorially, cut by the clang of the cash register.

  There was a time in the seventies when the Med was dominated by Hell’s Angels. Twenty or thirty of them would park their hogs outside the door and saunter in. Non-Angels gave them and the Med a wide berth. Managers were in a quandary. They appealed to the city, and the University, and someone came through with one of those solutions that make you glad to live here. No violence, no confrontation. Someone did a little research on the Angels and found that they never allowed their motorcycles out of sight. So a couple of No Parking signs in front of the Med, and voila! The Angels roared off, the old clientele ambled back in, and once again the marble tables were surrounded by men in scruffy plaid shirts and worn jeans, women in shawls and faded flowered skirts, students with backpacks and biochem texts.

  Now, twenty years later, the scene was much the same, with doubtless many of the same people. Probably in some of the same clothes. Scookie Hogan fitted right in. Her gray-streaked light-brown hair fell in waves that mimicked the cushions of her cheeks and was caught loosely at the nape. Her eyes were pale blue, her skin not so much sallow as dry, drooping.

  Despite the chill of a morning when the fog had yet to burn off, she was wearing a V-necked cotton shirt that she had to have bought from a table on the Avenue. I recognized the shade of teal. I’d bought one myself a few years ago. The color had run every time I washed it. By now, it was one of the few off-white things I owned. Scookie’s was a couple of washes behind.

  I got in line for a cappuccino, added extra chocolate, and walked between the tables to the far side, where she sat with her back to the wall. At this hour on a foggy morning the Med was more than half empty. A couple of regulars read papers. One of them fiddled with his wheelchair.

  Next to Scookie a young woman in jeans and sweatshirt was reading Virginia Woolf. Scookie wasn’t doing anything. She seemed to be neither thinking nor putting forth the effort to stare into space.

  I sat down at her table and identified myself.

  She shrugged.

  “You’ve had dealings with Philip Drem,” I said.

  Her pale face reddened. “Bastard! That slime wrecked my life.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Sure I’ll tell you. Glad to.” She tapped a pudgy finger on her saucer. Her face was redder. Her voice had risen. The woman at the next table glanced over the top of To the Lighthouse. “They should have made a movie of it—a tragedy, maybe a horror story. I’ll tell you, but you won’t believe me. It’s like something out of … like the Black Death. One day people were just minding their shops in Paris and Bruges. The next day they were breaking out in buboes; the next, they were dead. No reason, no escape.”

  Philip Drem had caused his share of misery, but hardly the equivalent of decimating fourteenth-century Europe. “Specifically, what happened to you?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get to it. I’m glad to tell you. Everyone else got sick of hearing it years ago.” Her voice was gruff, but there was a whine cutting through. It made me wary. “I used to have this business—Scookies—maybe you’ve heard of it?” She looked at me hopefully, silently begging for reassurance.

  She’d asked the right person. “Of course. You had the wagon next to the ones that sell sushi and fruit smoothi
es up by Sproul Plaza. You sold those wonderful scone-cookies, the ones with the soft-tart interior and the crisp sweet stuff around it. And you had great fillings—cranberries and hazelnuts and chocolate. The chocolate scookies were the best. A lot of times I had them for lunch. Not after lunch; they were my whole lunch. You had some real fans on the force.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She beamed, and that smile pulled her sagging cheeks taut and turned her blotchy red skin to a color that looked almost healthy. It changed her from a has-been to a woman of the moment. “The guys on the beat always stopped by. The big redhead, and the pretty blonde, and”—she looked intently at me—“I remember you. Yeah, you were a great customer.”

  “Then suddenly you were gone. You opened a bakery, right?”

  “Yeah. I needed the space, and it was time. I was doing too much business to handle out of a wagon like that. I couldn’t keep up with the demand. I worked my butt off in that wagon, and in the shop too. Got up at four every morning so I could be making dough by five and have the stand open at six thirty. The cookie people like you ate scookies for lunch, but the scone crowd—they demanded theirs at breakfast, see? I’d get the joggers lining up at six thirty, and plenty pissed if I was late.” The whine was almost gone from her voice. There was just a warm gravelly quality, not unlike a good oatmeal scone.

  “Wasn’t there an article in the Express about Scookies?”

  “Two columns.”

  “As I recall, it called you the nun of the dough world, the bride of the oven.”

  She laughed proudly. “Yeah, and they weren’t far from right, I’ll tell you. You don’t have a social life with a schedule like that. Oh, I could have gotten it down to a science—make dough, shove in oven, sell, and home by four in the afternoon. I suppose I could have had a couple hours free then. But there were always innovations to try. That’s how the hazelnut scookies came about. I was trying something late one afternoon. I was always fiddling with recipes, adding vanilla, trying less sugar. But you can’t do that while you’re making scookies for your customers. No way. You can’t disappoint your customers when they’re counting on their hazelnut scookie. You understand that.”

  I nodded with conviction and took a swallow of cappuccino.

  “So, the trial runs all had to be on my ‘free’ time. But I’m not complaining, no way. I loved it.” She hesitated, and in that moment her whole being seemed to turn down a notch. Her voice was a note or two lower as she said, “Making scookies was the first thing I ever did that was mine, the first—the only—time I did something, that I was something. You know, my real name’s not Scookie.” She shrugged, embarrassed. “My real name is the same one as half the other women my age. I might as well have been named Generic. It was like my parents created me to do no more than fit it, to never do anything special like make scookies.” The whine was back now, like an ill-played violin suddenly clear through the melody of the orchestra.

  “Philip Drem?” I prompted.

  “He’s a cancer.”

  No longer a bubo, I noted. “A cancer?”

  “Right. One day you’re sitting home healthy; the next—”

  “Drem?” I prodded before she could launch into a new chorus on disease.

  Momentarily she stared at me, affronted. Then she gave a half-shrug. If she carried on like this all the time, she must think being cut off was the norm of conversation. “One day I was baking scookies, thinking about whether to add coffee service and put some tables out front of the shop, and the letter arrived. The agent would be calling for an appointment. An appointment—no big deal, I thought. Maybe I should have known better then, but I was too busy to worry about it. I had a new recipe—with blackberry brandy—to work on.”

  “And he came to the bakery?”

  “Wanted to see my receipts for every bag of flour, every ounce of currants, and every cranberry I bought. I brought him the box of receipts, but that wasn’t enough. He had to have them in order. He was like insulted that I kept my receipts in a box! Insulted! To him, my bakery, my whole baking life, was nothing but a means to gather receipts. It was like if I had an hour to bake a tray of walnut scookies or write down every penny I’d spent that week, there would be no question which I’d do.”

  The woman at the next table slammed her book shut, stuffed it in her pack, and stomped out. Scookie turned, startled. “Sorry, I’m getting carried away again. After I lost the bakery, I got so out of control, I was in Herrick Hospital on a seventy-two-hour hold. I tried to slit my wrist. I didn’t do it right. I’d never done anything right except make scookies. But by the time Drem got through with my records, there was nothing left. He made me try to get copies of invoices from suppliers and estimate what I bought from the health-food store—I tried to have everything organic—and figure out what I paid for grocery stuff I couldn’t get organic or had to get in a hurry, like blueberries the year everyone went wild about blueberry scookies. He called my suppliers and badgered them till they wouldn’t deal with me. He contacted my landlord, at the shop and at home. He talked to the shopkeepers on either side of me. He made my life hell. I’d be rushing around trying to get the bank to give me copies of canceled checks and discover the next morning that I’d forgotten to buy flour. I’d have to race to Safeway, lose almost an hour, have nothing ready for the morning joggers. That only has to happen a couple of times before they find someplace else to eat.”

  She wasn’t shouting, but that whine of hers had cut through every other conversation around, and when she stopped speaking, the room was almost silent but for the whir of the espresso machine and the clatter of cups against saucers.

  “Did you end up paying a lot?”

  “Three hundred forty-seven dollars and twelve cents. Not what’s going to save the nation from bankruptcy, is it. Probably about seven dollars an hour for his time. I mean the IRS lost money on the deal. But it cost me my business. By the time he finished, all my suppliers and my customers had deserted me.”

  “So why was he after you like that?”

  “I don’t know. He was like a bulldog who’s got you by the scruff of the neck and starts shaking. If no one pulls him off, he’ll shake you till your neck snaps.” Once again she stared full at me. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Drem described as a bulldog. “With the IRS, no one pulls them off. And no matter what an agent does, you can’t sue them. With them, you’re gallows material unless you can prove yourself innocent.”

  “But why—”

  “What did I do? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? Everyone assumes you’ve done something to bring this on yourself. They can’t believe—maybe they don’t want to believe—it can just happen. You can lose everything that mattered and end up looking at a hypodermic in the psych ward at Herrick Hospital.” Her face was flushed, her hands shaking.

  Around us I could hear forced conversation. Scookie reached for her cup and could barely manage getting her fingers around the handle. The cup rattled against the saucer. When she finally did lift it, she smacked it into her lip. She was fortunate the coffee was gone.

  I said, “Tell me where you were last Friday night after dinner.”

  “Friday,” she said, putting the cup down with surprising control. “You mean when the slime was killed? Mason called me. He thought I’d be delighted. But he was wrong. I was here the whole evening. I’m here most nights. Only a block away from all the action. I could have seen Drem lying in the street. I would have liked that part. But I’m not happy he’s dead. Death’s too easy. Death’s nothing compared to knowing you had one chance and it got snatched away from you and now it’s too late.” She smiled unpleasantly. “Maybe I’ll try to work up a belief in hell.”

  “Was there anyone else here that evening who might remember you?”

  Her eyes widened. “Ah, just like Drem. ‘Can you document your existence here?’ Well, Philip goddamned Drem got every bit of documentation I am going to do. So if you want to know, you find out. If you can’t, take me to jail.”

&
nbsp; Slowly I said, “The police aren’t the IRS. We do have rules—and the police-review board if you feel they’ve been broken. I need your help—”

  Her smile grew wider but not more pleasant. “But you see, Officer, I don’t want to help.”

  I stood up and left her my card anyway. You never know when people will change their minds. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Arab saying goes. But I didn’t see how I could ever manage to seem like I hated Philip Drem enough to become the swing enemy in Scookie Hogan’s eyes.

  I stopped in the bathroom and took a minute longer in the stall than I needed to. Sometimes witnesses are so pleased to see me leave, they don’t pay attention to where I’ve gone. They wander in after and start talking to a friend. But when I left the bathroom, Scookie Hogan was still at her table by the wall. A tall thin man I didn’t recognize was standing next to her. She’d forgotten about me. She was looking up at him with that same eerie smile in place. I veered toward them.

  “Well, congratulations on your twenty-seven points,” he said to Scookie. “Azrael commends you.”

  It wasn’t till I got back to the station and hauled out my dictionary that I realized Azrael was the Hebrew angel of death.

  CHAPTER 15

  “AZRAEL COMMENDS YOU,” THE man had said to Scookie Hogan. The angel of death praises you. Now, back in my office at the station, I wished I had paid more attention to the angel’s messenger. Five feet eight, long brown hair, bald dome, army-surplus raincoat. If I came across him again, I’d recognize him, but I couldn’t put out a call for him. With a description like that, Patrol could pick up half of Telegraph Avenue.

  I ran the name Azrael through files. In Berkeley I wouldn’t have been surprised to find priors or warrants on a flock of fallen angels. But if we had angels, Azrael wasn’t among them.