by Susan Dunlap
I could have told him the department would have paid the rapid-transit fees, but I decided not to distract him. Moon leaned forward and made an inward circle with his arms, as if sweeping us into his confidence. “They hate taxpayers who cheat. More than that, they hate people who don’t report income at all. But the people they hate the most are the tax preparers who show you how to get away with overdeducting or not reporting. There are crooked accountants, of course, and, alas, incompetents. Incompetents cause them a lot of work. But the ones they’re after are the guys who find loopholes they know shouldn’t be in the law but are. The clever guys. The guys who beat the Service at its own game. It galls them.”
Moon reached up by his forehead, then let his hand drop. He’d intended to tip the floppy hat to accentuate his performance, but he was bareheaded. Undaunted, he went on. “So what they’ve got for the whole lot of these guys is something called the problem-preparers list. Of course, they’d never admit it exists. It’s like a blacklist of accountants. They watch these guys. They can audit their clients year after year. You don’t have any way of knowing if your accountant is on it, not until the third year your taxes are audited for no apparent reason.”
I eyed Pereira. She nodded. “Rumor is, they’ve run guys out of business. You can imagine, Smith, that when the word gets around that all of Lamott’s clients are being audited, he’s not likely to pick up new business. Or keep the old.”
“And that’s legal?”
Pereira and Moon nodded in unison. It was he who said, “It’s all legal for them. You can’t sue an IRS agent for harassment.”
“And in a case like this, if Lamott took it to court,” said Pereira, “the agency would say they’d found a pattern of abuse in his records and were checking it. He’d have a helluva time proving otherwise.”
“It’s not known as the Internal Kafka Service for nothing.” Moon was hitting his stride.
Behind him, the pounding stopped. A woman’s voice yelled something. A hammer hit, and again, mocking her, or so it sounded. Lyn Takai stalked out through the door, her short brown hair and gray sweatshirt covered in dust, her olivey skin flushed orange. Spotting our entourage at the desk, her scowl deepened.
It was a wonder this hotel had guests at all. I said, “What’s going on back there?”
“As little as humanly possible,” she grumbled, thrusting a foot onto the edge of the counter and leaning forward over her sleekly muscled leg. She clasped her hands around the foot, pulled her chest forward over the leg in what I assumed to be some yoga position, and said to Moon, “Ethan must have advertised in the uncoordinated-and-unwilling column. Those guys back there are working at capacity figuring out which end of the hammer to hold. And considering the skill they show hitting nails, the wrong choice probably wouldn’t make any difference.”
Taking advantage of Takai and Moon’s presence and their parallel bad moods, I said, “Lyn, Philip Drem was auditing you. Had he pulled the returns for the hotel too?” I didn’t move my head, but it was Moon I was watching now. He stiffened.
Takai released her foot and lowered her leg. “No. He asked me about the hotel, but he had his nose in my classes. He didn’t have time to worry about this place.”
“Not yet,” Pereira said with just the hint of a smile. She’d upped the ante before in situations like this. Nervously, Moon eyed the mess on the desk.
I considered asking what it was Drem would have been seeking here the night he died but decided against it. That was a question that needed to be asked the owners individually. Instead I said, “You don’t mind if I look around, do you?” That casual request worked about half the time. Some of the innocents were interested in getting things over with quickly, the guilty in looking innocent. But in Berkeley plenty of citizens would demand a warrant on principle. When neither Moon nor Takai answered, I focused on Takai, to whom I was a small nuisance compared to the more pressing problem of the workmen. I started for the stairs to the second floor, away from her problem. “Okay?”
“Yeah, sure. But you won’t bother the guests, will you? If the rooms are empty, the doors are open. If the doors are closed, chances are there’s someone in there. Some of our guests keep odd hours. Scookie’s finished cleaning, isn’t she?” she asked Moon.
He glanced at his watch. “Should be.”
I made my way up the wide oak stairs. The second floor still had the marks of deferred maintenance, but with work the dirt-darkened oak wainscoting could be beautiful. Put an antique table at the head of the stairs, add four-poster beds, quilts, vases of flowers, and the Inspiration could be a great rendezvous spot.
It reminded me of my grandmother’s house, except that there was never a question of renovation there. I didn’t want to think about that. I’d have to, I realized—both buildings were too much like Howard’s house. But I didn’t have to think about it now.
I looked through the empty rooms, but the only extra accoutrements in the drab cells were metal hangers, and not many of them. Nothing to titillate Agent Drem. And nothing to indicate he’d been here. But of course even if Drem had decided to come Friday night, he hadn’t arrived. Had he been looking for the person who stood him up at the Film Archives? Or was he headed here for something connected with the hotel books? Of course, if Lyn Takai was being straight when she said Drem hadn’t audited the hotel books, it didn’t really matter what they said. What mattered was what Drem thought might be in them.
I headed downstairs. When I passed the desk, Pereira was scouring the registration records and looked in her element. Moon, on the other hand, was fingering his stuffed clouds. I walked on past them to the back of the hotel where I’d been last night.
Down here, dust covered the hallway. The pounding, more regular now, came from room 3 with the easy-access entrance window and pile of boards.
I was halfway through the door when I spotted Ron, Saturday night’s blond host at the window. He stood there now, hammer in hand. In the corner behind him was a tiny corner bathroom sink with a big forked crack in it. It took me a moment to recognize it as the one I’d seen outside Lyn Takai’s.
Ron stopped, wiped his plaid sleeve across his forehead, and turned around. “You back?”
I smiled. “You still here?”
“Hey, lady, I live here.”
“Looks more like slaving than living,” I said, slipping into Ron’s view of life.
“The only reason I haven’t got two hammers is Simonov’s too cheap.”
“And the reason you don’t care about that lumpy cot is you’re too exhausted?”
He sighed. There was a yellow-Labrador-retriever quality about him. He’d look right at home flopped on the lawn. But you wouldn’t want to throw the ball too often and expect him to bring it back.
“You doing Lyn Takai’s plumbing in your spare time?” I asked, letting a note of irony come through. Extra work in spare time was surely a concept that hadn’t darkened Ron’s brow.
“Not plumbing. I don’t do pipes. I just swapped the sink for her.”
“Looks like that was a wise decision on her part,” I said, recalling the sink with the blue-tulip design, now in her bathroom.
“Yeah, but it’s going to be a pain in the ass for whoever takes care of this place. Guys they’re renting to now aren’t going to complain, but when they get ready for real money guests, they’re going to have to yank this baby out again.”
“And the sink she got is better, right?”
“It’d have to be. For one thing, it’s twenty years newer. And it doesn’t have a big crack.” Ron leaned back against the wall. Had he been a yellow Lab, he would have started scratching behind his ear with his hind leg. Clearly, he was prepared to make the most of this diversion. “Old is only good if you’re talking good condition.”
“Right.” I gave a wave and headed back toward the lobby. I was almost to the front desk before I heard a tentative tap of the hammer. Pereira was still at the registration book. Moon was seated in the swivel, arms crossed.
Lyn Takai was headed to the front door.
“Lyn,” I called. “One more thing.”
Irritably, she stopped. I said, “Can you show me the financial records for exchanging the sink in your studio for the one in back?”
“Records? They’re just two old sinks.” She was glaring at me, but it was the unsteady stare of someone who’s on shaky ground.
Pereira looked up, eyes widening. “You exchanged your personal property for hotel property?”
“Yeah, so? Look, I oversee half the work here. I have to make decisions all the time. We’re not talking about brand-new items with prices on them. Things like these sinks are from the salvage.”
“But they still have value.” Pereira put up her hand to forestall comment. “It doesn’t matter if you think it’s a waste of time. The IRS won’t. They take a real dim view of using rental property for your own house and not having sales figures both ways.”
“Philip Drem found out about that, didn’t he?” I insisted.
She shook her head angrily, then stopped. “Hell, I don’t know. He asked to use the bathroom last week at my house. So he saw the old one there and the new one in the yard. He asked me where I got it. That took me by surprise. But by then, I didn’t assume anything was a friendly question. I told him it came from a friend. He didn’t say anything else. I hoped he’d forgotten it.”
“Did he seem like he might have recognized the sink from here?”
“How could he? He’s never been here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Believe it,” Moon said. “Scookie’s carried on about the guy so much that we’d sooner rent a room to the devil.”
“We were renovating the room. We had the sink out anyway,” she said—poor explanation.
“So you rented out the room up till last week?”
“Yeah,” said Lyn, just as Moon said, “No.”
Pereira flipped back a page in the registration book. “Room three?”
“Right.” Lyn moved closer, eyeing the book with the same intensity Pereira had. “Hey, there’s just a line through it. Go back another week.” Pereira flipped another page. “Line there too. Mason, what’s going on here?”
If Moon could have rolled his chair out the front door, he would have. As it was, he slipped to the farthest corner from Takai. “It was a comp. Ron had a room upstairs last week, and he’s been in number three since Saturday. Before that, it was the girl who cleaned the rooms.”
“The blond?” Lyn demanded. That didn’t sound like a recommendation for housekeeping standards.
“Right. Maria.”
“Maria Zalles?” I asked.
He nodded.
Maria Zalles had had room 3 Friday night when Philip Drem was killed. By Saturday, she was gone from the hotel. She’d left before I talked to her. She hadn’t left Berkeley then, or even deviated from her routine of going to the Film Archives. “How did she come to work here, Moon?”
“She needed the work. She was, you know, between things. We didn’t want to throw her out. We needed a maid. She was here.”
“Whose decision was that?” Lyn demanded.
Moon shrugged. “You know how things are.”
“So, Mason,” I said, “your agreement with her was what? Straight trade, room for work?”
“Yeah.”
“What did she do for food?” She wasn’t hungry and destitute when I’d run into her at the Film Archives.
He shrugged again. “She must have had something else. But whatever it was, it didn’t keep her from cleaning here. She did a good job.”
Now it was clear why Maria Zalles had given me a false address—to keep from telling me she lived here. Philip Drem left the Film Archives where he’d been with Maria, felt woozy, aimed his bike down here. The question was, was he coming here for help or because he felt the prick of the needle and figured Maria had done it?
“Where is Maria?” I asked.
“Gone,” Mason said. “You can search her room, but I’ve been in there, and there’s not a thing of hers left.”
“Why did she leave Saturday?”
He shrugged again. “She just said she was quitting and going to stay with a friend. I figured she’d gotten a better job.”
“Who’s the friend?”
“Got me.”
I asked about forwarding address, other friends, phone calls, letters. But from what Moon and Takai admitted knowing of Maria Zalles, she could have been a hermit instead of a woman with a friend who happens to offer her a room.
Maria Zalles had seemed shocked when I told her of Drem’s death. If she hadn’t known about Drem’s death earlier, why would she have left the hotel? Coincidence? Or it was not Maria but the friend who wanted her out of the hotel? A friend who was nervous about the murder and Maria’s connection to Philip Drem?
I spent half an hour searching room 3, hoping for some lead to the mysterious friend. But for all the connection to Maria Zalles it held, it might always have been Ron the workman’s room.
When I was finished going over it, Pereira was waiting. She followed me back to the station, into my office and settled herself on Howard’s desk. Automatically she glanced around the office, checking for food or drink.
I gave her the background on Maria Zalles. “And so, Connie, it would take a naive trust to believe Maria Zalles’s story that she just happened to run into Drem at the Archives.”
“The hell with that, Smith. Let’s look at this from a tax agent’s point of view. Maria mentions that sink that they took out of her room, moans about how nice the tulip design was, and complains about the rotten cracked one they’re replacing it with. Drem may remember the cracked one from Lyn Takai’s yard. But even if not, he sees the tulip sink in Lyn Takai’s bathroom. For a bulldog, that’s steak tartare. He’d have moved on from Takai’s returns to the hotel’s in a flash.”
“And Lyn Takai would have been in a lot of trouble?”
“Depends. The sink switch is illegal, but it’s not a big financial swindle. It depends on what Drem chose to do. And, of course, what else he might uncover about Takai.”
“And what he might uncover about the hotel?”
Pereira nodded. “Right. And believe me, Smith, with the state of those books, even if Drem couldn’t get thousands of dollars from Moon and company, he’d have had Mason Moon chained to those books for weeks.”
CHAPTER 18
IT WASN’T TILL I got home and was standing on the stoop overlooking Howard’s newly replanted azalea that I realized I hadn’t had dinner. And there was not likely to be any food in the fridge here.
But suddenly the exhaustion from the day hit. Even the prospect of Chocolate Chocolate Shower ice cream couldn’t tempt me back into the car. I trudged past the resettled azalea and opened the door.
Heaven.
Or more accurately, pizza. Or utterly accurately, the smell thereof.
In the living room was the second surprise. Howard.
“You still working on your taxes?” I asked, looking from him to the pizza—pepperoni, anchovy, black olive, and green onion. It looked wonderful. Howard, on the other hand, looked like the pizza might two days from now: dry, lifeless, and curled in at the edges. His arms were crossed, his head down, his brow wrinkled. In front of him, the pizza lay untouched.
“I can’t do any more till tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting with the bookkeeper for Fancy Food Restaurant Service. That’s where the Nob Hill Club gets its ingredients.”
“Then how come you’re not out taking advantage of your freedom? You’ve been in the house all weekend. Aren’t you going stir-crazy?” I certainly would have.
“Can’t leave here.”
The light was beginning to dawn. If I’d felt bad before … I waited.
“Sunday night. I’ve spent the whole damned weekend watching for the plant thief. I’m not going to leave now. I know the criminal mind. Sunday, when no one suspects …”
I sank onto the sofa beside him. We’d always handled issues
circumspectly, lightly, jokingly—trusting that the other would get the point and appreciate the lack of leaden touch. We’d laughed at Quality Time and Serious Talk. But now I wondered if fifteen minutes of serious talk three days ago would have saved the lunacy I’d made of the weekend. I’d turned him into a hostage and myself into my grandmother. I could almost feel the clammy air-conditioned air of that East Coast house and hear the whir of the sawmill outside.
Howard motioned to the pizza. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry. Or almost not. But it wouldn’t do to refuse food—too out of character for me. I picked up a slice and bit into it an instant before Howard said, “Watch out—it’s hot!”
As I swished his beer over the burned roof of my mouth, I steeled myself to keep from racing out, throwing myself into the car, and heading for the freeway to anywhere. I looked over at him. His face was drawn, and the skin on his cheeks hung inward as if it were too tired to stand up. His eyes were half closed, not tired by weighing, pondering, ready to be amused. The fun guy, the guy willing to take a chance—that was how most everyone saw Howard. I’d seen beneath that to the man who took lots of chances on things that didn’t really matter but few on those that counted.
One of those chances had been on me, on showing me that nugget of what he really was. I just hoped I hadn’t yanked it out and trampled it. I pulled back from the thought. It was too painful to think I’d never again see that nugget but only the public Howard.