Death and Taxes

by Susan Dunlap

  “But you could say that about anything.”

  She held up a finger. “Now you’re beginning to see. Once your immune system goes, everything out there is potentially lethal. It’s like this: You’re wearing a tweed suit. One kind of thread in it makes you itch. You don’t know which one. You narrow the choices and pull the blue thread. But maybe by that time the irritants have rubbed off on the yellow threads next to the blues, and now the yellows seem like bad guys, so you pull them. But you don’t get any better. You start over pulling tan and azure and mauve, thread after thread. But you don’t feel better. In fact, you’re worse because now you’ve been stressed out from the allergy and worrying about it, and trying to find the lethal thread. But you can’t stop. You’ve got to find the thread. And so the whole process keeps going on and on until you’re naked and freezing.”

  I shivered. I wished I could reach out to her, but of course the glass separated us. Glass, and the murder, and my gut-level fear of a life like hers. I said, “It’s really hard when you don’t know what you’re looking for. Or what you’ve done. Like you’re playing a game without having been told all the rules.”

  She nodded, as people do when you’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. I waited for her to fill me in on the ice beneath the water, but she didn’t. Again I was impressed with how controlled she was. I thought about her and Drem and the coffee. And about Howard and me. Howard and I had handled our frustrations by stomping out. Tori couldn’t do that. She couldn’t even pull her curtain and be assured Drem wouldn’t yank it back open. She could never do much more than she was doing right now—purse her lips and block him, or me, out.

  It took me a moment to formulate my question. I understood her situation so well, it made it all too easy for me to poke into the open sore. I glanced quickly at Tori’s tense, controlled posture, her tight lips. In a flat, emotionless voice I said, “Philip changed his whole life because of your illness. How could you continue to drink coffee if it would aggravate your allergies and make you more of a burden to him?”

  Her hands flew up from the armrests. “Why didn’t I just fucking kill myself, right? And let poor Phil out from under!” She smacked her fist against the glass. I jolted back.

  “Do you know what it’s like living with a martyr?” she demanded. “He brought my food, he opened my packages, he showered three times, then waited till I went into the bathroom and came over and vacuumed. He never wanted thanks, never accepted it. There was nothing I could ever do to repay him. Every day I got further in debt!” She stood up, stalked around to the back of her chair, and plopped her arm atop it. “What could I give him?”

  “Love?”

  “If you mean sex, it was too dangerous. I had an attack two years ago, right afterwards.” She shook her head. “No, nothing so simple for Philip. You want to know? Look around you.”

  I turned and stared at the office like room with its posters.

  “Phil was always an obsessive. I just didn’t realize it before I got sick. Before that, he was caught up in travel, in our plans to go around the world, to make the trip last as long as possible. That’s a socially acceptable obsession. But then the explosion burned out my immune system, and no more travel. So Phil got into bicycle racing and environmental illness. If he’s not out on a timed course, he’s protesting perfume sales, or chemicals in new carpeting, or fumes from copy machines. Or car exhaust, or motorcycles. It became his goddamn life!”

  I said softly, “Mentally, he was as imprisoned by your illness as you are?”

  “He chose to be.” She held out a hand. “That sounds crass, doesn’t it? He devotes his life to me, and I shrug it off. But look, the thing is, it wasn’t me he was devoted to. He was a disciple of my illness. After a while it was like I was merely the host body for these allergies. Look at those posters: smoke, fumes, Styrofoam. They’re not my causes. They were his.” She sank back against the slats of her chair. “I was a stained-glass artist. I loved creating beautiful windows—the planning, the buying glass, sketching the patterns on oil paper, cutting the paper, scoring the glass, tapping the line till it broke. I loved the soldering. The whole process. I’ll never even be able to have a window like that in my house, much less make one again. Gone, forever. Okay, I’ve accepted that. I’ve given up going out. Being able to touch other people. Feeling any material but cotton. I know I’ll never again taste Coca-Cola, chocolate, alcohol, bread, cheese, meat—anything that makes eating more than a chore.”

  “And then Phil starts on the coffee.”

  “Yeah, the coffee. And if I’d given that up, he’d have moved on to some other poison.”

  Her hands were shaking, but still she kept them on the chair arms. By now, I would have killed for a cup of Peet’s coffee. Drem had audited her life and disallowed her everything but her illness. Or was his constantly recharged anger about environmental assaults his way of avoiding the bottom of the iceberg—because he couldn’t bear to see her life through her eyes?

  Slowly I said, “You’d given up everything and had nothing but your illness, and he co-opted that.”

  Her look told me I hadn’t seen the bottom of the ice either. “There was a point when I realized Phil had gotten so caught up in environmental illness that he’d forgotten me altogether. He was like sediment that hardened around a bird’s egg millennia ago. The fossil is still there, but the egg’s decayed and disappeared, nothing more than a hole in the fossil.” Tears ran down her face. It was the first time I’d seen her cry, and I knew it wasn’t for Drem but herself. I swallowed hard, wishing I could reach out to her, knowing no one could, ever. Finally she dragged her hand across her face, wiping away the tears, a rough movement she would never have allowed herself in front of Drem. “I haven’t cried for years,” she said softly. “I don’t know whether I was more caged by the illness or his protectiveness of it.”

  Caged! I sat forward, shocked out of my emotions. Like a bird in a cage. A canary in a cage. “You’re Canary’s Keen, aren’t you. You’re the death-game master.”

  Probably another time she would not have admitted it. Even now she hesitated, balancing the Homicide detective against the confidante. She searched me with her eyes.

  I watched her as she laughed, and her whole body relaxed as if the varnish of tension had dissolved. She’d given up so much. What more could I do to her? Imprisoned behind her glass, she was free.

  Finally she said, “It’s one of the few hobbies I can do like a normal person.” She laughed sardonically. “Or maybe I just like celebrating that others are worse off than I.”

  I restrained a sigh. I’d tried hard to feel what she felt—police-manual writers would call it getting overinvolved. I was relieved it had paid off. As game master, she’d have copies of every death-game player’s list. I said, “Phil was on a few lists. Whose?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t betray my players. It’s just a game. The rules clearly state that you don’t get points for a death you’re involved in. No San Quentin branch.”

  Normally I would have reminded her that it was her husband’s murder we were dealing with. But I knew that wouldn’t work here. Asking her to betray the game meant taking that too away from her. Drem taking it away. I didn’t think she was ready to be that free. I said, “I could get a warrant and force you to show me those lists.”

  She nodded.

  “Scookie Hogan, Mason Moon, Ethan Simonov, Lyn Takai. Who among them were players?”

  She sat tapping her teeth, deciding. “You won’t ask me any more names, just these?”

  “Deal.”

  “Okay, among them, just Scookie.”

  “She got a lot of points for Phil’s death. Was he her bonus choice?”

  “Yeah. But to be fair to her, Phil was another person’s bonus choice. It was a real shock to find how well known a minor bureaucrat could be.”

  “A tax agent,” I reminded her.

  “I was wrong about not having cried for years. I cried the day those forms came in.” She w
alked stiffly around the chair and leaned over the back. “Phil was a wonderful guy once. He wanted to go everywhere, see new things, let them stretch his mind. Instead, my illness chained him here to a job he loathed and shrank him down to a despot.” Tears rolled from her eyes, but she seemed not to notice them.

  Was it worse, I wondered, to have the man you loved die or to find he’d changed so much that only memory reminds you you once loved him? I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders. “I have to ask you this. Are you sure he never got involved with other women?”

  She shrugged. “As much as I can be.”

  “Did he have no other outlet? Nothing to look forward to? No long bike trips, for instance?”

  “No. Racers don’t ride for scenery. Phil rode to win. It was like everything else he did, a contest. His reward was when he got a restaurant to go all nonsmoking, or a company to install windows that opened.”

  I nodded. Nothing in Drem’s flat suggested otherwise. “But still, your immune system could regenerate. You might get better.”

  “Maybe. We both gave up thinking about that a couple of years ago. Phil even started looking around for a place we could live that would be free of irritants.”

  “Like where?”

  “Good question. People used to go to Arizona for their health, but now with the copper smelting they get allergies there. In Alaska I’d be indoors all the time, surrounded by housing synthetics. There’s nowhere on the continent that would be safe. Phil started thinking about islands in the middle of the ocean.” She laughed, a scratchy sound. “Of course, he got obsessed. He has a ton of vacation days. So he was going to check out an island off Samoa.”

  “When?”

  “Some time this week—he didn’t know which day it’d be. He picked up the ticket on his lunch hour Friday.”

  “Which airline?”

  “I don’t know. It never came up.”

  I asked for the name of his travel agent. No travel agent. He’d taken BART to the airport for it. But if Drem had gotten his ticket Friday, it would have been in his briefcase when he died. Where was that briefcase? And despite Tori Iversen’s certainty, I couldn’t help wondering if Philip Drem wouldn’t have found a week or so in Samoa more pleasant with a companion, particularly one who was the next thing to Tori. And the last person known to have seen that briefcase.

  But a ticket to Samoa wouldn’t be cheap. And if the islands worked out for Tori—something I doubted—surely a chemical-free paradise would be a tourist mecca and become chemical-full within a year. But if the plan did work, how would Drem have supported the couple once they moved there? I asked.

  “Phil made decent money. And there’s not much we spend it on.”

  That answer showed her financial innocence more than anything else. But Drem wouldn’t have thought that way. I tried another tack. “Tori, when did Phil start looking for places to move?”

  She lifted her foot and rested it on the edge of the chair. “I had a bad attack a couple of months ago. Phil panicked. He said anything was worth a try rather than watching me die here.”

  “A couple of months ago. Winter. Is that a normal time for an allergy attack?”

  “I don’t have ‘normal’ times. And that attack might not have been so bad, but Phil was away that week, and I let it go on longer than he would.”

  “He was in Fresno, IRS meeting, substituting for his group manager?”

  “Right.”

  “Did he talk about the TCMP when he got back?”

  “Only that they set the local standards for a couple of things, like business meals. Nothing interesting. Phil hated the meetings even more than he hated the job normally.”

  But he had come home from that meeting and begun to think about expensive travel.

  CHAPTER 20

  “DREM DIDN’T USE A travel agent,” I said to Pereira, Acosta, and Leonard. “He picked up his ticket from the airport. If he wrote a check, he didn’t record it.”

  “An IRS agent?” Pereira asked, amazed.

  “If he paid with a credit card, he could be in Samoa in less time than it would take us to track that down. So where is that ticket?”

  Pereira was sitting on Howard’s desk. Leonard was propped against the wall between desk and door with a stance so out of kilter that he could have slid into the Avenue scene without a ripple. Acosta stood on the other side of the door in the narrow space between the ends of the desks and the walls. Nothing on his person touched desk or wall; there was just the suggestion of a flare to his chiseled nostrils.

  “Drem picked up the ticket Friday at noon. It’s not in his desk at work.”

  “Smith,” Acosta said, “obsessives don’t leave their papers around. Trust me on this.”

  I glanced at Acosta. There was the slimmest suggestion of a smile on his angular face. He went on. “Ten to one, Drem had his ticket in his briefcase, and whoever lifted that has it. It’ll just be a matter of going to the airport and seeing who comes as Philip Drem.”

  “Or Philippa Drem,” Leonard offered.

  I said, “The last person who saw Drem with his briefcase was Maria Zalles. Zalles is missing. Chances are, she’ll be Philippa Drem. What airline would put up a fight against the argument that their agent had misheard Ms. Drem’s name?”

  “Let’s hope she’s not flying out of San Francisco. If there is one place you could lose a suspect flying out, that’s it,” Pereira said. “A flight to Hawaii, in a foggy April, with passengers who’ve chilled their butts all winter … It’ll be jammed. More flights than from Oakland, thus more flyers, more friends, relatives, kids running through crowds, toddlers wandering around the waiting areas—just try setting up a chase there. Luggage carts, cabs coming and going, hotel vans, buses, and cars. And rush-hour traffic on the freeway—”

  “Enough!” I said. “I take your point. If I can get the whole department over there, maybe I have a chance. I need to find Zalles before she leaves town.”

  “If she hasn’t already,” Acosta said. “The woman had a free room at the Inspiration Hotel. She’s been gone from there for days.”

  Leonard leaned forward. He looked as if he would have liked to clamber up on Howard’s desk, but Pereira already occupied most of that. “Zalles could have taken the connector van to the airport Saturday right after you left her and gotten a room at one of the hotels.”

  “With an alias. She is not a stupid woman, so by now”—Acosta glanced down at his watch—“she has checked out and gone to the airport.”

  Leonard moved in closer, virtually arm-to-arm with Pereira. “She could be at the gate for any flight on any airline, in any concourse. Just another passenger. When one flight boards, she moves to another, and another, see?” Leonard grabbed Pereira’s arm, shaking it with enthusiasm. “If she didn’t need to sleep, she could live out there at SFO the rest of her life.” Pereira extricated her arm, but Leonard didn’t notice. “In O’Hare she could probably do it, sleep and all.”

  I sighed. “I can’t tell you what a comfort this is to me. If Zalles is still in Berkeley, we’ve got a chance to catch her here on our own turf and avoid the airport horrors you’ve all been kind enough to describe. Acosta, you call the airlines and have them check reservations.”

  “For how long?”

  “All week. We only know Drem was leaving this week. Then start on the airport van companies, have them check the last two days for Zalles or Drem. Give them her description too. Chances are, she’d have left from the Durant Hotel pickup. Leonard, try the airport hotels—your reward for the suggestion. We need to have another go at anyone who might know her whereabouts. Connie, you take the Inspiration Hotel crew—Simonov, Moon, and Takai.”

  Leonard nodded his shaggy head, turned, and started out, his gun slapping against his tan pantleg. “Leonard,” I said as he reached for the door, “what’s the word on the street person who said he saw a patrol officer at the Drem scene?”

  Leonard shrugged. “Vanished. Probably boosted a better bike and pe
daled off into the sunset.”

  “No one on the Avenue has an idea where he went?”

  “Not that twenty bucks would buy. Unless I’m wrong, fifty wouldn’t do it either. I’d say Sierra just decided Berkeley was too hot and split.” He waited a moment, then walked out.

  Leonard was so at home on the Avenue, he’d know whom to trust, whom to get rid of. He’d been at the scene. He … I pushed back the suspicion. Leonard had been a veteran when I was a rookie. You don’t toss away your career for a trip to the South Pacific.

  “What about you, Jill?” Pereira said. “Who’re you checking out?”

  “Scookie Hogan.” I paused. “And if that doesn’t pan out, Herman Ott.”

  “How is your favorite PI involved in this one?” Acosta looked down the length of his perfectly straight nose, wrinkling it just a bit at the thought of Ott. It amazed me that immaculate Acosta had chosen this messy profession. There is a saying my Zen friend told me: “Exist in muddy waters with the purity of the lotus flower.” I couldn’t help imagining Acosta rinsing Berkeley off his stems each night. I wondered if his very compulsiveness made his partner Leonard so laid back.

  I grabbed a donut on the way out of the station. It was maplenut, the brussels sprouts of the donut world, but there was no other choice.

  By the time I got to Telegraph, the sky was gray again. Strong winds off the Pacific push the summer fog inland every afternoon and let it ease back over the ocean around ten in the morning. But winter fogs are land fogs, scummy gray layers that dim the sky and mute life beneath them. April this year clung to winter.

  I left the car in a red zone off Telegraph and ran around the corner to the Med. The Med is too much an old Lefty place to have bourgeois patio seating. It does have a wall of windows that make life on the Avenue an extension of the room. But today there was nothing to see outside except people pulling their sweaters tighter and hurrying up the Avenue. Inside, the place smelled of smoke, coffee, and wet wool.