by Jim Kohlberg
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“How so?”
Guthrie took my shoulder and turned me into the lee of the building. The van and loudspeaker were closer now, and behind them were fifty or sixty assorted people holding signs. Some said, NO TO BUSH’S WAR; one said, WE ARE THE TERRORISTS. The metallic voice blasting out of the loudspeaker was more conversational. It wanted me to call my congressman, write my senator, stop paying taxes. Guthrie pulled me farther into the recesses and marble pillars of the outdoor lobby that guarded one of the medical office buildings. His hold on my attention was stronger than the commotion in the street.
“It cuts the other way because she’s a small woman,” he said. “I know some defense attorney will create doubt in a jury just from that. Joe was six one, two fifty. Christina’s what? One twenty?”
“One ten. Maybe even ninety now,” I said, and looked right into his face. He had the conscience to nod.
“The ME said the bones in the hands and elbow were broken before death.”
“They can tell that closely? In time, I mean?”
“They think they can. Of course, nobody knows for sure. It’s opinion dressed up as science. But it’s a knowledgeable judgment. He’s seen thousands before. Anyway, the clincher is the fingernails.”
“They were broken?”
“It’s unlikely they were anything but reflex wounds or conflict fractures.”
“Those are what they sound like?”
“Yes. Sanitized, but yes.”
“So Joe put up his hands.”
“That’s the reflex part.”
“The killer broke them along with the nails.”
“Yes.”
“And I thought what I do for a living was ugly sometimes.”
He turned me back out toward the street, which was emptying now while a black-and-white, its Christmas tree flashing, trailed after the protesters as they descended another hill and went down out of earshot.
“I hear you’ve been talking to Hopkins and Hannaford,” he said.
“More like they’ve been talking to me.”
“Maybe.”
“You think I can make them do what I please?”
“No,” he said, sliding his hands in his pockets. Then, “I’m going to tell the chief to give them some running room.”
“Christina’s no longer a suspect?”
“I didn’t say that. She’s still the only one with motive.”
“You’re stretching.”
“No. You know that money is always the best trail.”
“Cash leaves no trail,” I said.
“It always gets you in the end. The money,” he said. “As certain as hell.”
“Or death and taxes,” I said. I know a lot about the second and was learning much too fast about the first.
Chapter 16
I always worry when I get lucky. So I wasn’t overjoyed when I got down Parnassus Heights to Stanyan, where an elderly lady shrugged out of a red-and-white dial cab. It didn’t stop me from getting in the back before the door shut or air had filled the seat cushions back up. The Cab Fairy, quite distinct from the Parking Fairy and requiring far different prayers, offerings, sacrifices, and supplications, had smiled upon me. And I was suspicious, for I had not prayed.
The cabbie was an Afghan living in Fremont across the bay, having brought his growing collection of Pashtun family there for ten years. He had on a black skullcap from which black curls escaped down his neck and over his leathery skin. Next to his medallion number on the license was his name: Mirador Afshani. He owned the cab. When I asked him how he had bought it, he smiled a yellow smile out of his dark beard. “My wife is very . . . certain woman, she likes things certain way?” he said. “But she is very good cook.”
“Most women are certain,” I said.
“Especially about cab. She say I must own, so I work construction, building, bad jobs, driving at city morgue.”
“You drove the morgue wagon?”
“Yes, they call it this. How do you know?” he said, studying me at length in his rearview mirror.
I shrugged, and he finished, saying, “Anyway, she makes me buy cab.”
I toyed with the thought of going home and at least getting back to the office where Irene could nag me back to normality, but I knew I had to talk to H & H. In my mind I had begun calling them that. So I told Afshani to take me to the precinct, and he turned the cab downhill.
The Park House Police Station, a squat redbrick building with nineteenth-century eaves and twenty-first-century dirt, was just off Stanyan. I could have walked, but I didn’t feel like traipsing through the quaint dilapidation of Haight-Ashbury and seeing the flower children’s grandchildren selling T-shirts, coffee mugs, porn videos, or bootleg cigarettes next to national retail chains. Afshani did not object to the quick drop-off. I tipped well and walked up the station house’s smooth brick steps.
The desk sergeant culled both my driver’s license and credit card, ran them through a computer check, and passed me through a metal detector before I was released to wander back to the homicide desk. H & H’s cubicle had a view of the park, where Kezar Stadium squatted on Martin Luther King Drive as it snaked around and intersected with the Golden Gate Park’s other twin artery, JFK Drive. MLK and JFK: the two were forever entwined in the park and the city’s pantheon. H & H didn’t seem surprised to see me.
“Hey,” they said. “Guthrie called.”
“Ah.”
“We got a few extra days from the chief.”
“That’s good.”
“Probably won’t be enough.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing obvious from the autopsy. No easy collar. We need more than a few more days.”
“Guthrie said they learned a lot from the autopsy.”
“Sure we did. Just not what we were hoping.”
“Which was?”
“We wanted some DNA. Some skin under the nails, some hair, something that we could wrap up with motive, follow it back, and then ID the murderer.”
“I see.”
“So a few more days may not be enough.”
“I see.”
“We’re not giving up.”
“I know.”
“We’ll keep you posted.”
“Hope so.”
I turned to go. The light from the park streamed into the cubicle. Kezar Stadium was empty, the vacant seats standing like so many open palms begging to be filled.
“Listen,” Arty said, “Guthrie talked to the doc just after you left.”
I turned around and sat down in the wire chair in the middle of their joint office space.
“It’s a tumor, like he thought.”
I had thought I was prepared for that. Macintyre had said it. But the weight of it, the certainty of it, fell on my chest like heavy stones.
Chapter 17
The IRS’s Northern California division office was, strangely, not in San Francisco. That offended transplanted natives like me who thought the city was the center of all intelligent life. Senior Agent Armand Redfield’s branch office was in Oakland, the hinterlands.
I crossed the first leg of the Bay Bridge, flashing by Treasure Island, then past the huge storklike arms of the loading dock cranes on the Oakland wharfs off to the south. I negotiated the confusion of signs, turnoffs, exits, and traffic racing across lanes to 880 East or 580 West, blocks of dilapidated, sagging warehouses, fading advertisements from the ’40s and ’50s, until finally I was dumped by the exit overpass on Oakland’s downtown streets.
As I passed the barren marquees of old theaters and new For Lease signs on vacant department stores, I began to appreciate why the IRS had located here: rents a third of the price of downtown San Francisco, with cheap housing close by. GS-2s and GS-3s could even commute through the Altamont gap of the Oakland Hills. There the Central Valley bulged virally on the other side, and cheaper bedroom communities were springing up like dandelions on new turf grass. It
was practically the only place people earning less than fifty grand a year could live in the Bay Area.
At the end of Main Street in Oakland, after two car dealerships, a medical clinic, and a Blimpie, street people loitered with assorted cardboard boxes or shopping carts. Next door a squat four-story office building planted itself firmly on the corner of Main and Twenty-Third. A band of reflective glass windows and cantilevers of cement on each floor striated it horizontally. I walked through the plate-glass entryway and up to Armand’s office, listed under IRS District Field Office in a black-and-white-lettered directory.
I felt a flutter of nerves tickle at my arm and right hand as I reached for the stainless steel doorknob to the field office. The receptionist, a GS-3, sat at the ready. I heard my mind click GS-3, GS-3 in uncontrolled idiocy. Her plump face smiled up at me in practiced courtesy, and I watched the V of her hefty décolletage twist as she turned to an expensive keyboard.
“Ms. Marsapo is not available; would you like voice mail?” She tapped a button, daintily popping her fingers on the appropriate extension as she turned back to me. As she tilted her eyes up I saw iridescent green rounded out by deep black irises. She would have been stunning without the disguise of an extra hundred pounds. I found myself pitying her, imagining marathons on the couch watching reality TV, guzzling diet soda, and eating pizza.
“Can I help you?” she asked, a vertical furrow digging at the bridge of her nose, darting upward to her broad forehead.
“Armand Redfield, please.”
“An appointment?” she asked and put a hand on the desk. I saw the blue back of a tattoo in the web between thumb and forefinger. The mark of a Buddhist meditator. Even in a GS-3. First Hannaford, now Armand’s receptionist.
“Yes. He’s expecting me.”
The receptionist pointed me down the hall, my mind screeching GS-3, GS-3, a howler monkey on steroids. Inside an office with a door open to the hall, Redfield was sitting behind an expansive desk of dark wood—walnut or stained cherry—with a series of files piled in intermittent mesas on the desktop. He stood up, and his lean frame was silhouetted by the large window in back of him. Through the window the land arched up steep hillsides into the Berkeley Hills. On the sill I counted three old coffee mugs with the string flags of tea bags hanging off their handles. A tea man, I thought. Strange I didn’t remember.
Redfield walked around the desk as I approached. His face was kinked with lines of age that had not been there years before and that I had not noticed in the hospitable light at Joe’s house. The furrows on his cheeks were deep and well worn. In through the open window, the bright day smells of dry earth and black oak from the hillside wafted in. He stopped at one desk corner and motioned with an open palm to an armchair, modern steel and black leather.
“Nice of you to come slumming, Max.” The East Bay shoulder chip was reflexive, and he smiled through it.
“No problem, Armand. I wanted to ask you something at Joe’s wake, but you vanished just when I was going to talk to you about it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about Joe. And Kessler. What did you want with him?”
“I told you. Pure curiosity. In my world he’s a celeb, a billionaire. So is Stoppard. How many times is a GS-10 going to get to rub elbows with high rollers like that?”
“So you just wanted to come home and gossip about George Stoppard?”
“It’s better than listening to my wife read People magazine out loud at dinner.”
He smiled and sat down on a corner of the desk. I looked up at him. His face stayed friendly. Joe might have been right: somebody had to be on the take in the audit chain, but Armand had always had a flair of disgust for wealthy tax dodgers. He loved nothing better than making a three-piece, four-thousand-dollar suit do a perp walk with cameras blazing and newspaper ink flowing.
“How is Carol?” I asked. His wife had been the pie and cookies type, a sweetheart straight from a high school yearbook.
“Kids are fine. College. Scholarships. We’re set. When I hit my twenty, I’m outta here.”
“You should have a pretty nice pension by now.”
“Only good thing about being a GS-10. You know that.”
I stuck out my feet and struggled out of the chair. Its angled seat made getting out of it a two-armed affair.
“I talked with Joe before he died.”
“Why?” he asked.
A strange question. No when, no what about, no surprise. Outside, a couple of jays squawked, flying tight figure eights up and down, then landing on an oak.
He said, “I mean, I heard you and Joe weren’t close since . . .”
“Since Christina, you mean?” I asked, standing now, aching to take a stab at him and make him stand, too.
“Sure, I mean, don’t get me wrong. I never saw the attraction; Christina was a little transparent for me.”
“You knew her well, did you?”
“No. But before you left . . .”
“Fired. You fired me.”
“You were never going to be able to follow orders and deal with the bureaucracy. I did you a favor.”
“Maybe. I talked to the police and the DA. Joe was under the heat. They were looking for someone doing fraudulent shelters. But then he . . . they found Christina, and no one wants to look further than the obvious. Joe thought there was something, someone gone bad in the audit.”
“Joe loved conspiracy. You know that. Sometimes, often, the obvious is true. We see that all the time. So must you.”
“Christina beat Joe’s head in with a baseball bat? She’s got a tumor bigger than a baseball in her head. And she’s weaker than a kitten.”
“Too bad you’re not the DA. Your lady love would be free as a bird.”
“Listen, Armand, Joe told me someone in the Service was taking bribes.”
“Really.”
“Any idea who that might be?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. It’s me. I confess.” He came off the desk. “Get out of here, Max, before I tell Guthrie he ought to look at you. I want anyone who’s taking kickbacks a whole lot more than I want Joe’s killer.”
“That a fact?”
“That’s right. And I’d watch your back if I were you. Joe’s clients almost always know each other. And a lot of them are your clients. Across the bay it’s still a pretty small town, when you put together a hundred key people.”
“The reputation-is-everything speech, Armand? That it?”
“Something like it.”
I tasted bile in the back of my throat and choked down his obvious threat. I forced a grin onto my face. It felt like breaking plaster.
“Nice talking to you, Armand. You better get your pension soon, because you’ve been doing the IRS sheriff speech too long. It just doesn’t hold together anymore.”
I turned and walked away from him toward the paneled door. I waited for a comeback reply, but none came, and as I went through the door his back was turned. One of the mugs from the windowsill was in his hand as he faced the green and tawny walls of the mountains behind us.
Chapter 18
After I left Armand, I drove back across the Bay Bridge. The city rose ahead of me in sunny splendor, a noonday sky whisked clean of clouds by a blustery spring wind scouring the bridge’s steel past the avenues and into downtown.
I drove into this headwind, deflated and unsure of myself. Armand had always been someone I despised, even hated, especially when he terminated me for what was really insubordination.
I had refused to threaten some poor cab owner in the city with jail time and instead told him to file a couple of extensions and get a tax lawyer. Armand had found out because it was the third or fourth time one of these small fry had bailed on us. I just couldn’t get excited when some guy was working seventy hours a week and taking out an extra fifty thousand a year in mad money the government couldn’t get.
There were developers’ finance guys, Internet darlings, or hedge fund honchos pulling down two million, thr
ee million, four million a year in salary, ten times that in cap gains or profits. I had wanted to go after capital gains treatment of profits on hedge funds. That we could audit. But Armand showed me the numbers, how it was too expensive to chase them behind their Belize holding companies and tax shelters with offshore accounts and high-priced lawyers. We couldn’t afford to audit, much less litigate. So we went after the small fry.
I quit. Or got terminated, downsized, fired, or whatever you want to label it. So I started my own practice doing small-fry returns, expecting a small-fry life until Joe started making recommendations to his clients to see me. And he gave me the fund’s tax returns to do. Easy, but a good selling point.
And now I had ended up doing tax shelters for the guys I had wanted to audit all those years ago.
I was supposed to feel guilty. I was supposed to think I had sold out. But I didn’t. I had made my peace with the world. I could have tilted at the windmills of my reality, but nobody did that anymore. The big money printed the bills and ran the regulatory boards, the development commissions appointed by the governor, the financial accounting standards board, the SEC, the World Bank. Everything. The system was impregnable, from shop owner to factory worker carrying slogans for God, country, and no gay marriage.
It was their world now, and I was just going to walk through it.
I got past the bridge traffic and off the exit into the pedestrian snarl of downtown. A vague bile of nausea barbed at my throat as I waited impatiently for the lights to turn so I could crawl through lunchtime crosswalkers who knew that, according to California law, they had the right of way on city streets.
Finally I broke through at the Transamerica tower to freedom on Broadway and turned right on Filbert to climb the back of Telegraph Hill. I parked, looking forward to my office oasis where I could stare out at the bay. Work was piling up in advance of April 15, and I had thirty days to finish the returns many of my clients had already sent me. Their collections of jam-spotted receipts or coffee-stained deductions waited in binders on my desk.
I parked in the garage on Filbert that cost me $500 a month and was dark and dank, sinking into the hill, then climbed the piss-filled stairs to sunlight. Hiked the tilted street to the corner of Montgomery, past the little corner deli that subsisted on low rent and homeowners unwilling to go down Telegraph Hill for milk or cigarettes.