Death, Taxes, and Hot-Pink Leg Warmers

by Diane Kelly

  I looked over at Eddie. He had a death glare locked on the woman, his angry eyes like heat-seeking missiles.

  I returned my attention to the attorney. “Every case is unique and requires different skills,” I replied. “I’m an expert marksman, the best shooter among the agents in the Dallas office. My boss assigns me to cases where my particular skills might be needed.” Take that, bitch.

  Plimpton passed me to Julian Vanderhagen, who made further attempts to discredit me.Vanderhagen strode quickly back and forth in front of the witness stand, like a duck in a carnival shooting game. “Miss Holloway, you recently spent several days in the hospital after being hit in the head with a baseball bat by someone you were investigating, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  He stopped, lifted his arms, and emitted a sarcastic chuckle.“So there’s been at least one investigation where you haven’t shot someone.”

  “There have been many,” I spat. “For instance, I haven’t shot anyone in this investigation.” Though I was sorely tempted at the moment.

  Another chuckle. “Well, let’s hope that trigger finger doesn’t get itchy again.”

  I fought the urge to show him the finger next to my trigger finger.

  “Special agents are trained in both weapons and self-defense,” he said. “Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And are you also taught how to identify whether someone is a threat?”

  “Yes.” During our training, we were taught to look for various signs that a target was becoming agitated and potentially violent. A change in respiration. A rise in voice volume or pitch. Shifting movements. Still, people could become agitated without necessarily becoming dangerous. “But we are also taught to use our judgment.”

  “Judgment?” He cocked his head and raised a finger. “Good point. Let’s talk about your judgment for a moment.” He turned theatrically away from me and faced the jury. “You allowed a person who was under investigation to knock you unconscious with a baseball bat. Not exactly the poster child for good judgment, are you?”

  There were so many things I wanted to say. That hindsight is twenty-twenty. That pulling a gun can sometimes cause a situation to escalate. That I’d been wrong, but that didn’t necessarily mean I’d been stupid. People were wrong about things all the time. Hell, even Albert Einstein, who was regarded as one of humankind’s greatest minds, had been wrong about the Static Universe theory. Not that I had a clue what the theory was. I’d just overheard that fact the other day when Alicia was watching the Discovery Channel.

  I spoke slowly, trying to sound calm, when all I really wanted to do was jump over the witness stand and throttle the man. “We all make errors in judgment on occasion. We’re human.”

  “Thank you, Miss Holloway. We appreciate that you are willing to admit your mistakes.”

  What?

  Brunwald and Needham went a little easier on me. I supposed they didn’t feel the need to come at me full force given that the other attorneys had already skewered me with their twisted logic and misleading implications. Either way, their cross-examinations were completed in only a few minutes’ time.

  Ross did his best to rehabilitate me. “Each time you shot your gun, your actions were deemed justified by the internal affairs officers?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Each and every time. I wouldn’t still have my job otherwise.”

  Through carefully worded questioning, Ross led me to point out that the case at hand relied almost entirely on paperwork, that the voluminous documents entered into evidence spoke for themselves. In other words, my work history didn’t really matter for purposes of this trial.

  Trish’s eyes were on me as I left the stand. Given that I’d once pulled a gun on her, she probably agreed with the defense attorneys that I was too impulsive, too quick to use my gun.

  I held my head up as I returned to the counsel table, but I felt furious, humiliated, tainted.

  Loose cannon.

  Itchy trigger finger.

  Poor judgment.

  I didn’t want to believe it, but there might be a tiny kernel of truth in their overblown accusations. After all, Lu admonished me every time I left the office to “try not to shoot anybody.” And even though I’d been exonerated each time I’d shot my gun, the multiple shootings made me subject to being discredited. Testifying in tax-evasion trials was one of a special agent’s most important duties. If I was not seen as a credible witness, one with good judgment, what value would I have to the agency?

  chapter thirty-two

  Closing Arguments

  Eddie gave me an empathetic shoulder squeeze as he stood to take the stand.

  Ross ran through some preliminary questions and Eddie noted that he, too, had begun his tax career with a CPA firm. He stated that he’d been with the IRS for nearly nine years now and held the title of senior special agent.

  Ross stood in front of the witness stand, his hands clasped behind his back. “Can you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how much in taxes, interest, and penalties is owed by each defendant and how the figures were computed?”

  Eddie discussed each defendant’s tax liability in turn, showing the actual returns each defendant had filed and what the returns should have looked like had they fully disclosed their earnings from their real estate activities. “In total, the defendants owe approximately three million dollars in past-due taxes, interest, and penalties.”

  Ross stood next to the witness box, putting a hand on the rail. “When people like the defendants don’t pay their fair share of taxes, who makes up the difference?”

  “You,” Eddie said, looking up at Ross. “Me.” He pointed to himself. Eddie turned his head to look directly at the jury. “And everyone else who pays their taxes.” That means you, folks.

  The knitter pursed her lips as she glanced at the defendants. The Indian brick house shook her head. The hipster’s nose twitched in disapproval. Quickie Slickie crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the men. It was hard to tell how Clip-On felt because he’d fallen asleep under the cozy blanket.

  When Ross finished his questions, he passed Eddie to the defense attorneys. Though Eddie’s stellar record with the IRS made him immune to being personally discredited, the attorneys did their best to impose guilt by association.

  Plimpton rocked back on her low heels. “You’ve been Miss Holloway’s partner since she joined the agency, correct?”

  “That’s right,” Eddie replied. “I asked to be paired with Agent Holloway. Her reputation preceded her. She’d made quite an impression on the staff at the training facility with her high scores on the written tests.”

  That wasn’t exactly how it happened, though it was close enough to be classified as spin rather than falsehood. Despite my stellar scores on both the written tax tests and in weapons proficiency, the other agents had taken one look at the five-foot-two-inch woman in front of them and dismissed me as too scrawny to make a good partner. Eddie, however, had eventually acquiesced, and I’d soon proven to both him and the others that I was scrappy, not scrawny, and brainy, if not brawny. Still, I appreciated his attempts to bolster me. I knew his words were intended as much for me as they were for the jurors.

  Plimpton narrowed her eyes at Eddie. “As the more senior partner, it’s your responsibility to teach Ms. Holloway the ropes. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s part of my role, yes.”

  “Given Ms. Holloway’s questionable record, your training left a lot to be desired, didn’t it?”

  Ross’s objection was sustained, but Plimpton had already made her vicious point.

  In questioning Eddie, each of the defense attorneys referred him to the paid preparer disclosure on the tax returns, asking him to acknowledge that their clients had used a professional tax preparation service. Blaming the CPA or tax preparer had become a common practice after the Enron case. In some cases, such as Enron, the blame was justified. In others, such as this case, it was not.

  Eddie di
dn’t bat an eye when he looked back at the defense attorney. “The preparer gave us copies of each and every financial record the defendants provided to him, as well as a copy of the client questionnaires. The defendants had provided incomplete and erroneous records to their preparer and provided false information in their responses to the questionnaires. In other words, garbage in, garbage out.”

  Time to take out the trash.

  Eddie’s testimony concluded and he sat back down beside me, offering me a discreet fist bump under the table as an act of support and solidarity. I had to wonder if the line of questions had him rethinking our partnership, though. He’d been the only willing volunteer to train me when I’d joined Dallas Criminal Investigations, and I was viewed by many in the office as his protégée. Were my actions a bad reflection on him?

  The mere thought gave me a hollow feeling. It was one thing for what I did to affect me, but it was another for my behavior to reflect poorly on Eddie. I didn’t want his career to suffer because of me. Maybe I should ask Lu to reassign me to work under another agent. At this point, though, I feared the others would be even more reluctant to take me on. Seemed I couldn’t get through a case without bullets flying.

  The attorneys made their closing arguments. Ross’s speech was straight and to the point, succinctly summarizing the evidence that had been offered against the Tennis Racketeers. The defense attorneys, on the other hand, belabored each minor point in their clients’ favor and continued to place blame on the other defendants, the tax preparers, anyone but each attorney’s particular client. They claimed the homeowners who’d lost their houses had been negligent not to hire their own counsel, that the contract between GSM and the homeowners was straightforward, with all of the terms spelled out in black-and-white. They argued and advocated ad nauseam, making one final plea for the jury to find their clients not guilty and let them go back to their wives and children.

  When the last defense attorney finally shut his piehole, Judge Trumbull dismissed everyone for the day. “Jury deliberation will begin first thing Monday morning.”

  Until then, the jurors were to remain sequestered in their hotel for the weekend. The knitter and Clip-On exchanged glances. Sequester away!

  * * *

  Friday night at the club was busy but relatively uneventful. No drugs or marked bills changed hands between Christina and Theo. Wesley Prescott didn’t show. Tarzan gave me only a cursory frisk at the executive office door. The most exciting thing that happened all night was when a group of groomsmen bought the groom-to-be one too many drinks and he urped rum and Coke onto Cyclops’s shoes on his way out the door.

  I wanted to tell Nick what happened in court, how my reputation and Eddie’s had been besmirched, but I didn’t get a chance. There were several people in the dressing room when we took our break, and we couldn’t seem to find a moment alone on the club floor, either.

  I bade Nick and Tarzan good night when I left after my shift. Two of the dancers walked out behind me, the one who’d been vying for a mustache ride stopping to ask Nick whether he might want to grab a bite at the twenty-four-hour diner down the block.

  “Thanks for the offer,” he said, “but my girlfriend might take exception to that.”

  “Whatever,” the girl spat. As they wandered off to their cars I heard her say, “I think Mitch is a fag.”

  Sour grapes, huh?

  chapter thirty-three

  Rehabilitation and Redemption

  Alicia was still up when I arrived home shortly before one A.M. She was curled up on the couch, a glass of wine in one hand, the remote in the other, my cat Annie in her lap. “You made the news.”

  “I did?”

  The fact that Alicia wasn’t smiling concerned me.

  “Remember,” she said, as she hit the button on the remote to activate the DVR. “I’m only the messenger.”

  Trish appeared on the screen, expounding about the day’s events in the trial of the Tennis Racketeers. “Defense attorneys easily discredited the testimony of IRS Special Agent Tara Holloway when she took the stand today,” Trish said, an evil gleam in her eye. “In her short tenure with the IRS, Agent Holloway has fired her gun numerous times, injuring multiple defendants. It will be up to the jury to decide whether Miss Holloway can be trusted given her highly questionable job performance.”

  Highly questionable job performance?

  Fury boiled up in me like an overheating radiator. Sure, I’d fired my gun several times on the job, but only because I had no other choice. The biggest mistake I’d made so far in my career was not shooting my gun when I should have. As a result, I’d ended up in the hospital with a major head injury.

  Alicia picked up a second glass of moscato she had waiting for me. “Here you go.”

  I took the wine from her and gulped it down. “Think the police would put it together if I took out Trish?”

  “If you used a gun, yes,” Alicia said. “Maybe you could burn her house down instead.”

  “I’d still be the prime suspect. I Googled Molotov cocktails recently, remember?” It had been a moment of weakness when Nick was on a date with another woman and I’d been trying to come up with ways to derail it.

  She tilted her head. “How about poison, then? Tie her to the railroad tracks? Maybe cut her brake lines?”

  “All good ideas,” I replied. “But I’m tired. I’ll settle for a little armchair revenge.”

  I rounded up my laptop. Since Trish had sabotaged my career, I decided to return the favor in kind. I used a fake e-mail account I’d set up in an earlier case against an errant minister. Yahweh@yahoo.com sent a scathing review to the television station manager. Trish LeGrande puts the B in Bimbo. Give us less boob and better reporting. Sincerely, God Almighty.

  Shooting off a nasty e-mail wasn’t nearly as satisfying as shooting Trish with my gun would have been. But maybe it was time to give my itchy trigger finger a rest.

  * * *

  Mid-morning on Saturday, Christina and I sat in the Mini Cooper in the park, waiting for Bernice and Maddie’s daughter.

  I watched as a woman walked by, pushing a baby in a stroller. Though the baby was bald, her mother had strapped a purple elastic bow around the infant’s head to let everyone know she was a girl. It was odd to think that each of the dancers at Guys & Dolls had once been innocent little girls. What had happened in their lives to put them on the path to becoming topless dancers? Had they voluntarily chosen that path, or had it been forced upon them by circumstance? I supposed every dancer would have a different story to tell.

  Bernice pulled up next to us in her pearlescent white Cadillac CTS coupe. In the backseat was a cute, dark-haired toddler in a booster seat. The girl’s eyes were big and she clung to a green stuffed animal as if clinging to her life.

  After greeting Bernice, I climbed into the backseat of her car while Christina took a seat in the front. I turned to the girl, noting the stuffed animal was a crocodile. An odd choice as a source of comfort, but then again, this crocodile was smiling and appeared more jolly than threatening.

  “Hi, I’m Tara,” I told the little girl.

  Bernice eyed us in the rearview mirror. “Karly, can you say hi to Tara and Christina?”

  She could but she wouldn’t. She shook her head.

  “She used to be a very outgoing child,” Bernice said softly, “before all of this mess.” She started the car and we headed out to the rehabilitation center.

  On the way, I did my best to melt Karly’s defenses. I showed her photos of my cats on my cell phone, scrolling backward through the pictures to find the cutest ones. She didn’t break a smile, though, not even at the one of Annie curled up in my laundry basket, shedding all over my freshly washed clothes, wearing one of my bras like a bonnet.

  “Nothing?” I kept scrolling. “You’re a tough audience, Karly.”

  A few seconds later she pointed at my phone. “Goggie.”

  The picture she indicated was a cute one of Brett and his “goggie” Reggie, a
black pit bull/Rottweiler mix he’d adopted after Christina and I busted the dog’s owners and got stuck with the huge beast. Both Reggie and Brett had Frisbees clamped between their teeth.

  A surprisingly sharp pang of melancholy skewered my heart. Brett’s boyish ways were one of the things that had attracted me to him. It would also be one of the things I’d miss. Ugh. This breakup would be so much easier if Brett weren’t such a nice guy. If only he’d cheated on me, fudged on his taxes, refused to recycle his plastics. Anything! But he hadn’t.

  I tweaked the screen, enlarging the photo until Brett disappeared and only Reggie remained. “Ruff-ruff!” I called, moving the phone around as if it were a playful pup.

  Finally, a hint of a smile crossed the girl’s face.

  The rehab center sat on four acres in the southeast part of the city. Bernice pulled down the tree-lined drive and parked in front of a U-shaped building encircling a lush outdoor garden with seating areas spread about the space.

  A pretty young woman with dark hair the same color as Karly’s immediately stood from a bench on the front sidewalk. In her jeans, sneakers, and sweatshirt, she looked hardly older than a high school student. Heck, she was hardly older than a high school student.

  Quickly, she came over to the car. She pulled open the back door and grabbed her daughter in a bear hug, no easy feat given that the toddler was strapped into a booster seat.

  “Hi, baby!” Maddie cried, all of her attention focused on her child. “I’ve missed you so much!”

  She smothered the girl’s face in kisses. When Maddie finally pulled back, there were tears in her eyes.

  “Oh.” She put an arm over her daughter when she noticed me, a complete stranger, sitting next to her child. It was a protective act, one that showed Maddie’s maternal instincts had been in no way damaged by her brief dalliance with drugs. She spotted Christina in the front seat, too. “Hi,” she said, her voice wary. “Who are y’all?”