by M. K. Wren
“Chief, I told you, I didn’t know those five. They paid cash; no credit cards or room charges and none of them was anywhere near eighteen, so I didn’t see any IDs.”
“All right, so what about this”—Kleber checked his notebook—“this Canfield woman?”
Conan descended the steps and started across the empty expanse of the room, and Brian surged out of his chair.
But Kleber spoke first.
“’Bout time you showed up, Flagg.”
Giff Wills, bluff and bland and blond, was more polite; his job was, after all, elective. He offered a smile.
“Morning, Mr. Flagg.”
“Good morning, Sheriff.” He glanced at Brian, who had come up beside him, but again Kleber intervened.
“We’re getting everybody together who was here last night when Nye came in. I understand you’re friendly with this piano player.”
“Pianist,” Conan said.
Kleber raised a heavy black brow. He was well into middle age but retained a thick crop of dark hair. His eyes were equally dark, but his complexion was fair so that his jaws were always shadowed with incipient beard.
“You know where I can find her?”
“Isadora?” Conan shrugged. “She’s out of the country.”
“Out of the country?”
“On a concert tour.”
While Kleber pondered that, Wills nodded sagely.
“Sure, I remember her now. She’s Senator Canfield’s daughter, Earl. Remember a few years back when the senator got murdered? You was in on that, right, Mr. Flagg?”
“Yes.”
Kleber remained unimpressed. “Still ought to get a statement from her. Maybe by phone.”
Conan asked sharply, “You’re taking statements now?”
“No. Just asking a few questions. And we don’t need any advice from amateur lawyers.”
Wills oiled the waters adroitly. “Right now, we’re waiting for the county DA and the state medical investigator, Mr. Flagg. I asked for a state crime scene team, too.”
Conan’s eyes narrowed at that. Calling in the state police was certainly an available option for the sheriff, but Wills wasn’t famous for his grace in surrendering any part of his authority.
On the other hand, Wills wasn’t famous for burning his hands on hot potatoes. Wills seemed to sense Conan’s unasked question and cast an anxious glance toward the kitchen. “When Earl told me who that guy was—I mean, him being with the IRS—well, I figured this thing might get a little complicated. ’Specially this kind of homicide.”
“What kind is that?”
“Well, the kind where it ain’t just a matter of robbery or a couple of drunks having at each other. The kind where you can’t say right off the bat who did it.”
Earl Kleber was looking past Conan straight at Brian, and if a confrontation was to be avoided, some distance would have to be put between them.
Conan said to Wills, “I’d like to talk to Brian for a few minutes. We’ll be up in the bar.”
Wills, being a peaceable as well as politic man, nodded amiably, but Kleber sputtered, “Now, just a damn minute! I’ve got some questions to ask you, Flagg, and anyway, you’ve got no right to leave here, either one of you.”
Brian retorted, “We’re not leaving, and you’ve got no right to hold me—unless you want to arrest me here and now.”
Kleber’s face went red, but that silenced him. Conan took Brian’s arm and aimed him for the steps.
“We’ll be within shouting range, Chief.”
Kleber turned away with a snort of disgust, while Wills smiled benignly, and Jastrow laughed and murmured, “Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg.…”
Brian muttered, “Shut up, Claude,” and marched off, pausing only long enough to send Tilda an uncertain smile.
*
In the wan solitude of the Tides Room, Brian went behind the bar and stood looking blankly around him.
Finally, he asked, “Can I get you something?”
Conan saw a glass coffee server steaming on a hot plate. “Coffee, Brian. Straight.”
He fumbled about filling a cup, which clattered in the saucer when he put it on the bar for Conan. Then he opened the refrigerator under the back counter, took out a quart bottle of tomato juice, and when he came around the bar and sagged into the chair next to Conan’s, gulped down a third of it, then sat with his eyes closed as if he were waiting to see how his stomach would respond.
No doubt that was questionable. He had repaired his appearance with a shave and change of clothes, and as befitted the host of the Surf House, he always dressed well, but his physical state seemed past remedy and aroused Conan’s sympathy. No one should have to contend with Earl Kleber, much less a murder, when he was so pitifully hung over.
“Last night was the full moon,” he said at length, apparently getting a reasonably favorable verdict from his stomach. “I should’ve known.”
Conan lit a cigarette and offered him one.
“What’s this about the full moon?”
“Don’t laugh,” he said sharply, although Conan hadn’t. “Call it superstition, but it never fails. The night of the full moon, you can always count on trouble in a bar.”
Conan took a long drag on his cigarette while Brian got his ignited, a feat of coordination that demanded his full attention.
Then he said grimly, “Conan, I called you because I can read the writing on Kleber’s face and I know I’m in trouble. I also know you’re a card-carrying private detective, even if you don’t seem to like admitting it.”
Conan shrugged. “I just don’t like to jeopardize my amateur standing.”
“Okay, but I was around when you pulled Dore Canfield out of that hole when her father got…murdered.” He seemed to have trouble with that word. “Anyway, she was happy with your work, and—damn it, Conan, I need help.”
The desperate plea in that made both of them uncomfortable. Conan nodded through a veil of smoke.
“I’ll do what I can, but I never make any promises.”
“I’m not asking for any.” Then he began tugging at one finger, finally freeing a ring. “This was my granddad’s. A genuine antique.” His mouth shaped a twisted grin. “Sounds like Bea with her damn heirlooms. Anyway, that’s a three-carat diamond. So, take it. Call it a retainer.”
Conan only frowned at it uneasily.
“Why don’t you wait until—”
“Take it now, or you’ll end up with nothing. When the IRS finishes with me, there won’t be anything left but flesh and bone, and I have a feeling Kleber intends to take care of that.”
Conan took the ring. It was quite ordinary; a heavy gold mounting for a stone impressive for its size, but he recognized it as something precious to Brian Tally; something surrendered in desperate reluctance.
“All right, Brian. You’re my client. First, you’d better tell me about you and the IRS.”
He called up a laugh. “I thought you were supposed to ask first if I…if I’m guilty.”
“Of murder? You said Nye was shut in the freezer. If he died of a blunt instrument the shape of your fist, I might wonder. Even then, I’d call it accidental.”
Brian turned away and again seemed to be consulting his stomach.
“He’s still in there. Did you know that? He’s still in that damned… It doesn’t seem right.”
“Wills called in the state lab people; the body can’t be moved until they have a look at it.”
“I know.” He eyed the tomato juice, then took a puff on his cigarette instead. “As for me and the IRS, that’s a long story. It started six months ago. August thirteenth, Friday the thirteenth. I got a letter from the IRS, then they sent a field auditor from Portland a few days later.”
“That was Nye?”
“That was Nye. He walked in with his briefcase and adding machine, and they might as well have sent a bomb to blow the place up. When he finished his audit—it took a week—he told me I owed the IRS fifty-three thousand two hundred
seventy-three dollars.”
“Good God!” Conan nearly spilled his coffee at that.
“Sure,” Brian said dully. “Good God.”
“On this, I will ask first if you’re guilty.”
“Of tax evasion? No. Nor tax fraud, civil or criminal. They’ve been trying to put the screws on me with that.”
“Fifty thousand in tax represents a lot of income.”
“Oh, that’s for three years and includes penalties and interest,” he replied airily. “Adds up fast, you know.”
“But Nye didn’t pull a tax deficiency like that out of his hat.”
“Why not? He had to come up with something to fill his quota, didn’t he? He talked a lot about averages. They’ve got it all down. Exactly how much it’s supposed to cost to put a steak in front of a customer and how much to put a martini in his hand. Nye didn’t like our averages.”
“Do you?”
He gave that some consideration, then shrugged.
“I’ve had this place for fifteen years, and it was six before I began to break even. After that it got better every year, and the last five years—well, I wasn’t complaining. I don’t know how our averages compare to McDonald’s, but anything in the black looks good to me.”
“How closely do you check your books?”
Brian responded defensively, “You mean how close do I check my bookkeeper, don’t you?”
“If she’s solely responsible for your accounting.”
“Beryl Randall’s been with me since I opened up here, and after the first year I turned all the bookkeeping over to her. Oh, I can run a profit-and-loss sheet, but I know damn well I’m better on the grill, or behind the bar, or just working my jaw with customers than I am with figures, so I leave that to Bea.” He paused, smiling to himself. “She’s one of the fixtures here, you know, and I love this place. Don’t ask me why when it’s meant working my butt off twelve to sixteen hours a day all these years.”
Conan laughed. “They tell me it gets in the blood. Like show biz.”
“Maybe. Anyway, about Bea—she may be a little dotty in some ways, but there’s one thing I’ll stake my life on: she’s a hell of a good bookkeeper, and she’s honest.”
Conan didn’t point out how much he had staked on that. “Then you’re convinced the IRS doesn’t have a case?”
“I know they don’t, but that doesn’t seem to bother them. What it comes down to is I can’t prove myself innocent, so that automatically makes me guilty.”
“Did you try to get outside help?”
“Sure. I went to a big tax lawyer in Portland and paid him two thousand bucks to tell me to take my licks and pay up. I don’t know where he thought I’d get the fifty thousand to pay up with. Business has been good the last few years, but not good enough to put back that kind of reserve.”
“I suppose you considered making a settlement with the IRS?”
His mouth made a thin, hard line.
“Oh, they talked about that when the Collection Division moved in. They also tried to slip a Form 870 waiver past me. Just a formality, Mr. Tally. But I’m damned if I’ll settle for anything more than zero. That’s what I owe!”
Conan turned his attention to his coffee.
“Brian, how much is this place worth?”
“I had an offer not long ago for five hundred thousand.” Then his narrowed eyes, glacial blue, fixed on Conan. “You’re about to give me some good advice, right? If I don’t come up with the fifty thousand—and I can’t, even if I was willing to—they’ll slap a seizure order on me and put everything up for sale to the highest bidder, and market value doesn’t mean a damn thing. If they get ten cents on the dollar, they’ll be happy; they’ll get their money. So, you’re going to tell me to settle while I still have something to settle with. Isn’t that how that tune goes?”
Conan shrugged a silent admission, and Brian hesitated, a little embarrassed at his own vehemence.
“Well, it’s probably good advice, Conan, and I’ve come close to taking it. They wear you down, you know. They keep making deadlines and shoving forms at you and shunting you back and forth from one office to another. And all the while you’re waiting for the guys in the suits and ties to walk in with the papers and padlock, to take away everything you ever…” He stared blindly at his own image in the mirrors behind the bar. “I haven’t got any family. I mean, like a wife and kids. It’s just me. At least…”
He seemed to lose track of what he was saying, and Conan had to prod him with a question.
“So, you’re going down with your ship?”
He managed a transient smile.
“Well, why not? What’s left after it sinks?”
“What about selling? You said you had an offer for five hundred thousand.”
“Sure, that sounds good, doesn’t it? After taxes—what the IRS says I owe, plus the taxes on the sale—I might have enough left to get a fresh start somewhere else, right? Trouble is, I don’t like where the offer came from. It’s dirty money, Conan, and I guess I’m still a country boy and probably not too smart, but I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.” He took a slow drag on his cigarette, exhaling with a sigh that seemed to come from his soul. “Besides, I don’t think I have what it takes to make a fresh start. I mean, why should I? Why should I fight it? There’s no way you can win anymore.”
Conan might have asked more about the source of that tainted money but deferred his questions, silenced by the depth of hopeless bitterness he read in Brian’s eyes.
“What I don’t understand,” Brian went on huskily, “is how they get away with it. The FBI or CIA steps out of line, and they get the press, the ACLU, and Congress on their necks. But nobody even squeaks at the IRS. They take your money before you owe it—and that’s just out-and-out confiscation—and never pay a damn cent of interest, and if a taxpayer happens to get a refund at the end of the year because the IRS made him pay more than he owed, damn, he acts like it’s a gift from heaven. And maybe it is. When you think what they can do to you, I guess you’re lucky if they let you have some of your own money back.”
He took a last puff on his cigarette and crushed it viciously in the ashtray. “They can’t lose. They’ve got the deck stacked so they just can’t lose. Like, once Bea and I were trying to figure out some damn rule on capital improvements, so we called that toll-free number they advertise like it was another gift from heaven. Before it was over, we called three times, got three different people, and three different answers. So, what do you do? Flip a coin? The hell of it is, if you get called down for doing the wrong thing, you can’t say, well, your agent, Joe Blow, told me this was what I was supposed to do. They just say, sorry, Joe didn’t know what he was talking about, so pay up. With penalties. And interest. They don’t pay any interest on your money, but they damn sure collect it when they think it’s their money. And they can break you—all legal and neat—they can take everything you own, and what can you do? Sue them?” His laugh was an acid parody of amusement. “Sure, you can go to court, all the way to the Supreme Court—if you’re a millionaire. A good tax lawyer gets seventy-five bucks an hour. And even if you win—hell, the IRS can be dead wrong and they don’t even have to pay court costs. Oh, Conan…”
He closed his eyes, then after a long silence brought his hands up to rub them, finally propping his elbows on the table to support his head.
“You know, I think I could’ve killed Nye. It was his audit that started this whole thing. And last night wasn’t the first time I wanted to ram my fist down his throat; it was just the first time I was ever drunk enough to try it. Damn, he was so smug. ‘Mr. Tally, the figures speak for themselves.’ The figures! What about me? Why was it when I tried to speak for myself, it just didn’t count?”
Conan said with the bitterness of similar experience, “Maybe you didn’t speak his language.”
“What language is that?”
“Accountese. A language with no adjectives or adverbs, no qualifiers.”
&
nbsp; “Well, I never was very good at languages. I nearly flunked Latin in high school. Conan, maybe I could’ve killed Nye; I had plenty of motive, and I guess that’s why Kleber’s looking at me so hard, but I didn’t kill him.”
Conan nodded unconcernedly. “I’m working on that assumption, Brian. Last night you said something about having five days left. What did you mean by that?”
“Did I…well, I’ve had my final final notice. In five—no, four days, they’ll be here with the seizure orders and padlocks. That’ll be another Friday the thirteenth.”
“But Nye was an auditor. He wasn’t with the Collection Division. What was he doing here last night?”
Brian frowned, patted his shirt pocket for cigarettes, and when he came up empty, accepted one from Conan.
“Thanks. I don’t know about last night, but he showed up last Thursday and said he wanted to see my books again.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him; I passed the buck to Bea. Damn, it’s a wonder she hasn’t had a real heart attack over this. Anyway, I said I didn’t care if he went over the stuff with a microscope, I just wanted him out of my hair, so he put everything in a box and carted it off to his motel.”
“All your records?”
“Everything for the three years in question, anyway.”
“Did you see him again? I mean, before last night.”
“Not to talk to him. He was in and out, but I made a point of being out every time he was in.”
“Did he talk to Beryl?”
“Well, not much, I guess. He was checking procedures, inventories, that sort of thing. And getting in everybody’s way. Claude threw a bowl of chowder at him one night.” He smiled tightly. “Missed, though.”
“What was Nye talking about last night? He said he’d found something that ‘changed the picture.’”
“I don’t know. I didn’t even hear…well, the whole thing’s a little fuzzy.”
“That happens to the best of memories. I had the feeling he thought he was bringing you good news.”
“Nye never brought me anything but disaster.” But after a frowning pause, he added, “That’s what Tilda told me, though. I mean, about it maybe being good news. Max, too. That was when we were driving back from the hospital. Maybe it was at least better than the kind of news he’d been bringing me. But I guess I’ll never know.”