“Possession being nine-tenths of the law, I might owe you fourteen bucks. But a hundred forty? You guys get ripped off every time you turn around. IRS would pay thirty dollars for a box of Cap’n Crunch. I could buy whatever you’re talking about for twenty-nine ninety-five on Wells Avenue.”
“Where is it? The tracker. I want it, now.”
“In my bra,” Lucy said. “I’m keeping it safe. And warm, if you must know. If you want it right now, you’ll have to go in and get it.” She pushed her chest out half an inch.
What a liar. She never wears a bra. But I didn’t think they would peel her shirt off to get at their misplaced tracker.
Two sets of IRS eyes jittered. I’d seen a lot of jittering eyes lately. I tried to keep a straight face, had to turn around and look at the bowlers. I turned back. “I wonder how Mike’s doin’.”
“We should go see.”
Lucy got up. We headed back to the lanes, stood behind the Alley Cats. They were three frames in. Mike had a spare and two open frames. Pretty soon his teammates were going to either set him up as a bowling pin or light him on fire.
* * *
Twilight. Purple-red glow above the dark Sierras, a sliver of moon headed west. We stood in the bowling alley parking lot, looking up at the first stars to appear.
“Neon will be getting bright,” Lucy said. “Downtown.”
“Yes, it will.”
“You said Wildcat’s sign was yellow. But small.”
“Oh, no.”
“You could drive by. I could get a look at it as we go past.”
“Oh, no.”
“Otherwise, I could be like walking around downtown at night and practically like stumble into it by accident.”
“Not if you stick with me, kiddo, since I’m not going near that place again, but your Valley Girl is terrific.”
“Mira might be there.”
“Oh, no.”
“According to you, she hangs out there sometimes.”
“What I might have to do, I might have to give you one of those in-home chopstick lobotomies.”
She turned and faced me, held me around the waist. “Kiss me.”
I did. It went French, lasted a while.
“Damn,” I said. “You sure are a tasty little wench.”
“Wildcat. You drive so I can look.”
So I drove.
We went west on Second Street, took a gander at the little bit of yellow neon, not much activity outside on a Wednesday evening, not yet seven thirty, turned around at Ralston and came back, closer now that we were headed east, same side of the street as Wildcat, and there was Mira, just coming out the door.
Great. Life is all about timing. Don’t look, big guy. Don’t say anything—
“Hey,” Lucy said. “Is that that girl, Mira?”
“My name isn’t Mira.”
She slugged my shoulder, kinda hard, too. “She turned the corner. She’s going down West Street, toward the river. Go around the block, let’s see.”
It wasn’t like I had anything to hide. I just didn’t want any of this to get us closer to Ramon, but Lucy yanked the wheel and to keep from expensively sideswiping a Jaguar XF I kept turning to the right and we went south on Sierra Street.
I looked over at her. “I should drive, Sugar Plum, since I’m over here and you’re over there.”
“Okay. But hang a right at the next corner.”
“Who’s drivin’ this Uber, you or me?”
“Turn right. That was her, wasn’t it?”
“Her, not she? Nice use of colloquial semi-English, kiddo. You’re gettin’ to be a real whiz—”
“Turn right or die. How’s that?”
So I turned right. I was only forty-two. That seemed a bit young to end this trip.
No Mira at the corner.
“Turn right,” Lucy said.
Onto West Street, headed north. Mira was on the west side of the street, walking slowly south.
“Is that her?” Lucy asked.
“Yes, it is, Miss Colloquial USA. And we’re going to leave her alone.”
“Because?”
“Because she’s a pipeline to Ramon who happens to be not only crazy as a bedbug, but schizo and mad to boot.”
“To boot, huh?” Lucy chewed her lower lip for a moment. “Okay. Let’s go home. Then … we’re supposed to meet Russell at the Green Room at, what? Ten?”
“That’s right. So what’ll we do in the meantime?”
“I’ll think of something.”
* * *
Man, that girl sure could think. Her brain was on steroids. We didn’t get to the Green Room until ten after ten.
“You’re late,” Russ said. He had a beer in front of him and had commandeered a jar of beer nuts, going through them like a squirrel after a hard winter.
“Something came up,” Lucy said.
“And,” I jumped in before she could expand on that theme, “it took us a few extra minutes to find a parking space.”
“Actually, we walked over,” Lucy said.
I squeezed her waist. “Hush, little darling.” I gave Russ’s beer a nod. “You paid for that yet?”
“Nope.”
“Got it covered, since you had to wait.” I thumbed out a free-drink coupon from my shirt pocket and shoved it toward O’Roarke who was listening to all this.
He threw a rag on top of the bar, hard. “Next time you get wounded or even killed, do not count on a bunch of coupons.”
“Gotcha. Thanks for the heads-up.” To Russ, I said, “Did you get that paperwork I asked for?”
He kicked a cheap nylon bag at his feet. It was bright pink with yellow daisies and bumble bees on it, probably belonged to Danya when she was in the fourth grade. “Right here.”
“That’s not a Gucci bag, is it? Sure you want to let that out of your sight? It’s a beauty.”
He drained his beer and stood up. “If you can’t tell, then, yeah, it’s Gucci.”
Man, I hate smart-asses. And irony.
“And,” he went on, “I didn’t give you nothin’. Don’t know where you got that stuff.”
“What stuff? And I haven’t seen you for three days.”
He gave my shoulder a buddy punch, softer than I had any right to expect, almost like we were friends, then he walked out.
* * *
My burner phone rang when I was halfway through a Pete’s Wicked Ale. Lucy was sipping a half-sized vodka martini that O’Roarke had given her on the house. I used to get drinks on the house, but that has tapered off significantly.
I answered the phone: “You should get more sleep.” The burner didn’t cost twenty bucks, didn’t come with caller ID, but Munson, Ma, and Russ were the only ones who had the number. Either way, sleep was good.
“That you, Mort?” Willie Munson was on the horn.
“Got it on the first try,” I said. “Are you in D.C. right now? What is it over there? Must be way past midnight.”
“It’s one twenty.”
“IRS never sleeps, huh?”
“You gettin’ anywhere with the Soranden murder?”
“Is the FBI absolutely certain it’s murder, not some bizarre accident involving ants?”
Silence so long I thought he’d hung up. Then, in a voice of finely measured beats, he said, “You gettin’ anywhere with it?”
“Not so you’d notice. But I’m working on it like a son of a gun, Commissioner.”
“If you find anything at all, let me know.”
“That’s a two-way street.”
A moment of silence. “Yeah, whatever.” He hung up after delivering that bit of IRS ambiguity, something they teach at the mandatory bi-annual hunter-killer trainings. Ambiguity is good. Sink people up to the armpits in verbal traps, then go for the kill.
At 11:02, I was on Channel Four finding that damn skull of Soranden’s again. Slow news day. It’d help if Charlie Manson broke out of Corcoran State prison and headed east leaving a trail of corpses. Which is dark, I know, bu
t true, or would be if Charlie hadn’t died two or three years ago. Lucy and I took off as an FBI spokesman was delivering the news that nothing new had come up in the investigation in the past three days, but that they were following up several promising leads and an arrest was likely in the near future.
Everyone lies.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“THIS’LL TAKE LIKE forever,” Lucy said the next morning. We were in my home office. She had the paper crap of Soranden’s that Russell had given us spread out on a four-by-eight library table against the south wall beneath a window with wooden blinds. She’d sorted the crud into piles: bank statements, car insurance, mortgage documents and payments, Edward Jones, printouts of email correspondence with sisters Esther and Alice, his children, Kate and John, and several others. Xerox copies of an address book, tax returns for the past four years, IRS pay stubs, car titles, health insurance, receipts for major purchases, car maintenance. He’d had an old dinosaur Rolodex. The FBI had hired a seventy-four-year-old woman by the name of Leneta Prato to go through it and put it all on Excel. She’d signed and dated her work. Lucky us, we had both the Excel file on flash drive and a printout. They’d included a Xerox of phone numbers and doodles on a desk pad, and a sheet listing all the magazines and periodicals they’d impounded.
“Go get ’em, Sugar Plum,” I said. “You said you’d grapple with it so I could work on the Joss-Volker mystery.”
I believe she produced a nasty little wolverine snarl. Then, “It’s ten thirty-eight. We’re supposed to be at Volker’s house at eleven, Mort. And for the record, I don’t grapple.”
“Right you are. Let’s go.”
She turned at the doorway to the office and looked back at the fire hazard on the table. “Go get ’em. Ri-i-i-ight. I may have misspoken when I said I’d go through that crud.”
“No takebacks, Sunshine.”
Got me another snarl.
We took the Toyota over to Volker’s house, hit sixty miles an hour on the freeway south, which made the mirror yodel like a Swiss goatherder.
“You should go faster or slower. That wail hurts my ears,” Lucy said. “Or you could buy another car.”
“Another car? You kidding? This baby’s got another fifty thousand miles left in it. Maybe a hundred.”
“Seriously? This thing is a wreck on wheels.”
“Gets twenty-nine miles per gallon. What’s your Mustang get?”
“Doesn’t matter what it gets. It isn’t a wreck on wheels. It just has a slashed top.”
“This is better for surveillance.”
“Got me there. No one would look at this piece of crap on purpose if they didn’t have to.”
“There you go.”
“Yeah. Learnin’ stuff like crazy.”
We got to Volker’s at ten fifty-nine. He answered the door. Marta was in the living room, in her wheelchair with an afghan on her lap, waiting for us. Kids in school. We had the place to ourselves.
“Something to drink?” Mike asked. “Water, coffee, tea? I have lemonade in the fridge, fresh made.”
“Nothing for me,” I said. Lucy had the same.
She and I took the couch. Mike settled into the love seat. Marta held a cup of tea on a saucer and watched us warily.
Small talk didn’t look like an option, so I turned to Marta and said, “Whatever happened, you know about it?”
“Yes,” she said. Nothing else.
I nodded at Volker. “You’re up, then. Operating account at Joss & Volker is light by thirteen thousand six hundred bucks.”
“I’m trying to make it good. I’ve been paying a thousand a month back into it.”
“Which is a good sign, but I was hired to find out why, which is a reasonable thing for your partner to know. So let’s get to it. Or,” I added, “you can explain it directly to Evelyn, which would amount to the same thing and keep me out of it.”
“No,” Marta said.
I looked at her in surprise.
“We talked about this, Mike,” she said to her brother. Her voice was mild, yet firm.
He was silent for a moment, then he took a deep breath, looked first at Lucy then at me. “This was never supposed to get out.”
“Lots of things like that,” I said amiably. “Like what really happened at Benghazi.”
“I should do this,” Marta said. “Since it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” Mike said. “Not at all.”
Marta looked at me. “Mike wouldn’t put the blame on me. He’s not like that, but he’s wrong. If it weren’t for me, none of this would have happened.” She gazed down at her hands, then up at me. “It’s a bit complicated and the details don’t matter, but four years ago I ended up owing the Internal Revenue Service thirty-seven thousand dollars. My ex-husband incurred the debt while we were still married. It had to do with his business, of which I knew nothing. Not that that makes any difference to the IRS. Ray and I stayed friends after the divorce, as many people do. We were on his motorcycle when a woman who was texting ran a red light and broadsided us. Ray was killed instantly, and I … I lost a leg from mid-thigh down. But that tax situation. Ray was trying to clear it up, but it wasn’t going well, especially with the penalties and interest and his business struggling after a few setbacks. The debt became mine when he died and, of course, the IRS came after me once they got everything they could from Ray’s estate, such as it was. That’s when I found myself on the hook for that thirty-seven thousand. I was living in New Bern, North Carolina. I was in the hospital, then physical therapy, not doing well with crutches. I was going to lose the house. The IRS doesn’t care what’s right or fair or anything else, they only want their money. As if it’s theirs.” She glared at me. “Mike said you used to be with the IRS.”
“Until I discovered I had a soul,” I clarified.
She almost smiled. “Good for you. There wasn’t a lot of equity in the house, but there was enough that the IRS wanted what they could get. After the real estate commission, I only had ten thousand I could give to the IRS. They were going to take the rest out of my IRA, which wasn’t very big, and with that ten percent penalty, and then income taxes on top of that—”
“Which I couldn’t let her do,” Mike interrupted.
“I still wish you had,” Marta replied. “After what happened later.”
“We did what was right at the time, Marta.” He turned to me. “I took out a loan and paid off the IRS. And got Marta out of New Bern. She couldn’t stay there after … after …”
“After this,” Marta said, indicating her wheelchair.
“Which isn’t your fault,” Mike said again. “Life happens. We are family. You would’ve done the same for me.”
He faced me and Lucy. “That loan stretched me pretty thin. Actually, it was the loan on top of the car outside, that BMW I never should have bought, and the mortgage on this place, car insurance, property taxes, all the usual expenses everyone has. After all that, the loan made things pretty tight—”
“Which it wouldn’t have if you’d let me use my IRA to pay the IRS,” Marta said.
Mike shook his head. “Made no sense in the long run to do that. So I moonlighted. Did some ‘off-the-books’ accounting for cash. My partner, Evelyn, didn’t know about it. Or the IRS. That wasn’t kosher, but it was the only way I could think of to keep us going here. All I know is accounting, and I could do it here at home. But I guess when you start down that road, things happen and it just gets worse and worse.”
“That was four years ago,” I said. “And I’m sorry to hear it, but it doesn’t account for the money you took from the operating fund earlier this year.”
He stared at his hands for a moment. “No, it doesn’t. This tax year it all fell apart. I was audited. Auditor was good at her job. She found the moonlighting. There was a discrepancy in my income from Joss & Volker and my expenses and the in and out of my bank accounts. I didn’t think the IRS got that far down in the weeds. Also, the businesses I did accounting for clai
med my work as a business expense, which of course they would. I know what I did wasn’t right, but …” He spread his hands, palms up.
“But life happens,” I said.
“Boy, does it ever. Like a ton of bricks.”
“So … more penalties, interest, years of back taxes?”
“You’d think,” Volker said. “But, no, that wasn’t it. I mean, that wasn’t what put me over the edge this year.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “No?”
Mike looked me in the eye. “What must have happened is that the auditor passed all that up to that Soranden guy. I don’t know exactly, and it doesn’t matter. One way or another it ended up on his desk and he took over.”
Maybe I flinched, I’m not sure. But … Soranden? I hadn’t expected his name to come up during this confessional. This luck thing of mine was like the Loch Ness Monster, surfacing when I least expected it.
“So Soranden got into it?” I prompted him.
“He did. He called me up, told me to meet him at the IRS office here in Reno. At that point I didn’t know what was up. The auditor hadn’t said a word to me, just went over my books, income, bank statements, mortgage payments, car payments, the usual, then left. A week later I got the phone call from Soranden, went over the next day, and he took me into his office, just the two of us, told someone to hold his calls, closed the door, and he laid it all out, the money I couldn’t account for, the underground accounting I’d done for local businesses, and he said all of it was indictable, that I was facing prison for tax evasion.”
“Which is true,” I said. “But very unlikely.”
“Unlikely wasn’t in my head. He made it sound like a slam dunk, that this was headed that way. Four years of tax evasion. Back taxes, penalties, and interest came to a hundred thirty-six thousand dollars, not to mention the illegality of it all. He told me I was looking at three to five years in a federal penitentiary. Then he paused and said, ‘If it got out.’”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Big if there.”
“That’s right. If it got out. He dismissed me then, told me to come back in two days. Told me not to mention any of this to anyone, that he might be able to do something to help me out, but if I ran my mouth and it got out, his hands would be tied.”
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