by Susan Dunlap
I leaned back, focusing totally on Philip Drem, trying to fit this view of Philip Drem into what I’d already heard. Was the Drem the world knew a fraud? Could the bulldog of the IRS, who shook his victims till their every secret seeped out, truly have hated the IRS? But I’d known people like that, guys who hated law enforcement. Rather than quit, they’d taken out their anger and frustration on the perps, or the victims. They’d been the cops everyone hated and feared. I could believe Drem was like them. But there was another possibility. Alone here day after day, his wife could have created a fantasy of the fairy-tale prince: eternally loving (indeed with no other friends), totally accepting no matter how disfigured she became, serving her automatically, and sexually neutral. Prepubescent prince, or the nicest of dogs.
In a while I would ask Victoria Iversen how she would manage. I’d make a couple of calls. Now I had to give her the answer to the question she hadn’t asked, that I could barely make myself answer. “Ms. Iversen—”
“Tori—that’s what people call me.”
“Tori.” I took a breath. “Phil didn’t just fall off his bicycle and die. He was killed.”
“I know he was killed.”
“No, murdered. Someone planned it and killed him. Can you think of anyone who would want him dead?”
She shook her head.
“Think about it. Tell me any theories, no matter how tenuous.”
Slowly she said, “I can’t imagine time without Phil. It’s like knowing dawn will never come again. He gave up his life for me. Not one in a thousand men would do that. How could anyone want to kill him?” Her voice was low, her tone flat. Desolate.
I found myself biting hard on my lip to keep it from quivering and loosing tears of sorrow and panic. Whether her picture of Drem was fact or fiction, her pain was all too real. I bit down harder. Sweat ran down my back.
When I was sure I could keep my voice steady, I said, “Tori, people kill for all kinds of evil, misguided, confused, misinformed reasons. They kill good people as well as bad.”
She didn’t say anything. I had the feeling that on her side of the glass she was holding tears in tighter than I.
“Has Phil ever mentioned the name Mason Moon, or Lyn Takai?” I wasn’t expecting a response to Moon, but I didn’t want to offer only Takai.
Her eyes widened momentarily. “No. He didn’t talk about his work.”
“You do recognize one of those names, don’t you?”
“No,” she insisted. “Well, not in the sense of knowing them personally. But I listen to the radio all day. I feel I know half the people in Berkeley. I’ve heard Mason Moon interviewed on Probabilities. He’s a plop artist, one of those guys who hires a crane to dump his fourteen-foot metal monster on the marina grass and dares the mayor to be bourgeois enough to haul it off.” She nodded, as if assuring herself her story was going okay. But her shaky voice gave her away.
“Moon is a metal sculptor? Is he the sculptor you shared a studio with?” Concentrating on Moon, I could feel myself slipping back into the protective camouflage of the police detective. More calmly I said, “Tori, someone murdered Phil. You’ve got to help me find him.”
“I will, but it wasn’t Mason,” she insisted. “Mason was there when the gases exploded, but he wasn’t responsible. It burned out his nose. He can’t smell anymore at all. He was a victim too. Phil understood that.”
Maybe Tori’s Phil understood, but did Agent Drem, IRS? And if Agent Drem pondered the books of a partnership in which Mason Moon was involved, might he not have wondered if the same lack of care went into those as the gases at the art studio? I asked Tori about Moon, but she insisted she hadn’t seen or talked to him since she got home from the hospital after the accident. Putting a question mark beside Moon’s name in my notebook, I said, “And Lyn Takai? What do you know about her?”
“Nothing. That’s the truth.”
Her expression gave no clue whether it was fact or not. I moved back to the lead she’d given me. “Tori, tell me about Phil’s plans for Friday.”
“His schedule?” she said, clearly relieved. “Fridays, after work, he went to the movie at Pacific Film Archives. He had dinner somewhere before. Phil really liked foreign films. We watch a lot of movies here on Phil’s VCR, but it’s too far away for me to read the subtitles. Besides, I’m not so interested in foreign countries anymore. When you know you’ll never be able to go to those places, they lose something. So Phil goes to the museum alone.”
“And you didn’t mind?”
“I told him to go out two or three nights a week. He wasn’t sick; he didn’t need to be confined here. But he insisted one was all he wanted. He knew how much I looked forward to his getting home.”
I took a breath. She was already so close to the edge. … But I had to ask. “When did you expect him back Friday night?”
“By ten thirty. The movie’s usually over by nine.”
But Drem had fallen off his bicycle after ten. The spot where he died was only about four blocks from the museum. And closer than that to the property on Carleton owned by Mason Moon and company. What had Drem been doing for over an hour? “Could he have had plans afterward? Or decided to stay for the second movie?”
“Once or twice he went to the Med for coffee and didn’t get home till eleven. But he would have called if he knew he’d be late.” She stared at me a moment. “Someone got to him there, didn’t they?”
“I don’t know. Can you think of anyone?”
“No, no one,” she said just a bit too slowly.
Tori watched through the series of windows as I checked Drem’s flat. The desk drawers in the living room and the kitchen and bathroom cabinets revealed nothing more about the man. I pushed open the bedroom door and stood staring at Drem’s bed—a single bed pushed up against the connecting window next to Tori’s on the other side. I turned my back to the window so Tori wouldn’t see me force back tears as I thought of him rolling over in half sleep, seeing her face next to his, reaching out … and touching only the cold glass.
I thought of Howard, wanted to clutch him to me, feel his body against mine, and hang on to the moment. This sting of mine, would it close the gulf between us or would it build a wall of glass?
But I couldn’t let myself get caught in personal issues now. I pulled open the top dresser drawer and checked the contents like a rookie with her instructor watching. It took me half an hour to finish the dresser and the closet. And as I left I forced myself to look once more at that solitary bed.
I walked outside and stood breathing in as much fresh free air as my lungs would hold. I could smell the crab apples, the flowering plum blossoms, and the unmowed grass in the yard below, and the dust, the exhaust fumes, and the tar fumes from a roofing job down the street. I breathed it all in greedily, making it all a part of myself, melding myself to it all.
Then I hurried back to the station and called Rick Lamott. Tori Iversen might believe Drem wouldn’t harass her old studiomate. Maybe she was right. Or maybe every time Philip Drem rolled over in bed and reached for the wife he could no longer touch, every time his hand hit the cold glass that walled her in, he thought of Mason Moon.
CHAPTER 9
“LAMOTT,” THE ACCOUNTANT BARKED into the phone.
“It’s Smith, from the Berkeley Police. I—”
“Jill! Great to hear from you. Listen, how about dinner? There’s this great little place in Stinson Beach.”
I laughed. “You’re the angel of death, aren’t you.” The road to Stinson Beach was narrow, windy, and cantilevered high over the Pacific. For Rick Lamott it would be a launching pad. “The way you drive, we’d be halfway to Japan before we hit water. Besides—”
“Augusta’s, then? You’re going to need an insider’s eye on the IRS, and there’s no one who keeps tabs on them better than me. You could ask half the doctors in Berkeley—if they were home. They’re not. They’re off in Maui living it up on the money I saved them on their tax shelters. The IRS hates tax shelter
s almost as much as they hate unreported income.”
“Since you offered your expertise,” I said, ignoring the dinner part, “would it have been possible for Drem to extend his audit to a TP’s partnership books to harass one of the other partners?”
Lamott hooted. “Possible? With those bastards, anything’s kosher. Rule number one: You can’t sue the government without its okay. Rule number two: You can’t sue a government employee for doing his job. Rule number three: IRS can audit anyone it damn well pleases. They see a write-up about some guy in the newspaper, they can pull his file. They get letters from ex-wives, ex-employees, ex-friends, they send out an audit notice. They’ve even got a special form, Form two-eleven, to make a contract with informers—”
“The trio of ex’s?”
“Maybe, but see, Jill, anyone can send a squeal letter—their term, not mine—and IRS is allowed to pay the squealer ten percent of any extra they collect. But the squealer better get it in writing first. Otherwise, no ten percent. They pay no more than they feel like. No honor among thieves.”
“Rick”—I leaned back in my chair, staring absently at the strands of dark brown hair I was winding around my fingers—“could Drem decide to audit you just because he didn’t like you?”
“He could jab a pen at the phone book. They call cases that aren’t assigned through normal channels individual pickups. But would he have audited me? I doubt it.”
“Why not?” If Drem was a bulldog, Lamott was a crow. I could picture him swooping down teasingly, inches from the floppy jowls, or landing lightly on the furry rump and digging in a claw just before he took off. Drem must have loathed him.
“See, the bottom line is money. And Drem would have known that he’d be making about thirteen cents an hour dealing with me. IRS is only going to pay him for that once in a while.”
“And there’s nothing to make you think Philip Drem wouldn’t use that once-in-a-while for vengeance?”
Lamott just laughed. But I was willing to bet Mason Moon wouldn’t be amused.
I swung by Peet’s for a doppio cappuccino to fight off a wave of exhaustion. A night in the car isn’t free. Working when you can barely stay awake is something you learn early in the department. Cops who go home for a nap don’t make it. I took a last swallow and crumpled the cup. I could still think, but emotions floated in and out, each more muted than the last. I was thankful to have Tori Iversen buried beneath the smoke of exhaustion.
Ten minutes later, I found Mason Moon in his “studio,” a garage with a workbench. There was no esoteric equipment to suggest metal sculpture. Moon was carving a slab of wood the size of a coffin, creating what looked like a dead body. Without his brown wool cape and floppy-brimmed green felt hat with the party noisemaker in the band, he looked almost normal. Or as near normal as a plump man with flowing brown hair and orange goatee (new gray mixed with old red) could. Moon hadn’t normalized enough to forgo his Moon-over-Berkeley T-shirt, though.
I said, “So you shared the artists’ studio with Philip Drem’s wife. Drem took his wife’s injury very seriously.”
“We all did!” Moon put down his tool. “Some jackass leaves his gas spigot going and nearly blows us all to Mars. I can’t smell at all now. And I lost a year’s work. Some of the best metal work I did. Gone. Forever. I’ll tell you, after that, I was so freaked that I’ll never go near metal or gas again. It’s wood for me now. Whatever you can say in metal, you can say in wood.” He stood up and stepped back, as if to take in his entire work.
I allowed my attention to be drawn down to it. “Is this plop art?”
Moon flung out a hand. He needed his cape and chapeau to achieve the full effect. “Yes and no,” he said. “Plop art is not just the piece. It’s the concept, the statement. It’s communication. Sometimes it’s political, sometimes whimsy. I play off the energy that’s going on,” he said in classic Berkeleyese. “It’s not just my thing, but it forces people to participate.”
“For instance, this …” I looked down at the dried-out piece of wood.
“Well, on one level it’s a bench. But of course it’s also a corpse. And then anyone can make the leap to realizing it’s a bench for people society treats no better than a corpse.”
“And you plop it down … ?”
“In the spot that symbolizes that degradation.” He looked me full in the face. “Of course, I can’t tell you where that will be. Police are not always supportive of the arts.”
I said nothing, allowing him to keep his secret. Later I could speculate on which section of People’s Park he’d choose.
“See,” he said, warming to his subject, “I practice what Lyn Takai and the yogis call ahimsa, nonviolence, in my art. Part of my statement is that I don’t harm the space I use. When I make delivery, I don’t endanger other people, or me.”
“You mean you don’t deliver at night?”
Moon laughed. “Right, but not just because of ahimsa. You haul a huge sculpture into the middle of the campus at two A.M., and you freak the campus cops. Do the same thing at two in the afternoon, and everyone thinks you work for the art department. Cops clear the way, students offer to help.” He turned around, reached for his fedora, and plopped it on his head. “Besides, it’s more fun to do in daylight. And there’s a chance of making the evening news.”
I couldn’t help smiling. There was something disarming about his straightforwardness. But I doubted it would have endeared him to Philip Drem. “Moon, were you responsible for the gas explosion?”
“No!” No theatrics. This looked like real shock.
“You were close enough to damage your sinuses.”
“I had nothing to do with the gas.”
“Did Drem believe that?”
He picked up his wood-carving tool and held it in both hands. “Who knows what that crazy bastard thought? I liked Tori. But after the accident I kept away.”
“And then Drem audited your partner Lyn Takai. If Drem had moved on from Lyn’s audit to the partnership, there would have been no way for you to escape him.”
“It’s been three years. He probably calmed down,” Moon said with a remarkable lack of conviction. “Besides, there’s nothing in the partnership’s hotel books, even if he did decide to summons them. Take a look at the building. Do you think there’s an extra cent in it for even the IRS to squeeze out? Someday when we turn it into a bed and breakfast, maybe. But not now.”
I walked out past the Inspiration Hotel next to Moon’s studio and sat in my car staring at it: a clapboard affair from the 1940s that might have been apartments or flats but was now passing as a hotel. But there were really two hotels. The dilapidated building I saw and the bed and breakfast that existed in the minds of its owners. Which was the real Inspiration? And which Philip Drem was the true Drem—the bulldog or the faithful, loving pet?
But unlike the hotel, Drem wasn’t an either-or question. Drem was a habitué of the Film Archives. Over the months there a faithful pet would have made friends at the Swallow Café next door. A bulldog wouldn’t have set jowl over the doorway. I had just time to make it to the Swallow.
CHAPTER 10
THE SWALLOW IS LIKE a diner that’s moved up in the world. Specials run to ratatouille and pizza rustica, fruit spritzers and caffè lattes, blondies (caramel brownies) and slices of Chocolate Decadence. Instead of booths, there are small tables, and out the window is the graded grassy yard of the University Art Museum. Had it still been light, I could have sat on a bench and contemplated the three-foot metal ball with the hole in the middle. I’d named it Cannonball Karma.
I asked the guy at the counter if he had worked Friday. He hadn’t. Nor did he know who had. So I switched to the reserve plan and sat in the café, drinking my latte and eating a salad—I consume a vegetable every now and then to remind myself why I don’t more often—and eyed the other patrons, trying to get a line on who might be theater regulars, people who could have known Philip Drem, film aficionado, aka family pet.
I chec
ked bejeaned legs for bicyclists’ leg clips or ridges left from them. When I spotted “ruffled” cuffs on the beige cords of a guy reading the East Bay Express, I smiled, picked up my latte, and walked over. “Do you know Phil Drem?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Cyclist. Medium height. Wiry brown hair. He’s here most Fridays.”
“No, I wouldn’t. My shiatsu group meets on Fridays.”
No fast fix here. I chose a spot along the window rail and sat nursing the latte, letting my mind drift in that dusky halflight of wired sleepiness. In that grayness you make connections that the glare of alertness would burn through. I found myself watching for potential witnesses and thinking about my grandmother’s house, that small, crowded gray frame house in a neighborhood of small, shabbier houses. It looked nothing like Howard’s house. I couldn’t really summon up a picture of it, no more than its aura. But I felt all the muscles of my back clenching.
I sipped the latte and glanced at the pantlegs of three newcomers, but there were no clamp marks. The reason I couldn’t “see” the house was that it was always behind me in all those early memories. Ahead of me our white Chevy sedan was pulling out of the driveway. My brother Mike was in the backseat waving, my parents in front, driving off to the new house in the new town my father had talked about for months, where everything would be new and exciting and fun, where life would be Technicolor. I clung to the car with my eyes till the white blur was long gone.
A guy with a bike helmet walked in. I called to him. He’d been here Friday, but he didn’t remember Drem.
By seven, I’d finished a piece of chocolate cake and a second latte. The dinner flock was thinning. Now people were rushing in for espressos before the film started. But they were in groups—chattering, excited, or intense—closed units that would have neither drawn nor admitted Drem. It was just as well. Two lattes have their effect. I had just time to make it to the ladies’ room before the opening credits.
