Death and Taxes (3 page)

“So how do you know he’s IRS?” I said, pulling his attention back.

“He’s auditing a friend of mine. She’s bitched enough. When she saw the guy sitting in the Med, drinking a cappuccino like a decent citizen, it was all she could do to keep from punching him out.”

I allowed for hyperbole. “What’s her name?”

“I don’t—”

“I’m not asking for the fun of it. This guy’s barely breathing. When the medics get here, they’re going to start pushing drugs into him. We need medical information. Is he allergic? Does he have some condition Advanced Life Support needs to know about? Your hesitation could kill him.”

“Okay, okay. My friend’s name is Lyn Takai.”

“Address?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think! His pockets are empty; we’ve got no ID. The man could die, Moon!”

He shook his head. His party whistle unrolled and snapped back. “Did you look at his bike? Maybe he’s got one of those carrier bags.”

This was the first I’d heard of a bicycle. “Where is it?”

“Under that streetlight.” He motioned across the street by a house up on blocks, one of the post-earthquake casualties.

“So you saw him ride up?”

“No. Look, I know from Lyn the guy rides a bike. When I recognized him, I looked around for it. Lyn said the guy was so paranoid, he chained both wheels to her railing every time he came. She does a great imitation of him, checking this, checking that, bending over, eyeing the lock from the bottom.”

I could imagine the man the firemen were still working on being suspicious; that fit with the awful picture of fear imprinted on his face. But there was a step missing in Moon’s recitation. The telephone pole at which Moon pointed was too far from the victim for Moon to have noticed. “Who was it who saw him get off the bicycle?”

He hesitated, then shrugged and glanced around. I wasn’t surprised when he said, “A guy I’ve seen on the Avenue, not one of the regulars. He’s not here now. He probably split when you showed.”

“Because?”

“A sensible sense of self-preservation.”

“What would we know him from?”

“Perhaps you don’t.”

The siren silenced the crowd once more, longer this time. It was near enough so we could hear brakes shrieking and tires squealing. I looked over at the victim. The firemen were checking the carotid for a pulse again, a routine they’d do every couple of minutes. I heard one of them say, “Cyanotic.”

“Moon, we’re going to find that witness. Make it easier for us.”

Moon took a step toward me. Even he seemed affected by the controlled desperation of the scene. “Lyn Takai lives on Derby, a couple blocks below the Avenue. Behind a violet stucco with a white picket fence. But this guy who saw him stumble into the street—I really don’t know. I’ve just seen him around. I think he boosts bikes.”

Moon’s identity I had. Pereira could get a patrol officer to baby-sit him on the Avenue till he spotted the booster. “Okay, so he was eyeing the bike when he spotted the flashing lights and split. What did he say about the victim?” If Moon’s story was true, the victim must have looked bad enough that the booster didn’t expect a fight over the bike.

“He said the guy came down Dwight, real slow, made a wide loop at the corner, coasted to a stop, and got off.”

“Not fell off?”

“No. He fiddled with his locks. Then he started across the street and fell on his face.”

“And your guy left him there and headed for the bike?” I said, disgusted.

Moon shrugged. “He took a look around.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he was so pissed off. Kept saying if he hadn’t screwed around taking precautions like his old lady kept telling him, he’d be riding instead of walking.”

I headed for the bike. Moon followed.

The bicycle was an old white racer with long narrow baskets on either side of the back wheel. It was probably a twenty-eight incher, which seemed about right for the man on the street. The only thing unusual about it was the two-pad seat, reminiscent of Mason Moon’s T-shirt. I’d heard those seats were more comfortable, and from my brief foray into bike riding as an adult, it was a fair guess anything would beat the knives that pass for regulation seats. Still, an old bicycle with seats added for comfort would not have been the means of transportation I would have imagined for a Treasury agent.

Bending, I looked closer. The plastic was torn where the two seats met in the back. It looked like a recent tear that someone may have tried to fix with what seemed like a mixture of chewing gum and plaster of paris. We would impound the bike. An errant tear like that and the tan-and-white specks of “fix-it” would be the meat of Raksen’s day in the lab.

A small carrying bag fit in the angle of the crossbar and one of the descending ones, but there was nothing inside. “Are you sure it’s his?”

Moon was already hunkering down. “Look at the chains.”

He had a point,
if
his story about the victim was true. Plastic-covered chains were looped through the spokes of both wheels. A lock caught the ends of one, but its tongue hung open. On the second one the ends of the chain hung loose. It looked like the work of a finicky man who was losing control, actions done from habit but beyond his waning physical ability. It suggested he’d gotten off his bicycle, been in good enough shape to try to lock it, then walked into the street and fallen.

Moon verbalized my suspicions. “What do you think—drink or drugs? God, Lyn’s going to love it.”

Another patrol officer pulled up just as the ambulance rounded the far corner. I motioned the officer over to protect the scene around the bike.

With the pulsers from the fire truck, ambulance, and patrol cars, and the radio squeals coming from all directions, the street was like a movie scene. The medics jumped from the ambulance and raced to the victim. Their energy seemed to pick up the flagging spirits all around. I headed toward them.

Moon straightened his shoulders and followed. “Think about it,” he said, “IRS agent on drugs. It’ll make the best courtroom drama of the decade. Everybody he ever screwed will be demanding blood.”

One of the medics held the victim’s arm, spreading a vein lengthwise, waiting to see if it would fill back up so he could use it for the catheter. The vein must have faded. The medic stuck the catheter in the carotid artery. His partner conferred with the firemen, then yanked the gurney from the truck.

Another patrol car pulled up. Murakawa got out.

The medics rolled the gurney to the ambulance and slid it in. I started toward them, Moon on my heels. I motioned Murakawa to take him. The drivers shut the doors and ran to the cab. The ambulance rolled with lights and sirens.

I was sure of the answer before I asked Pereira, “What’s the prognosis?”

“Better than if he wasn’t breathing. That’s what they said.” Her blond hair hung limp over the collar of her tan uniform jacket. Under the streetlights she looked washed out, exhausted. “I still don’t have an ID,” she added, a tacit appeal that I track it down. It was a request not from a district officer to a detective but from friend to friend.

“I’ll take care of that.” I didn’t want to go home anyway.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Mason Moon moving toward us, Murakawa five yards behind. Quickly I said to Pereira, “In case the victim doesn’t make it, keep the scene secured until you can get Raksen out from the lab. Right now, if the cyclist dies, we’ve got nothing.”

Moon stopped beside me, rubbing his hands in glee. “Time for the audit in the sky! Lyn’s going to love it.”

T
HREE PATROL OFFICERS WERE
already checking out the crowd, taking preliminary statements, getting names and addresses, and IDs where either of the former seemed ephemeral. Pereira called in a request for backup to canvass the neighbors. Neither of us had noticed an open shade, but maybe there’d been someone putting out the garbage or the cat when the bicycle coasted to a stop. Pereira would gather the reports from the scene. If the victim died, she’d turn them and the case over to me. (In Homicide-Felony Assault Detail we handle all questionable deaths.) If he lived, we’d have what they called in bureaucracies a challenge: justifying all this manpower for a guy who stumbled off his bicycle. I’d hope when the next budget hearing came up that this didn’t.

I left Mason Moon in the squad car with Murakawa, who’d take Moon’s statement. And irritated as he was at Moon wriggling past him, he’d be delighted at the prospect of squeezing out an ID for the thwarted bike thief.

With luck, I’d have the victim’s name in half an hour. With at least that much luck, the victim would survive that long. By now, Advanced Life Support would be pushing drugs into his system, hoping to find the right combination before the drugs started to contradict. They’d chase this thing till the last minute. And when the victim hit the emergency room, they’d start the clock there. Six minutes with no response, and it’d be all over.

Even if I couldn’t get an ID in time for the doctors, it was still vital. Somewhere in Berkeley a wife or lover, father or daughter, could be waiting for that bicycle. Getting bad news in the middle of the night was never pleasant, but getting it after hours or days of waiting and dreading was torture.

The address Mason Moon had given me for Lyn Takai turned out to be a rear cottage south of campus. Although it was a high-density area tenanted by students and young families, at midnight the streets were empty, and few house lights were lit. I made my way between the violet stucco cottage and a two-story wood house. The path was narrow enough that I could almost have touched both dwellings. The only light came from a fixture in the backyard.

The yard behind the stucco cottage was typical of Berkeley land usage. Real-estate values have risen so sharply here that lots sell for what houses used to, and leaving a backyard for recreation is wretched excess. The rear cottage was tiny, but so was the yard. The stucco shoebox hugged the property line. Its front door couldn’t have been more than six feet from the main house. And those six cemented-in feet were decorated not with potted plants and deck chairs but appliances. Under the cottage’s picture window where a planter box might have stood were an old refrigerator, an apartment stove, and a scratched metal table. Beyond, on their sides, were two porcelain bathroom sinks, one decorated with a blue-tulip motif, one merely sporting a crack, but both meant for corners of a pint-size bathroom. With all this out in the yard, what was left to be inside? “Less is more,” as our former governor said.

There was no bell. I knocked and waited. I wouldn’t mention the victim was likely to die. The dead are barely cool before even the staunchest enemy stops speaking ill of them. And speaking ill is the bread and butter of my business.

I was about to knock again when stronger lights came on and the door opened. The woman in front of me was short, with light-brown pixie hair and a mouth that was surprisingly wide for her delicate oval face. She wasn’t wearing lipstick, only eyeliner and shadow, but even with that effort she hadn’t managed to correct the imbalance. She looked to be about my age, midthirties, but already there were creases beside her mouth—none by her eyes, just the mouth—as if her irritation had all settled there. She was wearing a black V-neck leotard and shorts, and despite her slight build, the muscles in her legs and shoulders were clear. And I noted with surprise, even on this cold, windy night there were no goose bumps on her bare legs.

“Yes?” It was more a demand than a question.

No one wants to see a cop at the door at midnight. Tough-guy mouths like hers are usually clenched to hide quivering jaws. “Detective Smith, Berkeley Police,” I said, holding out my badge. In cases like this I don’t say “Homicide.” There’s rarely a need to frighten people more than they already are. But when there is, it’s nice to have kept “Homicide” in reserve.

She held the shield under the light. She could have saved the effort. The shield was no proof; anyone with the right resources could have made a good copy. But she scrutinized it, her brown eyes un-scrunched, her lips neither pressed together nor pursed. “Do you have a driver’s license?” she asked in a quiet voice, a softness that comes from assurance, like the perfunctory bark of a St. Bernard.

I showed her the license. Caution like hers is a trait we encourage in women living alone. But I wondered how much the tension of being ever watchful, ever vaguely afraid, had contributed to those defensive lines around Lyn Takai’s mouth.

As she looked from my license to me, her finger moved across it from
Brn
(hair) to
Grn
(eyes) to
5-7
(I had the feeling she knew I’d stretched the truth there, but maybe that’s just the paranoia of the shortest officer in Detective Detail), to
120
(actually that was more than the truth too; the Howard house diet, in which food disappeared regularly from the fridge, had slimmed me more than I’d intended).

Handing back the license, she said curtly, “I’m in the middle of my practice.”

I glanced into the room behind her, hoping to see what it was she was so adamant about practicing in the middle of the night.

The first thing I noticed was myself, then Lyn Takai’s straight muscular back. Reflected in mirrors on the far wall. And that was about all there was in the twelve-by-twenty room. It was bare but for a pile of two-by-five-foot rubber mats, wooden handrails on the walls, and ropes hung next to the mirrors. The setup suggested a dance studio, a dance studio with ropes. Exotic dance? Erotic dance? S-and-M dance?

One rubber mat lay alone in the middle of the floor, three thick books piled on the end. Slow dance with reading material?

Takai bent her right leg, braced her foot against the left thigh, put her palms together, and balanced on one leg like a stork. “I teach yoga. I was doing a forward-bend series.” She indicated the rubber mat. “I was teaching a private class this evening. It’s easy to pick up students’ energy and be too wired to sleep. Sitting on the floor bending forward relaxes the body and calms the mind. I’m limber enough that I can reach beyond my feet. That’s what I’ve got the books for.”