The Golden Gate Is Red Read online

  He laughed. “Still, Joe said you did a good job for him. At least he could understand what you were saying.”

  “That’s from staying out of law school.”

  “I thought it came from staying out of prison,” Danny Cleveland said, smiling. To show me it was a joke.

  I get that a lot now. Accountants and CEOs were suddenly wearing orange and had replaced lawyers and reporters at the bottom of the polls.

  “What seems to be your problem?” I asked.

  Danny Cleveland said, “I want to kill my IRS auditor.” He stopped and looked at me; his dull gray eyes held steadily on a point in the middle of my forehead. I let him do it for a moment. Then I raised my eyebrows. As I was sucking in a breath to speak he cracked a snide white smile.

  “Just kidding,” he said. “I want you to get the Service to accept my tax returns.”

  “Everybody does. I’d have to go through your deductions and other . . .”

  He interrupted. “You don’t understand. I want them to accept my tax payment. They think I am owed a refund.”

  “A refund.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want to make a tax payment?”

  “Actually just not receive the refund.”

  I gave him my best puzzled-owl look. But it didn’t faze him. He still had the same dull gray eyes and the white toothy smile painted on his face.

  “Well, that’s new,” I said.

  “Nevertheless.”

  “You want to pay the Service? More than they are asking?”

  “More precisely, I don’t want their refund.”

  “I believe you really do need a lawyer,” I said. Then a shrink. Maybe some medication. Pharmaceutical grade.

  “I’ve talked to some. They say there’s nothing in the law that requires me getting a refund.”

  “So get a court order.”

  “I don’t want to raise it to that level. You understand, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t want a refund. You don’t want to go to court.” I leaned back in my chair and spread my hands. “Avoiding taxes is the national pastime. A tax case has more players than a football team, takes longer than two baseball seasons. But you want to pay more?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “That’s correct?” I asked. He nodded. “May I ask why?”

  His spine stiffened and he came to attention. I was a little sarcastic, I admit.

  “I am a patriot, sir.”

  “A patriot?” I was getting tired of hearing myself parrot every sentence.

  “It is a grave time in our country’s history. We are at war. Beset by hidden enemies. Are you a student of history, Mr. Smoller?”

  “Just the rev procs.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The Service’s revenue procedures.”

  “A pity. You seem bright enough,” he said. Get a load of this guy. Eyes that needed Windex to shine them up and he’s calling me dim.

  “I am a strong supporter of this government. We must find our enemies. They are trying to kill us. We must get them first. Remember, Rome fell because of its own weakness, not its enemy’s strength.”

  “And you want to patriotically overpay your taxes?”

  “As I told you. I don’t want to collect my refund. At least for now. Perhaps at a later date when our collective danger has passed,” he finished.

  I let out a sigh. It hung in the empty conference room like smoke that won’t blow away. His hands were in his lap, patiently splayed on his thighs, back straight.

  “I don’t know that there’s much I really can do. It really depends on who’s got the case.”

  He smiled. For the first time I saw a little light inside those field-gray eyes.

  “I’m offering a hundred thousand dollars. On a success fee basis of course. The chief investigative auditor is critical. Correct?”

  I just nodded this time.

  “His name is Mr. Redfield,” he said, taking a card from his shirt pocket. “Armand Redfield.” A loud whistle sounded. The merriment in his eyes was not the end of a tunnel, it was a train. And its name was Senior Auditor Redfield.

  “Armand Redfield,” I said. “Jesus.” I was the one with the dim eyes now. Mr. Cleveland didn’t have a response for that one. Armand Redfield and I got along well. Very well—as long as we didn’t see each other, talk to each other, or work together. Eight years ago he fired me. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” he said, nodding.

  “Dempsey?” I asked.

  “Joe said you knew Armand well.”

  “Past tense. And Joe should keep the past in the past.”

  “Nevertheless,” he said, twisting his head to the side.

  “Present tense: he hates my guts.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell Danny boy that Armand terminated me from the agency and my certain ascent to secretary of the Treasury.

  “Will you take the assignment?”

  I bent down and unlocked a drawer on the right side of the credenza using an antique metal key I left in the keyhole. I pulled out a metal box that had been pushed against the back of the drawer, took another key from my jacket, and opened the flimsy lock with a single twist. Inside were stashed a pack of Marlboros and a silver Zippo lighter. I flipped a cigarette out and fired up. I glanced over at Cleveland to see if he would mind. With his good hand he pulled out a pipe and raised his eyebrows in question. I nodded as I sucked in my first puff. Soon the room was blue with smoke.

  “All right. I’ll give it a try. Give me five thousand now and five when I’m done.”

  “I’m offering a hundred,” said Danny.

  “I heard you. This is just going to be a couple of phone calls. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  He took a pipe tool from his jacket, switched the pipe to his plastic hand, tamped down his bowl, and put it out. He tucked it carefully into his jacket and stood up. Next he took a checkbook from inside his coat and bent over the desk and wrote. He tore the check out and placed it on my desk. By the time I finished my cigarette, he was gone.

  Chapter 3

  The first week of April floated by. Every spare moment I found myself staring out at white sails on the bay, hungry for blue water and wide sweeps of sun and unchallenged vistas, but I kept wrestling my mind back to the rev procs I needed to research to support Danny Cleveland’s tax position. There had to be something hinky about it. He wouldn’t be paying me to ask the Service to hold up his refund. And I would have to go see Armand Redfield in Oakland. That required a trip over the bay, and as a transplanted native, I sneered at Oakland the way only a reformed addict can.

  Armand and his Service depended on the pure unadulterated honesty of the majority of citizens paying taxes so that the IRS agents could focus on the 3 or 4 percent of tax deadbeats, frauds, and “ideological” objectors who didn’t pay or denied the government’s moral authority to tax. I then defended and investigated the returns of those so armored by greed, ideology, or secular religion. Righteousness was theirs. And even then half the time the Service was wrong, or at least technically incorrect. My real clients, the guys I got assigned work from, were hotshot tax attorneys. The tax court counterparts to Johnnie Cochran, but without the loud ties and the showman’s courtroom demeanor.

  They always, and I mean always, had their own tax accounting of their clients done at their own expense. Surprises in the courtroom were death, and their clients’ aversion to truth or disclosure was the rule, not the exception. So I got called in as the local green eyeshade. The lawyers could blame me for being a secrecy-obsessed compulsive, a digger of secrets, an explorer of tax guilt. Yes, sir, they told their clients, he should be fired on the spot, will do it tomorrow. But what about this home sale? This was unexpected capital gains? You sold that house in . . . wherever. You thought there was a deduction on capital gains for second homes? But this is a third home, and there have never been any deductions for capital gains on real estate, much less an exclusion, which is what you really meant. So by
all means, sir, let’s come clean, if not with our family or the IRS, at least between ourselves and Max. I can’t defend you without complete honesty. Of course, we acknowledge that Max is obsessive­, nasty, insistent, all that. Yes, he’s fired. Tomorrow. By tomorrow, I promise.

  And with that I would be off to another job, the lawyer paying my bills promptly, the smart ones happy and grateful for taking the ax from their clients. I saved their reputation. They found the saw inside the cake and ate it, too. I got a fast guilty check.

  I was in the process of assembling Danny’s public records, his IRS filings and state tax returns, UCC filings, checking them for discrepancies or even new data, any unreported transactions, anything, when my computer whirred to life and an instant message popped up on the screen.

  Joe Dempsey calling. I will take a message. Irene.

  My eyes found the bay again. The swells were blue green today, not dark, a lightness that came with spring. Sometimes it was hard to believe I lived in the midst of so much beauty. My hands went to the keyboard.

  Irene, I’ll take it. And no back talk. Okay?

  Okay, came the unusually brief reply.

  My phone rang. I picked the featherweight handle up slowly.

  “Max Smoller,” I said, just like . . . Max Smoller, tax detective.

  I was almost smiling as I bent my head to the earphone, at least until Irene appeared in the doorway. She leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Joe. How are you?” I said into the phone, as amiably as I could manage, using my eyebrows to play to Irene’s spectating.

  “Max,” came the soft charcoal voice. “Thanks for taking my call. It’s been a long time and I . . . well, I didn’t know whether you’d take my call.”

  “I’m still here,” I said, reduced to mild truculence.

  “How are you?” he asked. “Really. Not your standard phone answer, if you please. You got all my referrals?”

  That was Joe all over. The charm offensive, cutting to the chase, something given and something withheld, all at once.

  “Yes, Joe, I did.” Joe had taken to referring all his hedge fund clients, old and new, retail and wholesale (that’s industry jargon for individuals and institutions). It turned out to be the bulk of my practice now, a practice I had grown and tended with careful attention, but which we both knew, and he was reminding me, I probably could not have started without his high-flying imprimatur.

  “Got billions under management now. Short-long funds, five or six bond funds, some distressed and bankruptcies.” He paused. “But I don’t expect you’re following my exploits closely. Am I right?”

  I could feel my molars start to grind, and pretty soon my dentist would appear in front of me shaking her finger at me like my mother.

  “What can I do for you, Joe? Your tax cycle isn’t for another six months.”

  “I was calling—hell, I wasn’t calling to see how you are—you know that. I hear Christina called you and you turned her down. Right?”

  This time there was silence on my end of the phone, and he let it draw out. Was he calling to convince me where Christina failed? Did he want Christina to fail? Was there something else he wanted? I tried to go through all the permutations of his agenda, combined with the fact that he thought Christina had called in, not written, her plea. With Joe the bottom line was always hidden. His chuckle rumbled in my ear and I heard him break the silence. “I’ve got a confession, Max. Chris—Christina—and I separated a while back but we got a problem to solve together before we can agree on the papers. The divorce papers.”

  “I see,” was all I could say. I guess I knew where the “Forever Yours” came from now.

  “The Service has been on my back about a whole bunch of straddles we did back during the bubble; all those Internet guys trying to move income. You know those, right? And Armand’s been lead agent on the audit.”

  “You seem to be dropping his name a lot.”

  “Danny finally came to see you?” Joe asked.

  “Him and his plastic hand,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s got this wacky . . . don’t worry, Max, he’s okay. A little to the right of Attila the Hun. At least what passes for right in California. He actually thinks people should keep what they earn and we should kill people trying to kill us.

  “Anyway, Armand’s lead, and he goes back three years and checks the returns, which are all legit, but now he’s trying to back into 1997 to 2000, even though they’re closed and out of legal review, but he’s using some gibberish about ’01’s returns based on fraudulent previous returns and . . . well, you remember Armand.”

  “Yeah, I remember him.” I wanted to stop this monologue before Joe really got a head of steam. “What do you want with me?”

  “Christina and I are on the same side on this. We both need your help. Christina doesn’t want to see my estate depleted by taxes any more than I do. The bulldog’s on our ass, old man. You can’t refuse us, can you?”

  That was a dirty trick, I thought, the “old man” line. Joe’s “old man” referred to the first heady days of our friendship as singles on the Filbert Steps, not too far from where I sat now on the Alcatraz side of Telegraph Hill. We watched The Third Man one night and took to calling each other “old man,” mimicking Orson Welles’s urbane and corrupt smirk and his, “What can I do, old man, I’m dead, aren’t I?” Joe was all the way up on Pacific Heights now, in another world of huge mansions—elegant patios, basement swimming pools, rooftop gardens, and indoor squash courts—even in a city where acreage was more expensive than in Manhattan. And I was still here, on Telegraph Hill.

  “Joe, I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “Max, they’re really on me this time. They’re close. They’re close to both of us.”

  “Both of you? How is Christina involved? She’ll get a marital pass anyway.”

  “We’re separated, remember?”

  “No, Joe. No. I’m sorry. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. But there’s only so much I owe you. And my dignity’s not for sale.”

  “Max. No one’s going to assault your dignity. I’m begging you.”

  “I wouldn’t care if you were King Arthur on bended knee.”

  “Max, this could take us all down. Just come over tomorrow morning. Take a look at the docs in the data room. You believe I have a locked data room for all these agents? You believe that? That’s how many of these fire ants I got crawling up my butt, old man.”

  “Joe . . .”

  “At least have a drink at Marty’s. They’re your audits anyway. If you still want out after Marty’s, well, you can tell Christina yourself. I’ll be there by eight.”

  And he hung up.

  Did that mean Christina would be there? Shit. You bastard, old man. You fine, ruthless bastard, bringing Christina into this, bringing back memory. As if she’d ever been out of it, I thought. As if.

  Chapter 4

  I arrived at Pier 39’s cavalcade of honky-tonks, T-shirt shops, and restaurants as many of them were closing, the gutters filling with a greenish runoff from the kitchens. The water of the bay spread its thick cold smell over the pier. Night had fallen a couple of hours before, and tourists and diners had departed for brighter sights and more vibrant sounds than the lapping of small waves against the darkened piers or the twinkling of Oakland’s lights across the bay. I was still amazed at Joe for both his demand to meet tonight and his choice of Pier 39. There was no way he had been here since, well, ten years ago when we were kids at Andersen and not racing toward the brick wall of forty. The places he preferred now were white tablecloths­ where the maître d’ had a long nose out for you if you didn’t have on a tie or at least a dark shirt and darker jacket with the black, square patent leather shoes of downtown fashion.

  Marty’s Wharf Bar didn’t come up to Joe’s interior design standards, either. There were typical nautical accoutrements—nets, spindled wheels, brass compasses—and the distinctly unnautica
l smell of disinfectant and cleaning fluid. Standing behind the bar was a girl in a long ponytail who scarcely looked old enough to drink and would certainly have been carded if she had walked into the empty cavernous room above. As I headed for the bar, the netting hanging from the ceiling made me want to duck even though it cleared my head by a good ten feet.

  Joe was already there, hunched over something dark, with flecks of silver from ice cubes reflected through glass. I could see his long shoulders and knees at odd angles as if he could not get comfortable on the seat when he twisted to see me. He sat up straight, aware of being appraised. His toothy smile shone white in the gleaming dark of the bar while a neon Budweiser sign cast a faint red glow behind him. My pace quickened. My hand came up of its own accord. Even now, as he straightened off the stool and his smile cleared and his chin tilted, waiting for my anger or recrimination or coldness, even now as I saw his wariness of me, my hand came up and my heart lightened despite itself and the scalding memory of when he left with Christina. Through all that, I still was glad to see him. His hand came out, too. I felt his strong grip and the muscles going up his arm. He pulled me into the bar and into a brief embrace in the crook of his left arm.

  “Max,” he said. “Good to see you. I wasn’t sure you would come.”

  “Me neither. What’s with meeting in this dive?”

  He looked around and a grin creased his mouth and twisted up the crow’s-feet at his eyes. There was gray at his temples. I could see it even in the dim bar. That was new, at least five years new anyhow. Someone put on music, and Costello’s throaty, lonely voice filled the clink of glasses being placed on the rack by the girl behind the bar.

  “I never come to places like this,” he said. “Thought it would bring back old times.”

  “Joe, don’t start with bullshit. You wouldn’t come here if your life depended on it, and you wouldn’t lean on me or work so hard to get me here to this dive if something wasn’t wrong. What the hell do you want?”