A Red Death Read Online Free PDF

think about taxes either.

— 5 —

    T HE GOVERNMENT BUILDING was on Sixth Street, downtown. It was small, four stories, and built from red brick. It almost looked friendly from the outside, not like the government at all.
    But once you got past the front door all the friendliness was gone. A woman sat at the information desk. Her blond hair was pulled back so tight that it pained my scalp just to look at her. She wore a gray businesslike jacket and dark horn-rimmed glasses. She squinted at me, wincing as if her skull might have actually hurt.
    “May I assist you, sir?” she asked.
    “Lawrence,” I said. “Agent Lawrence.”
    “FBI?”
    “Naw. Revenue.”
    “IRS?”
    “I guess that’s what you call it. Spells taxes no matter what way you say it.”
    As government workers went she was polite, but she wasn’t going to smile for my joke.
    “Go down to the end of this hall.” She pointed it out for me. “And take the elevator to the third floor. The receptionist there will assist you.”
    “Thanks,” I said, but she had turned back to something important on her desk. I peeked over the little ledge and saw the magazine, The Saturday Evening Post.
    Agent Lawrence’s office was just down the hall from the reception desk on the third floor, but when the woman called him he told her that I had to wait.
    “He’s going over your case,” the fat brunette told me.
    I sat down in the most uncomfortable straight-back chair ever made. The lower back of the chair stuck out farther than the top so I had the feeling that I was hunched over as I sat there watching the big woman rub pink lotion into her hands. She frowned at her hands, and then she frowned again when she saw me staring through her glistening fingers.
    I wondered if she would have been performing her toilet like that in front of a white taxpayer.
    “Rawlins?” a military-like voice inquired.
    I looked up.
    There I saw a tall white man in a crayon-blue suit. He was of a good build with big hands that hung loosely at his sides. He had brown hair, and small brown eyes and was clean-shaven, though there would always be a blue shadow on his jaw. But for all his neat appearance Agent Lawrence seemed to be somehow unkempt, disheveled. I took him in for a few seconds. His bushy eyebrows and the dark circles under his eyes made him seem pitiful and maybe even a little inept.
    It was my habit to size up people quickly. I liked to think I had an advantage on them if I had an insight into their private lives. In the tax man’s case I figured that there was probably something wrong at home. Maybe his wife was fooling around, or one of his kids had been sick the night before.
    I dropped my speculations after a few moments, though. I had never met a government man who admitted to having a private life.
    “Agent Lawrence?” I asked.
    “Follow me,” he said with a gawky nod. He turned around, avoiding eye contact, and went down the hall. Agent Lawrence might have been a whiz at tax calculations but he couldn’t walk worth a damn; he listed from side to side as he went.
    His office was a small affair. A green metal desk with a matching filing cabinet. There was a big window, though, and the same morning sun that came into the Magnolia Street apartments flowed across his desk.
    There was a bookcase with no books or papers in it. There was nothing on his desk except a half-used packet of Sen-Sen. I had the feeling that if I rapped my knuckles on his cabinet it would resound hollow as a drum.
    He took his place behind the desk and I sat before him. My chair was of the same uncomfortable make as the one in the hall.
    Taped to a wall, far to my left, was a crumpled piece of paper on which was scrawled I LOVE YOU DADDY in bold red letters that took up the whole page. It was as if the child were screaming love, testifying to it. There was a photograph in a pewter frame standing on his windowsill. A small red-haired woman with big frightened eyes and a young boy, who looked to