Death and Taxes Read Online Free PDF

he died, I’d be back. Now I wanted to get the ID to Pereira. Philip Drem’s six minutes would be long gone. But maybe he’d done better than I imagined; maybe the ID would help him.
    Before I finished telling Takai I’d probably need to see her again, she had closed the door.
    I hurried past the fridge and that odd tuliped sink around the side of the house to my car. Since it was my own car rather than the patrol car, there was no radio.
    I flagged down a patrol car on Telegraph and called in the ID. Then I drove back to the scene of the accident. Almost an hour had passed since I’d left. I looked quickly to the end of the street by People’s Park, but there was no sign of Howard’s sting. He’d have reeled in his victim by now, and the action would be down at the station.
    Regent Street too looked merely middle-of-the-night now. A pair of patrol cars was still there, parked by a hydrant and in a crosswalk, lights out, radios off. And the slow progress of the officers going house to house would have been noticeable only to someone spending the night looking out a darkened window. I waited till one of the uniforms emerged from a house near the spot where Drem’s bicycle had been abandoned. It was Leonard, a short gray-haired guy who’d been a veteran when I started in Patrol.
    Leonard had been laid-back before the term entered the realm. There was a disarmingly shambling quality about him. He was the kind of cop who knew everyone on his beat and found a soupçon of decency in felons the rest of us would have classified as pornographic (no socially redeeming qualities). Because of that, he’d managed to get case-breaking hints from guys who knew they were on their way home to Q. (Or maybe they couldn’t quite believe this cop whose shirtsleeves were always wrinkled, whose pencil point was always broken, could be smarter than they were.) Whatever the reason, patrol was Leonard’s forte, and he knew it.
    Leonard should have gone off duty at eleven o’clock. It was going on 1:00 A.M. now, but he didn’t seem to mind. The wind had picked up, and it flapped at the sides of his tan jacket, the summer-weight jacket. But he seemed no colder than Lyn Takai had.
    “So,” I said, “you manage to massage anything out of the neighbors?”
    “It was late, you know. A time people are watching the tube, or listening to the stereo, or getting ready for bed.”
    From another man, that might have been an excuse for coming up empty. From Leonard, it meant full pockets. “Someone saw Drem get off the bike?”
    “After a fashion.” Leonard hated to overstate.
    “The house right by the bike, the one propped up, with the foundation damage,” I said, looking over at one of the earthquake’s casualties. The whole crawl space was open to the air. “Are there people living there?”
    “No. Anyway, it wasn’t the neighbors. It was one of the street people, guy named Sierra. Mason Moon spotted him. Murakawa passed him on to me. You heard of Sierra?”
    I shook my head. It had been years since I’d had this beat.
    “Well, he’s not someone you’d want to take on the stand, if you know what I mean. And really, Smith, when you find out what he said …” Leonard shrugged, the motion for which his shambling body seemed to have been created. “It’s no help, but he’s the only one who saw anything. I’ll have another go at him tomorrow. He could have been hoping for a few bucks from the snitch fund. Maybe he really didn’t see anything at all. It doesn’t make much difference.”
    “Leonard!” I said, exasperated. No wonder felons let down their guard with him. “What did Sierra see?”
    Leonard leaned an arm on the patrol car. His tan shirtcuff stuck out beyond his sleeve, wrinkled. “Sierra said Drem looked shaky, like he was on something, which is an area Sierra knows about. Said Drem propped the bike against the phone pole and had to brace himself on it before he squatted down and fiddled with his locks. Said he