Charlie's special skills involved the alchemy of turning disappeared assets into found ones. Over the years he'd learned the ten thousand ways that people shaded the truth, used their stories like sleds in the snow, slid all over the place, hid their assets, schemed, played with the numbers. He knew how honest people shielded their money from taxes in relatively innocent ways, and how dishonest people schemed to cheat the old U.S.A. any way they could. At work, digging through mountains of paper, he felt like a detective. When he was out in the field he wore a hat and thought of himself as a Columbo. He took pride in his juice "finds." He was a doggedly persistent man, untrusting, unyielding, obsessional about the details.
He loved playing tennis, but only two times a week. He cooked imaginative meals four times a week for his father, went out two times, and one night a week he hung out at the bars in Bay View. His car had gone completely to hell. He was bored, he was lonely, but his world was safe. He worked mostly with accountants, usually men. A few were women, but they were not good-looking. Likewise, the large force of female revenue agents were not generally hired for their looks or personality. His supervisor, Gayle Katz, had never married and cared only about her cat. Charlie rarely had the opportunity to see, much less get to know, any of the high-profile women whose lives he examined through their documents. Even when he evaluated women's houses or yachts, their assets of all kinds, they themselves were in the background, shadowy and inaccessible. When they came on to him, it was always to cover something up.
Although Charlie fantasized about excitement every day of his life, longing for something more that he couldn't really name, he actually counted on the status quo. He didn't want to fall in love and risk his life like last time. Years ago he'd married young to an unremarkable girl of ordinary attractions he'd thought he loved well enough to last a lifetime. Her name was Ingrid, and he'd never in a million years thought she would leave him. They'd had a baby. The baby died when it was two weeks old. Soon after that, Ingrid left him for a podiatrist she'd consulted a year earlier about her bunions. Ingrid's sudden departure raised a doubt in Charlie's mind that the baby he'd anticipated with such excitement and loved with all his heart had really been his. After both mother and child were gone, it was too late to investigate. Charlie went on to investigate other puzzles.
His personal tragedy occurred so long ago that torment had long since been replaced with cynicism about the opposite sex. Just as really bad dental experiences leave behind perpetual anxiety about all practitioners in the field, Charlie's experience with Ingrid left him skittish about women. His name and occupation were an added catastrophe. It was always the same thing: When women thought he was the financial giant, they threw themselves at him. Literally. The bodies flew at him the way Mona's had when she'd tripped on nothing and tried to fall into his arms, breathing hard with mint-freshened breath.
Then everything changed the second they found out he was not the "real" Charles Schwab. As soon as he told them he was a revenue agent with the IRS, he suddenly became the "fake" Charles Schwab, less than a nothing, a poisonous toad. A dangerous enemy. But this had not always been the case. Once the "real" Charles Schwab had been an unknown and the "fake" Charles Schwab had been young and handsome. And it was not completely true that Charlie was a total loser now. He just felt like one. The Beech Avenue strip of bars in Long Beach was near Kennedy Airport and the place where the stewardesses came for R and R. He dabbled with them easily enough, especially since the next flight out was only a few hours, or a day, away. He didn't like to stick with anybody longer than that, couldn't really stand prolonged encounters. He liked the getting-to-know-you part. But he became nervous when anyone tried to stake a claim on him. He didn't think he'd ever meet someone he really liked.
Charlie was still smoldering and obsessing about his humiliating experiences with the strange duo of Cassie Sales and Mona Whitman. He drove east toward his house in Long Beach. He didn't know what was up with the two women, but something definitely was. Cassie had looked crazy to him even before Mona had tipped him off. With the sunglasses and the scarf on her head at eight in the morning? Come on. And the story about the stroke? Please. Cassie was a borderline personality like Livia in The Sopranos.
As for the latter, he could still see her soft, tanned inner thighs, almost feel her breasts close to his chest. And smell her perfume. She must have managed to touch him somewhere. The perfume was clinging to his jacket. It made him want to laugh. She was sexy like an Italian, bringing out the big guns for him as if he could be swayed by anything she had to offer. Her little patter about compliances didn't fool him one bit. Something was up at that place. He had an insider's eye view, and his own. The warehouse was too big even for the volume of sales on their returns. Any lamebrain auditor who had a chance to see the place would pick up the fact that they were moving more product than they reported. Obviously, Mitchell Sales hadn't been expecting visitors. But why should he? Only about 1 percent of tax returns got audited, and of those usually the audit was limited to a single transaction, and the query on behalf of the service was done, mercifully, by mail.
Charlie kept thinking about the curvaceous Mona Whitman and the way she'd said, "IRS agents are toads." It annoyed him, it really did.
If she'd done anything wrong, he'd hang her out to dry; crazy Cassie, too. He was distracted by the sight of young Taj out in front of the only yellow house on the street on an all-white-house street. He was washing one of the three robin's egg blue limos parked along the curb. The music pounding out of his boom box sounded like Spanish rap again. He'd done something new to his hair. One side was gone. The other was green. Along this portion of Lake Avenue the air was filled with the pungent aromas of Indian cooking. And Ogden was on the lawn, jumping up and down.
"You okay, you okay. Taking it easy. Taking it easy." Taj Sr., wearing a white warm-up suit with red and blue chevrons on the legs, was chattering excitedly and banging the old man on the back, desperate to get down just a little lower whatever he'd given Ogden to eat that had caught in his faulty esophagus.
"Ah, Charlie home," Taj screamed.
Ogden's face cleared and he stopped jumping. "Hi, son," he called. He loped into the street between two limos to meet Charlie at the car. Just then, Taj Jr., engrossed in the joy of the moment and the beat of the music, let out a whoop. He twirled around with the spurting hose as his microphone and dance partner and sprayed the old man in the chest. Revenue Agent Charlie Schwab was home.
CHAPTER 25
THE ART OF WAR was on Mona's mind when she got home from the walk-in. She was no t afraid for herself. She was terrified for Mitch. Anyone who reacted to rejection in such an insane fashion as Cassie did was more dangerous than she'd ever imagined. Mona was breathing freely, but she was scared enough of Cassie to decamp. Mitch had been right when he'd told her Cassie was a toxic person. Even before Mona had opened her front door, she'd known she had to get out of there. Cassie turned out to be more than just a toxic, passive-aggressive, secret ball breaker. Cassie was a genuine killer. No wonder Mitch had been apprehensive about leaving her.
Cassie's driving Mona around for all of fifteen minutes while Mona faked an asthma attack was a nonevent compared with her murdering her vulnerable husband on life support in the hospital just because he wanted to leave her. Mona would not let Cassie hurt either one of them. She unlocked her front door, glanced quickly around in case Cassie had returned, then raced upstairs for her makeup case. She found it in the bathroom still packed for the trip to Paris. She stowed it in the car. Then Mona raced upstairs again and foraged around in the closet long enough to locate two pairs of Hermès alligator pumps and two alligator purses in red and purple. Mona believed she didn't care about things. She was a frugal person. Even as she stowed away the expensive accessories, she told herself she'd give up everything she had with the snap of her fingers to save her honey. She grabbed the few bills that had accumulated since Friday and left the junk mail on the table. That was it. She was traveling light, hurrying to save her man.