He drove into town. The town lay asleep in the desert, like some bright, cubist beast. A bored clerk in a small air-conditioned store sold him, reluctantly, a pair of maroon trunks. He carried the small package out to the car. A man stopped him, saying, “Just a minute, Mr. Shelby.” He was a short, fat man in a very gay shirt, pale rumpled slacks. His smile was amiable, his face purpled by the heat, his eyes small and shrewd behind glasses with heavy black frames.
“What can I do for you?”
“You can walk across the street with me and into yonder saloon and let me buy us something remarkably cold.”
“I’m afraid I—”
“And there we shall discuss all manner of things, including, perhaps, your wife and her untimely demise.”
“Who are you?”
“An incipient heat-prostration case, Mr. Shelby.” The fat man headed across the street. Jay followed him. They went into the cool interior of the bar. The motif of the place was ersatz Western. A wall mural depicted various young ladies wearing nothing but bandannas and six-shooters, looking more vacuous than lewd. The bartender had a flowing handlebar mustache.
They picked up cold bottles of dark Mexican beer at the bar and carried them back to the farthest, darkest booth. The fat man wiped his face with a soiled handkerchief.
He said, “I always feel awkward when telling people my business. I dream of being able to say I work for the Russian secret police. Or that I’m a leprosy carrier, or something of equal social acceptability. Instead, I have to say I am employed by the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Here are my credentials, Mr. Shelby.”
Jay looked at the card enclosed in glassine and slid it back across the table. “I have a man in New York who handles all—”
“No doubt. I hope he is excellent. I hope your conscience is stainless. You don’t flinch as much as most. Ah, this is truly good beer.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “We are not interested in you, Mr. Shelby. We are concerned with a case that, at present dating, is just shy of three years old. It is not a fraud case. Not so far. It is a deficiency case. I shall not mention the name of the taxpayer. I and my, shall we say accomplices, are leaving no stone unturned. In fact, we are peering under pebbles. We need more data to make a deficiency judgment of some two million dollars stick. That, of course, includes penalties and interest. So we peer under even the smallest pebbles. The taxpayer was in contact, in a slightly clandestine way, with your wife. In a most puzzling way, in fact, which I may or may not tell you. Our mutual friend, young Mr. Dockerty, advised me you had been in. He described you efficiently. I could not find you registered anywhere. I seem to be rambling. I will get to the point. Some of the most canny men brag of their canniness to blondes. Most usually to blondes, as a matter of fact. And sometimes divorce is merely a sort of arrangement. The parties concerned correspond. And blondes might write of the important people they have met. You see what tiny pebbles we look under?”
“I think I get what you mean,” Jay said. “We weren’t corresponding with each other. We weren’t... friendly.”
“Hmm. Yet you came out here to nose about?”
“I don’t think that concerns you or your taxpayer, Mr. Goddard.”
“I’ll accept that rebuke, Mr. Shelby, and purchase you another brew as a token of apology.” He waddled to the bar for two more bottles. He came back and sat down with an expansive sigh.
Jay, refilling his own glass, said, “Just exactly in what way was my wife in contact with Gerald Rice?”
“I don’t recall mentioning his name.”
“Oh, come off it, Mr. Goddard. You said you’ve been on this case for three years. He owns this whole Oasis Springs. There isn’t anybody else around here who could come close to fitting a two-million-dollar judgment.”
“Remind me not to keep underestimating artists and writers. The clandestine arrangement was merely that, after a certain scene in the Golden Sixpence, when our Mr. Rice ordered your wife from the premises, he apparently decided he had been hasty. And he sent one of his young men to — forgive the word, sir — procure her. At least, it appeared that way. The young man, a rather unsavory type named Thomas Rikerd, picked her up at the Terrace Inn and drove her to Mr. Rice’s well-fenced place south of town. We have that place under observation, with the aid of a surplus Navy telescope and a long-suffering young man. After several hours, Mr. Rikerd emerged with other persons, and that left your wife and Mr. Rice there the rest of the day. No one left the premises that night. No car arrived or left. Of course, a person could have left unobserved on foot, but it would be a long hike to town, so we will assume no one left. No one arrived the next morning. In the afternoon, a car arrived from town with a driver. It picked up Mr. Rice and drove him into town. Theoretically, your wife was there alone. Mr. Rice returned alone at dusk. The driver turned around and went back, alone. At four the next morning, a car drove in. It is believed that it contained Mr. Rikerd, who had been gone since the previous morning. It is still assumed your wife is there. But that, of course, is impossible, because at three that morning, or thereabouts, she was at the bottom of the pool at the Terrace Inn. That is why we consider it puzzling.”
“Dockerty said he didn’t know where she went.”
“He doesn’t. There is no possible way of proving she was there without giving away our little game of spyglass. And what would it add?”
Jay drew a beer line on the booth top with a wet thumbnail. “I can say this. I saw Rice. I knew Joan. In one word, never. I’m not saying never with anybody. I don’t know that. I sort of guess there were others. But they’d be young, very gay, very pretty, very shallow. Never for money, Mr. Goddard. Never with a specimen like Rice.”
“He has an odd knack of making people do what he wants them to do.”
“He could never have scared her or bullied her. She wasn’t afraid of anything that walks, creeps, or crawls. No. I can’t go along with that. I don’t get this about watching his place. How is that tax business?”
“Lesson number one. There are two ways of setting up a deficiency. You can either go on what we call an income basis — income less expenditures and so forth — or you can go on what we call a net-worth basis. That means you start with a year when you know the taxpayer had nothing. Then you add the total income reported, for all the intervening years. You deduct the taxes paid. You deduct what it cost him to live. Then you deduct everything he has. Cash, land, everything. It should come out zero. If it comes out a minus figure, then that’s the amount of income he didn’t report. The burden of proof is on him in a deficiency case. We’ve had him and his legal talent and his accountants up for hearings nine times in the past three years. We aren’t getting anywhere. We know he rooked the Government. We’ll get the proof somehow, somewhere, sometime, and then we’ll nail him to the wall.”
The mild little man with the amiable smile had suddenly turned into an imposing individual. He said softly, “In the meantime, we are observing his standard of living.”
Jay felt sickened by the implications of Goddard’s story, yet he sensed they could not be true. He did not doubt the actual details of physical movement; it was the assumptions that were wrong. Joan could have done wild things, crazy things — even dangerous things — but never sordid things. She had a pronounced money hunger, yet she could never have gratified that hunger with any action that was not fastidious. Illegal, yes. Soiled and stained, no.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you in any way,” Jay said.
“I didn’t expect you to be able to. This one was a very small stone to look under. We’d hoped to have a chat with your wife. They let things slip, sometimes. Point out a piece of property. Say that it is theirs, with title held by a dummy. Another thing to add to our list. You see, there is no quarrel with current income and tax accounting. All very carefully handled. We’re after the fat years, when he squirreled it away, the years that gave him the impetus to go into all this.” And with a wave of his chubby hand, Goddard included all the forced gaiety of Oasis Springs.