A Red Death

5

The 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 be the same age as LaMarque, both cowered under the large and smiling figure of the man before me.

“Nice-lookin’ fam’ly,” I said.

“Um, yes, thank you,” he mumbled. “I assume that you received my letter and so you know why I wanted to meet with you. I couldn’t find your home address in our files, and so I had to hope that the address we found in the phone book was yours.”

I was never listed in a phone book from that year on.

“The only address we had for you,” Lawrence continued, “was the address of a Fetters Real Estate Office.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I been in that same house for eight years now.”

“Be that as it may, I’d like you to write your current address and phone number on this card. Also any business number if I need to get in touch with you during the day.”

He produced a three-by-five lined card from a drawer and handed it to me. I took it and put it down on the desk. He didn’t say anything at first, just stared until finally he asked, “Do you need a pencil?”

“Um, yeah, I guess. I don’t carry one around with me.”

He took a short, eraserless pencil from the drawer, handed it to me, and waited until I had written the information he wanted. He read it over two or three times and then returned the pencil and card to the drawer.

I didn’t want to start the conversation. I had taken the position of an innocent man, and that’s the hardest role to play in the presence of an agent of the government. It’s even harder if you really are innocent. Police and government officials always have contempt for innocence; they are, in some way, offended by an innocent man.

But I was guilty, so I just sat there counting the toes of my right foot as I pressed them, one by one, into the sole of my shoe. It took great concentration for the middle toes.

I had reached sixty-four before he said, “You’ve got a big problem, son.”

The way he called me son instead of my name returned me to southern Texas in the days before World War Two; days when the slightest error in words could hold dire consequences for a black man.

But I smiled as confidently as I could. “It must be some mistake, Mr. Lawrence. I read your note and I don’t own nuthin’, ’cept fo’ that li’l house I done had since ’forty-six.”

“No, that’s not right. I have it, from reliable sources, that you purchased apartment buildings on Sixty-fourth Place, McKinley Drive, and Magnolia Street in the last five years. They were all auctioned by the city for back taxes.”

He wasn’t even reading from notes, just rattling off my life as if he had my whole history submitted to memory.

“What sources you talkin’ ’bout?”

“Where the government gets its information is none of your concern,” he said. “At least not until this case goes to court.”

“Court? You mean like a trial?”

“Tax evasion is a felony,” he said, and then he hesitated.

“Do you understand the severity of a felony charge?”

“Yeah, but I ain’t done nuthin’ like that. I’m just a maintenance man for Mofass.”

“Who?”

“Mofass, he’s the guy I work for.”

“How do you spell that?”

I made up something, and he pulled out the card with my information on it and jotted it down.

“Did you bring the documents I asked for in the letter?” he asked.

He could see I didn’t have anything.

“No, sir,” I said. “I thought that it was all a mistake and that you didn’t have to be bothered with it.”

“I’m going to need all your financial information for the past five years. A record of all your income, all of it.”

“Well,” I said, smiling and hating myself for smiling, “that might take a few days. You know I got some shoe boxes in the closet, and then again, some of it might be in the garage if it goes all that far back. Five years is a long time.”

“Some people make an awful lot of noise about equality and freedom, but when it comes to paying their debt they sing a different song.”

“I ain’t singin’ nuthin’, man,” I said. I would have said more but he cut me off.

“Let’s get this straight, Rawlins. I’m just a government agent. My job is to find out tax fraud if it exists. I don’t have any feeling about you. I’ve asked you here because I have reason to believe that you cheated the government. If I’m right you’re going to trial. It’s not personal. I’m just doing my job.”

There was nothing for me to say.

He looked at his watch and said, “I have a lot of business to see to today and tomorrow. You’ve served in the army, haven’t you, son?”

“Say what?”

He stroked the lower half of his face and regarded me. I noticed a small, L-shaped scab on the forefinger knuckle of his right hand.

“I’m going to call you this afternoon at three sharp,” he said. “Three. And then I’m going to tell you when I can meet with you to go over your income statements. I want all your tax returns, and I want to see bank statements too. Now, it might not be regular office hours, because I’m doing a lot of work this month. There’s a lot of bigger fish than you trying to cheat Uncle Sam, and I’m going to catch them all.”

If there was something wrong at home for Agent Lawrence, he was going to make sure that the whole world paid for it.

“So it may not be until tomorrow evening that I can see you.” He stood up with that.

“Tomorrow! I can’t have all that by tomorrow!”

“I have an appointment at the federal courthouse in half an hour. So if you’ll excuse me.” He held his open hand toward the door.

“Mr. Lawrence…”

“I’ll call you at three. An army man will know how to be at that phone.”