Twin Cities Noir

LOOPHOLE by Quinton Skinner Downtown (Minneapolis)

I should have known there was going to be trouble from the moment I discovered serious irregularities in Sam Vincent’s books, but in my line of work “trouble” usually means nothing more than a procedural slap on the wrist or a threatening letter from the I.R.S. I’ve known of accountants who have gotten into difficulty for committing actual crimes, such as embezzlement. But for those of us who follow the letter of the law, the profession provides long, quiet, solitary hours. And that’s precisely how I like it.

My ex-wife accused me of being “immune to passion.” She may have had a point, but when she subsequently digressed about her fervid need for “a real man,” it came to mind that she might have been missing the point about me. Maybe she always had. I possessed my share of passions, but they were quiet in nature: precision, detail, and the satisfaction of rows of numbers lined up and silently ringing with the celestial harmony of perfectly executed mathematics. And, besides, what exactly were these passions Barbara extolled from such heights of hauteur? Losing one’s temper over nothing? Abandoning control in the name of “love” or “romance”? How about making constant, capricious, carping demands on one’s spouse—now that was truly Barbara’s passion.

It’s not exactly that I prefer solitude but I can adjust to it easily. I arise, pour coffee out of my pre-programmed maker, eat a single low-carb breakfast bar (chocolate or zesty mango), then don the suit and tie I selected the previous night. I drive to my office in the Foshay Tower—not the trendiest Minneapolis address, but something about its humbleness in the face of its upstart high-rise rivals, like a quiet reserved type in the rough and tumble of a high school boy’s locker room, has always appealed to me. I like to think that its old-fashioned charm gives clients a sense of permanence, decorum, and tact that keeps them returning to me (and referring their friends).

Sam Vincent was one such referral—he came to me by way of Lucas Huston, an executive who lived on Lake of the Isles and who had retained me as his primary accountant for the last seventeen years. Lucas isn’t exactly a friend. He’s never invited me to his house, for instance, for one of the glittering holiday fundraisers that I see written up in the Star- Tribune with clockwork regularity. But he often lingers in my office for a cup of coffee and sometimes a cigar, if I offer him one and its quality meets with his approval. It was during one such visit that Lucas informed me that I might be getting a call from an unusual prospective client.

“His name’s Vincent,” Lucas told me, squinting through a cloud of purplish smoke that he exhaled across my desk in my direction. “He’s a building contractor. His company did some work on my house last summer, and he pestered me to find out who my accountant was until he got your name out of me.”

I nodded in my usual friendly manner, wondering why Lucas might have been reluctant to recommend me to someone.

“See, this is the thing,” Lucas went on. “The guy’s strange. Kind of a rough type. Makes a good living, I’m sure, but I didn’t know if you wanted to be associated with someone like that. Feel free to turn him down. It wouldn’t bother me at all.”

I fretted all that night about whether or not Lucas was telling the truth, and whether my turning down his contractor would indeed be something to which he wouldn’t take offense. In the process I rendered Sam Vincent, in my mind, into a slavering, drooling werewolf of a man, baying and clawing at my door with bone-sharpened claws.

Vincent showed up at my office the next day without calling ahead to make an appointment. He was no werewolf, but neither was he without certain fear-inspiring qualities. He was wearing a golf shirt, and its armbands strained against his considerable biceps. Under what I took to be a golf visor, his tanned face had frown lines where other people were wrinkled from smiling. His hair was so black that I figured he must have had it dyed. I wondered where vain rich men went to do such things—were there salons where intimidating building contractors were secretly buffed and pampered, their sun-damaged dermis lovingly tended to by smiling, silent young women?

“So can you do it?” he asked me.

“Beg pardon?” I said.

He shot me a look that implied people seldom dared drift off during his expositions. Somehow we had made it back to my office, where he was sitting in my chair, at my desk, and I was standing by my Twins 1987 World Series commemorative plaque.

“Nice plaque,” he said, in a fashion that made it impossible to discern whether he was joking or not.

“I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

Vincent had some tax problems, nothing major, but he didn’t care for his accountant and wanted someone to look over his tax returns from the last few years to see if he’d gotten a good break. He spoke of his accountant with the same disapproving regret one might reserve for a mouse that one had stepped on in one’s apartment, a rodent that had run from under the sofa to an unfortunate end.

I examined Vincent’s tax returns and saw that his accountant had indeed made a hash of them. There were all sorts of deductions missed and loopholes left unexploited. I got in touch with the I.R.S. on Sam’s behalf, and within days he went from being a debtor to the government, to a man with a clean slate. Vincent was ecstatic, and the next day a case of single-malt scotch arrived at my office.

Two days later Vincent was back, partaking of the scotch that he had so generously bought for me and outlining the details of our grand future together. He had made a lot of money and invested wisely, he informed me, and henceforth I would manage his wealth and, in the process of seeing to it that he paid as little tax as possible, I would be the beneficiary of his well-known generosity and largesse. And if I ever needed a new room put on the side of my house, it was mine for the cost of the materials.

It is true that, for some time, I had entertained notions of a hardwood den with antique leaded-glass windows. I had plenty of space since Barbara left me, though I hadn’t entirely given up on the idea that I might one day find another woman with whom I was compatible and who might one day share the home with me. There was, for instance, a secretary at my dentist’s office who always brightened when I came to endure the latest installment of my painful and protracted gum work. She was quite a bit younger than me, but seemed to view me as likeable in a paternal sort of way.

I told Vincent I would do it. I wasn’t wanting for work— my practice was doing very well—but I had to admit that dealing with Vincent brought a certain amount of excitement to my predictably stable professional life. He enjoyed telling me about his adventures, tales replete with withering impersonations of the “morons” and “assholes” he dealt with in the building trade. He told me about his girlfriends, and his wife, and his two sons who were evidently in a heated competition to see who could display the most appallingly antisocial qualities at the earliest age.

The honeymoon was short, but it was also enjoyable. Vincent sent me cigars, with which I impressed Lucas and other clients. His financial affairs were a tangle of handwritten receipts and slapdash spending, but I had seen worse. He liked to drop by, sometimes with motley offerings such as an Italian sub he’d picked up on the way from a building site. One time he brought me a brand new DVD player, still in the box. That seemed a little suspicious, but Vincent merely shrugged and smiled at me. We developed into a little comedy duo, with him exaggerating his roughness and his heedless rush through life, and me pretending to be a bit more scandalized than I really was. I knew Vincent viewed me as a fearful, drab creature constrained by convention and routine, but I didn’t mind. It occurred to me more than once that Barbara would have thought he was quite grand, and that I would have gained in her estimation by his seeking out a sort of friendly relationship with me.

Then the trouble started. I initiated some routine cross-checking between his various accounts, and the numbers I produced were wildly divergent from the ones we had been supplying to the government. In addition, large sums of money were vanishing from Vincent’s business funds into his personal accounts. A good deal of his income was disappearing without being reported.

Now, Vincent wasn’t the first tax cheat in the history of the world, nor was he the originator of stealing from his own business. Yet both were crimes, and by their discovery I was implicated. I had never been a party to this sort of thing, nor did I plan to. I agonized for a couple of days, dodging Vincent’s calls, until I hit upon what seemed the right course of action. I would not report him to the authorities, but I would no longer be his accountant. I called him at home to give him the news but immediately lost my nerve. Instead I asked him to meet me after working hours the next day at a bar downtown.

“What’s the matter?” Vincent asked. “You don’t sound right.”

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Just…a headache.”

“Well, get some rest, kid,” he said. “It’s a good thing we’re getting together tomorrow. I have something I want to talk to you about, and I’d prefer we didn’t do it at your office.”

I had suggested meeting at the Irish pub around the corner from WCCO because it was familiar to me. It was the kind of place where businesspeople had lunch, or stopped by for a drink before resuming their masquerade as loving family men. As soon as I stepped in, I instantly regretted the choice. People knew me there, or at least they used to. I hadn’t gotten out much since I no longer had my wife to avoid, but the thought occurred to me that someone might see me with Vincent and associate me with some future crime he might commit.

But I was getting ahead of myself, wasn’t I? I mean, he was a financial crook, but I had no reason to believe he was anything more nefarious. Money, after all, was just an aggregate of abstract sums to be played with and manipulated on computer screens and ledger sheets. It couldn’t hurt, or kill.

He was different from the moment he sat down. He was wearing a suit, for one thing, a nice one, and he leveled me with a stare that immediately indicated his day had been far more arduous and treacherous than mine. He ordered two vodka tonics—one for each of us, it turned out—and sat a black leather briefcase on the table between us.

“Hard day?” I asked when the drinks came.

Instead of replying, Vincent lit up a cigarette. He blew out a big cloud of smoke and stared at me through it.

“You wanted to talk,” he said.

“Yes.” I paused. “Look, I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just that you have to understand…I’ve come across certain discrepancies, certain things in your finances that make me very…”

“Uncomfortable?” he suggested sympathetically.

“Yes!” I said with relief. “Look, I have no intention of causing you any trouble. I’ve enjoyed working with you—”

He slid his chair closer to mine. “I hate to see you worried like this,” he told me. “You’re too serious.”

“Well, that may be, but—”

“You don’t want to be my accountant anymore.”

And I experienced a tremendous, almost painful sense of regret. Sam, who understood me so well, had intuited the reason for our meeting. It was almost enough to make me take it all back, to go on as though nothing had happened.

“Okay,” he said with a little smile. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“I’m really glad. I—”

“Forget it,” he said, raising a hand to silence me. “Look, I want to tell you something. Come over here.”

I obliged, moving my drink closer to his. I didn’t even mind the cigarette smoke in my face.

“Look over there,” he said. “Be discreet. But get a good look.”

I glanced over to a table in the corner, where a man a few years younger than me was engrossed in conversation with a younger woman. They were both smiling, seemingly at ease in a fashion that admittedly filled me with a poison sting of jealousy. I looked back at Vincent, and took a long slug of my drink, then another.

“You think they’re married?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

“Believe me, they’re not.” Vincent smiled. “Not to each other, at least. You know what they’re doing?”

I polished off my drink. Vincent seemed to approve. “What are they doing?” I asked.

“They’re walking the line,” he said. “A drink after work, they get home a little late. ‘Honey, I got a call just as I was about to leave. Sorry about that.’ Dinner, put the kids to bed, watch some TV, everything is fine. They walked the line, and they got away with it.”

I was having a little trouble following what Vincent was saying. Another round of drinks had miraculously appeared. Though I usually stop at one, my mouth was dry, and soon I was nearly done with my second.

“…matter of degrees,” Vincent was saying. I felt hot, and a little nauseous. I undid my top button and loosened my tie.

“Go back,” I said, surprised by how much my voice was slurring.

“All I’m saying is that we all have our little transgressions,” Vincent added, nodding with self-satisfaction. “Big ones, little ones. Who cares? All that matters is getting away with it.”

“But what about—” I started, in a voice not quite my own.

“You all right?” he asked me.

“I’m fine.” But, in fact, that wasn’t true. When I moved my head, it felt as though the contents of a swimming pool were sloshing around inside. I blinked, and saw that the lights of the bar had begun to undulate, fragment, and generally indulge in an orgy of visual insubordination.

“You don’t look fine,” Vincent said. “Maybe we better get out of here.”

He helped me to my feet. I hadn’t realized that I needed to be helped, but there it was. I teetered, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and nearly fell over. Through the fish-eye vantage of double vision I could detect that I was beginning to make a scene.

“No worries,” Vincent said to out waitress, who had arrived with the bill and a look of concern that shifted to impatience when I nearly fell into her. “My friend here seems to have come down with something. I’m going to get him home.”

We were in a car, Vincent’s car. He was laughing and talking about one of his girlfriends. Rain seemed to be coming down on us, streaking and pooling on the window by my face, but I couldn’t be sure. The town passed by, completely unfamiliar to me. I could have been in Kansas City; I could have been in Rome. I could barely see.

“You enjoying that little pill I slipped you?” Vincent asked me when we were stopped at a red light. “Boy, you made quite an impression back there. Don’t think they’ll be serving you drinks anytime soon.”

For some reason this struck him as inordinately funny, and his laughter echoed in my ears as we drove on. I had the impression that we were someplace in the warehouse district when we stopped on a deserted side street. Sam came around, opened my car door, and helped me to my feet on the (wet?) pavement.

“You slipped me something at the bar,” I managed to grunt.

“Smart boy,” he said, one arm around me, half-carrying me to the doorway of a building.

“Don’t want to,” I slurred.

“Come on now,” Sam insisted. “Be a good boy.”

There were some stairs, fluorescent lights. No people. I could have done with some people.

I found myself on a sofa in a spare little office, with the lights of downtown sparkling like Christmas trees through the horizontal gaps in the blinds. I slouched back, my clothes soaked through with sweat, while Vincent was doing something at a near-empty desk.

The phone. He was talking on the phone. He pushed a pretentious pen set to one side as he opened the briefcase, still engaged in conversation, nodding, not smiling.

I entertained myself for a moment or two by trying to remember when last I had felt so out of control. I hadn’t been much of a drinker in college, or anytime after. Maybe during one of the lengthy arguments Barbara and I had before our split, those eternal jousting matches that I always lost simply because Barbara would declare me the loser. I sat up a little straighter, my adrenaline burst of irritation serving to focus my senses at least a little.

Vincent hung up the phone. “Hey, look,” he said.

He tilted the briefcase so I could see it. It was full of cash, neatly bundled.

“Forty grand,” he said, giving me a lizard smile. “Big payout on that shopping complex I was telling you about. I wonder how much of it the I.R.S. is going to take when I declare it.”

He froze, staring at me, waiting for my reaction. Then he burst out laughing.

“Problem is, I need to find a way to launder it squeaky clean. You know anything about that?”

I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so.” Vincent ran his fingers over the cash. “Too bad. I really liked working with you. I didn’t think you were going to get cold feet on me.”

I stood up and, with some measure of surprise, realized that I wasn’t going to fall flat on my face. Vincent looked surprised too.

“Hey, pretty good,” he said. He unbuttoned his suit and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I gave you enough to whack out a gorilla.”

“Let me see,” I said, or sort of said.

“See what?” Vincent asked.

“Money.”

Vincent smiled. “Sure, kid, come on over.”

I took a couple of unsteady steps. “Need help,” I mumbled.

“Aw, Christ,” Vincent exhaled. “Sure, why not? You know, there’s someone coming over who I want you to meet.”

“Someone?”

“Yeah, sure. Someone who’s going to clear all this up for us.”

Vincent helped me across the thin carpeting toward the desk. My legs were heavy, and I heard him grunt with effort and finally place my hands on the edge of the desk.

“Like what you see?” he asked.

I stared at the money. It was in hundreds.

“All for you?” I rasped.

Vincent laughed again. “Know anyone else who needs some?”

I took a pen from the set next to the briefcase, turned, and, using all the strength I could muster, plunged it deep into the big artery rising from the right side of Vincent’s neck. It was, frankly, amazing how deep it went.

His eyes opened with shock, a moment of rage, then something that I took to be a quick nod of respect, before Vincent fell to the floor and began the process of bleeding to death.

I wasn’t particularly steady on my feet, but by holding the railing I was able to methodically get myself down to the lobby. I passed a man at the door who nodded when I held it open for him.

Outside I tucked the briefcase under my arm and made my way for the bright lights of downtown. Because, after all, business actually hadn’t been going very well for me, and it was undeniable that it was time for a change. My friend Sam Vincent had just made one possible.