Confessions of a Tax Collector (10 page)

“You’re being paranoid,” I told my thin, naked reflection in the closet mirror. Then, with bitterly satisfying self-deprecation: “Hey, didn’t I see you in an appeal for famine relief?”

I dressed quickly and took the elevator up two flights to Dee’s room.

She answered the door wearing a leopard-print robe. She was barefoot. Her hair was still wet from the pool. She was alone.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Allison’s not coming,” she said. “Has a headache. And Rachel is always late for everything. I haven’t heard from Caroline. You want something to drink?”

She waved me toward the sofa. Dee had a suite with a gas fireplace. “It’s over per diem,” she had said. “But I figure for ten extra bucks, why not a fireplace?” I sat on the sofa while she stepped into the kitchenette and rummaged in the refrigerator.

“How was the pool?”

“Great. I just got back. I was just about to jump into the shower.”

I stood up. “Okay. Well, I’ll just go back to my room and when Rachel—”

“That’s crazy. You just got here.”

She handed me a glass of white wine. I did not drink wine, but decided this was not the moment to tell her that. I set the glass on the coffee table. Dee collapsed on the sofa beside me.

“God, don’t you love it, how your body feels after a swim? Soooo relaxed.”

Her robe had come open, exposing the length of her left leg, sitting four inches away from mine. She stretched, arching her back, her long arms over her head. I had not been the object of many seductions, but I had seen enough movies and read enough books to know when I was in the middle of one. I saw the phone sitting at my elbow and grabbed the receiver.

“I’ll call Rachel and see what’s keeping her.”

“Are you nervous, Rick?”

“Constantly.”

“You’re an intellectual.”

“Huh?”

“Intellectuals are nervous people. Intellectuals are never in the moment. They’re always thinking. You know I’m attracted to you. Everyone’s noticed. Even Caroline’s noticed, and she hardly notices anything.”

“
I
didn’t notice.”

“Are you in love with Pam?”

“I’m engaged to Pam.”

“I think you just answered my question. Some men think I’m too skinny.”

“Some people think I am too.”

“Oh, I like lean men. Allison said you used to be a cowboy.”

“Not in the traditional sense. I never rode a horse or roped a steer or—”

“Rachel has a theory you might be gay.”

“I’m not gay.”

“I didn’t think you were. But her theory goes your relationship with Pam is just a cover.”

“No. I have a real relationship with Pam.”

“Are you attracted to me?”

“I—I don’t really know you, Dee.”

“I didn’t ask if you knew me or not. I asked if you were attracted to me.”

At that moment, mercifully, the phone rang. I yanked it up. It was Rachel.

“Where’s Dee?” she asked.

“Right here,” I said. Dee took my free hand and pressed my knuckles to her lips. “Where’s the daiquiris?”

“What daiquiris?”

“Just as I thought,” I said into the phone. “A setup. Did Caroline bring Twister to training?”

“Bring what?”

Dee released my hand. “Give me the phone,” she snapped. “Rachel, I’ve got to call you back.” She handed the phone back to me. “She’s not there,” she said when I put it to my ear. I hung up the phone and stood up.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings.” Always the good student, I was applying something I had learned from class: do not

THREATEN, SCOLD, OR PATRONIZE.

RECOGNIZE YOUR OWN ATTITUDES AND ELIMINATE THOSE THAT ARE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE: “I guess I’m just a loyal person.” avoid getting trapped. I headed for the door, know where the exits are.

“No,” she said. “A loyal person wouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

I never told Pam about my encounter with Dee. I never told anyone. Dee and I did not speak of it, not in the four years we worked together in the Service. That was fine with me. I could think of no worse fate than falling in love with someone who worked, as I did, for the Internal Revenue Service. I didn’t realize at the time, however, that within the Service there are far worse temptations than those of the flesh, and that love, wherever we might find it, often proves to be our only hope of salvation.

On the morning of our return from Phase One training, Gina summoned Allison and me to her office for a private conference. She was wearing a black dress, black hose and black soft-soled Rockport shoes. “I have terrible feet,” she had explained to the puzzled women of the office. She wore a diamond-encrusted pin over her right breast: an Egyptian scarab. Gina was fond of jewelry that drew its inspiration from the insect world. Cruder tongues than mine made reference to her large, protruding eyes as having a decidedly entomological slant, hence her affinity for wearing bugs on her breasts. Others said it had nothing to do with her appearance: wearing insect-inspired jewelry was a form of religious expression, Gina being a Wiccan, a modern-day witch. The Wiccan rumor was persistent and altogether baseless, the dyed-black hair, black clothes, and the onyx spider ring notwithstanding.

“Melissa is gone,” she said. She did not elaborate. “I’m reassigning both of you to Culpepper.”

Allison and I exchanged an apprehensive glance. We had met William Culpepper on our first day and had seen him occasionally before we shipped off to Tampa, but had not spoken more than five minutes with him. Melissa had told us to avoid him. My foremost impression of him was that he was an extremely snappy dresser. He was, at least in Florida, a living legend inside the Service, having made his bones early in his career by taking down five car salesmen in a bribery case. The case had involved undercover surveillance, midnight dead-drops, phone taps, and hidden microphones, and resulted in prison time for the offenders. Culpepper was destined for greatness, a rising star. His reputation for technical expertise was exceeded only by his reputation for bureaucratic brutality.

“He isn’t happy about being assigned to you,” Gina added.

“Why?” Allison asked. She was the more aggressive of the two of us. I had no personal experience in the matter, but I was of the opinion you don’t get into the face of a Wiccan.

“Culpepper wants to move into management,” Gina said. “Being an OJI is a step down for him. But I’ve made him promise to refrain from taking it out on you guys. Anyway, he’s waiting for you now, in the conference room.”

Her words rang in my head as I followed Allison down the hall to the conference room:
I’ve made him promise to refrain from taking it out on you.
I was consumed with envy of our fellow trainees, assigned to the gentle, if somewhat obtuse, Cindy Sandifer. And what was the deal with Melissa? Like so many things that happened inside the Service, there were few facts and many rumors. One rumor had it that she had had a disastrous romance with an IRS middle manager. Another that she couldn’t bear to be separated from her on-again, off-again bartender boyfriend named Butch, who lived in Tampa. Who knew? Everyone seemed to and nobody confessed to. Knowledge is power and, as I was about to learn, power is everything.

Culpepper was sitting at the head of the large conference table. Before him were two stacks of blue file folders, each about two feet high: our cases. I felt something about the size of a grapefruit rise in my throat. He rose upon our entrance. He seemed taller than his five feet ten inches, probably because he held himself so stiffly erect and his body had been hardened from his four-hour daily workouts. Culpepper’s passion was bodybuilding, his profession mind-molding. His uniform that morning consisted of suit by Brooks Brothers, tie by Armani, shoes by Nunn Bush, hair gel by Sassoon. His nails shone from a fresh manicure. He waved us toward the chairs but he himself remained standing. He slid one stack of file folders before Allison and another stack in front of me. Then, with no preamble whatsoever, he said, “I don’t intend to teach you anything. What you need to know about tradecraft can be easily learned by reading the manual, reviewing your training material, or consulting with SPf.
[6]
In this sense, ‘instructor’ is a misnomer. I am your trainer. My job is to prepare you to succeed. Whether you actually succeed is, of course, entirely up to you.”

He paced around the table as he talked, completing a circuit, pausing at the head of the table, his starting point, then beginning again, moving in the opposite direction. He reminded me of Robert De Niro as Al Capone in
The Untouchables,
circling the dining table with the baseball bat.

“I’ve read your personnel files. I have every confidence one of you has what it takes to make an outstanding revenue officer. About the other, I have my doubts.” He gave no indication who he thought was doomed. I felt he didn’t need to. My face burned with shame even as Allison turned her eyes toward me. She felt he didn’t need to either. “But I’ve been wrong before. Once. These are your cases. As you know, you only have thirty days to make initial contact on each. That isn’t much time. You’ll have one hour to choose the five that need immediate contact, and then we go.”

“Go where?” Allison had the temerity to ask.

“To the field.”

“We’re going to the field… today?”

“We hired you to be field officers,” Culpepper said. “If you wanted to sit behind a desk and talk on the phone you should have applied for ACS
[7]
. He resumed his route around the table. ”As you review these cases, I want you to keep one thing in the forefront of your mind: you are a revenue officer now. Whatever you were on the outside before you came here doesn’t exist anymore. You are a revenue officer. What does that mean? That means you are the last stop on the line. There is no step in the system after the revenue officer. Keep in mind that these people have had many opportunities to resolve their tax issues before their case landed in your inventory. We’ve sent them notices, we’ve mailed them letters, we’ve called them on the phone, and still they are waiting for us—they are waiting for
you.
And you are going to give them exactly what they expect.“

Allison spoke. “What do they expect?”

He paused, turned his icy-blue eyes upon her, and she actually flinched. I caught myself sinking lower into my chair and willed myself to sit erect.

“When I first came on board, a senior revenue officer took me aside and showed me a sign someone had made. He kept this sign hidden in his desk, because if it was seen outside his desk he would have been reprimanded. You will learn there are things you may say and things you may not say, and it is those things you may not say that are the essence of your work here.”

He sat at the head of the table and laced his fingers together. The silence dragged out until I couldn’t take it any longer.

“What did the sign say?” I asked.

“It was entitled ‘The Four Protocols,’” Culpepper said, still looking at Allison. “They are the rules that we may not say.” He counted the Four Protocols on his fingers. “Find where they are. Track what they do. Learn what they have. Execute what they fear.”

William Culpepper was a native Floridian, raised in the comfort of suburbia. He attended a small, private university near Miami, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and after graduation moved north to make his mark on the world. He didn’t get very far north or make much of a mark. He eventually settled in Lakeside, where all his ventures ended in utter failure: the clothing store, the restaurant, the watch-repair shop. At twenty-five, he was selling hotdogs wrapped in Pillsbury crescent rolls from a cart at the Joker Marchant Stadium, home to the Lakeside Tigers, the triple-A farm team for Detroit. “Billy’s Pigs in a Blanket.” He was also experimenting with various syrups with an eye on cornering the slushy market. His life changed abruptly and irrevocably when he answered an ad in the local paper.

He often said the IRS had “discovered” him—had plucked him from obscurity—and it was inside the Service that William Culpepper discovered his true calling, his passion and, ultimately, his damnation: the occupation of revenue officer.

* * *

Once we settled into Allison’s car, Culpepper began to hold forth. “I have been spat on, kicked, punched, pushed down, my hair yanked, and had a gun pulled on me. I have been called Nazi, Gestapo, pig, and other names that would make a marine blush. I’ve had doors slammed in my face and once somebody tried to run me over with a car. I go home at night and my wife tells me I drink too much and brood too much and don’t get enough sleep. I haven’t spoken to my parents in two years. My friends from college don’t call me anymore. People at my church cross the sidewalk so they can pretend they don’t see me. My neighbors call me ‘Mr. Culpepper.’ Three years ago, every strand of hair on my body, from the top of my head to those little hairs that grow on the top of my feet, fell out. Just fell out. I was bald all over. I was stripped completely bare. I looked like I was made out of wax. So I bought a toupee and the first thing I noticed was how much nicer people were to me, since they assumed I was undergoing chemo. Then one day my hair just started growing back, and it came in this dark; it came in
black.
Before it fell out it was brown. Now it’s black…

You are exceeding the speed limit, Allison. You get a ticket on the job and I’ll write you up. I’ll fire your ass. You are a federal officer. Henceforward you will be held to higher standard. And, while you are under me, you will be held to the
highest
standard… Be proud of what you do. Be proud you’re a revenue officer. Not some number-cruncher, not some fucking accountant or CPA who can’t make it in private practice. You are a revenue officer. There are only ten thousand others like you in the whole country, and you are the best of the breed. The United States has the most efficient tax system in the world, because of one thing. Don’t forget the fourth protocol— You’re turning right in less than a hundred feet; signal your turn. Make known your intentions. Always make known your intentions. Learn to detest the unexpected. Hate surprises. Surprises will get you killed. The highest award a revenue officer can receive from the government is named after the only revenue officer who was killed in the line of duty. Ambushed by a protestor. A few years back they actually put it to a vote whether ROs should carry guns. The overwhelming majority voted it down. I don’t think I need to tell you how I voted.“

I thought of Melissa and her opening remarks my first day on the job: were it were up to me, I’d line ‘em all up against a wall and shoot them.“ I sat in the backseat of Allison’s Audi and thanked all the gods of collection that he had chosen her cases to take to the field that opening day.

Our first stop was a mortuary, the first stop of dead people. As we approached the door, Culpepper said, “Remember the third protocol. Never go into a business thinking, ‘Am I going to have to seize this place?’ Always go in thinking,
‘What
am I going to seize in this place?’” He said it with no trace of irony. I prayed that what we saw inside was limited to caskets and flowers. The fact remained that Culpepper had chosen this as the first case and Culpepper never wasted an opportunity to signal his intentions.

The day had not gone well for Allison. She had become flustered, tongue-tied, bound by minutiae. She clearly thought she should have performed better and would not stop beating herself up for it. The owner of the mortuary was a stooped octogenarian named Mr. Rose and he spoke with a soft, babyish lisp. He was pitiful. Allison was pitiful. The whole damned thing was pitiful. Culpepper was intensely interested—or at least he pretended to be—in the esoteric intricacies of embalming. He assumed the lead in this and the other two of Melissa’s cases we called on that first day. At the end of it, after we had returned to the office, I looked through the window and saw her hurrying to her car, head bowed, and I was shocked to realize that Allison was crying.

Back in the office, Culpepper tossed a three-inch-thick case file before me and said, “Look this over. We’re calling on it tomorrow.” He added, “One of Melissa’s dogs.” A “dog” was an old case, either overworked or under-collected. Dogs were nearly impossible to close. “You’ll notice it flunks the thickness test.”

“The thickness test?”

“The thicker the case, the harder it is to close. The little sucker is choking on all the paper. You never want a case file over an inch thick. Under an inch, you’re a superstar. Over an inch, you’re a fucking loser.” It was clear from his tone what category he thought Melissa belonged to. “Look it over tonight.”

My first homework assignment. I dutifully brought the file home and spent three hours poring through Melissa’s history and the dozens of forms, computer printouts, letters, and sticky-notes pasted throughout.

At the beginning of the case, some two years before, Melissa’s handwriting was large and flowing, almost flowery. By the eighteenth-month anniversary of its assignment to her, her handwriting had deteriorated to an almost illegible scrawl, like some desperate lifer scribbling on the cell wall. The last entry was over two months old. She had written, “TP stll nt curr. Sts needs add. time to consol. debt & refin. DL in 2 wks to supply new CIS.” Most histories are written in this kind of shorthand. Translated, it read, “The taxpayer [is] still not current [with making tax deposits]. States needs additional time to consolidate debt and refinance. [Gave] deadline in two weeks to supply new Collection Information Statement.” The deadline came and went without Melissa securing the new information from Ms. Marsh. That, I supposed, was up to me, under the guiding hand and watchful eye of William Culpepper. I comforted myself that I would not be alone: at least Allison would be there and could be counted on to draw some of Culpepper’s fire.

“Allison’s called in sick,” Culpepper informed me when I walked through the door the following morning. “It’s just you and me today. Grab your cases. You’re driving.”

He lowered himself into my little car and shifted his bulk this way and that in the bucket seat, trying to get comfortable. That was not a possibility for someone his size in a Nissan Sentra. He looked around the confines of the interior, unable to disguise his distaste. Culpepper drove a Ford Probe, jet black, low to the ground and immaculately kept. My car was not immaculately kept. Old newspapers, plastic lids from convenience-store fountain drinks, yellow napkins from Wendy’s, gum wrappers, loose change, all littered the tiny backseat and floorboards. He shifted his feet, trying to clear a spot. I dropped the case files into the seat behind me, slid down into the driver’s seat, buckled my seat belt, placed my hands on the steering wheel, and waited for the entire universe to come undone and crash upon my head. The stories of Culpepper’s cruelty were legion; they were recounted in Phase One training with gleeful abandon, like ghost stories told around a campfire to frighten little children. Melissa had told us about the time he set fire to her case file. Then there was the time he told a trainee he would make it his mission in life to get him fired and back on the unemployment line where he belonged—then did. And the time he took three trainees into the conference room and spent three hours screaming at them until one poor woman fled from the building, never to be seen again. And the time he humiliated another trainee on a field call, joining the taxpayer’s rep in mocking her for her lack of expertise until she burst into tears and quit right on the spot. Culpepper called her a cab.