Confessions of a Tax Collector (37 page)

“‘My house.’ You almost said it, ‘my house.’”

“That’s right, asshole. My house. I want you out of
my
house. I’m sick of you and I want you out.”

“Well,” I said. “At least now I know why you came home.”

“And get it all in one trip, Rick, because anything you leave behind I’m throwing in the goddamned lake.”

I moved into an unfurnished apartment on the north side of Lakeside. I bought a bed and frame from Sears, a coffee machine and AM/FM alarm clock radio from Service Merchandise, linens and cookware and cleaning supplies and a television from Wal-Mart. I was broke, maxed out on my credit cards, and, looking around the empty rooms of the apartment, had precious little to show for it. I didn’t even have a kitchen table and chairs. I bought a set of TV trays and ate my meals sitting at the foot of the bed, three feet from the new television.

A week after I moved, Caroline and I were alone in the bullpen. I was doodling on a history sheet and punching numbers into the calculator. One leather sofa with matching leather chairs, $2,670. One coffee table, $415-One end table with lamp, $75. Rent for twenty-four months at $365 per month, $8,760. One designer hand-crafted diamond-and-pearl engagement ring, $525. Total cost, excluding miscellaneous expenses, $12,445.00.

Caroline was arguing on the phone with a taxpayer. The name was familiar; she had been baby-sitting this case for months.

“I can’t do anything for you if you don’t make your tax deposits… we have very strict guidelines… you can’t stop at one lender… have you tried factoring your receivables?”
[48]

There was something I was forgetting. I chewed on the end of my pen and tried to concentrate. Caroline’s voice assumed a whiney quality when speaking to taxpayers, as if she were trying to annoy them into paying. Pam was the beneficiary on my life insurance policy, with a face value of $54,000. There was a dismemberment clause; around $35,000 if, say, a taxpayer poked out my eyeball. Then there were the EE Savings Bonds deducted from my paycheck, to which she was also the beneficiary. Two $50 bonds every month for twenty-four months, $2,400. Grand total thus far, $68,845, not counting the miscellaneous expenses. I wrote a note to Bonny to pull the forms I would need to remove Pam as my beneficiary of these various assets.

“Well, how much more time do you think you need?” Caroline asked.

She sounded resigned. That’s what slays us: resignation, weariness, inertia, the black despair of monotony. I threw down my pen and went to her desk. She cast her eyes in my direction and gave a little helpless shrug. If I had had a heavy object, I would have smacked her on top of the head with it. She finished the call and said, “Sorry,” as if she were interrupting me.

“It’s the nurseryman, isn’t it?”

“He does landscaping, too.”

“What’s the deal with him, Caroline?”

“Well, I can’t get him current.”

“It isn’t your job to get him current, Caroline. Where’s the financial?”

She opened the case file and handed the form to me. She did not hesitate. She seemed relieved.

“There’s equity here.”

“Not enough. For the bank, I mean.”

“We’re not a bank and you’re not a loan officer.” I handed the form back to her. “You’re a revenue officer. Why don’t you seize him?”

“Well,” she drawled out the word, trying to arrange her thoughts. “Cindy said—”

“Cindy said? Cindy said. We’re not trainees anymore, Caroline.”

“I know that, but—”

“Unless she has a related case, you’re not supposed to be talking about it with her. That’s disclosure.”

She became defensive. “She’s a Grade Twelve. It’s part of her job description to help lower-graded…”

“Lemme guess, she told you to give the guy a little more time.”

“It’s a big operation, Rick. Forklifts and trucks and ten thousand dollars’ worth of plants and trees and shrubs and… and things like that. Cindy said we never seize anything that’s alive.”

“Bet she even told you not to file the lien.”

“She did not.”

“Did you?”

“Of course I did. You know—” her thoughts had finally caught up— “Talking about disclosure, you just looked at the financial statement.”

“Let’s seize him.”

“What?”

“Let’s seize the bastard.”

“Oh, Rick. Don’t call him that. He’s a very nice man.”

“You want me to assist?”

“Assist what?”

“The seizure.”

“But I’m not doing a—”

“Jesus, Caroline, I saw the date on the financial statement—you were three months into your training year. This thing has moss growing on it.”

“It’s my case, Rick, and—”

“Did you put in for the promotion?”

She looked blankly at me for a moment. Caroline did not normally make conversational leaps.

“Because there is only one thing that impresses management, Caroline. You and Dee have done maybe four seizures between the two of you. Four seizes in two years. What was your rating last year? What’d you get in ‘Protecting the Government’s Interest’? What’d you get for ‘Case Decisions’? Do you think it’s as high as what Allison got—or what I got?”

“Well,” she drawled, thinking again. When uncomfortable, Caroline tended to grin. Now she was smiling widely. “I’ve only seized a car and a piece of rental real estate. I’ve never done an in-business seizure.”

“I’ll help you,” I said.

“You’ll help me?”

“I’ll assist, if you want. Is the file ready?”

“Ready for what?”

Two days later we were sitting in her car, parked in a church parking lot, which happened to be the parking lot of the Methodist church I attended as a boy. We were waiting for Andy McNeil to meet us. The nurseryman had several trucks: pickups, delivery vans, flatbeds, as well as three forklifts, according to Caroline’s financial statement and DMV records. It was going to be a good seizure.

“That lake down there,” I told Caroline. “That’s where I used to hang out every Sunday when I was a kid.”

She was a bundle of nerves; the fear radiated off her like the stench of alcohol off drunks. Did it radiate from me on the morning I seized the cabinetmaker? I couldn’t remember; it seemed a thousand years ago.

“Oh, did your mother bring you out to feed the ducks?”

“No, she brought me to Sunday school. That’s where I would play hooky.”

“You played hooky from Sunday school?”

“I was an adolescent agnostic.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s so sad. Did you get over it?”

“As best I could,” I said. Talking seemed to ease her anxiety, but she was still grinning from ear to ear. She opened the case file and began to review it, the fourth time since we had parked ten minutes ago.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” I said.

“I sure hope I remembered everything.”

“It doesn’t have to be perfect, Caroline.”

“Oh, I know.”

“You remember what they told us in Basic? ‘Don’t worry about screwing up. Everybody screws up. And we can fix almost everything you do.’”

“Yes, I remember that.”

“‘Make a decision. Just make a decision and go with it. We want you to make decisions; that’s why we hired you.’”

“I remember that! I remember them saying that! Who said that?”

“Sam.”

“That’s right.” She closed the case file. In two more minutes, it would be open again. She said, “It’s a family business. His father started it and now his two sons work there.”

“It won’t even go to sale.”

“It won’t?”

“We’re going to scare the living shit out of him. And in two weeks, three, tops, you’ll have the money. You’ll have full-pay.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re taking his baby.” I looked out my window, at the sunlight glancing off the rippling water of the lake. “Find what they love, Caroline. Find what is most precious to them and take it.”

Andy arrived, in convoy with two other drivers. Andy was driving the big flatbed; he would haul the forklifts. I stepped out of the car to have one last smoke.

“You’re gonna need more trucks,” I said.

“You know, Rick, I do get other work, now and then, from other folks. I’ll call in some backup, if we need it. This isn’t your case, right?”

“Right. Why?”

“‘Cause after last time, I ain’t comin’ on any more of your cases.” He was referring to the protestor seizure that went bad, when the daughter almost took his head off while he was hooking up the ‘82 Monte Carlo. “Hey, did I tell you I know this guy? He does the landscaping at my sister’s church.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“This is because I don’t want you to know a goddamned thing about me, taxman.” He was laughing. He clapped me hard on the shoulder. “Gettin‘ warm, ain’t it? Two weeks of winter, a week of spring, then hello mother-fucking summertime.”

I climbed back into Caroline’s car. She was gripping the steering wheel with both hands.

“You get out of the car,” I said. “You walk over to the taxpayer. You tell him why we’re here. You hand him the B. You read the paragraph on the B. We sticker the stuff. You fill out the 2433. You hand him the 2433. We load up the trucks and the forklifts. We put a lock on the gate, and we leave. Simple.”

She nodded, staring straight ahead. “Simple.”

* * *

And it was, until the son got a call on his cell phone from his frantic mother. He was at a job site. He dropped his shovel and jumped into his pickup truck and raced to the nursery, to his father’s rescue. The truck he drove belonged to the family business; he was bringing it right to us. Behind his seat, stuffed in a crumpled paper bag, was the Saturday night special he kept with him, for emergencies. Beside the bag was a plastic baggie containing ten ounces of marijuana.

Caroline handed the taxpayer the B. I stickered the forklifts first, recalling my first seizure and the teddy bear that haunted my dreams afterward. I walked into the yard, under the hot afternoon sun, and stickered the passenger-side window of the old Ford pickup parked there. I was walking around the front of the vehicle when I heard a terrific crash. I looked up. The back gate had been ripped from its post by the barreling truck driven by the taxpayer’s boy. It was coming directly at me. I froze. The front bumper of the old Ford pressed against the back of my knees. There was nowhere for me to run.

At the last second, he swung hard to the right, skidding to a stop, throwing up huge clods of wet earth. I stepped away from the Ford. He leapt from the cab and came right at me. He gave me no chance to speak. And he raised both hands as he came for me, screaming obscenities. I was a motherfucking-sonofabitch. Then a bastard. By “asshole,” he was on me. He slammed his hands into my right shoulder, knocking me off-balance, but I managed to stay on my feet. Behind me, Andy shouted, “Hey!” and a young girl appeared as if from nowhere and wrapped her thin arms around the kid’s waist. He struggled in her grasp, and she screamed at him to stop, to not be crazy, to calm down. Andy appeared at my elbow, his sleeves rolled up to his biceps. He was itching for a fight. “You okay, Rick?” he asked. I nodded. I held up my commission for the boy to see.

“My name is Rick Yancey,” I said. “I am an agent of the Department of Treasury, and you have just assaulted a federal officer.”

“So fucking arrest me, asshole!” he screamed.

“That’s later,” I said.

· · ·

He was arrested the following week, charged and released on $25,000 bond. I drove to Tampa to meet with the Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of prosecuting the case, and with Inspection. Inspection investigated threats against, assaults upon, and harassment of Service personnel, in addition to investigating the personnel itself. The Inspector assigned to my case was running late. He called and told the AUSA to start the meeting without him. The AUSA was a man named Gunderson. We met in his office in the federal building, the same building in which Jim Neyland conducted my final interrogation.

Gunderson entered the room with one hand over his eye.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was in the hall and some kid poked me in the eye.”

“Really?”

“Look.” He dropped his hand. His right eye was swollen nearly shut. “Little bastard could have blinded me.”

“Why did he do it?”

“How the hell should I know? Little bastard.” He punched his intercom button and shouted at his secretary to get him some ice and a towel.

“Where the hell is Inspection?” he asked. The question seemed rhetorical, so I didn’t answer.

“Well, I’ve seen the report, and lemme tell you, Rick, there’s some problems with this one.” He jabbed the button again and shouted, “Ice, ice, ice!” He flopped into his chair and leaned his head back and massaged his eye with the heel of his hand. “I’m gonna be frank with you. We got zero jury appeal. Zero. Nada. Zilch. First, his age. He’s an eighteen-year-old kid. He flew off the handle to defend his old man. Second, his lawyer says the kid didn’t know you were a Fed. You didn’t identify yourself.”

“Then why—”

He held up his left hand. The right remained over his eye. “Then why did he shove you? That’s a good question, but the answer won’t help much. Third, you are the IRS. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, it shouldn’t matter, but it does matter. You are the IRS, and no matter who I put on that jury, no one’s going to raise their hand and say, ‘Hey, I love the IRS!’ And last, you didn ‘t leave.”

“I was supposed to leave?”

“Immediately. Forthwith. Without hesitation. It’s kind of hard to make our case if you stick around to complete a seizure. I mean, how scared could you have been? Forget scared. How hurt? How threatened? How serious was it anyway? A little shove from an immature eighteen-year-old, defending the honor of his daddy. Why
did
you stick around? Tell me the truth.”

“I was angry.”

“Because he shoved you.”

“It was a punch.”

“Really? A punch is better.”

He picked up Inspection’s report and squinted at it with his left eye. He quoted, “‘At which point the subject violently placed both hands on Revenue Officer Yancey’s right shoulder and forcibly pushed him backwards several feet.’ You didn’t fall down.”

“No.”