Free Death and Taxes by Susan Dunlap Page B

same dealing with the nearly normal ones they’ve got left. It’s like asking Joe Montana to play against the second string.”
    Now I did gasp. I understood the sports car; I realized Lamott was taken with himself and his image. But to see himself as Joe Montana! That was as close to sacrilege as we come in this secular corner of creation.
    Thinking of Lyn Takai, I said, “What odds would you give about Drem sleeping with one of his auditees?”
    Lamott slammed on the brakes at the stop sign. He was laughing. He turned to me. “Assuming one of his victims could still stand to be in the same room with him, much less naked? Not unless he could find a necrophiliac.”
    My beeper went off. “Damn. I’ll have to get back.”
    “Let it go.”
    “Lamott, I’m the police. We don’t beep to impress people. Make a left.”
    “Hey, they’ll find someone else.”
    “Not as good as me.”
    He looked over, caught my eye, and grinned. The route to the station didn’t take us back past Howard’s house, which was just as well.
    “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Lamott said as he squealed to a stop and I jumped out.
    “If you’re alive,” I called, already racing inside. We’re not profligate about calling officers in the field. I took the steps two at a time, panting by the time I reached the dispatcher.
    “Memo on your desk,” he said before I could ask.
    I ran back down the stairs and yanked open the office door. The memo was from Heling: “Philip Drem married to Victoria Iversen, the ‘hermit’ next door to him.”

CHAPTER 7
    W HEN A MAN’S WIFE becomes a hermit, it doesn’t speak well of him.
    It had been fourteen hours since Drem’s accident. I hated to think what shape she might be in now. I got her phone number, called, and let the phone ring. If there’s one thing you should be able to count on with a hermit, it’s that she is home.
    “Yes?” The voice was faint. She’d picked up the phone on the sixth ring. How long had she been sitting there, wondering why Drem hadn’t come back, worrying, embroiled in that awful combination of grief and uncertainty?
    “Victoria Iversen?”
    “Yes?”
    “I’m Detective Smith, Berkeley Police. Has one of our officers contacted you yet?”
    “No.” I could hear the dread in her voice. I felt that familiar mix: a dread at having to break the news, yet a quickening of excitement to see her reaction and fit it with what I knew of the deceased. It wasn’t the type of thing I’d admit to my mother. But it was during those moments of shock that survivors had given me evidence they would never have divulged later. “I need to ask you some questions. I can be at your door in ten minutes.”
    “What is this about?”
    I’d been hoping to avoid giving her the news over the phone. “I’m afraid your husband has been in an accident.”
    “On his bicycle?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is he all right?”
    “I’m afraid not. I’ll be right out.”
    She gasped, a small shrill sound. Then she put down the receiver.
    I grabbed my coat, flicked on the answering machine, and headed for a patrol car.
    Victoria Iversen’s and Philip Drem’s addresses were on Milvia Street, site of one of the city’s latest ecological idiosyncrasies. Milvia used to be a normal residential street that ran parallel between Shattuck and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, two of the cross-town thoroughfares. A handy shortcut in a city where automotive convenience is anathema.
    In the seventies the city installed bike lanes and barricaded intersections (thus creating routes for bicyclists and rude shocks for drivers). “Too little,” environmentalists claimed. And a decade and a half and half a million dollars later were born seven blocks of the Milvia Slow Street: a series of speed humps (humps are more gentle than bumps) interspersed with cement peninsulas, each holding a sapling and extending six feet out from the curb—two to a block on each side of the street, not across from each other. Skirting these