down white oxford tucked into shiny, stiff, dark jeans. No belt. A two-decade-old paisley tie and running shoes.
“Hello, Mr. Idle.” His weary, high-pitched voice seems inconsistent with his carriage. “Congratulations on your award. Seems like you did a good thing.”
I’ve seen this guy once before, prior to the luncheon. He was standing in the doorway of Green Love, one recent morning; I think I was whisking out of the office to get to an interview.
I’ve gotten out of the Audi, sprint-ready, though I’m too curious and tired to take off. He’s in his fifties, and no physical threat.
“Have you had it checked?” I ask.
“What?”
“You roll your right ankle when you walk. I guess you’ve gotten used to it but you’re stretching your ligament and sometime in the next decade you’re going to hate getting out of bed.”
“I got it tripping over a Labrador when I was chasing a deadbeat mom. Some banking exec.” He looks down and rolls his ankle in midair. “That woman could fly.”
Without taking his eyes from me, he reaches toward his back pocket with his right hand, deliberate. I flinch. He pulls out an elongated yellow envelope, official-looking. He extends it. I look at it but don’t reach for it.
“You’ve been served.”
He flips the envelope through my open car window.
“My work is done here.” He delivers the stock line, and wanders back to his car.
Inside the car, I open the envelope. It’s from the United States Treasury. I’m called into a hearing in four days. It says I’ve ignored repeated letters informing me that I owe “considerable” back taxes.
The letter offers few details beyond it telling me my hearing date is at 4 p.m. and, in all bold, that I may face criminal charges by failing to appear. Criminal charges.
It must be a mistake or joke. How does someone with my meager wages owe considerable taxes? And how could I not have seen the previous letters? Did I get them from the Treasury and ignore them? I am disorganized, I admit, but my chaos stops short of white-collar crime.
At the bottom of the letter is a phone number. I call it, reaching an automated phone menu that, when I follow it to its logical end-after inputting my tax ID number from the letter, and my birth date-I wind up getting an instruction to show up for a hearing with a revenue specialist on the date noted on the letter. Someday, some seventeen-year-old computer genius will destroy all the world’s automated phone menus and have a national holiday named after her.
I look at the spot where the square-headed delivery man had been parked and is no longer. I wished I’d probed him a bit, maybe asked him how he knew to find me at the awards luncheon. But I’m also struck by the obvious answer: if he’d done any research on me, he’d have seen the event publicized in various spots on the web.
I toss the envelope into the back, watch it find a final resting place on Isaac’s car seat, and I’m overcome with a wave of exhaustion.
I close my eyes for a catnap. I wake up with the sun still looming above one of the Valley’s three-story office parks, feeling decidedly refreshed, ready to attack a mystery.
I call Faith. It again goes directly to voice mail.
Next up: a former reality-TV contestant named Sandy Vello. This approach I’ll make in person.
7
Into my phone I punch PRISM, the name of the corporation Sandy worked for. It claims three campus headquarters. One each in South San Francisco, Berlin and Beijing. That’s no surprise and maybe not true. Increasingly, companies establish several headquarters so wherever customers live they can feel local ties. I use Google Earth to eyeball the nearby address and find it located in an office complex near the bay, just north of the airport.
An hour later, I drive by the campus, such that it is. It’s a single office building, six stories, glass and metal that feel as unwelcoming and lonely as the Holiday Inn across the way. The smattering of cars suggests the building is far from full, its engineers working typically odd hours or at home, or the company’s presence here is small. Or maybe this company, like many on the Peninsula, provides bus service from San Francisco, ostensibly an environmental play to reduce traffic and car emissions, but also so employees can get the first wave of emails knocked out during the commute.
At the front door, I peer into a small, spare lobby. I press a buzzer on the locked door below a brass placard emblazoned “PRISM-Floors 4 and 5,” with Chinese characters below it. Presumably, the receptionist is on the fourth floor. No answer. I try again, in vain. I wait for someone to come in or out, also in vain. On the wall beside the placard, there’s a phone number for reception. I call. I get an automated phone system. It allows me to dial by name, which I do. A voice mail answers: “It’s Sandy. Leave a message.” Sandy Vello, at least, does, or did, work at this place. I hang up. I wait some more. But no employees show up, and none exit. No one for me to make an inquiry with, no string to tug.
This is pointless, and probably not the best way to announce my attention or intentions. I start the car and head north.
A half hour later, I’m at the entrance to a place equally uninviting but somehow more approachable, the Twin Peaks Youth Guidance Center. I swallow hard. I came here not long after Isaac was born-losing myself in work so as not to think about how Polly and I went wrong-writing freelance fluff for the
As I pull into the visitor lot, I remember the layout. Three sections: a maximum security dormitory to the far left cordoned by a foreboding gate, a two-story administrative law building in the middle and, elevated on a hill just above the lot, a learning annex. It’s a single-story building that serves both inmates-the city calls them “residents”-who prove themselves sufficiently able to play with others, and a mix of lower-income kids from around the city who get bussed in to do after-school programs, learn tradecrafts, use computers, read, perform one-act plays they write. The annex itself actually has reasonably nice amenities, having been privatized a couple years ago to offload budget burden from a county starved of tax dollars. Still, nice touches notwithstanding, the buzzwords here are “basic life skills,” a far cry from the buzzwords “eventual Yale graduate,” spoken at private schools that are just blocks away and eons apart.
According to her obituary, Sandy Vello regularly volunteered here.
As I kill the ignition, the Audi’s fading dashboard tells me that it’s nearly 5, closing time. It’s a tight window for a long shot.
And something doesn’t feel quite right. Two cop cars, red lights flashing but unaccompanied by sirens, sit in front of the high metal gate that surrounds the dormitory section. Maybe trouble inside. If so, I’m the only passerby taking notice. Behind me, commuters crowd the adjacent artery, not a rubbernecker among them. They’re trying to get home before the light drizzle turns more menacing. Dusk threatens.
In the annex area, there’s not a soul in sight, I follow a sign for “volunteer access” and trudge narrow cement stairs to the entrance to a rounded building resembling a high-school basketball gym. I pull on the handle of the double-wide, thick green metal doors. Locked, of course. Craning my neck, I try to peer through musty glass with wire mesh between its triple panes. I push the buzzer. I hear the door click. I pull it open and take in the peculiar smell of sweat and antiseptic.
I’m standing at the entrance to an anteroom bisected by a wall-to-wall heavy wood reception counter. Behind it stand two women engaged in conversation, neither of whom looks up at me.
“Not taking deliveries today. It’s a lockdown.” The slender woman now glances up. Behind her on the wall, a poster with its right edge curled from age displays a man with welding glasses and a caption: “Skills Not Pills.” Beside it, cheap faux bronze framed, the portly head of the warden. He’s got a comb-over, a rotten makeup job and, in the corner of his lip covering what I know to be his ever-present cold sores. When the county privatized this lockup facility, he got nominal oversight. The move mollified chagrined lefties who had been accused on conservative radio of acknowledging through the privatization the inhering failure of public projects.
