The Tax Inspector

words, and it was her feelings. She could turn the shit of her life into jewels. She had plump arms and maybe a little too much weight under the chin and her belly pushed out against her clothes, but she was sexy. You had to say, whatever problems she had in bed, she was a sexy woman. You could watch men see it in her, but never straightaway.

‘Big night,’ he said. He stood up so she could take the bar stool and he sat instead on the ping-pong table.

‘Sure,’ she said. She was bright and tight, could barely talk. Tonight she was going to have her meeting with the band and with the lawyer. She drank her beer. He leaned across to rub her neck, but you could not touch her neck or shoulders unless she had been drinking.

‘Don’t, hon.’ She took his hand and held it. Something had happened with the neck and shoulders. Sentimental Cacka had dragged her out of bed at two in the morning to sing ‘Batti, batti’ from Don Giovanni to his visitors. It happened then, he guessed. She never said exactly, but he saw it exactly, in his mind’s eye. You could see the shadows of it. You could draw a map from them.

‘What you think?’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘Will I do it?’

‘You’ve got to decide,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you what to do.’

‘I’m just hurt, I guess. I’m pissed off with them for talking to a lawyer.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I know.’ He patted her thigh sympathetically – he was the one who had persuaded Craig and Steve Putzel that they could pull Cathy out on the road if they did what he said. He was the one who found them this so-called Entertainment Lawyer. He had manoeuvred them all to this point where they were an inch away from having the lives they wanted, all of them. He brushed some ash off his suede shoe. He buttoned his suit jacket and unbuttoned it.

‘Big night,’ he said again. Through the Venetian blinds he could see Mort walking down the fire escape from this mother’s apartment. This time next year, all this was going to seem like a bad dream.

Cathy saw Mort too. ‘They’ve been talking about the doctor,’ she said. ‘You can bet on it. He’s been telling her it was all my idea, the coward.’

Howie always thought Mort was a dangerous man, but he doubted he would be dishonest in the way Cathy imagined. He watched Mort as he bent over the whitewashed sign Howie had written on the windscreen of the red Toyota truck. He scratched at it with his fingernail.

‘He doesn’t like my sign,’ he said.

Cathy lifted the Venetian blind a fraction so it pinged.

Mrs Catchprice had walked back from the gates and joined her son. She also scratched at the whitewash with one of her keys.

‘You know he thinks “As-new” is sleazy,’ Cathy said. ‘You must have known they’d wipe it off.’

‘Ah,’ said Howie, ‘who cares.’

That surprised her. She looked at him with her head on one side and then, silently, drew aside his jacket, undid a shirt button, and looked at the colour of his rash.

She said: ‘You really think I’m going to take the leap, don’t you?’

He wasn’t counting on anything until it happened. She had been this close four years before, and once again, two years before that. Each time Granny Catchprice pulled her strings. You would not believe the tricks the old woman could pull to keep her workhorse working.

‘If we’re done for tax I can’t go on the road. You know that. I can’t just desert them.’

‘Yes you can,’ he said. He did up his shirt button. ‘This time you’ve got to.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to.’

She had that tightness in her bones, a flushed luminous look, as if she was about to do a show. He watched her drain her beer.

‘You look beautiful,’ he said.

‘This time I’m going to do it.’

‘When you look like that I want to fuck you.’ He came and held her from behind and began to kiss her neck. She accepted his kisses. They lay on her skin like unresolved puzzles.

‘He’s coming up here,’ she said.

She meant Mort. He could see why she said it. Mort was walking across the yard this way, but he was probably on his way to hammer and yell at Benny’s cellar door. Mort’s house shared a hot water service with their apartment, but Mort had not visited them for nine years.

‘He’s coming here,’ she said. ‘This is it. It’s starting.’

She had such amazing skin – very white and soft.

‘Don’t!’ She broke free from his hands, suddenly irritated.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘It’ll be about the nursing home.’

‘They’re going to try and make me stay.’

‘Cathy, Cathy … they don’t even believe you’re leaving them.’

‘She’s sending him to say something to me.’

‘Honey, calm down. Think. What could they say to you at this stage?’

Cathy’s eyes began to water. ‘She’s so unfair.’

Howie stroked her neck. ‘You’re forty-six years old,’ he said. ‘You’re entitled to your own life.’

‘She makes him say it for her. He’s going to say how much she needs me.’ She put her hand on his sleeve. ‘He’s coming up the stairs.’

‘Let me lock the door,’ Howie said.

Mort had not visited their apartment since he argued with Howie about the ping-pong table eleven years ago.

‘This is the living-room,’ he said. ‘There’s no room for a ping-pong table.’

‘With all respect,’ Howie had answered, ‘that’s not your business.’

‘Respect is something you wouldn’t know about,’ Mort said. ‘It’s the Family Home. You’re turning it into a joke.’

Even allowing for the fact his father had just died, this was a crazy thing to say. Howie could not think of how to answer him.

‘Respect!’ Mort said.

Then he slammed his fist into the brick wall behind Howie’s head. It came so close it grazed his ear.

‘I’ll lock the door,’ Howie said, not moving.

Cathy poured some Benedictine into a tumbler. Then the door opened and she looked up and there was Mort and his lost wife, side by side. But it couldn’t be Sophie. Sophie had left thirteen years ago.

13

It wasn’t Sophie. It was Benny. He had made himself into the spitting image of the woman who had shot him. Whether he had meant to do it, or if it was an accident of bright white hair, the effect was most disturbing, to Cathy anyway.

All through the day the men from the workshop had come and gone with their grubby job cards, cracking their jokes about her nephew’s ‘look’, but not one of them had said – how could they have known, they were all too young – how like his mother it made him seem. His hair was the same colour, the exact same colour, and it gave his features a luminous, fresh-steamed look. Sophie had grown her hair long in the end but at the beginning she had it short like this and now you could see he had the cheekbones. He was like his mother, but he had a damaged, dangerous look his mother never had. No matter what shit she put up with from the Catchprices she kept her surface as fresh and clean as a pair of freshly whitened tennis shoes right up to the day she shot her son.

Cathy said: ‘Benny, you look nice.’

The person he made her think of was Elvis – not that he looked like Elvis, but he felt how Elvis must have felt when he walked into Sam Phillips’s recording studio in