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"Maybe you didn't," she said, "but the deadline was missed; it's too late to argue it now. Damn, that makes me mad! How I wish I could have been with you before it was too late. They could at least have told you!"
"I knew on other levels, wook," I said. "I think part of me wanted the whole thing wiped out. It wasn't working, it wasn't making me happy."
"I'm surprised that you know that."
Richard! I thought. You know nothing of the sort! Of course it was making you happy! Didn't you have all the airplanes . . . don't you still? And your perfect woman? Of course it made you happy!
What a lie. The empire was a shambles, money plastered around like wallpaper stuck up by amateurs, myself the worst. I had a taste of empire life, and it was fluff, whipped cream, with a spoon of sweet-arsenic neglect for flavor. Now the poison was at work.
"That's not the way it had to be," she said. "You would have done so much better not to have hired anybody. Just gone on and been your same old serf."
"I was my same old self. I had more toys, but I was still me. My same old self never could do bookkeeping."
"m," she said.
We settled around the desk of John Marquart, the attorney Leslie had hired when I was in Spain. Cups of hot chocolate were brought in, as though somebody knew it was going to be a long meeting. She opened her attache case, set out her lists of notes, but the lawyer spoke to me.
"You filed a capital loss against ordinary income," he said. "Is that the problem, in a nutshell?"
"I think the problem is I hired a financial wizard who knew less about money than I did, which is less than zero," I told him. "The money he was investing, it wasn't numbers on paper, it was real money and it-pouf-disintegrated in the market. The IRS doesn't have a square on the tax-form for pouf. I think that's it, in a nutshell. To be honest, I don't know what the guy filed. I was sort of hoping you'd tell me
answers instead of problems. It's me hiring you, after all, and this is supposed to be your specialty. ..."
Marquart looked at me odder and odder, reached for his coffee, peered over the cup as though he hoped it might protect him from a raving client.
Leslie stepped in then, and I heard her voice in my mind, asking me please to sit there and be quiet, if possibly I could.
"As I understand it," she said, "the damage is done. Richard's tax attorney-the tax attorney his financial manager got for him-didn't answer the IRS in time, so the government won a judgment by default. Now it wants a million dollars. Richard doesn't have a million dollars in cash to pay them at once. So the question is, can he arrange to make payments? Can he give them a lump-sum down payment, and promise the rest as he liquidates his assets? Will they give him time to do it?"
The attorney turned to her with evident relief. "I don't see why not. That's fairly common in these cases; it's called an Offer in Compromise. Did you bring the figures I wanted?"
I watched her, marveled that she'd be so much at home in a law office.
She set labeled lists on his desk. "Here's Cash Available Now, this one is Assets To Be Liquidated, and here's his Income Projection Over The Next Five Years," she said. "Between these and new income, the figures show he can pay the full amount in two years, three at the most."
While I was sailing, I thought, Leslie was researching tax-payment schemes! I'm being wiped out, not getting rich- why does she care so much?
Soon the two of them were analyzing my problems as though I weren't in the room. I wasn't. I felt like a mosquito
in a bank vault ... I could find no way to break through the utter heavy dullness of liens, assets, liquidations, payment schedules. The sun was shining outside. We could go for a walk, buy [email protected] cookies. . . .
"I'd rather structure the payout over the next five years, instead of three," Marquart was saying, "in case his income isn't quite what you project. If he can pay it sooner, that's fine, but he'll have a heavy current-tax burden with this kind of income, and we want to be sure we aren't making new problems for him down the road."
Leslie nodded, and they talked on, the two of them working out details. A calculator clucked numbers on the desk between them; Leslie's notes marched in order down a blue-lined tablet.
"I can see it from their point of view," she said at the end. "They don't care about the people Richard hired, or whether he knew or didn't know what was going on. They want their money. Now they'll get it, with interest, if they'll just wait a little. Do you think they'll wait?"
"It's a good offer," the attorney said. "I feel sure they'll accept it."
By the time we left, the disaster had been tamed. Once, I had found a million dollars in my account with a single telephone call; to come up with such a modest sum over five whole years, that would be simple. Sell the house in Florida, sell the airplanes, all but one or two of them, get the film produced . . . simple.
And now I have Leslie and a professional Los Angeles tax attorney to keep order in my life, no slender twigs to break under pressure.
There had been a storm at sea; I had fallen in way over
my head. This woman had jumped into the waves and pulled me out, saved my financial life.
We left the lawyer's office full of hope.
