A Call from Commissioner Sam Oliver
A phone call from the IRS Commissioner — Sam Oliver.
The first words out of his mouth were these:
"You went and pulled another job without even stopping to breathe?"
"Quite the heartwarming greeting for our first phone call, Commissioner." I said it as I pushed through the lobby's revolving door.
"Heartwarming, is it? I've just had the district situation room on the line. Three IRS employees are sitting in the conference room at Castle Rock Construction Group headquarters, and there is no record anywhere of an authorization to open an investigation. What exactly is going on?"
"Ah, that was a voluntary submission. They sent a business card over first, offering to hand the materials across of their own accord. Ignoring that would have been dereliction of duty."
A short silence drifted down the line.
"...You had that answer prepared in advance, didn't you."
"Yes, sir. I rehearsed it a good five times."
"Heh."
Sam Oliver laughed.
"A voluntary submission, hm... Don't tell me even that was part of your calculations? Well, set that aside for now. The truth is, I called to pass something along. What was it... ah — some time this afternoon at the earliest, a document will be coming down to your team from the Large Business Investigation Bureau."
I stopped walking. My shoe sole gave a short scrape against the floor.
"I'm sorry — what kind of document would that be?"
"A jurisdiction adjustment request, I'd wager. Calling for every last scrap of Castle Rock-related material to be handed over to their side."
My stress index shot straight up. Someone intended to walk off with the entire ball of thread I'd only just gotten my fingers around. They were announcing it, bold as brass — that they meant to eat it whole.
My head spun trying to work out what development this was even supposed to be.
"Do you know who the officer in charge is?"
"Brad Sherman. Section Chief of Investigation Team 3 at the Large Business Investigation Bureau. Around twelve years with the Service, and his team-lead promotion review falls this year. There's a record of him searching your name in the internal personnel system."
It was a name I'd never heard before. Even so, a man who'd made the team-lead shortlist in his first decade wasn't likely to be wholly without ability.
"Ah, and one more thing."
"Go ahead."
"Chief Sherman spent four years under Carter Northrup. You catch my meaning? It may not be a matter of him stealing your work to get promoted — he might simply be a man taking his orders from the Castle Rock side. In any case, refuse when the proposal comes. The whole thing stinks."
"Carter... that's the name of the executive who was at Harrison, one of Castle Rock's subsidiaries. Yes — that was already my intention."
"Good. If anything unusual turns up on that front, hit my direct line. As long as it isn't too late at night, I'll hear you out."
The line went dead.
I slipped the phone into my pocket and looked up at the sky.
The Commissioner handled loose ends more cleanly than I'd given him credit for.
It was roughly an hour into the day's work when Sarah slid her chair halfway out from behind the partition and shot me a careful glance.
"There are three men over there muttering 'Leo—'? I think they've come looking for you."
I didn't take my eyes off the monitor. So the thing that was coming had finally come.
"Did you catch which floor they came down from?"
"Judging by the elevator display, they got off on nine."
The ninth floor belonged to the Large Business Investigation Bureau. Right on cue.
Before long, their footsteps stopped in front of my desk. Three suits stood looking down at me.
"Investigator Leo Kim?"
"That's me."
"Brad Sherman, Investigation Team 3, Large Business Investigation Bureau."
Having delivered his brief introduction, he laid a file down beside my keyboard.
"This is a jurisdiction adjustment request. All materials pertaining to Castle Rock Construction Group and its affiliated vendors are to be transferred to our side."
Sarah poked her face out from behind the partition. The clatter of keyboards along the row of investigators fell silent one by one.
I asked without so much as opening the file.
"I picked this case up on my own initiative. No prior request for cooperation, no legal basis — and you simply barge in with this? It feels strange saying it myself, but I've been producing results here."
"We are well aware. Ah — and of course there is a basis. Castle Rock Group's annual revenue exceeds four hundred million dollars. Corporate matters of that scale are our jurisdiction. More to the point, a case this size is not one a field investigator from Collections should be running alone."
"Well, that much is true."
Sherman's eyebrow rose a fraction.
"Glad to see you're quick to understand. Then if you'll simply hand it over right aw—"
"But I'm not investigating Castle Rock."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I'm working the trust fund recovery penalty case against Keller Staffing Solutions and its CEO, Randall Keller, personally. Keller Staffing is nothing more than a staffing agency."
I drew the relevant folder out of my drawer and set it on the desk.
That instant, Sherman's face went rigid.
"Investigator Leo. Don't play games with words. Since this morning, I see, you've added an outfit called 'Bayside Labor' to your caseload? Everyone in this building knows both of those companies are Castle Rock subcontractors."
Hm. Which meant, in other words, that he had come creeping through another team's investigators' work logs as well....
So that's how you want to play it.
I deliberately turned my gaze away from Sherman and onto the lower-graded employee who had accompanied him.
"Then show me the regulation that says you may peg an investigation into a subcontractor's case to the prime contractor's revenue. I've never heard of any such thing."
The young investigator who'd caught my glance quickly looked away.
Now, as the superior, he had to resolve both his subordinate's fluster and the situation at hand. Fumble either one, and keeping his dignity intact would be a struggle.
"...Investigator Leo."
The office went quiet for a moment. One tactless investigator from another team, close by, let out a low whistle.
Sherman picked the file back up.
"Haah. Very well. Then let me leave you with a single piece of advice before I go. Refuse to cooperate with another division like this, and someday you will regret it."
"I'll treasure that advice, sir."
"And my visit here today will remain on the written record. If an incident breaks out over this later, everyone will know that we requested the transfer and Collections refused. Which is to say, the blame in its entirety gets pinned on your side. You're still fine with that, I take it?"
Ah — so that was the point.
Now that I looked at it properly, the man hadn't come to take the case at all. He had come to stake out a safe position for himself in advance, in case a question of responsibility ever blew up while the case was in my hands. Working beneath a Castle Rock heavyweight, he would have needed some certainty of his own, after all.
His promotion — fast for his years — finally made sense.
I rose slowly from my seat.
"Then put this in the record as well."
"Put what?"
"'Collections Investigator Leo Kim was merely trying, in good faith, to do the job assigned to him.' — that's what."
The muscle along Sherman's jaw moved once.
"...Investigator Leo. Do you really believe you can afford to run this wild?"
"Have I committed some crime I'm unaware of?"
Before long, Sherman put on the expression of a man who could not stand to watch any longer, closed the distance, and spoke in a voice so low I could hear him breathing:
"Do you have any idea what kind of company you're up against right now? And what is this attitude, in front of a senior with more years than you?"
Out of nowhere — what? A snort escaped me.
At the same time, those two sentences told me exactly whose man I was dealing with. Sherman was, sure enough, something close to a small-fry puppet the Castle Rock side had all worked over.
...Do I know what kind of company I'm up against?
I knew. Probably better than anyone else in this building. If anyone was in the dark here, it was them.
Waving seniority around so cheaply... without a clue who's standing behind me.
What was more, the man on the twelfth floor — the one who held every approval line in this building in his hands — had told me with his own mouth to run as wild as I pleased.
And who exactly are you, to hold forth on my future and make yourself a nuisance?
For a moment I wanted to inform this man — who looked as though he enjoyed playing rank games — that my backer was a figure of the Commissioner's own caliber. What expression would he make then, I wondered?
After Sherman's visit, that afternoon, I spread Bayside Labor Service's quarterly payroll tax returns across my desk.
...
This was the very company my father had commuted to in a hard hat six years ago. He left for work there one morning and never came home.
Simply seeing the company name printed at the top of the paperwork was enough to bring the smell of antiseptic in a hospital corridor back to life.
In any case, this was the second-oldest of Castle Rock's six subcontractors, and once I set Sarah to compiling the various records, something a little peculiar surfaced.
Sarah held out a printout.
"The address and street name are different from Keller Staffing's, but it's the same building. Same warehouse — they'd been splitting it, one floor apiece."
"Well, this is practically announcing in broad daylight that they intend to save on taxes — no, to evade them outright. What is it with Castle Rock's subcontractors, being this brazen? They don't even bother hiding it."
Not that I couldn't understand. This was an organization that had once reached out to seize the IRS Commissioner himself and pull his strings. There might yet be some enormous variable in play that I hadn't foreseen.
Soon enough, my eyes moved down to the return itself.
Third quarter of last year: 112 employees... total wages of four million two hundred thousand dollars?
That was the moment.
Pop. A red dot rose from the paper.
The dot swelled slowly, the way ink drinks into water, then became an arrow and slid across the page.
...!
I had never expected the company that ran the site where my father died to be clean. I simply hadn't imagined it would leap out at me from the very first page I touched.
A closer look... yep. This outfit, too, was practicing tax evasion with true professionalism.
The starting point was the 'number of employees' box.
The arrowhead vaulted two cells to the right and struck the 'amount paid' box, sprang once more from there, and shot out toward the blank margin at the bottom of the page.
But where the arrow came to rest was a little strange. Nothing was written there at all. Bare white paper.
...Huh? Why the margin, all of a sudden?
Had my ability glitched out somehow?
My temple gave a sharp throb. I closed my eyes, then opened them again.
But on a closer look, it wasn't an empty margin after all.
The arrowhead had come to rest above the page number of a single attachment filed beneath it.
I pulled out the attachment in question.
[ Amended Return Details — Employee Count Adjustment ]
The contents were simple. A few lines stating that the headcount originally filed as 112 had later been amended to a figure approaching half — that was the whole of it.
And yet, for some reason, the 'reason for amendment' field was empty. The box had been drawn; its inside was snow-white.
Sarah, who had been watching over my shoulder, shrugged.
"Uh... even at a glance, that's just wrong."
I nodded and pinned the two documents side by side with my pen.
"The withheld taxes had already been deducted from the employees' wages. It's printed right there on their pay statements, so that part is no lie. But it doesn't match the headcount reported to the IRS."
Sarah's eyes went wide.
"...So they never properly reported it. Or paid it."
"Exactly. This one's even nastier than the last. Keller at least put effort into hiding things — these people just bare their bellies in broad daylight and dare you to come at them."
I moved on to the account withdrawal records.
Thanks to my ability, a few withdrawals from Bayside's corporate account over the same quarter snagged my eye.
Forty-two thousand dollars in marina berth fees, in Florida.
Two car leases under a private individual's name, at thirty-nine hundred a month apiece.
And two hundred thirty thousand dollars paid out under the name 'Palmer Holdings.'
Palmer Holdings' registered address was Glenn Palmer's house.
Sarah, having heard me out to the end, set her paper cup down with a soft thump.
"...This one's a far bigger fish than Keller."
"It is. But there's one decisive difference from the Keller case."
"What's that?"
"Keller kept insisting his finances were in a bad way, remember? Well, the paperwork shows this company's owner paid for a yacht slip that very same quarter. He'd dismantled his own excuse about being too broke to pay, all by himself. Which, frankly, makes my job easier."
"...You'd already confirmed all that? Still, though... I can't help feeling a little sorry for him."
"Huh? Sorry about what?"
Feel sorry? What on earth was she talking about? I stood blinking for a moment, waiting for Sarah to go on.
"Because out of everyone he could have been caught by, he had to get caught by you, of all people. This man bought a house in New York not long ago... once the tax bill comes down on him again, from that day on he'll be living out on the street, flat broke."
© Kim Okji#1v8mj