Heather Cochran - The Return Of Jonah Gray

“Never mind then.”

“What, just because he’s in Stockton?”

“Geographically undesirable, my dear.”

I felt myself smile a little.

“So what does Mr. Stockton do anyway? No way this site is a full-time gig.”

In his file folder, I flipped to the back of his return, to the field just below his signature. “He’s a journalist,” I told her.

Journalists weren’t often targeted by the Service, but like a number of my assignments that August, Jonah Gray was a randomly chosen compliance audit. Every year, a sample set of taxpayers gets tagged by pure chance. I appreciated compliance audits for the challenge of not knowing what to look for, but I did sympathize with folks on the receiving end. Out of the blue, they were ordered to gather their records and justify their claims and often had to bring in a certified public accountant to weed through the process. And still, maybe half the time, the IRS wouldn’t find anything amiss. My father, an accountant for going on forty years at that point, liked to say that compliance audits were like revving a car engine once a month. You needed to do it, if only to keep things running. Then again, as a CPA, he got paid no matter how things turned out.

“He’s a journalist?” Martina said. “That’s like you, only cooler.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve got to figure that auditors and journalists are opposite sides of the same coin. With auditors being the quantitative, nerdy side. No offense.”

“How am I the flip side of a journalist? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re both ferreters. You’re more interested in finding the truth than pulling down a high salary. Journalists are always sniffing around for a story, looking for the why and who and how. Same as you. I bet he’s actually perfect for you. Too bad he’s in Stockton.”

“And that I’m auditing him.”

“I know, I know. You’ve got all those rules.”

Martina had to get off the line to take a call from her boss. After I’d hung up, I sat there, wondering if what she’d said was true. I supposed that I was a ferreter, though I’d never thought of myself in rodent terms. But she had a point. I sorted through bills and bank statements, interest income and mortgage expense and capital gains, in order to find my own version of a story. I was about to do the same with Jonah Gray’s life.

I stared at the first page of his return, studying the way he’d printed his address, 530 Horse hair Road, all caps, in black ink. He was obedient, at least in those first few lines. The IRS requests black or blue ink, but I’d seen purple and green, too. And once, pink. You’ve got to figure a guy who fills out his tax form in pink is daring you to do something about it. In his case, actually, we did. I don’t advise people to assume that the IRS has a hearty sense of humor.

Because Jonah Gray had handwritten his address information, I figured he’d moved to Horsehair Road within the past year, and that he’d prepared his own return. Taxpayers who’d stayed at the same address year after year are sent forms with preprinted labels. And an accountant would have printed the return straight from a computer.

I respected a self-prepared return. It took more effort, but it meant that Jonah was someone who wanted to know where his money went. I’d seen plenty of people get into trouble by signing everything over to CPAs, though I’d have caught hell if I ever told my father that.

So Mr. Gray was a journalist, I thought. I glanced at his W2 (stapled, as requested, to the front of his return). His employer was the Stockton Star, which a quick bit of research confirmed was Stockton’s local newspaper. But the salary he’d been paid was too low for a reporter, even at a small city rag. That meant he was part-time or that he had taken the job midway through the previous year.

Then I noticed a second W2 stapled beneath the first. Now I was getting somewhere. Before he began working for the Stockton Star, Jonah Gray had been earning fully three times as much as a writer for the Wall Street Journal. What’s more, he’d lived in Tiburon. Tiburon—the same marina hamlet in Marin County where I was going to dock my Catalina. But why would anyone leave Tiburon and the Wall Street Journal to write for the Stockton Star?

“What the hell is all this?” Ricardo was back, standing before my desk, his arms crossed. “I can hear it all the way over in my office. You can’t be getting any work done.” He looked toward the ceiling and shook his fist.

Only then did I notice the construction noise that drifted and clanged down from the fifth floor. When had that begun? I worked on four, and it was rare that sound would seep up or down from the surrounding levels. Usually, my floor’s sounds were white collar—the papery flutter of returns being slipped in and out of folders; the soft metallic click of a file cabinet closing; the clitter-tick of a calculator. But now, hammering, sawing, the clamor of pipes being hit and the whir of machinery clattered around my cubicle.

I hadn’t heard them until Ricardo came in. Had my concentration returned?

Without waiting for an invitation, Ricardo pulled up a chair and sat down. “I thought I would hide out over here for a few minutes, but this is chaos,” he said.

I watched a flake of ceiling tile drift like snow onto my desk.

“That can’t be healthy,” Ricardo said.

“Don’t you have work to do?” I asked. I liked Ricardo and his visits were usually a welcome break, but I was eager to find out more about Jonah Gray.

“I don’t actually. My archivist is hired and the next sexual harassment seminar isn’t for a month. What are you doing?”

“An audit.”

“The bean guy? It’s the bean guy, isn’t it? Ol’ Beanie Beanerson.”

“He’s a journalist,” I said. “He used to work at the Wall Street Journal, I’ll have you know.”

“Oh Lord, really?” Ricardo sounded put out.

“You don’t approve?”

“Journalists are so self-righteous,” Ricardo said. “It’s always, let me tell you what to think, let me tell you what to know. And financial types are the worst. Present company excluded, I mean.”

“Maybe the journalists you’ve met, but on his Web site, he actually invites debate. About plants, at least. And fertilizer.” Before I could say anything more, Ricardo held out his hand.

“What?” I asked.

“Give it. Give me the return.”

“I’m not really supposed to—”

“Oh, please child. Hand it over.”

I handed him the first page of Jonah Gray’s return, and Ricardo pretended to skim it.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” he clucked.

I could tell that he wasn’t actually reading it. “What do you think being a journalist says about his personality?”

“Since when do you care about personality?” Ricardo asked, as a particularly loud crack from above sent a piece of ceiling onto his lap. He brushed it off in disgust. Ricardo had a point. I usually focused on what an occupation said about a taxpayer’s propensity for fraud. Some, like Kevin the contractor, had greater opportunities than others. With that, I realized that I hadn’t thought about Kevin all day. Gene, either. What a relief that was.

“He’s probably one of those earnest droners utterly devoid of humor,” Ricardo added.

“I know for a fact that’s not true,” I said.

“You’re defending the guy?”

I felt my cheeks redden. “What I mean is, on his Web site, someone was asking about a plant called ‘hen and chicks.’”

“Hen and chicks?”

“Apparently, it’s a succulent.”

“Succulent,” Ricardo said lasciviously.

I ignored him. “So he writes, did you hear about the city guy who went to the country and bought fifty chicks? The next week he buys a hundred, and the week after that, two hundred. Finally, the clerk at the country store says, ‘You must be doing really well with your chicks,’ and the city guy says, ‘No. I guess I’m either planting them too deep or too far apart.’” I laughed a little. It was a silly joke.