Death on a High Floor (11 page)

I was back at my house by 8:45. Jenna was in the kitchen eating, with five or six tabloids spread out in front of her.

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

“The guys out front.”

“You talked to them?”

“Sure. I took them some coffee.”

“Oh,” I said.

“The tabs have a name for you now,” she said.

“What?”

She flipped the
National Enquirer
around so I could see it right-side up. There I was on the front page, suited up, looking directly at the camera. The headline above my picture said: “
Coin Killer
?” And under that: “
Dagger in Back over Coin?”

Next to my picture was a fuzzy picture of an 1804 silver dollar.

I laughed. “Wrong coin. But if it’s an original and not a re-strike, I’d love to own it. I don’t collect that stuff, but I bet I could cover the costs of hiring Oscar by selling it to somebody who does. Anyway, who the hell told them anything at all about a coin?”

Jenna stretched her arms above her head. She was wearing flannel pajamas. The stretch bared her very thin waist. It was not unattractive. I tried not to look. “Well,” she said, yawning and continuing the stretch, “the police probably leaked it to them. The first of many leaks to come. When they tortured my dad, they leaked two or three things each week. Takes its toll because you never know what’s coming next. Or exactly how wrong or twisted it will be.”

“And our strategy is?”

“Counter leaks. Oscar’s job.” She picked up the remote, pointed it at my small kitchen TV, and clicked it on. To my amazement, there was Oscar on the morning news, standing on the steps of some nondescript courthouse, condemning the police for the leak, saying none of it was true, proclaiming my innocence, and asserting there would be no indictment, all without pausing for breath.

I was incredulous. “Did you know he’d be on?”

“No. Just blind luck.” She grinned. “But it is the top of the hour, and there’s not much else going on. Too close to Christmas. So I took a shot.” She clicked it back off.

“Jenna, how does Oscar even know about the coin?”

“I told him about it.”

“Oh.”

I looked again at my picture in the
Enquirer
. “Where do you think they got that picture? I don’t even recognize it.”

She shrugged. “Someone from the firm probably sold it to them. Or maybe your ex-wife. There’ll be a ready market for pictures of you from now on. Are there any nudes of you?” She grinned again.

“No. How about of you?”

“None that I know of.”

“Speaking of which, would you mind getting dressed, Jenna? It makes me uncomfortable. You sitting around in your pajamas. It doesn’t seem right, even though you’re living here for the moment.”

“Simon rather liked me in pajamas.” She grinned for the third time. “But, okay.” She got up and left the kitchen. I could swear she twitched her butt at me as she went through the doorway, but, then, maybe not. Jenna was certainly in a different mood this morning than she had been at the end of the day yesterday. Almost giddy.

Truth is, my complaint about the pajamas, while based in fact, was mostly an excuse to get her out of the kitchen while I considered whether to tell her what Stewart had told me. It was odd that I, of all people, was thinking of withholding it. I have always hated it when clients keep things from me.

Sometimes clients hide things to avoid revealing a case-losing bad fact. Like a ten-year-old who doesn’t tell his parents that he’s just put a baseball through an upstairs window, in the hopes they won’t notice. Sometimes clients hide things just to try to keep control. If information is power, then telling even your own lawyer everything offers you up to the heartless ministrations of expertise. You have nothing left to give.

Jenna reappeared in a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, and black tennis shoes. With a flash of white sock. She posed in the doorway, one hand behind her head, the other at her waist. “More appropriate, Mr. Uptight?”

“You look like a nun in a Vatican-approved tennis outfit.”

She smiled and did a small curtsy. “Did you know you can date nuns now?”

“No. Really?”

“Yes, as long as you don’t get into the habit.” She giggled. “My seventh grade lesbian gym teacher told us that joke.” She came over, sat back down at the table and paused for a moment.

“You know, Robert, I seem to be in the giddy phase of sad.”

“So I noticed. Let me tell you something that will sober you up.”

“What?”

“I had breakfast this morning with Stewart Broder at the
DownUnder
.”

“Now there’s a boys’ club.”

“Maybe so. Anyway, Stewart told me that he thinks Harry killed Simon.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

I told her what Stewart had told me, word for word, including the whole weird thing about “hello.”

Jenna was instantly suspicious. “Well, if
Stewart
was there at 2:00 a.m., he’s as much of a suspect as you. More so. He admits he was there. You don’t. Shit. I think Stewart did it!”

“And his motive?”

“How would I know? Motive is just the icing on the cake of opportunity. Stewart is really weird. Who knows what his motive was? Who cares? He was there.”

I was about to enlighten her about what
I
thought Stewart’s motive might have been when Jenna cocked her head to the side, looked thoughtful and said, “Oh shit. Wait. ‘Hello!’”

“What?”

Jenna looked startled. Almost as if she had let slip something she hadn’t intended. “Hmm. To tell you, I guess I have to go into a part of my life you don’t really know about.”

“What can there be that I don’t know about? Are you about to tell me you’re really a secret agent?” I said it about as unseriously as you can say anything. I thought I knew the general outlines of Jenna’s life almost as well as I knew my own. After working together for seven years and sharing a rather large number of martinis, we had few secrets between us. Or so I thought.

“Do you know about my time in Hawaii?”

I shrugged. “I guess not.”

“I graduated from high school when I was fifteen. My parents thought I was too young to go to college. So they sent me off to spend a year in Hawaii with my Uncle Freddie. My father’s half-brother. On the Big Island. I don’t think they knew a lot about Uncle Freddie and his friends. It was like my own, private version of
Almost Famous
. I got quite an education.”

“About what in particular?”

“Drugs, among other things.”

“Using them?”

“Uh uh. Selling them.”

I sat there and didn’t know quite what to say. People walk around with the damnedest pasts hidden inside them, and for the most part you can’t tell. Drugs? Jenna?

I chose to say something well-modulated. “Well, reprehensible as that was, I still don’t see what is has to do with Stewart and Simon.”

“Uncle Freddie lived in Hilo. We used to call it Hell-lo. To describe what a pit it is. A lot of the drug dealers there call it that. It was full of fine art galleries. Could just as easily have been rare coin galleries. So rare coins and ‘hello’ spell a drug deal gone bad.”

“Lay it out for me. It’s beyond my world.”

“Assume you’re a drug dealer. You arrange for heroin to be brought into Kona by boat.” She tapped the bowl of sugar cubes. I guess the bowl was the boat and the cubes the drugs that I’d delivered.

“Then suppose,” she said, “that the local dealers pay you in cash. One million dollars in hundreds.” She handed me her napkin, which was apparently the one million in cash. “So now you’ve got a problem.”

“Which is?”

“You have to do something with the money. You can’t deposit it in a bank, because any cash transaction with a bank over $10,000 has to be reported to the feds.”

“I could put it in many banks,” I said.

“You’d have to put it in at least a hundred and one banks. Won’t be easy and will itself arouse suspicion. It will also make it very difficult to buy big things.” She smiled. “You’d have to write fifty checks for your new Maserati.”

“You seem to know a lot about this.”

“Yes and no. Much of it is theory to me. Some of it isn’t. Anyway, one solution is to buy something valuable from someone and pay cash for it. Like a nice Picasso.”

She took the million-dollar napkin back and handed me the box of Cheerios. Which I guess was the Picasso I’d just acquired. “Maybe you overpay for it a bit, Robert, so the art dealer doesn’t become too interested in why you have a million dollars in hundreds.”

“Okay, but now all I’ve got is a nice Picasso.” I waved the Cheerios box.

“No, what you’ve got is a medium of exchange with a relatively fixed value, which is all money is anyway. One that’s lightweight and not reportable, to boot. So you take the Picasso out of its frame, roll it up, and stick in your suitcase. It won’t arouse suspicion. Most people will think it’s just bad art.”

I looked at the Cheerios box. Trying to think of it as a Picasso I could roll up.

“Then,” Jenna said, “you go to an art dealer in a different state and sell the Picasso. Let’s say I’m the art dealer.”

She reached out and took the Cheerios box from me. “In exchange, I give you a check, maybe for somewhat less than a million. Made out to some small business you’ve opened.” She handed me another napkin, which was apparently the almost-million-dollar check. I took it and put it in my pocket.

“In recognition of the discount I got on the price,” she said, “I don’t ask you why you happen to have the Picasso in the first place, or what your company does. The check you just received is from a legitimate business. Your own ‘business’ then deposits it in your bank. Or maybe you ask for the amount to be split into a couple of checks and you deposit them in a couple of different banks. No reportable cash transactions.”

She sat back, looking pleased with her explanation. Then she added a further lesson in laundering. “Or, maybe you find an art dealer who’s really in the know, and you just trade the art. He takes the Picasso and maybe deeds you a house in exchange. It’s not a cash transaction that is a reportable transaction. It’s not even a check that will show up as a deposit in your bank account. Either way, you’ve laundered the money.”

“You think rare coins could be used in the same way?” I asked.

“Well, let’s put it this way,” she said. “There are an unusual number of fine art galleries in the backwoods around Hilo. A rare coin business would hardly be noticed, and a coin is even more easily transported than art.”

She took a quarter out of her pocket, snapped it down on the table in front of her, and then tossed the Cheerios box into the nearby sink. It landed with a thud. “Out with art, in with coins.”

“Seems a stretch,” I said. “Someone supposedly said ‘hello’ while shouting at Simon. So from just that you’ve concluded that they were importing drugs and laundering the money by buying and selling ancient coins in Hilo? Occam’s razor says that’s hardly the likely explanation. Simpler and requiring fewer additional assumptions would be to assume they were arguing about the coin and that the ‘someone’ used ‘hello’ in its original, old fashioned way. You know. ‘
Hello! Wake up and smell the coffee, Simon. The coin is fake! I’ve been cheated
.’”

“Oh, right, old William of Occam,” she said.

“You know his first name?”

“Cambridge. Mathematics degree,” she said. “Remember?”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

“Well, there are some things you and Bill Occam don’t know,” she said.

“Such as?”

“Simon owned a house on the Big Island.”

“He never mentioned it to me,” I said.

“Owned through a blind trust. Not many people know about it.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Simon did coke. Maybe not in a big deal way, but he always had it around.”

For some reason, that seemed utterly unlikely to me. “Jenna, did you ever actually see Simon use cocaine?”