Death on a High Floor (14 page)

“I really am sorry, Jenna. I guess I thought what I thought because it seemed like you plunged into defending me without a backward look.”

“Maybe defending you will help avenge him. I know you didn’t do it. Maybe I’ll be able to help nail the asshole who did do it.”

“How can you be so sure I didn’t do it?”

“You’re not a killer, Robert. And besides, you couldn’t have killed Simon with a knife even if you had wanted to.”

I felt oddly offended at that. I was still strong and agile. I go to the gym three times a week. Most weeks, anyway.

“Why not?”

“He had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. You wouldn’t have gotten close.”

“He did that stuff a long time ago.”

“He still had a hard body.” She said it in a very soft voice. Almost a whisper. Then a tear rolled down her face.

I reached into the In-N-Out bag, the one that had had the fries in it, pulled out a napkin and handed it to her.

She took it from me without looking at it and dabbed at her eye.

“Ugh! It has ketchup on it!”

She began to giggle. I followed. Soon both of us had dissolved into gales of laughter. I fumbled around in the bag again and located a ketchup-free napkin. I reached over and wiped the smear of ketchup from under her eye.

“There you go, Jenna. Ketchup off.”

“You are such a dork, Robert.”

“Sometimes, I guess.”

“Can we change the topic?”

“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”

“I’ve been thinking that a key to all this might be what is in Robert’s secret room. The one I never went in.”

“You may be right. Maybe we could ask Spritz what he found in there. Or maybe your friends at KZDD could ask him.” I laughed.

“Maybe we should just go find out ourselves.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Seriously. We could go over there. And I think I know how to get into that room.”

“Even if you do, there will be cops everywhere.”

“I doubt it. It’s been four days. There’s probably one cop at the front door of his apartment. But I bet not inside the apartment itself. They’d be afraid of messing up the crime scene. Hand me my cell phone, will you?” I gave it to her and she dialed a one-button, preprogrammed number. “Hey, Mike,” she said, “What’s the scoop over at the Rafer condo?” She pressed the phone close to her ear and I couldn’t hear what was said on the other end. “Thanks. Q
ue pasa
with Harry? . . . Okay.
Ciao, amigo
.”

“Well, Roberto, there’s only one cop, at the front door of the apartment. No one out front of the building.”

“What’s with the
amigo, que pasa
stuff?”

“I dunno. Just silly I guess.”

“So there’s only one cop at the front door,” I said. “Isn’t
he
going to see us go in?”

“Only if we go in through the front door.”

“That condo only has a front door. The backdoor would be a window that drops down about 200 feet.”

“There’s another way. You’ll think it clever,” she said.

“I’ll wait to see, I guess. Anyway, what did he say about Harry?”

“That Harry left his place about fifteen minutes after we did. They followed him to LAX. He’s going somewhere. Mike promised to call me back and tell me where.”

We were beginning to approach the clot of traffic that always surrounds downtown’s freeways. It’s there day or night. I’ve never understood it. Maybe it’s because four freeways converge there. Maybe it’s because motorists slow to look at the road-hugging Convention Center and wonder how anything so ugly could have been built in the capital of glitz. We slowed our way through the traffic, until Jenna took the 1st Street off-ramp. She parked a couple of blocks away from the glitzy building in which Simon had his condo.

As we got out of the car, Jenna reached into the back seat and grabbed a small leather purse from amidst the debris. Jenna doesn’t usually carry a purse. She once described them as a male plot.

“Are we really, seriously going to do this?” I asked.

“Yes, we very seriously really are.”

I walked with Jenna to the building, through the lobby, and then into an elevator. She punched the button for twenty-four.

“Isn’t his condo on twenty-three?”

“It is. But it’s a two-story penthouse, and the second floor of the condo is on twenty-four.”

“Okay,” I said. “But there’s no door into his condo from twenty-four.”

“Right. But there’s a door into 2402. Which is a small, detached maid’s room and kitchen that’s been empty for a couple of years.”

“So?”

“Just watch.”

We got off the elevator, and she produced a key to 2402. We went in.

“Now what?” I asked.

“You’ll see.” Jenna walked across the single room to a dormer window, which looked out on a small, roofed deck. She pushed open the bottom half of the window and skinnied herself through onto the deck. Then she walked across to a set of tall, floor-to- ceiling glass doors that looked into the second floor of Simon’s condo. She rattled one of the glass doors, and it opened.

“Come on over, Robert. Loose latch. My secret way in.”

I managed, just, to push myself through the narrow window, although I felt ridiculous. Then I followed her through the open door into the second floor bedroom of Simon’s condo. It was a large, perfectly square room furnished in a spare Japanese style. Tatami mats and no western furniture. Just padded cushions around the walls, with four low, lacquered tables pushed together in the middle of the room, each set with a small black vase. Three were empty. One held red blossoms that were well beyond wilt.

“Is this how you always arrived?”

“Sometimes. We used to play . . . games. You know, naked girl arrives in your bed in the middle of the night?” She giggled. “Haven’t you ever played games like that, Robert?”

“No.” I changed the subject. “Won’t the cop outside the front door hear us if we go downstairs?”

“Not if we’re quiet. Take off your shoes and leave them here.”

I did, and we tiptoed down the stairs in our stocking feet. The decor on the main floor had been changed since the last time I had been there, maybe five years before. Back then, it was done in classic bachelor pad. Mostly stuff bought at Cost Plus. Since then, a decorator who learned her craft in the nineties had clearly gotten her hands on it. Big stuffed couches done in nubby white fabric, red-and-black Navajo-style rugs on top of beige Berber carpet, a large coffee table of speckled granite. Art on the walls that matched all that. Primary colors. No depictions of humans.

Off to one side of the main room was a closed door. Jenna walked over to it.

“This is the secret room,” she said.

“If you touch the knob,” I said, “you’ll get prints on it.”

“Not a problem.”

She unbuttoned the right-hand sleeve of her blouse, pulled the cloth down over her hand and, using it as a kind of glove, tried to turn the knob. “It’s locked.”

“So we’re stymied.”

“Not necessarily.”

She rummaged in her purse and took out a small leather kit, about the size of a wallet, but with a single flap. She extracted a very thin, flexible metal strip from it and bent over to inspect the lock on the doorknob.

“What is that?”

“A pick kit.”

“You’re joking.”

She turned and looked at me over her shoulder. With a look that the French would call
un regard méchant
. Slightly wicked in a charming way. “Don’t all the girls you know have pick kits?”

“Let me guess. A gift from Uncle Freddie.”

“Uh huh. A sweet sixteen present.”

She bent back to the doorknob and, holding the thin blade between thumb and forefinger, worked it delicately into the lock.

“This lock is a piece of cake.”

I heard a click, and the door popped open. Jenna went in and I followed.

It was a small room, with an old wooden table shoved up against the wall. There were no drawers or file cabinets. On the table were the to-be-expected computer monitor and printer. But there was no computer. Just some marks on the carpet where it had clearly sat until recently. There was nothing much else in the room.

“Well,” I said, “it may be a secret room, but it doesn’t look like it contains a lot of secrets.”

“I guess the cops took the computer,” she said, and pointed at the marks on the rug.

“Where was the computer on which you read Simon’s e-mails?”

“It was a notebook computer in the kitchen.”

She turned away from the wooden table and looked around the room. “What are those books over there?” She pointed to the back wall, which held a small bookshelf, with about half a dozen books on it.

I walked over to the shelf and glanced at them.

“They’re just standard books for someone who collects Roman Republican coins. Syndenham’s
The
Coinage of the Roman Republic
, Hill’s
Historical Roman Coins
, Crawford’s
Roman Republican Coinage
, and, of course Grueber’s
Coins of the Roman Republic in the British Museum
—the magnum opus. Usually it’s three volumes, but only two are there.” I peered more closely at them. “Volume III is missing.”

“None of them would be my bedtime reading.”

“I suppose not, Jenna. But if you love these coins, they make great reading.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“Which volume of the magnum opus would the
Ides
be listed in?”

“It would be described in Volume II, and there might be a plate—a picture of it—in Volume III. But I don’t recall if it’s in there or not.”

Jenna walked over to the shelf. “There’s a dust outline of a book on the shelf,” she said. “It must be where Volume III used to be.”

I looked more closely. She was right. Then I noticed Jenna staring at the painting above the bookcase. It was a copy of an old Dutch master. She reached up, grabbed the bottom corner, and pulled it toward her. The painting moved away to reveal a small green safe sunk into the wall, with a combination dial in the middle.

“There’s the secret,” she said.

“Can you open it?”

“It’s probably beyond me,” she said.

I was about to make some wry comment about the educational limitations of Uncle Freddie’s School for Girls when I heard a muffled voice outside the front door, talking to another voice. And then the scratch of a key being fitted into a lock.

“Shit,” Jenna said.

We bolted from the room almost as one, sprinted through the living room, and took the steps to the master bedroom two at a time. Jenna scooped up her shoes and hurtled through the door, out onto the deck. I went through right behind her, shoes in hand, exiting just in time to hear a voice on the floor below say, “Hey, wasn’t the door to that small room closed the last time we checked?”

We raced across the deck, and I watched as Jenna skinnied herself back through the window into the maid’s room. I willed myself not to look over my shoulder while I waited. When I finally squeezed myself through it seemed an even tighter fit than it had been going the other way. Or at least a more urgent fit. I pictured being arrested while stuck in the window frame.

I finally made it through. Jenna closed the window behind me, then dropped to all fours and made a beeline for a wall that was out of the sight-line of the windows. I followed. We sat on the floor and leaned up against the wall. I was breathing hard. Jenna was sweating.

“We should get out of here,” I said.

“No, we should stay put. If we stand up, and they’re out on the deck, they might see us.”

“They could look through the window.”

“They still won’t see us.”

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll stay here for a while.”

We put our shoes back on and then just sat there, saying nothing. My breathing slowed. The emptiness of the room came to seem soothing. Then the silence came to seem awkward.

Jenna broke it, speaking softly, just above a whisper.

“Robert, where did you get the
Ides
?”

“From my grandfather.”

“You’ve never mentioned him. Who was he? Where did he get it?”

“Roberto Istarza. I don’t know exactly where he got it. From some Loyalist officer he killed during the Spanish Civil War. Or at least that’s what he said.”

“Istarza?”

“It was the family name before my father changed it. Dropped the ‘Is.’ He thought it made it more American, less Basque. All it did for me as a kid was to bring on all the Tarzan jokes.”

She giggled, but so quietly that it came out as more like a suppressed sneeze. “Yeah, I remember thinking that when I saw your name on the interview list at Harvard. Thought about starting the interview by saying, ‘Me Jenna, you Tarza.’ But thought better of it.”

“Good thing.”

Sitting there next to Jenna in the empty room, it was almost like being a kid in a secret place, where you could talk to other kids about things you didn’t normally talk about. I had not talked to anyone about my grandfather in many years.

My thoughts about my grandfather were interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the deck outside. Jenna pointed to the window and put her finger to her lips. We sat there, unmoving, hardly breathing, for what seemed like forever. The sound of footsteps faded.

Jenna looked at me and shrugged. Then she resumed the conversation, almost as if there had been no interruption. The sign of a good lawyer. Never lose the thread.

“When did you get the coin from him?”

“When I was eleven. He gave it to me right before he died. Said I should treasure it always. That’s why it took me so long to sell it.”

“Why did you?”

I hesitated. I knew that what I was about to say would sound very strange. “I concluded that it was cursed.”

“That’s odd.”

“Well, I lent it out twice. Each time to a respected museum. And each time, the curator of that museum died in some violent way. I’m sure it was all a coincidence, but it was beginning to creep me out.”

“Did you tell Simon that?”

“Uh huh. He tried to wheedle a discount out of me because of it. Said a cursed coin should be worth less. I told him it should be worth more.”

“That is
really
creepy.”

“I know. It’s probably just coincidence. The loans were ten years apart.”

“Who did you lend it to?”

I never got to answer. Jenna got up in mid-conversation and moved to the door of the apartment. She put her ear up against it and listened.

“Someone was just out there. I heard the elevator door open and then close again,” she said.

I guess her hearing was more acute than mine because I had heard nothing. She opened the door a tiny crack and peered out.

“There’s no one out there now. But I think now’s the time to get out of here,” she said.

And we did. Furtively. Jenna kept looking over her shoulder as we crossed the street, on the way back to where her car was parked. I glanced back once. The windows of Simon’s condo faced the street and, looking up, I thought I saw Spritz standing in the window. It was probably just my imagination.

The drive back to M&M’s office building was short.

“We didn’t learn anything,” I said, “and we took a huge risk. Plus now our fingerprints are all over that empty maid’s apartment.”

“Even if they do go over there, I don’t think they’ll wipe it down for prints. And we did learn something. We learned the police took Simon’s computer, we learned there’s a safe in the secret room, and we learned that volume III of whatever that big book is called is missing.”

“
Coins of the Roman Republic in the British Museum
,” I said. “And maybe it’s not missing. Maybe Simon just put it somewhere else for a while. Anyway, so what if it’s missing?”

“I don’t know. But somehow, it’s important,” she said.