Death on a High Floor (31 page)

On the day of the hearing, I found myself wide-awake at 5:00 a.m., unbidden by anything other than anticipation. Or maybe fear. Either way, it was hardly surprising.

I got up and took a long shower, then considered what to wear. For the prior two weeks I had been mostly in sweats and tennis shoes. There had seemed little point in getting dressed up. Especially since my days of going to my office had ended. At least for a while. Maybe forever. In between watching old movies, I had formally asked for and been granted an indefinite leave of absence from M&M. Caroline had graciously agreed that it would be a leave with pay. That was helpful, since my legal expenses were exploding. Jenna was a bargain, but Oscar had a high-floor hourly rate.

In exchange for getting paid during my leave, I had promised not to darken the eighty-fifth floor until and unless I was acquitted. I had also agreed that if I ended up being convicted I would immediately resign. No waiting around for an appeal. And resign on the spot if I pleaded to a felony. Which was a-belt-and-suspenders provision, because if I pleaded to any felony I’d promptly lose my bar card.

I assumed that the firm assumed they wouldn’t have to pay me for very long. The one time I had looked at a newspaper when I was off at camp, it had featured still another front-page story about a potential plea bargain. There was nothing about Oscar telling the DA that I had said to stuff it.

The only question in my mind was whether M&M would wait for a conviction before taking me off the wall in
Thomas Edison
, the room where they had hung the portraits of all former managing partners of the firm.
Thomas Edison
, by the way, is the conference room on eighty-three near the firm’s Patent Law Group, and the only conference room that included a first name. I believe that my patent colleagues had given the room that name as a kind of charm, to increase the chance that a twenty-first Century Thomas Edison might be lured through our doors.

In considering my clothing choices for my debut as the accused, sweats and tennis shoes were obviously not going to cut it. After thinking about it, I decided simply to resume my unvarying sartorial ritual from what seemed almost a past life: Crisp white shirt, blue pinstripe suit, red tie and polished black shoes. I put all of it on.

It felt good to be dressed up. Like I was somehow useful again. One of the hardest things about my forced inactivity was how unproductive I had felt. After almost forty years of productivity, if you count law school as productive, I felt utterly useless. Not to mention at loose ends. It is remarkably hard, at least for someone with a mind, to fill an entire workday if there is no work. Especially if you have to stay inside.

It was still dark outside when I walked into the kitchen. To my surprise, Jenna was already up, sitting at the kitchen table and working at her laptop. She was wearing her court clothes—starched white blouse, tailored blue-black suit, her red cloisonné dragon pin perched on the lapel, and two-inch black heels. She greeted me without looking up.

“Hi, Robert. Just finishing a few items. Ready for the day?” She was as cheery as a cheery lawyer can be.

“Yes. Anxious for it, in truth.”

“Good, because it’s going to be a long grind, this hearing. And you’ll have to pass through the Blob every day just to get out of here.”

“The new windows should help,” I said.

The week before, Jenna had had the rear windows of her car replaced with glass of the darkest tint that the law allowed. Oscar had insisted to me that I’d be very hard to see if I sat in back. He also explained that the height of the Land Cruiser, together with the long interior distance from front to back, would make it difficult to photograph me clearly, even through the windshield. Especially, he had said, if I were to sit in the third row of seats. He then suggested we could also hang a blanket between the front and back to make it truly impossible to see me.

I told him I didn’t know if I was willing to sit in the third row of seats behind a blanket. It was childlike of me, but I wanted to sit up front. I resisted threatening to get carsick if I had to sit in back. Finally, I told him I didn’t really see why it mattered anymore if someone took my photo. He said it mattered. We reached no agreement. We still hadn’t.

I put some cereal in a bowl, ate it, and chatted with Jenna about not much in particular. She had closed her laptop but did not eat. Either she had already eaten or was simply not eating that day. I used to find it hard to eat the first morning of a trial. I had no idea what Jenna’s habits were in that regard. She had never lived in my house before.

There was a sudden knock at the kitchen door. I couldn’t imagine who it might be, unless Oscar was arriving. Since we had agreed the night before that he would meet us at the courthouse, that seemed unlikely.

Jenna got up and opened the door. There was a guy in his fifties standing there. He was huge. About six-foot-seven and maybe 280 pounds. Not an ounce of fat. The thing that made him so distinctive, besides his size, was his impeccably tailored suit, his steel-grey hair, and his little rimless glasses. He could have been a super-sized version of Robert McNamara in his prime.

Jenna gave him a hug and then brought him over to the table. I stood to greet him. Politeness dies hard, even in your own house.

“Robert, this is Fredrick James.”

“Uncle Freddie,” I said. “My God.”

He stuck out his hand. “I see that both my nickname and my reputation precede me,” he said.

I reached out to meet his handshake and was pleased that he wasn’t one of those giants who undertake to crush your hand on first meeting. Which would have been easy for him to do. His hands were both meaty and muscular at the same time. Mine are hardly small, but it would have been no contest.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said, just the way I was taught to greet people in third grade.

“And it is indeed a distinct pleasure to meet
you
,” he responded.

“Jenna,” Uncle Freddie went on, “has told me ever so much about you over these many years, and I do appreciate all you’ve been able to teach her. Among the many other qualities of mind you’ve been able to instill in her, she has a great deal more discipline now.”

He paused. “Unlike during her formative years.” He chuckled, and Jenna looked slightly uncomfortable. A lot uncomfortable, maybe.

I thought to myself that if I somehow got out of this a free man, I would have to take Uncle Freddie out for a martini and find out more about Jenna’s formative years. He looked like a martini guy, but you never knew.

Jenna invited him to join us at the table. I sat back down myself, as did Jenna. Uncle Freddie declined Jenna’s offer of coffee and asked for
Earl Grey
instead. I waited to find out exactly why he was in town.

Jenna explained. “About ten days ago,” she said, “Oscar and I decided we needed a world-class investigator.” She nodded at her uncle. “Uncle Freddie is the best of the best, and he’s still got a California license.”

I hadn’t known that Uncle Freddie was a private investigator at all, licensed or unlicensed, and I said so.

“Well,” Uncle Freddie said, “I haven’t performed this function, really, for more than twenty years. But I inferred from Jenna’s detailed account that you were being treated poorly by our vaunted justice system. I do so detest injustice.” He stopped and looked at me, clearly waiting for a response of some kind.

“Well, yes, we all detest injustice,” I said.

Uncle Freddie seemed satisfied with my bow to his thought and resumed.

“Thus,” he said, “when Jenna called, I made an immediate reservation and winged my way here to see what small service I might render in order to be of assistance—to you and to justice.”

Uncle Freddie’s elaborate language was spectacularly not, I thought to myself, what you’d expect from an oversized private eye, and maybe former drug dealer, from Hawaii.

Jenna had in the meantime gotten up to look for the
Earl Grey
and put the kettle on. She seemed anxious to move the conversation along, though, and not to dwell on the exact hows and whys of her uncle’s presence or provenance. “We don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “Tell him what you found, Uncle Freddie.”

“What I found
so far
,” he said. “I suspect there will be a great deal more of interest to uncover. But to commence, I investigated two people Jenna pointed out as obviously suspicious.
Messieurs
Harry Marfan and Stewart Broder.”

I obviously knew why they were suspects, but I asked anyway, more to hear Uncle Freddie talk some more than anything else. “Why them?” I asked.

“Mr. Harry Marfan had some involvement,” he said, “in that, according to Mr. Serappo Prodiglia, Mr. Marfan had participated, as a silent partner, in the undertaking of purchasing the
Ides
from you. Although his possible motive is at this point in time a matter of conjecture, he might well, by killing Mr. Simon Rafer, have been trying to conceal something compromising. Something of which Mr. Rafer might have been aware, but cannot now reveal to us given that he has passed into the other realm.”

“Plus,” I said, “Harry has been fingered by Stewart.” I was pleased at my use of what I took to be detective language.

“Correct, indeed,” Uncle Freddie said. “If Mr. Stewart Broder is to be believed, Mr. Marfan was quite seriously angry at Mr. Rafer about something and was present on the eighty-fifth floor only hours before the apparent time of Mr. Rafer’s unfortunate death. If this is true, Mr. Marfan had opportunity.”

“He also knew about the secret compartment,” I added, “the one in which we found a counterfeit
Ides
and a scholarly coin book.”

“Precisely,” he said. “Although we do not know if he was cognizant of its recent contents.”

“And Stewart?”

“He had opportunity, for one. By his own admission, he was present on the eighty-fifth floor not long before the murder, and his office is quite near to Mr. Rafer’s. He also seems . . .” Uncle Freddie paused for a moment and then started again. “Let me phrase it this way. He seems to have intruded himself needlessly into this event by coming forward and volunteering information when he had no precise need to. In my profession, we are always prone to be suspicious of that behavior.”

“‘Equity abhors a volunteer’ is the way we put it in my profession,” I said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Oh, just an old legal adage that translates as ‘volunteers get the shaft.’”

“Ah,” he said.

Jenna had poured Freddie’s tea and was now standing behind him.

“For God’s sake, Uncle Freddie, skip the erudition and tell him what you found out!” In seven years I had never seen her so excited.

“Of course, Jenna, of course. But perhaps it would be best if I were to show the document to Mr. Tarza so that he might see it for himself.” Whereupon he reached into his inner suit coat pocket and handed me an off-color, oily-to-the-touch piece of photo paper. It was clearly a printout from an archival microfiche.

I looked at it. As usual, it was so ill-copied and blurry that it was almost impossible to make out.

“I can’t read it. What is it?”

“It is none other than a fifteen-year-old arrest record alleging possession of a pound of cocaine.”

“Who was arrested?”

“May I suggest that you answer that question yourself by studying the faint, typewritten name set forth in the right-hand corner?”

I studied. And read the typed letters aloud, slowly, “H-A . . . can’t read the next two, uh Y . . . then there’s a space, maybe M-A- R . . . can’t read the rest . . . Shit. Harry Marfan?”

“Precisely.”

You could have knocked me over with a spoon. I started to connect the dots. Then I stopped myself. There are a lot of dots out there. If you automatically connect all the stray facts you hear to all the available dots, the next thing you know, the chaotic vagaries of the world will have you believing that the United Nations operates a fleet of black helicopters based in Wyoming and that Osama bin Laden is living secretly in the Lincoln Bedroom.

So I restrained myself and said only, “What happened to Harry after that?”

“Nothing at all it would appear. There is no further record of any court action in connection with the matter, and no mention of it in the press.”

“I see,” I said, still straining to be ho hum about it. “And what do you make of it?”

“In truth, I made little of it at the outset,” he said. “I concluded that it should most likely be categorized as a mere oddity of fact. But then I had that difficult-to-read document blown up and examined more carefully, and I learned something else.”