Death on a High Floor (9 page)

“How do you know what the criminalist said?” Jenna asked.

“A former wife’s cousin runs the LAPD crime lab. Twenty years ago, I helped him land his first job there. So I called, and asked him what he knew.”

“Corruption,” I said. To no one in particular, for no particular reason.

“That’s one way to look at it,” Oscar said. “Or you can look at it as business as usual that’s helpful to my clients. Like you.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Oscar, are we done for today?” Jenna asked.

“For today, yes. Except for a nicety. Robert hasn’t said whether he actually wants to hire me.”

“I do want to hire you,” I said.

I got up from behind my desk and walked over to offer my hand. It was a ritual I had picked up from my father. Always seal a deal with a handshake.

Oscar rose from the couch, took my proffered hand and shook it. “Great. My initial retainer is $50,000.”

I should have said, “That’s a lot of money,” or “Perhaps we could start with a lower amount since this case isn’t going anywhere,” or any number of other things.

Instead, I just said, “Okay. I’ll have Gwen messenger a check over to you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll set up another meeting in a couple of days. We’ll go over the evidence. The detailed facts, your relationship with the victim, possible motives, stuff like that. In the meantime, here’s my first piece of paid-for advice. Stay home and watch TV, even though you don’t watch TV.”

“I’m not going to do that,” I said.

Oscar stared at me. Much, I thought, like a father might stare at a sixteen-year-old who has just announced that he’s taking his girlfriend to Las Vegas for the weekend. But instead of taking my keys, he just said, “No, I don’t suppose you will. Clients like you are so smart they’re stupid.”

He gathered up his coat and left.

I looked at Jenna, still sprawled on the couch.

“I’m not accustomed to being talked to that way.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But, on the other hand, are you accustomed to being suspected of murder?”

“Fair point. But it’s only been two days. I need some time to clothe myself in the rags of my lowered status. Which status is undeserved, by the way. This is all a bunch of bunk. The cops don’t really have anything on me.”

“You didn’t tell Oscar about the dagger or the piece of cloth they removed from your couch,” she said.

“I forgot. I’ll tell him at our next meeting.”

Jenna didn’t respond, but instead reached over to the table between the couch and the chairs and picked up the cube with the Athenian tetradrachm in it. She turned it in her hands, studying the coin inside. “It’s pretty,” she said.

I knew what she was doing, of course. Distracting me from my embarrassment at being treated like a child by Oscar, not to mention my defensive reaction to it. Jenna is talented at distraction. At times it has annoyed me. This time, I relished it.

“Take the coin out of the cube if you like,” I said.

“Really?”

“Sure. I always let people do that.”

“I didn’t know that. Thank you.” She turned the cube over and dumped the coin into the palm of her left hand, then held it up to the light.

“I’ve always loved the owl,” she said.

“I love it, too,” I said, “but the really nice thing about that wonderful piece of art is that it only cost me three hundred bucks.”

“I always assumed it was rare. It’s not?”

“No. The Greeks minted hundreds of thousands of them.”

“But the
Ides
is rare, right?”

“Very. At most Brutus probably struck only a few thousand of them. Only fifty-eight are known to have survived. No one has dug up a new one in over a hundred years.”

“Maybe we should put together an expedition to Rome and try to dig more of them up ourselves, Robert.”

Jenna had moved from distraction to implementing our mutual joint stress reduction strategy—fantasizing about getting out of Dodge and doing something entirely unrelated to law. During some dark moments in the Media Sausage trademark trial, the last trial we’d done together, we’d developed a plan to start a Ferrari dealership in Costa Rica. Using my money, of course.

“Actually, Jenna, we’d be better off going to Northern Italy or Macedonia. That’s where Brutus’s army was when he minted the
Ides
. Fighting Anthony.”

“Perfect. We’ll dig there, then. I’ve never been to Macedonia.”

“Well, you don’t usually dig specifically for coins. People hid coins in clay pots beneath the floor stones of houses and shops—hoards, they’re called. Sometimes, when you dig up a building, the hoards are still there.”

“People buried their coins? That’s interesting. Why?”

“For safekeeping. There weren’t any banks.”

“What about ATMs and credit cards?” she said, grinning.

“Nope.”

“Then how did they shop?” She laughed out loud.

“The same way I did the year I came here. With cash.”

“Oh, geezer money,” she said.

“You don’t really call it that, do you?”

“Sometimes.”

We were bantering again. It felt good. Maybe it really was going to be all right.

“We’ve got some other things we need to talk about,” I said. “But first I’m going to get myself some coffee. Want some?”

“No, I think I’ll just sit here and admire your partner-level view. We can finish talking when you get back.”

“Okay.” I walked out the door. Gwen was at her desk.

“Mr. Tarza,” she said, “you have a lot of phone calls.”

“I’ll deal with them a little later. Right now I want to get myself some much needed coffee.”

“I can get it for you.” Unlike a lot of the more modern secretaries, Gwen doesn’t mind getting my coffee.

“Thanks, but I feel like getting it myself today,” I said.

I didn’t wait for her response, but turned left into the hallway and headed for the small kitchen on the other side of the floor. The long walk felt good.

Once in the kitchen, I pulled a mug off the shelf and started to pour myself some coffee. I watched it spill into the mug and told myself that all the cops had on me was opportunity and a bloodstain subject to expert interpretation. By the time I had poured in a small bit of milk and stirred in the sugar, I had dismissed the dagger thing as too far-fetched for anyone to believe and had also persuaded myself that the stain on the couch would turn out to be an old red wine spill. I felt great. I picked up the mug. My hand did not shake.

On the way back to my office, I stopped along the way to say hi to a couple of people. They seemed a bit reserved, but that was understandable. I mean, who wants to chat up a killer? Soon, the true facts would come out and everyone would crowd around me, hanging on my stories of what it had been like to be wrongly suspected. Maybe I’d even speak about it on a few bar association panels.

Gwen didn’t say a word as I walked past her desk on my way back to my office. She just gave me her patented “you need to deal with these phone calls” look.

“I know, I know,” I said. “As soon I get done talking to Jenna.”

And speaking of talking to Jenna, it seemed to me like an excellent time to wrap up an unresolved issue. Whether Simon really had been about to dump Jenna, as Harry claimed. It was time to find out.

I walked into my office, intending to learn the answer. And there was Oscar, sitting casually in one of the chairs, chatting with Jenna.

“Oscar, what the hell are you doing here?”

He turned his head toward me without getting up. “I’m your lawyer,” he said. “I’m here because it turns out we need to talk some more.”

“About what?”

“Well,” he said, “I have some new information. But why don’t you sit down?”

It was unbelievable. He was inviting me to take a seat in my own office. I gave in and took the other chair.

“Okay, what is it? I’ve got a lot of phone calls to return.”

“On my way out, I ran into my old buddy Spritz in the lobby.”

“You know him?”

“Sure. Ever since we were both rookies in the DA’s office back in the late sixties. He was a rookie investigator and I was a rookie Assistant DA.”

I was not thrilled to learn that Oscar had known Spritz for many years. I should have been, but I wasn’t.

“What did he want?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you. But let me ask you a few questions first, so I don’t pollute your recollection with what Spritz told me.”

Oscar’s approach was, of course, a standard technique for good lawyers. Get your client’s first recollections pure, unsullied by what someone else has said.

“Okay,” I said.

“What did you tell the cops when they arrived the morning of the murder?”

“Very little.”

“Tell me what you remember.”

I shrugged. “I told them that I had arrived and found Simon’s body face down with a knife in his back. That I had called 911 and then just waited there for them to show up.”

“Anything else?”

“The only other thing I can think of is that they wanted to know if there was anybody else on the floor. I told them I hadn’t seen anyone else. That was pretty much it.”

“Did they ask what time you arrived?”

“Come to think of it, they did. I told them I had arrived exactly at six. I knew that because the elevator unlocks automatically from its security mode at 5:59 a.m. I remembered looking at my watch, right before I got into the elevator, to see if I needed to pull out my key card to get up here. It read exactly 6:00 a.m., so I didn’t need to get it out.”

“When I ran into Spritz,” Oscar said, “he was just coming out of the building Security Office, right off the lobby.”

“I’ve never been in it.”

“I have,” Jenna said.

Oscar seemed not to care that Jenna had been in it. He reached into his inner suit coat pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. “Spritz gave me this,” he said. He unfolded it and handed it to me.

It was a four-columned list of numbers on an 8 1/2 by 11 page.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A printout of the computerized elevator records for this building’s M&M floors for late Sunday night and early Monday morning before Simon’s murder, stating at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday.”

“And the numbers mean what?”

“Left-most column is the time on a twenty-four hour clock. Next one is the number of the key card used to unlock the elevator if it was in after-hours security mode. Next after that is the date. Right-most is which of the three elevators that serve the eighty-fifth floor on weekends came up when. The printout shows only trips up.”

“And?”

“Well, why don’t you compare the number on your elevator key card with the last entry on the list?”

I pulled out my wallet and took out my key card. There was no number on the front. I flipped it over and examined the back. There, right above the magnetic strip, was a small, printed number—239738. I had never noticed it before. I looked down at the list again. My number matched the last entry—the one for the elevator that came up at 4:30 a.m. on the morning Simon was murdered. I felt an icy tingle run up my spine.

“I think this is a problem,” Oscar said.

“This is bullshit. You said you got this from Spritz?”

“Indeed I did.”

“Well you tell that asshole I was
not
on the elevator that morning at 4:30 a.m.,” I said. “I didn’t get here till 6:00 a.m. Period.”

“There’s more.”

“Like what?”

“The coroner’s estimate for the time of death is between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. So the cops think you came up early, killed him, left, and then came back later to ‘discover’ the body. If you ever left at all.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“And they also think,” Oscar said, “that they’ve caught you in one of those incriminating lies they like to tell juries about.”

“It’s utter bullshit.”

“May I see the card?” Jenna asked. Oscar handed it to her, then turned back to me.

“I believe you, Robert,” Oscar said. “But it seems no one else does. So we need to find out how your key card came to be riding up the elevator at 4:30 a.m. without you. If we don’t, they’ll need only one more piece of evidence to feel comfortable charging you.”

He turned toward Jenna. “You see, Miss James, if you add this sad little fact to the other sad little facts we were talking about right before I left, you’re a long way toward an indictment and a conviction.”

“Don’t condescend to me, Oscar,” she said.

“I’m not condescending to you. But despite your snotty credentials, you appear to know zero about criminal defense. The only reason I’m not tossing you off the case right now is because you called me and got me hired.”

“I’m not totally ignorant about it,” Jenna said. “I’m sick today. I’m not myself.”

“Okay. I’m sorry,” he said.

I didn’t think he was sorry.

“Back to Robert’s key card,” Oscar said. “Robert, could someone have taken your card, copied the magnetic strip, then returned the real card without your knowing about it?”

“I don’t see how,” I said. “When I’m not using the card, it’s usually in my wallet. Once in a while I leave it in my suit coat pocket. When it’s hung up on the back of the door.”

I glanced over at Jenna. She was, of course, the only person who would have had access to my office before the murder as well as access to my wallet
after
the murder. While I was in a drugged sleep that first night. I thought I saw a slight twitch in her face. Maybe I just imagined it.

“Then perhaps,” Oscar said, “someone borrowed it out of your coat pocket.”

“They didn’t have to copy his physical card,” Jenna said. “The encoding on the magnetic strip on the back of each card”—she held the card up—“is on record somewhere. Someone could have copied the data from the source and made a duplicate card without borrowing this one.”

Oscar looked at her. “Smart girl.”

“I’m not a girl.”

“Smart
lady
.”

The whole Jenna-Oscar thing was beginning to tire me out. “Would you two cut it out?” I said. “It’s not helpful to have my two defense lawyers behaving like children.” It felt good to say it. Like I was in control again.

Neither of them responded, but they did stop bickering.

“Jenna,” I asked, “what else do you know about key cards?”

“I know,” she said, “that copies have been made before. By associates who . . . Well, there were some sexual liaisons that people wanted to cover up. Wouldn’t do to have a record of who was up here with whom in the middle of the night.”

Oscar looked intrigued. “Do you know someone who did it?”

“Well, yes,” she said.

“Who?”

“Simon did.”

“He did?” Oscar seemed genuinely surprised. As a guy who had been a sole practitioner most of his life, he probably had no inkling of what a managing partner could bring to pass if he put his mind to it.

“Yes,” Jenna said. “He created one for me and another one for him. So that when I met him up here late at night, it would look like two male associates working late. He duped the cards of two guys who always left by six each night. Then each of us came up separately, fifteen or twenty minutes apart.” She smiled wanly. “Those two guys are gone now, of course. Not enough billable hours.”

I looked over at Oscar looking at Jenna. His eyebrows were arched. Like he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. Then he pulled his head back a bit, in what I took as mock surprise, and just asked her outright. “You were sleeping with Simon?”

“Yes.”

I could almost see Oscar’s brain running, mulling it over. “Do the cops know?

“Not so far as I know. We were very careful.”

“Who does know?”

“Nobody.” She paused. “Well, there is someone who might be able to put it together if she tried.”

“Who?”

“Susan Apacha.”

“Who is that?”

“The security chief for the building,” she said. “She was a former, well, flame of Simon’s. They were over but still friends. She helped him make the fake key cards for us. Although I don’t think she knew who his female partner was. Unless he told her about me. Which I doubt. He was very discreet.”

Oscar looked thoughtful. Hopeful even. “So the cops don’t know about her yet?”

I piped up. “I think they do. They were asking Harry Marfan about her last night. And I’m guessing that’s why Spritz was in the security office.”

“Yeah,” Jenna said. “That’s where she works.”

Oscar took a tiny notebook out of his jacket pocket. I saw him writing down Susan Apacha’s name. “Maybe,” he said, “they also wanted to talk to this Apacha woman about something else. The something else being that someone disabled the security camera in elevator 3 right around the time it was being used by whoever killed Simon. If they hadn’t, we’d have a picture of whoever it was.”

I hadn’t thought about the security camera in the elevator. Dumb not to have thought of it. There was one in each elevator. “How did they do that?” I asked.

“They aimed a laser pointer at the camera lens. Like the one in that pencil holder over there.” He gestured in the general direction of my desk.

“I use that when I teach.”

“No doubt. But that is what they used, and not many people around here have them.”

“Did Spritz . . .?”

“Yes, he made careful note of it when you two imbeciles let him in here.”

Jenna just glowered at him, and I could tell she wanted to hit him. But he was right. We had been imbeciles.

“What about the security cameras in the lobby?” I asked.

“According to Spritz they were reported ‘out-of-order’ sometime late on Thursday. Supposedly. They were to be repaired on Monday morning.”

Oscar got up, clearly getting ready to leave. “I think I need to talk to this Apacha woman. Have you got her home number, Jenna?”

“Yeah. Somewhere they gave everybody a list of how to reach the security people day and night. I’ll have to find it.”

“Why don’t you call me with it?”

“Can I just e-mail it to you?”

“I don’t have a computer.”

“What’s your cell number, then?”

“I don’t have one of those, either.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got your regular number. I’ll call you with it.”

“Good.” He stood up and left.

I got up, too, and said, “Jenna, I think it’s time to go home. Maybe we can even do it without hearing more bad news on our way out.”

“Yeah, let’s go,” she said.

She got up and started to head for the door. And almost fell over. Fortunately, I was right next to her and managed to catch her before she went down.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and collapsed back into the couch.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Not really. I threw up right before our meeting with Oscar. I still don’t feel very good.”

“Do you have the flu?”

“Uh, yes, I guess so.”

I eyed her. I could have sworn that she had hesitated before answering me. I hoped to God she wasn’t hiding something awful. The year before, a young associate had died of brain cancer. It had all started with his throwing up. But I didn’t press her.

“Okay, Jenna. Why don’t you sit for a few more minutes. I’ll check with Gwen about my phone calls, and then we can try again. Do you want us to get you something? A Coke, maybe? That can calm your stomach.”

“No, I’ll be okay. I just need to gather myself.”

“Okay.”

I walked out to Gwen’s desk. She got up and came around to me, holding a small pad on which she had obviously written a list of names.

“Mr. Tarza, you’ve gotten seventeen phone calls. Do you want all of them?”

“No. Just tell me the important ones.”

“Okay. Your former wife keeps calling. She says she’s being hounded by the
National Enquirer
. Says she doesn’t want to talk to them. But it sounds like she’s going to if you don’t call her back.” She paused. “I never did like her.”

“I’ll call her. I promise. Who else who’s important?”

“Your daughter. She called again about needing airfare.”

“Call her and tell her my lawyer doesn’t want her to come back right now.” It’s always great to blame things on your lawyer.

“Anyone else?”

“Peter Penosco. He seems annoyed, too. Complained you didn’t return his call of yesterday. And someone named Serappo Prodiglia. He called four times. Says he knows you.” She hesitated. “Is there really someone with that name?”

“Yes.”

Gwen said nothing. She was clearly waiting for me to tell her who Serappo Prodiglia was.

“He’s a rare coin dealer.”

“I’ve never heard of him before,” she said.

It was a reproach of sorts. Why hadn’t I ever mentioned him to her? That was the unspoken question. Gwen had once explained to me that having a top secretary was like being married. She had to know everyone you knew and where you were going and what you did when you got there. Otherwise, she had explained, it would be embarrassing for her.

“I haven’t talked to him in more than ten years.”

“I was here ten years ago.” She paused. “He refused to give me his contact information. I’ll just get it from you later, I guess.” She huffed back behind her desk.

I went to call Peter Penosco. Jenna was still sitting on the couch, although she looked a bit less pale.

The direct line on my desk rang before I could pick up the phone to dial. It was Stewart Broder.

“Hi, Robert, how
are
you?”

“I’ve been
better
.” It was so hard not to mimic his speech pattern.