Death on a High Floor (13 page)

“You were never in it?”

“No. I tried to respect his privacy.”

“Okay.”

I turned back to the cell phone and called Serappo Prodiglia. Another person who’d been waiting almost two days to get his call returned. He was not in. I left a message.

No sooner had I hung up than the phone rang. It was Oscar.

“Are you with Jenna?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, call me back when you’re not.” He hung up.

Jenna continued to drive. “I heard that.”

“I would have told him to go ahead and talk, but he hung up before I could say anything. I have no secrets from you, Jenna.”

“Was that a sly way of saying I may have secrets from you?”

“You already admitted that you do,” I said.

“They’re for your own good.”

“So you say. But Jenna, I think we are going to have to resolve all of this, and soon.”

“How about not today?” she said.

“Okay.”

We drove on in relative silence, but without frost.

Harry was not exactly thrilled to see us. In fact, he initially refused to open the door when we knocked. Jenna used a direct approach to pry it open.

“Listen, Harry, Stewart Broder told us that
you
killed Simon.”

It worked. The door opened a crack, and Harry peered out at us.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said.

“Well if it’s ridiculous, let us in,” Jenna said.

Harry opened the door all the way and waved us in. He was wearing his usual outfit, but he looked somehow disheveled. His Dockers were smudged, his blue work shirt wasn’t very well tucked in to his pants, and he was barefoot. He pointed us over to the couches that faced the ocean, but the bonhomie of my visit two days earlier was distinctly missing. He didn’t offer us anything to drink, and he skipped the pleasantries.

“Who sent you here?” he asked.

“No one sent us,” Jenna said. “Stewart told Robert that
you
killed Simon, and that it involved a drug deal gone bad. So we just came down to ask if it’s true.” She smiled a tight little smile.

Harry was still standing, leaning against the wall. For a while he said nothing. He just stared at Jenna. She stared back. Jenna is a world-class starer. I noticed that Harry’s fists were clenched. Finally, Jenna won, and he spoke.

“Listen,” he said. “I didn’t kill anyone. Stewart is a nutcase. And not a very good lawyer. We should never have made him an offer. It was close, you know. A 4-3 vote in the Hiring Committee, and if I had wanted to block him, I could have, but I figured, ‘what the hell’ and let it go forward.”

I had to stifle a laugh. “Harry,” I said, “that was more than thirty years ago.”

“I have a long memory.”

Jenna jumped on it. “How’s your memory of last Sunday, Harry? Stewart says the two of you were at Simon’s for brunch, looking at the coin.”

“Yeah, I was there. What of it?”

“Got an alibi for the morning of the murder?” she asked.

“Are you Detective Spritz now, Jenna?”

“Do you?”

“Yes. I’ve even told it to the police. But unless you’ve got a badge now, it’s none of your business.”

“You still haven’t said whether you and Simon were involved in drugs,” she said.

Harry actually rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t. He wasn’t. Like I told Robert yesterday, Simon was in debt for gambling. But if he was trying to cover it by selling drugs, I’m unaware of it. Now, if you don’t have any more impertinent questions, I’m rather busy.”

“I think we do have more questions,” she said.

“Well, I fear they will have to wait, Jenna. If you do want to discuss it further, I suggest you make an appointment.”

“You don’t have a phone,” Jenna said.

“Well you’re a smart young woman. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

Then he showed us the door.

We climbed back in the Land Cruiser and headed up the 405, back to L.A.

“This whole trip was a waste of time, Jenna.”

“Maybe not,” she said.

“We didn’t learn a thing. We weren’t with him two minutes before he threw us out. And you scared him off by flat-out asking him if he killed Simon. Now he’s not going to help us out at all.”

“My gut tells me he’s involved in this somehow,” Jenna said. “If he weren’t, he would have talked to us more. Maybe he
did
kill him.”

“Got any evidence?”

“No.”

“Okay, so like I said, the visit was a waste of time and probably counterproductive.”

“No, our visit is going to roust him out.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Well, he doesn’t have a phone, and you say he has no cell phone. So if he was involved, he’s going to need to tell someone that we were there, asking questions. He’ll have to go out to do it.”

“Wherever do you get this stuff?”

“In truth, I read detective novels,” she said.

“Oh, great. I feel heartened. But we won’t be there to watch where he goes if he goes out.”

“Remember my friends at KZDD? The guys who followed us with their news van on the freeway the other day?”

“What about them?”

“Well, I promised the news director something in trade if they backed away. I just paid off.”

“I’m utterly confused,” I said.

“I gave them Harry. I called them up, told them Harry knew something about this case, told them I’d lead them to him, and asked them to stake him out and follow him if he left his place.”

“When did you do that?”

“When you were in the bathroom, right before we left to come down here.”

“You bear watching, Jenna.”

“Maybe so. But you bear paying more attention to your surroundings. The KZDD car followed us all the way down, and you never even noticed. They parked just down the block from us at Harry’s.”

It was true. I had been oblivious to it. And in contemplating my oblivion—oblivion not being my normal state of being—I suddenly realized I was starving.

“How about something to eat on the way back?” I said.

“There’s some food somewhere on the back seat.”

I turned around and looked, but couldn’t see much. “All I see is a dead pizza box.”

“I’m sure there’s something there. Protein bars I think, under that big file box maybe.”

I didn’t want to eat old protein bars. “How about fast food instead?”

“Sure.”

We chose an
In-N-Out Burger
. The lines can be longer there than at the other chains, but the burgers are better enough to make the wait worthwhile. I have even learned to ignore the citations to Bible verses on the burger wrappers and on the inside bottom rim of the cups.

I told Jenna I’d take a cheeseburger and a vanilla shake. When the voice on the speaker asked for our order, I heard Jenna give my order and then say, “And an Animal Burger and a Coke.” I raised an eyebrow.

“What’s an Animal Burger? It’s not on the menu.”

“It’s from their secret menu.”

“Their
secret
menu?”

“Right. There’s a lot of stuff not on their printed menu. You just have to know. Or, just check it out on their website. But you don’t surf the web, remember?” She shot me a sly smile. Like the ones I used to get from her before this all began. “You, Robert, should be ordering the Protein Burger. Wrapped in lettuce. No bun.” She reached over and patted my stomach. “You’ve put on a few pounds lately, eh?” Another smile.

I ignored that. “What exactly is in an Animal Burger?”

“Lot of extra stuff on it. Mainly, the mustard’s fried into the patty.”

While we waited, I considered the dire implications of my ignorance of the existence of a secret menu at the area’s most popular burger chain. Now that the dot-coms are gone, the entertainment industry is the only business in the world where age discrimination begins at twenty-five and is held at bay only if you can continue to show a certain cool knowledge of pop culture without seeming like a geek. At sixty, it’s a serious challenge. I am ever on the alert for the first signs of my own pop decrepitude, and this was not a good sign.

Ten minutes later, we had our food. The guy who handed us the bags was staring at me. I looked away.

We decided to park and eat rather than drive and eat. We found a place around the corner on a residential street. Neither of us said much. Mostly because trying to eat a dripping burger, wrapped only in paper, without spilling it all over yourself requires a certain amount of attention. It doesn’t interrupt thinking, though. When I had finished the burger and was struggling to suck up the overly thick milkshake through the too narrow straw, I decided to tell Jenna what I had concluded somewhere in the middle of my attack on the burger.

“Jenna, we need to have what my grandfather used to call a come-to-Jesus meeting.”

She laughed. “What? Have you been reading the bible references on the bottom of your cup?”

“No.”

She reached over and took the almost depleted milkshake out of my hand, held it up high , and read from the inside rim on the bottom. “Proverbs 3:5.”

“Don’t know it,” I said. “Memorizing Bible verses has never been my thing.”

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding.”

“Jenna, I’m always amazed at your vast store of knowledge. But I’m trying to get serious.”

“I thought we were back to having fun again, Robert, like in the old days.”

“In the old days I wasn’t suspected of murder. So we’re not having fun. We’re having serious. I seriously don’t like your withholding facts from me.”

The old days were, of course, only a week ago. Time flies when you’re a person of interest.

She switched her mode. “I told you on the way down.
A
s your lawyer I think it’s best.”

“And I think that’s horseshit,” I said. “Not to mention unethical. Lawyers can try to put the best light on bad facts. Buck their clients up, and all that. But when the client asks flat out what the lawyer knows, he has to tell them. Period.”

“
She
. And not if it will harm the client.”

“Horseshit! You have a conflict, Jenna. Maybe the facts that you’re keeping to yourself prove
you
killed him. And you’re utterly wrong on the ethics.”

“Didn’t we just have this same conversation about an hour ago?”

“That was about trust between friends. This one is about my rights as a client.” I was finally ready to say what I had been thinking. “Tell me what you know or you’re fired. And I’ll just tell Oscar to go out and find himself a new second chair.”

By this time, Jenna had her head on the steering wheel. I could hardly hear her response. It was more whispered than spoken. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

Unlike the frost that had earlier filled the car, it now seemed filled with a kind of sadness. The kind that comes from a friendship about to splinter. Or an uncomfortable truth about to be told. I felt oddly compelled to explain myself, even though, in truth, she should have been the one doing the explaining.

“Jenna, I don’t want to go to jail, okay? I know there are clients who don’t want to know too much—who want their lawyers to tell them only what they need to know. I’m not one of them. So please tell me what you know or please get off the team.”

Jenna started the car and headed back toward the freeway on-ramp. Once there, she floored it up the ramp. It seemed an indicator of her mood. Aggressive. But I misread her. The acceleration was somehow tied to resignation.

“What do you want to know, Robert?”

“When did you start going out with Simon?”

“A year ago. At the firm Christmas party.”

“An entire year.” I said it slowly.

“You’re wondering how you could have failed to notice for so long?”

“Yes.”

“We kept it very quiet. Very underground. On purpose.”

“Why?”

“Simon said that if it got around, my elevation to the partnership would be cheapened. He said a lot of people would think I got there on my back.”

“I thought you liked to be on top.”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, he used a more vulgar term.”

“I won’t ask,” I said.

We drove for a few minutes without talking.

“How close were you and Simon?” I asked.

“Close and not close. We spent a lot of time together, mostly out of town. Places like Riverside.”

Riverside is a rather nice town about forty miles east of downtown L.A. It’s got a lovely river, a historic inn, and about three hundred thousand people, but it’s the kind of place people from the Westside never go. It might as well not exist, which is no doubt why Simon had picked it.

“And in town?”

“In his condo on Bunker Hill. I always came late at night and left early in the morning. We never went out.”

I was quite familiar with Simon’s condo. In the old days, we had had a regular Friday night poker game there. Simon also had a big, classy place on the Westside—an old movie star’s house in Brentwood—but holed up downtown during the week. He told everyone it shortened his commute and gave him more time to work. More time for a lot of things, apparently.

“How many people knew about you and Simon?”

“Just Harry.”

“Why did he get to be in the know?” I asked. That question of course, contained within it the unspoken statement that if Jenna needed to confide it to someone, that someone should have been me.

Jenna ignored the implication.

“Simon told him,” she said. “It was the night I threatened to break it off. Simon said he needed to confide in someone. I was pissed, frankly.”

During this entire conversation, Jenna had been looking straight ahead, weaving amidst the traffic, exceeding the speed limit in whichever lane she happened to be in. When she’s driving and talking, Jenna usually glances frequently at her passenger. So frequently it had made me nervous in the past. Now I wondered if her road stare meant she was lying. Or leaving something out. Once distrust begins, it quietly twines its little vines around everything.

I finally asked the thing that had been bothering me the most.

“Why aren’t you upset that he’s dead?”

“What makes you think I’m not upset?”

“You haven’t shed a single tear.”

“That you’ve seen.”

We drove on for a while in silence again. It had been tacky of me to question her grief. She turned the radio back on.
No Doubt’s “Just a Girl”
had moved on to Chris Isaak’s “
San Francisco Days
.” I turned it back off.

“Are you really grieving for him, Jenna?”

She shrugged. “In my own way. I grew up in the home of a politician who had once been a general. Emotions were to be kept in your bedroom or saved for a studied moment in front of the cameras.”

“So you’re gonna cry for the Blob?”

“That was cheap.”

“It was. I’m sorry.”

“Robert, I’ve cried a lot. It’s just that you’ve been so caught up in your own troubles that you couldn’t see my grief.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you think I looked so awful in your office yesterday?”

“I thought maybe you were pregnant.”

She ignored that and went on. “Earlier, I had been looking at mementos. Ones of me and Simon. A couple pictures I took, a few small gifts he gave me. I lost it. Spent an hour crying and then another half hour throwing up. So don’t talk to me about grief.”

“I feel like a shit.”

“Well, you don’t need to. You do have a few problems that other people don’t.” She smiled.