Death on a High Floor (15 page)

I changed the topic. “Jenna, when did you first learn about Simon buying the
Ides
?”

“Right when you were selling it to him. He was like a little kid. So excited. I remember the day he brought it home. He even let me touch it. I was excited too. More than two thousand years old. Thinking how many hands it had passed through.”

I looked over at her and detected the little gleam in her eye that people who collect old things get when they talk about them. But I had never known Jenna to collect anything. She had once told me that she had an aversion to owning things. Except clothes.

“What did he do with it when he got it?” I asked.

“He put it in a plastic envelope and then put it in his little red coin box, and then put the box away somewhere. I don’t know where.”

That rang true. Coin collectors are an odd lot. Usually, they don’t display their coins. They just put them in an oblong box, and look at them every once in a while. Many coin collectors would consider the coffee table display in my office somewhat outré.

“And then?” I said.

“Harry came over the next day. He took it out of the box, and they looked at it together. Then he put it away again. Maybe two weeks later, I don’t know why, they decided to have it appraised.”

“Who appraised it?”

“They sent it to someone in Chicago. It came back with a report that said it was a forgery. Then they sent it somewhere else. It had just come back from wherever that was last Saturday.”

“Do you know who they sent it to in Chicago?” I asked.

“Somebody with a weird name.”

The somebody had to be Serappo. Whose call I had not yet returned.

“Was it a guy named Serappo Prodiglia?”

“Something like that.”

We had reached our building, but the Blob was not there. At all. Jenna did not seem concerned and told me not to worry about it, that it was probably off feeding somewhere else. I never did learn where it had gone that day.

When I got up to my office, Gwen was sitting at her desk. It was bare. So was my office. No books, no furniture. Gwen was almost in tears. “Oh, Mr. Tarza, a window panel is loose in your office. They say it’s too dangerous for you to stay in there until they figure out what the problem is. But they don’t have any spare partner offices.”

In the old days, a week earlier, I would have been taken aback. But after five days of a murder investigation, a possible blood stain on my office couch and faked elevator records, not to mention secret menus, this was nothing. Far from being nonplussed, you might say I was totally ‘plussed.’ “So where are we going then?”

“They gave you an associate office on eighty-two.” She looked stricken.

Eighty-two is fondly known as FYG. First-Year Ghetto. Several years before, the HR people at the firm had persuaded the Executive Committee to house all first-year associates on the same floor. The better to create a “cohesive cohort” amongst each year’s incoming class of about thirty associate in the L.A. office. Or so they claimed.

Maybe it works, but God knows partners never venture near. Even senior associates stay away. Half college dorm, half fraternity, it features offices filled with video games, old pizza boxes, half-empty water bottles, dead bras, and the general detritus left by new lawyers pulling all-nighters to try to unearth those twenty-five hundred billable hours the firm insists on sucking out of them.

I doubted seriously that there was any real problem with a window panel in my office. Caroline and her court were just trying to humiliate me. If they couldn’t move me to the Annex, they would send me down amidst the unwashed. My attitude was: to hell with them. I’d go and make the best of it.

“Gwen, if you don’t want to go down there with me, you can ask to be transferred, and I’ll just use the pool.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I went down and checked it out. I want to go with you.” She looked up at me. “But could we have your new office there steam cleaned first?” We both laughed. Then I took the elevator down to eighty-two to check it out myself.

My new office was the absolute farthest you could get from the elevator bank. On the trek there, I passed a few associates, who just stared at me. I heard later that some of them thought my arrival was the first step in a nefarious plot to break up FYG.

Coming down the hall, I could see through the doorway that my desk and desk chair had been moved into the office, but not my couch and coffee table. No room. There was only one guest chair. And sitting in it was Oscar, casually reading my
New York Times,
with his suit jacket draped over the chair back.

I loathed seeing him there. It reminded me of things. Like the fact that the afternoon’s activities with Jenna had not been a game. Or the fact that Oscar now felt no compunction about just waltzing into my office, plopping himself down and appropriating my newspaper. Like he was waiting for a shoeshine.

I went in and tried to act cheerful about it. “Hi, Oscar.”

Oscar dropped the paper on the floor, folded his arms across his chest and glared at me. “You didn’t call me back.”

“You said to call back when I wasn’t with Jenna. We just now left each other’s company.”

I sat down in the chair behind my desk.

Oscar seemed not to be interested in my excuse. “Listen, my friend, I had a chat this morning with Susan Apacha. The key card queen.”

“And?”

“Jenna’s key card came up the elevator late Sunday night, not long before midnight.”

“Oh.” It was the kind of oh you utter upon feeling pole axed.

“Oh, indeed. And even more indeedly, it turns out that Miss James reported her key card stolen two days earlier.”

“You’re telling me Jenna did it?”

“Either did it or helped frame you. Or both.”

“Maybe her key card really was stolen,” I said.

He ignored my thought that Jenna might be innocent and plowed straight ahead. “Right now,” he said, “I’m leaning toward the ‘both’ theory. The police, meanwhile, are leaning toward the theory that you stole her card and used it as part of your plot, probably to bring up a co-conspirator. Somebody strong and good with a knife, according to them.”

“Mr. Tarza and his friend in the foyer with a knife?”

“What?”

Oscar apparently hadn’t played endless games of Clue as a child.

“Never mind. Why don’t we just call Jenna and ask her about it?” I said.

The phone, no doubt meant to rest on a desk when the office was fully put together, was still on the floor, next to Oscar's chair. He reached down and picked up the hand piece.

"What's her extension?"

"8502."

He punched it in. "Hi, Jenna. It's your warm and loving co-counsel, Oscar. Could you come and join me and Robert for a few minutes? We’re in his office. He’s on eighty-two now." He hung up. "She's on her way."

When Jenna arrived, Oscar didn’t waste any time. “Susan Apacha says the building computer shows that it was
your
key card—number 526428—that came up the elevator at 11:45 p.m. Sunday evening.”

Since the only guest chair was occupied, Jenna had had to stand in the doorway. On hearing what Oscar had to say, she slumped against the door jam. “Oh, stupid me.”

“Meaning what?” Oscar asked.

“I leave my key card in my desk drawer. I never use it. You only need it if you get here super early or leave after seven and come back after dinner, and I never do either. Someone must have stolen it.”

“According to Susan Apacha,
you
reported it stolen last week.”

“No I didn’t.” Then, apparently detecting the look of disbelief in Oscar’s eyes, she repeated it more distinctly and more slowly, holding his gaze. “I . . . did . . . not.”

I decided I needed to say something. Something really powerful.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Utterly sure. I haven’t reported anything missing. In fact, I don’t even know if my key card really
is
missing. But I’m going to go and find out. Right now.”

With that, she turned and left. I had the impression that she would have slammed the door if she could have. That was when I first noticed that the door was gone. The hinges were there, but no door.

Oscar had not unfolded his arms. “You should get rid of her.”

“I’m loyal, Oscar.”

“Benedict Arnold was loyal.”

“To the wrong side.”

“Precisely my point,” he said. He finally unfolded his arms, put his hands above his head and stretched. “Look, my friend, this is nuts. You’ve asked me to take on as my co-counsel—my second-in-command—the prime suspect besides you. By doing that you’re protecting her. When we should be out investigating whether
she
did it. Or even insisting to the police that she did it.”

“Oscar, you don’t understand. I’m divorced, my only contact with my ex-wife is to send her checks. I’m estranged from my daughter. My only contact with her is to say ‘no’ to her requests for checks. I don’t have a lot of friends. So the law firm is my family, and it’s trying to kick me out.”

“So?”

“Emotionally, I
need
Jenna. She’s a friend.”

“I see,” he said, sounding very much as if he didn’t see.

“Anyway, she didn’t do it,” I added. “I’m sure she didn’t.”

“Sure you’re sure. How the hell do you know that?”

“I just do,” I said. “She’s even shared some things with me that might help us catch who really did do it.”

Oscar smiled a big smile. Then he laughed, not quite uproariously, but close. “Oh, right. I forgot. You’re out looking for the true killer. Have you figured out who it is yet? Someone from the world of Faye Resnick perhaps?

I had forgotten that Oscar had had a small, hidden role in the O. J. Trial. Faye Resnick had been a friend of Nicole Simpson’s, and the defense had floated a totally bogus theory that maybe someone Faye was acquainted with did it.

I ignored the sarcasm. “Actually, Oscar, we’ve made progress.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“Harry Marfan may have done it.”

“Harry Marfan? The guy who was a senior partner here for years?”

“Yes, him.”

“What makes you think he did it?”

“Stewart Broder heard Harry and Simon arguing here in the office. Arguing about drugs. Around 2:00 a.m.—just hours before I found Simon’s body.”

“Who is Stewart Broder?”

“He’s a tax partner in the firm.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Not all that well. He came here the same year I did. We were friends at first, but in recent years, we’ve lived in different worlds. He’s single. He has some interest in coins, but his real passion is collecting butterflies. Minds his own business. That’s about it.”

“What was Harry Marfan’s motive?”

“Drug deal gone bad maybe? I don’t really know.”

“Great. Do you at least know if he has an alibi?”

“He says so, but he wouldn’t tell us what it is.”

Oscar looked suddenly ashen. I realized we must have violated the rules.

“You actually went and asked him about it?”

“We did.”

“Both of you?”

“Yes. Was that a mistake?”

“Oh my God.” Oscar got up, got down on the floor, and began to do super rapid push-ups. “One, two, three, four . . .”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Deflecting . . . five, six seven . . . tension . . . eight, nine, ten, eleven . . . So I won’t . . . twelve . . . yell at you . . . thirteen . . .”

“So we screwed up?”

“. . . fourteen . . . Big time.”

He was slowing down.

“Why?”

“If he did do it . . . you tipped him off, so now . . . fifteen . . .”

He was puffing a bit.

“. . . he’ll try harder to . . . sixteen . . . cover his tracks.”

He strained to make the next one.

“. . . seventeen . . . And the two of you are now . . . witnesses to what . . . he said when . . . he was first accused . . .”

He was starting to turn red, but then seemed to find a burst of energy.

“Eighteen . . . . . . nineteen. . . . . . . twenty!”

Oscar stopped, got up and sat back down in the chair, breathing hard.

“That is why lawyers in the real world don’t interview suspects, Robert. They let investigators do it. They let the damn investigators do it!”

It seemed to me that Oscar had written off our efforts too easily. “Harry seems like a pretty good suspect to me.”

He rolled his eyes. “Listen, I got a look at
all
of Susan Apacha’s key card records for Sunday evening and Monday morning. The ones that match names with numbers. Aside from Jenna, thirteen people rode the elevator up to the eighty-fifth Floor between 8:00 p.m. Sunday night and 4:29 a.m. Monday morning. Apacha says the cops have interviewed all of them, and each and every one has a legitimate excuse—coming back from a late dinner, working late or whatever. So even if Harry was in the office and yelled at Simon, so what? Lots of other people were probably still here, pulling all-nighters. And anyway, Harry’s name is not one of the names on the list.”

"If the cops interviewed everyone whose key card came up, why haven’t they interviewed Jenna?”

“Maybe they did interview her and she forgot to tell you.”

“She would have told me.”

“Uh huh. Well, then, maybe they haven’t interviewed her because she’s your goddamn lawyer.” He paused, got up, came over to my desk, put both hands on it, and, leaning across it, got as close to my face as he could. “Don’t you understand, Robert? She is
hiding
behind you!”

Just then, I noticed that Jenna had returned. From the look on her face, she had heard everything Oscar said.

“I’m not hiding behind anyone,” she said. “You want the cops to interview me, Oscar? Give them my cell number. I’m happy to chat.”