Death on a High Floor (25 page)

“I am, and I will,” I said.

“Good . . . Damn it! Behind us!”

I turned. “Shit! It’s a news van.”

“We need to lose it,” Oscar said.

“Jenna got rid of a news van with a cell phone call,” I said.

Oscar glanced behind us. “Well, good for her. I haven’t fucked anybody in the media lately, so I’ve got no one to call.”

“That’s unkind.”

“Whatever. I have an idea,” he said.

Oscar made a screeching U-turn and accelerated back up the street, moving past the news van, which was still going the other way. I could see the driver’s face as we passed, looking startled. I looked behind me and watched the truck, starting to turn. But he was big, so he had to do a three-point turn instead of an easy U. We were by then almost two blocks ahead of him.

“He’ll catch up,” I said.

“Yeah, but I know downtown like the back of my hand,” Oscar said. “And there’s one place he’s gonna have a problem following.”

Oscar turned onto the next cross street and then almost immediately turned again into a narrow alley. I looked behind us again. The truck was about to follow us into the alley. Ahead was an overhanging walkway that spanned the alley from one building to the other. A sign in large letters read,
LOW CLEARANCE. NO TRUCKS OR VANS
.

“Looks too low,” I said.

“We’ll make it,” Oscar said. “But the truck won’t. Especially with that microwave array on top.”

Oscar stepped on it, and I instinctively ducked. We cleared the overhang by an inch or two. I raised my head back up as we accelerated even faster down the alley.

I looked behind us again. The truck had come to a dead stop at the overhanging walkway. Oscar sped through the first cross street, then into the next alley, and then through two more blocks of alleyways. He was going really fast. Finally, he screeched through a left turn at the third cross street, slowed abruptly and headed at normal speed for a freeway on-ramp.

“They’ll never figure out where we went,” Oscar said.

“You know, Oscar, I used to live a pretty calm life.”

“Yeah, you were sure up there on a high floor,” he said.

“Not anymore. Where are we going?”

“To my office,” he said.

“I don’t even know where your office is.”

“I work out of an old place in Venice. The address isn’t listed anywhere.”

“Your law office has no listed address?”

“I use a P.O. box. That way no one can bother me at work if I don’t want to be bothered. Call me eccentric.”

“Is that why you were so intent on losing the van?” I asked.

“In part.”

“And the other part?”

“I just hate those fuckers.”

We were by then moving on the Santa Monica Freeway, heading toward the ocean at seventy miles per hour, with no traffic. Which was surprising at that time of day. Another mystery of the L.A. freeways.

I kept glancing around, looking for more news vans. I had begun to feel like a hunted animal. Then I thought about how much trouble I was in and who my legal team was. I had one lawyer who worked out of my
own
house and another who had a secret office. Actually, I didn’t even know if Oscar
was
one of my lawyers again.

“Oscar, are you back on my case?”

“It seems I came out at the top of some list again.”

“Oh.” I had utterly forgotten about the list I’d told Jenna to make when I left to go to Chicago. It seemed like months ago.

“So, yes, I am back on the team.” He paused. “If you want me.”

“Sure I want you. But didn’t you quit?” I was tired and befuddled.

“I did. But Jenna called me yesterday morning and asked if I’d come back. I said I’d see. Then I spent all day with her. Was impressed, so I said yes. Smart cookie. Doesn’t know a lot yet but learns like Sherlock Holmes.”

“Was he a fast learner?”

“Don’t know. Really meant she has a good strategic gut,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Welcome back.”

“Mind if I put on some music?”

“No, go ahead.”

He put a CD in the player. It was one of the Bach cello suites. Who’d have thought Oscar liked Bach. I began to think about Oscar and his musical tastes. That’s the last thing I recall.

The next thing I knew I was jerked awake as the car stopped in front of the gated garage door of an apartment building. The Bach was no longer playing. Oscar had switched to a Beethoven piano concerto. I had been asleep for at least twenty minutes. Amazingly, I actually felt refreshed.

As I climbed out of my slumber, I watched Oscar use the remote to retract the garage door.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“My office.”

“It’s in an apartment building?”

“Yep.”

We pulled into a small underground garage—the type that collapsed on and crushed hundreds of cars in dozens of buildings in the ’94 quake—and got out of the car. I noticed that it was an old
Crown Victoria
. I hadn’t had a chance to note the model back when we were clambering in.

“Isn’t this the car they make into cop cars a lot, Oscar?”

“Yeah. In fact, it
was
an old cop car,” he said.

“Should I ask?”

“Bought it at an auction. Tipped off by a friend that this one was a really good buy. Low mileage. Off-loaded because somebody died in it in a bad way.”

We were heading for the small elevator in the corner of the garage.

“That didn’t bother you? The dying part?”

“Nah. A good detailing and the blood was gone. Pretty much anyway.”

“How’d the guy die?”

“Did you ever see
Pulp Fiction
?”

“Yes.”

“Like that.”

“Oh.”

We got into the elevator, and Oscar hit 4. The elevator began to grind its way upward, in the way that old apartment building elevators in Los Angeles always do. Life was slower in the sixties.

“Who tipped you to the car?” I asked.

“Spritz.”

“Should I be worried?”

“No, you should be thrilled. He tells me things. Like he already did about the elevator access records.”

The elevator doors finally opened, and we exited into a narrow hallway. Oscar fished out a key and opened the door to apartment 403, which revealed itself as a single, large, square room with a badly scuffed hardwood floor. Casement windows on the far wall looked out over rooftops and satellite dishes to the beach a block away. There was a large kitchen off to the left.

A narrow Formica counter-desk wrapped around three sides of the room, including beneath the casement windows. The Formica had once upon a time been red. Now it was only reddish. One corner of the counter held an old manual typewriter. A Royal. Stacks of paper covered every other inch of the surface. In the middle of the room stood a square conference table, fashioned from some indifferent oak. Four threadbare cloth swivel chairs, one to a side, completed the conference set. The only thing missing was anything made after about 1965.

“No computer?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“No fax machine?”

“Negative.”

“Cell phone?”

“Never.”

“Multi-line phone?”

Oscar lifted a pile of paper and pointed to the black telephone beneath. It had a rotary dial. “My only concession to the modern world,” he said.

“Don’t you worry you’re behind the times?”

Oscar was on his way into the kitchen. He answered me over his shoulder, in a near-shout. “Jury verdicts are delivered the old fashioned way. By voice!”

I took his point and sat facing the kitchen across the table. I heard the clink of glassware. “You want a drink, Robert?”

“A Coke, please?

“My friend, you need something stronger!”

“You’re right,” I said. “A very dry vodka martini, then. With an olive if you’ve got it.”

“Coming up!”

I should have thought about the fact that I had eaten hardly anything since breakfast. With the exception of what I snacked down on the plane, most of which I had deposited on Spritz and Drady. But I didn’t think about that at all. At the very least, I should have asked Oscar for some cheese and crackers or something. But I didn’t do that either. I just sat there and waited for the martini.

I heard Oscar shaking the ice in the kitchen. The martini was going to be gloriously cold.

The doorbell rang. I got up to open it. It was Jenna. She was wearing tattered jeans and a baggy, grey sweatshirt, and she was carrying a lumpy shopping bag.

“Hi, Robert. Welcome back!” she said.

All I could manage to get out was, “You look like a bag lady. I have a bag lady and a Luddite for lawyers.”

Someone watching all this might have thought I was just being flip. But I was in fact suddenly teetering on the brink of despair.

She laughed. “Chill, man. You have
the
best combo. Young and smart, plus old and savvy.” She dropped the shopping bag by the front door and headed for the chair that faced me across the table.

Oscar emerged, carrying two martinis in classic glasses. Each with the required olive. “I heard that,” he said, “and I don’t like to think of myself as old.” He put both glasses down on the table. “One’s for you, Jenna.” Then he headed back to the kitchen.

Jenna swiveled her chair toward the kitchen. “Are you drinking, Oscar?”

“I’ll be right back with what I drink,” he said.

“Which is what?” she asked.

“A Manhattan. I keep a pitcher in the fridge, just in case.”

Jenna laughed. “Talk about the fifties.”

Oscar was by then at the far end of the kitchen. He had to shout to be heard. “You should learn to drink them, Jenna! They’ll make you savvy!”

Jenna ignored him and swiveled back toward the table. I looked across at her. I was beginning to have second thoughts about my choice of libation.

“Maybe it isn’t such a savvy idea for me to drink this,” I said. “I may fall over.”

“You need it for old time’s sake, Robert.” She paused. “Not to mention new times.”

Oscar returned, Manhattan in hand, and took the chair at the end of the table, the one with its back to the windows. “Let’s have a toast then,” he said.

I didn’t see a lot to toast. “What are we toasting?” I asked. “My arrest? My feeling that this can’t be real?”

Oscar raised his glass. “To the acquittal of the innocent!”

We clicked glasses, and I watched Oscar down half of his. Jenna followed his lead. I took an even larger gulp of mine. The icy cold felt fantastic as it slid down my throat. It even revived once again, if only momentarily, my sense of control.

“Oscar, does your toast mean you now think that I’m really innocent?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I told you a couple days ago that I believed you when you said you were innocent. Remember?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I had the sense that that was a professional courtesy kind of belief. What any lawyer will do for a paying client. Different from being really
persuaded
. Are you
persuaded
, Oscar?”

“I am,” he said.

“I still have the same question, then. What changed?”

“Jenna told me about Stewart’s office.”

“About the counterfeit
Ides
and the book?”

“About the fact that they were hidden.”

“That doesn’t seem to exculpate me.”

“It does,” he said, “if you add to it the fact that the secret compartment used to belong to Harry. And then when you add another rather curious fact.”

“Which fact is that?” I asked.

He motioned to Jenna, palm up, inviting her to speak. She beamed like the proverbial cat who had just made a gourmet meal of the canary.

“Betty Menino took me out for a delayed goodbye lunch,” Jenna said. Betty was the long-time M&M office manager. She had been there for almost forty years and was rumored to know everything about everybody. “I wormed the history of the secret compartment out of her.”

I took another swig of my dwindling martini and waited.

“She told me that ten years ago Harry asked her to get the bookcase specially modified. Back when he was the managing partner. But he asked her to keep it strictly to herself. He told her that he needed a place to keep certain sensitive things where no one would sneak a look at them. He didn’t trust the safes, he said, because someone else always had a key or the combination.”

“Wow,” I said. Which is not a word that normally plays a major role in my vocabulary.

Jenna continued. “Betty told me that when Harry retired, he didn’t want to take the bookcase. So Betty put it up for grabs in the usual way. Partners got first shot by seniority, then associates. Stewart ended up with it.”

Suddenly, despite the importance of what Jenna was saying, I was rapidly leaving wow behind. The martini had overtaken wow and passed it on the right. I was left staring into my drink, having trouble holding my head up. I heard Oscar following up, since I couldn’t.

“Now tell our fast-fading client the really important thing,” he said.

“Betty told me,” Jenna said, “that starting about a month ago Harry became
very
interested to know who had ended up with the bookcase. He even called her to inquire. But he tried to make it seem like a “by the way” kind of thing in a conversation about something else. She told him that Stewart had it.”

“But then,” Jenna added, “she told me one other thing that was kind of odd.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard this part,” Oscar said. “What was the odd part?”

“She told me that Harry knew damn well who had the bookcase. Because right after he left the firm, he had asked her who ended up with it, and she told him.”

“Maybe,” Oscar said, “old Harry’s getting a touch of Alzheimer’s.”

I had been only half listening, focusing on the inch of liquid left in my martini glass. I figured what the hell and drank it down, head back. It was still chilled, and that last little shot of cold vodka gave me what I needed to ask the big question. The one I’d been pondering since my visit to Serappo.

I put my empty glass ever so carefully back on the table and looked directly across at Jenna.

“I suppose that’s all very incriminating for Harry,” I said. “But here’s what I really want to know. Jenna, were you the courier who took the
Ides
to Serappo?”

Jenna had long ago finished her own martini. It showed in her eyes, which radiated a kind of defiant sparkle.

“In a word, yes,” she said.

I held her look. She knew exactly what I was thinking. Many seconds of silence passed.

Oscar looked from one of us to the other and then back again, like someone who had been watching a tennis match and suddenly found both players frozen in place.

Jenna, eyes still locked on mind, broke the silence. “After you sold the
Ides
to Simon, Simon wanted Serappo Prodiglia to authenticate and appraise it. But he didn’t want to ship it. So about two months ago, he asked me to take it to Chicago. And I did.”

Oscar did a double take.

“But you didn’t tell either of us this little fact before?”

“No.”

“Why the
fuck
not?”

“I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Don’t you think that would be for us to decide?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Okay. Yes,” she said. “But I never saw the coin, and I never talked to Serappo about it. I was just the post office.”

“Fuck,” Oscar said again.

“Stop saying fuck,” she said.

“Double fuck!”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am.”

Now
I
felt like someone at a tennis match. A match in which the ball was going back and forth with increasing vigor.

“You lied to us!” Oscar said.

“It wasn’t a lie!”

“Don’t lawyer me, Jenna,” he said. “Covering it up is no better than a lie.”

Jenna didn’t respond.

“Admit it!”

“Fuck both of you,” she said.

As she said it, she swept up her martini glass, raised it above her head, and hurled it against the wall immediately behind me. I heard it shatter, then watched the ricocheting olive bounce neatly into the shopping bag.

Without another word, Jenna rose from the table, moved to the door, opened it, and walked out. She didn’t close it behind her, and she certainly didn’t look back. Even in my near-dead state, I knew it was the best exit I’d ever seen. Better even than Oscar’s had been.

Oscar looked at me. “We need to talk about this, Robert.” He was right. But I was too tired and too drunk right then. All I managed was, “Can’t now.”

He took me at my word. “Okay. We need to get you to bed then. Can’t take you back to your house. Gonna be too much press there. I’ll take you to my place.”

“Apartment?” I mumbled.

“House,” he said. He helped me get up and guided me out the door and down the elevator to the
Crown Victoria
. I vaguely noticed that he had grabbed Jenna’s shopping bag from beside the door as we left. I don’t remember much about the trip to his house, except climbing into a bed when we got there and falling instantly sleep.

It had been a very long day.