Death on a High Floor (5 page)

She didn’t wait for me to respond. She reached over, picked up the flip, and held it out to me. “Take the fucking coin, Robert.”

When I didn’t reach for it immediately, she continued to dangle it there in front of me, waiting.

Finally, I took it from her and dropped it into the right-hand pocket of my suit jacket. “I’ll think on it,” I said. “But I’ll probably just give it back.”

Jenna changed the subject.

“Ready to talk about lawyers now?”

“I guess we should. Who should I hire?”

“Me.”

“We’ve been through this. You don’t know enough.”

“I’ve done seven long jury trials. Six of them with you.”

“None was a criminal trial.”

“Don’t you remember? I also spent six months on loan to the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s office. I tried four federal criminal cases to verdict. All convictions.”

“They were misdemeanor drug trials. Pigeons on a fence.”

“Maybe so, but I learned the ropes and the rules.”

“Just help me find a good,
experienced
criminal defense lawyer, okay?”

“I want to do more than that. You’re my mentor. I want to help you.”

“I’m truly touched, Jenna. But I can’t risk it. For the lead, I need somebody with deep experience. But if it’s okay with whoever that turns out to be, you can be second chair.”

She sighed. “Okay, I figured that’s what you’d say. This morning, while you were still asleep, I called Oscar Quesana. He’s agreed to join the team.”

I cringed inwardly at the word
team.
Whenever I thought of criminal defense teams, I thought about defendants who were obviously guilty. Like O. J. Simpson.

“Quesana’s always struck me as slow,” I said.

“He is. But he’s slow like the tortoise, you know?”

“I don’t know, really.”

“We have an appointment with him at two o’clock at your office.”

“I’d rather he came here.”

“He can’t. The media will see him.”

“Oh.”

I sat for a moment, thinking. “Jenna, why are the media people out there so interested in this? Simon wasn’t famous. Not even a little.”

“He was prominent, Robert. He had been on a million mayoral commissions and like the
Times
said, he had just been elected honorary chair of the opera.”

“Who in this town goes to opera?”

“Lots of people.”

“Do you go?”

“That’s not the point.”

“All right, fine. I still don’t understand it. But how am I supposed to get to my office? That thing outside is like a man-eating blob.”

“You can escape in the trunk of my car.”

“I’m not doing that!”

“Robert, I’m joking. I parked my car in your garage facing out. We’re going to open the garage door and drive out slowly. The Blob, as you call it, will part. They’ll take your picture in the car. Nothing to be done about that. Other than that, it will be fine. Trust me.”

“Okay.”

Suddenly, my brain returned from some kind of vacation-from-logic it had been on.

“Jenna, how do I know that you didn’t kill him yourself?”

“Why would I want to kill him?”

“How should I know? Maybe you killed him because he was doing it with someone else.”

“Probably was. That was his M.O.”

“I don’t know anything about his M.O.,” I said.

“Do you really think I killed him?” she asked.

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Look, Robert, the reason you should believe me when I say I didn’t kill him is the same reason I believe you. Faith in each other.”

There was a small silence as I considered what she had said. It was true that there was no particular reason for her to believe me. No more than my reason for wanting to believe her.

I was starting to feel overwhelmed again.

“Maybe,” I said, “we should see Oscar another day.”

Jenna got up, came over, and sat down next to me. She put her arm around me. Rather gently, I thought. “Robert, after you get a grip, I think it will actually help you to meet with Oscar today. We need to get a strategy in place quickly, and that will make you feel better.”

“What’s the rush? Why don’t we just wait and see what happens?”

“We can’t wait. The police were already here asking to interview you again. I told them you were sick. So we have to get going on figuring out a strategy.”

I looked down at my tie. “Okay, but before we go downtown I need to change my tie. There’s a spot of coffee on it.”

“I can’t see a spot.”

“It’s there.”

“Okay, okay. Change it and we’ll go.”

I got up and headed to the bedroom to get a clean tie. One without a damn spot on it.

The drive to the office was not as bad as I had feared.

Jenna pulled her car slowly out of the garage, and the Blob parted, just as she had said it would. Jenna drives a Toyota Land Cruiser. Whatever its political and environmental correctness, it is big and high. High enough that the reporters moving alongside the car as we inched down the driveway had to peer across at me, instead of down at me. Jenna had instructed me to look straight ahead, and I did. The flashes were annoying, but at least they weren’t in my eyes.

I had expected the Blob to follow us, but it didn’t. I still had a lot to learn about blob behavior. Among other things, I hadn’t yet learned that there was more than one blob. I would learn that later.

The first few minutes of the drive, neither of us said a thing. We just watched the trees go by as we wound our way down the canyon. It’s not a road you can take at much more than thirty-five. Finally, as Jenna exited the canyon onto city streets and headed to the freeway, I broke the silence.

“May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Where’d you learn how to deal with the media? In the trials we’ve done together, the courtroom has always been empty. Zero press interest. They certainly didn’t teach you that in law school.”

“You’ve forgotten who my father was.”

“Senator James. Democrat of Ohio.”

“Right. Do you remember the scandal?”

“Not well.”

“Accused by political enemies of taking bribes when he was on the Cleveland City Council. Accusations leaked two weeks before he stood for election to a second term in the Senate. I was twelve. When the media mob—and
Blob
really is a great name for it—materialized in front of our house, my mother was terrified by it. My father was enraged by it.

“And you?”

“For some reason I found it fascinating. So I became the family blob expert. I took coffee out to them. I chatted them up. As a twelve-year-old girl who hadn’t yet reached puberty, I could go out and do that without becoming a camera target. Today, it might be different. But back then, news directors weren’t about to put images of a guy’s daughter on the news. It would have crossed the line. So I learned what you might call the Way of the Blob without being devoured by it.”

“That’s how you knew it wouldn’t block our car?”

“Yes. I even learned when and how to feed it.”

“Meaning exactly what?”

“Meaning that I learned exactly what the Blob lives for. Which is to be ‘in the moment.’ From the anchor all the way down to the guy who holds the boom mike, there’s a craving to be where it’s happening—to be where it’s at.”

Now I am a guy who, far from being in the moment, doesn’t even watch the local news. To the extent that I had ever let the thought of journalists enter my mind, I pictured them scurrying around taking notes on those funny little rectangular pads featuring a tightly wound spiral binding at the top. From my perch on the eighty-fifth floor, they had seemed nobody I needed to care about. Let alone worry about becoming a snack in their food chain.

“What do you feed something that wants to be in the moment?”

“First, you feed them the feeling that you like them and respect them. Journalists crave approval almost as much as they crave the moment. Second, you help them create the very moment they’re seeking. You hold press conferences. You slip them the names and addresses of people they can blob up. You feed them inside stuff.”

We were approaching the freeway on-ramp. It’s a place where a driver has to pay attention. A bad merge can kill you. As Jenna focused on executing a good merge, I reflected on what she had said. It made sense. But what the hell was I supposed to do while she fed the Blob its moment? Hide?

“Jenna, what does all that mean for me?”

“It means your lawyers might do a few careful interviews on talk shows—the ones where ground rules can be negotiated and followed. But it also means you’re never ever going to talk directly about it to anyone, least of all to the Blob. Instead, you’re going to learn to wave the jaunty wave of the innocent as you get in and out of cars.”

“I am so thrilled.”

“More questions?”

“Yeah. Why do you want to help represent me? Really?”

“Cause I like you a lot.”

“You like a lot of people,” I said.

“How about because you’ve protected me from the assholes in the firm and given me great advice?”

“I try to do that for all the associates.”

“Put it this way, Robert. When I came here, I knew I was smart enough to do the work and do it well. I assumed I’d get to be a partner, no sweat. But you made me see that everybody here is smart, one way or another, and that it’s a brutal competition. A hundred associates enter every year. Eight years later, only three or four get to wear the garlands. If I make it, it will be because of you, and I want to repay you. I never thought I’d actually get to do that.”

I didn’t know what to say in response to such an encomium, so I just asked one more curmudgeonly question. “Any other reasons?”

“Uh huh.”

“Such as?”

“I want to be famous.”

As Jenna said that, she accelerated suddenly and then swerved deftly to avoid a semi that had changed lanes without warning. Unlike Stewart, Jenna could drive. The maneuver shoved me back in my seat.

“Well, at least you’re honest about it.”

“Look, Robert, face it. Big deal civil litigation— the stuff we do—is intellectually interesting. But you can’t dine out on it. I mean, sure, it’s better than being a dentist. But guys at bars aren’t exactly fascinated by what I do. It’s not going to land me an up-and-coming movie producer.”

“Do you want a movie producer?”

“I don’t know. But I’m twenty-eight going on twenty-nine, and if I’m not careful I’m going to end up married to some other lawyer, for God’s sake. But if the media stays focused on this and I help get you off, I emerge seriously famous, and I get to do something both more lucrative and more interesting. So it’s a twofer. I do good for you and good for myself at the same time.”

I had always known Jenna to be ambitious. It was one of the things that attracted me to her. The “tiger, tiger burning bright” thing. But I’d never before seen the tiger glow with quite so many kilowatts.

“Maybe I shouldn’t want a lawyer on my team who wants to be famous.”

“Every criminal lawyer in this town wants to be famous.”

“What about Oscar Quesana?”

“It’s too late for him. He’s achieved the enviable status of ‘respected,’ and that’s as far as it’s going to go for him. Ever. Besides, I’m more telegenic. A five-foot-five pert size six looks great on camera. So the guys in the press, and maybe even some of the girls, will find me very interesting indeed. Even more so when they discover I’m a natural blonde who dyes her hair black. And their interest in me will translate into a favorable interest in your story.”

“My story? I don’t have a story. Except that I’m not guilty and I didn’t do it. What possible story do I have beyond that? That I was home alone Sunday night? That I watched a re-mastered DVD of
The Maltese Falcon
? Because that is God’s truth.”

“Well, we’ll need a better story than that. Because the DA is going to be sitting in the courtroom weaving a scarf that says ‘guilty’ in both English and Spanish.”

“Courtroom? Shit, I haven’t even been arrested, let alone indicted.” I was feeling agitated. “I mean they’ve got nothing. Nothing.” If I were the kind of person who pounded things, I would have pounded the dashboard.

Jenna turned her head and gave me a quick, eyebrows-arched look before focusing again on the road ahead. “Robert, you don’t read the newspapers you subscribe to, and you don’t watch television. You don’t surf the Net. You don’t have a Facebook account, and you’ve probably never even heard of Twitter.”

“I know about Twitter. I just don’t use it.”

“Whatever, you’ve mostly missed the brave new world of crime stories.”

“I think I’ve even missed the brave old world of crime stories, Jenna.”

She laughed. “I don’t doubt it. But here’s the scoop. These days, the police and the DA need to solve high-profile killings pronto. DA’s don’t get reelected if they don’t solve them before the next election, and police chiefs don’t get reappointed by the mayor if they’re not solved. There’s an election for DA in six months, and the Chief’s first term is up in nine. He wants a second term. So right now you’re what they call second-term security.”

By now my agitation had dissolved into a petulant mutter. “They’ve got nothing.”

“They think they’ve got a lot. They’ve got opportunity. They’ve got you tied physically into the crime by the blood on your suit coat. If you decide to return the coin to Simon’s estate and then the police find the e-mails, they’ll also have a plausible motive.”

“I still think it’s a dumb motive.”

“Well, I don’t think so. And my gut tells me that they
do
have something more. Or they wouldn’t have leaked to the
Times
that you’re a person of interest.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. We need to find out. Maybe it has to do with that ‘vator’ thing I heard them talking about.”

We never finished the conversation, because a white news van suddenly pulled alongside us, a TV camera poking out its window. Jenna saw it, too.

“Don’t turn your head!”

It was hard not to turn my head, but I obeyed. I was trying to be a good client. The van was still alongside. I could see it in my peripheral vision.

“Robert, grab my cell. In the glove compartment!”

I opened the glove compartment, rummaged for the phone, extracted it, and handed it to her. She punched in a number.

“Who are you calling?”

“The news director for KZDD. That’s their goddamn van.”

I heard a click as someone answered.

“Hey, Mike. Jenna James. . . Uh huh. Well, I’m representing him. . . Yeah, it
is
hard to believe. Fun stuff, huh? Hey, I have a small request . . .” Then she laughed and said, quite sweetly, really, “Tell your fucking news van to get away from my car?”

I could not help but notice that she had used the vocal mannerism so common to her generation—an upward lilt at the end of the sentence, turning it from a statement into a question.

There followed more banter between Jenna and Mike. Then, to my amazement, the van dropped back and away.

“How do you know that guy?”

“He’s Janet Bui’s boyfriend.”

Janet is a third year associate. I had a vague recollection of a bearded guy who sometimes hung around Janet’s office late in the day and on weekends. Must be this Mike guy.

“So Mike did you a favor?”

“More like he backed off now in exchange for an implied promise of some tasty tidbit later.”

“What difference would it have made if they’d filmed me this way?”

“Being filmed in a moving car makes you look like prey.”

“Oh.” This constant obsession with image was going to take getting used to.

We were exiting the freeway onto the streets of downtown and making our way toward our office building. That was when I learned that the Blob has a downtown cousin. Because a Blob that would have done the one in my driveway proud was milling about at the entrance to the building’s parking garage. In fact, it was blocking the way.

“Okay, now what, Jenna? I can’t not look. They’re right in front of us.”

“Look right at the cameras and give them a big thumbs up.”

I did it. It seemed to work, because the Blob parted and let us through. But it felt truly and utterly stupid. I never learned if it looked truly and utterly stupid, because I resolved then and there that I was not going to watch myself on television.