Death on a High Floor (28 page)

Jenna tore a piece of paper out of her legal pad and drew a line down the middle. She wrote “pros” at the top of one column and “cons” at the top of the other.

“Jenna,” I said, “I know I taught you to do that, but you don’t need to this time. I want to get rid of the capital crime threat. Even if it’s weak. Let’s take their deal.”

Jenna picked up the coffee cup and downed maybe half of it. “Whatever you want, chief.” She crumpled up the piece of paper and dropped it on the floor.

Oscar got up and started pacing. “Robert, my friend, I understand your decision. But before we make it final, we need to talk about exactly why the DA wants this deal.” I recognized the technique. I was about to be handled.

“Okay. Enlighten me,” I said.

Oscar continued pacing. He reminded me of an old professor I once had. One who never stood still. “Enlightenment goes like this. Horace Krandall is unpopular. He’s lost three high-profile cases in the last two years. People hate losers. The next election isn’t that far away—people are already gearing up for it. He’ll need 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off. He’s already got three potential challengers putting out feelers to campaign donors, two from his own office.”

“So?”

“So he needs a big win in the courts right now to make himself look good. If your case takes the normal course of a complex case, the prelim could end up being after the election. So what he needs is to seem to win something big in your case right now. Very publicly.”

“I still don’t understand why you’re so sure he’ll win.”

Oscar finally stopped moving. “Because they don’t have to prove you actually did it. They don’t even have to come close. Practically speaking, any two pieces of evidence that seem to link you to the crime will constitute sufficient evidence that you likely did it. Maybe just one piece.”

“They could lose the prelim. They must have lost at least one,” I said.

“Let me say it again. No one remembers the last time the DA’s office lost a prelim in a major case that’s in the public eye. Most judges have no balls in major felony prelims. They rarely kick them.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it might fuck up their chances for reelection,” he said, “or lose them appointment to a seat on the Court of Appeals. So, bottom line, the DA not only knows he’s going to win the prelim, he also expects to get lots of favorable publicity while he does it. The public will have no clue the fix was in.”

Jenna was tapping her pen against her right ear. It was always a sign of Jenna thinking.

“Okay,” she said, “if that’s the case, and the DA desperately wants this, and Robert is going to insist we take the deal, we ought to be able to get more out of it.”

“Yes!” Oscar said. “Exactly!”

Jenna held her cup out. “More coffee, please?”

“God, you’re a regular addict,” Oscar said.

“I know what I like,” she said.

“I’ll need to make some more, then.” Oscar headed back toward the sink.

Jenna opened her legal pad again. “What do we want, then?”

“Ah,” Oscar said, turning to talk over his shoulder. “I can think of many things.”

Jenna tore out a new piece of paper and again prepared to write. “Okay, Oscar, list them.”

“One,” he said, “access to the courthouse for all hearings via the garage and a private elevator. That way we miss the media . . . Two, they agree not to mention anything about Robert trying to flee, either now or during the real trial.”

“I didn’t try to flee.”

“I know,” Oscar responded. “But they can paint a very nice picture that says you did, and there’s that very nice jury instruction that tells the jury that attempted flight is a marker of guilt. So we want that shit out.”

I had become an observer of the scene rather than a participant in it. Now I knew how clients really felt. Except most clients probably didn’t get to see their lawyers doing strategy while one made coffee and the other gulped it.

Jenna was still making the list. “Is there a three?”

“Yeah, there is,” Oscar said. “Three, they give us the names of all their witnesses. Ten days in advance, not the night before the prelim, like they usually do. And all their expert reports three business days before the hearing. Then let’s add a number four.”

Jenna’s pen was poised. “Which is?”

“Four, we do the prelim the first week of the new year, not next week. That still gives them plenty of time to put on their prom dresses and gussy up for the election. One week is ridiculous. We can’t get ready in a week.”

Jenna closed her pad. “Okay. I take it that my assignment, should I choose to accept it, is to bargain hard for all four of those things?”

Oscar came back with more coffee and filled
QE2
once again. “Yeah,” he said. “Call Benitez back and tell him those are our terms.”

“Okay,” she said.

“And there’s one more thing, Jenna,” Oscar said.

“Which is?”

“Tell him the terms are nonnegotiable.”

Jenna looked pleased. She was, I knew, terrific at playing the unmovable rock.

She drank still more coffee. Then she started packing up to go. Which reminded me that I needed to get back home.

“Can I get a ride back to the house with you, Jenna?”

Oscar looked at me like I had lost my mind. “You can’t just go ride in a car to get back there. The media swarm is probably five times the size it was when you left. We need to keep your picture out of the paper until the prelim starts. Pictures of your possessions, too. The late news last night showed a clip of them towing your car from airport parking.”

I had completely forgotten about my car. “What do you suggest?”

Oscar grinned a big Cheshire Cat grin. I hadn’t seen him grin that grin before. “Well, my friend, I have an old plumber’s truck in the garage. Sign and all. It has no windows in the back and a nice privacy screen that completely blocks the back from the front.”

“I have to sit on the floor of a truck?”

“No, it has a wooden bench back there. A bit hard, but no one can see who’s sitting on it. So we could get you into your garage that way without the media noticing you. They’ll think it’s a repair guy. Or at least they won’t be sure. I have a friend who’ll drive you.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Nope. If you don’t like that plan, Jenna can drive you out in the open.” Oscar paused. “Jenna, that reminds me. Add a number five to the list: The police move the media back at Robert’s house, starting tomorrow. They can say it’s now a law office or something.”

So that is how I got home. Sitting in the dark on a hard wooden bench in the back of a bouncing truck. I felt like Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine.

I was back home by 9:00 a.m. So far as I know, the Blob never figured out that I was in the back of the truck. The young guy who drove—I later learned that he was a law student who sometimes clerked for Oscar—had actually donned coveralls to disguise himself. After we got into the garage, he came inside and waited around for an hour to make it look like he had stayed to do some work.

Perhaps the Blob actually thought my sink was clogged. On the other hand, it had to know that I wasn’t in the house when the truck arrived, and it must, in its buzzing collectivity, have seen Jenna leave earlier that morning. So who knows what its little hive-brain really thought about the truck. Maybe it was just sporting us the fantasy that we had outsmarted it.

After the “plumber” left, it was quiet in the house. Jenna had not yet returned, and the murmur of the Blob, audible as we entered the garage, could no longer be heard. All of the drapes were drawn. I very carefully turned on only one light, a small one in an inside bathroom. Somehow, I thought that lights ablaze, glowing even dimly through the drapes, might give me away. Not that it would have mattered. The Blob had never tried to climb through the windows. But I wasn’t in a particularly rational frame of mind.

I decided to give myself a time-out, so that I could stop thinking about my situation, enjoy the quiet of the morning, and get myself back to some semblance of peace of mind. First, I sat in my big leather chair and just stared at the blank slate of closed drapes. It didn’t work. Then I tried sitting on the floor and quietly chanting a mantra I had learned in a meditation class twenty years before. That didn’t work either. It never really had. I am not really mantra-amenable.

Eventually, I anesthetized myself by watching a DVD of
Casablanca
. Jenna walked in the front door just as Rick was giving Ingrid Bergman the letters of transit.

She glanced at the screen. “You think letters of transit could get you out of this, Robert?”

“God, don’t I wish.”

“It wouldn’t work. Horace Krandall’s such a stiff he’s probably never even seen
Casablanca
. So he wouldn’t honor them.” And with that, she walked into the kitchen. I got up and followed her.

“What’s next here in the real world, Jenna?”

She was rummaging in the refrigerator, with her head buried inside it. “Oscar is coming over this afternoon,” she said. “We need a strategy meeting.”

“Did you call Benitez about their proposed deal?”

“Yeah. I called him on my cell. They agreed to everything. I keep wondering what more we should have asked for. You know, what we left on the table.”

“Ah, the table problem,” I said.

Jenna and I had discussed the table problem a lot. If you settle lots of cases, as civil litigators inevitably do, you always end up wondering what you left on the table. How much more you could have taken off the table if you’d hung tougher, or how much less you would have had to put on the table if you’d been more of a recalcitrant asshole. Here was the same damn table, sitting in the criminal law parlor.

Jenna’s head was still in the fridge. “Yeah, the table problem.”

“What are you looking for in there?”

“Something for lunch. It’s almost noon.”

“Why don’t I make lunch? I’m tired of my lawyers always cooking for me.” It was the first lighthearted thing I’d said in days.

Jenna pulled her head out of the fridge. “You cook? This is new.”

“I make a world-class tuna salad.”

“With mayo or the competing product?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is that I’ve put on four pounds in one week because I’ve been mainlining pizza for stress relief. I’m going all protein and fat, no carbs. Mayo’s got tons of fat, but no carbs. The competing product tastes better but has a couple of carbs.”

I had not thought about the stress all of this was putting on Jenna. I had been too cooked in my own stew. “I think that diet theory is nonsense, but mayo it is.”

While I started on the tuna salad—mayo only—Jenna extracted several piles of paper from her backpack and put them on the kitchen table. She riffled through the papers as I worked on the salad. Adapting to my role as a client, I didn’t ask what the papers were.

I enjoyed making lunch. I turned the tuna salad into a sandwich on whole wheat for me. And since even I recognized that bread contains carbs, I put Jenna’s tuna salad in a bowl. I located a couple of apples, carbs though they were, and cut them up. I felt enormously, fulfillingly competent.

The lunch became a debriefing. I told Jenna in detail what I had learned from the
Enquirer
reporter, from Serappo, and from the cops. Jenna took notes and, intermittently, bites of her tuna salad. She didn’t touch the apple pieces.

“You learned a lot,” she said, after I had finished both my report and my sandwich.

“In some ways, yeah. But I’m still no closer to knowing who did it, except that
I
didn’t.”

“
I
didn’t either.”

“Right.”

“Oh shit,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s another thing I should have extracted from Benitez.”

“What?”

“A promise not to try to disqualify me on the grounds that I could be a witness.”

I had forgotten about that issue. Entirely. “Let’s cross that bridge if we come to it,” I said.

Which represented a big change of attitude on my part. As a lawyer, up to that point, I had always tried to imagine in advance
every
bridge I might come to and how to cross it safely. Or how to blow it up after I had made it across.

Jenna nailed me. “Well, that’s a big change, Mr
.
Always-Be-Sure-to Look-at-All-the-Options
Tarza.”

“You and Oscar can look at all the options.”

“We will.”

I changed the subject. “Jenna, what surprises you most about what I just told you?”

She was busy folding a piece of paper into ever-smaller rectangles. In her first year at the firm, during a particularly intense meeting, I’d seen her fold a dozen pieces of paper, one after the other. I had teased her about it one day, and she told me that the neurosis—my term, not hers—had started in grade school. After seven years of observation, I finally concluded that she did it when she was trying to think through a difficult problem, the way some people use worry beads.

Jenna didn’t answer for a bit. She was completing the sixth and final fold. I noticed, to my distress, that I, too, had begun to fold a piece of paper. Just as I was contemplating whether such habits were communicable, Jenna stopped folding and answered my question.

“The business about there being many fakes, that’s what surprises me,” she said. “It sounds like someone was putting together a counterfeiting ring for the
Ides
.”

“Which makes no sense,” I said. “Because the
Ides
is too famous and too rare. If you tried to market even a couple of them, everyone in the coin world would be asking you where you got them.”

“And if someone tried to market seven of them?”

“Everyone would instantly scream counterfeit, just like they did with the Black Sea Hoard.”

“Suppose they were real,” she said. “How much would a coin like that sell for if you went to sell all of them?”

“Well, Simon way overpaid me for mine. He just wanted to beat out the other bidders, or something. But if they were real—which they can’t be, by the way—and they were sold one at a time, maybe the owner would get three hundred thousand each if they were in Extremely Fine condition.”

Jenna put the new piece of paper she was folding aside, took a calculator out of her backpack, and punched in the numbers. I am always amazed at the simple math Jenna’s generation can’t do in their heads.

“Well,” she said, “that would be two million one hundred thousand dollars. A serious chunk of change.”

“Yes, but the coins can’t be real, so that isn’t going to happen.”

“What if they
were
real?”

I resisted rolling my eyes.

“Seven of them, all at once?”

“Yes.”

“They can’t be real. Think about it. Seven coins, hidden away for over two thousand years, suddenly pop up here in Los Angeles?”

“In your garden.”

“Right. In my garden.”

“Hey, you know, we haven’t really gone out to look at your garden since the police dug it up,” she said.

She was right. Without exchanging another word, we both headed for the kitchen door. Before going out into the backyard, I looked around to make sure I wasn’t in the Blob’s sightline. I wasn’t, so I stepped outside.

“Yard” is kind of a misnomer. My yard is mostly a steep hillside, held back by a huge concrete retaining wall. But at the foot of the hill, nestled in the space between the house and the retaining wall, a prior owner had carved out a small garden, maybe ten feet by twelve, and surrounded it with a low, red brick wall pierced by a wrought iron gate. The perfect place for Peter Rabbit and his mother if they ever needed to get away from a damp English summer.

When my daughter was young, the garden had had a playhouse in it. It was long gone. In recent years, I’d done some desultory planting there in the summer, usually a few vegetables and some flowers. Now, in winter, it was mostly bare dirt, with a few weeds thrown in for good measure. Not at all Peter Rabbit-friendly.

We walked over to the wall and stood there, looking in at the garden.

“Alright, Sherlock,” I said. “What do you deduce?”

“Well, for one thing, they must have been tipped off about where the box was buried.”

“Because?”

She pointed to the dug up area. “Because they only dug up one corner in order to find it.”

“Maybe they just got lucky.”

“Maybe. But if they were digging at random and found a box, you’d think they’d go on digging to see what else they might find. So they were looking for something specific, knew where to look, found it, and left.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Who has access to your garden?”

I shrugged. “Pretty much anybody, really. All you’d have to do to get here is walk down the driveway between my house and the one next door. There’s no fence or gate. So unless I was home or my neighbor was, nobody would see you.”

“Maybe we should ask your neighbor.”

“I’m embarrassed to say I don’t even know her name. She’s lived there about three years I think, but I’ve never even met her.”

“Welcome to Los Angeles,” Jenna said.

“Isn’t it a little early to be planting spring flowers?” It was Oscar, who had come up behind us.

“What are you doing back here?” I asked.

“I was sneaking in. The media saw me arrive, and I felt like sticking it to them. So I walked around to the back, where they couldn’t follow because someone has put up no trespassing signs all over your property.”

Jenna beamed. “I did it yesterday.”

“Smart work,” Oscar said. “But unless you ace detectives have more to do out here, could we go inside? It’s cold.” Then he cast a knowing eye over the garden. “By the way, Robert, if you plan on growing anything there, you should be turning the soil during the winter.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Oscar. If I’m still around to tend it.”

He wasn’t listening. He was instead staring at the dirt pile.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“What’s what?”

“That thing there.”

He pointed at the dirt pile but didn’t wait for me to respond. He opened the gate, walked into the garden, and reached into the pile of turned earth. Then he plucked out what appeared to be a coin, partially covered with dirt, and brought it back through the gate.

He handed it to me. “Is this an
Ides
?”

I brushed some of the dirt off and examined it as carefully as I could.

“Yes, it appears to be an eighth copy. Also fake, I assume.”