Death on a High Floor (3 page)

“That was right after I stopped liking him,” I said.

“Yeah, I know you were friends before that,” she said. She paused, as if thinking about what to say next, then continued. “After he became managing partner, as you’ve told me over way too many martinis, he hurt a lot of people you think of as your friends. And you’re loyal, Robert. Despite your snotty aloofness, you’re loyal to your friends, and I can imagine you killing Rafer for what he’s done to some of them.”

“Shit, Jenna, that stuff goes on in every mega firm on the planet. It’s hardly a motive for murder.”

She said nothing. I felt suddenly, sinkingly defensive. “I didn’t do it,” I said.

I paused and waited. Still, she said nothing.

“You do believe me, don’t you, Jen?”

She looked up at me and tilted her head in that funny little way of hers. “Oh, I believe you. But remember all those people milling in reception, right before that guy in the baggy suit took you away?”

“His name is Spritz. Detective Spritz.”

“Whatever. After he took you away, the buzz was that you did it.”

“Cut it out, Jenna. This isn’t funny.”

“I’m just telling you what they were saying.” She paused and stared again into her coffee cup. “Well, to be honest, they said more than that.”

“Like what?”

“I heard a cop say, ‘We’ve nailed him.’”

I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach I hadn’t had since I stood up to say “ready” at my first trial. There is something gut-twisting about coming to work in the morning, ready for a bright, shiny productive day and ending up, a couple hours later, sitting on a stool in a Starbucks, discussing why people think you killed someone you didn’t.

I tried to make light of it. “Well, Detective Spritz must share their suspicions about me, I guess. That’s why I’m wearing this stupid pink thing. Spritz was nice enough to give it to me after he took my suit jacket and shirt to check them for more blood.”

“More blood?”

“I got blood on my sleeve when I touched him.”

“That’s not a great fact.”

“I guess not.”

“Well, why didn’t you just go back to your office and change out of that thing?”

“We were in da Vinci. My office was taped off.”

There was a small silence. “Earth to Jenna.”

“I’m thinking whether I should tell you something. Something to do with da Vinci.”

“What?”

“Da Vinci is where I had my first tryst with Simon.”

Now the small silence was on my side.

“Are you telling me you did it with Simon?”

“My generation would say
fucked him
Robert. But yes, I’m telling you I
did it
with Simon. If he weren’t dead, I wouldn’t have told you. Ever.” She looked at me directly. “Are you shocked?”

Shocked wasn’t exactly the word for it. Try bowled over. Sickened, really. An image conjured itself for me.

“Want me to be blunt, Jenna?”

“Yes. Friends can be blunt with friends.”

“It’s hard to picture that shit on top of you on that table.”

“I was the one on top.”

In some ways, discovering that Jenna had, to use her own word, fucked Simon Rafer, was more shocking than discovering Simon with a dagger in his back. Or maybe more upsetting. More something. I could not fathom why someone as classy as Jenna would have sex with a slime like Simon. She didn’t need to do it to become a partner. She was already a star. I said the only thing I could think of. “Why?”

“Cause I
like
to be on top.”

“Shit. You know what I meant. I meant why did you
do
it.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot. I don’t know exactly. I think I did it for the standard male reason—conquest. You’re from a different generation, Robert. Girls have changed. Sometimes we just want to notch our belts. Like the boys in your coin club.”

“That club is defunct.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t, really, Jenna. In fact, I don’t know why we’re even talking about this. He’s dead. What you did with him, on top or on the bottom or on the side, is your business. I’ll keep it to myself.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have.”

“I needed to tell someone.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“Okay.”

An intense need to get out of there washed over me.

“Jenna?”

“Yes?”

“I need to go.” And with that I slipped off the stool and walked out.

After I left Starbucks, I decided to do the only sensible thing for a man suspected of murder. Go home. I assured myself that once I got there, I’d sit down, regain my composure, make a few calls, and get the whole thing sorted out.

I did not drive home in my own car, however. When I took the elevator down to Level B, I found that the police had cordoned off my car with more yellow tape and posted a guard. A woman cop with a bright smile and a large gun on her hip. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to.

Taking a cab was an option, but I’ve never taken a cab in L.A. Only tourists take cabs in L.A. I was saved from that fate by Stewart Broder, whose car was parked just down the row from mine.

“
Need
a lift, Bob?” he asked.

Stewart had persisted in calling me Bob for thirty-six years, ever since we entered the firm together as first-year associates. He knew I loathed it. I had never been a Bob, not even when I was in first grade. It didn’t fit. But this didn’t seem to be the right time to make objection.

“Can you take me home, Stewart?”

“Sure. Get
in
.”

Stewart drove a red Ferrari. He looked stupid in it. He was overweight, bald, and had never been handsome, even in his thin, hirsute youth. He also had terrible skin—adult acne. In the last year or so he’d been making it even worse by trying to cover it up with heavy makeup, which looked even more gooped on than usual.

I doubted that even the Ferrari helped him pick up girls, which is, after all, why most sixty-year-old guys own cars like that. Not that any girl in her right mind would have stayed in the car with him for more than one turn around the block. He drove like shit. Crazy fast with no skill.

Which is exactly how we left the garage. Crazy fast up the ramps, screech of rubber on the final exit. I hunkered down in my seat and hoped we wouldn’t be rubbed out by a passing truck. Then I waited for the questions to start.

“Is it true you
found
him?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he look
like
?”

“Like he was dead.”

“Come on, Bob,
you
can trust me.”

“Stop calling me Bob.”

“Okay, okay.
Robert,
what’d he
look
like?”

“Dagger between the shoulder blades, lots of pooled blood.”

“Just
like
in a murder mystery.”

“I guess. But the angle of the blade was wrong.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it looked plunged in sideways. In murder mysteries the blade is always straight up and down in the back.”

There was a pause. “It is? Doesn’t it depend on how
tall
the killer is or how the victim is
standing
, or something like that?”

“I don’t know, Stewart. It just seemed odd to me.”

“Okay. But what did you
see.”
Stewart has an odd and irritating habit of stressing random words. I remember noticing it the first day I met him, when he asked where I had
gone
to law school. I told him I had
gone
to law school at Harvard. Where had he
gone
? Yale he said. I remembered thinking that he looked like the kind of person who would go to Yale.

I was beginning to drift in my own head. I had not answered Stewart’s question.

He tried again. “What did you
see
?”

“Stewart, I don’t know. He was dead, all right? Dead in a pool of blood with a knife in his back. Is that why you were hanging around the garage, so you could ask me what I
saw
?” To my surprise, I was getting angry. Which I knew was unfair. Who wouldn’t be curious to know the details of such a thing?

We drove on in silence.

The image of what I had seen had begun to beat around inside my skull. Ugly death. I was having difficulty with it. It was surprising. I am famous for calm and collected.

Stewart had turned on the radio. KFRG, the country station in San Bernardino. Hard core twang. I like country. I turned it off.

“Why did you
turn
it off?”

“I don’t know. I need quiet, I guess.”

“Okay.”

We drove on in more silence. Almost forty-five minutes more, all the way from downtown to my house in the canyon.

When we pulled into my driveway, I just sat there without moving. Stewart came around and opened the door.

“You don’t look
so
good. Do you want me to come in?”

“No.”

“Are
you
sure?”

“I’ll be okay. It’s just beginning to hit me.”

“Are you
sure
?”

“Yes!” I just wanted him gone, and I wanted inside. I managed the polite exit. “But thank you, Stewart. I really appreciate the ride.”

“I figured you needed a
friend
today.”

We hadn’t truly been friends in many years. But it didn’t seem the thing to say right then. “I know, Stewart. But I’ll be fine, really.”

I got out of the car and walked up the stone walkway to my front door, maybe fifty feet in all. My legs felt rubbery. I could feel Stewart watching me. I took out my keys and noticed my hand shaking. I managed to get the key in the lock, open the door, walk inside, and sit down in the big leather chair by the window. I heard him drive off.

I am not sure how long I sat in the chair. For a while I just looked at the profusion of trees through the big windows. Mock orange trees on my side of the canyon, tall eucalyptus on the steep slope across the way. I thought about the body. I thought about the fact that Detective Spritz must think I did it. I tried to imagine what they could possibly have found that nailed me. It couldn’t be the blood on my sleeve. That was obviously there just from finding the body. Maybe Jenna didn’t hear it right.

The ringing of the phone roused me. It was Jenna.

“Can I come over?”

“I thought you were still at Starbucks.”

“No, I went home.”

“Come over if you want.”

“Be right there.”

I stumbled to the bathroom and threw up. A long, wrenching, gagging throw-up that left that awful smell in my nose. I cleaned myself up as best I could and went back to my leather chair. Jenna arrived maybe ten minutes later. She walked in without knocking. Which was something she had never done before. I had apparently left the front door wide open.

“You don’t look so good, Robert.”

“I am having trouble with all of this.”

“Trouble with the fact he’s dead or the fact you’re a suspect?”

“Both.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this before.”

“I never came upon someone murdered before.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“I don’t drink.” That wasn’t really true of course. My drinking had, over the last year or two, simply faded away. I only drank socially now, and then only a little. But there still was a lot of liquor around. It’s the one food that doesn’t rot.

Jenna went over to the cabinet where I kept the booze, an old wooden sideboard that had belonged to my great-grandmother. I think she brought it from Kansas in 1903. Or maybe she just bought it at a secondhand store. My mother never seemed sure. Anyway, I guess Jenna knew where the stuff was because she’d been there for six years of summer clerk parties. I’d had a lot of them. A big old country-style house in a canyon is a nice place to do that kind of thing, even if the house is really only faux old.

She handed me a rather large glass. “Here’s some
Jack Daniels
. Bourbon will do you good.”

“Jack Daniels isn’t a bourbon, Jenna. It’s a sour mash.”

“Hey, that’s more like your old self. Full of snotty information.”

I drank the whole thing down in a swallow. “Leave me alone, Jenna.”

“After you left Starbucks, the cops came in. I heard them talking some more.”

“And?”

“They are
sure
you did it. Blood on your shirt cuff, like you said. For some reason, they don’t buy that you got it from touching him. Plus they kept talking about “the other thing.” The thing that nails you. But they never said what it is. I overheard one of them say something about a vator. But I don’t know what a vator is. Some kind of test maybe? Do you know?”

The warm bourbon going down had been helping but suddenly it wasn’t helping anymore. I wanted to answer her, but I couldn’t. I had no clue what kind of test a vator was. More important, I couldn’t really even think.

Jenna came over and sat on the arm of the chair. She put her hand on my shoulder. Yesterday, I would have thought it was a come-on. Today it just felt nice. And needed. “Robert, you need a lawyer.”

“I am a lawyer.”

“Very funny. You know what I mean. You need a criminal defense lawyer. You are not one of those.” She paused. “You’re shaking. I’m going to call your doctor.”

“Doctors don’t make house calls.”

The rest is a blur for me. John Donald, M.D., actually came to my house, for the first time ever. I recall him injecting something into my arm, and I recall wondering if it would put me to sleep. That’s it.