Death on a High Floor (36 page)

The term “judge’s chambers” makes them sound fancy, and maybe in England or some courthouse I’ve never been in, it’s true. But for state trial judges in the County of Los Angeles, it’s not. For the most part, a judge’s chambers in L.A. are just a group of carpeted offices, with the judge getting the biggest one, usually with a couple of windows.

Judge Gilmore’s chambers, just down the hall from the conference room, were no different. Nicely done, but with furniture only a click up from the usual county issue. The main furnishings were a blonde oak desk in lieu of metal and four cloth-covered green chairs, arrayed in a semicircle in front of the desk. The desk itself was strewn with family photos—lots of kids, but no visible picture of the director husband. And unless the judge herself had taken up paint-by-numbers, the landscapes on the wall had been created by the kids in the photos.

Benitez and company were already there, sitting on a long, red-and-white striped couch that sat along the back wall facing the desk. It didn’t surprise me that they’d taken the couch. Powerful lawyers tend to sit toward the back of such settings. It makes them look like people who don’t really give a shit and makes the up-fronters look more like supplicants or suck-ups.

We took three of the suck-up chairs in front of the desk. I noticed myself scooting my chair back a bit. Old habits die hard.

Judge Gilmore sat down behind her desk. This was going to be formal. If she had wanted it to be informal, she’d have grabbed one of the leftover chairs, moved it a small distance away from the group and pretended to be more a friend than someone who wielded, at least temporarily, vast arbitrary power over us. In a criminal case, maybe not so temporarily over me.

I noticed that Nancy, the court reporter, had slipped into the room. This was going to be seriously formal.

“I thought I needed promptly to inform all of you, including the defendant,” Judge Gilmore began, “about something that happened this morning. The vaunted security system that blocks access from the outer hallway to my chambers was breached while we were in trial. The gentleman who breached it then walked up to my secretary and said that he had been inside
Marbury Marfan
at the time of the murder and had ‘excellent information’ about who killed Mr. Rafer.”

Benitez spoke up from the back. I was surprised that he had chosen to speak first. Maybe he already knew something about it.

“Do we know him?” he asked.

Judge Gilmore flashed him a smile and said, “I doubt it. According to my secretary, he was wearing an ill-fitting leather-fringed suede suit complete with coonskin cap and was carrying a child’s popgun rifle. Fully loaded—with a red cork. He told her his name was Daniel Boone.”

“Where is he now?” Jenna asked.

“In the special lockup in the basement,” Judge Gilmore said. “I didn’t personally see him or talk to him. He’s at least in theory a potential witness, and it would be improper for me to do that.”

I could see that she was thinking that the universe in which Boone was really a potential witness was a universe parallel to this one, in which live elephants danced on Broadway.

Benitez cleared his throat. “So why are we here?”

I thought it was rather cheeky to say that to a judge sitting on a hearing you were in the middle of, but then the DA’s office does represent the sovereign. Yet Judge Gilmore didn’t look the least offended at his lack of respect. Or courtesy.

“Well, Mr. Benitez,” she said, “I could have asked to have him charged with a variety of crimes connected with how he broke through security. But I’m inclined instead to arrange for him to be sent for thirty days’ involuntary observation at the loony bin. Since he’ll be away, so to speak, I wanted to offer each side the opportunity to interview him before he goes . . . if you wish. I don’t want to be accused of secretly sending potential evidence out of town.”

“I don’t think we want to bother, Your Honor,” Benitez said. “He sounds like a total nutcase. It will be an utter waste of
everyone’s
time and distract us from getting on with the People’s justice.” As Benitez said “
everyone’s”
, he looked directly at Jenna. Daring us to interview the guy and interrupt progress toward justice? I considered making a gagging sound, but then thought better of it.

“Your choice, Mr. Benitez,” Judge Gilmore said. She turned to the court reporter. “This is off the record, Nancy.” Nancy stopped moving her fingers, and Judge Gilmore resumed. “Mr. Benitez . . . I’m not sure I should say this. Your case could use some help. It’s limping a bit at the moment.”

Benitez had already started to get up from the couch. I could tell that her comment had startled him. But he recovered nicely.

“Your Honor,” he said, “I can understand your feelings at the moment. But we don’t need Detective Spritz to prove up our probable cause case. If Your Honor is doubtful about his testimony, we can put Officer Apple on for the same testimony. It’s the experts we’ve got coming later who are the heart of our case. Especially the e-mail guy, the elevator records guy, and the blood guy.”

Judge Gilmore cast a quick look at Nancy. “Back on the record, please. Okay, Mr. Benitez. Your call. But do stay a moment.” She had turned toward Jenna, presumably looking for our answer, when Oscar spoke up.

“We’ll see him, Your Honor,” he said.

I could see Benitez hesitate. He had perhaps assumed we wouldn’t want to bother either, especially since the judge had gone out of her way, without quite saying so, to depict the guy as a nut. Now Benitez had been put in a position where it would have been prudent to say, “Okay, in that case we’ll tag along, too.” He chose manliness over prudence, though, and said nothing.

Judge Gilmore focused on Oscar. “Mr. Quesana, it’s so very nice to see you again.” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. “I saw your name on the court papers, and I’m delighted you’re going to play a larger role. Not that Ms. James isn’t doing a terrific job.” She nodded at Jenna, who beamed. Benitez had in the meantime sat back down.

“The reason,” Oscar began, “that we want to see him . . .”

Judge Gilmore held up a hand, in the universal language of “stop.”

“Uh uh,” she said. “I don’t want to know your reasons, Mr. Quesana.”

“Okay, Your Honor,” Oscar said.

“One more thing,” Judge Gilmore said. “I’m putting this matter under seal, and I’m gagging all of you about it until further notice. Totally. If one scrap of this leaks to the media—if I see it in one newspaper or on one sleazy cable channel, no matter how far up the numbers that channel is, I’m going to find out who leaked it and make it my lifetime goal to take that person’s bar card. Is that clear?”

We all said, “Yes, Your Honor.” In unison.

Judge Gilmore looked at the court reporter. “Please record each person as having individually agreed.”

Then she seemed to realize, almost as an afterthought, that I was somehow different. She looked directly at me. “Mr. Tarza, that applies to you, too. Do you agree to it?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I said, and then added, “I’d like to go, too.”

She cocked her head, considering. “Well, Mr. Tarza, that’s really up to your lawyers. If they want you along, that’s fine with me. If not, that’s fine with me, too.” She got up.

Her comment stunned me. It brought home how much my status had changed. The judge clearly regarded me, not as a Prince of the Legal Realm, which was certainly my former status, but as a piece of baggage that belonged to my lawyers. If they wanted to lug me along, fine. It made no difference to her one way or the other.

Judge Gilmore was already halfway out the door when she was clearly reminded of something she had forgotten.

“By the way,” she said, “. . . still on the record, Nancy . . . Mr.
Boone
had in his possession a Kentucky driver’s license showing his name as Daniel Boone, from Lexington, Kentucky. My secretary says the gentleman in the lockup matches perfectly the picture on the license. We checked with the Kentucky State Police, and the license
is
a valid Kentucky driver’s license. The Kentucky file on Boone shows his profession as hunter, and the stats—height, weight, hair, and eye color—match this guy.” There was silence in the room.

Oscar broke the silence. “We still want to see him, Your Honor.”

“We still don’t,” Benitez said. “We have a solid case, and we don’t need nutcases to bolster it.” I thought the reverse implication of that statement a rather nice touch.

“Okay,” Judge Gilmore said, “Mr. Benitez, we’ll see you after lunch. I think you know how to get out of here. Ms. James and Mr. Quesana,”—she paused—“and Mr. Tarza, if you would wait in the small conference room you were using, I’ll have someone escort you down to the special lockup.”

Then she laughed and said, “Good hunting.”

As she swept out of the room in her robes, I saw her shaking her head and thought I heard her mutter, although it may have been my imagination, “If I get that seat on the court of appeals, I can get out of this bin.”

So there we were, back in the small conference room. The chairs still squeaked.

“This is certainly unusual,” Jenna said.

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “It sure is. But I’m kind of surprised this Boone guy got in. They recently upgraded the security systems in this courthouse. Hired some big international outfit to install it. Cost over a million bucks.”

Jenna looked interested. “Do you know its name?”

“International Security something or other. The last word is odd. Oh, ‘Domain,’ I think . . . International Security Domain. Do you know something about that world?”

“Kind of,” Jenna said. “I was the associate representative on the M&M Security Committee last year. We dealt with, you know, access issues, stuff like that. We interviewed a few security contractors before we hired one.”

“You deal with after hours elevator access on that committee?” Oscar asked.

There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. It didn’t last long, but you could feel it.

“No. We did not,” she said.

“Is that your final answer?” Oscar asked.

Jenna said nothing. Apparently it was her final answer.

I tried to change the topic to something more neutral.

“Shouldn’t we be discussing what we’re going to ask Daniel Boone?” I asked.

No one responded, so I tried to lighten things up with a different tactic. “Good thing,” I said, “the guy’s name isn’t Peter Rabbit. It’d be harder to think what to ask him.”

“Thank God,” Oscar said, “you didn’t lay that witticism on the judge.”

“Oh, never,” I said. “Saying something like that to a judge violates the local court rules.”

Oscar looked puzzled. He even scrunched up his eyebrows. “
Which
rule?” he asked. I looked at Jenna. She was finally smiling, at least a little. She’d heard me cite the “rule” before.

“It’s Rule H,” I said, “‘Initiation of
humor
shall be only and solely by the judge.’”

“Boy, ain’t that the truth,” Oscar said. “And then there’s the rule two down the list from that one.”

I bit. “Which one?”

“Rule J, ‘Lawyers shall laugh immediately at
all
jokes told by the judge
.’”

Jenna broke into a broad grin, apparently fully recovered from Oscar’s momentary lapse into “maybe Jenna did it” territory.

The conversation did raise an issue, though, that I was curious about. I’d never heard of the firm having a security committee. As far as I could recall, it had never been mentioned in the Executive Committee. Did Simon have secret committees? I made a mental note to ask Jenna about it later.

Oscar brought the topic back to Mr. Boone. “Okay, first, as we all know, you can’t really plan an interview like this one,” he said. “We’ll just have to see what Boone says and go with questions from there. Second, we should say very little
to
him. When this guy gets out of the bin he’s gonna sell his story to the
Weekly World News
or something. So let’s not give him anything to talk about.”

Then he looked directly at me. “Third, it’s a miserably bad idea to have you along, Robert.”

“Why?” I asked. The day had begun to turn fun for me, and this promised to be the capstone outing. I wanted to go.

“For the obvious reason. This interview won’t be privileged. So on the off chance you testify at the trial, the DA will be able to cross-examine you about what you heard from Boone. Frankly, the less you have in your head about the facts other than what you know personally, the better off we’ll be. It’s bad enough you already investigated the crime yourself.”

“I’m going,” I said.

“Fine,” Oscar said. “You’re supposedly a good lawyer, so you can see the risks. Any other client, I’d tell them, ‘Stow it, you’re not going.’”

“Thanks for the backhanded compliment,” I said.

“You’re welcome. But there’s one other thing.”

“Which is?”

“You have to keep your mouth shut,” he added.

“I will,” I said.

“Good,” Oscar said. “So if you’re going to come, that brings me to the fourth—”

He didn’t get to say right then what the fourth thing on his mind was, because a knock on the door interrupted him. It was clearly not the judge, since the knock wasn’t followed instantly by the door opening.

“Come in,” I said. We all swiveled our heads to see who it might be.

The door opened, and there loomed the Green Giant, almost filling the doorway.

“Hi. I’m Deputy Green,” he said. “Judge Gilmore asked me to take you down to the special lockup to see—” he paused, and you could see him thinking for a split second whether to make a joke out of it but deciding not to—“Daniel Boone.”

Deputy Green led us to a non-public elevator and pushed the down button. The door opened almost immediately, and we got in. He inserted a key in the elevator panel, turned it, and then pushed a button marked B4. I don’t know why, but I had assumed that an elevator heading for a basement jail cell would grind its way downward slowly. Instead, we went down like a rocket.