Death on a High Floor (37 page)

We exited the elevator into a concrete block corridor painted institutional grey. As we walked along, Oscar said, rather emphatically, “Fourth, I’ll do all the talking in this interview.” I saw no reason to disagree, since I had already agreed to say nothing. Jenna didn’t disagree, either.

We turned a corner and came upon three jail cells. Each one was about five feet wide, with bars for doors. Two built-in benches ran along the side walls, front to back, and there was a small sink and toilet. The bars of each cell were thickly padded, as were the floor, walls, benches, sink, and toilet. All in yellow padding. A temporary bin, or so it appeared.

Two of the cells were empty. Only the third had anyone in it. I assumed it was Daniel Boone. Before we could try to get a better look at him, Deputy Green addressed us as a group.

“Okay, guys, you have a choice. One option, I just leave him in there, and you talk to him through the bars. If you take that option, I’ll leave the area, and I won’t be able to hear you. If you want to interview him while he’s not behind bars, I’ll have to cuff him, and I’ll have to be very nearby. Your choice.”

“We’ll talk to him through the bars,” Oscar said. “But thanks for letting us know our options. We appreciate it.”

“No biggie,” Deputy Green said. “Let me introduce you.”

He turned toward the occupied cell. The person in it was sitting on one of the benches, near the back of the cell, but gave no sign of having noticed us.

“Hey, Mr. Boone, you have visitors!” Deputy Green was clearly addressing Boone in the overly cheerful way I imagined you might address someone who’s crazy. Boone looked up but didn’t budge.

“Big deal,” Boone said.

“Two of them are lawyers,” Deputy Green said.

That got Boone’s attention. He got up and came over toward the bars, but stopped a couple of feet back. He appeared to be in his fifties, about five-foot-ten, maybe one hundred eighty pounds, with dark, stringy hair that came almost down to his shoulders. He wore buckskin pants, red Nike tennis shoes, and a beige shirt of rough spun cloth, open almost to his waist. The shirt had small brass grommets where normally there’d be buttons and button holes. But the leather lace that would have passed through the grommets to hold the shirt closed was missing, as were his belt and shoelaces.

He also had mesmerizing eyes. Even at a distance of several feet, I could see their deep blue color. He could have been Paul Newman stepped out of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. I was certain I had seen those eyes before, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on where.

Deputy Green introduced us. “Mr. Boone, this is attorney Ms. Jenna James.” He motioned toward Jenna with his head. “And her colleague—” he took a small three-by-five card out of his breast pocket and looked at it, clearly reading Oscar’s name from it, “Mr. Oscar Quesana.” He nodded toward Oscar.

Then he turned to me. “And this is, uh, the defendant in the Rafer murder, Mr. Tarza.” I could tell from his brief hesitation that Deputy Green had never before brought a defendant to interview someone in a jail cell. Clearly, he was used to the defendant being the one in the cell.

“Hi,” Oscar said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Boone.”

“What do you want?” Boone asked. “I thought I was doing the court a favor here, and now I’m in jail.” He seemed really pissed off. His voice was familiar, too, but I couldn’t quite place it.

Deputy Green interrupted. “I’ll leave you guys now. When you’re done, I’ll be in my office right around that corner down there.” He pointed to a bend in the corridor. “I’ll leave the door open just a crack, but please knock anyway. Or yell loudly, and I’ll come running. I can hear a yell easily from there.” He headed off down the corridor.

He had not gone far, when Oscar yelled, “Deputy Green?”

Green turned. “Yeah?”

“Is this area miked or bugged or surveilled in any way?”

Deputy Green smiled the smile of those who recognize a fellow professional at work. “Yes. Sorry. Forgot that. I’ll turn it off. Give me a minute.” He turned and continued away.

“Forgot, my ass,” Oscar said, more to himself than out loud.

We all stood there, silently, awkwardly waiting. Suddenly, a speaker hidden somewhere inside the cell blared, too loudly, “Okay, I’ve shut it off now.”

Oscar turned to face the truculent Mr. Boone. He started by ignoring Boone’s opening anger.

“Mr. Boone,” Oscar said, “could you tell us how you were going to help the court? That would be enormously helpful to us, and we’d be deeply appreciative.”

I had never seen Oscar so courtly.

“First, get me out of here,” Boone said.

“Well,” Oscar said, “we’re not in a position to do that, but I can promise you that as soon as we get back upstairs, I’ll call a lawyer friend who knows the sheriff. He’ll contact you right away, and I assume he’ll do whatever he can to speed up getting you out of here. We criminal-lawyer types don’t like places like this. They treat people like dirt.”

It was clever. Oscar was being sympathetic to Boone, almost empathetic. Like he’d been unfairly slapped in jail himself once. Maybe he had.

Boone considered it. He actually stroked his chin. “All right. Maybe that’s the best you can do right now. I’ll trust you to contact your friend.”

“Well,” Oscar said, turning almost jolly, “you must have scared the bejesus out of those folks in the judge’s chambers when you walked in. They think they’ve got the world’s best security.”

“Yeah, I guess they were startled all right,” he said.

“How’d you get past all that security stuff, if I might ask?” Oscar said.

“Truth? I had some help.”

I could see Oscar thinking where to go with it. He chose the camaraderie of people who know something others don’t.

“Some help?” Oscar said. “I won’t ask you who or exactly how, then. We all have our little secrets.”

“Thanks for that,” Boone said.

“Hey,” Oscar said, “is your name really Daniel Boone?”

“Yes, it is. Attention getting, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is. Is it your legal name?” Oscar asked.

“Yep.”

I kept staring at Boone, trying to see him better. I knew that somehow, somewhere, I had met Boone before. It was driving me crazy.

“Mr. Boone,” Oscar asked, “is Boone your original name? The one on your birth certificate?”

“Oh, goodness no. That was Ezekiel Smith. I always hated it. Ezekiel was too weird, and Smith was too common. I changed it as soon as I got to be 18, to Jedediah Smith. Pissed off my family, though. Ezekiel was an old family first name. I was actually Ezekiel Smith IV or something. And I had six or seven cousins named Ezekiel. Can you imagine being at a party with three or four other Ezekiel Smith’s?”

Oscar responded casually, clearly trying to encourage Boone’s chattiness. “It would be an odd party, for sure. But I’m curious. Is Daniel Boone the only name you’ve had since you changed it from Ezekiel?”

“Oh, no,” Boone said. “I’ve had maybe six or seven of them since I turned eighteen. Maybe more. I kind of forget them all, in truth. Got ‘em in different states, too. So nobody’d get too nosey.”

“Hey,” Oscar said, “sometimes I wish I had the courage to pick a new name. Oscar Quesana ain’t so great. Quesana’s hard for a lot of people to spell, and Oscar is, well, not all that common here. But I’m real curious, what was the last name you chose right before this one? Something just as creative?”

“Not really. I picked Alexander Hamilton. Used it for only one year, though. Most people, believe it or not, have never heard of him. So it didn’t cause the kind of stir I like.”

As he said it, Boone smiled in a goofy, lopsided kind of way, and then moved closer to the cell door, where I could get a better look at him. And then it came back to me. Boone was the client who’d put Stewart’s head on the chopping block by not paying his legal bills. Except then he had called himself Top Quark and had a buzz cut and preppy clothes.

Quark is a physicist. Back when he was an M&M client, he had been the founder and president of
Physical Science Concepts
, one of the hottest of the hot composite materials companies. He had the reputation in the firm of being brilliant—a Nobel Prize winner in waiting, some said—and seriously daffy at the same time. When a couple of his company’s projects crashed and burned, he’d been forced to put his company into bankruptcy. And then he had vanished, leaving behind a huge bill for legal fees and leaving Stewart deep inside a million dollar billing hole.

I had never spent real face time with Quark, but I knew about him. I’d seen him once in reception, though, waiting for Stewart, where I chatted him up for a minute or two. I considered whether to alert Oscar and Jenna about who I thought Boone really was but decided to wait. I wanted to be sure he was Quark.

“Well,” Oscar was saying, “I’m admiring, truly, of your sense of innovation and adventure, Mr. Boone. But the deputy will probably be back shortly, and the longer we spend with you, the more time it will be before I can call my friend and see if he can get you out of here. So let me ask you . . . what can you tell us about the day Simon Rafer was murdered?”

“It’s easy,” Boone said. “I was right there on the eighty-fifth floor when it happened.”

“You were?” Jenna said. She seemed both dumbfounded and unable to contain herself.

“I’m conducting this interview,” Oscar said, and glared at her.

“I’d rather talk to her,” Boone said. “She’s prettier than you are—um—Oscar? That is your name isn’t it?”

I glanced over and saw Oscar considering. I guess he decided not to blow the whole thing over who was prettier, because he just said, “Okay, Jenna can do it if you prefer. I’ll just listen and maybe chime in once in a while.”

Jenna looked not the least bit displeased at the turn of events. She picked up the questioning without missing a beat.

“So, Mr. Boone, Judge Gilmore told us that you were in the offices of M&M the night of the murder. But I had no idea you were on the eighty-fifth floor.”

“I never talked to Judge Gilmore,” Boone replied.

“I’m sorry,” Jenna said, “I meant to say that Judge Gilmore’s secretary told her, and then Judge Gilmore told us.”

“I’m a scientist, you see,” he said, “so I like precision.”

“Okay,” Jenna said. “I’ll try to be more precise. But you were actually there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, speaking of precision, do you remember what day that was and what exact time it was?”

“Not by date,” he said. “But it was last month in the early hours of the day that guy Rafer was murdered. I was on the eighty-fifth floor the morning it happened. I’m not sure of the exact time. It was still dark while I was there. I had planned it that way. It didn’t start to get light till I was leaving.”

“Do you mind, Mr. Boone, if I take some notes?” Jenna asked.

She held up a pad of lined paper she had brought with her and showed it to Boone at eye level, as if revealing the notepad in that way would help to generate his consent.

Notes, of course, were an excellent idea. If we ended up using Quark as a witness and he later changed his tune, his testimony could be impeached by reference back to Jenna’s notes. But Benitez might have a hard time getting his hands on them in advance since they’d be attorney work product, and he had passed on his own chance to interview the witness.

In response to Jenna’s request, Boone craned his neck back and looked at the ceiling for maybe fifteen seconds.

Finally, he lowered his head and gave Jenna one of his goofy smiles. Then he said, “Sure go ahead with the notes. I’m an open book. Take a look!” He spread his arms wide, which made his shirt gap open, and began to do an odd little tap dance. Which, with no laces in his tennis shoes, looked even odder.

Jenna ignored the performance and said, “I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Boone. We like honest witnesses.”

Boone stopped dancing and said, “Well, you’ve got one, so lay the questions on me.”

“Let’s cut to the chase, then,” Jenna said. “What the hell were you doing there?”

“It’s easy,” he said. “I went there to scare the shit out of Stewart Broder.”

“Why?” Jenna asked.

“Because his bad tax advice ruined me. If it hadn’t been for that weirdo creep, I’d be a wealthy man today.”