Death on a High Floor (39 page)

“Do you think,” I asked, “that he’s telling the truth?”

“Only if pigs can fly,” Oscar said.

When we emerged from the elevator, Judge Gilmore herself was waiting for us. Along with Benitez and his two assistants.

“Welcome back,” she said. “Mr. Benitez has changed his mind. He’s going to interview Mr. Boone after all.” As she said that, Benitez and company, without so much as acknowledging our existence, brushed past us into the elevator. I heard the elevator door slide shut behind us.

“I thought Boone needed time to eat his lunch,” Oscar said.

“Well,” Judge Gilmore responded, “They’ll just have to chat with him while he eats. And speaking of food, we’ve set up that conference room and ordered some sandwiches for you. You can go out if you’d prefer. But I’d like to start the hearing again by 3:00, and there’s not a lot of time.”

I looked at my watch. It was only 1:15. There was still plenty of time to go out and get a decent lunch at a decent place.

“We’ll use the conference room, Your Honor,” Oscar said, without consulting either me or Jenna. “Thank you for arranging the food and drink.”

“You’re very welcome. I’ll see you at 3:00.” She turned and left.

When we got inside the conference room, the middle of the tiny table held, as promised, two pots of coffee, three cups, three glasses, a carafe of water, and six sodas, three diet, three regular. We squeaked ourselves into the chairs and helped ourselves to the drinks. Oscar grabbed a regular Coke, Jenna took a diet root beer, and I poured myself a cup of coffee, caffeinated.

“What,” Jenna asked, looking at Oscar, “do you think Boone is going to tell Benitez?”

“Same bullshit he told us,” Oscar said.

“Why are you so sure it’s bullshit? It sounded right down the alley to me.”

“And to me too,” I said. “I may not have any criminal experience, but a witness is a witness, and that guy feels like he’s telling the truth.”

Oscar looked slowly from one of us to the other, as if he were looking at children in a nursery school who had just reported to him that the milk on the floor had been spilled by Martians.

“Listen my friends, Boone fits exactly the M.O. of a jailhouse snitch. You know, the playwrights of the cellblock. The guys who learn the details of a cellmate’s crimes from TV or newspapers and then make up a story that their cellmate confessed, complete with convincing detail. Which they then trade to the DA in exchange for a better deal for themselves. The only difference here is that Boone got the facts for his made-up story just by sitting on his butt in court all morning.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “Even if Boone wants to trade, he’s got nothing of value to trade to the DA because his story exonerates me.”

“Exonerates you, my ass,” Oscar said. “He didn’t say he saw somebody else kill Simon Rafer. All he said was that he saw people on the eighty-fifth floor early in the morning, heard them argue, and heard them leave. And then he heard the elevator bell ding, and then he heard a struggle. Know what the DA will say if he hears that story?”

“No. What?”

“That the ding was you, Robert, arriving on the elevator. And that the sound of a struggle was also you, Robert, struggling with Simon right before you killed him. And that you killed him because he yelled at you that the coin was a fake. The DA will be delighted to trade Boone a lot for that story.”

“But, Oscar,” I said, “what Boone actually said was that the voice he heard might have said
they’re
fake, or might have said
it’s
fake. He wasn’t sure.”

“What possible difference does that make, Robert?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “It makes no damn difference. None. Whichever it was, his story kills you.”

No one said anything for maybe thirty seconds. All I could hear was the squeaking of the stupid chairs.

Finally, Jenna spoke. “You know, Oscar, I think you’ve been at this too long. All you see is the downside. This guy’s story helps Robert, if only by putting a lot more people in the picture the morning of the murder. I want to put Boone on the witness stand as our first defense witness.”

“Sorry to sound like a broken record,” Oscar said, “but to remind you—again—this is a preliminary hearing. This judge ain’t gonna let Robert walk based on the testimony of some nut who waltzed into her chambers carrying a pop gun.”

“See,” Jenna said. “You’re a defeatist. You’ve given up. I want to win. Right now. At this hearing. And Boone is somehow the key to doing that.”

“I admire your spunk, Jenna,” Oscar said. “But for now, we should just investigate Boone’s story. If by some miracle it checks out, we’ll be much better off doing something with him at trial.”

“Stop being so fucking condescending, Oscar.
Spunk
is the kind of word people reserve for cute little girls who aren’t expected to get their socks dirty.”

Oscar looked genuinely taken aback. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. Really.”

“Okay,” Jenna said. “Apology accepted. And I’ll think some more about your point. But whether we use Boone in a couple of days or in a couple of months, there’s one more big problem.”

“Which is?” Oscar asked.

“That guy is going to disappear into some other pseudonym.”

“Not gonna happen,” Oscar said. “I’ll call Christian Ogalu like I said I would, and he’ll get Boone out. But out doesn’t mean gone. The DA will want him around while they sort out the security breach. Christian will make sure he stays put. Where the DA can find him, and so can we.”

That reminded me of something I’d been meaning to ask. “Does Ogalu actually know the sheriff? Like you said he did?”

Oscar laughed. “Well, only in a manner of speaking. Christian has sued the Sheriff’s Department maybe thirty times for excessive use of force. I think he’s taken Sheriff Hansen’s deposition a couple of times in those suits.”

“And that helps how?” Jenna asked.

“They’re afraid of him. They won’t want to incur his wrath by making a big deal out of a pissant case like this one. They’ll do him a favor and expect one in return later.”

There was a knock on the door. It was a guy with the sandwiches. He came in and put three Styrofoam boxes on the table. One was marked beef, one turkey, and one vegan.

“I’ll take the turkey,” Jenna said.

“The vegan one is for me,” Oscar said, as he reached for it.

Jenna looked thunderstruck. “You’re a vegan?”

“Yeah. I want to be able to do just as many pushups when I’m seventy as I can now.”

“I thought you already were seventy, sir,” Jenna said.

“Not yet, my twenty-something friend.”

I ignored the banter and took the leftover beef. But I had a different question. “How did the judge know you’d want a vegan meal?”

“Let’s say we know each other.”

“How well?” I asked.

“Not so well as you’re imagining. But well enough. What is it they say these days? Let’s not travel there?”

“It’s let’s not
go
there,” Jenna said.

“Well,” Oscar said, “whatever it might be, let us not arrive there.”

So we did not travel to the land of how Judge Gilmore knew that Oscar was a vegan and instead turned to eating our respective sandwiches, vegan and otherwise. Between bites, we tried to outline our strategy for the afternoon. It boiled down to: Keep what Boone said in mind, but forget about him as a witness for now and concentrate on the next scheduled witnesses.

Jenna needed to finish Spritz’s cross-examination, of course. We agreed that she was going to push him about who else was at the
DownUnder
the morning of the murder, whether they were personally having breakfast with him or not. She was also going to ream him, if she could, about why he apparently hadn’t even bothered to investigate anyone else.

The deputy coroner was scheduled to be the next witness after Spritz. The one who’d done the autopsy on Simon. Jenna had brought a copy of the autopsy report with her, and she paged through it.

“First thing I want to do is mess with time of death,” Jenna said. “The deputy coroner estimates it at between 4:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. I want to push it toward 6:00 a.m. if I can. Your elevator card record supposedly shows you, Robert, coming up at 4:30. So their current theory is you killed him around 4:30 and then came back later, mimicking your regular arrival time at 6:00, to discovery the body.”

“Okay,” I said, “but what’s to keep them from arguing I came up at 4:30 and then killed him and just hung around till 6:00, when I called it in?”

“Nothing,” she said. “But it’s not their current theory.”

“How does that help?”

“Well, if we show that the death was closer to 6:00, they’ll have to revise their theory and explain, among other things, what you were doing during that hour and a half.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, “that a person could find a way to busy himself for an hour and a half while waiting to kill somebody.”

“Robert, the real point is that if I do it right, their expert pathologist will have to change his testimony substantially about the time of death. And, as you know, an expert who changes his mind on the stand is . . .”

Oscar completed her thought, “. . . a dead expert.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe that will help. But how are you going to get him to change his mind?”

“While you were watching
Casablanca
for the fifth time last week, I did some research on time of death. It’s a very inexact science, it turns out. But we don’t have a lot of time right now, so wait and see, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “What else?”

“Just a minute,” Oscar said. “Maybe it’s not such a great idea for you to take on the coroner, Jenna.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’m the one who’s done all the work on this issue.”

“Yeah, I know,” Oscar said. “And we agreed to that breakdown of work. But now that I’m hearing it, it sounds weird for you to be cross-examining the guy who cut up your boyfriend on the autopsy table.”

“Maybe you’d feel weird about it,” Jenna said. “But I don’t. So let’s move on.”

“It’s not about how you feel about it,” Oscar said. “It’s about how it will look. Spritz knows about you and Simon, so presumably Benitez and his friends know too. Sooner or later, the press is going to know. And then you grilling the coroner about cutting up your boyfriend’s body is going to turn you into Little Miss Tabloid Cover Story. They’ll say you got off on it.”

“I just don’t care,” Jenna said.

“Maybe the case should care.”

There was obviously no way to decide the issue rationally. I had long ago learned that some decisions in litigation just have to be made, one way or the other, for better or for worse. So I decided to make the decision myself. I was the client, after all. “Jenna should just go ahead and do it,” I said.

Oscar looked at me as if he were seeing a ghost. And it was true that I had more or less withdrawn from a decisional mode. But he accepted it.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s move on.”

Jenna was looking at some notes she had made on the autopsy report.

“There were some weird bruises on Simon, according to the report,” she said.

“So?” I asked.

“I have a couple theories about those that I want to explore with the witness. The theories come from, well, something I know about Simon that I had forgotten about until I listened to Daniel Boone just now.”

Oscar grimaced. “Shit. Like what?”

“Why don’t you wait and see, too, okay? I promise you it has nothing to do with
my
having killed him. And nothing to do with my getting off on all this.”

“Okay, okay,” Oscar said. “Explore what you want to explore. I’m just your co-counsel.”

I waited a second to see if Jenna was going to respond to that. When she didn’t, I said, “I have one more issue.”

“Which is what?” Jenna asked.

“The angle of the knife in his back. I swear it was in sideways—horizontally across his back—instead of vertically up and down. It’s just not how someone would stab someone. Although I don’t know if that’s an autopsy issue.”

“Actually,” Jenna said, “I don’t think you’re right about that. The pictures of the Holbein dagger show it with a round handle. So you could stab somebody holding it either way. Blade straight up or blade sideways. But I’ve been thinking about it, and
where
the blade went into Simon’s back is something else again. I think I can mess with them about that, too. But again, wait and see.”