Death on a High Floor (6 page)

The garage was blessedly empty. No cops, no crime scene tape, no people. We parked on B-Level without incident, got in the elevator and rode up to eighty-five. As the elevator doors opened, I was seized by a slight panic. Was just walking past reception and then down the hall to my office going to be an ordeal?

I need not have worried. Our stolid, mannish, but extra-friendly receptionist, Christine Mulcahy, greeted me with a cheerful “Hi, Mr. Tarza!” Like a lot of Marbury Marfan staff, Christine is a fixture. She’s not the first receptionist since I arrived at the firm, but she’s been there at least fifteen years. Maybe twenty. And we like each other, to the extent you can like someone you never actually talk to other than to say hi.”

Some people, by the way, think that Christine is a cross-dresser whose real name is Christopher. But I’ve always just put that down to the rumor mill that runs its mouth in all law firms. A mill in which speculation about everyone’s sexual proclivities seems to be a topic of intense interest. Maybe it’s like that in all big organizations. But then again, I’ve never worked anywhere else.

I was apparently just standing there, running those disjointed thoughts through my head, because I suddenly noticed Christine staring at me. A little poke in the small of the back from Jenna got a “Hi, Christine!” out of me and a start down the hall toward my corner office, with Jenna following.

A corner office is, of course, what my seniority commands. One of the few perks it’s hard for them to take away without causing the whole pecking order to tumble down. As we entered, the snowcapped San Gabriels were breathtakingly on display through the windows. They were not obscured by smog, like they are so many months of the year. Maybe, I thought to myself, the smog is good, because it keeps even more people from pouring into our city.

I was wandering again. And I was again just standing in one place, not moving anywhere.

“Robert, sit down, will you?”

I went behind my desk and sat down in the leather chair, as instructed. Jenna continued to stand, looking at me intently.

“Robert, you are, I think, still a bit out of it. Not surprising. First you find a dead body. Then your picture gets in the paper as a suspect. It would unnerve anybody. But you have to get a grip.”

“I’m trying to get a grip,” I said.

“Well, grip harder. Oscar Quesana will be here in less than an hour. In the meantime, ask Gwen to get you a cup of coffee, read through your mail, and just try to chill, man.” She gave me a smile that I think was supposed to be reassuring, and left.

So, for the first time since Jenna had come over to my house the morning of the murder, I was alone. I looked around my office and felt comforted by the familiar. The furniture is light oak, well made and modern. There is only one painting on the wall. It’s a large oil, maybe three feet by five, done by my college roommate, now dead almost twenty years. It depicts a field of wheat, wind-blown on a gently sloping hillside. Craig was no great artist. I suppose you could call him an early Wyeth imitator. But the painting works somehow, at least for me.

In the corner of the office, abutting the east-facing window, there is a short couch, covered in a subdued herringbone tweed fabric, and two small armchairs, all arranged around a glass coffee table. Two of my favorite coins—a gold aureus of Augustus with a crocodile on the reverse and a silver tetradrachm of Athens with its famous owl on the front—are on the table.

Neither coin is especially valuable, so I have had each of them slotted vertically into a Lucite cube. That way, if you want to, you can turn the cube upside down and dump the coin into your hand. There is no romance in a two-thousand-year-old coin you can’t touch.

Gwen Romero, my secretary of twenty-five years, stuck her head in the door. It still surprises me that she’s pushing fifty. She was only twenty-three when she started. But, then, I was only thirty-five. So we have kind of grown up together. Passed through the demise of the typewriter together. She still calls me Mr. Tarza. And she still respects my privacy, in the sense that she rarely asks directly about my personal life. Even though she pretty much knows everything there is to know about it, since she pays my bills and screens my mail.

“Mr. Tarza, there is a Detective Spritz to see you.” Gwen said.

It shocked me down to my toes, but I pretended indifference. “He doesn’t have an appointment.”

“I know, but he’s very insistent.” She paused. “He’s the one I saw on the news last night. Talking about poor Mr. Rafer.”

Gwen stood there, waiting. She is not one to push, and she knows that I hate people who show up without an appointment. I’m a lawyer, not a barber. But still, as the gatekeeper, she needed a decision.

“What the hell. Bring him in.”

Decision made and communicated, I had expected Gwen simply to go and fetch him. Instead she continued to stand there, looking stricken. “Shouldn’t I call Jenna and get her to join you?”

I think I may actually have rolled my eyes. “Are you part of some collective keeper they’ve installed to look after me?”

She stared back at me, even more stricken. “Robert . . . I’m not stupid you know. I read the papers. I know what’s going on. When Jenna left here, she came by my desk and told me to make sure that nobody—
nobody—
connected with this whole thing got near you without her.”

On one level, I was touched. I had been trying for twenty-five years to get Gwen to start calling me Robert instead of Mr. Tarza. But she calls only associates by their first names, and then only while they remain associates. She only calls me Robert when she wants to show me that she really cares about me on some personal level. It doesn’t happen very often.

“Okay, you can call her. But please go and get Detective Spritz first. Then call Jenna.”

She nodded and left. While I waited for her to return with Spritz, I considered how petulant, even stupid, I was being. Hadn’t I myself told clients, hundreds of times, in the most direct of language, that they were absolutely not to talk to other people about their cases unless I was there to oversee the conversations? I had. Most had grudgingly obeyed. Now the shoe was on the other foot and it pinched.

Gwen returned with Spritz. I showed him to the corner seating area and offered him the couch while I took one of the chairs. Gwen offered him coffee or a soft drink, but he declined.

We looked at each other. Yesterday—was it only yesterday—I had not registered his looks. Today I did. Tall, gangly, very thin, almost bald. He reminded me of no one so much as Ichabod Crane.

We sat a moment, waiting to see who would speak first.

“It’s good to see you again, Mr. Tarza.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

“Touchy, are we, huh?”

“No, pissed.”

“What about?”

“Well, the picture in the paper, for one.”

“I thought you looked kind of fetching in that windbreaker.”

My reply stuck in my throat as Jenna charged into the office. And charged is exactly the right word. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next moment she was standing directly behind my chair, glaring at Spritz. I swiveled my head to get a better look at her. She didn’t actually have her hands on her hips, but she might as well have.

“Detective Spritz, I’m Jenna James. Mr. Tarza’s attorney. I’m sure you didn’t know that he is represented by counsel, but now that you do know, I’d appreciate your scheduling any interviews through me.”

Spritz leaned back and actually guffawed. “Now that is a howler. Perhaps you didn’t know it, Miss James, but you are a potential suspect in this case. But now that you know, I’m sure you’ll want to withdraw and help Mr. Tarza find other counsel. While you’re at it, you might want to find counsel for yourself, as well, huh?” He locked his hands behind his head and waited to see what would happen.

“Get out.”

“As you wish. But you’re passing up the opportunity to learn some things, you know. Far be it from me, though, to teach learned counsel how to do her job.”

I said nothing. I was becoming more client-like every minute. Woof, woof.

Spritz got up from the couch and headed for the door. Jenna followed. After they had gone, I got up and wandered around my office, enjoying its familiarity. Then I saw it. A small patch of fabric, maybe two inches square, had been cut out of one arm of my couch. I was about to yell for Gwen, to ask her about it, when Spritz and Jenna reentered. Jenna spoke before I could say anything.

“Detective Spritz and I have had a little chat in the corridor and concluded that it’s in both his interest and yours for all of us to talk a little more. But we’ve agreed that he’s going to speak first, and you’ll talk only if I say it’s okay.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I tried to say it with panache, but I’m not sure it came across that way. In any case, we all repaired back to the sitting area. Jenna took the couch while Spritz and I took the chairs. Meanwhile, I couldn’t take my eyes off the missing spot of fabric on the couch arm. But I couldn’t figure out any way to bring it to Jenna’s attention.

Gwen popped in and again offered coffee or soft drinks to all. Spritz asked for a Diet Coke. Maybe he was worried about gaining weight. Jenna ordered her usual Orange Crush. I said no, I didn’t want anything, thanks. Truth is, what I really wanted was coffee. I didn’t ask for it because I was afraid my hand would shake again.

Spritz picked up the Lucite cube with the Athenian tetradrachm in it and held it up. “You collect coins, huh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Any particular kind?” He rotated the cube so he could see the other side of the coin.

“Well, truth is, I just collect coins I like. As long as they were coined before 400 A.D.”

“Huh,” he said, and put the cube back on the table. “Do you also collect daggers, Mr. Tarza?”

I looked over at Jenna. She nodded, and I answered. Although I don’t think she knew what was coming.

“Once upon a time, I did.”

Spritz took a tiny notepad out of the inner pocket of his suit coat and jotted something down.

“Huh. Once upon how long a time ago, Mr. Tarza?”

“Well, until about ten years ago, when my whole collection was stolen from my house. I reported it to the police.”

“Yes, I know. We have the police report.”

Jenna made a note and looked up. “Detective, could we get a copy of that?”

“Sure.” Spritz looked at me again. “Mr. Tarza, would it surprise you to learn that Simon Rafer was murdered with a Holbein dagger?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because there were hundreds of Holbein daggers made in the 1530’s. They were the ‘in’ dagger in Switzerland at the time. There have since been thousands of copies. Maybe tens of thousands. So it’s like asking if I’d be surprised to learn that someone had been shot with a Colt 45.” I felt smug. Superior knowledge always makes me feel that way.

“Well, would it surprise you to learn that the murder weapon matched almost exactly a particular Holbein dagger stolen from your house some years ago? Or should I say supposedly stolen?”

Jenna put her hand on my arm. “Don’t answer that.” Then she turned on Spritz. “I thought that we agreed out in the hall that you weren’t going to ask my client what he knows and doesn’t know about this crime.”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

“Sorry, I think you should go.”

Spritz put his hands out in front of him and turned them palms up. “As you wish, Counselor. But too bad, you might have learned even more, huh?”

“Maybe we can learn whatever it is later,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe.” Spritz unlimbered himself from the chair.

I knew I was off message, but I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Detective, what do you know about that hole in the arm of my couch?” I pointed to it.

He turned slightly and looked casually down at the gap in the fabric. “Oh, there was maybe more blood there,” he said. “One of the officers who checked the floor found it and the criminalists took it to the lab for analysis.”

Neither Jenna nor I said anything.

“Good day, then,” Spritz said. And he ambled out.

Jenna waited until he’d cleared the doorway. “Robert, why the fuck didn’t you tell me you collected daggers?”

“I want to talk about the blood on the fabric.”