Death on a High Floor (17 page)

I started to fill it in.

Jenna had opportunity, if you believed the key card records, and maybe a motive. But why would she want to murder Simon just because, at least according to Harry, Simon had wanted to dump her? Which she denied in any case. And Jenna attracted men like flies. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to find a replacement. I put a question mark in the Motive box. Next, I looked at the Alibi box. I realized that I had never really queried Jenna about her alibi. I put a question mark there, too.

Then there was Stewart. By his own account, he had opportunity. But I had no idea what his motive could have been. It was true that I had confronted him at the
DownUnder
about the possibility of his being fired, but, so far as I knew, he hadn’t known about that. Who knew about his alibi? Everyone seemed to have one but me.

What about Harry? If Stewart were to be believed, Harry had opportunity and was angry at Simon about something, maybe about drugs. But Harry had told us he had an alibi. I’d believe him for now.

Finally, I filled in my own column. Just looking at it made me queasy. It was little wonder Spritz was after me.

No wonder Oscar had wanted to focus first on simply defending me—on getting some of that stuff out of my column, instead of trying to blame the murder on someone else. There was little hard evidence on which to lay blame on anyone else.

Two days ago, I had set out to learn enough to find the killer myself. But the only useful thing I had learned had been volunteered by Stewart. Which was that I should put a “yes” in the Opportunity box for both him and Harry. Other than that, I hadn’t learned shit.

I suddenly wondered: Had the police searched Stewart’s office? I bet not. Why would they? And what
was
in that office? Sometimes, despite my patina of control, I get uncontrollable impulses.

I got up, grabbed my suit jacket, walked to the lobby, and took the elevator down to the parking garage. I went over to my car, popped the trunk, and found the brown leather gloves I’d left there after my ski trip to Mammoth, plus the flashlight I keep in the trunk for emergencies. Then I went back up the elevator.

When the elevator doors opened, I peeked out and looked furtively around the eighty-fifth floor lobby. There was no one in sight, and it was dark. I held the elevator doors open with my shoulders while I put on the gloves. My heart was beating fast.

Stewart’s office is right next to reception. I actually sprinted over to it. The door to the office was closed. I tried the knob, and the door opened. I went in and closed it behind me, but not all the way. I wanted to be able to hear anyone who came onto the floor. Then I switched on the flashlight.

Even by flashlight, Stewart’s office was nondescript. Smallish, with only two windows. I had always wondered why he kept it when his seniority entitled him to a much nicer one.

Under the windows there was a couch covered in a bright green chintz with a motif of overlapping ferns. An old oak desk sat in the middle of the room, with a tall bookcase on the wall to its left. On the wall to my right there was a large, bright-green abstract oil no doubt bought because it matched the green couch. Beneath it there was the required potted plant. Also green, of course.

I sat down behind the desk and thought about where I would hide something. Under papers in a drawer maybe. I opened each of the desk drawers in turn. The first two were mostly empty. A few pencils and pens, a few pads of Post-its, some of the stray paper clips that seem to inhabit the bottom of all desk drawers. In the third drawer, there was a large pile of papers. Old tax returns of some corporate client. I lifted them up and looked underneath. Nothing. My hands were sweating profusely inside my gloves.

I remembered reading somewhere that people sometimes hide things in false bottoms in potted plants. I got up, walked over to the plant, and started to feel around the bottom of the pot, looking for a secret door of some sort. My hands were trembling.

“Hi!”

I almost jumped out of my skin. It was Jenna, standing in the doorway, outlined by the faint light from the hallway. I had not heard her push open the door.

“Jesus, Jenna. You scared the shit out of me.”

“Why Mr. Tarza, whatever are you doing in here?”

“Um . . .” That was all I could think of to say. I couldn’t even manage an “oh”.

“Are you going to answer?” she asked.

I didn’t respond.

She shut the door behind her and turned on the overhead lights. “Well, you look really stupid in those gloves. Brown. Utterly wrong for that suit.”

I blinked as I tried to adjust to the bright lights. “I’m looking for some kind of evidence that Stewart did it.”

“Find anything?”

“No. But I haven’t been in here very long. I was looking for a secret compartment in the pot.” I pointed at it.

Jenna stood there for a moment and then looked slowly around the room. You can always tell when a professional is looking at something. They examine whatever it is differently from the rest of us.

“Give me your gloves, Robert.”

I took them off and handed them to her. She put them on, went over to the bookcase, and inspected it closely. After a while she bent down and ran the flat of her hand slowly along the molding on the left side of the bookcase, at the very bottom. She paused for a second and then pushed gently. I heard a very faint click on the other side of the bookcase.

Jenna got up, moved to the right side of the bookcase, bent down, and pulled at the side molding at the bottom with the tips of her gloved fingers. A small door opened. She looked up at me with a distinct expression of triumph.

“There’s a cable that runs from a pressure point on the other side to a hidden latch over here,” she said. “The idea is that if someone accidentally pushes the trigger plate on the left side, they won’t necessarily realize they’ve opened a latch on the right. Give me your flashlight.”

I gave it to her. Jenna aimed the beam into the secret compartment and peered inside. Then she reached in and pulled out a small coin and a thick book.

“That’s all there is,” she said. “This coin looks like the Ides to me. But I’m guessing it’s a copy.” She pulled off her right-hand glove, handed the glove to me to put on, and then passed me the coin with her still-gloved left hand.

I hefted it, brought it up to my eye, and studied it more carefully. “It looks real enough.”

“How can you tell?”

“Experience,” I said. “I’d have to examine it more carefully with a loupe, but it looks just like the one you picked up at Simon’s and gave to me.”

“There are two of them?” She raised one eyebrow.

“So it seems.”

“And what is this book, Robert?” She held it up. It had dust clinging to the bottom.

“It’s volume III of Grueber’s
Coins of the Roman Republic in the British Museum
. From the look of the dust, it’s the one that was on Simon’s bookshelf.” I started to reach for it with my ungloved left hand.

Jenna pulled it back. “Don’t touch it with that hand. Use the one with the glove.”

Using only my gloved right hand, I took the book and opened it, awkwardly. “Yeah, it’s got his name written on the flyleaf, ‘S. Rafer.’”

Jenna looked at me. “Really. Well, the plot thickens.”

I managed a small joke. “Congeals even.”

“Is the
Ides
pictured in that book?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.” I turned to the pages in the back with pictures of coins, which are called the plates. I couldn’t immediately spot the
Ides
among the photos.

Jenna peered over my shoulder at it. “Is the whole volume just coin photos?”

“No. A lot of it is lists of coin hoards. Where they were found, what they were found in.”

“Were there hoards of
Ides
?”

“I’ve never looked that up in this book, but not so far as I know.”

“Maybe we should look it up,” she said.

“Maybe.” I was starting to feel nervous about being there. It didn’t seem the time or place to conduct research on the hoard history of the
Ides
. “What should we do with this stuff, do you think?” I asked.

“How about we put the stuff back and get out of here before we get caught?”

“No, I think I want to keep both the coin and the book.”

“That’s risky, Robert.”

“Probably. But I want them anyway.”

The coin Jenna had nicked from Simon’s kitchen was in my left suit coat pocket. So I dropped the coin we had just found into my right pocket, brushed the dust off the bottom of the book, and tucked it under my arm. Jenna closed the secret compartment. It made a smart click as she pushed it shut. We turned off the lights, closed the door behind us, and went to Jenna’s office, which was just down the hall. It was full of packed boxes. We chatted about this and that, while Jenna packed some more, almost as if nothing had happened. Then we drove our respective cars back to my place.

Jenna got there first. Let’s face it, she just drives faster than I do.

When I walked into the house, she was standing in the living room, stock still.

“What’s wrong?”

“Things are out of place.”

I looked around. She was right. Stacks of paper had been moved. A vase here and there was out of place. The sofa had been nudged closer to the wall.

“Burglars?” I asked.

“More likely cops. With a search warrant.”

“Oh. Well, they won’t have found anything of interest. There’s nothing to find.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am. And I’m wiped. I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Jenna.”

As I left the room, she was still standing there, looking around. With her hands on her hips, muttering about the perfidy of Detective Spritz.

I got up at 5:00 a.m. and showered. I picked out my usual suit and put it on. I felt refreshed. I had not, however, forgotten that there was now a deepening coin mystery to be solved. Exactly the kind of mystery I liked to sink my teeth into, and one for which, finally, I actually had some competent teeth. Not like investigating murders.

I took the original
Ides, t
he one Jenna had taken from Simon’s kitchen table, and placed it obverse-side-up—the side with Brutus’s portrait up—on my nightstand. I put the second
Ides
, the one I had borrowed from the secret compartment in Stewart’s office, next to it. I looked at them carefully. To my naked eye, they looked identical. I turned them both over. The reverse sides—the side with the daggers—looked identical, too.

I needed to see if their small flaws, too hard to see with the naked eye, were also identical.

I went to the closet where I keep my coin supplies and pulled out a high magnification jeweler’s loupe and a small, bright Maglite. I picked up the original coin, bathed it in light and peered through the loupe at the reverse side. Then I did the same with the reverse of Stewart’s coin. I noticed that each had the same tiny, circular pit right next to the left-hand dagger. I recognized those pits as die flaws, possibly left there by a protruding rough spot on the die when each coin was struck.

I turned the coins over and began to examine their obverse sides with the loupe. There, on the original, to the left of the first letter of his name—“B”—above Brutus’ portrait, I could see a small, incuse—indented—triangular die flaw. I looked at the obverse of Stewart’s coin. It had exactly the same flaw.

Which troubled me. What were the odds that I had accidentally stumbled upon two, two-thousand year old coins struck from exactly the same reverse
and
obverse dies?

I could not for the life of me recall exactly how many obverse and reverse dies had been identified for the Ides issue, and the books that would have told me the answer were in my office. I did recall that, overall, the numbers had been relatively small. Which made sense to me because the Ides coins had, after all, been minted by Brutus to pay his soldiers, using a mobile military mint while he was fighting in Macedonia, falling back from Anthony. So it was likely a small issue, not equivalent in numbers to a huge issue of standard coinage minted in Rome.

I also seemed to recall that fewer obverse dies had been identified than reverse dies. Which also made sense because the obverse die, containing the image of Brutus’s head, would have been on the bottom of the stack, fitted into the anvil. The reverse die, holding the image of the daggers, would have been on top of the stack, fitted into the trussel, and would have received the force of the hammer more directly, which would have caused it to wear more quickly. But I couldn’t remember those details for sure, either.

Whatever the true number of dies, though, it seemed to me that the odds of finding two coins that were die duplicates, drawn at random from history, were quite small.

Was there a way to make those odds better? Only if I were to assume that each of the Ides had been drawn from a hoard buried by a single solider, which had survived as a hoard for over two thousand years. But how likely was that? The coins were a soldier’s daily wage and were usually spent. Plus Brutus’s troops were constantly on the move and would have had little reason to bury a hoard since they could not have expected to be able to return to retrieve it.

What really nailed it for me, though, was that Stewart’s coin appeared to be in Very Fine condition, bumping up against Extra Fine. Had a new Ides of that high quality been discovered, it would have made news in all the ancient coin publications. But there hadn’t been a peep about it.

“Shit.” I said it out loud. The coin was very likely a forgery. Because a forger of rare coins, who would need to strike only a few coins, wouldn’t have to make more than one set of reverse and obverse dies. So all of the forger’s Ides would be die matched.

I put the first coin, the one that supposedly came from Simon’s kitchen, back in its transparent coin flip. But I needed to make sure that I didn’t confuse the two. So I went and found a flip I had that was tinted slightly red, and put the second coin, the one from Stewart’s office, in that flip.

Then I walked over to my bed, sat on the edge, and began to ask myself some questions. Was the coin Jenna had taken from Simon’s kitchen table my grandfather’s original and the other a fake copied from it? Or were they both fakes? I searched my memory to try to recall whether my grandfather’s coin—which I still thought of as the true original—had had those die marks. I could not recall.

More questions began to carom around inside my head. If both of the coins were fakes, what had happened to my original, and who had it now? If one of these two coins was indeed my original, who had copied it and why? Were there even more copies somewhere? Was my original actually just an old counterfeit and this one its counterfeit twin?

Sitting there on the edge of my bed, I was now fully in touch with my inner feelings. They were afraid. They were telling me—screaming at me really—that if I didn’t find the answers to those questions, my feelings and I were going to be sharing a very small room in a big building surrounded by barbed wire.

Serappo was a logical place to start looking for answers. After all, if Jenna was to be believed, he had supposedly declared my original—if it really was my original he looked at—to be a fake. But to pull the answer out of Serappo, I was going to have to reverse course and do what he wanted: go to Chicago to meet with him in person.

I decided to do it.

First, though, I had to get there, and I for sure did not want to get there on a commercial airliner. Then I remembered that Peter Penosco had said to call him if I needed help. Now I did need help, and Peter had exactly the variety of help I needed. A very nice
Citation
. I’d flown on it dozens of times. If it didn’t have the range for Chicago, we could refuel somewhere.

I got up off my bed and went into the kitchen to call him. It was still dark out, and there was as yet no sign of Jenna. The dim glow on the wall clock said it was not yet 6:00 a.m. The phone has a lighted keypad, so I didn’t bother to turn on the kitchen light. Over the years Peter had called me at home before six God knows how many times, so I simply returned the favor.

He answered on the first ring. When I identified myself, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in Peter’s responding “hi.” From a sixth sense developed over a lifetime of business phone calls, I knew in an instant that he would rather be hearing from his dentist. But I plunged ahead.

“Peter, you said if I needed anything, just call.”

There was a slight pause. “Um, yes.”

“Now I do need something.”

I expected him to say something along the lines of “Just name it.” Instead, I got something more curt.

“What is it?”

“I need to get to Chicago. Right away. I’d like to borrow the
Citation
. There and back in one long day. I’ll pay for crew and fuel.”

There was an even longer pause.

“Roberto, I’d love to do that. Love to. But I can’t. As you know from the papers, this thing’s getting out of hand.”

“I don’t read the papers,” I said.

“Well, you should. You should. The
Times
says you’re about to be arrested. I have to think about the company. Can’t take a publicity hit like that.”

“Like what?” I genuinely didn’t get it.

“Lending a plane to a killer.”

Now the long pause was on my side. I was getting it. I had become a pariah.

“I’d probably do the same thing in your place, Peter. Thanks, anyway.”

“Actually, Robert, I’m real glad you called. Was gonna call you.”

I should have seen it coming. “Why?”

“Well, under the circumstances, we can’t use you anymore. As our lawyer. At least right now. You know how this business is. Pure image.” He plunged right on, in a rush to get it all out. “But the good news is, we’ll still be able to use the firm! I’ve been talking to Caroline about who to go with while you’re on leave.”

“I’m not on leave.”

“Right, right. But you know what I mean. It will be hard for you to negotiate our deals from jail.” He tried a small chuckle, as if it were a little joke between us.

“I’m not going to jail.”

“Okay, okay.
If
you go to jail.”

I realized it was hopeless. “Peter, I hope Caroline arranges someone top notch for you.”

“She will. I’m sure she will. She says there are some good young guys there who can do it even better than you.” He must have realized how cruel that sounded. “Well, you know, not as good as you.” There was the forced little chuckle again. “But, you know, guys who can climb the old learning curve really fast.”

“No doubt. Hope it works out.”

“Thanks. And, hey, Roberto. Good luck to you, pal.”

“Thanks.” I hung up.

Just then, Jenna flipped on the lights. I blinked. It seemed as if that was our M.O. now. I’d be in a dark room, and Jenna would blind me by turning on the light.

She must have had the same thought. “So, Mr. Tarza, sneaking around in the dark again?”

“Just making a call.”

She stifled a yawn. She was still in her bathrobe. “At six in the morning?”

“I was trying to get a ride.”

“Where to?”

“Chicago.”

“You’re going to Chicago?”

“Yeah. To find out what Serappo knows about all this.”

“About all what?”

“I looked at the two coins under a loupe this morning. They came from identical dies.”

“So?”

“It means that at least one of them is almost surely a fake. Maybe both.”

“Want to enlighten me as to why you concluded that?”

“Not right now. I’ll explain it when I get back from Chicago. I’ll even show you.”

“Okay, fine. But it’s dumb to go there.”

“Why?”

“When they arrest you, they’ll use your having left town to try to deny you bail. Flight risk.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “I’d be just as much a flight risk if I’d never gone anywhere.”

“A lot of legal rules are stupid.”

“Do you really think I’m going to be arrested?”

“Yeah. And if you go to Chicago, it will be sooner rather than later.” She paused. “When I got back to the office last night, there was a call on my voice mail from Spritz. Asking if we’d surrender your passport.”

“What did you say?”

“I haven’t called him back yet. Maybe you better give it to me before you go to Chicago.”

“In the top drawer of my dresser,” I said.

“I’ll get it later. Want some breakfast?”

“You’re what, the full service lawyer? Cook and defend?”

I thought it was funny, but Jenna didn’t, I guess, since her only response was to ask, “Eggs over easy or scrambled?”

“I’m going to skip breakfast this morning, but thanks.”

Then I went to my study to make some reservations online. Something I’d only recently started doing. Except my computer wasn’t there. I went back to the kitchen.

“Where’s my computer, Jenna?”

“I assume the police took it when they searched the house yesterday.”

I felt outraged. “They just took it? The whole thing? You can’t do that with a subpoena.”

“They didn’t use a subpoena. They had a search warrant—to uncover evidence of a crime. You remember—like of a civil subpoena on steroids?”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “But now I don’t have a computer.” I was sounding whiney. I knew that. But I couldn’t help it.

“My law firm has one,” she said.

“Where’s your law firm?”

“In the back bedroom. I kind of figured even before my meeting with Caroline that my days at M&M were numbered. So a couple of days ago I printed out “
JAMES AND ASSOCIATES, ATTORNEYS
” on a piece of paper and taped it to my door. I think the police were hesitant to go in there, even with a warrant for the house. Which reminds me.”