Death on a High Floor (29 page)

“Let me see it,” Jenna said.

I handed it to her. She turned it over a couple of times in her fingers. “I wonder how the hell it got here.”

“Well,” Oscar said, “I see only three possibilities. One, whoever buried the box dropped it. Two, the cops who dug up the box dropped it. Three, the cops planted it so we’d find it.”

“There’s a fourth,” I said.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Brutus’s army came this way on pay day, and one of his soldiers dropped it.”

“Very funny,” Oscar said. “Well, the good news is that now we’ve got one of the fakes. We can have it tested and maybe find out where it came from.”

“Good luck,” I said. “Counterfeiters don’t usually put their initials on their fakes.”

Oscar started to slip it into his jacket pocket.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said.

“Why not?”

“If the police catch you with it, they’ll change their minds and think
you’re
the counterfeiter.”

We all laughed, ruefully, and made our way back into the house.

Oscar plunked himself down at the kitchen table, and Jenna and I followed.

“Okay,” Oscar said, “I came over here for the meeting Jenna told me we absolutely
had
to have. I hope we’re not going to have a lot of them. They’re usually a total waste of time.”

Despite the fact that we were already seated, I did
not
want to meet in the kitchen. It was too far down-market from the eighty-fifth floor.

“My study has a small conference table,” I said. “Let’s have the meeting there. It will be more comfortable.”

“I’ll have to move all my papers,” Jenna said. She looked annoyed.

Oscar laughed. “Including those three there that you folded up?”

“One of them was folded by Robert.” She said it deadpan.

“Oh, great,” Oscar said. “
Two
people with obsessive compulsive disorder.”

Jenna shrugged, gathered up her papers, and put them back in her backpack. She left the folded ones on the table. We headed for my study, toward the back of the house.

I love my study. All my books are there—almost a thousand of them—on ceiling-high shelves covering two adjoining walls. The other two walls are dark mahogany. The floor of the room is wide-plank dark wood, covered by an old oriental rug. One I bought during a trip to Turkey, after way too many glasses of something whose name I still can’t pronounce.

In one of the corners there is a big chair, its red leather cracked from age and use, with a battered old ottoman in front of it. Next to the chair there’s a small, marble-topped table on which I leave my coin magazines until I get around to reading them. In another corner, three black leather swivel chairs cluster around a round mahogany table.

I used to enjoy going into the study every night after dinner. I’d plop my body down in the leather chair, put my feet up on the ottoman, light up a cigar, and read my
Wall Street Journal
. A few months ago, Jenna, who’d seen me smoke cigars from time to time, started giving me a hard time about oral cancer. So I dropped the cigar part of the ritual. Which destroyed its magic, of course.

The cigars were still in the humidor though. And as the three of us walked into the study, I thought to myself that it might be time to light up again. I probably wouldn’t last long enough in prison to get oral cancer.

We sat down at the round table.

“What’s the agenda for this meeting?” Oscar asked.

“To outline the basic facts of the case,” Jenna said. “To figure out what we’ve got.”

“You know, that would make good sense in a
civil
case,” Oscar said, in a tone that I took to be a not-too-guarded suggestion that civil litigators aren’t real trial lawyers.

“In a civil case,” he continued, “the plaintiff puts the defendant on the witness stand and proves the bad facts out of the defendant’s very own mouth. In a criminal case, thanks to the Fifth Amendment, the defendant gets to sit there with his mouth shut. So, boys and girls, the first question in a criminal case is not, ‘What are the facts?’ It’s always, ‘What can the government prove?’”

“I get it,” I said. “The government can’t prove its case by asking me what Simon and I said to each other.”

“Right. And they can’t ask Simon either, because he’s dead. So the government has to prove up its case some other way.” He paused. “If they can.”

Jenna sat for a few seconds, lost in thought. I could see the wheels turning. Then she returned from wherever it was she went when the wheels turned.

“Okay, I see it, too.” she said. “So let’s ask ourselves: what evidence does the government have that Robert’s guilty?”

“That’s what I want to talk about,” Oscar said.

He pulled a dog-eared notebook from his back pocket. The kind with a tiny spiral binding at the top. He opened it and made an elaborate display of flipping slowly through the tattered pages until he came to the page he wanted. The one page I could see had messy jottings out to the margins in two different colors of ink. Not very professional.

“Here it is,” he said. “My notes on motive. Let’s start with that. My guess is that the DA is going to claim that you offed Simon to keep him from outing you as a counterfeiter and, as a side benefit, to avoid giving his 500K back.”

“I guess,” I said. I felt no enthusiasm for my supposed motives.

“So,” Oscar said, “what’s the best evidence the DA can put his hands on about that motive?”

“Well, there were a bunch of grumpy e-mails about the coin between me and Simon,” I said.

“What did they say, exactly?”

“I don’t really recall.”

“I do,” Jenna said. “I read them.”

“And?”

“There were five of them. First, Simon writes and says the coin’s a fake. Then Robert writes back and says it’s not. Simon then demands his money back, politely. Robert doesn’t respond, and Simon writes again and demands his money back again—or else. I actually have a copy of that one. I already showed it to Robert.”

“Let’s see it,” Oscar said.

She rummaged in one of her piles of paper, pulled out the e-mail and set it on the table in front of Oscar, but positioned so that we could all see it.

Subject
  
Forged Coins

Date
      
11/25 4:03:37 PM PDT

From
     
[email protected]

To
          
[email protected]

Robert—

Quit pretending that your Ides is anything other than a clever Becker-like forgery. Take it back and return my money.

I’ll be out of the office the rest of the day and the rest of this week and next. Your worthless fake will be in the top drawer of my desk. Pick it up while I’m gone. Don’t bother to leave a check. Just wire the $500K to my offshore bank account in Shanghai. Name on the account: Simon S. Rafer. The bank name, routing number and my account number are on a sticky on top of the coin.

This is my final offer. Accept it and I’ll forget the whole thing. Stall any longer and it’s going to get very public and very ugly. I think that at the very least you knew all along that it was a fake and I’m going to say so. Maybe you won’t go to jail. But no one is ever going to buy a coin from you again and it won’t exactly be good for your legal career. Here or anywhere else. Assuming you can find a job somewhere else.

The only reason I’m not going to the police right now is in deference to our long professional relationship.

Do the right thing, Robert.

Simon

Oscar read it and said, “It sounds, Robert, as if he was accusing you not only of selling him a fake coin, but of being the one who forged it.”

“It doesn’t say that,” I said.

“I’m reading between the lines.”

“I think Oscar’s right,” Jenna said. “Why else would it get ugly?”

“Have the police seen this piece of paper?” Oscar asked.

“No,” Jenna said. “They’ve not served a subpoena, and the cops didn’t find it in their search because it was in my office and they didn’t search there.”

“Okay,” Oscar said. “Where did you get it?”

“I printed it out the morning of the murder, when I went over to Simon’s place. Before the cops got there.”

“But you didn’t print out the others?”

“No.”

“Okay, you said there was a fifth e-mail. What did it say?”

“Robert wrote back and told him to fuck off.”

“I
never
said that.”

“I’m paraphrasing.” she said. “It was that hostile and maybe more.”

“Perhaps the
sense
of it was that hostile,” I said.

Oscar turned to one of the few blank pages left in his notebook, pen poised. “Robert, now that you’ve maybe had your memory jogged, do you remember more about what you said in the ‘fuck off’ one?”

“Please don’t call it that.”

He looked amused. I was once again behaving like a client.

“Okay. I’ll rephrase the question,” he said. “Do you remember what you said in that last e-mail?”

“Not exactly. Something along the lines of, ‘My family always thought it was real. I still think it’s real. You examined it carefully before you bought it. So if it’s a fake, you had as good a shot at finding that out as I did. Stop pestering me.’”

“Is that what you remember, Jenna?”

“Yes, but it was profane, too,” she said. “The a-word appeared, coupled with the name of God.”

“Whatever,” I said.

Oscar did not write any of that down. He just clicked the pen against his front teeth. “When did you send that last one, Robert?”

“Maybe eight or nine day before the murder. Not sure exactly.”

“Did Simon give up after that?”

“No, over a day or two he called me maybe ten times and left screaming, profane messages on my voice mail.”

“Any actual threats?”

“Yeah. In the last one, which was maybe the Tuesday before the murder, he said he was going to wipe me and my family off the face of the earth.”

“He talked like that all the time,” Jenna said.

“Yeah, he did,” I said. “A lot of people even thought it was a sign of aggressive leadership based on some idiot business book they read. I never took it seriously.”

“Did you keep any of the voice-mails?” Oscar asked.

“No. They’ve been taped over frequently since then. I get a zillion voice mails a day now.”

Oscar looked over at Jenna, who had been studiously taking notes. “Jenna, did you hear any of those voice mails, either at Robert’s end, on his machine, or when the calls were being made from Simon’s end?”

“No.”

“Robert, did anyone else hear them?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“Well, the government isn’t going to have those, then,” Oscar said. As for the e-mails, they’ve probably already got all of them from the hard drives on the two computers. Yours and Simon’s.”

“No, they don’t,” Jenna said. “I deleted the e-mails from both computers—Simon’s the morning I was there before the cops got there. Robert’s while he was sleeping that first night. A couple of hours after the doctor put him out.”

“All of them?” Oscar asked.

“Yep. All of them.”

“Shit.” He had the look of a man who was searching the floor for a convenient place to do push-ups. I probably had the look of a man who was merely stunned.

“I thought,” I said, “that you only deleted the ones on Simon’s computer.”

“No, from yours too. I thought I told you that.”

“I guess you forgot to,” I said. “Because I’m certain you didn’t tell me that.”

“Why,” Oscar asked, “did you do it?” He showed no signs yet of dropping to the floor to give us fifty.

“I was in a get-rid-of-this-stuff mode. Just to keep Robert from being hassled. Maybe it was a mistake, okay? If I had thought Robert was really going to be a target, I wouldn’t have touched them. I’m not stupid, you know.”

Oscar was clicking his pen against his teeth again and rocking a bit. “Jenna, you know that all those deletions can be undone, right?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “I used
ScrubBucket
on both computers. It runs when you log off and deletes everything for serious ever. I set it to use the NSA standard, seven passes of random x’s and o’s over each file deleted.”

“Did Robert already have
ScrubBucket
on his computer?” Oscar asked.

“No. I picked up the disk for it when I went home Monday evening to grab some clean clothes. While the doctor was still here with Robert.”