Death on a High Floor (8 page)

“You know, Robert, I wouldn’t, if I were you, count on this Spritz fellow’s ignorance. He seemed quite thorough. Indeed, he had with him a very thick notebook that he had mostly filled with notes. He was writing on the last page when he was interviewing me.”

“Harry,” I said, “I’m not counting on anything except the fact that I didn’t kill Simon and don’t know who did. But I aim to find out.”

Harry got up, in what was clearly a signal that our talk was over. “Well, I wish you good luck and Godspeed in doing it.” He smiled. “With emphasis on the speed part, because I think Spritz is in a hurry.”

I knew that I should have pressed to stay. To question him in more detail about what Spritz had said and what else he had wanted to know. But I was discombobulated. Lying did not agree with me.

Harry saw me to the door, and we parted with the usual pleasantries, including a mutual promise to have dinner sometime soon. We both knew it wouldn’t happen, but it’s the kind of thing people in L.A. say to one another. Let’s have lunch. Let’s have dinner. Let’s have whatever. No one ever really means it. It’s just a more elaborate form of goodbye.

I headed back to L.A., to my office.

In early afternoon there is
relatively
little traffic in L.A., even on the freeways. Unless it’s raining of course. People in L.A. can’t drive in the rain. The exact reason is a mystery, because it rains every winter. But since it wasn’t raining that December day, I covered the twenty miles between Manhattan Beach and downtown in just under twenty-five minutes.

I spent most of those twenty-five minutes justifying my lie—to myself. I wasn’t very persuasive. Then I imagined trying to repair the damage. Calling Harry up and telling him that I had lied. Explaining why. I rehearsed the call in my head. Several times. It always came out sounding like an admission of guilt.

When I arrived back at our office building, the Blob, somewhat thinner than the day before, as if it hadn’t eaten, was still hunkered down at the entrance into the garage. It seemed, however, to be uninterested in photographing my cheery thumbs up and parted quickly. Perhaps they already had too much tape of my up-thumbing them.

I drove into the garage, then took the elevator to eighty-five. Still thinking. By the time I got off on our floor, I had pretty much persuaded myself that the lie had been inconsequential and necessary to prevent an injustice. I felt a lot better.

When I got to my office, Gwen was sitting glumly at her desk, hands folded in front of her, doing nothing. As I went past, she didn’t even look up. But she was clearly aware I was passing by. “Mr. Tarza, there is a letter on your chair.” She said it in a flat voice, kind of the way you’d announce to someone that his dog had just died.

“Who’s it from?”

“The Executive Committee.”

I suddenly understood Gwen’s tone of voice. She was probably thinking that, for all intents and purposes,
I
had just died. Because I am
on
the Executive Committee. So getting a letter from them is a rather ominous event. Also, Gwen had no doubt come to understand, as we all had in the last few years, that nothing much moved anymore via paper in envelopes. Especially not internal communications among lawyers. Everything of importance came by e-mail. Except notices of termination. For some reason, no doubt at one with the reason that some documents still have red wax seals, termination notices at M&M still come on paper.

But there it was, sitting on my chair. A business-size white envelope, sealed and with my full name neatly typed on it:
Robert Winthrop Tarza
.

I opened it. The letter had two sentences and was signed by Caroline Thorpe, “Interim Managing Partner.” So, sometime this morning the Executive Committee had apparently gotten together without me and appointed an interim managing partner. Perhaps they thought I was too busy talking to Spritz to attend.

The first sentence of the letter asked me to join the committee for a meeting at 2:00 p.m. in
da Vinci
. The second sentence alerted me that the topic of discussion would be “the advisability of my taking a temporary leave of absence from the firm.” The word temporary was italicized.
Temporary
, I was to understand.

I looked at my watch. It was 1:55 p.m. Just enough time to take the internal stairway down one floor and arrive punctually for what was no doubt being contemplated as my “temporary” professional execution.

The letter actually made me feel upbeat. Perhaps it is because I have always enjoyed confrontation, particularly with the bozos on the Executive Committee. Gwen, I noticed as I passed by her desk, did not look upbeat. She still had the same hangdog look she had had when I came in. Maybe she knew something I didn’t.

As I opened the door to da Vinci, I wondered why it had been chosen as the venue for the meeting. It will easily hold forty people. The Executive Committee, counting the now-deceased Simon Rafer and me, consisted of only nine people: The managing partner, three partners from L.A., one each from our largest domestic offices in Seattle, Chicago and Washington, and two “floaters” from whichever two of the other nine offices get the nod in any particular year. This year they were from Hong Kong and Boston. Usually, only the Los Angeles-based partners attend in person, with the others there by speaker phone. Usually, the monthly meeting is in
Yeats
, which is a cozy little room that seats six.

This time though, all the still-living members of the committee were there, even Charlie Wing from Hong Kong. So they had picked da Vinci for the same reason I had picked it for my interrogation by Spritz. For effect. Except this time the desired effect was the formality that they no doubt thought should accompany the execution of a beloved partner. Or perhaps they just thought that I would protest less vehemently with the hills and the Pacific Ocean as backdrop. That the view would calm me.

The seven of them were clustered toward one end of the long mahogany table. They had left a seat for me at table’s end. Perhaps as a courtesy due me by dint of being the most senior among them, but more likely just to make me feel isolated from the group. It may not even have been conscious.

Caroline spoke. “Robert, please join us.” She gestured toward the chair. I sat down, folded my hands in front of me, and waited for her to continue. I didn’t bother to greet anyone. I had long ago concluded that in certain situations, it went better if you just dropped the pleasantries and got right to the ugly business at hand.

Caroline squirmed, which is what I had intended.

“Robert, as you can imagine,” she said, “we’ve done a lot of talking since Simon’s murder.”

“And saying?”

“Saying that we all need to think of the common good. This firm employs more than two thousand people around the world. No matter how much we value you as a colleague—love you really—we can’t allow this scandal to overwhelm M&M. Can’t allow a hundred thirty years of work to be destroyed by a scandal.”

The amazing thing was that the other six of them, normally so prone to chatter, were stone silent. They just sat there looking at me like crows on a fence. I looked back. I decided on the spot not to make it easy for them by following Caroline’s comments to their natural destination. Which was to my execution ground.

Instead, I just looked at Caroline and said, “And so?” “And so we have decided to place you on temporary administrative leave—with full salary of course, plus your year-end profit share. We will issue a statement saying the firm has full confidence in your innocence, but that
you
have asked, for the good of the firm, to take a brief leave while the situation works itself out. Of course, we know you will need a place to work with your, um, defense counsel.”

I picked up immediately on the “um.” Caroline is one of those people who always speak in perfect sentences, nested in perfect essay-like paragraphs, with nary a pause, let alone an um. So the um meant that she wasn’t sure she wanted to say what she was about to say. But after a slight pause she conquered the um.

“So,” she said, “we have arranged for you to have an unofficial office in the Annex, and Gwen will move there with you.”

I stifled a laugh. The Annex is a nondescript seven-story building in the Mid-Wilshire area to which we have moved many of our lower-level administrative functions and staff. Like night word-processing and our internal archival storage. If M&M were a farm, the Annex would be the equivalent of the tool shed on the back forty.

“I’m sorry, Caroline, but I’m not taking a leave,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” In truth, I was surprised at my own decisiveness. It appeared that self-confidence had flown back into me on my drive up the freeway from Manhattan Beach. “To do that would be like admitting guilt. Haven’t you ever read the jury instruction that says that the jury may consider evidence of flight from the crime scene as evidence of guilt?” The question was meaningless to her, I knew. Caroline is a tax lawyer.

Caroline didn’t respond to the jury remark. She just sat there and looked at me. I don’t know whether I’d call her look perplexed or stunned. Apparently, she and her friends had really expected I’d just roll over and leave, thirty-six years with the firm be damned.

Finally, after the silence had grown awkward, she spoke. “But, um, we have decided.”

I let the silence reign again for a moment, and then spoke myself. “You don’t have the power to decide, Caroline. You want to fire me? You’ll have to put it to a vote. Go read the fucking partnership agreement.”

With that I pushed my chair back, very carefully standing up as I did so, turned and walked out. So far as I could hear, there wasn’t even a rustle as I left. I would have liked to have looked back to see if their mouths were agape, but it would have broken
Old Man Mather’s Rules
.

John Cotton Mather, or Old Man Mather, as we called him with affection, had been eighty-something, white-haired, crotchety, bent-over, and decidedly witty. A partner in a hoary old Boston firm, he had crossed over the
Charles
to the Law School every year to teach trial practice, although most of what he had to say had little to do with trials.

My favorite Mather lecture was called “How to Stomp Out of a Room Without Looking Like an Ass.”

As Mather put it, “Gentlemen,”—he never did acknowledge the three women in our class—“by the time you get to be my age, you will have had but one or two really choice opportunities to leave a room in anger. Three if you are lucky. But unless you do it properly, you will simply have had several opportunities to make yourself look like a horse’s ass. Leaving a room in anger is an art, gentlemen, an
art.
” He then offered his “
Five Rules for Leaving a Room in Anger”:

One:
Do not
pick up your books or papers. Leave them there. They will serve as a perfect reminder that you are gone.

Two:
Do not
shove your chair back from the table while you are still sitting in it. Push back
as
you are standing up.

Three:
Do not
try to put your jacket on as you leave. Don’t even fling it over your shoulder. You’ll never be Jack Kennedy. Leave it on the chair back.

Four:
Do not
announce that you are departing. Say nothing. Just go.

Five: Never . . .
ever
look back.

I recall now, with some amusement, that he then actually had us
practice
stomping out of a room.

I once had the temerity to ask, “Well, wouldn’t it be risky to just leave your stuff there?” To which he replied, pushing his reading glasses down on his nose and fixing me with a withering stare, “Mr. Tarza, if the people you are dealing with are well-bred, they will return your briefcase unopened, your papers unrifled, and your suit jacket with its pockets unprobed.” I dared not suggest that one might someday have to walk out on the ill-bred.

John Cotton Mather has been dead now for more than twenty-five years. But I think he would have smiled on my leave-taking of Caroline and her crew. I never ever looked back.

As I took the stairs back up to eighty-five, I reflected that my victory over Caroline and her crew was likely to be but temporary. If they really wanted me gone, they weren’t going to forget about it just because I had walked out on them, however elegantly. Not one of them had risen to power in the snake pit that
Marbury Marfan
had become by giving up after a first defeat. I needed to watch my back.

More immediately, I needed to keep my appointment with Jenna and Oscar Quesana. We had agreed to meet in my office at two-fifteen, and I like to be on time. I had to get a move on. As I hurried past Gwen’s desk on the way into my office, she thrust an e-mail at me, still printer-hot. I shoved it in my pocket, to be looked at later.

Jenna and Oscar were already there, sitting side by side on the couch. I hadn’t seen Oscar in maybe ten years, but he hadn’t changed. Same small, lithe, wiry body. Same unlined face. Same bow tie. Same not-quite-the-right-fit gray suit. Probably bought at
Suits Way Below Cost
.

“Sorry guys,” I said. “Unexpected meeting.”

Oscar sprang off the couch and came toward me, hand extended. “Robert, good to see you again after all these years. Wish the circumstances could be better.”

Then he gripped my proffered right hand with both of his, using that clasping double handshake that is supposed to communicate “so
very
sorry,” or “I like you
so
much” or some other patently false sentiment. A device known to the unctuous and to undertakers everywhere. But then, a criminal defense lawyer is an undertaker of sorts if you think about it.

“Good to see you, too, Oscar.” Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Jenna smiling at me, still on the couch, making no move to get up. She was wearing a white silk blouse and tailored black pantsuit, with a small cloisonné dragon perched on the lapel. Emerald green and spouting a bright red flame from its mouth.

Oscar dropped our handshake, and I moved quickly behind my desk.

Early in my career, I favored sitting next to a client or a guest on a couch. But I had long ago dropped that egalitarian hangover from the seventies. If you put yourself behind the desk and leave the client “out there,” it immediately establishes an implicit and important hierarchy. One that works especially well if the client is some powerful captain of industry accustomed to being in charge.

Facing Oscar and Jenna, I needed every inch of hierarchy I could muster. For the very first time in my life I was the client, not the lawyer. I sat down in what I hoped was an authoritative, take-charge sit.

“Okay, Oscar. Let’s get down to business.”

But Oscar was himself apparently not unskilled in the dominance ritual that takes place on first meeting. He did not make the fatal mistake of sitting back down on the couch. That would have acknowledged my trump and my triumph. Instead, he put his hands behind his back and began to pace in front of my desk, at first saying nothing. It was a move that said, “Sit where you will, I own the room.”

Then he double-trumped me by sitting smack on the corner of my desk, left foot planted on the floor, butt firmly on the corner, bodyweight on his right hand, leaning in toward me. I actually shrank back.

“Robert, I’m not gonna give you VIP treatment. I’m not gonna treat you with kid gloves. That’s the way VIPs get hosed in this business. I’m just going to ask you the same first question I’ve asked every murder suspect I’ve ever represented.”

“Which is?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to hear it.

“Did you kill him?”

I did not expect that question. For one thing, I had always heard that criminal defense lawyers prefer not to know whether or not you are guilty. For another, it was too direct a question on such short acquaintance. There’s something enormously intimate about being asked if you have killed another human being. Maybe it would have seemed an okay question later, after Oscar and I had gotten reacquainted some. After all, it hadn’t bothered me when Gwen asked. Or Harry. But Oscar was still almost a complete stranger.

I looked over at Jenna for guidance. She remained stock-still on the couch. Despite the snappy outfit, she did not look at all well. She was not going to be of help.

“I’m innocent,” I said.

“If only,” Oscar said, “that were an answer to the question I asked. Look, you could be innocent even if you killed him. Not all killings are crimes.”

He was still sitting on my desk. “So why don’t you just answer the question I actually asked you?”

I was apparently on trial with my own lawyer. He was going to listen to what I said and judge me. How, I wondered, are you supposed to declare your innocence? With anger? Calmly? Slowly, each word distinctly separated from the other for effect? I chose calmly.

“I didn’t kill him,” I said.

“Good,” Oscar said. “Now, ask me why I want to know.”

“Is this a game?”

“Not at all. Ask me the question.”

“Okay, why do you want to know?” Physically, I was still behind my desk. Mentally, I had begun to float somewhere out in the room. Was I really having a conversation about whether I killed Simon Rafer?

“Let me try it with a hypothetical,” he said. He slid off my desk, walked over to the window, and stood looking at the view, hands behind his back.

“Suppose,” he said, still facing the window, “you were to change your mind and tell me, ‘yes, I killed that schmuck.’ What do you think we’d need to do then?” He turned to hear my answer.

“But I didn’t kill him,” I said.

“Well, my friend, as our now mostly departed profs used to say to us in law school, oh so long ago, ‘It’s my hypo.’ And since it’s my hypo right now, you have to play along and say, ‘I killed him.’”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s suppose I killed him.” Like every lawyer, I am easy prey for an absurd hypothetical.

Oscar put his hands in his pockets and lounged back against one of the windows. “So,” he went on, “if you were to tell me that, yes, you did kill him, we would proceed to have a nice talk about it.”

“Like what?”

“About how and why you did it. What you need to know about the temporary insanity defense. How not to cave too early in a plea deal.”

I wasn’t liking being guilty, even in a hypothetical. So I interrupted it. Or tried to. “Oscar, could you stop leaning against the window? It’s making me nervous.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “The window isn’t going anywhere.”

I tried again. “Wouldn’t that be unethical? To coach me like that?”

“Could be,” he said, then went right on, as if there had been no interruptions.

“After we finished our little chat, Robert, you would have to fire me and get yourself a brand new lawyer. We’d put it out to the press as a ‘difference of opinion’ maybe. Or that you insist on pleading innocent just because you are.” Then he laughed with a kind of explosive “hah!” A laugh that seemed to imply that very few people protesting their innocence really are.

I finally got it. This whole thing was Oscar’s
shtick
, no doubt perfected over years, to give me an opportunity to change my statement with a minimum of embarrassment. This time, he didn’t have to tell me what question to ask.

“Why would I have to fire you, Oscar?”

“Because knowing you killed him, I wouldn’t be comfortable insisting to the press that you’re an innocent man being hounded by a vote-hungry DA. Or bargain very effectively for a great plea deal. Or put you on the witness stand and let you lie your little heart out. I wouldn’t even be able to argue to a jury that you didn’t kill him—only that the state didn’t prove that you did.”

I was beginning to feel like I was back in first-year Legal Ethics. “Okay, Professor Quesana,” I said. “What’s the bottom, bottom line?”

“Just what I said. You’d need a new lawyer.”

“And what would I tell this new lawyer?”

“That you’re as pure as a new fallen snow.”

“What about Jenna?”

“She will leave the case with me.” I noticed that he had dropped the conditional “would” and switched to the immediate future tense, “will.”

Jenna sat up straight. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

Oscar unleaned himself from the window and went to sit beside Jenna on the couch. He turned slightly to face her. “Robert can think it over. If he tells us he killed him, then, toots, when the strategizing’s done, the party will be over and we’ll both be going.”

Jenna’s voice was no stronger, but still firm. “Like I said. I’m not going anywhere. And don’t call me toots.”

“Fine, I will call you Miss James then . . . Miss James, this is not a civil case. This is a criminal case. About murder. About Robert going to jail for twenty-five years. The rules are different here. I know them, you don’t.”

Jenna looked straight at him and said it again. “I’m not leaving him, no matter what.”

“Yes you are,” Oscar said. “If Robert comes clean and tells us he killed Rafer, then when we’re done with the strategy part, you’re leaving with me, even if I have to drag you out of here by your pretty hair.”

“You are not a nice person, Oscar.” She said it, not so much as an accusation, but in sadness, as something she was resigned to.

“Once upon a time, Miss James, I was. Criminal defense is a blood sport. It takes away the nice in you.”

I was taking this in as if from afar. Like watching a bad play from the last row. I wanted to put an end to it.

“Both of you, please shut up,” I said. “Let me say it again.” This time I
did
string the words out, one by one. “I . . . did . . . not . . . kill . . . Simon . . . Rafer.”

I paused for what I hoped would be the impact of brief silence. Neither one of them said a word in response. Then I continued. “Get it guys? And I have no clue who did kill him. Is that definitive enough for you, Oscar? Can we now get on with it?”

“Yes, now we can get on with it,” he said. “I’m well on the way to being persuaded.”

I felt better.

“Subject, of course,” he added, “to looking at all the evidence.”

There it was. He was qualifying it. All lawyers do that, of course. I do it myself. But this was the first time I had been personally qualified to.

Oscar must have seen the sudden look of discomfort on my face, because he went on to qualify his qualification.

“At the very least, Robert, I’m persuaded enough to start talking about how we can prove that you’re innocent.”

“I thought I was innocent till proven guilty.”

“In high school civics books maybe. Here in the real world, the jury looks over at you and thinks, ‘Well, damn! If he weren’t guilty, he wouldn’t be here, would he?’ So, practically speaking, we’ll need to prove you
didn’t
do it. Unless, of course, you’re famous and the jury can imagine that they already know you and trust you.” He grinned. “Are you famous, Robert?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, the victim, while not really famous, was locally prominent. So the jury will feel more anxious to avenge him than it would a homeless, nearly nameless drunk.”

“Wait a minute,” Jenna said. “Okay, Robert found the body. And sure, he was stupid enough to touch it and get blood on his sleeve. But aren’t those pathetically small facts to lead Spritz to suspect him of murdering Simon?” That seemed to drain her. She slumped again into the couch.

“Do you know what spatter is, Jenna?” Oscar asked.

“Only from TV shows.”

“TV shows get it mostly right. It’s a pattern in the way blood hits a surface that suggests the blood flew through the air and landed on the surface with a splat. Not what you’d expect from a glancing touch.”

I never watched TV, but I got it. “Like,” I said, “blood flying through the air when a dagger strikes flesh.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, since the blood on my sleeve didn’t get there by flying through the air, that test will exonerate me. Bring it on.”

“Unfortunately, Robert, spatter analysis is like reading tea leaves. You see what you want to see. A junior criminalist at the LAPD crime lab took a look at the stain and saw spatter.”

“That can’t be.”

“They’re sending the blood stain to an outside expert. You may turn out to be right. Let’s hope so.”