Death on a High Floor Read Free

could think of. “Why?”
    “Cause I like to be on top.”
    “Shit. You know what I meant. I meant why did you do it.”
    “I’ve thought about that a lot. I don’t know exactly. I think I did it for the standard male reason—conquest. You’re from a different generation, Robert. Girls have changed. Sometimes we just want to notch our belts. Like the boys in your coin club.”
    “That club is defunct.”
    “You know what I’m talking about.”
    “I don’t, really, Jenna. In fact, I don’t know why we’re even talking about this. He’s dead. What you did with him, on top or on the bottom or on the side, is your business. I’ll keep it to myself.”
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
    “Maybe you shouldn’t have.”
    “I needed to tell someone.”
    “I can see that,” I said.
    “Okay.”
    An intense need to get out of there washed over me.
    “Jenna?”
    “Yes?”
    “I need to go.” And with that I slipped off the stool and walked out.
     
     

CHAPTER 2
     
    After I left Starbucks, I decided to do the only sensible thing for a man suspected of murder. Go home. I assured myself that once I got there, I’d sit down, regain my composure, make a few calls, and get the whole thing sorted out.
    I did not drive home in my own car, however. When I took the elevator down to Level B, I found that the police had cordoned off my car with more yellow tape and posted a guard. A woman cop with a bright smile and a large gun on her hip. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to.
    Taking a cab was an option, but I’ve never taken a cab in L.A. Only tourists take cabs in L.A. I was saved from that fate by Stewart Broder, whose car was parked just down the row from mine.
    “ Need a lift, Bob?” he asked.
    Stewart had persisted in calling me Bob for thirty-six years, ever since we entered the firm together as first-year associates. He knew I loathed it. I had never been a Bob, not even when I was in first grade. It didn’t fit. But this didn’t seem to be the right time to make objection.
    “Can you take me home, Stewart?”
    “Sure. Get in .”
    Stewart drove a red Ferrari. He looked stupid in it. He was overweight, bald, and had never been handsome, even in his thin, hirsute youth. He also had terrible skin—adult acne. In the last year or so he’d been making it even worse by trying to cover it up with heavy makeup, which looked even more gooped on than usual.
    I doubted that even the Ferrari helped him pick up girls, which is, after all, why most sixty-year-old guys own cars like that. Not that any girl in her right mind would have stayed in the car with him for more than one turn around the block. He drove like shit. Crazy fast with no skill.
    Which is exactly how we left the garage. Crazy fast up the ramps, screech of rubber on the final exit. I hunkered down in my seat and hoped we wouldn’t be rubbed out by a passing truck. Then I waited for the questions to start.
    “Is it true you found him?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What’d he look like ?”
    “Like he was dead.”
    “Come on, Bob, you can trust me.”
    “Stop calling me Bob.”
    “Okay, okay. Robert, what’d he look like?”
    “Dagger between the shoulder blades, lots of pooled blood.”
    “Just like in a murder mystery.”
    “I guess. But the angle of the blade was wrong.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning it looked plunged in sideways. In murder mysteries the blade is always straight up and down in the back.”
    There was a pause. “It is? Doesn’t it depend on how tall the killer is or how the victim is standing , or something like that?”
    “I don’t know, Stewart. It just seemed odd to me.”
    “Okay. But what did you see.” Stewart has an odd and irritating habit of stressing random words. I remember noticing it the first day I met him, when he asked where I had gone to law school. I told him I had gone to law school at Harvard. Where had he gone ? Yale he said. I remembered thinking that he looked like the kind of