Death on a High Floor by Charles Rosenberg Read Free Book Online

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