Death on a High Floor by Charles Rosenberg

said, “you have a lot of phone calls.”
    “I’ll deal with them a little later. Right now I want to get myself some much needed coffee.”
    “I can get it for you.” Unlike a lot of the more modern secretaries, Gwen doesn’t mind getting my coffee.
    “Thanks, but I feel like getting it myself today,” I said.
    I didn’t wait for her response, but turned left into the hallway and headed for the small kitchen on the other side of the floor. The long walk felt good.
    Once in the kitchen, I pulled a mug off the shelf and started to pour myself some coffee. I watched it spill into the mug and told myself that all the cops had on me was opportunity and a bloodstain subject to expert interpretation. By the time I had poured in a small bit of milk and stirred in the sugar, I had dismissed the dagger thing as too far-fetched for anyone to believe and had also persuaded myself that the stain on the couch would turn out to be an old red wine spill. I felt great. I picked up the mug. My hand did not shake.
    On the way back to my office, I stopped along the way to say hi to a couple of people. They seemed a bit reserved, but that was understandable. I mean, who wants to chat up a killer? Soon, the true facts would come out and everyone would crowd around me, hanging on my stories of what it had been like to be wrongly suspected. Maybe I’d even speak about it on a few bar association panels.
    Gwen didn’t say a word as I walked past her desk on my way back to my office. She just gave me her patented “you need to deal with these phone calls” look.
    “I know, I know,” I said. “As soon I get done talking to Jenna.”
    And speaking of talking to Jenna, it seemed to me like an excellent time to wrap up an unresolved issue. Whether Simon really had been about to dump Jenna, as Harry claimed. It was time to find out.
    I walked into my office, intending to learn the answer. And there was Oscar, sitting casually in one of the chairs, chatting with Jenna.
     
     

CHAPTER 10
     
    “Oscar, what the hell are you doing here?”
    He turned his head toward me without getting up. “I’m your lawyer,” he said. “I’m here because it turns out we need to talk some more.”
    “About what?”
    “Well,” he said, “I have some new information. But why don’t you sit down?”
    It was unbelievable. He was inviting me to take a seat in my own office. I gave in and took the other chair.
    “Okay, what is it? I’ve got a lot of phone calls to return.”
    “On my way out, I ran into my old buddy Spritz in the lobby.”
    “You know him?”
    “Sure. Ever since we were both rookies in the DA’s office back in the late sixties. He was a rookie investigator and I was a rookie Assistant DA.”
    I was not thrilled to learn that Oscar had known Spritz for many years. I should have been, but I wasn’t.
    “What did he want?” I asked.
    “I’ll tell you. But let me ask you a few questions first, so I don’t pollute your recollection with what Spritz told me.”
    Oscar’s approach was, of course, a standard technique for good lawyers. Get your client’s first recollections pure, unsullied by what someone else has said.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “What did you tell the cops when they arrived the morning of the murder?”
    “Very little.”
    “Tell me what you remember.”
    I shrugged. “I told them that I had arrived and found Simon’s body face down with a knife in his back. That I had called 911 and then just waited there for them to show up.”
    “Anything else?”
    “The only other thing I can think of is that they wanted to know if there was anybody else on the floor. I told them I hadn’t seen anyone else. That was pretty much it.”
    “Did they ask what time you arrived?”
    “Come to think of it, they did. I told them I had arrived exactly at six. I knew that because the elevator unlocks automatically from its security mode at 5:59 a.m. I remembered looking at my watch, right before I got into the elevator, to see if I