Death on a High Floor Read Online Free Page B

from the counter, and started to sop up the spilled coffee. “If they discover your possible motive, it’s not going to straighten out.”
    “I don’t have a motive.”
    My denial had come out in a croak, even though my brain had instructed my mouth to say it firmly.
    “Why don’t we go sit in the living room and talk this through?” Jenna said.
    “Okay.” Talking the whole thing through with her seemed like a good idea. She was, as I had told the Associate Evaluation Committee only a month ago, on her way to being a great lawyer, even though she’d been practicing for only seven years.
    Jenna was already moving toward the conversation pit. A big design feature in the seventies, when my house was built, it’s a semicircle of couches built-in over red tile, the whole thing a step down from the main floor, facing a white brick fireplace. Ugly and dated, but a good place to talk. Jenna sat down on one of the couches, and I placed myself carefully upright on the one across from her. I stuck my right hand under my thigh in hopes it would stop shaking.
    Jenna looked more serious than I had ever seen her look.
    “When I mentioned motive just now,” she said, “I said possible motive.”
    “I don’t have any kind of motive.”
    “I think you might.”
    “Like what?”
    She scrunched her fingers into the pocket of her jeans, took out a tarnished silver coin about the size of a dime, and held it up between thumb and forefinger. “Like this one. Here, catch!” She tossed the coin to me. Overhand.
    I managed, barely, to jerk my hand out in time to snatch it out of the air. It was a close call.
    “Jesus, Jenna. I could have dropped it.”
    “Well, it’s already lasted since before Jesus. I didn’t think a quick three-foot toss would bother it all that much.”
    “They crystallize inside. It could have shattered if it had hit the floor.”
    I still couldn’t believe that she had shown such . . . disrespect. I placed the coin ever-so-gently on top of a copy of The New Yorker , which was sitting on the table.
    “Your hand has stopped shaking,” she said.
    I ignored the comment. “Where did you get it?”
    “At Simon’s condo, yesterday morning. After I left Starbucks.”
    “It’s incredibly valuable. Precious, really. It should be stored in an archival coin envelope, not sitting out on a table, naked.”
    “Maybe so,” she said. “But when I picked it up, that’s where it was. Sitting out on a table. Simon’s kitchen table, to be exact.”
    “You must be kidding.”
    “No.”
    “Simon left it out on a table?”
    “I don’t know who left it there,” she said. “But that’s where it was.”
    I shrugged. “Well, he bought it, so I guess he could do whatever he wanted with it.”
    “How much did he pay you for it?”
    I hesitated. “Five hundred thousand dollars.”
    Her eyebrows went up. “Jeez, I had no idea.” She seemed genuinely shocked.
    I was staring at the coin. I couldn’t stand to see it sitting there, unprotected. I pictured it somehow sliding off the The New Yorker and shattering on the floor.
    “Excuse me a moment.” I got up, went back to my study, and returned with a small, transparent vinyl coin flip. I picked the coin up off the table and placed it in the flip, which is about two inches square.
    Jenna just watched.
    “Jenna, do you understand what this coin is?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Simon was like a small kid when he first got it. Couldn’t stop talking about it and showing it off. I must have heard its little history twenty times: ‘The Ides denarius . Minted by Brutus in 42 B.C. to commemorate his assassination of Caesar. Double daggers and the Latin words Idesof March on the back. Most famous coin of the ancient world,’ blah blah.”
    She smiled at the “blah blah.” It was a phrase she had picked up from me.
    “Why did you take it?” I asked.
    “So you could say you were in the process of unwinding the deal.”
    “Why would I have wanted to unwind the