Death on a High Floor Read Online Free PDF Page A

deal?”
    “To avoid having the police think that your motive for killing him was a fight over the coin.”
    “What fight?”
    Jenna reached in her back pocket and extracted a piece of paper that had been folded in quarters. She handed it to me. "This fight."
    I unfolded it. It was an e-mail Simon had sent me about ten days before he was killed.
     
    Subject    Forged Coins
    Date        11/25 4:03:37 PM PDT
    From       [email protected]
    To            [email protected]
     
    Robert—
     
Quit pretending that your Ides is anything other than a clever Becker-like forgery. Take it back and return my money.
I’ll be out of the office the rest of the day and the rest of this week and next. Your worthless fake will be in the top drawer of my desk. Pick it up while I’m gone. Don’t bother to leave a check. Just wire the $500K to my offshore bank account in Shanghai. Name on the account: Simon S. Rafer. The bank name, routing number and my account number are on a sticky on top of the coin.
This is my final offer. Accept it and I’ll forget the whole thing. Stall any longer and it’s going to get very public and very ugly. I think that at the very least you knew all along that it was a fake and I’m going to say so. Maybe you won’t go to jail. But no one is ever going to buy a coin from you again and it won’t exactly be good for your legal career. Here or anywhere else. Assuming you can find a job somewhere else.
The only reason I’m not going to the police right now is in deference to our long professional relationship.
    Do the right thing, Robert.
     
    Simon
     
    First I tried humor. “You have a lot of interesting stuff in your pockets, Jenna.”
    She just sat and looked at me.
    “Okay,” I said, “where did you get this e-mail?”
    "Printed it out. Right after I read all of Simon’s e-mail exchanges with you."
    "Why were you reading his e-mails?"
    “Let’s come back to that. Right now I’d like to learn some more about your dispute. It’s important.”
    It hit me that Jenna was starting to interview me as if I were a new client. Facts first. I also recognized a specific technique I’d taught her. Don’t let the person you’re questioning change the focus to you. The focus is on him, not you. Keep it there.
    I gave in. “What else do you want to know, Jenna?”
    “Who is Becker?”
    “Was. Carl Wilhelm Becker. Perhaps the greatest counterfeiter of ancient coins who ever lived. Swiss. Died in 1830. As you saw, Simon claimed the coin was a Becker forgery.”
    “Is it?”
    “Can’t be. There are only fifty-eight of them in the world, and a new one showing up would have attracted too much attention, even back then. Becker enjoyed his quiet life in Geneva, peddling flawless counterfeits to coin rubes. Why would he have risked it all by forging such a famous coin?”
    “Why did Simon think it was a fake?”
    “He had it appraised.”
    “By whom?”
    “I’m not sure. But it doesn’t matter. This coin”—I leaned over and tapped the vinyl flip—“is real, damn it. I’ve owned it myself for more than fifty years. I know who owned it before me and where it came from before that.”
    “So you never went and picked up the coin from his office?”
    “Shit, no.”
    “Well, now you’ve gotten it back in a different way. I brought it back to you. I suggest you keep it and send Simon’s estate a check for five hundred thousand dollars. Pretend you agreed to undo the deal before Simon was killed.”
    Maybe I was still in shock. But what Jenna was saying made no sense to me.
    “I’m sorry, Jenna. I’m not getting it.”
    “We don’t want the police to think you killed Simon so you could keep the 500K.”
    “Why would anyone think that? I’m not the a lowlife who would kill someone over money—not for that amount or any amount.”
    “If there’s some other piece of evidence that links you to the crime, a lot of people are going to think that.”
    “It’s