Death on a High Floor by Charles Rosenberg

not.”
    “Good.” She said it as if someone had just reassured her that the grocery store had not run out of bananas. Then she said something that really caught my attention.
    “I’m not sorry he’s dead,” she said.
    “You’re not? Why not?”
    “He was mean to people.”
    “Was he mean to you?”
    “Yes.”
    “He was?” We both knew what we were talking about, and I realized as soon as it was out of my mouth that my surprise had offended her.
    “I was a looker back then.”
    I ran my head back twenty-five years. Sometimes you have to do that quite consciously to remember how we all used to be. She was right. When she got to M&M, Gwen was, if not really well put together, at least very respectably put together. Simon arrived not all that many years after her. As a young associate he wouldn’t have been powerful enough to sate himself farther up the food chain.
    “Well, Gwen, did you kill him?”
    “No.”
    “Thank God. That makes two of us who didn’t, then.”
    “What about Jenna?”
    “What about her?”
    “She had plenty of motive.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Robert, the secretaries are an in-house spy network. We know everything.”
    “I suppose so.” Then I had a thought. “Do the secretaries know who did do it?”
    “We have our theories.”
    “Want to share them?”
    “It wouldn’t be right. I mean, it’s just gossip.”
    Over the years, Gwen has always, in the end, been willing to tell me everything the secretarial spy network knows. At least most of the time. About ten years ago, I’d had the temerity to doubt a secretarial finding that two of my married partners were having an affair. In fact, I had uproariously derided the information. So when the two partners eventually divorced their respective spouses and got married to each other, the secretarial network, offended at my derision, cut me off. I didn’t get another crumb of gossip for more than four years.
    They had restored my security clearance about five years ago. As a thank you for leaking to Gwen, a week in advance of the announcement, that Simon was going to be the next managing partner. And for revealing the vote of the Nominating Committee.
    I decided not to press her for the moment. In due course I’d find out who the secretaries thought had done it.
    Gwen didn’t budge from her position in the doorway. “Mr. Tarza, you had a lot of phone calls today. Would you like the list?”
    “Any that were important?”
    “Your daughter called, for one. From Prague.”
    “And said?”
    “She said she loved you and was coming home to help.”
    “Bullshit. She’s coming home to see her boyfriend.”
    “She didn’t say that.” Gwen is a great secretary, but she is something of a literalist who is unable, or refuses, to read between the lines. You could say she doesn’t get sarcasm.
    “Did she say anything else?”
    “That she needed the airfare.”
    “I’ll think about it. Who else called?”
    “Mr. Penosco. He wants you to call him.”
    Peter Penosco is the CEO of Bright Bulb Productions. Bright Bulb, or BBP, as we call it, was my largest remaining client. It used to produce feature films, but had shifted to mostly made-for-television movies and direct-to-video stuff. I did all of its contracting work, which was pretty interesting. But mainly I did BBP’s litigation. Peter had a habit of breaking the deals he’d made, so people often sued him. Call it his way of renegotiating the deals, which is not exactly unheard of in the movie business. Peter usually netted out a profit when the litigation was over. Whether that was due to his business acumen or my lawyering skills is something we’d been known to argue about.
    “Okay. Would you let him know that I’ll call him back tomorrow?”
    “I already did. I explained you were out this afternoon.” She smiled. Gwen knows that I make it a fetish to get back to clients promptly and don’t like them left in doubt about when I’m going to call