Free Death on a High Floor by Charles Rosenberg

even have been conscious.
    Caroline spoke. “Robert, please join us.” She gestured toward the chair. I sat down, folded my hands in front of me, and waited for her to continue. I didn’t bother to greet anyone. I had long ago concluded that in certain situations, it went better if you just dropped the pleasantries and got right to the ugly business at hand.
    Caroline squirmed, which is what I had intended.
    “Robert, as you can imagine,” she said, “we’ve done a lot of talking since Simon’s murder.”
    “And saying?”
    “Saying that we all need to think of the common good. This firm employs more than two thousand people around the world. No matter how much we value you as a colleague—love you really—we can’t allow this scandal to overwhelm M&M. Can’t allow a hundred thirty years of work to be destroyed by a scandal.”
    The amazing thing was that the other six of them, normally so prone to chatter, were stone silent. They just sat there looking at me like crows on a fence. I looked back. I decided on the spot not to make it easy for them by following Caroline’s comments to their natural destination. Which was to my execution ground.
    Instead, I just looked at Caroline and said, “And so?” “And so we have decided to place you on temporary administrative leave—with full salary of course, plus your year-end profit share. We will issue a statement saying the firm has full confidence in your innocence, but that you have asked, for the good of the firm, to take a brief leave while the situation works itself out. Of course, we know you will need a place to work with your, um, defense counsel.”
    I picked up immediately on the “um.” Caroline is one of those people who always speak in perfect sentences, nested in perfect essay-like paragraphs, with nary a pause, let alone an um. So the um meant that she wasn’t sure she wanted to say what she was about to say. But after a slight pause she conquered the um.
    “So,” she said, “we have arranged for you to have an unofficial office in the Annex, and Gwen will move there with you.”
    I stifled a laugh. The Annex is a nondescript seven-story building in the Mid-Wilshire area to which we have moved many of our lower-level administrative functions and staff. Like night word-processing and our internal archival storage. If M&M were a farm, the Annex would be the equivalent of the tool shed on the back forty.
    “I’m sorry, Caroline, but I’m not taking a leave,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” In truth, I was surprised at my own decisiveness. It appeared that self-confidence had flown back into me on my drive up the freeway from Manhattan Beach. “To do that would be like admitting guilt. Haven’t you ever read the jury instruction that says that the jury may consider evidence of flight from the crime scene as evidence of guilt?” The question was meaningless to her, I knew. Caroline is a tax lawyer.
    Caroline didn’t respond to the jury remark. She just sat there and looked at me. I don’t know whether I’d call her look perplexed or stunned. Apparently, she and her friends had really expected I’d just roll over and leave, thirty-six years with the firm be damned.
    Finally, after the silence had grown awkward, she spoke. “But, um, we have decided.”
    I let the silence reign again for a moment, and then spoke myself. “You don’t have the power to decide, Caroline. You want to fire me? You’ll have to put it to a vote. Go read the fucking partnership agreement.”
    With that I pushed my chair back, very carefully standing up as I did so, turned and walked out. So far as I could hear, there wasn’t even a rustle as I left. I would have liked to have looked back to see if their mouths were agape, but it would have broken Old Man Mather’s Rules .
    John Cotton Mather, or Old Man Mather, as we called him with affection, had been eighty-something, white-haired, crotchety, bent-over, and decidedly witty. A partner in a hoary old