Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  I struggled awake again. “Tell him I’m asleep and I’ll call him back tomorrow.” There was a pause, and then Tess again, louder this time. “He says it is important, and he knows you do not sleep because he heard you say you were in sleep.”

  “All right, all right.” I struggled back to full wakefulness and picked up the bedside phone. “What do you want? It’s late here.”

  “I apologize. I’m calling to ask your assistance in something urgent.”

  “What?”

  “Jenna has been sued.”

  “I know. She told me, and late last night she faxed me the complaint.”

  “Did she also tell you about the student who died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, this is all becoming a mess, and the two things are intertwined. I’ve been dealing with the cops, but I need you to come back and deal with the civil suit.”

  “Did Jenna suggest that I come?”

  “More or less.”

  “I told her I was surprised she hadn’t asked me about it to start with, and I guess I said I was willing to help if I could do it from here. But I wasn’t thinking of coming back. I could recommend several good people at my firm. In fact, Jenna probably knows them all.”

  “Robert, Jenna has worked hard to get tenure, and I think this is going to derail it. You know her better than anyone, and I think you’ll be in the best position to counsel her on how to handle this. Otherwise, I think the whole thing is going to blow up in her face. And candidly, my friend, you owe it to her.”

  “Well, when you were here we talked about the whole situation, and I’m feeling much better about Jenna and hoping to resuscitate some sort of relationship with her. But I don’t think that translates into making a transatlantic trip.

  “You should do it because you owe her. Without her, you’d be working in the library at San Quentin right now.”

  “I think you could have done an equally fine job.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll think about it and call you in the morning. Now I want to go back to sleep.”

  “Okay. I’ll send you an e-mail with more details.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Robert?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do the right thing.”

  “Good night, Oscar.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Jenna James

  Week 1—Thursday Morning

  After our dinner in Venice on Wednesday evening, Aldous had dropped me off at my apartment. He had first offered to take me back to his place, but I had declined. My fear had begun to abate. After all, I could’ve been killed in the bike accident, so perhaps I needed to stop worrying about an assassin.

  As for the bike, there was no way it could fit into his VW, so we chose to leave it in his office at the law school. He told me he’d get it back to me later.

  By the time I got through my front door, my bruises were really beginning to hurt. I had two things to do before I tried to go to sleep.

  First, I booted up my computer and searched for Professor Sikorsko. To my astonishment, he not only had a Facebook page but had left it totally open, so I could see everything about him—his newsfeed, his friends, his photos and his “likes.” The page said he had been retired for twenty-five years. His profile picture showed him holding a small dog named Corky. None of his friends seemed to have any connection to the law school, sunken treasure or anything else remotely connected with Primo’s death. His photo albums mostly showed pictures of his adult grandchildren, who lived in Pennsylvania. There were no pictures of big dogs. I also checked out his posts for the last year. There was nothing of interest. His only “like” was Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

  Second, I left a note on Tommy’s pillow, asking him, if he could find the time, to do me a favor and go to Home Depot and buy the best dead bolt he could find. I said cost was no object. To just get the best.

  Then I took two Tylenol and tried to sleep.

  Sleep had been slow in coming and fitful, and I was still tossing and turning when the alarm beeped at 6:00 A.M. the next morning. I reached out to turn it off. A sharp pain shot through my arm, but I managed to shut off the alarm anyway and fell instantly back asleep, into my only deep sleep of the night. I woke again with a start at 9:00, when my cell phone rang. I usually leave it on the nightstand beside my bed. When I grabbed for it, I managed to knock it off and then had to reach down and scrabble for it on the floor with my fingers, which reminded me again, as my muscles protested the entire thing, of the accident the previous afternoon.

  I finally got the cell to my ear. “Hello?”

  “Jenna, its Bill Nightingale.”

  I was still pulling myself out of sleep, the way you do when you’re suddenly awakened by a phone call, trying to make sense of who’s calling. It took a second or two to clear the fog from my brain, and I finally managed to blurt out, “So you have a first name.” I didn’t think he would notice my slightly delayed response.

  “Yes, of course I do. Did I wake you? You sound kind of sleepy.”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “Okay. Well, I’m not calling about dinner. You need to call me on that, as we discussed last night. But first, how are you feeling?”

  I stretched a bit more and felt my muscles protest again. “I’m okay, I guess. A bit sore.”

  “That’s to be expected. Do you have a headache?”

  “No. Do you always call your patients the next day to check up on them?”

  “No, I usually ask one of the nurses to do it.”

  “So is this just to encourage me to call you about dinner?”

  “No, actually not. I got a phone call this morning from someone at the coroner’s office that I think you should know about.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’ve completed Primo’s autopsy and are moving into analysis of tissues and fluids for toxins of various kinds. They usually send that out.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But they have some newfangled device that gives them a preliminary read on certain toxins.”

  I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. My legs didn’t seem to hurt. “Should I be taking notes on this?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. Go ahead.”

  “Anyway, he asked me if we had any sodium azide in the Emergency Department and, if so, if it might have somehow gotten on our patient.”

  “What’s sodium azide?”

  “It’s a common laboratory reagent, used a lot in bio and medical labs.”

  “Why did he want to know, and what did you say?”

  “Apparently, using this new whizbang instrument, they detected some in a small coffee stain on his shirt.”

  “What’s sodium azide?” Even as I asked the question, I had a bad feeling about what the answer was likely to be.

  “It’s similar in some ways to sodium cyanide.”

  “Well, do you use it in the ER, and could you have spilled it on him?”

  “No, we don’t, so no, we couldn’t have. Which is what I told him.”

  “What happens if you ingest it?”

  “I just looked that up. A fraction of a gram will kill you, and the initial symptoms sound similar to the ones Primo presented with when he was brought in.”

  “And therefore?”

  “I just looked at Primo’s chart on the computer. It says you told the EMTs that he drank some coffee in your office that you prepared.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Well then, assuming you weren’t trying to commit suicide and take a student with you, someone tried to poison you.”

  His statement jolted me. Up until that second, I had maintained the faint hope that the coffee hadn’t actually killed the plant. That maybe bugs had come in the night and eaten holes in the leaves that looked like burn marks but really weren’t. Or that maybe the coffee really did have some weird, naturally occurring fungus in it that was poisonous. Now the poison had a name, and it didn’t
grow on coffee beans.

  “I hate to say it,” I said, “but that confirms something I’ve kind of assumed, except until now I didn’t know the name of the poison. Does the coroner’s office also have Primo’s UCLA chart?”

  “Of course. Or if they don’t, they will shortly. The coroner’s office will also be analyzing his blood and other fluids and tissue to make sure they didn’t somehow spill the sodium azide on his clothing themselves. It’s only a preliminary result.”

  “Do you think,” I asked, “that sodium azide could burn a hole in a plant leaf if some of it splashed on it?”

  “I don’t really know. But it’s pretty strong stuff, so it might.”

  “That only confirms that someone is trying to kill me.”

  “I meant that only as a joke, Jenna.”

  “I don’t think it’s a joke at all. That poison wasn’t just in Primo’s coffee cup. It was also in the coffeepot in my office. Someone put it there, and I don’t see how Primo could have been their target. It had to be me.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill you, Jenna?”

  “I have no idea, but that won’t make me any less dead if they try again and succeed.”

  There was a pause in the conversation. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I was thinking I needed a friend with some scientific expertise.

  “Dr. Nightingale, I think I want to take you up on the dinner invite.”

  “Bill will do fine for a name.”

  “Okay, Bill, I’d like to confirm what I said yesterday. I’d like to go out to dinner with you.”

  “Name a day.”

  “Well, my dad’s coming into town today and will be here through Sunday afternoon. So how about Sunday evening?”

  “Sounds good. I’ll call you on Saturday sometime and we’ll pick a time and place.”

  “Great. And thanks for the heads-up about the coroner’s findings.”

  “No problem.”

  I pushed the button to end the call, got up from my bed and walked very slowly into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. When I looked in the mirror over the sink, I actually shrank back. The entire right side of my face, from right above my lip to right above my eyebrow, was black-and-blue. It didn’t hurt that much until I made the mistake of touching it. “Ouch.” I said it out loud and promptly decided not to wash my face. I did brush my teeth, although the back and forth motion of my arm in brushing was slightly painful.

  I took two Tylenol.

  I heard my phone ringing again. I padded back to the bedroom, where I had left it, and picked it up.

  “Hi, it’s Matthew Blender.”

  “Oh, hello, Dean.”

  “I heard you were in a bicycle accident yesterday, and I’m calling to check up on you and see if you’re okay.”

  “Yeah, I think so. They took me to the ER and I had a CAT scan, but I don’t seem to have anything really wrong with me except that one side of my face looks like I was beaten up.”

  “Do you have classes today and tomorrow?”

  “Yep.”

  “No one would blame you for canceling them for the next couple of days.”

  “No, I think I’ll just man up and teach them.”

  There was a slight pause on the other end.

  “Jenna, I’m sorry I said that the other day. I’ve never lost a student, or at least not so directly, and I just wasn’t being sensitive to what that must feel like. I apologize.

  “Apology accepted.”

  “So where were you headed on your bike?”

  That seemed to me an odd question. I mean, what did it matter? I couldn’t fathom why he was asking, so I decided to tell a white lie. “I had ridden up to the law school earlier, for the exercise, and was just heading home.”

  “I should start doing that. Get away from my desk more.”

  “Well, if you do, watch out for darting dogs.”

  He chuckled. “I will. You take care, and if you need anything, please call me.”

  “Will do, boss.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall. It was already 9:15. I had a class to teach at 10:00. I needed to get a move on. As soon as the class was over, I needed to put a plan in place—one that would protect me and at the same time figure out who was trying to kill me.

  CHAPTER 33

  On Thursdays at 10:00 A.M. I taught civil procedure, a first-year course. That made it different from all the other courses I taught at UCLA. The students were still in their first semester of law school and thus, for a brief moment in time, slightly afraid of their law professors.

  The fear stemmed from two facts. The first was that they had all arrived thinking they were smart because, on the basis of their college grades and LSAT scores, they had gotten into UCLA Law, a so-called “highly selective” school that accepts only a small percentage of applicants. The second was that it was only November, so first-year students had not yet received any grades. As a result, they had no way to know how they would stack up against all the other self-designated smart people who sat around them. The first stack-up would soon be measured by the only metric law schools really care about—end-of-semester grades.

  As a law professor, I was one of the temporary gods with the power to sort the students at semester’s end by giving them grades. That’s a terrifying power, on both sides. Most of us tried, of course, in the modern academic way, to be approachable and helpful, but in the last analysis we were gods, at least for a little while.

  So now I, one of the gods, was standing in front of the gathering class at 9:55 A.M., looking like someone had beaten me up. The question in my mind was, Would any one of the seventy students in the class mention it? Would anyone say, “Hey, God, what happened to you?” I was curious about it, if only because, during my first year of teaching, I had turned to eating to cover my anxiety—coffee alone hadn’t done an adequate job—and had porked on fifteen pounds in the first semester, then lost it again over Christmas. No student ever mentioned it.

  I waited a moment or two for a few stragglers to hurry in. Unlike a few of my colleagues, it wasn’t my habit to close the classroom doors at 9:59:59 and start talking at 10:00 A.M. sharp. As I waited, I sipped coffee from my red M&M mug, which I continued to use as some sort of talismanic reminder to the students that once upon a time I was a real lawyer and please don’t forget it.

  At 10:03 I began. “Good morning, everyone.” Would anyone, I wondered, say anything?

  Jordan Brown, a student in the first row, answered that question within the first few seconds by blurting out, “Professor, what happened to you?”

  “Bike accident,” I said.

  At that point, of course, I had a choice. I could elaborate, or I could just plunge ahead. I chose a semiplunge.

  “Thank you, Jordan, for asking. I appreciate it. The good news is that I wasn’t badly injured. The bad news is that you’ll get to watch my face”—I pointed to it with my right index finger, being careful not to touch it—“turn from its current black-and-blue to a nice yellow over the next couple of weeks. But now, since you were the first to speak today, let me ask you the first question.”

  “Okay,” he said, looking a bit rueful that opening his mouth had led to his being called on.

  “What is a deposition, Jordan?”

  “It’s when, in a civil suit, you take someone’s testimony under oath but before trial and outside of court.”

  It was odd how sometimes what went on in the classroom reflected my life outside of it. As soon as I got my legal team fully in place, I wanted to take Quinto’s deposition. There were a zillion questions I wanted to ask him. He’d be under oath, and we might get some straight answers.

  “Not a bad seat-of-the-pants definition, Jordan,” I said. “But what does Rule 30 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which governs depositions, actually say?” I was forever trying to train the students to start with the actual rules and their actual language.

  He quickly looked down at his notes. “I don’t recall exactly,
Professor. I’d have to read it from the book.”

  “Let’s do that together.” I flipped a switch on the podium and projected the text of Rule 30 onto the large screen behind me. It said:

  Rule 30.

  Without Leave. A party may, by oral questions, depose any person, including a party, without leave of court except as provided in Rule 30(a)(2). The deponent’s attendance may be compelled by subpoena under Rule 45.

  I picked up my laser pointer from the podium, turned slightly and aimed its small red dot on the words Without Leave. “What does that phrase mean, Jordan?”

  “It means that you don’t have to get the permission of the court—the court in which the suit is pending—to take a deposition.”

  “Right. Well, when do you have to get the court’s permission?”

  “There are a variety of circumstances set out in Rule 30(a)(2) when you do.” As he spoke I moved my laser dot to focus on the reference to Rule 30(a)(2).

  “Well, Jordan, we don’t have Rule 30(a)(2) projected at the moment, but did you read it?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Just as he finished answering, the classroom door opened. It made a squeak, and I jumped. My first thought was, once again, that it was someone with a gun. It wasn’t. It was Greta Broontz.

  “Hello,” she said, addressing the class but not me. “I’m Professor Broontz. I’m here to evaluate Professor James’s teaching as part of the ongoing evaluation for her tenure application. Apologies for being late. I’ll just take a seat up in the back row. Please ignore me.”

  I was infuriated. No one ever showed up unannounced, let alone late, to do a teaching evaluation. Greta had either intentionally failed to let me know in advance or, most likely, had just made up the whole assignment. Even worse, she hadn’t even acknowledged that it was my classroom. She hadn’t even looked at me.

  I could have thrown her out, of course, and maybe I should have. But a little voice in my head said that I could make use of the outrage, and it would be better if I didn’t flip out myself. Instead, I just said, “Well, welcome, Greta,” intentionally skipping the professorial honorific.