I didn’t open the door. Instead, I just raised my voice and yelled through it, “How did you get up here, Tommy?”
“The usual way. I took the elevator. They know me at the front desk, and I guess you didn’t tell them I’ve moved out.”
He was right, of course. “Well, what do you want?”
“I left a set of walking sticks in the closet of my room. I need them for a hike I’m taking tomorrow.”
“I might get them for you, Tommy, but before I do, did you tell Greta Broontz that I had my hands waxed the day my student died?”
“Who is Greta Broontz?”
“One of my colleagues at the law school.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
“You didn’t tell her about the hot wax?”
“No. Why would I? And how could I if I don’t know her?”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Can I have my poles now?”
“Wait there, please.”
I walked back to his bedroom and, sure enough, there was a pair of walking sticks leaning against the back corner of his closet. I hadn’t noticed them when I checked his room after he moved out. I picked them up, went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, then returned to the front door with the poles in one hand and the knife in the other.
“Tommy,” I yelled, “move down the hallway to the very end, where I can see you, and I’ll toss them out.”
He actually rolled his eyes, or at least I think that’s what he did, since his face looked weird in the distorted visual field of the peephole. As requested, he moved far down the hallway, so that he was just a speck in the eyepiece. I opened the door a crack, heaved the poles out and slammed the door.
I watched Tommy return and pick up the poles. When he turned around, he gave me the finger, then walked off down the hallway. I watched until he turned the corner.
Oscar was right: I was losing it.
CHAPTER 81
After Tommy left I went back to working on my exams, although I had trouble focusing on them. About 11:30 I put them aside, grabbed my bike from the study and headed for the front door. Right before I reached it, I thought about calling Aldous and canceling. I rejected that and instead went back to the kitchen, grabbed a six-inch knife and put it in my saddlebag. If someone came after me with a gun, it would be useless, of course. But so far it had been poison and library books, so maybe it would be helpful in a nongun situation.
I left the building and rode my bike up to the sculpture garden, which is at the north end of the campus. It’s named for the UCLA chancellor, Franklin D. Murphy, who founded it. Its five acres of grass, planted with flowers and trees, spreads over gentle hillocks crisscrossed by winding walkways. Amid all of it are dozens of exquisite sculptures from the world’s most famous sculptors, from Rodin to Calder. It’s the most calming place on campus. On any day you can see young couples watching their small children run, students studying and people picnicking. It’s a place where the grass seems to say Please walk on me.
I spotted Aldous right away. He was sitting toward the bottom of one of the small hillocks and had already spread out a green blanket and a checkered tablecloth. On top of the tablecloth was one of those classic, rounded wicker picnic baskets with a split wooden top and polished double wooden handles.
He got up as I approached and we hugged. He was still hugging when I broke it off and sat down.
“Hi, Aldous, it’s good to have you back.” I knew as soon as I said it that it wasn’t the kind of thing someone would say on her lover’s return, and that it meant our relationship was, if not over, very close to over. I felt a wave of sadness wash over me. The relationship had seemed to have such promise when it started.
I think Aldous sensed the end coming, too, because all he said in response was, “Good to be back.”
Neither one of us said anything more as he pulled back the basket’s wooden handles and flipped open the wooden tops. He took out bright red plastic plates, two red plastic cups and what looked like coleslaw packed in a plastic container he’d picked up at one of the campus eateries. I could also see sandwiches inside the basket, which he’d clearly made himself and carefully wrapped in Saran Wrap. And, finally, there was a white thermos that I knew must hold coffee, plus a couple of soft drinks.
“What are the sandwiches?” I asked.
“Ham and cheese, salami and your favorite, peanut butter and jelly.”
“On white, I hope.”
“Yep, on WASP white. Guaranteed stale in one day.”
He knew I loved peanut butter and jelly. I’d eaten it all through my childhood and had seen no reason to stop just because I passed the age of eighteen and eventually became a law professor. On the salvage boat that past summer, the sailors aboard, who preferred heartier fare, had derisively dubbed me the PB&J girl. By the end of the summer, though, I’d converted two of them and even drawn them into the ultimate PB&J discussion topic—which peanut butter was best and whether you should eat smooth or chunky.
I took out one of the PB&Js, unwrapped it, poured myself some coffee and began to eat. Aldous picked up a ham and cheese and pulled a can of Coke out of the basket. After we’d both munched for a while, I said, “I gather from the call this morning that you’re definitely going to Buffalo.”
“Yes. It looks like a perfect opportunity.”
“It probably fits. You’ve always been as much a businessman as a lawyer.”
“True. I’m hoping to persuade you to come, too, Jenna. The founder told me that, to get you, he’d be willing to build you a world-class center for admiralty law. There’d be three faculty positions to fill, and the funding for some scholarships and an academic journal.”
“You think they’d want a suspected murderer?”
“That’s going to go away, I’m sure.”
“Aldous, I appreciate your saying that, but may I speak bluntly?”
He laughed. “Have you ever done otherwise?”
“That’s not fair. I can be subtle.”
He just looked at me.
“Okay, not very often, but I can.” I paused. “Anyway, I would die in Buffalo. I’m sure it’s a very nice place, but it would remind me too much of Cleveland. I need a much bigger city.”
“I figured you would say something like that.”
“Also, and here’s the blunt part, if I thought our relationship was going somewhere, I might consider it, despite Buffalo. But even with our many attempts to work things out—and I kept thinking we would work it out—our relationship still seems mostly to be about the great sex. I know we have fun together, too, and we travel well together, and we have a lot of things in common. Maybe it’s mostly my fault, but it’s just not enough, at least for me. So—there’s no easy way to say it—we need this to be over.”
He took a bite out of his sandwich, as if to give himself some time to think, a gesture that sort of summed up what was wrong in our relationship. After a while he said, “I don’t feel that way, Jenna, but it takes two, and if I’ve learned anything about you, it’s that once you make a final decision about something, you rarely change your mind. And your decision sounds final.”
“It is.”
“I can’t say I’m not hurt, because I am. But I know you don’t mean it to hurt.”
“I don’t.”
“Will we still be friends, Jenna?”
“Of course we will.” I scooted my butt over on the blanket and gave him a big hug, much warmer than the one with which I’d greeted him.
“Good,” he said after we broke the hug. “Because I wouldn’t like to lose our friendship. Maybe I can even persuade you to visit me in Buffalo at some point.”
“Visiting is certainly doable. In late spring.”
He laughed. “By the way, I have a present for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yep. It’s in an envelope in the picnic basket. Check it out.”
I leaned over and looked into the basket. There was a white business-size envelo
pe on the bottom of the basket. I picked it up. “Is it the offer for the admiralty professorship?”
“Nope. Open it.”
I tore it open and pulled out several folded pieces of paper stapled together. I unfolded them and saw that it was a long multipage list of Internet addresses. “What is it?”
“Do you remember that you were pissed off at me when I refused to break the confidentiality agreement I had when I investigated Primo and Quinto’s treasure salvage deal?”
“Yes. Are you about to break it now?”
“No. But I wanted to make that up to you, so I hacked Julie’s notebook computer and looked at her Internet search history.”
“What?”
“Don’t act so shocked. You know I have those skills.”
“Yes, but you have strange ethics. You won’t break the confidentiality agreement, but you’ll break various federal and state laws to hack someone’s computer.”
“Sometime I’ll explain to you why I think they’re different.”
“I don’t expect to be persuaded. But since you’ve already done it, I guess I need to ask what you found.”
“I found out that about two weeks before Primo died, Julie went online and Googled the topic poisons soluble in coffee. It’s the sixth item on the list I just handed you.”
“Are you able to tell what she did with that?”
“Yes. She linked from the results for that search to several newspaper articles about an incident that took place at Harvard a number of years ago. Somehow sodium azide got into a coffeepot in a research lab there, and six people were poisoned, although none of them died.”
“Who did it?”
“The articles say Harvard did an investigation but never figured out how the poison got into the coffeepot.”
“Oh my God. That means Julie did this.”
“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion quite so quickly.”
“Why not?”
“Because Julie was living with Primo and Quinto, and if you look at all the searches, it’s pretty clear from the topics searched that some of them were done by Primo or Quinto. They’re searches of multiple Italian websites. So we can’t know for sure if Julie did the poison search or if one of them did it using her computer.”
“Why would Primo have done it?”
“To kill himself?”
CHAPTER 82
Week 3—Wednesday Afternoon
I thanked Aldous for the picnic, gave him a peck on the cheek—it’s amazing how a relationship can cool as quickly as thin-crust pizza—and went back to my condo. I had come up with a plan, but if I was going to implement it, I needed to do it quickly.
Oscar had given me a copy of the receipt for the sodium azide that had supposedly been found in the pocket of my jacket. The name of the company from which it was bought was at the top of the page—Angin Chemical. It was located near downtown LA. The salesperson’s name wasn’t on the receipt, but the salesperson’s number was.
I called the company and when someone answered, I said, “Hi, this is January Bigelow.” (January Bigelow was the name of my long-ago freshman college roommate.)
“I bought some chemicals the other day from one of your salespeople. I came in personally to pick up the order. I can’t recall the name, but the number is 2385. Can you tell me who that is so I can talk directly to them again? I have a couple of questions.”
I listened. “No, no, it’s not a complaint, just a question.”
After a moment the person came back on the line and said, “That would be Sylvia Menendez. Let me connect you.”
I hung up.
Next I went back to the website and tried to find the most benign thing the company sold over the counter. Then I ordered up my car from the valet, got in and drove to my bank, where I took out four hundred dollars from the ATM. Then I drove downtown to Angin Chemical. When I got there, I parked in one of the three spaces labeled CUSTOMERS ONLY, got out of my car and walked in through the double glass doors at the front. As I expected, there was a service counter in the back, and I made a beeline for it.
Luck was with me. The woman standing behind the counter had a nametag that said Sylvia Menendez. She looked to be in her early twenties. She was shorter than me, maybe five foot three, with dark hair cut short and green eyes. She was wearing the kind of button-up blue smock you often see on employees of places where there can be a lot of dust around.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Annej Semaj.” (I had been amusing myself since childhood pronouncing my name backward. I thought it sounded vaguely East Indian. I always pronounce the j in both words like the g in Geronimo.) “I saw on your website that you sell Decon AquaPur ST Sterile Purified USP-Grade Water. Is it in stock?”
“I’m pretty sure it is,” she said, looking down at her computer screen as she typed in a query. She glanced again at the screen display and said, “Yes, we do have it in. What size would you like?”
“What are the available sizes?”
“It comes in one-gallon containers, four containers to a case.”
“I’ll take one case.”
“Okay, let me get it from the stockroom.” She turned and disappeared into the back.
I had ordered the four-container case because I knew that a gallon of water weighs almost eight-and-a-half pounds, and I wanted the entire thing to be heavy enough that it would be reasonable for me to ask for help carrying it out to my car.
Sylvia emerged from the back, pushing the case of USP-grade water on a dolly.
“Will you be paying by cash, credit card or check?” she asked. “Oh, I should add that we only accept checks if your company has an account with us. Do you?”
“No. I’ll pay with cash. How much is it?”
“It’s $180 plus sales tax. You can pay here or at the front.”
“Here is fine.”
With tax the bill came to $196.20. She took the two hundred dollars I proffered her and gave me change. “For your receipt,” she asked, “what name should I use? Yours or a company name?”
“Oh, just my name, Annej Semaj.” I spelled it for her and then pronounced it again, slowly.
She handed me a receipt that looked just like the one found in my pocket.
“Will you need some help,” she asked, “getting this to your truck?”
“Oh, I don’t have a truck. Just an old Land Cruiser, but yes, I could use some help. I’m parked right out front.”
“I’ll push it out for you,” she said.
I headed for the front door and she followed. When we got to my Land Cruiser, I popped open the back, lifted the hatch and together we lifted up the heavy box and slid it in.
I was trying to think of some small talk to engage in that would make my visit memorable when she saved me the trouble. “It’s unusual,” she said, “for individuals to buy this much highly purified water. If you don’t mind my asking, what do you do with it?”
“Oh, I work in a medical research lab at UCLA. We use purified water to dilute sterile disinfectants. We ran out of it this afternoon, and my boss was bitching about how long it would take to reorder it through normal channels.”
“So you just said you’d go and get some?”
“Exactly.”
“Medical research. Wow, maybe I should try to get a job like that. One day I’d like to go to med school.”
“What do you do now?”
“I’ll be graduating from LACC next spring and I’m hoping to transfer to UCLA.”
“Well, give me your card, if you have one, and I’ll send you a link to the UCLA job postings board.”
“That would be great. Let me run back in and get you one.”
She was gone a couple of minutes and then came back with a card. She handed it to me and said, “This is actually the company’s card, but I’ve written my name and e-mail address on the back.”
“Great.”
“Do you have a card?”
“Not with me. But now that I’ve got your e-mail address, I can send you my co
ntact info.”
“Thanks.”
As I drove away, I thought to myself that I had taken a risk. Sylvia might have recognized me if the police had already shown her my photo. Oscar had told me that the police used to show photos but now tried to avoid it because it could screw up the credibility of later identification. But it had still been a risk. Or the clerk could have seen a picture of me in the paper or online, although I thought that the only picture connecting me with Primo’s death had been in a brief article in the Bruin on an inside page. Anyway, it had worked. She thought my name was Annej Semaj, and she had shown no hint of knowing who I really was.
CHAPTER 83
Tess had asked me to meet her at the Bel-Air at five. I hadn’t been there since Marbury Marfan had taken me to a recruiting dinner at the hotel almost fifteen years earlier. I arrived a few minutes before five, gave my car to the valet and walked across the bridge toward the main building. The place was still beautiful. The hotel had been remodeled a few years before, but its essential character had been preserved. Even the ducks and swans remained.
Tess was waiting for me in the wood-paneled bar. She was sitting at a table for two in a corner, sipping a drink and picking at a plate of olives.
“Please sit,” she said.
I did, and said to her, “I feel as if I really ought to reintroduce myself, since we met so briefly at Craft.”
“Yes, it was rapid,” she said. “So let us do it properly. I am Tess Devrais.” She put out her hand to shake mine.
“And I’m Jenna James.” I took her hand and shook it. “Pleased to meet you, Tess.”
We both laughed out loud. So loud that the bartender turned and looked at us.
“When I saw you that night,” Tess said, “I had a small jealousy. Because you have a necklace with the same design as the bracelet which I have. A gift to you, I think by the same man, yes? Is that not stupid?”
“Yes, it was the same man, and it is stupid. In fact, I would be happy to give you the necklace if you’d like. Maybe the necklace and the bracelet need to live together again, as they must once have done.”
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