Long Knives
Authors: Charles Rosenberg
Also by Charles Rosenberg
Death on a High Floor
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Charles Rosenberg
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477817520
ISBN-10: 1477817522
Cover design by Paul Barrett
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013915797
For Sally Anne and for Joe
CONTENTS
Jenna James
I
had never been happier. That was, of course, because I couldn’t see twenty-four hours into the future.
But let’s start with the past. Five years earlier, I had decided, let’s face it, on a whim, that I was done with Big Law. And so, aided by a bit of luck and the dwindling memory of my fifteen minutes of fame from saving Robert Tarza’s butt from San Quentin, I left my law firm, Marbury Marfan, and transformed myself—poof!—into a tenure-track law professor at UCLA. I still worked hard, but I no longer spent my nights preparing for trial or my days battling the jerks, most of them of the male persuasion, who seemed to appear like clockwork on the other side of my cases.
It was only twelve miles from M&M’s perch on the eighty-fifth floor of a downtown high-rise to the rolling hills of UCLA, but in terms of lifestyle it might as well have been a thousand. I found time to eat in good restaurants, I slept well at night and I stopped biting my fingernails. I enjoyed my colleagues and, although he wasn’t perfect, I even had a guy in my life. I no longer made the kind of money I made at M&M, but I still lived quite well by anybody’s standards.
Another way to put it is that after lunging at every carrot dangled in front of me from the age of five—the need to ace grade school, stride down the aisle as the valedictorian of my high school, nail acceptance to an Ivy League college and then go on to Harvard Law School and make the law review—I finally had a life instead of a résumé.
Okay, that’s not quite true. There was still one last carrot dangling out there. I was up for tenure. It was November, and the decision would come no later than April. But with four well-received law review articles published in less than four years—two on civil procedure and two on admiralty law—I was pretty confident I had that final carrot nailed, too, if you can nail a carrot.
Teaching and writing about civil procedure, with eight long trials under my belt, was a natural for me. Teaching admiralty law had come as a surprise; I’d never even been on a sailboat prior to arriving at UCLA. But fate twists your life in funny ways. The week before classes started for my first year of teaching, Charles Karno, who looked the picture of health and had been teaching the admiralty course for more than twenty years, dropped dead of a heart attack while running a half marathon. The dean had prevailed on me to teach it. “You can learn it along with the students,” he said.
I did and found I loved it, and particularly liked teaching the law of salvage—who has what rights to ships, and everything in them, when they sink to the bottom of the sea. In order to live the law and understand it better, I had even spent the past summer at sea as a lowly deckhand on a treasure salvor ship. And now, instead of my formerly pasty-skinned self, I was bronzed and, well, if not ripped, at least the most toned and buff I’d ever been in my life. In fact, I had been admiring myself in front of the mirror when my cell phone beeped to let me know that a text had arrived. I picked up the phone from the bed, where I had tossed it along with my clothes. The text was from the dean:
“meet me Oroco’s 8:30
A.M.
tomorrow”
It was an odd time and an odd place, but I texted back:
“ok what topic?”
No text came back in reply.
So tomorrow was going to be an odd day—a mystery meeting with the dean at 8:30 and, just before that, a meeting with Primo Giordano, a student in my Law of Sunken Treasure seminar. Several days earlier, Primo had put himself on my office hours sign-up sheet for 7:30
A.M.
—the first time a student had ever signed up for that only-slightly-past-sunrise slot, which I made available as a kind of joke because no law student ever got up that early.
When I saw him later in class and asked him what he wanted to see me about at such an early hour, he paused and said, “I have something interesting to talk to you about,” and hurried away. Given that he was a student, Lord knew what that might turn out to be.
I didn’t think it was going to be a problem to meet Primo at 7:30—the meeting probably wouldn’t take very long—and then, right after that, drive down to meet the dean at Oroco’s in Westwood at 8:30. It was at most a ten-minute drive.
As it turned out, I should have texted the dean that I was too busy to meet with him, told Primo that I had a firm policy against discussing anything the least bit interesting with students, canceled my classes for the week and taken a nice long drive up the coast.
CHAPTER 1
Week 1—Monday
M
y office is on the third floor of a red-brick addition to the law school that some people still call the New Building. Built in 2001, it’s in the southeast corner of the law school and can be reached by a separate entrance. That way, you don’t have to walk through the old building and risk running into students. I arrived at the law school at about 7:15
A.M.
At that hour I didn’t expect to find anyone else around in any part of the building. Neither law professors nor law students are known to be early risers.
I climbed the steps to the third floor, wanting to arrive at my office several minutes before Primo. When I reached the top, I opened the heavy fire door and turned right into the hallway that leads to my office. My keys were in my purse, and as I walked I burrowed in it, searching for them. When I finally looked up, keys in hand, I stopped dead in my tracks. The door to my office was already open. Not only that, the light was on, and when I entered, Primo Giordano was already seated in one of my two gray suede guest chairs—chairs I had purchased with my own money to replace the butt-ugly ones the university had provided. He had with him a long red mailing tube, sealed on both ends with white plastic caps, which he had rested across the chrome arms of the chair.
He turned as I came in. “Hi, Professor. The door was open and the light was on, so I calculated that you were only away briefly. I hope it is not a bother to you that I entered. There is no place to seat oneself in the corridor.”
“No worries, Primo,” I said as I hung my black wool blazer on the back of the door, moved to my desk and took a seat in my red Aeron desk chair, another piece of office furniture I’d purchased with my own funds. In truth, though, the open-door situation was worrying. I always lock my door when I leave, and I was sure I hadn’t failed to lock it the day before.
I must have been silent for a moment, while those thoughts went through my head, because I suddenly heard Primo saying, “Are you okay, Professor?”
“Oh yes, fine. Sorry, got up super-early this morning and need a cup of coffee to really start functioning. Would you like a cup, too?”
He smiled broadly. “I am Italian. What Italian would not want a cup of coffee?”
“Great.” I turned toward the credenza, where my Braun coffeepot sat. I had ground the beans the day before, filled the reservoir with water and set the timer so the coffee would be ready at 7:30 the next morning.
“Hmm,” I said. “It’s not quite finished dripping. Let’s give it another couple of minutes.”
“Professor, do you always prepare the coffee the night before?”
“Almost always. I’m usually too sleepy to do it when I first get in.” I smiled at him, and he smiled back. He was nice to look at. He had a terrific smile, not to mention that he was tall, dark and chunky handsome. Plus older than the average law student. Twenty-eight or -nine, maybe even thirty. Which was great, because I’d begun to tire of early-twentysomethings. Maybe I was getting old.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me so early, Professor.”
“You’re welcome, although this isn’t all that early for me. I’ve been trying to get in by at least 8:00
A.M.
every day this semester because I’m pushing to finish a law review article.”
“You go to bed early, then?”
“No. I stay up late
and
get up early. I don’t need a lot of sleep.”
“You are, how do you say it, an owl of the night?”
I laughed. “We would say night owl.”
“Ah, you will forgive me. My English is good, I think, but the metaphors sometimes escape from me.”
I restrained myself from correcting him again and waited for him to tell me why he was there.
“Professor, is the law review article you are working on the one you spoke about in class? About sunken treasure?”
“Well, it’s not only about sunken treasure. It’s called
The Law of Sunken Treasure Salvaged
, but that’s just an attempt at a cute title. It’s about how the law of marine salvage should be applied to many things that are abandoned in the ocean. Sunken treasure’s just one example. Most of the other examples are boring.”
“But sunken treasure is why I am here, Professor. I have a map that shows the exact location of a sunken treasure.”
“Is that what’s in the tube, Primo?”
“Yes.” He raised the tube off the arms of his chair and held it out to me. “I want to show it to you and receive your advices on how to claim the treasure.”
“It would be ‘advice,’ Primo. Singular rather than plural.”
“It is many advices that I need from you. Why is it therefore singular?”
“Who knows? Do you mind my correcting your English?”
“No, no, Professor. That aides me. Please fix my English when I make mistakes.” He smiled his very nice smile again, showing a row of pure white, perfect teeth. He continued to hold the tube out toward me but then put it back across the chair arms when it became apparent that I wasn’t immediately going to take it from him.
We sat and looked at each other for a few seconds without saying anything. What ran through my head was the dumb thought that in the multipage policy manual provided to professors by the law school, there was probably not a single word about what you should do when a student offered to show you a map to sunken treasure. But whether it was in the manual or not, it certainly made no sense for me to step over the line that separates
us
from
them
and give legal advice about a business venture to a student who was taking a class with me.
“Primo, even if it’s real, I’m not sure I want to see it or get involved in it.”
“But you are an expert, no?”
My mentor at my old law firm, Robert Tarza, had taught me that the quickest way to wiggle out of representing a client you don’t want is to deny expertise.
“Well,” I said, “I know something about the legal theory maybe, but I know nothing about how it gets applied in the courts on a practical basis. I’ve never practiced admiralty law. It’s something I’ve become interested in—on a theoretical level—only since coming to UCLA.”
“But I need your advices—I mean, your advice—and I trust you. If I go to a law firm, I will not know if to trust them. They could steal the treasure. I am sure you will not.”
“Maybe I can recommend someone else you can trust. Before I do that, can I ask you a few questions?”
“I am disappointed. But, yes, ask me your questions.”
“Where did you get the map?”
“I inherited it from my grandfather. It was received by me when he died three years ago.”
“No one else claims the map?”
“My brother and I together own it. He also inherited it.”
“Is the treasure part of a sunken ship?”
“Yes. A Spanish galleon, the
Nuestra Señora de Ayuda.
It sank in 1641.”
I don’t know if you can roll your eyes internally, but I think I did it just then. The wreck of the
Ayuda
is quite well known. The ship was a so-called Manila galleon, one of the Spanish treasure ships that plied the seas between Acapulco and Manila, carrying silver and gold outbound from Mexico to Manila and Asian trade goods on the way back. It sank just west of Santa Catalina Island, about thirty miles from where we were sitting.
“You realize, Primo,” I said, “that the resting place of the
Ayuda
is hardly a secret. It’s everyone’s favorite Southern California Spanish shipwreck.”
“Yes, but no one has found it.”
What he said was true. But that was most likely because the ocean had long ago pounded whatever was left of the
Ayuda
into oblivion. Not only that, the ship had managed to sink in what was now a federal marine sanctuary, so good luck on getting a permit to dive for it. In Primo’s defense, the treasure-hunting bug can bite deep when it first sinks its pincers into someone’s neck, and Primo had clearly been badly bitten. There was little to be gained, though, in telling him that he was an idiot.