Long Knives (14 page)

CHAPTER 30

I
went back to my office, checked my e-mail—nothing of any consequence—then went to the copy room and copied the notebook. I figured if anyone saw me, I’d just say I was copying some notes I’d made when I was out on the treasure-hunting ship over the previous summer. If they asked about the vinyl gloves I was wearing—I had brought an extra pair with me—I’d say I was having some kind of hand treatment. Or something like that.

As it was, no one came in while I was copying. When I got back to my office, I lifted the sign-up sheet off the wall—it still had Primo’s signature on it—and put it in a plastic bag, as Oscar had instructed. I would have to replace the sheet, but since I didn’t have office hours on Wednesdays, I could do that later.

I had to get the original down to Oscar’s guy in Venice. I decided that, instead of biking back to my apartment and then driving to Venice to see Oscar’s guy, I’d just bike there. I checked Google Maps. It said that by bike it was nine miles and would take me about an hour. The ride would clear my head, and after I dropped off the packages, I would have dinner by myself at some small café by the shore and then take myself and my bike back to Westwood on a bus. The Santa Monica buses all have bike racks on the front.

I realized that my plan involved staying away from my apartment for as long as I could, and it was because I was still afraid. Maybe it was worth staying at Aldous’s after all. But I didn’t want to stay there until he was out of town.

I put the three plastic bags—one with the original of the diary, one with the copy and one with the sign-up sheet—in a saddlebag on the side of the bike and carried the bike down the steps. I placed it in the street outside the law school, mounted and began to pedal away. Just as I was picking up speed, I noticed a man in a dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat that obscured his face walking along beside me. He had two dogs with him. Suddenly, the man gave the large dog a sharp kick on the side, and it ran into the street, directly in front of me. I swerved to avoid it and somehow managed, in the process, to hit the curb straight on. The bike stopped dead and I went flying over the handlebars. My shoulder hit the still-wet grass and skidded along until my head bonked the sidewalk with a distinctive sound. The world whorled and went dark.

I woke up just as they were unloading me from the ambulance at the UCLA ER. I tried, feebly, to get up but found I was tethered to the gurney with leather straps. I heard the EMT say, “Take it easy, Professor, you had a bit of a spill, and it looks like you hit your head, although, fortunately, not very hard. All your vital signs are stable, and your color has come back. But the docs here are going to take a look at you just to be sure you’re okay.”

“All right,” I said. “Where’s my bike?”

“When we came to pick you up, someone from the law school was standing there—a tall guy who said he was also a law professor—and he said he’d keep it safe until you got back. He gave me his card to give you. It says his name is Aldous Hartleb. I’ll bring the card in to you after they get you settled in an exam room. Initially, he wanted to get into the ambulance with you, but we didn’t feel comfortable with that.”

“No need for the card,” I said. “I know him well.”

Shortly thereafter, they wheeled me into an exam room, where most of my clothes were removed. I was immediately surrounded by several doctors and nurses, who hooked me up to some sort of beeping machine, pushed and pulled at me, moved my arms and legs around and clucked and chatted among themselves in incomprehensible gibberish. Then someone else came and wheeled me to another room on another floor, where they did a CAT scan of my head and upper body, then took me back to the exam room and got me into a blue hospital gown.

After a while I was alone in the little room. Just me and the machine to which I was tethered. I thought about trying to get up, but the rails on the narrow bed were up, and I couldn’t immediately figure out how to lower them. I fell asleep. When I woke up and cracked my eyes open, there was a doctor in the room looking at me. I realized with horror that it was Dr. Nightingale.

“Well,” he said, “the bad news is that you’re pretty banged up, particularly your shoulder and your face, and you’re going to be black-and-blue in various places for a while. The good news is that you don’t appear to have any bleeding under your skull or any other sign of a severe concussion, and you don’t have any broken bones or, so far as we can tell, torn ligaments. So you’re lucky.”

“When can I get out of here?”

“We’ll discharge you just as soon as you can arrange for someone to pick you up. Is there someone you can call?”

“Probably. Can I borrow your phone to make the call?”

“Sure.” He handed it to me.

I reached Aldous on his cell, and he told me he had rushed down to the hospital and was out in the waiting area because they wouldn’t let him in to see me.

I handed the phone back to Dr. Nightingale. He wasn’t bad looking, really. And he was, for the moment, my only conduit to what had killed Primo. Perhaps I needed to follow my thoughts of the morning to their natural conclusion and accept his dinner invitation.

“Dr. Nightingale, I’m grateful to you for taking care of me tonight, and I realize that I’ve been kind of rude to you in the last couple of days. If it’s still open, I’d like to accept your dinner invitation.”

He smiled. “Good, but I don’t think it’s ethical for me to finalize a dinner with you until you’re no longer a patient here. So call me if you still want to do it when you wake up tomorrow morning, okay?”

“Okay, I will.”

“I’ll go and sign your discharge papers. Be sure to arrange a follow-up with your personal physician tomorrow. If you begin to experience a bad headache or other symptoms, please return here immediately. And it’s probably best to avoid driving for the next day or two.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have any Tylenol at home?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re probably not very sore right now, but you’ll likely be really sore tomorrow, and maybe even more so the next day. Tylenol should do the trick, but if you need something stronger, call the hospital pharmacy. I’ll leave a script there for you.”

Shortly thereafter, I was discharged. I shed my blue, open-backed hospital gown, put my slightly abraded Lycra back on—the only clothing I had—and went out to the waiting area to find Aldous. The Lycra did look a little incongruous in that setting. Aldous was sitting in a chair, reading something on his iPad. He got up, picked something up off the floor, walked over and handed it to me. “I put your bike in my office before I came down here, but I brought this. I thought you might want it.” It was the saddlebag from my bike.

“Oh, thank God. I was worried that had been lost.”

“What’s in it?”

“Well, can you drive me to Venice?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll tell you what’s in it on the way there.”

He looked at me. “You know, I’d like to give you a hug, but it looks like that might hurt.”

“Yeah, probably best to avoid it for now.”

We left the ER and went out to get into Aldous’s red VW Bug, which he had left with the valet. I decided I needed to start trusting people more, and that Aldous was a good place to start. On a certain level, it was crazy, because he’d withheld the information about the Italian company from me. But on another level, after thinking about it, I concluded I would probably have done the same thing if faced with a tight confidentiality agreement.

Making him my lawyer for the day—so what I said to him would be privileged—I told him about the diary and pretty much everything else I had discovered. He made no comment, just kind of grunted.

Then I asked him the question that had been bugging me, but that had seemed so paranoid I’d hesitated to ask it.

“Aldous, did you see my accident?”

“Yes. I was looking out the window when it happened.”

“Did some guy intentionally push that dog into the road in front of me? A guy in a big black coat with his hat pulled down over his face?”

He laughed. “I saw the accident, and you misinterpreted what you saw. That guy walking along was old Professor Sikorsko. He’s a retired chemistry prof. He was out walking his little dog when the bigger dog—a stray, I guess—started bothering the little one. Sikorsko smacked the big dog on the side to make him go away, and it ran out into the road in front of you. He felt terrible about it.”

“But not terrible enough to come to the hospital and see how I was.”

“He’s like ninety years old.”

“Oh, okay. I just had to ask.”

“I understand.”

When we got to Venice, I went up to a large brown door at the designated address, lifted the brass knocker and let it fall against the metal kick plate. A small man with a handlebar mustache and a shaved head opened the door and looked at me.

“I’m Jenna James. I have some things for you. Oscar Quesana told me you’d be expecting me. He also told me to ask your name so I wouldn’t give these things to the wrong person.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Right. I’m John Smith.”

That was the right name.

“Just a minute,” he said, and closed the door. A couple of minutes later the door opened again and, still standing in the doorway, he gave me a clipboard with a sheet of white lined paper on it. He also handed me a pen. “Please list the name and description of what you’re leaving, one item to a line. Then date and initial each entry.”

I put the clipboard against the doorjamb, so I’d have something to steady it while I wrote, and filled the items in as requested. Then I handed it back to him.

“Thanks,” he said and closed the door in my face.

Aldous had parked around the corner. I walked there and got back in the car.

“How’d it go?”

“Let’s just say the guy wasn’t exactly charming.”

“Well, I don’t know exactly what forensic examiners do, but I’ve never imagined them as the life of the party.”

“Let’s go to dinner, Aldous. I’m starving. And maybe you can tell me what I need to know about staying at your house.” I had decided that while I wasn’t committed to staying there, it was good to have the option, just in case.

CHAPTER 31

Robert Tarza

Week 1—Wednesday

Paris, 10:00
P.M.

I
n my gathering old age I had taken to going to bed early, at least during the week. Tess usually stayed up reading or watching TV or old movies. She had a particular affinity for Monty Python movies, although I was never sure whether she really, truly got all of the jokes.

I had put down my copy of
Le Monde
, which I admit I could only read with a French-English dictionary close at hand, and was already drifting off when the phone rang. Tess would get it, I knew, and, in any case, hardly anyone ever called me at her place. My friends always called my cell.

I put the pillow over my head. After a few rings it stopped, and I fell back asleep. Then I heard Tess calling me from the other room. “Robert, wake up. It is your friend Oscar.”

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

A
fter 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.