Long Knives (18 page)

CHAPTER 40

Robert Tarza

T
ess and I arrived in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. Initially, I hadn’t wanted to spend the money on a business-class ticket and had insisted on buying for myself a coach ticket, which was pricey enough, given that it was bought on the day of the flight. Tess had insisted on flying business class and also buying me an upgrade. I had put up token resistance and accepted.

On the way across the Atlantic, Tess pushed me to tell her the details of Jenna’s situation. Even though I couldn’t think of any real way for Tess to help out, I eventually gave up and told her. Then I tried to sleep the rest of the way, but without much success. At one point I opened my eyes and noticed that Tess was on her laptop looking at real estate in LA; the plane had Wi-Fi much of the way across. She was probably, I thought to myself, planning to buy an estate. Then I went back to sleep.

After we arrived at LAX and collected our baggage, a cab took us to the Hotel Bel-Air, where Tess had arranged for us to stay. The Bel-Air is a luxurious, Spanish-style hotel tucked into the hills above Sunset Boulevard, set amid twelve acres of gardens. The Bel-Air would find it hard to justify its existence in any other city. It features its own burbling brook, complete with ducks and swans, and the bar still requires men to wear jackets. The mission-style guest cottages are hidden away amid profusions of bougainvillea. Prices start at a thousand dollars per night and go up from there. With a staff that is the very essence of discretion, it’s always been the best place in LA for a late-night tryst.

Upon arrival at the hotel, we surrendered our luggage to the valet, walked across the bridge and went into the lobby. I started to identify myself, but the man behind the reception desk focused immediately on Tess. “Ah, Madame Devrais,” he said, rolling the
r
as if he were a native speaker. “We have been expecting you. You are preregistered. Did you have a pleasant trip from France?”

“
Oui
. Very pleasant, thank you.”

“You and monsieur are in the Grace Kelly Suite. May I give you a small map to guide you? Or would you like someone to show you the way?”

“I know where it is,” I said. I thought I detected an ever so slight elevation of his eyebrows at the news that I, so clearly below the salt, was familiar with the location of one of their priciest suites, but it may have been my imagination. We exited the lobby and followed the winding trail, through ferns and sycamore, to the cottage. The door was open. The living room featured a bone-white couch and two white chairs around a small round table. A fire crackled in the fireplace. The bedroom was to the right, behind a sliding wooden door.

“Nice place, Tess,” I said. “And so very Hollywood. Planning on making movies while we’re here?”

We both laughed. Tess threw her arms around me. Suddenly we were in a full embrace. As always, she was hard in all the right places, soft in all the other right places. She put her hands on my shoulders, pushed me back, studied my face for a few seconds—with what I call the Tess squint—and wrinkled her nose. “Welcome back to America, Monsieur Tarza.”

“Thank you. It’s good to be back.”

“And now we must get to work to help your friend Jenna.”

“We can do that tomorrow. It’s 2:00
A.M.
in France right now and I want to go to sleep.”

Which is what I did, although I tossed and turned all through Thursday night, as I often do on the first night after long-distance travel. I woke up at 4:00
A.M.
Friday morning—1:00
P.M.
in the afternoon in France—tried to get back to sleep, had trouble with it, got up, ordered snacks from room service, read for a few hours and finally fell back to sleep on the couch in midafternoon. At one point Oscar called and woke me up. He wanted to talk details, but I told him I was too brain fogged to do it. He suggested instead that we meet at his office at 6:00
P.M.
He said Jenna would also be there.

I struggled awake at 4:30, shaved and change my clothes. Tess was nowhere to be seen and hadn’t left a note. I grabbed a cab and arrived at Oscar’s office at 6:00, as we had agreed. Oscar was already there. Jenna wasn’t. I was still feeling severely jet-lagged.

It was the first time I’d been to Oscar’s office in almost six years. Back in the day, when Jenna, Oscar and I were strategizing my own defense against murder charges, I’d almost lived there. The office hadn’t changed at all—still in an old apartment building in the Venice section of LA and still nothing more than a converted one-bedroom apartment with the living room serving as a cluttered work space. Its chief feature was a large, wooden conference table placed in the middle of what had once been the living room, with four swivel chairs, each pushed up to one of the sides of the table.

“Welcome back, Robert,” Oscar said. “Grab a seat.”

“Okay,” I said and sat myself down in the chair that had its back to the window and faced the door. “When’s Jenna coming?”

“In a few minutes. I gave her a slightly later start time for the meeting so you and I would have a chance to talk a little.”

“So talk. Even with a night’s sleep, I’m still pretty jet-lagged. It’s three in the morning Paris time right now. It will be easier if you do the talking.”

“Bottom line, I think our girl is in big trouble.”

“Why big? I thought we were dealing with a frivolous civil case that’s been brought against her for a theft of documents she didn’t take—some kind of crazy mix-up—but that it’s going to ruin her chances for tenure unless it’s nipped in the bud in the next few days. You said it should be easy for me to take care of.”

“Well, that’s only part of it, as it turns out.”

“What’s the other part?”

“A law student died shortly after being carted unconscious out of her office.”

“She already mentioned that to me and said the police were investigating it. But why should that make trouble for her?”

“There’s a crazy rumor going around UCLA that she killed him. That she poisoned his coffee and served it up to him shortly before he died.”

“What could her motive be for that? Were they lovers?”

“No, the supposed motive—wait for this—was to get her hands on a secret map he had showing the location of sunken treasure.”

I put my fingers to the bridge of my nose, rubbed my eyes and shook my head slowly back and forth, in the manner of someone trying to wake up from a deep sleep. “Say what?”

“Yeah, it’s passing odd, and I’d normally be inclined to dismiss it. But my sources on the UCLA police force tell me it’s being taken seriously, and my sources in the coroner’s office tell me that a preliminary tox report says the student died of a deadly chemical that’s soluble in coffee, and that a coffee stain with that very chemical in it was found on his shirt.”

“Oscar, when you persuaded me to come back here, you kinda lied to me.”

“No, I just didn’t give you all the details.”

“How is the civil case for theft related to all this?”

“The clear implication is that she killed him in order to steal the map.”

“I read the lawsuit. Jenna faxed it to me. It doesn’t say that. It’s just about recovering the map and seeks damages for stealing it. The poison coffee aspect is clearly a criminal matter, Oscar. I’m a civil litigator. I’d be happy to go into court and ask that the civil theft case be stayed while the criminal matter gets resolved. That’s what people usually do in these mixed cases. The motion is almost always granted.”

“True, but in this case we can use the parallel civil case to do the kind of discovery we could never do in a criminal case, where there really is no discovery. So it’s in our best interest to keep the civil case alive and use it to our advantage, particularly in discovery.”

“What kind of discovery?”

“To start, we can take the deposition of the lead plaintiff, this Quinto guy.”

There was a knock on the door and Oscar got up to answer it. When he opened the door, Jenna was standing in the doorway.

“My God, Jenna,” Oscar said, “what happened to your face?”

“Bike accident. Doesn’t hurt much, though. Nothing to worry about.”

“Maybe,” he said, “I shouldn’t give you a hug.”

“No. I’m off hugs for a while. Maybe in a week?”

“Well, how about a fist bump, then?”

“You do fist bumps now, Oscar?”

“Something Pandy taught me.”

Oscar held out his fist and they bumped, and then bumped again and laughed.

I had gotten up from my chair and was just standing there, several yards away, unacknowledged. I felt the same kind of awkwardness you feel when a friend you’re with runs into someone he knows whom you don’t, and your friend doesn’t bother to introduce you. Maybe I deserved it. Suddenly I felt a wash of guilt that I had been so cold toward Jenna when she decided to leave Marbury Marfan. I owed her an apology for that.

Finally, Jenna walked over to me. “Hi, Robert. Thanks so much for coming.”

“Of course I came. And I need to apologize to you for the way I treated you when you left.”

“There’s no apology needed. Or if there is, your coming back from Paris for this is more than apology enough. Let’s just let bygones be bygones.”

“All right, let’s. Do I get a bump, too?”

“You bet.”

We bumped, but only once.

Oscar had been standing to the side, watching all of this. “Hey, guys,” he said, “back in the old days, when we used to meet here, we didn’t whistle while we worked, but we did drink. Who’s up for a martini?”

“Count me in,” Jenna said.

“Oscar, between that and the jet lag, if I have a martini I’ll be on the floor.”

“I’ll make you one anyway and you can just sip at it.”

“Okay, I guess. But don’t fill it all the way up, please.”

Oscar went into the kitchen and came back with a large pitcher of clear liquid in one hand, three martini glasses gripped precariously in the other. “Martinis,” he said, putting both pitcher and glasses down in the middle of the table.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I’m still drinking Manhattans.” He went back into the kitchen and returned after a few minutes with a tall glass filled with an amber liquid.

“So,” Oscar said, “I think we should take the deposition of this Quinto guy. Under the rules we have an exclusive right in the first ten days after the suit is served to notice depositions.”

“Sure,” Jenna said, “we do. But we have to give them ten days’ notice, so it’s not going to happen right away. And as I was just telling my civil procedure class, we only get one shot at the guy, even in a state court. We really ought to wait until we’ve done other discovery and investigation and know what we want to find out from Quinto. Otherwise we’re going to waste our shot.”

Oscar got up and began pacing around the room, his hands behind his back. “I don’t agree. Let’s notice his depo for Tuesday. If they show up, we can learn a lot even without all the prep. The worst that happens is that they don’t show up. But I bet they will, because they’re anxious to get the map back and they think you have it, Jenna. They’ll expect you to come to the depo, too, and to get to discuss that with us informally. By the way, do you have it?”

“No, I don’t have the effing map, and I don’t effing know where it effing is.”

“You used to use the f word full on, Jenna. What happened?”

“I’m losing my edge, I guess.”

I finally spoke up. “Since I’m the one you guys think ought to take the depo, I should get to make the decision. I think we should go for it, crazy as it is. Although I’m betting they’ll just send us an objection and not show up.”

“What,” Oscar asked, “are the stakes for that bet?”

“How about dinner at the world’s highest restaurant, including the airfare to get there?”

“It’s a bet,” Oscar responded. “Where is it?”

“According to Tess, it’s At.mosphere, which is on the one hundred twenty-second floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. And by the way, they spell it with a period after the
t
.”

“I’m not in on this bet,” Jenna said. “It’s above my pay grade, no pun intended.”

“The loser of the bet,” Oscar said, “gets to pay for you, too.”

CHAPTER 41

I
let Jenna and Oscar imbibe while I sat and sipped sparingly at my own martini, drinking enough to be polite but not enough, I hoped, to do any serious mental damage to my jet-lagged brain. For a while we just sat there, drinking and chatting about old times. Finally, I said, “Well, you guys want me to take a deposition of someone we know almost nothing about in a case about which I know almost nothing. Assuming this Quinto even shows up, of course. So I think we should spend time on preparation now.”

“I think,” Oscar said, “Jenna and I can get you up to speed pretty quickly. We do have at least some information.” He reached into a folder that had been sitting on the table and handed me a thick set of pages that were stapled at the top. “This is a copy of Primo’s supposed diary. The last entry is dated the day before he died and mentions the map. It also mentions Jenna and his brother Quinto, among other things of interest.”

I took it from him and paged through it. “It’s handwritten,” I said. “How do we know it’s actually Primo’s handwriting?”

“Jenna gave me a copy of Primo’s known handwriting. I gave that and a copy of the diary itself to a questioned-documents examiner. He reports that if the handwriting on the sample is truly Primo’s handwriting, then so is the handwriting in the diary.”

“Okay, Oscar,” I said, “that’s good enough for now, and I suppose Quinto, since he’s Primo’s brother, will be able to further validate the handwriting.”

“Assuming,” Jenna said, “that you choose to show the diary to him.”

“Right. Assuming that. There might be a good argument not to right now. What else have you guys got for me?”

Oscar responded. “Not much, really. I’m having a PI run an investigation on both Primo and Quinto, but so far it hasn’t turned up very much of interest except for the fact that Quinto, unlike Primo, was born in the United States—in Pittsburgh—and is a junior at UCLA. We don’t know what he’s majoring in.”

“Primo’s former girlfriend told me he’s majoring in biochemistry,” Jenna said.

“Does either one of them,” I asked, “have a social media account of some kind?”

Jenna laughed. “Robert, do you even know the names of any social media sites?”

“Actually, Jenna, I do. I admit I didn’t used to. I even have a Twitter account.”

Oscar looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “You do? Hey, I do, too. What’s your handle?”

“You go first.”

“I don’t remember. Pandy set it up, but I’ve never twittered anything.”

“The proper way to say it,” Jenna said, “is tweeted. You guys are too much. Let’s go back to the depo prep, although this is a lame kind of prep. And by the way, I looked and, surprising as it seems, neither brother has either a Facebook or a Twitter account. If they used to have them, they’ve been taken down in a way that left no trace.”

“So much for that,” I said. “In terms of paperwork to use as a basis for questioning, then, we have only two things. The first is the lawsuit itself. We can ask Quinto questions about the allegations in it, but it’s a suit that’s scarce on details, so we won’t be able to drill too deep with that. Second, we have the diary. Anything else?”

“No more paperwork,” Jenna said, “but we can ask him what he knows about the map and where it came from—Quinto must know a lot about that. And maybe we can make use of the chronology of what actually happened after I arrived in my office. Like what Primo told Quinto his plans were for the meeting in my office. In fact, I’ve prepared a detailed chronology. Here it is.”

She handed me several sheets of paper with a series of columns, headed
Date
,
Time
,
Event
and
Notes
. At the top, the paper said “Prepared in Preparation for Litigation. Privileged.” That designation would make it harder for the other side to discover. Then she handed a second copy to Oscar. Oscar and I sat studying it. The chronology started several days before her meeting with Quinto and continued through the present. It was pretty thorough.

“This is helpful,” Oscar said, “although Quinto isn’t likely to be able to add much to this since he wasn’t there. And let’s not forget that what we really want to focus on is information that will tell us who killed Primo. Maybe learning what happened to the missing map will tell us that, but it’s otherwise irrelevant.”

“Well,” I said, “you guys are talking about stuff that goes right over my head. I’m seeing the chronology for the first time, Oscar, since you intentionally withheld most of it from me in your attempt to lure me here.”

“It worked,” Oscar said, exuding a Cheshire cat smile.

“Yes, it did. But now I need to know even more. Jenna, this chron is good. But I’d like to hear it from you in even more detail. Why don’t you tell me what happened, with as much precision as you can recall, in exact chron order, starting with the first time you ever set eyes on Primo or even heard about him.”

“Okay, good idea,” she said.

Some fifteen minutes later, when Jenna had finished telling me her story—in much more detail than she had been able to write down—I said, “Well, that fills me in, and who knows, maybe Quinto will turn out to know some useful things, like exactly where Primo was before he came to see you.”

“I think,” Oscar added, “there are two basic questions to be answered, and the answers to those questions will tell the tale, although whether Quinto knows them I don’t know.”

“Which questions?” Jenna asked.

“The first is how the door of your office came to be open when Primo got there early in the morning.”

“And the second?” I asked.

“The second question, assuming for the moment that Primo was poisoned by sodium azide, is how it got into his coffee. And I suppose two subquestions are how that chemical works—quickly, slowly?—and where it came from. Stolen from a UCLA laboratory? Bought on the Internet? Obtained in some other way?”

“Knowing you, Oscar,” I said, “I assume you’ve already given some thought to those questions.”

“I have, Robert, I have.”

“And?”

“Well, at first glance it would seem that the question of where the poison came from would be most fertile to investigate. But I think not. The better key to this is, somehow, who unlocked the door, how and when.”

“It’s possible,” Jenna said, “that I just left it open the night before, when I left.”

“I think,” Oscar responded, “that that’s unlikely, Jenna. You are OCD in the extreme, so you’re unlikely to have skipped something so routine. Plus you remember locking the office when you left. I’m going to assume that, between the time you left your office the evening before and when you got there the next morning and found Primo sitting in a chair in front of your desk, someone unlocked the door.”

“Okay,” I said. “Why will that unravel the mystery?”

“Because, assuming Primo didn’t commit suicide, it’s extremely likely that whoever unlocked the door also poisoned the coffee.”

“Have you figured out who it was, Sherlock?” Jenna asked.

“No, of course not. But I’ve made a speculative list of how it might have happened.” Oscar pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, placed it on the table and smoothed it out in front of him. “To start, there are two main possibilities: someone opened it with a key or someone picked the lock.”

“That sounds right,” Jenna said.

“Okay,” Oscar replied, “the candidates for having a key are law school personnel from maintenance, the cleaning crew, UCLA security and, I assume, the dean’s office. Would the dean have a master key, Jenna?”

“I assume so, but I don’t think I can just, at this point, go ask him.”

“No, probably not. But beyond those people, who would be in a position to get a spare key made?”

She sat and thought for a moment before answering. “Well, I keep a spare office key in my apartment, in a drawer, and I suppose someone could copy that. But the only person who’s in my apartment regularly is my cousin Tommy, who’s a kind of temporary roommate. Other than that, someone would have to steal it from my purse and make a copy, but my purse is rarely out of my sight.”

“Or,” I said, “there’s the other possibility: that someone copied the master key from maintenance, the cleaning crew, UCLA security or the dean’s office.”

“You know,” Jenna said, “the most likely explanation is the second one on Oscar’s list—that someone picked the lock.”

Oscar looked thoughtful. “What makes you think that?”

“Because even I could pick that lock.”