Long Knives (20 page)

CHAPTER 45

I
looked through my closet to see if anything else seemed appropriate for my date with Dr. N. Nothing looked quite right. Shopping isn’t exactly my favorite thing, but it looked as if I needed to go out and buy something new to wear. Not to mention that I would have to buy, once again, a new coffeepot.

The question was, should I clean up the apartment first or do it later? I decided on later and called down to the valet to ask them to bring up my car. The answer, which was usually, “We’ll have it for you in five,” was, instead, “Uh, I’m sorry, Professor, but the police took your car.”

“What?”

“Yes, a few hours ago they served the valet service with a search warrant. They drove a tow truck down into the garage and took your car away. They left a receipt, though.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“They told us we weren’t permitted to. Something about people sometimes getting upset and violent if they learned their cars were being taken.”

Officer Krentz had left his card stapled to the search receipt. It listed his cell phone number, and I called it.

“Krentz here.”

“Officer Krentz, this is Jenna James. Don’t you think you might have told me you were going to tow my car?”

“I could have, I guess, but I thought you’d just get even more upset.”

“I didn’t think I was upset.”

“Yeah, you hid it fairly well, but I could tell. Your hands were clenched into fists every time you talked to me.”

“Well, I guess that’s neither here nor there now. When do I get it back?”

“That’s up to the court that issued the warrant.”

“F you,” I said and broke the connection.

So that meant I had to shop for a rental car first. I called the valet service back and asked them to call me a cab. When the cab came, I asked the driver to take me to the rental car agency in Beverly Hills that specialized in high-end cars. I looked at various choices, rejected the less ostentatious ones and selected a red Ferrari. I’m not sure why I did it, exactly. Maybe it was because renting something out of my league and—let’s face it, show-offy—seemed a good, if temporary, antidote to having had all of my possessions pawed through by the cops.

The rental guy seemed as surprised at my choice as I was. “Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s pretty pricey and your insurance is unlikely to cover it. We’ll have to add an insurance supplement.”

“I’m sure, and that’s fine.”

After he ran a credit check on me, checked my insurance and had me fill out the paperwork, the rental guy tossed me the keys and said, “Live it up.”

First I drove the couple of blocks to Neiman Marcus, which is one of the few upscale stores in Beverly Hills with valet parking. I went into the store and explained to a salesclerk, a woman of a certain age, that I had an important date and needed something that would show off my figure without being too blatant about it.

“All right,” she said, “do you want black or do you prefer color?”

“For sure not black. How about white? Or maybe off-white? Something casual but sophisticated.”

“I think I have just the piece for you.”

She disappeared around the corner for a few minutes and came back with a white dress still on its hanger. “This is,” she said, holding it up, “designed by Roland Mouret. His dresses are architectural and have a good bit of stretch. It’s really elegant.”

“Wow. It’s also really tight.”

“You’ll look great in it. Try it on.” She pointed to the fitting rooms.

I took it from her, went into a fitting room, dumped my jeans and T-shirt on the floor, slipped on the dress and zipped it up. It hugged my body in all the right places. I hadn’t put on a dress that tight since law school. The top of the dress, at least, was modest. It rose all the way to my neck and featured little cap sleeves.

I walked back out and stood, rather awkwardly, in front of the saleswoman. “What do you think?”

“I think it looks fabulous. You don’t even notice…”

“The bruises on my face?”

“Right.”

“I’m thirty-four. I don’t know if thirty-four-year-olds normally wear dresses like this.”

“In this zip code they do.”

“Why not? I need to live it up. Now I need some shoes to go with it.”

“I have some nude sandals I think will be perfect.”

“Might be a bit cold.”

“This is Los Angeles, dear. No one ever admits that it’s cold.”

CHAPTER 46

T
he balance of Saturday was uneventful. Nobody served me with a lawsuit. Nobody searched my condo or towed my car. No further meetings were called by Oscar or Robert. I didn’t hear from my father. The dean didn’t call to press me about deferring my tenure decision. Nobody else died. And the no doubt temporary lull in my fear factor had continued. I did, however, get out my list of suspects to look at. Except for Aldous, they still seemed like good ones to me.

I also spent some time asking myself why, on top of the extravagant car rental, I’d just bought a dress that cost almost two thousand dollars. With the condo mortgage and fees already stressing me financially, it made no sense. Yet somehow it felt like taking control of a life that had suddenly and inexplicably spun out of control. I knew a lot of people would say that spending all that money on a dress represented just the opposite: lack of control. Somehow my theory made more sense to me.

Dr. N—that’s how I’d come to think of him in my own mind—called midday to confirm our date on Sunday. I asked him if he’d mind going out Saturday night instead because on Sunday I wanted to get some work done finalizing my law review article. I also wanted to show off my new dress before I lost my nerve.

To my surprise, he agreed to change the date and offered to pick me up at 7:00
P.M.
I told him I’d pick him up instead, and he could just tell me when I got to his place where we were heading for dinner, since he’d obviously need to make a new reservation. He said he would e-mail me his address. Maybe that was just a sneaky way for him to acquire my e-mail address, although maybe not, since he could just as easily have found it through the UCLA Law School website.

I felt a little guilty about stepping out on Aldous. Who was in Buffalo. Of his own free will. There was no way I was moving to Buffalo.

As the time neared for me to leave to pick up Dr. N, I put on my new dress and the sandals and examined myself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom. The dress looked spectacular, emphasizing every curve and plane of my body, although I didn’t know how I was going to feel appearing in public in something so “architectural,” as the saleswoman at Neiman had put it. Of course, my Lycra bike outfit was also formfitting, but somehow its arguable function—reduced wind resistance—made it seem less disclosive, to coin a word. The dress had no excuse.

I looked through my jewelry box, took out a thin gold chain and looped it around my neck. The chain had an intricate set of interlocking links. If you looked closely, you could see that every other link was a tiny lion, and next to each lion was a link depicting a gazelle on its side. If you got really close, you could see that the lion link was feasting on the gazelle link. Robert had given it to me after his trial, with a note that said, “To the hunter go the spoils.” I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, because I didn’t feel as if I’d hunted anything other than a dumb prosecution or that there were any spoils other than two minutes of fame. But I did love the necklace, and I did love the look on the faces of those who got close enough to decipher the design.

A final decision I had to make was whether to wear a coat. The weather was unseasonably warm—a Santa Ana wind was blowing in off the desert—and I wasn’t planning to do anything other than get in the car and move from the car to the restaurant, where there would inevitably be valet parking. I decided to leave the coat at home.

At 6:30 I called down to have the Ferrari brought up. When I got there, it was waiting in the driveway, with several men gathered around it. As I strolled out of the door, I heard one of the men say to Hector, the valet, “Whose car is this?” I walked up to the car and said, “It’s mine.” All of the heads snapped around to look at me. I ignored them, got in the car, put it in gear and drove off. In the rearview mirror I could see all of them gaping at me. Or maybe it was the car.

Dr. N lived in Hancock Park, a leafy neighborhood halfway between UCLA and downtown filled with large, stately houses, all with manicured lawns running down to flawless sidewalks on which children ride their overpriced bikes, watched over by the best nannies in town. In truth, it has always reminded me of the tonier parts of Cleveland. I’m sure the residents of Hancock Park would be horrified at the comparison.

The area was developed in the 1920s by people connected with big oil, then fell into disfavor in the 1970s as people fled the smog by moving west toward the ocean. In the last few decades, as the smog was abated and in-city living once again became popular, the area again became the lair of prosperous lawyers, doctors and corporate chiefs.

Dr. N’s house was a two-story fake Tudor. Looking at it from the front, my guess was that it was about five thousand square feet, most likely with a pool and pool house out back. I pulled up in front and honked. There was no way I was stepping out of the car. After a moment the door opened and Dr. N emerged, wearing khakis, an open shirt and a blue blazer. At least in sartorial style, he looked a lot like Aldous.

“Wow,” he said as he got into the car. “Is this what law profs drive these days?”

“This law prof does,” I said.

“You’re from a rich family or what?”

“Actually, Doctor, it’s a rental.”

“You’re going to continue to call me
Doctor
? I thought I told you my name is Bill.”

Calling him Bill was another step toward intimacy. But then again, I
was
going out on a dinner date with him, however much I might have excused it in my own mind as research on who poisoned Primo.

“Well then, Bill, where are we going?”

“We’re going to Craft in Century City.”

“I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard it’s elegant, has great food and is pricey.”

“All of those things but worth it. You know where it is?”

I put the car in gear. “Yes, I know where it is. Jeez. On Constellation, right off Avenue of the Stars.”

“You know, Jenna, Avenue of the Stars is a very famous street.”

“Because it has a dumb name?”

“No. It’s because the pedestrian bridge that crosses the street is where they filmed one of the major scenes in
Planet of the Apes
.”

“Wait. How old are you, Bill?”

“Forty-three.”

“You couldn’t have seen that movie when it was originally released.”

“Right, it came out in 1968, before I was born.”

“So you’re some kind of sci-fi movie geek?”

“Kind of. What about you?”

“I don’t do science fiction.”

“What do you do?”

I realized that was a rather open-ended question, but I wasn’t sure whether it was intended that way, or just a clunky way of asking what kind of movies I liked. I decided to interpret it the second way.

“I just like good movies. No particular genre, really, but I shy away from westerns, political movies and fart-joke movies. And science fiction.”

“You equate the last two things?”

“I never thought about it that way, but yeah, they’re about on the same level for me.”

We spent the rest of the drive to the restaurant doing what people in LA who don’t know each other well often do—talking about movies. It’s the local equivalent of sports.

CHAPTER 47

C
raft is in an elegant, modernist building that features walls of glass. When I pulled up to the valet stand, I was pleased to see that my car got admiring attention. My old Land Cruiser doesn’t get much respect from the valetosphere. As I got out of the car, I saw one of the valets glancing at the windshield sticker that reveals that the car is a rental. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought he wrinkled his nose when he detected it.

Craft itself is a visually stunning place. Built with rich woods that set off the acres of glass, including thin wood beams that arch overhead, it manages to be both modern and warm at the same time. We were seated promptly at a good table, not too far from the door. When I looked around, I saw that the place was nearly full.

“You know, Bill, I’ve heard this place is one of those restaurants where it’s really hard to get a reservation on short notice. And it’s Saturday night. How did you do it?”

“It’s my universally recognized charm.”

“Sure. What’s the real answer?”

“One of the senior people here believes I saved his life when he was brought into the ER a couple of years ago.”

“Did you?”

“Well, I suppose it depends on how you look at it. I guess he might have died if he hadn’t gone to an ER promptly, but pretty much any competent doc in any ER could have saved him.”

“But you haven’t told him that.”

“No, I have, actually. But he insists I saved his life. It’s a better story than my version, and he enjoys telling it. He’s a writer on the side, and he says his version of the story is more literary.” He smiled, and I noticed that he had teeth that were perfectly white.

“Do you get many perks like that as a doctor?”

“Not as an ER doc. Maybe if I were a high-end heart surgeon or something. What about as a law prof?”

“I’ve only been law proffing for a little over four years, so none of my former students are old enough yet to have landed important positions.”

The waiter appeared with the menus and asked if we would like something to drink. I ordered a Jack Daniel’s, neat. Dr. N ordered a scotch on the rocks. The drinks arrived quickly. I put my menu aside and looked across the table at him.

“I’m curious, Bill. Why are we here, exactly? Is this a date, or follow-up with a patient, or what?”

He pursed his lips, took a sip of his scotch and said, “I think, in truth, it’s some combination of thinking, when I first saw you, that you’re pretty, and assuming that if you’re a law professor, you’re smart—I like smart women—and noticing that you’re not exactly young, so you’ve been around the block and…”

“Around the block? You mean I’m old? Do you think someone old could wear this dress?”

“No, no, I’m not using
around the block
to mean old. I just mean that you’ve lived a bit. Last year I dated a twenty-five-year-old, and she didn’t really seem to know much about the world yet. And, uh, you look great in that dress. More than great. Stunning, really.” He took a larger swig of his scotch.

“So this is a date.”

“I’d call it a getting to know you, which is maybe somehow less than a date.”

“I see.”

“But let me ask you, Jenna, why did you agree to come?”

“Curiosity. I don’t know many doctors, so I thought maybe hanging out might introduce me to a new world. I like new worlds. It’s one of the things I used to like when I was a litigator in a big law firm. I got to explore new worlds with every new case.”

“What about Mr. Boyfriend? Is that an exclusive kind of thing?”

“It has been, but without formalizing it. Right now he’s in Buffalo, looking for a new job, and that’s a place I’m not going.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“He’s a law professor at UCLA, but he suspects he won’t get tenure, so he’s looking elsewhere.”

“Are you likely to go with him to elsewhere, as long as it’s not Buffalo?”

“No.” I paused. “Well, maybe if it were Chicago or New York, but probably not those either.”

“I suppose I should feel good about that, but I’m such a nice guy that I don’t. I mean, it would give me a better shot, but I know how hard it is to build relationships that last.”

I didn’t want to start down that path, so I said, “Let’s order. I can’t afford to make this a late night.”

“Been burning the midnight oil?”

“More burning the midnight stress. Ever since my student died. I shouldn’t be saying this, but some people seem to think I did it.”

“Did you?”

“No. Like I told you on the phone, someone is clearly after me. And part of my stress is caused by constantly looking over my shoulder. There are lots of ways to kill people other than by putting poison in their coffee.”

“True.”

“I’ve become almost paranoid. Every little noise makes me jump. Every stranger on the street who gives me a glance makes me nervous. I’ve even started locking my office door from the inside when I’m in there by myself. For whatever reason, though, I’ve been more relaxed about it today. I’m sure that will change, though. The basic circumstances aren’t any different than they were yesterday.”

Just then the waiter arrived to take our orders. I chose squid ink tagliatelle with Manila clams. That made twice in the last two days that Manila had entered my life, once as galleons and once as food. I also ordered an asparagus side dish. Dr. N ordered Alaskan halibut with olive relish and a mushroom side dish called Hen of the Woods.

After the waiter had departed, I looked at him and said, “I wonder why those mushrooms are called Hen of the Woods.”

“It’s because they grow in big bunches at the foot of deciduous trees, and some people think they look like a hen fluffing up her feathers. You’ve never seen them?”

“No. But it’s a nice name.”

“Its scientific name is kind of nice, too.
Grifola frondosa
.”

“Where do they grow?”

“Mostly in the northeastern US.”

“Big range,” I said.

“Yeah, it is. Did you grow up anywhere in that area?”

“In Cleveland.”

“There are probably lots of those hens in various woods around there, although it could be a little too far west.”

“My family didn’t do much walking in the woods.”

“Why not?”

We were about to go down the personal path again, and I decided to divert it. “It’s a long story. Let’s just say my parents were too busy.”

“That’s sad. If we’re ever in the East together, we can take a woodland hike and I can show you some.”

The thought that went through my mind at that moment was that it would probably be very pleasant to go for a walk in the woods with Dr. N. It sounded as if he could appreciate the simple pleasures. Aldous’s pleasures seemed to require boy toys like sailboats and expensive things like five-star hotels and twenty-year-old wine. On the other hand, Dr. N and I were sitting at Craft, which wasn’t exactly a down-market burger chain, and I had arrived in a Ferrari wearing a two-thousand-dollar dress.

“Hey, Jenna,” Dr. N asked, “are you still with me?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I was just thinking about how nice it would be to stroll in the woods—any woods—and get away from the stresses of my life.”

“Well, the walk-in-the-woods offer is open any time. Any place, any woods.”

“Okay.”

After that we chatted on easily for a while, avoiding the personal. Then dinner came. The food was exquisite, and we mostly talked about the food and exchanged bites of the various dishes. We skipped dessert but ordered coffee, and when it came Dr. N said, “You know, I wasn’t sure whether I should bring this up, given how stressed out you’ve been, but I did some research on sodium azide. I think what I found out will be helpful to you.”

“Helpful how?”

“Helpful by showing that it’s unlikely someone brewed the poison in your coffeepot. More likely it was put in your student’s cup before the coffee was poured into it.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, first sodium azide, at least in powder form, is unstable. Too much vibration and it can explode.”

“Why would that be helpful to me?”

“Would you want to put something unstable in a coffee grinder with the beans and subject it to grinding, whirling blades in a small space?”

“I see your point. What else did you learn?”

“It’s unstable around certain metals. They can turn it into a toxic gas. So, again, you wouldn’t want to put it into a metal coffee grinder with metal blades.”

I sipped my coffee. “Anything else?”

“Too much heat can make it explode.”

“How much is too much?”

“Over two hundred seventy-five degrees.”

“Coffee doesn’t get that hot.”

“No, it doesn’t. But no one in his right mind would brew sodium azide in a drip coffeepot. I looked it up, and the water in the holding tank of a good coffeemaker can get up over two hundred degrees.”

“So what’s your expert scientific opinion, Dr. Nightingale?”

“To a reasonable degree of medical certainty”—he was, with a wry smile, using the magic words expert medical witnesses are required to say to make their testimony admissible—“if it was added anywhere, it was added to his cup in liquid form either before the coffee was poured in or right after. Less heat, no vibration, no metal.”

I cocked my head. “Hmm. That makes sense, I suppose. But let me ask you this: could it have been put in the coffeepot directly after it was brewed?”

“I suppose so. That wouldn’t expose it to vibration or heat that was quite as high.”

“Do you remember,” I asked, “my telling you about the plant leaves getting burn holes in them?”

“I had forgotten that.”

“Well, the coffee that burned the leaves came from the pot, so that tells me it was added both to the pot and to Primo’s cup, maybe at the same time.”

He looked thoughtful. “Could be.”

“Does it come in a liquid form?” I asked.

“Yes. You can buy a five percent solution without a permit, and that’s plenty potent enough to kill someone, especially if they turn out to be unusually sensitive to it.”

“Well, Bill, that’s all quite helpful. I’ll turn the info over to my lawyers. I have two of them now, if you can believe that. I appreciate your looking into the whole thing. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Now I think it’s time for me to take you home. This has been a lovely dinner and, well, I’d like to do it again, if you would.”

“I would.”

We ordered the check and then struggled over it. He insisted on paying; I suggested we split it. In the end he paid it, and I left the tip. How romantic.