Long Knives (9 page)

CHAPTER 19

I
arrived a few minutes early for the class, took my place at the podium and watched as the remaining ten students, seven men and three women, filtered in and took their seats. The classroom was small and banked, with only four rows of seats rising upward in curved ranks toward the windows in the back. To keep the seminar enrollment low, I had employed two old tricks that are well known to all law professors. First, I made the full admiralty law course, which I taught only in the spring semester, a prerequisite for the seminar. Second, I arranged for the class to be scheduled to meet on Tuesdays and Fridays at 9:00
A.M.
Most law students don’t like to get up that early, and they treasure three-day weekends with no classes.

Lodged in the podium in front of me were controls for a veritable cornucopia of digital equipment, including a DVD player, a VHS tape deck and an opaque projector on which I could lay a book or document, as well as a PC linked to the Internet. With a touch on a control screen protruding from the console, I could project sound and images from any of the devices onto a large screen behind me.

Usually when my students arrived for the seminar they found an image already being projected on the screen, often a picture or sketch of a famous ship that now lay broken on the bottom of the sea. But today the screen was dark, and I was sure the students sensed the reason. I had decided to start the class by talking about Primo.

The class settled down and grew quiet as I stood there. I took a deep breath and began.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you all know by now the sad news that one of your classmates, and a member of this seminar, Primo Giordano, passed away yesterday at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. We don’t know yet what happened, although I assume that in time we’ll learn what it was, because an autopsy is going to be performed. The dean has shared with me that there will, at the appropriate time, be a memorial service here at the law school, according to the wishes of Primo’s family.”

I looked out at the students and saw ten sets of eyes staring at me amid the kind of silence in which you could hear a pin drop. “I’d suggest that we bow our heads for a moment of silence in Primo’s memory, and then, if any of you would like to say anything, it would certainly be appropriate.”

I bowed my head and stared down at the assorted electronics on the podium, where a tiny red light was blinking. I used its blink to count to sixty, then looked up and out at the class.

“Would any of you like to say something?”

Julie, the brunette who had asked about Primo the day before, and who was sitting in the front row, raised her hand and said, without waiting for me to acknowledge her, “He was a great guy. I’m going to miss him.” I thought I detected a small tear in the corner of her eye. The two other women in the seminar, who sat in the front row on either side of Julie, nodded their heads in apparent agreement but said nothing.

Then Crawford Phillips, one of the guys in the back row—four of the seven men had chosen to sit together there—spoke up, saying, “He
was
a great guy. And a great pickup basketball player. We’ll all miss him, both here and on the court. I’m really sad.”

After that there was an awkward silence as no one volunteered anything further. Which didn’t surprise me; Primo had said very little in the seminar, just as he had said very little in the admiralty law class the spring before. I had had the impression then that he didn’t have any close friends in that class, although that hadn’t struck me as unusual at the time. With more than three hundred students in each class year, and almost a thousand in the school overall, there are often students in my classes who have never before had a class with most of the others.

I let a moment pass and then said, “Well, it’s a sad thing and we’re going to miss him. But I don’t know what else to say at this point. I should also mention that if you feel the need for counseling, contact the office of the associate dean for Student Affairs, and they’ll arrange for you to see someone.”

I waited a few seconds to see if anyone else wanted to speak, then reached down and touched a button on the console. The screen behind me lit up with a black-and-white picture of a mammoth Great Lakes iron ore freighter. “Today I want to discuss the wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald
—the ship, not the Gordon Lightfoot song.” There was a short burst of laughter, which is what I had hoped for. Teaching is, after all, a performance art, and I wanted my opening to take us away from Primo.

I looked toward the back row. “Crawford, that ship, which sank in Lake Superior during a huge storm in 1975, is in only 580 feet of water. Its exact location is well known, and it’s easily within reach of modern salvage robots. If we thought there was something valuable in the purser’s safe, could we go and get it?”

“No, we couldn’t,” Crawford said. “It’s in Canadian waters and the Canadian Underwater Cultural Heritage Act precludes it from being salvaged.”

Julie raised her hand. “Not exactly,” she said. “We could request a permit from the Canadian government to salvage it.”

“Good luck with that!” one of the other students said. The comment triggered another burst of laughter, and we were off and running in a class that explored, as I had intended, the increasing conflict between treasure hunters and the marine archaeologists who want to keep the world’s hundreds of thousands of shipwrecks as their personal scientific playgrounds. Or at least that’s how I think of it.

When the class ended over an hour later without further mention of Primo, I breathed a sigh of relief and went off to see if Aldous had returned to his office.

CHAPTER 20

T
he light was on under Aldous’s door. As I raised my hand to knock, a voice behind me said, “So I heard some poor student died in your office.”

I knew who it was without looking. I would have recognized the deep, raspy voice of Professor Greta Broontz anywhere. Greta is one of the other civil procedure professors, and she hates me.

I considered opening Aldous’s door without knocking and going inside without even acknowledging her, but it seemed the wrong thing to do. I sighed and turned around. And there she was: about my height but butt ugly, with stringy red hair cut in a pageboy, one brown eye and one blue, a squashed nose and deep acne scars. The students called her the Pineapple.

“Greta, he didn’t die in my office. He died at the UCLA Medical Center. Of as yet unknown causes.”

“Well, I heard he was poisoned by your coffee.”

“And where did you hear that absurd story?”

“A little bird told me.”

“What was the bird’s name?”

“I’m sorry, I was told in confidence, and unlike some people, I do keep my confidences.”

I knew she was referring to her suspicion that I was the one who, during my first year at the law school, had leaked to the UCLA student newspaper, the
Daily Bruin
, that she was moonlighting more or less full-time with a downtown law firm, pulling in at least two times her law-school salary. She had apparently assumed I was the paper’s source because I had just arrived from a downtown law firm, albeit a different one.

“Greta, I didn’t poison anyone.”

“I didn’t say you did, dear. I said he was poisoned
by
your coffee. Passive voice. Guilty conscience?” She grinned, exposing brilliant white teeth, which I had always assumed were dentures.

“Greta, please excuse me. I have an appointment with Aldous.” I turned around, performed a perfunctory knock, opened the door and walked in without waiting. I closed the door behind me and collapsed against it.

Aldous was sitting in his desk chair, looking at me. “Wow. I didn’t even get a chance to say ‘come in.’”

“Sorry. The Pineapple just appeared out of nowhere and accused me of poisoning Primo.”

“What?”

“Actually, she said he was poisoned by my coffee and then suggested she wasn’t accusing
me
of personally poisoning him. Somehow it was just my coffee.”

“That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It’s particularly not good that it’s Greta.”

“Why?”

“She’s a member of your confidential Ad Hoc Tenure Committee.”

I wasn’t surprised. She was a faculty member who taught civil procedure, as I did. And she was very senior. So it made sense. I had been hoping against hope that if there was going to be a professor who taught civil procedure on the committee, it would be someone else. Now my hopes had been dashed. “That woman is the curse of my life, Aldous. She has the office next door to me, lives in my condo building and now you’re telling me she’s on my tenure committee.”

“Do you get along better as neighbors than you do here?”

“No. She has the apartment beneath mine and is always playing her classical music at full volume in the middle of the night.”

“Do you complain to her about it?”

“No. I just pound on the floor with a big wooden pole until she turns it down. I guess I’ve avoided mentioning that to you.”

“For fear it would make me not want to stay overnight at your place?”

“You never have.”

“I know. It was a joke, Jenna.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I guess my joke receptors are off today.”

“Well, Greta does sound like a curse on you. Maybe you need to consult someone in Haiti about her.”

“Not a bad idea. But wait a minute: How did you learn she’s on my committee? That’s supposed to be confidential.”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“No, I do want to know.”

“I developed some special computer skills back when I was a quant on Wall Street.”

“You hacked into the UCLA computer?”

“Not exactly, and why don’t we just leave it be? I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Well, however you found out, it’s bad news because she hates my guts. But she’s clever enough to cover it up and find some supposedly legitimate problem with my scholarship. And if she’s a no, all I need is one more no, or one yes with reservations, and I’m sunk.”

“Yeah, but there’s also good news. The other two faculty on your committee are much more favorably disposed toward you.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Do you want to know who they are?”

I hesitated for a few seconds, then, finally, said, “No.”

He laughed. “Or at least you don’t want to know right now.”

“I need to sit down,” I said. I moved away from the door and sank into one of the two guest chairs.

Aldous came out from behind the desk and plopped himself into the other chair. “I think I’ll join you out here. It’s weird talking to you from behind my desk. Not emotionally connected enough.” He smiled.

“Very funny, Aldous. Ha ha. Somehow I’m not focused right now on who’s sitting where, and I don’t want to rehash our conversation of this morning.”

“You’re not having a good week,” he said.

“Not hardly. Did you read the lawsuit?”

“Yeah, I did. You’ll need a lawyer, obviously.”

“I know. I was thinking about that as I was driving in.”

“Got anyone in mind?”

“Yeah. Oscar Quesana.”

“Who’s he?”

“He was my co-counsel when I defended Robert against the murder charge. I learned a huge amount from Oscar. We had a rocky start, but we became good friends in the end. He’s an unusual guy—a vegan who lives in a house that looks like it was decorated by the Vermont Country Store and doesn’t believe in cell phones or fax machines, let alone e-mail—but a great lawyer.”

“Ah, yes, you’ve mentioned Oscar before. But isn’t he a criminal defense lawyer?”

“Yeah, he wasn’t even in our law firm. We didn’t do criminal defense. But I think he used to do civil cases, too, and he’s aggressive. He’ll figure out a way to get rid of this in short order.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sounds good. If he can’t do it, I’m sure you know lots of others who can. In the meantime, though, I’ve got a class to teach. Do you want to stay here until you’re sure Greta has gone away?”

“It doesn’t matter one way or the other.”

Aldous got up from the chair and reached for the doorknob, then paused. “You know, Jenna, you really can’t blame Greta for being hostile to you.”

“What? Why?”

“Because she thinks you leaked that she had that job downtown.”

“I didn’t
do
that.”

“I know. But everyone around here thinks you did.”

“That really pisses me off.”

“I’m just telling you what I hear.”

I had been having an internal struggle about whether to tell Aldous about the dying plant, and the conclusion I’d reached about who had been the target of the killer. On one level he didn’t seem like the best person to tell because our relationship was so fraught. But on another he did care about me. I decided to tell him, even if we had only minutes left before he had to leave.

“Aldous, before you go, there’s one more thing we need to talk about. And it’s something I haven’t wanted to bring up because it seems nuts.”

“What?”

“I believe there
was
poison in that coffee; not just in Primo’s cup but in the pot—I’ll explain later why I think so. So I think someone was trying to poison
me
, not Primo.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, and I’m scared. Terrified, really. So afraid that when the process server served me with the lawsuit this morning, I thought he was an assassin. Not only that, I’m thinking of moving to a hotel until they catch the person who did it, and I’ve pledged to myself not to eat a single bite of anything that I didn’t make myself.”

Aldous sat back down in the chair. “I can be late for my class. Tell me the details of why you think Primo was poisoned and why you think the poison was in the coffeepot.”

I told him. When I was done, he looked at me and said, “This is a lot more serious—for you—than I thought it was. When you came in here, I thought you were just being paranoid.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Crazy as it seems, someone may actually have tried to kill you. Although I think we need to find out for sure what was in that coffeepot. Going to the police right away is a good idea. But I have another idea.”

“Which is?”

“Why don’t you stay at my house while I’m gone?”

“It’s lonely up there. You don’t even have any close neighbors.”

“I can hire a security guard for you if you want.”

I thought about it for a moment. It was one of those on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand conversations I was always having with myself. Oddly, one of the on the other hands was that despite sometimes being attracted to Aldous because of his wealth, I didn’t want to be dependent on him and his money. Which somehow, in my warped internal monologue, seemed to balance out my life being in danger.

“I don’t think that’s necessary, Aldous, but I appreciate the offer.”

“Will you at least think about it?”

“I will, but I don’t think I’ll change my mind.”

“Okay, I do really have to go now.” He got up from the chair, opened the door and looked back at me. “There’s one more thing, Jenna.”

“What’s that, Aldous?”

“Emotionally unavailable as I am, I love you.”

He exited through the door and shut it gently behind him.