Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  The financial drain was one of the things that had prompted me to say yes when my cousin Tommy had called from Hawaii the previous spring, reported that he’d been accepted into the graduate molecular chemistry program at UCLA and asked if I’d let him rent my spare bedroom for the fall semester. He said he’d only need it while he got the lay of the land in Los Angeles and found a place of his own. He’d offered to pay me a thousand dollars a month.

  Tommy is the only child of my Uncle Freddie, who is one of my favorite people on the planet. I’d first met Tommy the year after I graduated from high school. I’d spent that gap year before college living with Uncle Freddie in Hilo, Hawaii. At age sixteen, my parents had thought I was still too young to go directly to college and could instead have a more limited adventure with some adult supervision. At the time, Tommy was only nine. He was already tall for his age and had a mop of bright red hair. His hated nickname was Carrot. We got along in the awkward way that a sixteen-year-old out for adventure gets along with a nine-year-old who spends most of his time playing video games and collecting Bufo toads.

  As I opened the door, Tommy was slouched on the leather couch in the living room with his red tennis-shoed feet propped up on the coffee table, reading a professional journal of some sort that displayed colorful hydrocarbon rings on the cover. Tommy had grown into something of an odd duck. He was now very tall and gangly, almost loose-limbed. His hair, still bright red, was now cut into a mohawk.

  “Hi, Tommy,” I said.

  “Hi, Jenna. Why are you carrying a coffeepot full of coffee around?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said as I put it on the kitchen counter. “The coffee may be bad, so don’t drink it.”

  He gave me an odd look. “Okay, I won’t. Hey, your father called you. About an hour ago.”

  “He did?”

  “Yep. He said, ‘Hello, this is Senator James.’”

  “Did he say whether something was wrong?”

  “No. He sounded pretty casual. Just said to call back when you got a chance. Didn’t seem very interested in chatting with me. I’m not even sure he realized he was talking to his nephew.”

  “Oh. Did you identify yourself?”

  “No. Guess I should have. Hey, I was pretty young when he was a politician. I’ve forgotten, what kind of a senator was he again?”

  “The United States kind. From Ohio. Still fond of using the title, I’m afraid.”

  “Not a bad title, as hierarchy goes.”

  “No, not bad, I guess.”

  “Hey, someone also came by to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “That real-estate agent who keeps bugging you to sell your condo to his client. Knocked on the door.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Exactly what you told me to tell him the last time. That the condo’s not for sale, and it’s particularly not for sale to an anonymous buyer. I said you wanted to know who the buyer was.”

  “Did he tell you?”

  “No. He just gave me his card again and said you should reconsider because they’re offering a great price. The card’s on the kitchen counter.”

  “I’ll put it with the stack of his other cards.”

  “Hey, Jenna, can I ask you something personal?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why are your hands so red?”

  I didn’t see that there was any point in telling him that it had arisen right after someone died—I didn’t feel like sharing all of that with him yet—so I told him half the story.

  “I stopped off and had a hot wax treatment. Felt great but seems to have left my hands kind of red.”

  “That’s weird. An old girlfriend of mine used to have those treatments, and they never left her hands red.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe the wax was too hot.”

  “Can I suggest a different possibility, Jenna?”

  “Sure.”

  “It could be stress. There’s something called Raynaud’s disease that can make your fingers red. It’s often triggered by stress. Hold up your hands a second.”

  I held them up in front of me, and Tommy and I both stared at them.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s mostly my fingers that are red.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And the tips are white, which is also characteristic of Raynaud’s. Anything stressful going on with you right now?”

  I felt, suddenly, as if Tommy had become my doctor. But it felt good to have someone care about me, especially after my go-round with Drady. I decided to tell Tommy what had happened.

  “Something very stressful. One of my students just died—he collapsed in my office, and I had to go with him in the ambulance to the hospital. At first they thought he’d be okay, but a couple of hours later he died.”

  “Well, Jenna, I don’t know much about Raynaud’s, but that’s the kind of thing that could do it.”

  “How do you know about it at all?”

  “I went to med school in Hawaii for a year and then dropped out. But you ought to see a real doctor about it, because some forms of Raynaud’s are benign, but some indicate a serious underlying condition.”

  “All right, I will. But right now I’m going to go call my father.”

  I tossed my purse on the big black leather recliner next to the couch and headed toward my bedroom so I could have some privacy. As I put my hand on the bedroom doorknob, Tommy said, “Hey, Jenna, what did your student die from?”

  I turned to face him. “No one seems to know. Or at least not yet. Why?”

  “Well, are you a suspect?”

  I froze. And, despite the absurdity of the question, I felt my stomach clench. “Why in hell would I be a suspect, Tommy? I hardly even knew the guy.”

  He grinned. “Isn’t the person who finds the body always a suspect?”

  “I didn’t find the body. He wasn’t even dead when I found him.” I realized, as those last words came out of my mouth, that I sounded defensive, which was ridiculous. I had no need to be defensive.

  “I’m just pulling your chain, Jenna.”

  “Well, I don’t find it funny. At all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to call my father.”

  I turned, walked into the bedroom and, resisting the temptation to slam the door, closed it quietly behind me. Then I collapsed against it. First George Skillings had collected the coffee from my office based on a “gut feeling”—before he even knew that Primo had died. Then Drady had all but accused me of murder. And now Tommy was “joking” about it. Were these people serious? I could feel myself beginning to hyperventilate.

  CHAPTER 13

  I walked over to my bed, sat down on the floor next to it, closed my eyes, folded my legs into a yoga position and took long, slow, deep breaths. I had learned the technique in a meditation class I attended while in law school in an attempt to beat back exam anxiety. Eventually, the slow breathing started to work, and my near-panic retreated. After a few minutes more, I felt more or less like myself again.

  I got up, sat down on the bed and picked up the phone from the nightstand—I still have a landline, another extravagance—and punched in my father’s number on the speed dial. As the phone rang on the other end, I wondered what his call could be about. Normally, my father only called me twice a year—on my birthday and, if it wasn’t one of the years when I dragged myself back to Cleveland for the holidays, on Christmas.

  The phone was picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Hi, Dad, it’s Jenna.”

  “Jenna Joy! What a pleasure.”

  I controlled myself from telling him, for the millionth time, not to use my hated middle name. But ever since my grandmother, his mother, whose name it had been, died last year at the age of a hundred, it had become harder to complain about it.

  “It’s nice to hear your voice, Dad. But you almost never call. What’s up?”

  “I’m coming to visit.”

  “When?”

  “On Thursday.”

  “Why?”

  “
There’s a conference at USC Law School honoring old Judge Jenkins. You remember, the judge I clerked for on the 9th Circuit, when I got out of law school.”

  “I don’t recall him personally, Dad, because I wasn’t born yet, but it sounds like fun. I hope I’ll get to see you while you’re here.”

  “I’m hoping to stay with you.”

  “You’re certainly welcome to, but, you know, I’m a long way from USC, and the traffic in the morning is bad, and…”

  “Oh, no worries there, Jenna Joy. I’ll have a car and driver. And it will give us an opportunity to spend some quality time together.”

  I thought to myself that despite our checkered history, I really ought to make an effort to be more welcoming. Dad had just turned eighty, and since my mother’s death two years earlier, he had clearly been lonely.

  “Dad, I’m having trouble hearing you. I’m going to put you on my speakerphone. Sometimes, for reasons I don’t understand, it works better than the handset.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  The truth was that I needed to put him on speaker because my hand had begun to shake so violently that I was having trouble holding the phone.

  “Okay, Dad, can you hear me?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hey, Dad, I’ll look forward to seeing you. What day are you coming?”

  “This Thursday. My plane gets in late in the afternoon. Don’t worry about picking me up. I’ll just take a cab. Can you leave a key with the doorman?”

  “Sure. And Tommy may be here, too.”

  “The guy who answered the phone when I called?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something romantic?”

  “No, Tommy’s your nephew, Dad. Uncle Freddie’s son.”

  “Oh. Didn’t realize he was living with you. Fred was always a bit worried whether he’d amount to anything. What’s he doing now?”

  “Grad student in molecular chemistry at UCLA.”

  “Guess he’s straightened out, then. But I’m sorry you’re not living with someone romantically. It would be good for you to get married, Jenna Joy.”

  I had never mentioned Aldous to him and didn’t think this was the time.

  “Dad, I’m going to get married when I want to get married.”

  “All right.” And then he hung up. Which wasn’t unlike most of the exits he’d made from my life over the years. Here one moment, gone to a chicken-dinner fund-raiser the next.

  CHAPTER 14

  After I hung up, I grabbed my iPad, which was sitting on the nightstand next to my bed, and looked up Dad’s conference on the USC website. I kept missing the keys because of the way my hand was shaking, but eventually I found it. It was called Harold Jenkins: A Judge before His Time and was slated to start Friday afternoon with a cocktail reception and end Sunday at noon. So unless Dad was making other plans—unlikely—I was going to be forced to join him for dinner on both Thursday and Sunday, plus be expected to spend Friday morning and much of the day Sunday with him. Worst of all, he’d probably ask to attend one of my classes, and I’d be hard-pressed to say no. Unfortunately, the only class I’d be teaching during his time in LA would be my Sunken Treasure seminar on Friday morning—a class in which one of the students had just died under mysterious circumstances.

  I stopped myself midthought. Why was I thinking of Primo’s death as having happened under mysterious circumstances? Hadn’t I overheard the students saying he was a heavy partier? It was probably drugs.

  All of that was going through my mind as I sat on my bed staring at the telephone in its cradle. I finally got up and walked to the third bedroom, which I had converted into a study. It was the smallest of the three, and while the room I had rented to Tommy would have made for a more comfortable study, the third bedroom had the best view of the hills. I could even see the law school from its windows.

  I had furnished the room rather starkly—Lucite desk in red, pushed right up against the windows, black mesh Aeron desk chair and a set of floor-to-ceiling blonde oak bookshelves fastened to the wall just to the left of the windows. The carpeting was the same industrial gray I had chosen for the rest of the condo, but I’d splashed a bright rug on top of it, something I’d picked up in Guatemala on the previous summer’s treasure cruise. Against the back wall I had installed a pull-out sofa, also red. Not that it had gotten much use as a bed. It was rare that I had overnight guests. The only art in the room was a woodblock print of a monk in his red robes. It looked classic until you noticed that he was holding a brimming martini glass with a sliver of lemon hooked over the top edge.

  I sat down and turned on my notebook computer, which was sitting on the desk. It was an exact match of the one in my office. I had finally tired of carting a computer back and forth and had elected instead to have two, one left at the law school and one in my condo. All my files were stored in the cloud, backed up automatically every few minutes. All I had to do if I needed a file was pull it down from the Net, without regard to where I had been when I created it. Aldous had warned me that this created a greater risk of data theft, but I had ignored him.

  My first problem was what to do about my Law of Sunken Treasure seminar, which met for just over an hour and a half on Tuesdays and Fridays at 9:00 A.M. Tomorrow was a Tuesday. As I thought about it, there was something unseemly about meeting the day after Primo had died and just going forward as if nothing had happened. I would at least have to make some mention of it, and I really had no idea what to say. Or maybe the school was going to cancel classes for the day. No student had died during my almost four years at the law school, so I didn’t know what the drill would be. I needed to ask.

  I picked up my cell—my hand seemed to have stopped trembling—and punched in the dean’s number.

  He answered on the first ring. “Jenna, I’ve been sitting here waiting for your call for well over an hour. Did you find the map?”

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I totally forgot to call you. I’ve been kind of distracted.”

  “Understood. Was the map there?”

  “No, it wasn’t. I searched everywhere but couldn’t find it.”

  “Well, where is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “We have a big problem then.”

  “Dean Blender, there’s something you need to understand. All I ever saw was a red mailing tube. I have no idea whether there was a map or anything else in it.”

  “This Quinto guy insists that’s what was in it. He says he helped his brother roll the map up in the morning and put it in the tube so Primo could show it to you.”

  “I sound like a broken record, but, again, I have no way of knowing whether that’s true or not. I never got a look at the map, if it was even in there.”

  “All right, I’ll take you at your word.”

  “That sounds ominous. Why would you not take me at my word?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. It was just a manner of speaking. Anyway, please let me know if you learn anything new. I have to go now. I have a lot to do to try to put a lid on this mess before it spins out of control. It’s one thing for a student to die, it’s another thing for his family to claim a professor stole something from him.”

  “They think I stole it?”

  “That’s the clear implication.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “I know. Welcome to my job as dean. And as I said, I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait.”

  “What now?”

  “Are you going to cancel classes tomorrow?”

  “No, why would we?”

  “A student died.”

  “Once in a while we lose a student, Jenna. It’s tragic, but life goes on. We’ve never canceled classes before for that. We’ll have a memorial service of some sort at an appropriate time. Assuming that’s okay with the family, of course.”

  “I see. Maybe I’ll just cancel my own class in the morning. The one Primo was in.”

  “That’s up to you, but I think most faculty would just man up and teach
it.”

  “I can’t man up.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not a man.”

  There was a small silence, as he, I hoped, absorbed what a chauvinist pig he was. Finally, he said, “I’ve got work to do. Let me know if you learn anything more.”

  “I will, but I don’t know how you expect me to learn anything more.”

  There was no response. I looked at the cell phone screen, which said “disconnected.” He, too, had hung up on me. I was tired of people doing that. In fact, I was tired of talking to people I didn’t want to talk to. I powered off my cell phone.

  Then I remembered the coffee, which was still sitting on the counter. I went back to the kitchen, poured some of it into a glass jar, put a lid on the jar and placed it in the refrigerator. That left almost half a pot of coffee still in the pot. I sniffed it and it smelled bad, so I hesitated to pour it down the drain, lest I smell up the sink.

  There’s a small balcony off the living room that I rarely use in the winter. It has a broad-leafed plant on it that I sometimes neglect to water. I figured I could just dump the coffee in the plant and it would kill two birds with one stone. I’d get rid of the coffee and give the plant some needed water. It seemed unlikely to me that the plant would be bothered by the smell or whatever fungus had sickened Primo. If that’s what had really happened, which I doubted.

  CHAPTER 15

  I had agreed to meet Aldous at 7:45 P.M. at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood for a performance of Hamlet. The curtain was at 8:00. It wasn’t the Geffen’s usual fare, which tended a bit more toward the modern. Nor was it mine; I very unsophisticatedly prefer movies. But I had been looking forward to it as a fun night out with Aldous.