Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “Dinner.” He got up, turned and walked out the door, whistling. I couldn’t quite make out the tune. The truth is, I had been tempted to accept his dinner invitation on the spot, which surprised me. Hadn’t I been put off by his propositioning me while Primo was still in the ER? Hadn’t I just, in effect, agreed to try harder with Aldous? Hadn’t Aldous just told me he loved me? He had. But, then again, it was also true that I had failed to respond in kind when Aldous said it.

  I sat at the Coffee Bean for another hour and a half, reading a Wall Street Journal someone had left behind, then an LA Times I ducked out to buy from a newspaper rack across the street. I managed to limit my coffee intake to just one additional cup.

  At about 9:00 A.M., I walked onto the campus and up toward the top gate of the botanical garden. The garden, set on several acres on a steep hillside in the southeast corner of the campus, contains hundreds of tropical and subtropical trees and shrubs. On sunny days it’s shady. On rainy days you can shelter there without getting wet.

  I loitered about half a block from the entrance, waiting until I saw them open the gate. At 9:15 sharp I headed onto the steep dirt path that winds down toward the bottom gate. Sure enough, Julie was walking up the path. She was wearing a beige trench coat, which seemed a bit over the top to me, but maybe it was just something she wore all the time on cool days. As she approached me, she swiveled her head back and forth, clearly looking to see if there was anyone around. There wasn’t, and as she passed she handed me a brown manila envelope and walked on. The whole thing was absurd, but then, the last two days had been absurd all around.

  I walked the five blocks back to my condo and took the elevator up. When the doors opened on my floor, Greta Broontz was standing there. After I got out, she entered the elevator without acknowledging me and studied the ceiling until the doors closed. It seemed odd, since her condo was a floor below mine. There were three other units on my floor, so perhaps she was visiting someone. I turned away from the elevators and walked down the hall to my own condo. I unlocked my door, went into my study, shut the door behind me, sat down at my desk and ripped open the brown envelope.

  CHAPTER 27

  The envelope, now open, sat before me on my desk. Suddenly, a little voice in my head said, This could be evidence. Do you really want to have your fingerprints all over it? Even though there was no one there to see it, I shook my head in the negative. I got up, went into the kitchen, knelt down in front of the sink and pulled out a box of disposable vinyl gloves I keep there to use when I’m cleaning. I pulled out a pair and skinned one onto each hand. Then I got up and headed back to my study.

  “Cleaning on a weekday morning, Jenna?”

  It was Tommy. He was sitting in his usual spot, tennis shoes up on the table, chemistry book of some kind in his hands. That day, the shoes were an iridescent green.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m getting rid of the dust bunnies in my study. They’re starting to drive me crazy.”

  “Huh. Haven’t noticed any in my room. Maybe it’s because your study faces the street. All those cars.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Were you here when I came in?”

  “Uh-huh. You blew right by me without saying a thing. Both coming and going. I don’t think you even saw me.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I’m a bit distracted. Cleaning probably will help clear my mind.”

  “Jenna, if it won’t take you away too long from cleaning, can I ask you a legal question for a second?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know much about wills?”

  “Hardly anything. Why?”

  “My dad is bugging me to make a will. He says now that I’m an adult, it’s important.”

  “Could be. Do you want me to give you the name of a lawyer who can help you out?”

  “That would be good. But let me ask you, if I don’t bother and I die without one, who would inherit the little that I have?”

  “It varies by state, but probably, unless you get married or have children in the meantime, your dad. And if he isn’t around when you die, my dad, and if he isn’t around either, your first cousins, I think.”

  “Which would include you?”

  “I guess.”

  “Do you have a will yourself?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  I smiled. “The cobbler’s children never have any shoes.”

  “Okay. Well, thanks. When you get a chance, please give me the name of a lawyer you’d recommend.”

  “Will do.”

  I walked back into my study and shut the door. Tommy, if he noticed, would likely find it odd that I had closed the door in order to tackle dust bunnies, but he would just have to find it odd.

  Now properly gloved, I sat down at my desk and extracted the contents of the envelope, which consisted of a thin, spiral-bound notebook with a green cover. The pages inside were narrow ruled. Being OCD, I couldn’t help but count them. There were only ninety-nine, despite the fact that the cover of the notebook stated that it contained one hundred sheets. I also counted the pages with writing on them. There were fifty-one.

  There was no writing on the cover, and the first page was blank. The second page was covered, margin to margin, top to bottom, with handwriting in blue ink. The writing was cramped but followed the narrow-ruled lines with precision.

  I began to read. I had half-expected it would be written in Italian, but instead it was all in English. In fact, the first entry said he was going to try to write in English to try to improve his language skills. The diary seemed to me very likely to have been written by Primo because it contained the same awkwardness of phrasing he displayed when he spoke. Despite the fact that Primo was dead, I felt like a voyeur. The journal was very personal.

  Most of it was about how unhappy he was—unhappy with law school because his grades were poor; unfairly so, he thought. Unhappy with Julie because she wasn’t treating him right, and unhappy with his brother Quinto because they couldn’t agree on how to go about some secret project, although the diary didn’t say what the secret project was. Maybe it was recovery of the treasure? Primo was also homesick for Italy, and in particular for his small village there.

  Assuming the dates on the pages were accurate, he had started the diary about three months before he died, sometimes writing every day, sometimes skipping several days in a row. For the most part, on each day he wrote he filled only a single page. There was a temptation to skim through it all and look for the entry Julie had mentioned about Quinto threatening to kill him. But as a lawyer, I had learned that chronology is a powerful ordering tool, and that if you were going to review a set of documents for the first time, it was best to read them first in chron order. So I steeled myself and began to read.

  In one of the entries, dated about six weeks earlier, he had written that he was “tired of Julie’s spirit,” which I assumed was some Italian idiom misrendered in English, and that he was going to throw her out. I guess that confirmed that they were living together, as Julie had asserted. The complaints he lodged against her were failing to keep their apartment clean, doing better than he was in law school, lording it over him and secretly dating someone else. The latter accusation, of course, seemed to me like the most important one. I had never heard of anyone evicting a girlfriend for failing to clean. At the very end of the page, he called her a troia stupida. I would need to look that one up.

  It had taken me quite a while to read the first thirty pages, which were in some ways like a poorly written soap opera. Before starting on the last pages, I got up and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, passing Tommy, who seemed not to have moved. There was still coffee in the pot from the morning, but it was cold, so I poured a cup and put it in the microwave for fifty-seven seconds, which I had determined to be the best time for reheating coffee in that particular oven. The better to pretend I was still cleaning up dust bunnies, I took a roll of paper towels and a can of Endust out from under the sink and headed back to my faux task.

&nb
sp; As I walked past Tommy, he looked up from his book. “I’m surprised there are any bunnies left.”

  “Only a few. This stuff will deliver the coup de bunny, so to speak.”

  He tipped his head slightly and looked at me. “I didn’t know you were witty, Jenna.”

  “Oh, witty as witty can be, Tommy,” I said over my shoulder as I headed back to the study. Once there I sat back down, swigged down a big swallow of coffee and turned to the remaining pages. After reading for another ten minutes or so, I reached the last written-on page, which was dated the day before Primo died. On that day—there was no entry dated two days before he died—Primo wrote only about a fight he was having with Quinto about the best way to carry out their secret project. But, again, there was no mention of exactly what it was. Then I came to the last paragraph, which said:

  I have said to Quinto that he has the wrong in this and that I will ask Professor Jenna James to help us and will show her the map to get her to be part of our project so she is aware we are serious. She has much legal expertise about sunken treasure.

  Upon reading that, I actually said, “Aha!” out loud. The secret project did involve the sunken treasure: presumably, how to recover it.

  The diary paragraph continued:

  Quinto does not want her because she is the girlfriend of Professor Aldous Hartleb, and he argues that this professor is not to us a friend. We have shouted about this. Today he said if I show her the map to involve her in our project, he will kill me. I do not think he means it, but if he does, I am not afraid. I will do this in a way that is mine. I am first and Quinto is fifth and he must know his place.

  Aldous was involved? As my grandmother would have said, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

  CHAPTER 28

  I sat at my desk for a few minutes, staring out at the hills to the north. It was by now late morning, and although the day was still gray, it was no longer drizzling. I swiveled my chair toward my computer so I could look up the meaning of troia stupida. I put the phrase into Google Translate, and it came up in English as stupid bitch. Troia, by itself, translated as slut. Either way, hardly a term of endearment.

  I considered my options.

  The diary, assuming it was genuine, was potent evidence that I didn’t kill Primo. It suggested that if he wasn’t killed by something he ate, drank, injected or inhaled, or by some preexisting medical condition—if his death was, as a coroner might put it, “at the hands of another”—then the most likely hands belonged to Quinto. Or maybe even Julie. So the most intelligent option was to turn it over to the police just as quickly as I could get over to the campus.

  Another option was to keep the knowledge of its existence to myself and wait. Wait for what, Jenna Joy? an inner voice asked. (Okay, I admit it, when I talk to myself, I sometimes use my hated middle name in my internal monologue. It’s probably me as the sneaky ten-year-old I once was.) I answered myself out loud: “Hold on to it until it will do me the most good.” That was a reference to the time I hid my parents’ video camera under a pillow on a high bookshelf and used the tape to nail my mother for snooping around my room—after she vehemently denied it.

  Finally, the inner voice of Jenna—the mature one—spoke up: You’re out of your depth, kid. Sure, you did a good job defending Robert, but you never did set up the criminal defense department at M&M like you promised to do, so you’re in no way a real criminal defense lawyer. But you do have one now. Call him.

  Oscar answered on the second ring, and I explained the situation to him.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re proving as stupid as your former law partner.”

  “Robert’s not stupid.”

  “No, but he was situationally stupid when there was a threat to his own hide.”

  “Well, what the hell did you want me to do? Tell her I didn’t want it?”

  “You could have tried to persuade her to give it directly to an investigator. Or you could have had somebody nearby who could testify that she gave it to you and could then have taken it from you and secured it.”

  “As long as I give it to the police right now, I still don’t see…”

  “Jenna, you’re now unfortunately part of the chain of custody. The police, trusting as they are, and especially as fond of you as they are, will say you had an opportunity to cook the evidence in some way.”

  “How could I possibly do that?”

  “How about by ripping out a page?”

  “If I’d ripped a page out, Oscar, the binding coil would be filled with those tiny little shards that get left behind. But you can see that there aren’t any.”

  “Maybe Julie ripped out the page herself and removed the shards before she gave the diary to you, Jenna.”

  “Setting me up?”

  “Right. You mentioned that there’s a diary entry three days before he died and one the day before he died, but not two days before he died. The police will suspect you tore out that missing day and removed the shards yourself.”

  “He didn’t write in the notebook every day.”

  “Maybe not, but if the notebook had a hundred pages to start with, there’s a page missing, right? So no matter how often Primo wrote in it, someone tore out a page.”

  “Okay, so I screwed up. How can we fix it?”

  “Frankly, I’m not sure yet. But in any case, we do have to get it to the police so you’re not also accused of obstructing justice by hiding evidence. But that doesn’t mean it has to be this minute.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning if we give it to the police, they’ll never agree to share it with us later for forensic analysis, or at least not without a lot of trouble and expense.”

  “So?”

  “I used to use a private forensics guy down in Venice. He can do a bunch of tech stuff, including sampling the ink. I’m gonna call him. Can you get down there this afternoon?”

  “Sure. I don’t have any classes today.”

  “Do you have a copy of Primo’s handwriting?”

  “No, students type or e-mail almost everything.”

  “We’re going to need to find something to prove authenticity.”

  “Come to think of it, there’s his signature on the sign-up sheet for appointments. It’s on the wall beside my office.”

  “Are you at the law school now?”

  “No. I’m at home.”

  “Do you have a copy machine there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. First, put your gloves back on and make a copy of every page of the diary, front and back, including the cover, the back and the blank pages. Then put it back in its envelope and put the envelope in a plastic bag. After you copy the diary, go up to the law school and grab the assignment sheet and put it in a separate envelope. Then take both envelopes down to my guy in Venice. I’ll e-mail you his name and address.”

  “Shouldn’t your guy be the one to copy the diary?”

  “He’ll make a copy of it, too, but I want a copy for us while he works on the forensics. It might take him a day or two.”

  “Will he turn it over to the police when he’s done?”

  “No, I will. I’m coming back to LA to deal with this. Tonight, if I can get a flight.”

  “Last minute. That will be expensive.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re paying for it.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I put a pair of gloves back on, extracted the diary from its envelope and started to copy it, page by page, on my slow ink-jet printer. On page four the black ink cartridge ran dry. I opened the desk drawer and shuffled around the junk, looking for a spare. Nada. Buying a couple of new ones had been on my list for a while, but it was, unfortunately, still on the list. It didn’t seem to me a big risk to copy it at the law school.

  I was also going to look for Aldous. He had some explaining to do, that was for sure. He had kept from me his involvement with Primo’s project, and it was hard to imagine what excuse h
e could have. How could we have slept in the same bed without his mentioning it?

  I looked at my watch to check the time. So few of my generation even wear watches anymore, but I still wear the one my grandparents gave me for my high-school graduation. They had been under the sweet misapprehension that watches were still valued as gifts. Wearing it reminded me of them, which was a nice memory because they had been my emotional port in a stormy childhood, what with my mother’s mental instability and my father’s drinking problems, both of which had been routinely hidden from public view by my father’s senate staff until it all came unglued the year I turned twelve.

  Since it was no longer raining, I decided to bike up to the campus instead of driving. I needed the exercise.

  My bike lives in my study. It’s a red Cervélo R5 racer, which I bought when I was still at M&M, at a time when its cost wasn’t much of an object. On some level it was a stupid purchase, because I no longer race it, and its value makes it a prime target for thieves. In fact, the chain I use to lock it up when I have to park it outside seems at times like it weighs almost as much as the bike. On the other hand, I look great on it, especially in black Lycra.

  I went into my bedroom—Tommy had disappeared from the living room—put on my riding gear and a helmet, lifted the bike from its rack in the study and headed down the freight elevator. The route from my condo up to the law school was easy and involved mostly backstreets. Instead of pedaling down six lanes of traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, which is always scary as hell, I just crossed Wilshire at a nearby traffic light, took mostly backstreets up to the edge of the campus, then pedaled uphill to the law school, which is more or less at the top of the set of hills that encompass UCLA. It was enough of an uphill that, despite all the gears, I worked up a minor sweat.

  I carried my bike up the steps to the third floor of the law school. As I headed toward my office, I saw that Aldous’s door was open. He was standing at one of the bookshelves, reading a book that was open in his hands. I stood in the doorway, holding my bike in one hand, and said, “Hey, handsome, how you doing?”