Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “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.”

  CHAPTER 42

  You can pick locks?” Oscar looked genuinely surprised.

  “I can,” Jenna said. “And it’s not difficult to get a pick kit. Would you like to see mine?”

  I had forgotten that Jenna could pick locks, even though I had personally witnessed her do it five years before.

  Jenna reached into her purse, pulled out an elongated leather kit about eight inches long and three inches wide and put it on the table. We all stared at it. Oscar reached over, picked it up and moved it to his side of the table. “Jenna, you shouldn’t be carrying this around when the police suspect you of a crime. But tell me, where did you learn to do that?”

  “Oh, when I visited Uncle Freddie in Hawaii during my gap year after high school. He’s a PI, and he has all kinds of interesting skills. I think it amused him to teach me, and I got quite good at it. He had a set of six practice locks, each one more difficult to pick than the one before it.”

  “How’d you do?” Oscar asked.

  “I eventually nailed them all.” She grinned.

  “You know,” I said, “I think I’m going to focus my efforts on figuring out who might have copied a key. Call it a gut sense, but I say key.”

  “Why?” Jenna asked.

  “Because not very many people know how to pick locks, and if you’re standing there in a UCLA hallway using a lock pick on someone’s door, you’re at big risk of being caught. No one much notices someone opening a door with a key.”

  “Well, I say pick,” Jenna said.

  “Well, you say potato, I say potatto, but I’m the one taking the depo. I’ll cover both possibilities, of course. Somehow. And I guess I’ll call Gwen to see if I can talk her into filing a notice of appearance in the lawsuit for me and serving a notice of deposition on Quinto’s lawyer. For what day do you think? Tuesday?”

  “Maybe Wednesday,” Oscar said. “That’s at least a tad more reasonable notice.”

  “Let’s roll with it,” Jenna said. “But Robert, don’t you have to get the firm’s new business committee to approve your taking on a new client?”

  “Probably. But I’m just going to ignore that for now, and if Gwen will do what needs to be done, I’ll deal with it later.”

  “Sounds good,” Oscar said.

  “I have one more question,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Jenna asked.

  “You must have some theories about who poisoned Primo. Who are your main suspects?”

  Oscar let out an actual guffaw. “She does! And all of them are crazy, if you ask me.”

  “Well, who are they?” I asked.

  Oscar looked over at Jenna. “Madame, you have the floor.”

  “The first one is my boyfriend, Aldous Hartleb. He’s a faculty member and has the office next door to mine. It’s complicated, but I was thinking he’s after my tenure slot, even though there are no real slots.”

  I smiled at her. “I know you well, Jenna, from all our years of working together, including your verbal ticks. You just said, ‘I was thinking.’ Does that mean you’ve now changed your mind?”

  “Sort of,” she responded. “I realize now that my feelings about that are overheated, so although I haven’t crossed him off the list, I’ve demoted him to last place. As I said, my main reason for including him was the thought that he was after my tenure slot. But the more I think about it, the more I see that he doesn’t really care that much about getting tenure here. He seems really excited about going elsewhere.”

  “Who’s in first place now?” Oscar asked.

  “My colleague, Professor Greta Broontz. She has the office next to mine on the other side, so if I did leave the door open, she had an easy opportunity to plant the poison.”

  “What’s her motive?” I asked.

  “She hates me. For various reasons.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Is that it?”

  “Yes, but if you knew her, you’d think it was enough.”

  “Who’s the third person on the list?” I asked.

  “Before we get to that,” Oscar said, “would anyone like another drink?”

  “I would,” Jenna said

  “I would not,” I said. “I’ve hardly touched this one.”

  “Okay,” Oscar said, “two refills.”

  He scooped his and Jenna’s glasses off the table, got up and went into the kitchen. While he was out of the room, Jenna reached over, retrieved the pick kit from his side of the table and dropped it back into her purse. She looked at me and placed her index finger gently over her closed lips.

  I considered ratting her out to Oscar but then thought better of it. Jenna was an adult, and if she wanted to walk around with a pick kit in her purse, that was really her business. Besides, I was doing the civil side of the case.

  Oscar ca
me back into the room a few minutes later, set a refilled glass in front of Jenna and his own at his place at the table and said, “Jenna, I see you took the pick kit back. I can’t make you give it to me, but at the very least you should leave it at home.”

  “I’ll think about it, Oscar.”

  I was tired of the argument about the pick kit and wanted to get back to the core issue. “Who,” I asked, “is the third person on your list, Jenna?”

  “The third person is my cousin, Tommy, who’s also my roommate.”

  “Why him?”

  “Tommy knows where my office is—he’s been there quite a few times and could have taken the key from my apartment because he lives there. He also majors in molecular chemistry. So he would have easy access to sodium azide. Plus the other day he rather casually asked me if I had a will, all in the guise of wanting to have his own will done.”

  “Would he,” I asked, “inherit your assets if you died?”

  “Well,” she said, “only if both my father and his father died first, and then he’d have to split it with my half brother and maybe also with the three other cousins I have. But I’m not sure.”

  “Do you have a lot of assets, Jenna?” Oscar asked.

  “No.”

  I thought about it for a moment. Perhaps it wasn’t totally far-fetched. But there was a timing question that was critical. “Jenna, did Tommy ask you if you had a will before or after Primo died?”

  “After.”

  “So that means,” I said, “that if he tried to kill you, he didn’t bother to do his homework before the attempt. I mean, who would even bother to try without first learning if you had a will? Because if you did, it might provide that you were leaving your money to Friends of Dogs or something.”

  Oscar had been quietly sipping his Manhattan. Finally, he spoke. “Jenna, you’ve had experience with two murders, this one and back when your boyfriend was killed. I’ve represented defendants in several dozen homicides. There’s always a theme, and the theme is that someone wants something—they want your car or they want your money or they want their husband or wife back. Sometimes they want their stolen dignity back. Or they want revenge. But usually, particularly if they get away with it, they get what they wanted.”

  “So?” Jenna said.

  “So each of your suspects here may want something, but I don’t see how killing you is going to get it for them. Tommy won’t get your money if you die. Aldous isn’t likely to get tenure just because you’re dead, and Greta Broontz gets nothing at all.”

  “That’s not correct,” Jenna said. “She gets me gone. And in her warped universe, that would be enough, I suspect.”

  “No,” Oscar said, “it wouldn’t. People who kill out of hatred alone want two things. They want the victim to suffer in terrified agony before dying, and they want the poor soul to know who did it. Neither fits this murder.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Week 1—Saturday Morning

  I could have gone downtown to Marbury Marfan to prepare for Quinto’s deposition. I still had a small office there, the lifetime perk of being a retired partner at the firm. But with the Internet and my notebook computer, it was easy enough to prep at the Bel-Air, and a hell of a lot more pleasant. Plus Tess was force feeding me cheese and crackers and fine wines as I worked.

  I had a bunch of paper strewn on the coffee table and on the floor all around me, including the diary, which I had disassembled into its individual pages. It was like being surrounded by a paper beach, except with red Post-it notes scattered all over the sand.

  Tess was standing in the doorway between the living room and the bedroom, surveying the scene. “You are quite the mess, monsieur.”

  “Preparing for a deposition can be messy. And this one is particularly messy.”

  “What is this deposition?”

  “You put the person whose deposition is being taken—we call him the deponent—under oath and ask him questions, which he must answer.”

  “It is like a trial?”

  “No, because although the person takes an oath to tell the truth, there’s no judge. Just the lawyer asking the questions, the deponent and his lawyer are there. What the deponent says can sometimes be used later at the trial, if there is one. But sometimes not.”

  “It is in the courtroom, then, this deposition?”

  “No. You’re in an ordinary conference room, usually at a law firm.”

  “It is recorded?”

  “Sometimes even by a TV camera. But always with a court reporter, who takes down, word for word, the questions the lawyers ask and the answers the deponent gives. Then the court reporter puts the testimony into a typed booklet, which we call a transcript, and the deponent signs it.”

  “Do you like this deposition thing? Or do you like a trial?”

  I thought about it for a moment and shrugged. “They each have their charms. And their risks.”

  “Like women.”

  “One way to look at it.”

  “What is the main charm of a deposition?”

  “If the witness is a party to the lawsuit, you can ask the witness anything you want and not worry about the answer. In a trial you need to be very careful what you ask because you’ll be stuck with the answer.”

  “I do not understand.”

  I sat and thought for a moment, trying to figure out how to explain something that’s actually complicated, plus has a hundred exceptions, in a way that Tess would understand.

  “Let me explain it this way, Tess. Suppose you were in a French court suing a husband for divorce. And suppose to get a divorce you had to prove that the husband cheated on you.”

  “He would not be in court. He would be dead.”

  “Just suppose. It’s a hypothetical.”

  “It is a hypothetical I do not like, but okay.”

  “If your husband is on the witness stand in a trial, and you want to prove that he cheated on you, you could ask him, ‘Did you cheat on Tess?’ He can say yes or he can say no, but he can’t elaborate on his answer.”

  “What other question could you ask?”

  “You could ask him an open-ended question—one that doesn’t have to be answered only yes or no. For example, you could ask him, ‘Why did you cheat on Tess?’”

  “He would have no good reason.”

  I ignored her and went on. “If you asked him that open-ended question at trial, he could talk on and on about how bad you were in bed, what an awful cook you were and how old-fashioned and out of style your clothes were.”

  Tess picked up a pillow from the couch and threw it at me. I ducked, and it missed.

  “You are a sheet, Robert.”

  “It’s pronounced shit.”

  “Do not correct my English.”

  “Well, do you want to know what’s different between a deposition and a trial or not? Because I’m not done.”

  “Yes.”

  “In a deposition you want to ask open-ended questions and get the deponent to tell you everything he’s thinking or knows. That way you can know in advance what the other side will try to have him say at trial, and you can also learn things to ask other witnesses.”

  “I see. But this is byzantine. It would be better just to have people tell their stories in what way they wish. Without all these rules of the Anglo-Saxons.”

  “I’m sure the French have many similar rules, some even more byzantine.”

  “That is impossible. Our system is perfect.”

  I smiled. “Well, even in your perfect system, this depo would be a challenge.”

  “Why?”

  “Because normally when I take a deposition of an opposing party in a lawsuit, I already know almost as much as the person I’m deposing, and all I want to do is confirm what I know. And, if I can, I want to trick the witness into putting his foot in it.”

  “Foot in what?”

  “Never mind, it’s a metaphor. But essentially, the problem here is that I know virtually nothing. I’m going to have to wing it, and I�
��m not a wing-it person.”

  “Wing it?”

  “Tess, I need to buy you a book of English idioms.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Jenna James

  Week 1—Saturday

  Saturday began for me as a day of nothing much happening. I slept late, got up, peered at myself in the mirror—the bruises were beginning to fade to yellow—got dressed and poured myself a bowl of high-protein cereal that I thought of as assorted sticks and stones. And I made myself a large cup of coffee. Then I sat down to read the LA Times over breakfast. Tommy had brought the paper in and left it on the kitchen table. Tommy himself was nowhere to be seen.

  I was feeling at peace. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain, I felt less afraid, and I had stopped trying to refine my list of who was after me and why. Maybe it was because, as Oscar had pointed out, my current list didn’t make much sense. I paged through the Times to see if there was any mention of Primo’s death. There wasn’t. Nor had there been any mention of it in the paper on any of the previous days since his death. Nor, strangely, had there been any mention of it in the Daily Bruin or in the usual online places. Except for the lawsuit filed against me, the whole thing had disappeared without a trace. Maybe the suit could be resolved quickly, and it would all go away and I could go back to my life.

  Around 10:00 A.M., Robert, who was preparing for Quinto’s deposition—it was his MO to start days in advance—called to get more details about what had happened. Among other things, he wanted to know whose fingerprints had been found on the diary. I told him I didn’t know, to ask Oscar, because his forensics guy still had the original diary.

  It was a beautiful day, sunny and crisp. I decided it would be relaxing to go for a bike ride down by the beach. But first I had to make sure my bike hadn’t been damaged in the accident. I had retrieved it from Aldous’s office earlier in the week and brought it back to my condo, but without really inspecting it. Now when I examined it, except for a few scratches here and there, it appeared to be in fine shape.