“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
Craft 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.
CHAPTER 48
As we were waiting for my car to be brought around, another car pulled up, and Robert and a woman I’d never seen before emerged from it. He saw me immediately and walked over. The woman hung back a bit.
“Hi, Jenna. What a nice surprise.”
“Indeed. Let me introduce you to my date. Robert, this is Bill Nightingale. Bill, this is my mentor of many years at my old law firm, Robert Tarza.”
The two of them exchanged the usual pleasantries and shook hands. Then the woman, who had been hanging back, came forward, and Robert introduced her, too. “Jenna and Bill, this is Tess, who is visiting from France.”
As soon as Robert said “Tess,” I realized who she must be, because when I had called Robert in France, she had answered the phone and said her name. We shook hands all around. Then Tess said to me, “That is a very pretty necklace you wear.”
“Thank you.”
“The design, it is just like my bracelet.” She held up her wrist so that I could see the dangling chain of gold lions biting into prone antelopes. I was speechless, in part at the surprise of the matching designs and in part because I had no idea how to traverse the emotional terrain I had just stumbled into. I assumed that Robert had given her the bracelet, and that it must be pretty obvious he had given me the necklace. I couldn’t read Tess’s face at all, and I didn’t know if she was making light of the whole thing or was going to read something into the necklace that wasn’t there.
Robert tried to solve the problem himself. “You know,” he said, “I inherited both the necklace and the bracelet from my grandmother, who got them on a safari she took to Kenya long ago. I gave one to each of you because, like her, you’re both very special to me.”
“That’s a very special story,” I said, intentionally mimicking his words and wondering to myself if it was true. “I never knew that.”
“I did not know it,” Tess said, giving Robert a look that seemed to mirror my own doubts as to the story’s veracity. At the same time, though, Tess looked more amused than upset.
“They’re certainly unusual pieces,” Dr. N said, no doubt trying to steer the conversation away from who had given what to whom and when.
“Well,” Robert said, “we’re running late for our reservation, so we should get going, but I think the two of you—” he gestured at Tess and me—“would like each other, and we should all have lunch soon. You, too, Bill. But like I said, we’ve got to hustle. So ’bye for now.” And with that he put his hand on the small of Tess’s back and led her toward the entrance. Tess glanced back at me over her shoulder as they went. I wished, at that moment, that I’d worn a different dress.
In the meantime my car had arrived and the valet was holding the driver’s door open for me. “Nice necklace,” he said, and winked as I got in.
“Thanks,” I said, checked to see that Dr. N was in and had fastened his seat belt, then headed off down the street.
“What was that all about?” Dr. N asked.
“Tess is Robert’s new squeeze. She’s French, and he was living with her in Paris before he came back to help me with my legal situation.”
“Were you romantically involved at some point?”
“No, never.”
“I couldn’t tell if she was unhappy or just amused at Robert’s rather awkward attempt to make the whole thing go away.”
“I thought she looked amused. But I don’t know her at all, so I can’t say for sure. Anyway, let’s talk about something else. Maybe she’s as uncomfortable with the whole thing as I am.”
“How about music,” he said. “What do you like?”
“I’m stuck in a past that’s not really my own. I like bands like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. And I like No Doubt, which is at least more from my own time. What about you?”
“Similar, but I’m at least a little closer in vintage to bands like those.”
We talked about music the rest of the way. We did turn out to have remarkably similar tastes. Unlike me and Aldous, who tended to prefer Wagner. Eventually we pulled up in front of his house. I put the car in park but left the engine running. We had arrived at what I used to call, when I was a teenager, the Moment, although usually I was the one in the passenger seat.
“Well,” I said, “I guess this is it.”
“Uh-huh, I guess so. Do you think a kiss would be appropriate?”
I thought about it for a second. Inviting him to kiss me would be the final admission that things with Aldous were over. I wasn’t quite ready for that, though, despite the fact that Aldous was still at le
ast marginally on my suspects list. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
But I couldn’t really say any of that out loud, so I just said, “Do you know, Bill, that in my head I still call you Dr. N?”
He laughed. “No, I had no idea.”
“Given that, I think probably a kiss on the cheek would be best.”
He leaned over and gave me a quick peck, then opened the door to get out. As he exited, he said, “I’m going to make it my goal to move my name inside your head to Bill.”
I thought he had a good chance of accomplishing that, and getting the kiss, too.
I watched him walk up the pathway and waited until he put his key in the lock and opened the door. Then I drove away and thought to myself that he had learned at least something about me over dinner, but that I hadn’t asked a thing about him, other than an inquiry about what music he liked. Which was rude of me. Maybe it could be excused by my current situation. Or maybe not.
CHAPTER 49
Robert Tarza
Week 2—Tuesday
You need a place to take a deposition, and the location is usually up to the lawyer who notices the depo. I considered noticing Quinto’s depo for Oscar’s unusual office in Venice but rejected it on the grounds that it would send the wrong message. In the end I opted to schedule it at my old law firm, Marbury Marfan, whose imposing offices occupy the top ten floors of a downtown skyscraper, including the penthouse floor on eighty-five. I hoped the setting would say to both Quinto and his lawyer, “Don’t mess with Jenna.”
As a retired partner in the firm—someone who, in the firm’s lingo, has gone senior—I’m still entitled to avail myself of the firm’s conference rooms and other facilities, so long as no one more important needs them. While trying to book a conference room for the depo, I learned that when you’re senior every other person in the firm is more important.
My first choice was the elegant main conference room on eighty-four—da Vinci, as it’s called—with floor-to-ceiling windows and a sweeping view of the hills to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It had been reserved for the time I wanted it, however, by a second-year associate who would be hosting a meeting of his Los Angeles County Bar Association committee on gender bias in the profession. In the end I had to settle for a small conference room on the seventy-eighth floor that was named Cochise. It had no windows and was being remodeled. Its normal complement of contemporary furniture had been removed and temporarily replaced with stuff inspired by early disco. The small, oblong conference table sprouted like a mushroom from a fluted, white plastic base, and it wobbled. Its top was made of some material that screamed, “I am made from something fake.” The room had only six chairs, which would make for a very snug fit around the table—two chairs on each side and one on each end. Upon seeing the room, I shuddered, but there was nothing else, and the alternative was either to change the date or move the depo to Oscar’s place.
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