Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  Then Stevens said, as he was zipping up, “Do you guys want to settle this thing?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But it’s a little difficult to know how.”

  Stevens was by that time at the sink, and I could hear the water running. I was still facing the wall.

  “Well, Mr. Tarza,” he said, “the easiest way to settle it would be for your client to give the map back to Mr. Giordano. Once he gets it, he’ll drop the suit and give your client a complete release. It will be totally over. Among other things, that means there won’t be any wrongful death suit in your client’s future. And who knows, maybe the police will lose interest in the whole thing.”

  “Jenna didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Stevens.”

  “I believe the police think differently.”

  I zipped up and moved to the sink. Stevens was already pulling paper towels out of the dispenser and starting to dry his hands.

  “You know,” I said, as I washed my own hands, “your solution would be a perfect solution but for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jenna doesn’t have the map.”

  “I think she does.”

  “I don’t understand why you guys think that.”

  “Ask my client that question and he’ll tell you.”

  “I’ll do that, plus at least one more question that’s been bothering me.”

  “Feel free,” he said as he grabbed the door handle using the wadded-up paper towels, opened it, then tossed the towels in the wastebasket as he went through the door. Clearly a guy concerned about germs.

  When we were all back in the conference room and settled in, I skipped the cordialities and started right in.

  “Mr. Giordano, you’re aware you’re still under oath, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What leads you to think that my client, Professor James, has a map that you claim belongs to you?”

  That was not, of course, a very good question. Among other flaws, it called for a narrative answer, which, although not technically objectionable, most lawyers will object to in order to send a message to their client: don’t blather on. Make him ask you more narrowly focused questions.

  Quinto looked over at Stevens, as if expecting some sort of objection. Instead, Stevens said, “Go ahead and tell him the whole story, Quinto.”

  Quinto folded his arms in front of him and said, “Here’s the deal. The morning my brother died, I drove him to the law school in my car. Before we left to go there, I helped him roll up the map and put it into a red cardboard mailing tube. Then I watched him walk into the law school with it. He told me he was going to show it to Professor James. That was the last time I saw it.”

  Quinto stopped talking, folded his arms in front of him and just stared at me.

  “Well, sir, why does that persuade you that my client has your map?”

  “Because my brother had an appointment with Professor James at seven thirty. Like I said, I dropped him off right in front of the law school not long before that. I assume he went straight to her office. I understand he met with Professor James, became ill and was taken to the hospital. So during all of that, Professor James was the person with the best opportunity to take the map.”

  “Any other reason, Mr. Giordano?”

  “Yes, come to think of it. When Primo didn’t return to the car—that was before the hospital called me—I went to Professor James’s office. When I got there, her door was locked, and there was no one there. The police told me that when they searched the office later, no map was found. So figure it out yourself.”

  “Are you aware that my client went with your brother in the ambulance?”

  “Yes, I’ve been told that.”

  “Well, if she went right out the door with your brother, when do you think she had the opportunity to take the map?”

  “She probably had a friend standing by, ready to take it.”

  Jenna pushed a note in front of me. It said, “Ask him if I knew Primo was bringing the map.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe,” I asked, “that Professor James knew in advance that your brother was planning to show her a map?”

  “He told me, right before I dropped him off, that he’d mentioned it to her, and that she was looking forward to seeing it.”

  Jenna pushed another note in front of me, but I knew what it was going to say and asked her question before even looking at it. “Do you recall his exact words?”

  He hesitated slightly, and then said, “Something like ‘I told her I was going to show her a treasure map.’”

  When you take a lot of depositions, you learn to read pauses and hesitations, and I read Quinto’s initial hesitation as saying “I’m not sure.”

  “Are you sure, Mr. Giordano?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  I looked down at Jenna’s note. It said, “He told me that he had something interesting to talk to me about.”

  “Is it possible, sir, that your brother told you that he mentioned to Professor James only that he had something interesting to talk to her about?”

  “Objection,” Stevens said. “Anything is possible, so the question is vague and ambiguous.”

  He was trying to get in the way of the answer. I rephrased. “Mr. Giordano, didn’t your brother actually say to you that he had told Professor James he had something interesting to talk to her about?”

  “I don’t recall it exactly that way.”

  “What way do you recall it?”

  Stevens interrupted again, trying to protect his witness. “He already told you how he recalled it.”

  “Mr. Giordano said he was ‘pretty sure.’ That gives me the right to probe his answer. Madam Court Reporter, please read the question back to him.”

  The truth is that I could just as easily have repeated the question. It wasn’t complicated or long, but sometimes having the question read back by the court reporter gives it added gravitas and makes the witness more inclined to answer it.

  Looking down at the screen on her stenotype, she read the question out loud:

  “‘Mr. Giordano, didn’t your brother actually say to you that he had told Professor James he had something interesting to talk to her about?’”

  “He might,” Quinto answered, “have said that, although I think he said that he had told her he wanted to discuss a treasure map. I’m not sure.”

  I thought about pursuing that further, but it was good enough for now. At the very least, I had started to mess up their timeline about how Jenna had supposedly arranged for the map to disappear. One of the things you learn as a lawyer is to leave a good enough answer alone.

  Stevens looked conspicuously at his watch. “It’s getting kind of late. We’d like to get out of here before the traffic gets really bad.”

  I knew, of course, that what he really wanted was to get his witness out of there before I pursued the current line of questioning further. “I have only two quick areas to go into,” I said, “on a different topic.”

  “Okay,” Stevens said. “If it’s really quick, go for it.”

  “Mr. Giordano,” I asked, “do you have a copy of the map yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “With regard to the map you believe your brother took to Professor James’s office, was it a copy or an original?”

  “It was a copy.”

  “So if it’s a copy that’s missing and you have a copy yourself, why do you want the copy your brother allegedly took to Professor James’s office back?”

  “Because that copy has some information on it that my copy does not, and I don’t know of any other copy with that information on it.”

  “What’s the information that’s on it?”

  “That,” Stevens said, “is business confidential and is objected to on that ground. I instruct the witness not to answer the question.”

  “To save you the trouble of asking,” Quinto said, “I’m going to follow my counsel’s instruction and decline to answer.”

  “Okay,” I said.
“Maybe we can work out a stipulation as to confidentiality. But to save us all a lot of work in the meantime, Mr. Stevens, how about if you permit the witness to answer the question now, and we’ll all instruct the court reporter to mark the pages as confidential until such time as we can get the court to hear our motion, in case that’s necessary?”

  “What guarantee do we have that you won’t disclose it in the meantime?” Stevens asked.

  “Well, I’m an attorney, Mr. Quesana is an attorney and Ms. James, even though she’s a professor, is still a member of the bar. So we’ll give you our pledge as officers of the court not to disclose the information prior to entering into a stipulation or obtaining a court order.”

  “Are you all agreeable to that?” Stevens asked.

  “Yes,” Jenna said.

  “Yes,” Oscar said.

  Stevens leaned over and whispered to Quinto. I saw Quinto nod his head in the affirmative.

  “Okay, then,” Stevens said. “Mr Giordano, go ahead and answer the question, if you recall it.”

  “I recall it,” Quinto said. “And the answer is that the information on the copy is the exact longitude of the wreck, out there in the Pacific.”

  “Is that on your copy as well?” I asked.

  “No. You see, I hate to say it, but Primo and I didn’t quite trust each other. So when we hired a company to drag sonar arrays across the area where the ship likely went down, we asked the captain of the search ship, after he found the wreck, to put the exact latitude of the wreck only on my copy of the map, and the exact longitude on Primo’s copy.”

  “So neither one of you had both pieces of information?”

  “Correct. We planned, after we raised enough money to bring up the treasure from the ocean bottom, to combine our data so we would know where to go to do it.”

  I sat and thought about it for a few seconds. In many years of taking depositions, I had developed a nose for stories that smelled bad, and this one certainly had an aroma. But I couldn’t figure out exactly where the smell was coming from, so I just plowed ahead with a few more questions.

  “Mr. Giordano,” I asked, “didn’t your brother have other copies of his version of the map, the one with the longitude on it?”

  “I assume he did, but I’ve been unable to find them.”

  “Do you have extra copies of your version?”

  “Certainly.”

  “So if you have the exact latitude and longitude of where a wreck is, you don’t really need a physical map, do you?”

  He smiled. “Nope.”

  “Why did you and your brother bother to use a map at all?”

  “It’s so much better,” he answered, “to give investors a map with an X on it to mark the spot. It’s more romantic.”

  “Romantic?”

  “Sure. Lots of people invest in this sort of venture out of a sense of romance. It’s much more exciting to tell your friends at a cocktail party that you’ve invested in looking for sunken treasure than to tell them you invested in a totally quiet garbage disposal.”

  “But you couldn’t put the actual X on any investor copy, right, because it would give away the location?”

  “Right. We put an X on a map, all right—we used that old map my grandfather found in the archive—but we told the investors that the X we placed wasn’t at all close to where the ship actually lies. The Pacific is large, and even if you put the X a hundred miles from where the ship really is, no one will ever find it. Or at least not with the amount of money anyone other than some government is willing to spend.”

  “If someone invested, did they get more precise location information later?”

  “We told them, ‘Hey, if you invest and we get enough other investors, we’ll give you a map with the real X on it.’”

  “Has anyone invested?”

  “Not yet.”

  It was all very interesting—if true—but we were clearly running out of time, so I decided to close with something else.

  “I have one final question today. Mr. Giordano, do you know how to pick a lock?”

  Stevens, rather than objecting, just sat there, kind of stunned at the question, clearly trying to think up an appropriate objection. But before he could, Quinto answered, “No, I don’t.”

  “All right, then. I’m going to ask the court reporter to e-mail me a rough-draft transcript of today’s testimony. And I’d like to find a date to resume sometime next week. We’re allowed a total of seven hours for a deposition, and we haven’t come close to that today.”

  Stevens looked at his smartphone, clearly paging through his calendar. “No can do, I’m afraid. It’ll have to be sometime after Thanksgiving.”

  I had expected that, of course. “That’s fine, but let’s actually pick a date before we leave.” And we did. December 20. Which meant, having picked a date five days before Christmas, that it wouldn’t actually happen until at least January.

  After Stevens and Quinto cleared the room, I looked around and asked, of no one in particular, “So what’s next?”

  Oscar answered. “I think that you, Robert, should try to get in touch with this Cabano guy and see what you can learn. And Jenna, you and I need to get together and talk.”

  “Talk about what?” Jenna asked.

  “Right before the depo started I got a call from the district attorney.”

  “The district attorney or an assistant district attorney?”

  “The man himself.”

  “I’m embarrassed to say,” Jenna said, “that I’m not even sure who that is now. I didn’t vote in the last election, and I didn’t pay much attention to who was running.”

  I spoke up. “The new district attorney is Charlie Benitez.”

  There was a dead silence in the room while Jenna took that in.

  “You mean the assistant DA who prosecuted you, Robert?” Jenna asked. “The one I beat in the preliminary hearing?”

  “The very same one,” I said. Looking at her, I could tell she was taken aback by the news.

  “He probably holds a grudge,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Oscar said, “whether he holds a grudge or not. He seemed friendly enough in the call and just wanted some information. My suggestion, Jenna, is that you and I meet in your office tomorrow morning to go over what he wants.”

  “Okay,” Jenna said. “I’m planning to make a really big push on finishing up my law review article tomorrow morning, so how about we start early, like 7:00 A.M.?”

  “That’s not really early in my book,” Oscar said, “but if you insist on starting late, it’s okay by me.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Jenna James

  Week 2—Thursday

  Seven in the morning might not have been early in Oscar’s book, but it was nevertheless still dark as I rode my bike from my condo to the law school. As I pedaled up the last hill, I thought about the fact that Oscar hadn’t told me in advance exactly what the DA wanted. On the other hand, I hadn’t pressed him to tell me. Maybe he thought not knowing would allow me a better night’s sleep. Maybe I thought so myself. I had hardly slept a wink.

  When I wheeled my bike into the hallway that led to my office, Oscar was already there, waiting.

  “Hi, Jenna.”

  “Hi. I’m glad to see you found the door to my office locked.”

  “I even tried it. It’s locked tight.”

  I got out my keys, unlocked it and we went in. I leaned my bike up against the wall and tossed my helmet onto one of the guest chairs.

  “Grab the other chair, Oscar. Do you want some coffee? I bought a new pot, but I’ve stopped setting it to make coffee automatically before I get here, so it’ll take a few minutes.”

  “Sure. Whenever you’ve got it ready.”

  I opened up my purse and took out a fresh bag of Peet’s dark roast coffee, preground. I took out a measuring spoon and spooned the proper amount of coffee into the cone-shaped permanent filter. Oscar just sat and watched me do it.

  “You’re no l
onger using special beans?”

  “Nope. I just buy coffee already ground at the grocery store and carry it back and forth with me in my purse. Someone tried to kill me, and I figure they might try again.”

  “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “Perfect sense.”

  Instead of taking the seat I had offered him, Oscar was standing, looking at the books in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that occupied one wall of my office. “You have a lot of books about ships,” he said.

  “Not just ships. Also books about admiralty law and sunken treasure. Since I got interested in all of that four years ago, I’ve turned into something of a collector. Feel free to browse while I go and get some water for the coffee. I’ll be right back.”

  I walked down the hall to the kitchen and filled the carafe. When I got back, Oscar was thumbing through a large-format book with a colorful cover, which he had pulled from the bookshelf.

  “I never realized,” he said, “how many ships there are on the bottom of the sea.”

  “Well, you’re looking at Pickford’s Atlas of Shipwrecks and Treasure. It’s pretty authoritative, and if you look in the back, it’s got great maps, divided by world region, showing known or suspected shipwreck sites.”

  He flipped to the back of the book. “Is the Ayuda in here somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “Does that mean it’s not real?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows? It probably means that at the very least Pickford didn’t consider it certain enough to list in his atlas. You can find mention of the Ayuda on online treasure sites, though, of which there are a ton.”

  “What’s your best guess about it?”

  “Best guess? A Manila galleon by that name probably did sink on the west side of Catalina Island in 1641, but its cargo was likely salvaged not long after the ship sank. What was left of the ship has been pounded by the Pacific Ocean for, at this point, more than four hundred fifty years.”