Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “A long time.”

  “Right, and it was made of wood. So it’s either been dashed apart, rotted or buried so deep in the sand that no one is ever going to find whatever’s left of it.”

  “I thought wood didn’t rot under water.”

  “Some does, some doesn’t. Depends on the type of wood, the amount of oxygen in the water, its acidity and a lot of other factors.”

  “So given all of that, why did Primo think he and his brother had found it?”

  “All Primo would tell me is that they dug up some information in the Spanish archive—the survivor account that was mentioned in the depo yesterday—that suggested the ship sank much farther offshore than all the legends say it did.”

  “Do they know exactly where the ship is?”

  “He claimed they’d actually located it with precision.”

  “Which Quinto said in the deposition, too. But you sound dubious.”

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in 1641 mariners could measure latitude pretty accurately while aboard a ship at sea, but not longitude. That wasn’t figured out for another hundred years. So even if Quinto and Primo somehow managed to figure out the latitude at which the Ayuda sank—assuming it wasn’t near Catalina—all that got them was the ability to draw a thin line on a map. One that stretched west from Catalina toward China, all the way to Manila.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Something like seven thousand miles, maybe even eight.”

  “And yet they seem to think they, using a sonar search, found out where the ship really is.”

  “Yes, but taking off on the point Quinto made in the depo about how vast the ocean is, if you can only guess that a wreck is somewhere along a couple of hundred miles of latitude—and you don’t even know the latitude with precision—you’re not going to find it. Not unless you spend tens of millions of dollars or have the kind of luck you need to win a Powerball jackpot.”

  I decided to interrupt the conversation for something even more important than latitude and longitude. “Do you,” I asked, “want some coffee, Oscar? Enough has dripped in that I can pour you a cup.”

  “I’d love some.”

  I poured him a cup, then poured one for myself. He sat down in the chair that didn’t have my helmet on it. I went to sit behind my desk.

  “Oscar, this is all very interesting, and I’ve come to love the lore of sunken ships, but let’s cut to the chase. What did the DA want?”

  “He wanted to tell me some things, and he wanted to ask me some things.”

  “What things?”

  “He wanted to tell me that the autopsy shows that Primo died from respiratory failure secondary to being poisoned, and that the preliminary toxicology results say the poison was sodium azide.”

  “Which we already knew, more or less.”

  “Right.”

  “What else did he want to tell you?” I took a large gulp from my coffee. I assumed the news wouldn’t be good.

  “That the dregs of coffee from Primo’s cup contained sodium azide in a high enough concentration that drinking a modest amount of it could kill you.”

  “Okay. We suspected that, too. What else?”

  “He told me that the search of your apartment turned up a receipt for the purchase of a five percent aqueous solution of sodium azide, purchased at a local chemical company for cash. A printed-out receipt with your name on it was in a pocket of one of your blazers.”

  I leaped out of my chair. I couldn’t believe it, but it was vividly obvious who was behind it. “Tommy!”

  “What?”

  “That little shit must have bought the stuff. He could easily have put the receipt in my blazer pocket. Or in one of them. I have four of those blazers, all identical. So I was right to put him on my suspect list. In fact, he’s now number one.”

  “Well, for whatever reason, the DA still thinks it could have been you.”

  I banged my cup down on my desk so hard that some of the coffee slopped out. “This is absurd. What is my motive supposed to be for poisoning Primo?”

  “The map, I guess.”

  “Oh, dear God. I don’t have the map. I never saw the map. I don’t know where the map is.”

  “It’s somewhere, last seen in your office.”

  “Well, maybe so, but as we learned at the depo, there really isn’t any ‘map.’ It’s just an old piece of paper they found in the archive that they put some numbers on, along with a meaningless X.”

  “Well, the DA is willing to listen to an explanation. His request is that we permit the police to interview you about this whole situation.”

  “I already talked to the police. Detective Drady interviewed me the day Primo died.”

  “They want a more extensive interview now.”

  “I don’t want to talk to them. They’ll just take whatever I say and twist it to fit their ridiculous theory. I’m better off saying nothing.”

  “I think we might be able to blow this whole thing out of the water by agreeing to do it. You and I will go over everything carefully beforehand and get rid of the case. Point out all the absurdities to them.”

  “That’s your advice?”

  “It is.”

  “Let me sleep on it.”

  “All right. But sleep on this, too: If it was Tommy who bought the poison and you’re going to blame it all on him, what was his motive for trying to kill you? Or Primo, for that matter? Or for trying to frame you? You still haven’t come up with good answers to those questions.”

  CHAPTER 56

  After Oscar left I tried to work on the additional footnotes Stanford had requested for my law review article. My conversation with the editor had been only ten days earlier, but it seemed like a year had gone by. I had trouble getting back into it. Not only that, I was going to have to go back to the library to finish up. Some of the materials I needed weren’t available in my own collection or online.

  I had told Oscar that I wanted to sleep on the decision about whether to submit to another police interview. As lunchtime approached it was becoming more and more clear to me that if I wanted to avoid another sleepless night, not to mention a workless day, I needed to make that decision sooner rather than later.

  I decided to consult a pastrami sandwich. Although I usually avoided all that fat and all those carbs, pastrami sandwiches had always seemed able to speak clearly to me in times of trouble. I had even consulted one about whether to leave M&M for a teaching job. I walked to Northern Lights, a small eatery on the north side of the campus, and ordered a double pastrami with extra mayo, a large bag of chips and a supersized Coke.

  The sandwich said Oscar was a great lawyer, and you should always follow your lawyer’s advice.

  I called Oscar while the pastrami rush was still with me. “Let’s do it,” I said.

  “All right, when?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “The DA told me they they want to do it late today.”

  “No. Not today. And tomorrow I have my sunken treasure seminar at nine. So early tomorrow morning or in the afternoon will have to work. Where do they want to do this?”

  “Since it’s going to be Detective Drady doing the interview—you were right about that—I assume at the UCLA police station on campus.”

  “I’m not going there. If they want to interview me, they can come to my office. If not, they can stuff it.”

  “I’ll try to put it in more acceptable language, as a request.”

  “Put it in whatever language you want. I’m not going to the police station like I’m some perp. It’s me someone’s trying to kill. I don’t understand why they can’t get that through their thick heads.”

  “I think the sodium azide receipt in your pocket didn’t help.”

  “You don’t think I did it, do you?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then, let me know what time. My office or nowhere.”

  After I hung up, I really wanted to order
a second sandwich, but I resisted and instead walked back to my office. Once there I scooped up my notebook computer and headed for the library. To get there I used a door on the third floor that leads from the faculty office hallway directly onto the third floor of the library.

  The door is alarmed to prevent students from taking books and leaving without checking them out. Faculty are given keys that fit into a wall lock a foot or so to the left of the door. The trick is to open the door and then turn the key before the alarm goes off. It’s hard to turn the key in time. A couple of times I haven’t made it. I’ve always suspected the alarm was set up with such a short fuse because library staff would really rather have you walk through the main entrance. This time I made it through without setting off the alarm.

  The admiralty law collection is housed in a funky area of the library called the Mezzanine. It’s a sort of half floor sandwiched between the main floor and the second, dating from the founding of the law school back in the ’50s, and it looks it. Instead of carpeting it has concrete floors, and instead of rich wood shelving it has rows of orangish metal shelving that run from floor to ceiling, densely packed with books. The aisles between the rows are narrow.

  The Mezzanine is reached by an internal concrete stairway off the main reading room. Along the back wall are small study carrels with beige Formica desktops and beige wooden Boston chairs with curved arms and upright slats on the back. They always reminded me of the chair I had to sit in when I was called into the principal’s office in high school, which was frequently.

  I liked working in the carrels because no one bothered me there. I’d arrive, turn off my cell phone and just work. When I began my Stanford law review article, I commandeered one particular carrel and simply left the books I was using in it, topped with a big DO NOT RESHELVE sign in red. In the more than a year that I’d been working on the article, no one had touched my stuff. It was a cozy place, away from it all.

  When I got to my carrel, it looked like it had been rearranged slightly. I hadn’t been there in almost two weeks, so I brushed it off as a false memory. I sat down and got to work. After working steadily for about an hour, I heard the alarm bell on the third floor door go off. The bell was so loud that it sounded throughout the library, even on the Mezzanine. Some poor faculty member had no doubt failed to turn the key quickly enough and had been nailed by the door’s alarm bell.

  I worked for maybe another ten minutes, then reached for Volume 6 of the Benedict on Admiralty treatise, which I had kept in the exact same place in my carrel for almost a year—top shelf, right-hand side. It wasn’t there. Nor could I find it anywhere else in the carrel, which, admittedly, was something of a mess, with forty or fifty books scattered about, some shelved, some just stacked six or seven high on the desktop. Probably someone else had needed Volume 6—it was about international admiralty treaties—and had reshelved it in the stacks instead of putting it back in my carrel. No biggie.

  I got up and walked down the row of stacks that began right next to my carrel. As I entered the row, I heard what sounded like a woman’s high heels coming up the concrete steps. I didn’t think anything of it. Quite a few of the women law students had returned to wearing them, although only God knew why.

  The thirty-three volume Benedict on Admiralty treatise was always shelved in the middle of the row on the very top shelf, high enough up that at five foot six, I could barely reach it. I peered up at it. Volume 6 was missing. I would have to ask the librarians to search for it. In the meantime I could make do with one of the treaties in Volume 5. I didn’t much feel like stretching up, so I glanced around to see if I could locate one of those rolling library stools to stand on. That’s when I heard a slight groaning noise, like metal bending, and realized that the entire book stack was toppling toward me. I instinctively raised my arms to protect my head.

  I’m not sure how many books hit me. All I know is that I was suddenly being pummeled by dozens of heavy volumes. The thunder of all of them coming down and hitting the floor—and me—more or less simultaneously was deafening. It was all over in a few seconds, and I found myself trapped in a kind of dark, dusty book cave. My arms were over my head, but I couldn’t lower them because there were books jammed beneath my armpits. The metal shelving had bent forward—it had been kept from falling over entirely and killing me only because it hit the shelves on the other side—but it had so weighed down the books on top of me that I couldn’t raise my arms. Every time I moved my torso even a little, the books above and around me shifted. Plus I was pinned back against the still-upright shelf behind me.

  I screamed.

  For what seemed like forever, but was probably only a minute or two, no one came. Then I heard a voice shouting “Is anyone in there?”

  “It’s Professor James. I’m in here.” I realized I was yelling, but my voice came out muffled because dust was choking my mouth and throat.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I tried to yell louder. “I don’t know. Please get me out of here.”

  “We’re trying.”

  I heard still more voices, and then the books began to move and shift again as people pulled them from both ends of the aisle and, finally, from over my head. I could glimpse two or three people at each aisle end, trying to push the shelf back off of me.

  “Keep calm,” someone said. “We’ll have you out in a moment. We called the EMTs.”

  I’m not sure how long I was buried. Someone later told me it took almost five minutes to dig me out. When I emerged, somewhat dirty and feeling a bit bruised, particularly on my arms, I had to duck to get out from under the still-leaning shelf. I stood up when I got out, only to be greeted by my EMT friends from the UCLA ambulance—Carter Sullivan and Susan Suarez. They were standing there with their blue cart.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Carter said. “We couldn’t see who was in there. How do you feel?”

  “Upset. Someone’s trying to kill me.”

  “We need to check you out. Could you lie down, Professor, so we can do that?”

  “Sure.”

  Carter and Susan moved to my sides and eased me gently down onto their gurney, which they had lowered to floor level. Susan put the blue bag under my legs and inflated it, while Carter put on the automatic blood pressure cuff and inflated it.

  “Professor, can you tell me your name?” he asked.

  “Yes. Jenna James. Assistant professor of law.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “The law library, on the Mezzanine.”

  “What happened here?”

  “I was looking for a book and the whole stack fell on me.”

  “Do you know how that happened?”

  “No.”

  Susan spoke up. “Her vitals are pretty good. Blood pressure’s a little high, pulse is a little high, not surprisingly.”

  “Did any of the books,” Carter asked, “hit your head?”

  “No, I had my arms up, so they hit my arms.”

  He examined my arms. “They’re going to be a bit bruised.”

  “What else is new?”

  “Can you move your arms and legs without pain?”

  I moved my legs up and down, then flexed my arms over my head. “No problems.”

  “Good. You probably haven’t broken anything. But we’d like,” he said, “to transport you to Reagan. You could have a concussion without knowing it, and given what happened to you last week, it would be prudent.”

  “You were the crew for that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was unconscious.”

  “Right.”

  “I appreciate what you say, Carter, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to wait right here until someone shows up and explains to me exactly what happened.”

  One of the librarians spoke up. “Someone from engineering is on the way, and someone from the UCLA police department. But we can’t let you stay here, Professor. It’s not safe. We’re going to have to clear the Mezzanine and close it until we find out what hap
pened.”

  “Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.”

  CHAPTER 57

  Carter made one more attempt to get me to agree to go to the hospital. When I declined again, he handed me an Against Medical Advice form and asked me to sign it. I skimmed it. It said I released the Emergency Services Agency from all liability and mentioned that the possible consequences of refusing medical treatment could include head injury, broken bones and internal organ injury, and included consequences “up to and including death.” I scribbled my signature on the form. Carter then asked one of the librarians to sign as witness to the fact that I’d signed it. After that the librarians all departed. Who could blame them?

  Simultaneously, a UCLA police officer arrived. When they told me they’d called the police, I feared Detective Drady would show up, but instead it was a guy in uniform who identified himself as Officer Perez. Perez asked me what had occurred and I told him. He, too, looked at my bruised arms and clucked.

  “You were lucky you weren’t more badly injured.”

  “I know, Officer.”

  “This is the first library accident I’ve ever investigated.”

  “This was no accident.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I heard someone coming up the steps right before the shelving started to fall. From the sound of it, it was a woman in high heels.”

  “Don’t people come up here all the time?”

  “Not very often, really.”

  “But they do, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So it may just have been a coincidence.”

  “I don’t think so. Someone has been trying to kill me for almost two weeks.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “How’s that?”

  “Don’t you know about Primo Giordano, the student who died after drinking coffee in my office?”

  “I’ve been on vacation for the last two weeks, so I’ve heard about it, but I’m not working that case.”

  “Well, that happened because someone was trying to kill me.”