Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “All right, what else?”

  “Let me show you.” He opened his briefcase and took out a spiral-bound notebook with a green cover. “This is similar to the one Primo used. I bought it at Ackerman Union yesterday.”

  “And?”

  “Tear a page out of it.” He handed it to me.

  I took it from him. “Any page?”

  “Try one from the middle.”

  “Okay.” I opened the notebook—it was narrow ruled—and ripped out a page.

  “Now look inside the spiral spring that held the page you just tore out.”

  I looked.

  “What do you see?”

  “Tiny little flecks of paper from where the page used to be before I tore it out, stuck within the spiral metal spring.”

  “Right.”

  “I see where you might be going, but as I told you before, there weren’t any little flecks in Primo’s notebook spring. I looked.”

  “None that you could see. But there apparently were some. Smith used a special kind of very bright light that allows him to see tiny, almost microscopic paper fragments. It seems someone tore out at least one sheet.”

  “But we have no way of knowing for sure which sheet was torn out, who did it or when,” I said.

  “Right. And because you were dumb enough to take possession of the notebook, the police will no doubt suspect you did it.”

  “So we’re stuck with that bad fact.”

  “Not quite. It turns out that Primo wrote in his diary with a ballpoint pen on paper that’s fairly soft. When he pressed on the paper to write, it made a slight depression on the next piece of paper.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “In the old days, they did it by putting a piece of tracing paper on top of the second page and rubbing it with charcoal. Like people do to trace old tombstones. But now there’s a laser instrument that lets you read the next-page impression even better, or at least most of it.”

  “Which page was torn out?”

  “It’s the missing page from the very end, dated the day before he died.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It says Julie is threatening to kill him because he threw her out at the start of the semester.”

  “I’m off the hook.”

  “Maybe not. The laser instrument is new, it doesn’t have much of a scientific track record and it might not be admissible in a trial.”

  “You think this is going to trial?”

  “It could.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “It would be crazy but for the fact that there was that receipt for the poison in your pocket. And the fact that Charlie Benitez may not like you because you beat him in Robert’s trial.”

  “Last time, Oscar, you said you didn’t think he held a grudge.”

  “No, I said I didn’t know if he did or not.”

  “Well, in any case, I beat him fair and square. And it wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of the cops and their lousy investigation.”

  “Prosecutors have a hard time admitting that people they prosecuted were actually innocent. They tend instead to blame the things that went wrong. And in that case what went wrong was a great defense. Which was you.”

  After that rather sobering exchange, we spent the next hour going over what I was going to tell Detective Drady. I promised I would try to answer only the questions asked of me, that I’d let Oscar do the persuading if there was any persuading to be done. I also promised that if Oscar held up his hand, I would immediately shut my mouth.

  CHAPTER 60

  Detective Drady arrived at my office precisely at 8:00 A.M., as we had arranged. After polite greetings and handshakes all around—you might have thought we were there for something a great deal more benign—Drady sat down in one of the two guest chairs, took out a leather-bound notepad and flipped it open. He also took out a black digital recorder about the size of a pack of cigarettes, placed it on my desk and pushed a button. A small red light went on. Oscar whipped out his own identical recorder and put it next to Drady’s. Now I was looking at two tiny red lights.

  “We’re here,” Detective Drady said, “to record the interview of Professor Jenna James concerning the death of Primo Giordano on—” He looked at his notepad and mentioned the date of Primo’s death and the date of the interview.

  “Before we begin,” Oscar said, “I’d like to summarize the ground rules that you and I have agreed on, Detective.”

  “Sure.”

  “First, we’ve agreed that if I object to any question, Professor James need not answer it.”

  “Right. But we’ve also agreed that, should there be a trial in this matter and should this interview be entered in evidence, I may comment on any question she declines to answer.”

  “And I can ask the court not to permit that.”

  “Right.”

  “Would either of you gentlemen,” I asked, “like a cup of coffee before we begin? I just made a full pot.” I hadn’t cleared that question with Oscar in advance, but I saw a small smile flicker across his face.

  “I’d love one,” Oscar said.

  “I think I’ll pass,” Drady responded, not making eye contact with me but instead looking down at his notebook.

  I poured Oscar a cup and handed it to him. I knew he took it black.

  “I want,” Oscar said, “to put a couple of other things on the record here. Detective Drady, you’ve told me that Professor James is not at this time a target of your investigation, nor is she a suspect. Is that correct?”

  “That is correct. She is simply a person of interest.”

  “And you’ve agreed that, if at any time in the interview, her answers lead you to move her into the category of a target or a suspect, you’ll let me know.”

  “Yes.”

  I knew what those terms meant because Oscar had explained them to me. If you were a target, it meant the cops believed you committed the crime and were just looking for proof. If you were a suspect, it meant the cops thought there was a good possibility it was you but weren’t sure. A person of interest was somehow a click down from that, without a tight definition. As Oscar had explained it, if a wife is found dead in a bathtub with her throat slashed, the husband is always a person of interest. If he’s seen driving rapidly away from the house, he’s a suspect. If when he’s stopped he’s got his wife’s blood on him and is carrying a large carving knife, he becomes an instant target.

  “All right,” Drady said, “let’s get started.”

  Oscar took a very loud slurp of his coffee.

  “Professor, when did you first meet Primo Giordano?”

  “He was a student in my admiralty law course in the spring semester last year. I first met him when he took his seat on the first day of that class.”

  “Had you ever had any contact with him at all before that?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “He was taking another class from you this year?”

  “Yes, he was a student in my seminar this semester on the law of sunken treasure.”

  “Did you have any contact with him outside of class?”

  “The first time was last week, when I met with him on the day he died.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “He signed up for an appointment to see me during my office hours a week ago Monday.”

  “How does that work?”

  I took a large and noisy sip from my coffee cup before answering. “Every semester I pick two days during the week when I’ll have office hours. This semester it’s Mondays and Thursdays. I keep a sign-up sheet on the wall outside my office where students can sign up to see me during the available time blocks on those days. Students can sign up for blocks of fifteen minutes.”

  “Do you put up a schedule a week at a time?”

  “No. I’m an optimist, so I put it up for a month at a time.”

  “What do you mean by saying that you’re an optimist?”

  “I mean that I imagine that I can p
redict my schedule a month in advance.”

  “Can you?”

  “Usually.”

  “Did Primo sign up for one of those slots?”

  “Yes, he signed up for the 7:30 A.M. slot that was available a week ago Monday.”

  “Did you know in advance what he wanted to talk about?”

  “No. He had signed up for it during the previous week. I saw him in class the day after he signed up and asked if he could give me a heads-up on the topic, so I could be prepared. He said he’d rather just come in and talk because he had something interesting to talk to me about. I said okay and didn’t ask for further details.”

  “Is it unusual for students to decline to tell you in advance what they want to talk about when they see you?”

  “No. Sometimes it’s because they haven’t yet figured it out. For example, there are some students who just like to check in, so to speak, a couple of times per semester. It’s one way for them to help you remember them years later, when they might want a reference for a job or something.”

  “Had Primo ever signed up for office hours before, in either course?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Do you keep the sign-up sheets?”

  “No. I throw them out when the month’s over.”

  “Do you have the one from this month?”

  “I took it down from the wall and gave it to Mr. Quesana. I later put up a substitute sheet for the balance of the month.”

  Drady looked over at Oscar, who opened his brown briefcase, extracted a manila envelope and handed it to Drady. “Here you go,” Oscar said. Drady clicked open his own briefcase, pulled out a large plastic bag of the size used for freezer storage and dropped the envelope into the plastic bag.

  “Had you ever talked to Primo outside of class before he came to see you on the day he died?”

  “By outside of class, do you mean outside of the physical classroom in which I teach? Because students often come up to the front of the room to talk to me before or after class, and I have no recollection of whether he ever did that. Certainly he wasn’t one of the regulars at that.”

  “Yes, I mean outside of the physical classroom.”

  “I think that during the admiralty law class he ran into me in a hallway one day.”

  I looked over at Oscar to see if it was okay to continue down that path. It wasn’t something we had discussed during our preparation. He didn’t raise his hand or make any other gesture, so we continued.

  “What did he want to talk about?”

  “He wanted to know if I could read Spanish texts from the seventeenth century.”

  “Do you know why he thought you might be able to read them?”

  “Because I had mentioned in class that I had had a research grant to spend a summer in the Spanish state archive in Seville to study seventeenth-century documents there related to Spanish treasure ships.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I was terrible at it.”

  “Did he tell you why he wanted to know?”

  Oscar held up his hand. “Officer Drady, I think this is going fairly far afield. We’re talking about something that happened many months ago. I thought you were investigating a death that took place recently.”

  “I think this is relevant, and it may actually tend to exonerate your client. But if you don’t want me to continue, I won’t.”

  “Okay,” Oscar said. “You can go on for a while.”

  “What was the question again?” I asked.

  “Did Primo Giordano tell you why he wanted to know if you could read Spanish from the seventeenth century?”

  “No.”

  “How long did you talk to him about it?”

  “Maybe a minute. I’d forgotten about it until just now.”

  Oscar spoke up. “Why does that tend to exonerate my client?”

  “I can’t explain that to you until we complete our investigation. Telling you now might compromise it. In any case, I want to move on to another topic. Professor, did you buy a bottle of sodium azide at Angin Chemical Corporation downtown?”

  “No.”

  “You never went down there and purchased it for cash?”

  “I don’t even know where it is because I’ve never heard of it.”

  “We’d like you to participate in a lineup so that the salesclerk can identify you as the purchaser. Or not.”

  “Whoa.” Oscar was on his feet. “I think this interview is at an end. This is some kind of ambush.”

  “No, Mr. Quesana, we’re just trying to get at the facts. If your client will voluntarily participate in a lineup, I think we can resolve all of this one way or another, since the woman who sold the poison to—well, to somebody—has lawyered up and won’t talk to us. But both her attorney and her company’s attorneys are willing to have her try to identify the person who bought the chemical in a lineup. If she fails to identify your client as the one who bought the chemical, this case is over, at least as far as Professor James goes.”

  “Even though,” Oscar said, “you supposedly found a receipt for it in the pocket of one of her jackets.”

  “Right, and if she didn’t buy it, the receipt had to be planted.”

  “Do you have a copy of the receipt with you?”

  “Sure.” There was more unsnapping of briefcase locks, and Drady handed a piece of paper to Oscar. “Here it is.”

  “This is a copy?” Oscar asked.

  “Yes. I’ll arrange for you and your expert to examine the original.”

  “Fine. And now I have something for you.” Oscar opened his briefcase again and handed over a plastic bag that contained what I knew to be the original of Primo’s diary.

  “What is it?” Drady asked.

  “It’s Primo’s diary. You can match the handwriting in it with the handwriting on the sign-up sheet I just gave you. You’ll find the diary is genuine.”

  “What’s the bottom line of the diary?”

  “Jenna didn’t kill him.”

  “Who did, then?”

  “His brother Quinto.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” Drady said.

  “My client and I,” Oscar said, “need to confer. Would you mind, Detective, stepping out for a few minutes? I’m sure you know the campus well and can find someplace where you can get an untainted cup of coffee. We’ll need about ten.”

  “No problem, Counselor. I’ll be back.”

  CHAPTER 61

  After Drady shut the door, I asked Oscar, “Do you want me to do the lineup?”

  “Are you nuts? Lineups are for suckers, and they can only force you to do one if you’re in custody. Not only that, lineups are often fixed. Either the police indicate by their body language who they want identified, or the person doing the identifying is shown pictures where, one way or another, the message gets through. And speaking of pictures, it will be worse in this case because your picture could soon be in the papers, and if that happens the clerk will see them.”

  “I’ve been wondering why there’s been almost no news coverage of this.”

  “It’s because Primo wasn’t a pretty young white undergraduate woman. He was a late-twenties male foreigner. That’s not a story, particularly when he died in the hospital and not here, thank God. To most of the media, without access to the coroner’s report, it still reads like a drug overdose. Ho-hum. So far as I know, there was only one small item in the Bruin about it.”

  “Maybe it will stay that way.”

  “Might, might not. Pretty soon the coroner’s office is going to release their report, assuming the police let them. Once our friends in the media read the word poison, the headline DID PROF POISON STUDENT? is going to be all over the place. And you didn’t help matters yesterday when you talked in the library about someone trying to kill you. That rumor is probably all over Westwood by now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s all coming out soon anyway.”

  “Can we go back to the lineup
thing for a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  “Since I didn’t buy the poison, don’t you think there’s a good chance the clerk will fail to identify me, and then it will all be over?”

  “Too big a risk. Like I said, lineups are unreliable. Subjecting yourself to one is stupid.”

  “Maybe they should put Julie in the lineup.”

  “Maybe, but I’m going to let them figure that one out for themselves, at least for the moment. They have the same technology as my forensics guy, and they’ll soon figure out that a page is missing and what it said.”

  “It’s interesting,” I said, “that Drady thinks the receipt might have been planted in my jacket.”

  “It’s interesting that he’s willing to consider that.”

  “Tommy was the one with the easiest access to my jacket.”

  “What’s his motive again?”

  “You don’t buy he’s after an inheritance. So I don’t know.”

  Not long after that, Detective Drady returned and resumed his questions, which were benign. He went over in more detail the timeline of my meeting with Primo, and I pretty much repeated what I’d told him the first time he’d interviewed me. He seemed to accept that I’d locked my door when I left the night before my meeting with Primo. Interestingly, he didn’t seem that concerned about the map or where it had gone. His final set of questions, though, surprised me.

  “Professor,” he asked, “do you know if your roommate, Tom James, knows how to pick locks?”

  Oscar raised his hand. “Can you give me a little bit of guidance as to where this line of questioning is going, Detective?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Drady asked.

  “Whether it’s obvious or not, I think I should answer it,” I said. Oscar made no attempt to stop me.

  “Tommy is the son of my Uncle Freddie. Uncle Freddie is a private detective in Hawaii, and picking locks is kind of a hobby of his. I believe he has taught his children how to do that. But I’ve never asked Tommy if he was one of his students.”