Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  Drady wrote something in his notebook, then asked, “Did your uncle teach you how to do it?”

  “She’s not going to answer that one,” Oscar said. “I can’t see that it has anything to do with this investigation, unless you think she picked the lock on her own office door. Do you have anything else?”

  “No, that’s it. Thank you for your cooperation, Professor, and you as well, Counsel.”

  He picked up his recorder and put it in his briefcase, along with his tablet. As he was opening the door to leave, I said, “Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee for the road? I have some Styrofoam cups.”

  He declined.

  After he left I said to Oscar, “So what do you make of that?”

  “That they’re not very focused on you. For some reason they’re focused on Tommy. Maybe they know what his motive was. When they find the missing page in Primo’s diary and learn what it said, they’re going to start looking hard at Julie, too.”

  “I feel kind of bad, to use the terminology I see in gangster films, that I ‘gave up’ Tommy by telling them he probably knows how to pick locks. It doesn’t make sense that I feel that way, but I do. I guess it’s because he’s family.”

  “You didn’t give him up. The police already had him in their sights.”

  “What happens next?”

  “I’m guessing the criminal part of this just goes away as far as you’re concerned. It never made any sense in the first place.”

  “Goes away? What about the crime that hasn’t happened yet?”

  “What crime?”

  “My upcoming murder.” I pulled up the sleeve on my right arm and displayed the bruises. “Have you forgotten that the poison was in the coffeepot, too, and that library shelves just happened to fall on me yesterday?”

  “I haven’t forgotten, Jenna, but I think that’s going to turn out to have been some kind of freak accident. Whoever put the poison in the coffeepot was trying to kill Primo, not you. That’s what I think.”

  “I’m glad you think so, but I don’t agree,” I said.

  I couldn’t understand why no one else seemed to take seriously that someone was out to kill me. It seemed obvious, and yet no one cared. I wasn’t going to get anywhere in making people concerned for my safety, so I changed the subject. “Even if you’re right about the criminal case, Oscar, there’s still the civil case, remember?”

  “Robert and I talked about that. We both have a gut feeling that the whole thing is a scam to get money out of you, the university or various insurance companies.”

  “Speaking of insurance companies, has Robert heard from mine? I know he submitted a claim.”

  Oscar laughed. “He told me that he received a typical response—preliminary, of course—via a phone call. Seems your policy, like most homeowners’ policies, covers only bodily injury and property damage.”

  I knew, as a lawyer, what he was going to say next.

  “So,” Oscar went on, “the insurance company’s opening position is that the theft of a map isn’t bodily injury, and it’s not property damage either, because theft of someone else’s property isn’t damage to your property. Your policy doesn’t have a theft or loss of entrusted property rider.”

  “That’s not a surprising position on their part, Oscar,” I said.

  “Insurance companies are such thieves, Jenna.”

  I refrained from telling him that, in my days at Marbury Marfan, I had represented a major insurance company against a claim by policyholders that the insurance company had fraudulently denied their claims. At the time I thought policyholders were the thieves.

  “Well,” I said, “if there’s no insurance coverage, there’s not going to be a settlement, and we’ll need to defeat the civil suit on the merits. Maybe I can learn more about the scam you suspect from Aldous, since he reviewed the investment proposal. At some point he has to stop hiding behind that confidentiality agreement. Especially if he wants me to go to Buffalo with him.”

  “I thought you weren’t going there ever.”

  “I seem to go back and forth about it in my own head. One moment he’s a suspect, the next I’m at least toying with the idea of joining him in Buffalo. Anyway, let’s not talk about that today. Let’s focus on what we can do to defeat the civil suit. What about getting info from that guy in Spain Quinto identified?”

  “Cabano, you mean? Robert tried to get in touch with him in Seville, but he didn’t return his calls.”

  “The General Archive of the Indies has digitized a lot of their documents from that period. Like I showed you guys, you can just dial them up on your computer. Many of them have been translated to modern Spanish.”

  “I know. Robert stayed up late Wednesday night looking at them and using a translation program to render them into English. He couldn’t find any survivor account from the sinking of the Ayuda in 1641, or from any other year, for that matter.”

  “Maybe I should look at the records.”

  “You probably should. But in the meantime, Robert is already on his way to Seville to look for the document himself. If it exists.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. He thought he could do more good there than here. He left at the crack of dawn Thursday morning, with a plane change in Miami. He may even be in Seville by now.”

  “But Oscar, he doesn’t speak the language well, and he won’t be able read the archaic Spanish script.”

  “He’s going to do what all lawyers do, my dear.”

  “Which is?”

  “Hire an expert when he gets there.”

  “Is Tess going with him?”

  “No. She told him she thought she could be more useful to you here. Whatever that means.”

  CHAPTER 62

  I wasn’t quite ready, psychologically, to teach my 9:00 A.M. seminar on the law of sunken treasure. I was still unnerved by the interview with Drady. Oscar thought it was all going to go away. I wasn’t so sure. But classes must go on.

  Most days I’m a few minutes early for class. That day I was five minutes late. The first thing I saw on walking in was Julie, sitting in the front row. I noticed she was avoiding making eye contact with me. The thought that went through my head was, precisely: You little bitch. You killed him yourself and tried to set me up by giving me the diary. But you were too stupid to realize that the writing on the torn-out page can still be read. This is only just beginning for you.

  Instead of saying any of that out loud, though, I stood at the podium and said to the class as a whole, “Apologies for being late. Something came up.” Then I put a DVD in the player and projected my image for the day, which was a split picture. On the right-hand side was a picture of the Manila galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, which sank along the coast of Saipan in 1638 on its voyage out from the Philippines to Acapulco. On the left-hand side of the screen was a handwritten document from the General Archive of the Indies, written in the cramped script of an early seventeenth-century notary.

  The document was a page from the report of an investigation the Spanish Crown undertook after the ship sank. The investigation uncovered a tale of incompetence—the governor of the Philippines had appointed his inexperienced twenty-two-year-old nephew, Don Juan Francisco, as the commander of the ship. It was also a tale of corruption. The governor had secretly shipped more than a thousand pieces of twenty-two-karat gold jewelry to be sold by the nephew in Acapulco, which violated just about every rule in the Spanish rulebook. The jewelry represented bribes paid to the governor for appointing people to office.

  Several weeks before, I had passed out to the students the page of handwriting I was now projecting and asked those in the class who said they spoke Spanish to try to read it and translate it into English. This was going to be fun.

  I called on a student in the second row. “Henry, I think you said you spoke good Spanish. How did you do in deciphering the document?”

  “Miserably. It took me several hours to puzzle out four or five lines.” />
  “Is the problem that you don’t understand the words, that they’re archaic words?”

  “No, it’s the handwriting. They didn’t put spaces between words, they didn’t use punctuation and they used capitals in random ways. Plus some of the letters are quite different.”

  “What did the lines you managed to read say, in your opinion?”

  “Best I can make out, they say that Don Juan Francisco, the nephew who was the master of the ship, was a total idiot.”

  There was laughter all around.

  “I don’t assume, Henry, that those are the actual words used?”

  “No. I think they use a phrase like ‘lacking competence.’ In Spanish, of course.”

  “Yes. And as we discussed when I handed out this assignment several weeks ago—the whole point of which was to show how difficult this is—that Don Juan was basically there to protect the governor’s illegal shipment, and to get it sold in Acapulco.”

  “What I wonder,” Henry said, “is how they managed to conduct an investigation of corruption that took place in the Philippines, when the authorities were in Spain.”

  “Can anyone answer that?”

  Candace, a woman in the third row, raised her hand. “The people in the Philippines—in Manila—investigated it themselves and then sent the report to the authorities in Spain and New Spain, that is, Mexico.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Empires, even in the days before Facebook, managed to keep in touch.”

  I clicked again and projected a new image from the DVD. This one was of the gold-encrusted jewels—the governor’s stash—recovered when the Concepción was salvaged in 1987. “Now what I’d like to discuss is one of the issues at the heart of this course: who owns what. The treasures of the Concepción were salvaged in 1987. The ship was in territorial waters just off the coast of Saipan. Why is that an issue here, Candace?”

  “Because,” she said, “Saipan is a territory of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is itself a self-governing territory of the United States. The cargo was originally owned by Spain, but it was shipped from what is now the sovereign nation of the Philippines and was headed for New Spain, which is now Mexico. So all of them could have made claims.”

  “But did they? For the balance of today’s class, I’d like to have us pick through the various salvage permits you’d need to obtain from the government of the Marianas, and whether any of the international treaties might apply, even though the wreck was in the territorial waters of the United States.”

  During the rest of the class we did just that. When the class was over, I saw Julie making a beeline for the door. I practically jumped down from the podium, caught her before she got there and said, “Julie, I’d really like to talk to you.”

  “Does it have to be right now, Professor? I have a class with Professor Broontz right after this one, and I don’t want to be late.”

  What I wanted to say was, Why on earth would you want to take a class with that woman? But I couldn’t, of course, denigrate another faculty member to a student, so I just said, “Oh, what course are you taking with her?”

  “I’m doing an independent study.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “It’s going great. She’s a brilliant teacher.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Julie, but I really do need to talk to you now. And it’s private enough that I’d like to chat in my office, even if it makes you a few minutes late for Professor Broontz’s class.”

  “All right.”

  We walked to my office, saying little to each other.

  When we got there, I settled into the chair behind my desk while Julie took one of the guest chairs. I decided not to offer her any coffee, even though there was some left in the pot.

  “Julie, why don’t you close the door?”

  She got up, closed it and returned to her seat. “You don’t seem in a very friendly mood today, Professor.”

  “I’m not. Some of it has to do with you, some of it has to do with other things.”

  “What’s the part about me?”

  I knew Oscar wouldn’t approve of what I was about to do. He wanted me, I knew, to be a good client and stay out of trying to manage my case. He wanted me to do what all lawyers want from their clients: go home, sleep well, I’ll call you when I need you for something. I had tried to do that, but it was starting to drive me crazy. I needed to take charge of my own destiny.

  “Let me begin with a very direct question, Julie: Did you tear a page out of the diary you gave me?”

  “No.”

  “I can tell you’re lying. We detected the little paper pieces left in the coil when you tore the page out. Not only that but I counted the pages in the notebook. There were ninety-nine. If you go and buy that very same brand of notebook at the student store today, it has an even one hundred pages.”

  “Oh.”

  “So let me ask you again, did you tear a page out of that diary?”

  “No. Somebody else must have done it. Maybe Primo.”

  “We gave the diary to the UCLA police, and they’ll come to the same conclusion we did.”

  She sat silent.

  “And,” I lied, “the police will find your fingerprints on it. You didn’t manage to wipe all of them off. So, once again, did you tear out a page?”

  “Okay. Yes, I did.”

  “Do you still have the page?”

  “No, I shredded it.”

  “You realize that if Primo was murdered, or even if he wasn’t, your destroying that page is probably obstruction of justice.”

  “Maybe I should get a lawyer before we talk further.”

  “If you want to do that, go ahead.”

  We sat there for a moment, just staring at each other.

  “Maybe,” she said, “we can talk a little longer without my doing that.”

  “Okay. What did the page say?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Didn’t Primo write in it that you had threatened to kill him? We could tell that from the imprint on the next page.”

  “He did. The reason I tore it out is that that’s not true.”

  “What’s not true about it?”

  “I didn’t threaten to kill him. I said that someday he’d be really sorry he kicked me out. He just interpreted it as a threat.”

  “Were you really angry when you said it?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Okay. A lot. But I didn’t kill him, and I don’t know who did.”

  “Why should I believe that?”

  “We reconciled the night before he died. Patched it up after our six-week separation. Our relationship was always like that. Stormy.”

  “You patched it up how?”

  “Well, we spent the night together. In fact, when Quinto drove Primo over here for your early-morning meeting, I grabbed a ride with them, and I walked with Primo up to your office.”

  “Was the door open?”

  “Yes, it was. We figured you’d just gone down the hall and would be right back.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I went over to Lu Valle Commons for some coffee and a sweet roll. I told him I’d meet him back at your office around 8:00 A.M. because he didn’t think it would take very long. That’s why I was hanging around out in the hall when the EMTs came.”

  “I see.”

  “Professor?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is this going to affect my grade?”

  I had to resist smacking myself in the forehead. Students had one-track minds. Grades were the be-all and end-all of life.

  “No, Julie, it won’t.” I was able to say that in all honesty because exams at UCLA are graded blind, with just ID numbers on the exams instead of student names. So if Julie didn’t kill Primo, her grade would be unaffected, no matter how much of a lying scum I thought she was. If she did kill him, she’d likely be in jail during finals, and I wouldn’t have to worry about her grade.
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  CHAPTER 63

  As soon as Julie left my office, I called Robert, expecting to reach his voice mail. To my surprise, he picked up on the second ring.

  “Hey, Jenna, what’s up?”

  “I assumed you were still on a plane somewhere, Robert.”

  “No, I’m already in Madrid. It’s Friday evening here.”

  “I thought you were going to Seville.”

  “I am. Tomorrow morning on the train. And I don’t mean to be curt, but please tell me what you want to tell me, because I’m badly jet-lagged, and I want to go to bed soon.”

  “OK. I called to tell you that you screwed up in the deposition.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you remember when you were teaching me to take depositions that one of the rules you taught me was, ‘always ask if anyone else was present’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, when you took Quinto’s deposition, do you remember he said he drove Primo to the law school?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He drove Julie there at the same time.”

  “I see. So I didn’t ask if anyone else was in the car. We screwed up.”

  “We?”

  “You could have passed me a note to remind me.”

  “Touché.”

  “Robert, did you really need to go to Spain? Almost all of that stuff is digitized now.”

  “Not all of it, and I want to find Cabano. He won’t return my calls, but I bet I can find him when I get to Seville.”

  “Why are we bothering with this? Oscar thinks the criminal thing is going to go away, at least in regard to me, and we can just litigate the civil case out ’til it collapses under its own weight.”

  “Three reasons. One, I think it’s important to slay the civil case, too, so that it doesn’t come back to haunt you later in some way, including your tenure. Two, the criminal stuff won’t truly go away until they figure out for sure who did it.”

  “And the third reason?”

  “I think it will be cool to be in Seville and do the research there. I’ve been rotting of late, intellectually.”

  “Okay, but I’m not paying for it.”