Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “Does it say anything about his tenure on the Charges Committee?”

  “It says he’s done various tours on both that one and on the Committee on Privilege and Tenure and has served a total of twenty-seven years on one or the other. What do you make of that, Oscar?”

  “He’s a judge.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning he’s a guy who gets off on being an elder in the tribe, and UCLA is his tribe.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Jenna, if we can persuade him that the whole charge against you is crazy and bad for UCLA, he’ll want to get it dismissed and taken somewhere far away, where no one will ever hear of it again. Perhaps he’ll ask Professor Healey to take it with her the next time she goes south and suggest she bury it somewhere along the shores of the Orinoco.”

  “You’re awfully upbeat for you, Oscar.”

  “Well, I should also have mentioned the other possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “Dr. Wing will conclude the solution is to have you buried along the banks of the Orinoco.”

  CHAPTER 72

  Before we left to see Dr. Wing, I suggested to Oscar that we get in touch with Robert and bring him up-to-date. “Perhaps,” I said, “he’s found something in Seville that will be useful.”

  “Well,” Oscar responded, “he called me yesterday from Seville—it must have been very late evening his time—and said he’d learned some useful things, and he wanted to tell me what he’d found. But I was kind of busy, so I suggested that since you were no longer the focus of the criminal investigation, he just wait until he got back.”

  “He agreed to that? That’s not like him.”

  “He did. But he did fax me an archaic Spanish document from 1641 that he got in Seville. I speak Spanish, but I can’t make out the handwriting. I’ll give you a copy, and we can talk to him about it when he gets back.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “Late Wednesday I think is what he said.”

  “Maybe we could call him, now that this idiocy with Greta Broontz has arisen, and see if what he found out will be useful now.”

  “I don’t think we can, Jenna. He said he was going to Madrid for two days of R&R and was going off the grid.”

  “Off the grid?”

  “He’s turned off his cell phone and his computer and didn’t tell me where he’s staying.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “He’s a lawyer with an active case. He must be entering a second childhood or something.”

  “Could be. But it is what it is.”

  “Maybe Tess knows how to reach him.”

  “No. When you called me so upset, I figured something bad had happened and that we ought to plug Robert into the conversation. So I called Tess right before you got here to see if she knew how to reach him. He told her the same thing—he’s off the grid until his plane lands here late on Wednesday.”

  “Shit.”

  “She also said she had an important lead, but it was ‘not yet at an end.’”

  “On what?”

  “On your case. I think that was her way of saying she hadn’t quite nailed it down yet.”

  “I can’t imagine what she could find, but I guess we’ll find out later what it is.”

  “Jenna, let’s go see Dr. Wing.”

  Which is what we did.

  We found Dr. Wing’s office without too much difficulty, considering that it was inside one of the dozens of medical buildings, many connected by tunnels or pedestrian bridges, that festoon the southern portion of the UCLA campus. Some of the buildings are such rabbit warrens that new interns have been known to disappear for hours trying to find their way. We knocked on the door—there was no secretary or receptionist outside his office—heard someone say “come in” and went in.

  When we entered it was clear we weren’t in a clinical office where Dr. Wing saw patients but in his professorial office. The walls, like those of most professors, were filled with books. Several shelves, however, held unrecognizable medical instruments that looked ominous. There was also a large whiteboard on one wall, with a tray running along the bottom filled with dry-erase markers in various colors.

  “Good afternoon,” Dr. Wing said. He was lying half-prone in a large, red leather recliner with the footrest up. As a result, it was a little hard to tell how tall he was, but I would’ve guessed well over six feet. He had a large nimbus of fine gray hair. He was wearing a long-sleeved, checked sport shirt in blue, dark khakis and black loafers.

  “You’ll excuse me,” he continued, “if I don’t heave these old bones out of this chair to greet you, but it’s been a wearisome day. As you must have guessed, given the name on the door, I’m Dr. Wing, but no title’s necessary. Just Rex will do,” he said, looking at me, “for a fellow member of the faculty. And you get to ride along on that informality, Mr. Quesana.”

  “Just plain Oscar will be fine, too.”

  “And I’m Jenna,” I said.

  “Good, good. Plop yourselves down on that couch there.” He pointed to a black leather couch, much cracked from long wear, which looked to me as if it had been around since Dr. Wing started at UCLA as an undergraduate.

  We sat ourselves down, as instructed. The couch was so huge I felt swallowed up in it. My feet actually failed to touch the ground unless I sat far forward toward the front edge. I suspected the couch was installed before women were much in evidence in the medical school.

  “Well,” Dr. Wing said, “would either of you like something to drink?”

  Oscar politely declined, and although I would have loved a cup of coffee, I decided to decline, too. I was anxious to get to the heart of the matter.

  “I assume,” Dr. Wing continued, “that you two have come to try to persuade me that we shouldn’t pass this case on to the Committee on Privilege and Tenure, or P&T, as we call it.”

  Oscar responded. “At bottom, that’s right.”

  “Good, good. Well, I just got off the phone with the complainant, Professor Broontz. I tried to suggest to her—gently, of course—that the whole thing seemed a tad premature, that the better part of valor might be to put this matter on ice and let the police investigation proceed awhile. She was quite adamant that she didn’t want to do so. If she persists in her adamancy, we’ll be forced to confront the issues here.”

  “Well,” Oscar said, “that’s actually okay with us. Professor James—Jenna—doesn’t want this hanging over her head.”

  Dr. Wing looked at me. “Jenna, do you want to speak for yourself here? It’s fine, of course, to bring your lawyer—great American right and all that—but I like to think that these proceedings are more like a conversation among friends than some sort of adversarial proceeding, all tangled up with law and lawyers.”

  While he was finishing his pitch for me to, in effect, ditch Oscar for now, I thought about how we should respond. On one level, the old let’s-just-talk-among-friends thing was attractive. On the other hand, it was a trap. No one at UCLA was currently my friend.

  “No, Dr. Wing,” I replied, “I’m really quite comfortable having Oscar speak for me. He’s not just my lawyer but an old and trusted friend.”

  “All right, then,” Dr. Wing said, “let’s get to the heart of it. And do call me Rex, please. I meant that.”

  “What do you see as the heart of it, Rex?” Oscar asked.

  “At the heart of it is the question of whether Jenna killed someone.”

  His statement kind of hung there in midair, reminding me what this was all about.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” I said. Why exactly I had the need to reiterate that every time it came up was unclear to me. Surely everyone understood that I denied it. And yet I needed to say it.

  “We agree with that, Rex,” Oscar responded. “One hundred percent.”

  Dr. Wing unlimbered himself from his chair and lumbered to the whiteboard. The guy was huge. Six foot six perhaps, and at least two hundred and fifty pounds. As I watched him,
I wondered if his CV had left off some kind of football career as an undergrad.

  “So,” Dr. Wing said, picking up a marker from the tray, “on the one hand, we have an unsettling death, likely a homicide.” He wrote MURDER in large red letters in the middle of the board, dropped the red marker back into the tray and picked up a blue one. “And over here, we have a supposed disruption of campus tranquility.” He wrote DISRUPTION in very small blue letters to the right of MURDER.

  He tossed the marker high into the air, watched it turn several times and caught it perfectly on its return. “And you can understand, certainly, how murder might cause campus disruption.” He drew a quick, slashing arrow from MURDER to DISRUPTION.

  He dropped the blue marker back into the tray and turned to face us full on. “And so, class, are we going to try to focus on whether there’s a disruption? No, not very much, because in a university who cares if a professor causes disruption? The very nature of the university is to be disruptive. No, the question is what has caused the disruption.”

  I had the sense we were watching a master teacher who probably held his students in thrall.

  “We couldn’t agree more,” Oscar said.

  “And would you agree, Oscar,” Dr. Wing asked, “that if Jenna caused the disruption by murdering her student, that’s a problem for this great university?”

  “Of course.”

  “So the focus of our inquiry must be, must it not, whether Jenna killed her student?”

  “Exactly,” Oscar said.

  “And yet,” Dr. Wing said, “how in the world does our small committee, or P&T, for that matter, if we send it on to them with a finding of probable cause, have the resources, the expertise or the acumen to investigate a murder?”

  There was a small silence in the room. The obvious answer was that the committee had no business at all investigating a murder.

  Finally, Oscar asked, “What’s the bottom line?”

  “The bottom line, Oscar, is that if Jenna doesn’t want to go forward with this, I’m sure my two colleagues on this committee, Professor Trolder and Professor Healey, will be easily persuaded to rule that this is not an appropriate case for us to consider. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” Oscar said. “If we ask you to do it that way, the matter will be over for you, but not for Jenna. Her tenure decision will still be delayed, and the cloud over her head will remain. And that’s true even though the police no longer suspect Jenna of the murder.”

  “But apparently,” Dr. Wing responded, “that information has not reached other people on the campus, particularly not Professor Broontz.”

  “Apparently not,” Oscar said.

  “Just to be clear, then,” Dr. Wing said, “you want us to consider the crime, not just whether there’s disruption from the allegation.”

  “Yes. Jenna didn’t do it. And there’s no evidence that she did.”

  “All right,” Dr. Wing said, “we just need to discuss where and when we’re going to do this crazy thing.” He chuckled. “You know, this reminds me of the start of a joke.”

  “What joke is that?” Oscar asked.

  “Well, I don’t know the punch line, but it’s one of those jokes that begins, ‘A doctor, an economist and a philosopher walk into a bar.’”

  I sat there and thought to myself that the punch line in this case would likely be that later they wished they had skipped the bar and gone to a pancake house instead.

  We then all tried but failed to come up with a good punch line for the joke, and I decided not to volunteer the pancake-house version. After our failed effort, which certainly did seem collegial and informal—even fun—we returned to the serious business at hand. Dr. Wing gave us a choice. He said we could either start the hearing the next day—Tuesday—or wait until the following February, which is when he’d be back from some mini-sabbatical he was taking to Finland.

  Oscar and I went out in the hall to discuss it. My initial reaction was that it was a setup and a trap, because if Greta Broontz and the rest of the Charges Committee were ready to start any time, as Wing claimed, that meant she and the dean—and maybe Wing, too—had been plotting this for a long time. Oscar said we were going to win, that they had no evidence, and we should get it over with, that if we waited months, it would get more complicated and more difficult. He also said that Wing had practically promised us they’d listen to the evidence, decide it was nonsense and not send it on to P&T. I acquiesced, although I wished Robert were around to weigh in on the decision. But he was off the grid somewhere, the asshole.

  We went back in and told Dr. Wing we were good to go for Tuesday. He looked, frankly, kind of shocked that we had chosen to do it so soon. Maybe Oscar was right.

  CHAPTER 73

  Week 3—Tuesday

  Dr. Wing called Monday evening and told us that the Charges Committee usually met in a conference room in Murphy Hall, the administration building across from the law school. He also told us that in order to keep our hearing informal he was going to move it to a place much farther away from the law school and a lot harder for reporters or anyone else to find. He’d chosen a small conference room on the top floor of the multistory red-brick pile that was once the UCLA Hospital before it moved down the road to the palace called the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

  Oscar and I arrived at the conference room at 8:00 A.M. The room had been hard to find, which I guess was the point. Plain is too fancy a word to describe it. It had no art on the walls—walls whose color I would describe as blah cream. There was a small conference table in the middle of the room, topped with blah-white plastic of some kind, badly scratched. In addition, there was a large gouge running down the middle. There were seven uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs placed around the table.

  The three panel members were already present, seated in chairs that were clustered together at the head of the table. Dr. Wing sat in the middle chair of the three. He was decked out, in contrast to his oh-so-casual attire in his office, in a very nice herringbone suit, white shirt and deep red tie. His suit jacket breast pocket sported a handkerchief with his initials, RW, sewn in red thread.

  It was the first time I had gotten a look at the other two panel members in person.

  Samantha Healey, the philosopher, didn’t look to me at all as I thought a philosopher should, which is to say slightly unkempt and a bit plump, with a distracted air about her. Instead, she was about my height, slim and dressed in a blue knit dress that emphasized her figure. Her hair was blonde, clearly bleached and shellacked into a tight helmet. She was wearing black, three-inch heels. I’ve never been good at identifying brands, but they looked expensive. Her eyes were green and, far from presenting an air of distraction, seemed almost to bore into you when she caught you in her gaze. It was hard to picture her along the banks of the Orinoco with her arm around a feathered guy. Maybe the person in that Facebook picture was someone else.

  Paul Trolder, by contrast, looked more like I expected an economist to look. He was of average height, with average brown hair and scuffed brown loafers. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt and—I’m not making this up—a plastic pocket protector that held several pens. He also looked a bit distracted, if failing to make eye contact with anyone in the room was a sign of distraction.

  Professor Broontz arrived shortly after we did and seated herself on the table’s right side, just a few feet from the panel members. There was an empty chair next to her that I assumed would be used for witnesses.

  When Dr. Wing had first provided us with the address of the conference room, I had asked if there was a coffeepot in it. Dr. Wing said no, but he’d see that one was installed. I glanced over at the small side table against the wall and spied a small coffeepot sitting there. It looked brand-new and still had a Target tag attached to it. I suspected Dr. Wing had probably bought it himself at the store nearby. Next to the pot was a bag of beans with a company logo I didn’t recognize. There were also two large carafes of water. Since there was no one el
se around to make coffee, I assumed I would become the first defendant/coffee girl in history.

  Dr. Wing rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we have a few important things to take care of before we begin. And those things involve how we’re going to go about this hearing. Let’s go down the list.”

  He removed an actual list from his briefcase and placed it on the table in front of him.

  “First, we’re required to make a tape recording of this and all sessions. So…” He took a small digital recorder from the briefcase next to him, placed it on the table and pushed the start button. A red light glowed. “I suggest that if anyone wants their own copy, the most efficient way to obtain one is to make your own recording. This one, though”—he pointed to the recorder he had placed on the table—“is making the official copy.”

  Oscar took out a recorder, placed it on the table and turned it on, as did Professor Broontz, who to that point hadn’t spoken a word to anyone. Now there were three red lights glowing.

  “Anyone else?” Dr. Wing asked.

  No one responded.

  “Good, good,” he said. “Let’s move on to the next thing, then, which is procedure. Usually in this committee we listen to the faculty grievant explain his or her case to us. Then we listen to whoever is on the other side of that grievance—usually an administrator or, in rare cases, another faculty member—tell us their side of the story. If there are witnesses the parties think will be helpful, they invite them to join us, and we question those witnesses. We do that in private without the parties present.”

  “I don’t think,” said Oscar, “that—”

  “Hold your horses, Oscar,” Dr. Wing said. “There’s a but coming.” He paused for what he clearly regarded as the drama of it. “But this time my colleagues and I have decided to let the parties remain when the witnesses testify, unless the witness objects. Any problem with that?”