Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  At the mention of treasure, Professor Healey’s eyes lit up, and she asked her first question. “Did you ever find the map, Detective?”

  “No, ma’am, we didn’t. But I did learn later that Professor James had hidden the information about the map from the EMTs and hadn’t told Mr. Skillings about it either. And now I understand Mr. Giordano’s brother has sued her for the return of the map.”

  I sat there and cursed myself for my decision, taken what seemed like ages ago now, to keep the map story to myself initially—a decision I had made not to protect myself but to protect the confidentiality that Primo had seemed so concerned about. It was a lesson I kept having to relearn: stop worrying about other people and worry more about yourself.

  Dr. Wing then returned to asking questions. The examination, if you could call it that, wandered on for a while, with nothing much being said that I didn’t already know and eliciting nothing that seemed very damaging. Then Professor Broontz had another question.

  “Detective, isn’t it the case that you learned later that Professor James had taken what coffee was left in the pot and tossed it out, along with the coffeepot?”

  “Yes, I did learn that.”

  “Did that seem suspicious to you?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Wow, I thought to myself, that was a straightforward, honest answer.

  “Why not?”

  “We just didn’t know—and don’t know—all the circumstances of how she came to discard the coffee and the pot. Plus Mr. Skillings had already collected some of that evidence.”

  It didn’t seem that anyone else had any further questions of Drady and, as usual, Dr. Wing seemed about to move on without asking Oscar if he had any questions. I looked over at Oscar, because we had discussed a few days ago what had really happened with the discarded coffeepot.

  “Detective,” Oscar asked, “do you recall that when you were in Professor James’s office and were about to leave, Professor James asked you what she should do with the remaining coffee?”

  “No, I don’t recall that.”

  “Maybe I can try to refresh your recollection a bit.”

  Dr. Wing interrupted. “You know, Oscar, it seems to me you’re about to try to cross-examine the witness, which is not our approach in this informal setting. I think the detective has tried to answer your question as best he can, and we should just leave it at that for now.”

  “Okay, thank you,” Oscar said. “I have nothing further.”

  I knew, of course, that had we been in a real courtroom, Oscar would have pressed Drady to the wall about his answer. “I don’t recall that” is one of the most weaselly answers a witness can give. It can mean “I don’t recall one way or the other.” It can mean “I don’t recall that exactly, but I recall something else.” Or it can mean “I don’t recall right now because I don’t want to recall”—as well as a whole host of other things. All of which leave the witness free to recall a more precise answer later on. I truly hated this way of doing things. I thought we were done when Professor Broontz asked one final question.

  “Detective,” she asked, “did Professor James tell you she’d been out of the office on a phone call and had left the student alone in her office for a while?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she say how long that phone call had taken?”

  “She said about six or seven minutes. And George Skillings later told me she’d given him the same estimate.”

  “Have you had the opportunity to check her estimate against her phone records?”

  “Yes, we obtained her cell phone records from her phone company.”

  “What did you find?”

  “We found a record of an incoming call to Professor James’s number that started at 7:36 A.M. on the day of Mr. Giordano’s death and ended at 7:53 A.M.”

  Professor Trolder spoke up for the first time. “So the call was seventeen minutes long, not seven?”

  “Yes.”

  I guess math was Trolder’s thing.

  I looked at Oscar and he looked at me. I was dumbstruck; he appeared merely surprised. This must be the real reason Broontz had brought Drady in to testify. But why had she left the question to the very end? And what inference was going to be drawn from the answer? That I lied? But why would I? While I was pondering all of that, Oscar gave it the old college try.

  “Detective,” he asked, “do you know what happens to the call time record if someone receives a cell phone call but doesn’t click off at the end of the call?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  I didn’t know either, but I suspected that the call had indeed lasted that long. I just hadn’t thought about it since I gave my initial rough time estimate to Skillings. Nor had I thought it was important. Until now.

  Broontz was no doubt going to argue later that I blatantly lied about the length of the phone call, even if she didn’t know—yet—exactly why I felt the need to lie about it, or even if it was obvious I’d be caught. But, she’d argue, lie I surely had. And then she’d add, “Once a liar, always a liar.”

  As a civil procedure teacher, she was no doubt aware of the California jury instruction that tells jurors: if you think a witness lied about one thing, you’re entitled to disbelieve them about everything else. This wasn’t a jury, of course, but she’d make the same argument to the panel, and she might just get them to buy it. And then who knew what else they’d conclude I lied about? How the receipt for the poison got in my pocket? Whether I had the map?

  Shortly after that Dr. Wing declared a lunch break. Before we left he asked Professor Broontz who the next witness would be. She said she couldn’t tell him exactly because of scheduling issues, and she didn’t want to give him a bunch of names and then not be able to bring any of them in. Dr. Wing said okay, that we’d just wait to see who showed up after lunch.

  CHAPTER 77

  The medical school complex is on the southern end of the UCLA campus, not far from Westwood Village. Oscar and I walked the two blocks into the Village to have lunch. We chose the Corner Bakery, which has good, quick food and large tables, some of which, if you pick the right one, have a reasonable amount of privacy. We grabbed one by the windows.

  The Corner Bakery is a place where you stand in line and order, and then they bring your food to you. I ordered a chicken panino and a large coffee. Oscar ordered an apple.

  Back at our table, I said, “All you’re having for lunch is an apple?”

  “That’s what I usually eat, Jenna. Well, sometimes I’ll have a peach, if they have them.”

  “Okay. I need more sustenance than that.”

  “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

  “Do you know where that saying comes from, Oscar?”

  “No, where?”

  “It was an old proverb popularized in the early 1900s by an ad agency for the apple industry to try to persuade people that apples were healthy.”

  “Didn’t people already think they were healthy?”

  “Not really. At that time apples were primarily used to make alcoholic apple cider. Carry Nation and her friends in the temperance movement were chopping down not only saloons but apple trees. So the industry decided to promote apples as healthy.”

  Oscar took a bite out of his apple. “Huh, who knew? You know, you’re becoming as filled with esoteric information as your friend Robert.”

  “It’s a hazard of being a law professor.”

  “Well, what does the law professor think so far about our bizarre hearing?”

  “It’s driving me crazy. I mean, the information is so squishy it’s junk. I also think it was a mistake to agree to participate and that we should depart.”

  “That won’t stop the hearing. If we stay we learn what the police and others are thinking. It will be helpful in any defense.”

  “I thought you said they were no longer looking at me, that this was over. If that’s so why do I need to think about a defense, Mr. Criminal Defense Attorney?”

  “After
listening to this morning’s testimony, I’m wondering if the DA was shining me on. That they’re still looking at you.”

  “Great.”

  “Jenna, what did you make of the testimony about the length of your phone call?”

  “I was shocked. I do remember that guy from the law review just wouldn’t get off the phone, and that the call took a long time. But I would have sworn it was well under ten minutes, not seventeen. I assume Greta’s just going to argue that if I lied about one thing, I’m lying about everything else.”

  “Maybe,” Oscar said, “if the information about the timing is correct—and I have no reason right now to think Drady’s lying about it—it should make us rethink what happened here.”

  “Please explain.”

  “We’ve been working with a time line that says you locked the door the night before and that someone with a key opened it or someone picked the lock. On purpose. Let’s assume instead that you simply forgot to lock it the night before or maybe the cleaning people accidentally left it open or whatever.”

  “Where would that get us?”

  “If we assume that someone had to pick the lock or use an illegal key, it strongly suggests they were after you, and that they came in the night before and spiked the ingredients for the not-yet-made coffee with sodium azide, hoping you’d drink it.”

  “Which is what I’ve been assuming.”

  “Right. But if we assume instead that you accidentally left the door open the night before, it erodes that assumption and means that whatever was done to the coffee was likely done either right after Primo got there or right after you left to take the phone call.”

  I thought about it. “That could make sense. Particularly if Dr. Nightingale is correct that sodium azide is too dangerously unstable to grind in the coffee grinder and too heat sensitive to be exposed to the high heat of the coffeemaker.”

  “Right. It means the poison was most likely dumped directly into Primo’s coffee cup. And if you were out of that office for seventeen minutes instead of only six or seven, it leaves a lot of time for someone to show up and do that.”

  Just then our food arrived and was set down in front of us by the server. I began to eat my panino, and Oscar started in on his apple. Before biting into it, he used his knife to peel all the skin away.

  “You’re taking off the skin?”

  “Sure.”

  “But that’s the part that keeps the doctor away. It’s got most of the vitamins and fiber.”

  “I do what I do, Jenna. I’m too old to adopt newfangled approaches like eating the skin of an apple.”

  “You just throw it away?”

  “No. At home I might use some of it to make an apple martini for guests.”

  “Oh.”

  “Weren’t we discussing,” Oscar said, “who poisoned Primo?”

  “Yes. I suppose I’m just trying to take my mind off the whole thing. Three days ago I thought this was over, and now it’s returned.”

  “Let’s get back to the analysis, Jenna. First of all, you think you left your office door open when you went across the hall to take the phone call, right?”

  “I’m sure I did.”

  “If you were gone for seventeen minutes, that means Primo was sitting there by himself for seventeen minutes with the door open, and almost anyone could have come by and seen him.”

  “True.”

  “Jenna, isn’t this just like when the cops find people murdered in their own house and there’s no sign of forced entry? What do they always say in those cases?”

  “I don’t know, Oscar, what do they say?”

  “That the killers were probably someone the victims knew, and that the victims let them in.”

  “You’re saying if my office door was open for all that time, the person who poisoned the coffee was someone Primo knew who came by and saw him sitting there and invited himself in to chat. Or herself. And Primo made no objection.”

  “Exactly, and, while chatting, whoever that was surreptitiously dumped the poison in Primo’s coffee, waited for him to get in too much distress to call for help and then left and locked the door behind them.”

  “The only problem with that,” I said, “is that there was clearly poison in the coffeepot itself, too, because it burned the leaves of the plant I dumped it in.”

  “All right,” Oscar said, “let’s modify my theory. After Primo was disabled, the killer dumped the poison in the pot, too, in order to frame you, or maybe kill you. That way, it got into the pot without having to be brewed and exposed to too much heat.”

  “If you’re right, Oscar,” I said, “that leaves us with two very likely suspects: Julie and Quinto. Both were in the vicinity and both had reason to kill Primo. Julie out of anger and Quinto to get Primo’s copy of the map, with the longitude of the sunken Ayuda written on it.”

  “Exactly. The problem is that while we now have a plausible scenario, we have no direct evidence against either of them.”

  “Except,” I said, “that Julie tore out the diary page on which Primo wrote that Julie had threatened to kill him. And in the diary Primo also wrote that Quinto threatened to kill him if he showed the map to me.”

  “Actually,” Oscar said, “that’s not quite what Primo wrote, or not all of it, anyway. You can check the copy of the diary, but, if I recall correctly, what Primo actually said was that Quinto had threatened to kill him if Primo showed you the map in order to ‘involve you’ in ‘our project.’”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Your interpretation focuses on Quinto being worried that you’d see the map. I think what Quinto was worried about—assuming the diary reports all of this correctly—was not that you’d see the map but that once you got involved, you would investigate the true facts of their project. Whatever they are. And that perhaps Aldous, who already knew a lot, would help you.”

  Just then my cell rang. I answered and listened.

  “A drink tomorrow? Sure, I could do that. Five o’clock sounds fine. If I’m going to run late for some reason, I’ll call you on the number you just called me on.”

  “Who was that?” Oscar asked.

  “It was Tess. She says she’s discovered something I’ll find very interesting.”

  CHAPTER 78

  Oscar and I returned to the small conference room at about 1:30 P.M. Only Dr. Wing was present.

  “I think the others,” he said, “will be back shortly.”

  “I’m going to make some fresh coffee,” I said. “We need more water, though, so I’ll take one of the carafes and get it refilled. I noticed there was a water fountain down the hall.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Wing said. “That would be appreciated. I wanted to ask you, though, how do you think we’re doing?”

  My initial inclination was to tell him what I assumed he wanted to hear—that everything was going great, he was doing a good job on presiding over a wonderful, just-among-friends hearing and that all was well. And then I thought to myself, well, what’s the point in that?

  “What is it they say in the military?” I asked. “Or at least in military movies? Permission to speak freely?”

  Dr. Wing laughed. “Granted.”

  “I think this whole thing is a joke. The witnesses are walking all over you and the panel, and you’re not learning half of what you need to know.”

  “Jenna,” Oscar said, “I think—”

  “No, Oscar, I’m not stopping. For example, Rex, let’s talk about that detective, Drady. He came in here and basically said from the get-go that he’d tell you some things but not others, and he didn’t even tell you what category of things he was holding back on. In any self-respecting courtroom the judge would either have kicked his butt out of the courtroom or put him in jail until he wised up. And then you wouldn’t let Oscar go after his wimpy I-don’t-recall-that answer.”

  Dr. Wing grinned at me. “Ah,” he said, “now I see the hard-bitten, brilliant law professor I’ve been hearing about on the grapevine. What do yo
u suggest we do to correct these deficiencies, Professor?”

  “Let Oscar cross-examine the witnesses when they’re finished telling their mushy stories.”

  “Maybe we’ll give that a try,” he said. “I’ve been a little dissatisfied myself with the quality of information that’s been coming out.”

  I looked over at Oscar, who had taken his seat. His face was frozen. I couldn’t read it one way or the other.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m now going to go down the hall and get some water for fresh coffee.” Which is what I did.

  When I got back, everyone was back and seated, but there was as yet no witness in the vacant chair. I walked around the table, poured the water into the coffeepot receptacle, dumped the ground coffee into the filter, pushed the on button and took my seat.

  Dr. Wing looked at Professor Broontz. “Well, Greta, do you have a witness for us?”

  “Yes. I want to recall Detective Drady.”

  “Is it,” Dr. Wing asked, “absolutely necessary? We already heard quite a bit of testimony from him.”

  “He has something new to tell us,” she said.

  “All right, then, let’s have him back.”

  A sudden chill ran up my back. Whatever was coming could not be good.

  The door opened and Detective Drady sauntered back in, took a seat, smiled broadly and nodded at Professor Broontz, as if to say, “I’m ready to roll.”

  And roll he did, with Broontz’s first question.

  “Detective,” she asked, “have you learned anything new about the case against Professor James?”

  “Yes, I have. Over the lunch break I learned the results of a forensic analysis of an item taken from Professor James’s apartment during a search.”

  “And what was the item?”

  “A jar of dark liquid that was in her refrigerator.”

  “What did the report show?”