Long Knives (23 page)

CHAPTER 53

A
fter the three of us entered the empty office, I closed the door and said to Jenna, “So if I remember correctly, Aldous Hartleb is your boyfriend, right? The one on your suspect list.”

“Right.”

“Do you have any idea how he happened to be in touch with Cabano, the research guy?”

“I can make a good guess. Aldous told me that he did some work for an investment firm that was considering investing in a venture that was being put together to finance a search for the
Ayuda
. He did some of the due diligence on the deal. So I assume he talked to Cabano as part of that.”

“Did Aldous’s company,” Oscar asked, “invest?”

“No, they passed on it.”

“Well, then,” Oscar said, “let’s call Aldous up.”

“Right now?” Jenna asked.

“Why not? I assume you have his cell number.”

“He’s in Buffalo.”

“I bet his cell works even in a place like Buffalo. Let’s do it.” Oscar pointed to the speakerphone that sat on the desk, the surface otherwise bare.

Jenna picked up the handset and punched in a number on the keypad. Even though she was holding the handset to her ear and hadn’t activated the speaker, I could hear the call ringing on the other end. Just as I thought it would go to voice mail, I heard a voice answer, although I couldn’t make out what was said. Then Jenna spoke.

“Hi, Aldous, it’s Jenna.”

She listened for a moment, then said, “No, nothing’s wrong. I’m calling about something specific. We’re taking the depo of Quinto Giordano today, and something’s come up that you might be able to help us with. I’m here with my lawyers, Oscar Quesana and Robert Tarza. Can I put you on speakerphone?”

Jenna put the handset back into its cradle and pushed the speakerphone button. “Can you hear us, Aldous?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Good. Hey, I don’t think you’ve met Oscar or Robert, so let me introduce them.”

Which she did, and, in the usual awkward dance of introductions on the telephone, we all “met.”

“Aldous,” Jenna said, “when you were doing the due diligence on the
Ayuda
deal, did you talk to a researcher in Seville?”

“If I tell you the answer to that, can I be sure no one will let on that I’m the one who told you?”

Jenna looked around at me and Oscar.

“Aldous, this is Robert Tarza,” I said. “I promise you your name won’t be mentioned.”

“Okay, then,” Aldous said. “I sure did talk to someone. His name was Cabano. Hard guy to forget. Very slick.”

“What did you talk with him about?”

“I was following up on a document that referred to a search in the Spanish archive made by Mr. X and Mr. Y, or maybe only one of them. It wasn’t clear. I now assume those were code names used for Quinto and Primo. In any case, whichever one of them did the search had supposedly used Cabano to help look for a key document in the archive. Cabano himself actually found the document, or at least that’s what I understood.”

“Do you recall,” Oscar asked, “what document it was?”

“Uh, yeah, I do. But the company I was working for signed a confidentiality agreement, and I’m bound by it. So I really can’t tell you. But”—he chuckled—“if you were to take my deposition, I’d have to tell you, wouldn’t I?”

“Right,” Oscar said, “but if we noticed your deposition, I’m sure they’d go to court and try to get some sort of order to prevent you from answering that question. Anyway, Quinto has already told us it was a survivor account, and Primo told Jenna the same thing before he died. So that piece of confidential info is already out of the bag. Can you add anything to it?”

“I don’t think I should.”

I broke in. “Aldous, this is Robert again. I’m the one who’s taking the depo today, and at this point what I most want to know is how we can get in touch with Cabano.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Finally, Aldous said, “I suppose I can tell you that without violating the confidentiality agreement. But all I have is his cell number, or at least what it was last summer. I don’t have an address or an e-mail.”

“That would be a great start,” I said.

“Okay, let me dig it out of my database.” After a few seconds, Aldous came back on and gave us the number.

“Thanks, Aldous,” I said. “Is there anything else you can share with us that might be helpful?”

“I’m afraid not. It was a pretty tight confidentiality agreement and, you know, I’d like not to be dragged into this thing.”

“Understood,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“You’re welcome. Sorry I can’t be more forthcoming.”

“Oh, I understand. By the way, what are you doing in Buffalo?”

“Looking for a job. Jenna can bring you up to date on that.”

“Okay, well, have a good day.”

“You, too. Hey, Jenna, can you pick up for a moment, honey?”

“Sure.” Jenna picked up the handset, which caused the speakerphone to go off.

They talked for a few moments while Oscar and I chatted about other things.

Finally, I heard Jenna say, “Talk to you soon. ’Bye.”

After she hung up, I looked over at her. “He’s looking for a new job in Buffalo?”

“Yep.”

Oscar had been drumming his fingers on the desktop. “Jenna, if I understand correctly, and please forgive me for being so direct, you sleep with Aldous, right?”

“Sometimes. Yes.”

“Well, maybe you can get more out of him via a little pillow talk.”

“I can try, but Aldous isn’t a talker in those circumstances. He prefers…”

“Never mind,” I interrupted. “I’m sure we can all imagine what he prefers.” I was famous for being something of a prude, and living in France hadn’t really changed me on that score. “Let’s leave it, Jenna, that you’ll give it a try if the situation presents itself. In the meantime, now we have Cabano’s phone number, so we ought to be able to talk to him ourselves if we play it right.”

CHAPTER 54

O
n my way back to the depo, I headed to the men’s room. Stevens was standing at one of the two urinals. I went to the second one, which was right next to the first. For a while the two of us just stood there in silence, doing our respective thing. As I stared at the wall, I thought to myself that it wasn’t unheard of for male lawyers to conduct serious business in that setting. I had no idea what the deal was in women’s bathrooms. Did they talk stall to stall? In any case, apparently nothing was going to happen this time, and I wasn’t about to initiate any conversation.

Then Stevens said, as he was zipping up, “Do you guys want to settle this thing?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s a little difficult to know how.”

Stevens was by that time at the sink, and I could hear the water running. I was still facing the wall.

“Well, Mr. Tarza,” he said, “the easiest way to settle it would be for your client to give the map back to Mr. Giordano. Once he gets it, he’ll drop the suit and give your client a complete release. It will be totally over. Among other things, that means there won’t be any wrongful death suit in your client’s future. And who knows, maybe the police will lose interest in the whole thing.”

“Jenna didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Stevens.”

“I believe the police think differently.”

I zipped up and moved to the sink. Stevens was already pulling paper towels out of the dispenser and starting to dry his hands.

“You know,” I said, as I washed my own hands, “your solution would be a perfect solution but for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Jenna doesn’t have the map.”

“I think she does.”

“I don’t understand why you guys think that.”

“Ask my client that question and he’ll tell you.”

“I’ll do that, plus at least one more question that’s been bothering me.”

“Feel free,” he said as he grabbed the door handle using the wadded-up paper towels, opened it, then tossed the towels in the wastebasket as he went through the door. Clearly a guy concerned about germs.

When we were all back in the conference room and settled in, I skipped the cordialities and started right in.

“Mr. Giordano, you’re aware you’re still under oath, right?”

“Yes.”

“What leads you to think that my client, Professor James, has a map that you claim belongs to you?”

That was not, of course, a very good question. Among other flaws, it called for a narrative answer, which, although not technically objectionable, most lawyers will object to in order to send a message to their client: don’t blather on. Make him ask you more narrowly focused questions.

Quinto looked over at Stevens, as if expecting some sort of objection. Instead, Stevens said, “Go ahead and tell him the whole story, Quinto.”

Quinto folded his arms in front of him and said, “Here’s the deal. The morning my brother died, I drove him to the law school in my car. Before we left to go there, I helped him roll up the map and put it into a red cardboard mailing tube. Then I watched him walk into the law school with it. He told me he was going to show it to Professor James. That was the last time I saw it.”

Quinto stopped talking, folded his arms in front of him and just stared at me.

“Well, sir, why does that persuade you that my client has your map?”

“Because my brother had an appointment with Professor James at seven thirty. Like I said, I dropped him off right in front of the law school not long before that. I assume he went straight to her office. I understand he met with Professor James, became ill and was taken to the hospital. So during all of that, Professor James was the person with the best opportunity to take the map.”

“Any other reason, Mr. Giordano?”

“Yes, come to think of it. When Primo didn’t return to the car—that was before the hospital called me—I went to Professor James’s office. When I got there, her door was locked, and there was no one there. The police told me that when they searched the office later, no map was found. So figure it out yourself.”

“Are you aware that my client went with your brother in the ambulance?”

“Yes, I’ve been told that.”

“Well, if she went right out the door with your brother, when do you think she had the opportunity to take the map?”

“She probably had a friend standing by, ready to take it.”

Jenna pushed a note in front of me. It said, “Ask him if I knew Primo was bringing the map.”

“Do you have any reason to believe,” I asked, “that Professor James knew in advance that your brother was planning to show her a map?”

“He told me, right before I dropped him off, that he’d mentioned it to her, and that she was looking forward to seeing it.”

Jenna pushed another note in front of me, but I knew what it was going to say and asked her question before even looking at it. “Do you recall his exact words?”

He hesitated slightly, and then said, “Something like ‘I told her I was going to show her a treasure map.’”

When you take a lot of depositions, you learn to read pauses and hesitations, and I read Quinto’s initial hesitation as saying “I’m not sure.”

“Are you sure, Mr. Giordano?”

“Pretty sure.”

I looked down at Jenna’s note. It said, “He told me that he had something interesting to talk to me about.”

“Is it possible, sir, that your brother told you that he mentioned to Professor James only that he had something interesting to talk to her about?”

“Objection,” Stevens said. “Anything is possible, so the question is vague and ambiguous.”

He was trying to get in the way of the answer. I rephrased. “Mr. Giordano, didn’t your brother actually say to you that he had told Professor James he had something interesting to talk to her about?”

“I don’t recall it exactly that way.”

“What way do you recall it?”

Stevens interrupted again, trying to protect his witness. “He already told you how he recalled it.”

“Mr. Giordano said he was ‘pretty sure.’ That gives me the right to probe his answer. Madam Court Reporter, please read the question back to him.”

The truth is that I could just as easily have repeated the question. It wasn’t complicated or long, but sometimes having the question read back by the court reporter gives it added gravitas and makes the witness more inclined to answer it.

Looking down at the screen on her stenotype, she read the question out loud:

“‘Mr. Giordano, didn’t your brother actually say to you that he had told Professor James he had something interesting to talk to her about?’”

“He might,” Quinto answered, “have said that, although I think he said that he had told her he wanted to discuss a treasure map. I’m not sure.”

I thought about pursuing that further, but it was good enough for now. At the very least, I had started to mess up their timeline about how Jenna had supposedly arranged for the map to disappear. One of the things you learn as a lawyer is to leave a good enough answer alone.

Stevens looked conspicuously at his watch. “It’s getting kind of late. We’d like to get out of here before the traffic gets really bad.”

I knew, of course, that what he really wanted was to get his witness out of there before I pursued the current line of questioning further. “I have only two quick areas to go into,” I said, “on a different topic.”

“Okay,” Stevens said. “If it’s really quick, go for it.”

“Mr. Giordano,” I asked, “do you have a copy of the map yourself?”

“Yes.”

“With regard to the map you believe your brother took to Professor James’s office, was it a copy or an original?”

“It was a copy.”

“So if it’s a copy that’s missing and you have a copy yourself, why do you want the copy your brother allegedly took to Professor James’s office back?”

“Because that copy has some information on it that my copy does not, and I don’t know of any other copy with that information on it.”

“What’s the information that’s on it?”

“That,” Stevens said, “is business confidential and is objected to on that ground. I instruct the witness not to answer the question.”

“To save you the trouble of asking,” Quinto said, “I’m going to follow my counsel’s instruction and decline to answer.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we can work out a stipulation as to confidentiality. But to save us all a lot of work in the meantime, Mr. Stevens, how about if you permit the witness to answer the question now, and we’ll all instruct the court reporter to mark the pages as confidential until such time as we can get the court to hear our motion, in case that’s necessary?”

“What guarantee do we have that you won’t disclose it in the meantime?” Stevens asked.

“Well, I’m an attorney, Mr. Quesana is an attorney and Ms. James, even though she’s a professor, is still a member of the bar. So we’ll give you our pledge as officers of the court not to disclose the information prior to entering into a stipulation or obtaining a court order.”

“Are you all agreeable to that?” Stevens asked.

“Yes,” Jenna said.

“Yes,” Oscar said.

Stevens leaned over and whispered to Quinto. I saw Quinto nod his head in the affirmative.

“Okay, then,” Stevens said. “Mr Giordano, go ahead and answer the question, if you recall it.”

“I recall it,” Quinto said. “And the answer is that the information on the copy is the exact longitude of the wreck, out there in the Pacific.”

“Is that on your copy as well?” I asked.

“No. You see, I hate to say it, but Primo and I didn’t quite trust each other. So when we hired a company to drag sonar arrays across the area where the ship likely went down, we asked the captain of the search ship, after he found the wreck, to put the exact latitude of the wreck only on my copy of the map, and the exact longitude on Primo’s copy.”

“So neither one of you had both pieces of information?”

“Correct. We planned, after we raised enough money to bring up the treasure from the ocean bottom, to combine our data so we would know where to go to do it.”

I sat and thought about it for a few seconds. In many years of taking depositions, I had developed a nose for stories that smelled bad, and this one certainly had an aroma. But I couldn’t figure out exactly where the smell was coming from, so I just plowed ahead with a few more questions.

“Mr. Giordano,” I asked, “didn’t your brother have other copies of his version of the map, the one with the longitude on it?”

“I assume he did, but I’ve been unable to find them.”

“Do you have extra copies of your version?”

“Certainly.”

“So if you have the exact latitude and longitude of where a wreck is, you don’t really need a physical map, do you?”

He smiled. “Nope.”

“Why did you and your brother bother to use a map at all?”

“It’s so much better,” he answered, “to give investors a map with an
X
on it to mark the spot. It’s more romantic.”

“Romantic?”

“Sure. Lots of people invest in this sort of venture out of a sense of romance. It’s much more exciting to tell your friends at a cocktail party that you’ve invested in looking for sunken treasure than to tell them you invested in a totally quiet garbage disposal.”

“But you couldn’t put the actual
X
on any investor copy, right, because it would give away the location?”

“Right. We put an
X
on a map, all right—we used that old map my grandfather found in the archive—but we told the investors that the
X
we placed wasn’t at all close to where the ship actually lies. The Pacific is large, and even if you put the
X
a hundred miles from where the ship really is, no one will ever find it. Or at least not with the amount of money anyone other than some government is willing to spend.”

“If someone invested, did they get more precise location information later?”

“We told them, ‘Hey, if you invest and we get enough other investors, we’ll give you a map with the real
X
on it.’”

“Has anyone invested?”

“Not yet.”

It was all very interesting—if true—but we were clearly running out of time, so I decided to close with something else.

“I have one final question today. Mr. Giordano, do you know how to pick a lock?”

Stevens, rather than objecting, just sat there, kind of stunned at the question, clearly trying to think up an appropriate objection. But before he could, Quinto answered, “No, I don’t.”

“All right, then. I’m going to ask the court reporter to e-mail me a rough-draft transcript of today’s testimony. And I’d like to find a date to resume sometime next week. We’re allowed a total of seven hours for a deposition, and we haven’t come close to that today.”

Stevens looked at his smartphone, clearly paging through his calendar. “No can do, I’m afraid. It’ll have to be sometime after Thanksgiving.”

I had expected that, of course. “That’s fine, but let’s actually pick a date before we leave.” And we did. December 20. Which meant, having picked a date five days before Christmas, that it wouldn’t actually happen until at least January.

After Stevens and Quinto cleared the room, I looked around and asked, of no one in particular, “So what’s next?”

Oscar answered. “I think that you, Robert, should try to get in touch with this Cabano guy and see what you can learn. And Jenna, you and I need to get together and talk.”

“Talk about what?” Jenna asked.

“Right before the depo started I got a call from the district attorney.”

“
The
district attorney or an assistant district attorney?”

“The man himself.”

“I’m embarrassed to say,” Jenna said, “that I’m not even sure who that is now. I didn’t vote in the last election, and I didn’t pay much attention to who was running.”

I spoke up. “The new district attorney is Charlie Benitez.”

There was a dead silence in the room while Jenna took that in.

“You mean the assistant DA who prosecuted you, Robert?” Jenna asked. “The one I beat in the preliminary hearing?”

“The very same one,” I said. Looking at her, I could tell she was taken aback by the news.