Long Knives (3 page)

CHAPTER 4

C
arter and Susan were moving fast with the gurney. I trailed behind them, first down the hallway to the elevator bank, then into the elevator, which someone from security was holding open for us—where had he come from? Then they pushed their way out of the front door of the building, where, in the street, a white ambulance stood with its motor running,
UCLA AMBULANCE
emblazoned in blue letters across its double back doors. Another uniformed woman in blue, sporting a UCLA police badge, stood at the rear of the vehicle. As we arrived, she opened the doors, and the two EMTs slid the gurney into the ambulance and clamped it in place. Despite the oxygen mask over Primo’s mouth, I could still hear his ragged breathing.

Carter looked over at me. “Why don’t you ride along with us? We can continue debriefing you to see if you know anything else that might be helpful.”

“Okay, I will.”

“Hop in,” Susan said, pointing to a bench on the right side, which was covered with a long flat beige plastic pillow, the kind you sometimes see on a chaise longue. I climbed aboard and sat down. Carter and Susan clambered in after me and seated themselves, one on either side of me. I heard rather than saw the rear doors slam. Seconds later we accelerated away as the siren began to wail. I had always wondered if the siren outside an ambulance sounded loud to people inside. It does.

As we got under way, Susan turned to me and asked, “When he showed up in your office, did you notice anything at all that seemed unusual? Please think hard, this guy isn’t in good shape.”

“No, nothing. It was just an ordinary conversation.”

“Did he say anything about drugs or hard partying?”

“Nothing.”

“Did he mention any health problems?”

“No.”

“Why did he come to see you? Maybe there’s a clue there.”

What ran through my mind at that point was that if Primo was so nervous about the treasure map that he was looking for hidden microphones in my office, I shouldn’t tell this unknown EMT about it. And besides, how could that have had anything to do with his collapse? But maybe I should tell them about it. After all, if it somehow came out that the map was important and I hid the information, wasn’t it going to make me look bad? And what if it was missing? I suddenly realized that Susan was staring at me, waiting for my answer.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little shaken up by all of this. I don’t really know why he came to see me. He put his name down on the sign-up sheet that’s on my office door last week, and he’d only been in my office about five minutes when, like I said before, I got a phone call and went across the hall to take it. Up ’til then we were just exchanging pleasantries.”

“For five minutes?”

“He’s Italian,” I said and smiled. “So yes, about five minutes of pleasantries, and during that time I was finishing up making coffee. I offered him a cup just before I left to take the phone call.”

“Was there anything unusual about the coffee?”

“Not that I know of. I bought it at Coffee Chaos, where I usually buy my beans, and ground it the day before, right before I left to go home.”

“Did he put anything in the coffee?”

“Sugar. A couple of teaspoons. Well, actually, I put it in, at his request.”

“Sure. So nothing out of the ordinary there?”

“No.”

“Did he drink it?”

“I assume so. I think his cup was sitting on my desk when I was let back into my office. I didn’t look in it, but I assume he drank it. I can check when I get back.”

“Did you have any yourself?”

“No. I was about to pour myself some when the call came. In fact, right now I’m dying for a cup of coffee. I haven’t had even one this morning, and I’m kind of an addict. By now I would usually have had at least three.”

“There’s plenty of it around the hospital,” she said.

Just then the ambulance, which had been twisting and turning its way through the campus to the hospital, came to a quick stop and began to back up. A few seconds later it stopped again and the back doors flew open.

“Professor,” Carter said, “we’re at the ER receiving bay now. I’m sure the docs here will want to talk to you, but right now we need to off-load the patient and tell them what we know. Nice to meet you.” He stuck out his hand, we shook and he was gone.

I waited for them to roll out the gurney, where it was immediately surrounded by three or four doctors and nurses dressed in scrubs of various colors. Then I stepped down from the ambulance and watched as they pushed the gurney into an exam room and pulled the curtain closed.

I stood there, stunned. Not thirty minutes earlier, I had been sitting in my office—totally comfortable in my own world—talking to a student. Then, in what seemed the blink of an eye, I had been transported to an entirely different world, dumped off there and left to fend for myself while the denizens of that world went about their mysterious tasks—including whatever they were doing to Primo behind the curtain.

I had been standing there alone for perhaps a minute or two, lost in those thoughts and perplexed about what to do next, when suddenly a voice from behind me said, “And who might you be?”

I turned around and saw a short, slim man, perhaps in his midforties, with thinning black hair and a goatee that was beginning to be shot through with strands of gray. He was wearing a white coat and had a stethoscope tossed casually over his shoulder. His name, which was stitched in red just above the breast pocket on his white jacket, said
William Nightingale, MD
.

“I’m Professor James,” I said. I don’t usually use my professorial title in introducing myself, but I could sense that I was in a professional world where rank might somehow count.

“Professor of what?” he asked.

“Law.”

“Ah,” he said. “The enemy.”

“Doctor, I’m an expert on the law of marine salvage, which is a subtopic of admiralty. I don’t think that has much to do with medical malpractice claims, which is what I assume you’re referring to.”

He laughed. “You’re right. And I suppose that means that on some level we’re in the same business, since we salvage people who come here.” He paused. “When we can.”

“I suppose.” I was still piqued at the hostility so often shown to lawyers as a matter of rote response.

“So,” he said, “I understand you came in with the student who’s unconscious?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what happened, please.”

“I already told the EMTs.”

“Yes, and I’m sure they’re being debriefed by the people who are working on him in that cubicle over there.” He pointed to the white curtain behind which Primo had disappeared. “But I’m the attending physician in the emergency department, and I’d like to hear it directly from you.”

I sighed. “Okay.” And I told him the whole story all over again, still sans treasure map.

“Interesting,” was all he said.

Would he, I thought to myself, find it more interesting if I also told him about the map? More useful to Primo’s recovery? I was on the edge of telling him when I remembered how important Primo thought maintaining confidentiality about the map was. And it couldn’t possibly have any relationship to his illness. I decided again to skip it.

“Dr. Nightingale, is there someplace around here where I can get a cup of coffee? I’m something of an addict, and for one reason or another, I haven’t yet had my morning fix.”

“Sure. I’ll take you out to the visitor waiting room and show you the machine there. It even takes credit cards.”

“That stuff is usually horrible. You can’t just sport me a cup from some stray coffeepot around here?”

He tilted his head. “I think I can do that. But I do need to get you out of here and to the waiting room. Let me walk you there.”

I followed him past various cubicles, most empty and open, a few behind closed doors. When we reached the waiting room, I grabbed a chair and sat down, and the good doctor departed with a cheery wave and an “I’ll be right back with your coffee, Professor.” And sure enough, he returned a few minutes later with a blue mug that said
UCLA EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT
on the side, filled to the brim with life-sustaining black fluid. He handed it to me and held out several small packages of creamer and sugar.

“Oh, I drink it black. But thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re welcome, Professor.”

“What should I do now?”

“You’re not family, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, after you finish the coffee I think you should just go back to your office. Since you’re not family, the medical privacy rules prevent me from telling you anything.”

“Can you at least tell me if he’s still alive?”

He pursed his lips and shrugged. “Sure. He’s very much alive.” He paused again. “I think he’s going to be fine. We’ll probably just keep him here for a few hours for observation and then release him.”

“Thanks. What shall I do with the coffee mug when I’m done?”

“Why don’t you just take it with you? That will give me an excuse to ask you out to dinner in order to retrieve it.”

His remark irritated me, even though I was accustomed to being hit on—if less frequently since I’d left my twenties behind.

“I already have a boyfriend.”

“Is he also a fiancé?”

“No.”

“Then there’s hope,” he said, and turned and walked away, waving at me over his shoulder.

I sat for a few minutes after Dr. Nightingale left and savored the coffee. His parting remark had been charming, although not nearly charming enough to overcome my initial annoyance, especially given the setting, with my student still lying on a gurney behind a curtain. I put the empty cup carefully on the floor beneath my chair. Maybe he could ask my chair out to dinner if he felt like it.

CHAPTER 5

I
looked at my watch. It was exactly 8:15
A.M.
Amazingly, the whole episode with Primo, from office meeting to hospital, had taken only forty-five minutes. There was still time to get to Oroco’s, which was only four or five blocks south of the hospital, in time for my meeting with the dean. I considered canceling but decided to go ahead with it. Among other things, the dean would probably want to hear directly from me what had happened with Primo, and I’d be able to tell him.

I left the ER waiting room and walked south toward Oroco’s at a brisk pace. I suppose I should have worried more about Primo, but I just assumed it was some kind of drug issue. And since he was apparently going to be okay, I pushed the matter out of my mind. Instead, I tried, without success, to puzzle out what urgent matter had caused Dean Matthew Blender to summon me to meet him on such short notice at such an unlikely place. Oroco’s wasn’t a law-school crowd hangout—I had been there only once in my four years at UCLA—nor was it the kind of upscale establishment our dean frequented. It was, at best, funky.

At 8:30
A.M.
sharp, I walked through the front door of Oroco’s and spotted the dean, who was seated in the rear at a red Formica-topped table for two, studying his menu. I walked to the back and sat down across from him. He put down his menu, looked at me and said, “I heard about your student.”

“You did? I was just about to tell you about him and give you the details.”

“The security guy called the associate dean for student affairs—which is something you should have done, by the way—and told her about it. She called me about fifteen minutes ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, annoyed but trying hard to respond in a neutral tone. “I was rather preoccupied with going to the hospital in the ambulance with him.”

“Well, no harm, no foul, Jenna. The important thing is, how’s he doing?”

“A doctor there told me he was probably going to be fine, that he’ll likely be released from the ER in a few hours.”

“Good. I suppose it’s just a blip then, and we don’t need to worry further about it. Nor do I need to know the details right now, unless they somehow implicate the school. Do they?”

“No.”

“Good. The associate dean will deal with it, then. Let’s order.”

“Okay.”

During the entire conversation, as I sat there facing him, I had the same thought I had had the first time I met him: that he looked like a ferret. I know you’re not supposed to judge people by their looks, and I try not to, but every time I encountered him that’s what came immediately to mind.

For a couple of minutes we sat silently, studying our menus. Finally, Dean Blender put down his menu again, but instead of saying “Nothing on here looks quite right for a ferret,” he said, “You know, Jenna, I’m quite surprised.”

I hadn’t a single, solitary clue what he was talking about. I elected to say so, although during that microsecond in which words move from brain to mouth, I decided to omit the so clearly called for profanity. “Dean Blender,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any idea what you’re surprised about.”

“Jenna, you don’t need to call me Dean Blender. As I’ve mentioned before, Matthew will be just fine.”

“I apologize. I was taught as a child to be more formal when dealing with authority. But before we get into a serious discussion about anything, can we order coffee and breakfast? Especially coffee? I’ve had only one small cup this morning, and I need more than that to function well.”

“Of course, of course,” he said. “And I do apologize for asking you to meet me so far from campus at such an early hour. But it’s close to another meeting I have scheduled at nine thirty. Plus, with my busy schedule and all my fund-raising, I rarely get to meet one-on-one with my faculty anymore, and this seemed like a grand opportunity to catch up.”


I think my lips twitched slightly at his reference to
his faculty
, as if my colleagues and I were his personal possessions. But before I could say anything that would have further cemented my reputation as one of his faculty who always spoke her mind, a cute waitress, no doubt a UCLA undergrad, appeared at the side of our table, order pad in hand. She bore a name tag announcing her name as Tiffany.

“What would you guys like?” Tiffany asked, looking at me.

“A giant cup of coffee and a green onion scramble, please,” I said. “And no salt on it, please.”

“We don’t have giant cups of coffee. Just one size, kinda small, actually.”

“Then please bring me two.”

“Okay. Toast or bagel?”

“Just the eggs, thanks. No side dishes.”

The waitress turned to the dean. “And you, sir?”

“Coffee. One cup only.” He gave her a wink. “And a toasted bagel with cream cheese. And please, the bagel cut in half, cream cheese spread on the first half only—in a thin, nongoopy layer—the second half left dry.”

“Well, sir,” she said, “we’re short a waitress this morning, and they’re short in the kitchen, too. So if it’s okay with you, I’ll bring you the cream cheese, and that way you can put it on just the way you like it. Will that work for ya?”

“Sure, sure,” he said.

She turned and departed, leaving the two of us to resume our conversation.

“So,” I said, “I think you were about to tell me what has so surprised you.”

“Right, right. Well, candidly, I’m surprised that you’ve done so well here.” He waved vaguely in a northerly direction, as if to acknowledge that
here
referred to the UCLA Law School, which was less than a mile north of where we were sitting in Westwood Village, the commercial area just south of the campus.

“Why’s that surprising?”

“You’re probably unaware of this, but there was quite a debate in the faculty as to whether to make you an offer of a tenure-track teaching position.”

“I’m quite aware.”

“You are?”

“Dean, secrets at the law school have a half-life of about three days. I hadn’t even taught my first class before I heard that I was a controversial hire because I had spent too many years practicing law before I arrived—God forbid—plus I didn’t have, in addition to my JD, a PhD in economics or political science or history or whatever’s trendy these days.”

He had put his right hand in front of his mouth and partly over his nose, a habit of his I’d noticed in faculty meetings that he often engaged in right before telling a lie. When he did that, his long, thin, turned-up nose tended to stick out from between his splayed fingers, which is no doubt why the ferret analogy came so easily to mind.

“No, Jenna,” he said. “That wasn’t it at all. Not at all. The discussion was whether, after a splashy career as a high-profile trial lawyer, you could really buckle down and do scholarly work. Whether you’d find it boring to do that instead of strutting around a courtroom.”

“Well, the career, as you call it, was only eight years long. And I didn’t ‘strut around courtrooms.’ That’s a typical academic misperception of what real lawyers do in courtrooms, particularly from certain faculty who’ve never been in one, haven’t really practiced law and treasure their PhDs.”

“My apologies,” he said. “I didn’t and don’t mean to disparage trial work or the value it can bring to scholarship.” He took his hand away from his face. “But anyway, I asked you here so I could tell you that, to my surprise, you have overcome everyone’s—or at least almost everyone’s—doubts. Your scholarship has been outstanding. I’ve read every one of the four law review articles you’ve published so far and they’re great.”

Just then Tiffany returned, managing to balance three cups of coffee in two hands. She set one in front of the dean and two in front of me. “There you go,” she said. “Be back with the food as soon as it’s up.”

The arrival of the coffee gave me the opportunity to decide not to cross-examine him and ask exactly who had
not
had their doubts erased. In fact, I suspected that the dean was himself one of the doubters. I had been hired during his first semester as dean, when he hadn’t yet amassed enough power to block my appointment, and he’d never been particularly friendly or supportive. So I assumed his current praise was bs.

Instead, I said, “I’m pleased to hear that the general opinion—and yours!—is that I’ve done good work. Although I’m kind of surprised you asked me to breakfast at 8:30
A.M.
just to tell me that.”

“I thought you’d appreciate my telling you personally.”

“Sure. But it hasn’t escaped me, Dean, that you usually breakfast with
your
faculty at the Faculty Center. What do you really want to tell me, and why are we having what is in effect a secret meeting?”

“I simply wanted to have the opportunity to tell you, one-on-one, that assuming your big law review article on marine salvage gets the rave reviews everyone is expecting for it, you’ve pretty much got a lock on getting tenure. I mean, it’s ultimately up to your Ad Hoc Tenure Committee, and then the Internal Appointments Committee and the faculty as a whole, of course, but I’ve got my ear to the ground, as they say, and what I hear sounds good.”

“Dean Blender, not to be egotistical about it, but I think I already know that. So I’m still not sure why we’re here.”

Just then his cell rang, and he glanced at the screen. “I need to take this.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay, keep me posted.” He looked over at me. “That was the associate dean. She just learned that they’ve decided to admit Giordano to the hospital and keep him overnight. They’re still not worried. It’s just so they can run some tests. He’ll probably be discharged tomorrow morning.”

“Good,” I said. “He’s a nice guy; I hope he’ll be okay.”

A few seconds after that, Tiffany came back with the food and set it down in front of us, which interrupted any further discussion of Primo. The dean picked up his knife and began to spread cream cheese on half of his toasted bagel. He went on spreading while I let my scrambled eggs sit in front of me untouched. Finally, I said, “Dean, right before you got that call, I was saying I still wasn’t sure why we’re here.”

“Well,” he said, “let me put it this way, Jenna. There are two people up for tenure next year, and I think you’re the only one likely to get it. Telling you that is a terrible breach of confidentiality, of course, so it’s not something I wanted to talk about anywhere near the campus. But under the circumstances…”

I immediately understood what he was saying—that Aldous Hartleb, my next-door office neighbor, close friend and lover, would probably not be getting tenure.

“Have you told him?” I asked.

“No, of course I haven’t. That would be presumptuous of me, because I could be wrong and, as I said, it’s confidential. I’m not even supposed to be a part of it at this point. And the process isn’t done yet. But I thought it would be a kindness to let you know my sense of things due to the, uh, situation.”

“Would you like me to be blunt?”

“Are you ever anything but?”

I stared at him without responding.

While he stared back, no doubt wondering if I was going to explode, I took the time to think carefully about the tenor of my response. Since the moment I learned to talk, I had for the most part lacked a filter in front of my mouth. Overall, that approach had served me well. In recent months, though, I had been consciously trying to moderate my tone. Not because I enjoyed doing so but because it had seemed a better way to get ahead in an arena where civility, even if often faked, was so prized.

I went for unfiltered.

“Bluntly, I think that you’re too chickenshit to tell him yourself and you want me to do it for you.”

“That’s not what I intended at all.”

“Well, intended or not, I’m not doing it. Plus I’m no longer interested in dining with you.” I screeched back my chair and got up.

“Where are you going?”

“To my office. I have work to do on my law review article.”

As I reached the door of the restaurant, I glanced back at him. He had pulled my scrambled eggs over in front of him and was busy putting ketchup on them.