Long Knives (7 page)

CHAPTER 14

A
fter I hung up, I grabbed my iPad, which was sitting on the nightstand next to my bed, and looked up Dad’s conference on the USC website. I kept missing the keys because of the way my hand was shaking, but eventually I found it. It was called
Harold Jenkins: A Judge before His Time
and was slated to start Friday afternoon with a cocktail reception and end Sunday at noon. So unless Dad was making other plans—unlikely—I was going to be forced to join him for dinner on both Thursday and Sunday, plus be expected to spend Friday morning and much of the day Sunday with him. Worst of all, he’d probably ask to attend one of my classes, and I’d be hard-pressed to say no. Unfortunately, the only class I’d be teaching during his time in LA would be my Sunken Treasure seminar on Friday morning—a class in which one of the students had just died under mysterious circumstances.

I stopped myself midthought. Why was I thinking of Primo’s death as having happened under mysterious circumstances? Hadn’t I overheard the students saying he was a heavy partier? It was probably drugs.

All of that was going through my mind as I sat on my bed staring at the telephone in its cradle. I finally got up and walked to the third bedroom, which I had converted into a study. It was the smallest of the three, and while the room I had rented to Tommy would have made for a more comfortable study, the third bedroom had the best view of the hills. I could even see the law school from its windows.

I had furnished the room rather starkly—Lucite desk in red, pushed right up against the windows, black mesh Aeron desk chair and a set of floor-to-ceiling blonde oak bookshelves fastened to the wall just to the left of the windows. The carpeting was the same industrial gray I had chosen for the rest of the condo, but I’d splashed a bright rug on top of it, something I’d picked up in Guatemala on the previous summer’s treasure cruise. Against the back wall I had installed a pull-out sofa, also red. Not that it had gotten much use as a bed. It was rare that I had overnight guests. The only art in the room was a woodblock print of a monk in his red robes. It looked classic until you noticed that he was holding a brimming martini glass with a sliver of lemon hooked over the top edge.

I sat down and turned on my notebook computer, which was sitting on the desk. It was an exact match of the one in my office. I had finally tired of carting a computer back and forth and had elected instead to have two, one left at the law school and one in my condo. All my files were stored in the cloud, backed up automatically every few minutes. All I had to do if I needed a file was pull it down from the Net, without regard to where I had been when I created it. Aldous had warned me that this created a greater risk of data theft, but I had ignored him.

My first problem was what to do about my Law of Sunken Treasure seminar, which met for just over an hour and a half on Tuesdays and Fridays at 9:00
A.M.
Tomorrow was a Tuesday. As I thought about it, there was something unseemly about meeting the day after Primo had died and just going forward as if nothing had happened. I would at least have to make some mention of it, and I really had no idea what to say. Or maybe the school was going to cancel classes for the day. No student had died during my almost four years at the law school, so I didn’t know what the drill would be. I needed to ask.

I picked up my cell—my hand seemed to have stopped trembling—and punched in the dean’s number.

He answered on the first ring. “Jenna, I’ve been sitting here waiting for your call for well over an hour. Did you find the map?”

“Oh my God, I’m sorry. I totally forgot to call you. I’ve been kind of distracted.”

“Understood. Was the map there?”

“No, it wasn’t. I searched everywhere but couldn’t find it.”

“Well, where is it?”

“I have no idea.”

“We have a big problem then.”

“Dean Blender, there’s something you need to understand. All I ever saw was a red mailing tube. I have no idea whether there was a map or anything else in it.”

“This Quinto guy insists that’s what was in it. He says he helped his brother roll the map up in the morning and put it in the tube so Primo could show it to you.”

“I sound like a broken record, but, again, I have no way of knowing whether that’s true or not. I never got a look at the map, if it was even in there.”

“All right, I’ll take you at your word.”

“That sounds ominous. Why would you
not
take me at my word?”

“I didn’t mean it that way. It was just a manner of speaking. Anyway, please let me know if you learn anything new. I have to go now. I have a lot to do to try to put a lid on this mess before it spins out of control. It’s one thing for a student to die, it’s another thing for his family to claim a professor stole something from him.”

“They think I stole it?”

“That’s the clear implication.”

“That’s absurd.”

“I know. Welcome to my job as dean. And as I said, I’ve got to go.”

“Wait.”

“What now?”

“Are you going to cancel classes tomorrow?”

“No, why would we?”

“A student died.”

“Once in a while we lose a student, Jenna. It’s tragic, but life goes on. We’ve never canceled classes before for that. We’ll have a memorial service of some sort at an appropriate time. Assuming that’s okay with the family, of course.”

“I see. Maybe I’ll just cancel my own class in the morning. The one Primo was in.”

“That’s up to you, but I think most faculty would just man up and teach it.”

“I can’t man up.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not a man.”

There was a small silence, as he, I hoped, absorbed what a chauvinist pig he was. Finally, he said, “I’ve got work to do. Let me know if you learn anything more.”

“I will, but I don’t know how you expect me to learn anything more.”

There was no response. I looked at the cell phone screen, which said “disconnected.” He, too, had hung up on me. I was tired of people doing that. In fact, I was tired of talking to people I didn’t want to talk to. I powered off my cell phone.

Then I remembered the coffee, which was still sitting on the counter. I went back to the kitchen, poured some of it into a glass jar, put a lid on the jar and placed it in the refrigerator. That left almost half a pot of coffee still in the pot. I sniffed it and it smelled bad, so I hesitated to pour it down the drain, lest I smell up the sink.

There’s a small balcony off the living room that I rarely use in the winter. It has a broad-leafed plant on it that I sometimes neglect to water. I figured I could just dump the coffee in the plant and it would kill two birds with one stone. I’d get rid of the coffee and give the plant some needed water. It seemed unlikely to me that the plant would be bothered by the smell or whatever fungus had sickened Primo. If that’s what had really happened, which I doubted.

CHAPTER 15

I
had agreed to meet Aldous at 7:45
P.M.
at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood for a performance of
Hamlet
. The curtain was at 8:00. It wasn’t the Geffen’s usual fare, which tended a bit more toward the modern. Nor was it mine; I very unsophisticatedly prefer movies. But I had been looking forward to it as a fun night out with Aldous.

After my strange phone call with the dean, in which he all but accused me of stealing Primo’s supposed map, I had considered canceling. Yet it didn’t seem likely that staying home would improve my mood—or my hands, which were still red and in which I could still detect an ever-so-slight tremor if I held them out in front of me. And perhaps Aldous would have some good advice. So I threw on a little black dress I had bought at Nordstrom, looped a string of pearls around my neck and slipped on my patent-leather heels. Then I retrieved my car from the valet and drove to the Geffen.

Parking is often an issue in Westwood, but since I had a UCLA parking pass, I just pulled into a nearby UCLA lot. Teaching at UCLA doesn’t have a lot of privileges, but it has some.

When I walked into the stone-walled courtyard of the Geffen, Aldous was standing there waiting, looking handsome. The evening was cool but not cold—in the low 60s, not unheard of for mid-November in Los Angeles—and he was dressed in a nubby brown cardigan worn over an ecru shirt, sharply creased brown khakis and brown tasseled loafers. He looked like an ad out of a Brooks Brothers catalog, which fit, since he’d once told me he bought almost all of his clothes there.

He sprinted over to me. “Honey, I’ve been trying to call you all day, but you didn’t pick up or return my messages. And you haven’t been in your office. I’ve been by three times to look for you. Are you okay?”

I admit that I was a bit stunned to hear him say that. I couldn’t recall the last time he had tried to track me down. For any reason.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I turned off my cell and forgot to turn it back on. And no, I’m not okay. I don’t know if you heard, but my student died. I’m a mess.”

“Of course I heard. It’s all over the school. I’ve been worried sick about you.”

“You could have dropped by my condo when you couldn’t reach me.”

As soon as I said it, I realized it had been the wrong thing to say. He was trying hard to care about me and I was being a jerk.

“Jenna, you’ve told me several times never to do that. Under any circumstances.”

Which was true. I didn’t like being dropped in on. Maybe some of the lack of intimacy was on my side. I’d never agreed to move in with anybody, despite several heartfelt invitations, and I didn’t even like staying overnight with a guy.

In the end I didn’t respond to what Aldous had said about dropping in on me but asked, instead, “What are they saying around the school about Primo?”

“Nothing specific. Just a lot of shock and supposed grief, although I haven’t run into anyone who really knew him well.”

“Nobody’s saying what killed him?”

“No. Do you know?”

“No. I have no idea. I went with him to the hospital in the ambulance, but they wouldn’t say much because I wasn’t a relative. And anyway, at that point they seemed to think he’d be fine.”

“Who told you that?”

“Some doctor who also tried to pick me up.”

“Did he succeed?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“I’m teasing you, Aldous.”

“You don’t usually tease.”

“I know, I know. I need to lighten up, don’t you think?”

Before he could answer, the chime sounded and we went in.

Aldous had reserved seats in the middle of the third row of the orchestra. One of the things I’ve always liked about him is that he drives an old VW Bug and only flaunts his wealth in small ways. Which got me thinking, as we sat there waiting for the curtain to go up, that if I wanted to, I could become Mrs. Aldous Hartleb, retire and grow prize gladiolus or something. Sure, I’d have to overlook the lack of emotion in our relationship, but maybe all that stuff was overrated. And marrying Aldous would make my father happy. Maybe it would make me happy, too.

The play was, thank God, a classically staged
Hamlet
, not a jazzed-up, modern version with Hamlet wearing a pin-striped suit and living amid Danish modern furniture. As the actor began the soliloquy and spoke the famous lines, “To
be or not to be,” it hit me that Primo had been alive when the sun rose in the morning and was now dead. He was, and now he was not. And it struck me that Primo wasn’t the only one who had gone through an arc. When I got up that morning, I had been a happy camper on my way to tenure. Now, not much more than twelve hours later, I had become an almost unhinged camper whose hands shook. In fact, when the curtain went up I had shoved my hands under my thighs to hide them from view, just in case that started again.

During the intermission we ran into a couple of other faculty members from the law school. We all drank champagne and made small talk. No one mentioned Primo, but his ghost was clearly present and walking around. I looked at the hand holding my champagne glass and was relieved to see that there was no tremor at all.

After the play ended, Aldous and I were standing on the sidewalk in front of the theater, talking about where to go to dinner.

“I’m thinking the Napa Valley Grille,” he said.

“I’m thinking someplace less fancy,” I responded. “Maybe a late-night burger place. Preferably someplace far from Westwood, where we won’t run into anyone from the law school. I’m finding seeing people from there and not talking about Primo unnerving, even though I very much don’t want to talk about him.”

“Well, what about…”

He never got to finish his thought because just then a slight, dark-haired young guy wearing a black leather jacket burst out of the alley next to us, sprinted up to me and began shouting in my face, “Where’s the map? Where is the damn map!?”

Aldous put his large hand on the kid’s thin shoulder and pushed him gently backward. “Whoa, my friend. I don’t know who you are, but please get out of the lady’s face.”

The guy backed off a couple of feet and said, “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m Quinto Giordano, the brother of the man Professor James poisoned. The police can deal with that part. Right now I just want the treasure map back. Tonight.”

“Poisoned?” I asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I dropped him off near your office this morning, with the map. I watched him go into the building. A few hours later he was dead, and the treasure map he took with him to your office is missing. Put it together yourself, bitch.”

Aldous stepped forward and placed himself between me and Quinto. “You’re out of line, sir. If you have information about your brother’s death, take it up with the police or the DA. But stop harassing—and slandering—Professor James. Got that?”

“Yeah, I got that. But you—” he stabbed his finger at me over Aldous’s shoulder—“are gonna hear from me again. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get that map over to me. Your dean knows where to find me.” He turned and strode off toward Ralphs, the big grocery store that sits next door to the theater.

“Are you all right, Jenna?” Aldous asked.

“No.”

“Have you ever seen that guy before?”

“No.”

“He said he was Primo’s brother. Wasn’t Primo Italian?”

“I thought so.”

“This guy doesn’t sound Italian.”

“No, he doesn’t. No accent. Perfect grammar.”

“Are you sure you’ve never seen him before? He certainly seemed able to pick you out of a crowd.”

“The first time I ever even heard of him was earlier today, when the dean told me that he was demanding a map the guy thinks I have but that I don’t.”

As I said it, I realized that I was holding back the gory details from Aldous, almost like they were dammed up behind an emotional wall. If I couldn’t tell him, who could I tell? The wall broke.

“There’s more, Aldous. The dean practically accused me of stealing the map.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. Because it was in my office and now it’s gone? It’s ridiculous, but I
know
he thinks I took it. And then Drady practically accused me of murdering Primo.”

“Who’s Drady?”

“A cop who was involved in Robert Tarza’s prosecution, way back when. Now he’s on the UCLA force and is investigating Primo’s death.”

By that time Aldous had gathered me into his arms and was just holding me tight. “Jenna, you need to get a grip. We need to sit down, and you need to tell me everything. Maybe I can help.”

“That would be great. I need someone I can count on.” I was crying gently into his shoulder, and people in the crowd were staring at us. To my surprise, I didn’t care.

“Jenna, do you still want to go to dinner?”

“No.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Can I come home with you?”

“Of course.”