Unlucky in Law

“Expect us to believe that?” she said softly.

“Objection!” Jaime roared.

“Withdrawn. I am finished with this witness, Your Honor.”

28

Monday 9/29

SALAS ADJOURNED IMMEDIATELY AFTER GABE WYATT’S DIRECT examination. What a hell of an endless day. They all needed to go to their offices and homes to cogitate and reflect.

Jaime could reflect on how he was losing his murder case. Another lawyer might care deeply about that and try to bring the case under control, at the expense of the truth. Jaime couldn’t help himself. He wanted the truth, too. Sitting in her little office in the Pohlma

Nina drew pictures on the pizza box on her desk: a big young man falling off a giant fishhook, Stefan a Christlike figure with his arms out. Most of the pizza reposed in her stomach right now, along with a healthy infusion of red wine. She looked at her watch.

Almost ten P.M. Bob was home alone at their house in Pacific Grove; Paul had left a message that he’d be back very late; Klaus, feeling better, according to his wife, rested in his bed in the big house on Peter Pan Way in Carmel Highlands; Sandy packed up suitcases in Big Sur.

A massive deconstruction was going on.

Meantime, Stefan was i

And Gabe hadn’t sounded guilty enough. Nina could hear it now. At least one jury member was going to use the word flimflam.

She tried not to think about the evidence, but instead to concentrate on the people. Stefan, a young man in love and in jail, wanting only to marry and create the happy family he had never had. Christina, a shy woman who transformed herself to live a life she finally found purposeful, pursuing a dream.

Father Giorgi, hearing all his prayers for the old Russia come true when Christina came to him, and watching them fade when she died.

Sergey Krilov, Christina’s lover, still something of a mystery, but likely another hopeful wanting to cash in on Christina’s potential.

And Gabe, forever aggrieved, seeking his share of whatever it was that his father had given to Alex and Christina, but never able to attain the love he so desperately wanted.

He must have done it.

Nina picked off a piece of pepperoni from the single piece of pizza swiftly turning rancid in its cardboard box. Her door was shut and she was alone in the building. To avoid the creepy feeling night fog always gave her, she had closed the blinds. She clicked back to Google on her computer and searched for some more of the Russian Web sites. So many things were still unexplained. What had brought Sergey Krilov to the U.S.? Where was he? What relationship had he had with Christina?

Yawning, Nina pushed her hair back. She had reached that bleary place beyond simple exhaustion, where you can go on forever.

What a story Christina could have told, if she had lived. Romance, Russia, assassination. An alluring fabrication, unfortunately, like Anastasia’s story, like the stories of all the pretenders to the Empire of the Russias. It would have made a lively press conference, though.

Even immersed in her fantasy, how could Christina explain to herself the one obvious fact that made it all impossible, that all the Web sites with their escape theories had to acknowledge? Constantin Zhukovsky could not have been a fourteen-year-old tsarevitch in 1918, for the simple, well-known reason that, aside from the fact that he was almost certainly assassinated at Ekaterinburg along with the rest of his family, the tsarevitch had hemophilia.

Alexis’s mother, the tsarina, Alexandra, had brought Rasputin in, hoping he could help cure her chronically ailing son. Ultimately, that relationship was one of the biggest factors in the downfall of the Romanovs. The Russian people, already reeling from the suffering caused by war, drew the line at being ruled by this haughty German woman and her wild-eyed lover.

“Hemophilia/tsarevitch.” Lots of sites. She scrolled down a Web page about a tsarevitch pretender who supposedly had come to Washington State via Estonia after escaping the bullets of the Bolsheviks. This particular site was chock-full of colorful theories. She read down the page, her head aching.

Then her eye stuck on a word. She went back and looked.

Thrombocytopenia.

“It is always said that even if the tsarevitch escaped the assassinations he would have died soon after from hemophilia. But maybe Alexis did not have hemophilia. He may have suffered from a similar condition called thrombocytopenia, a medical syndrome referring to a hemorrhagic condition which is underlain by another disease, such as-”

Had she read it right?

“Such as aplastic anemia.”

She stared at the page. Gabe Wyatt had just testified that afternoon that he had been diagnosed with aplastic anemia, which had led eventually to leukemia. She hadn’t known Gabe’s symptoms could include hemorrhaging.

Strange to have such a rare illness pop up twice in one day.

Where was that death certificate? She found it eventually, sandwiched between two sets of pleadings.

She had remembered correctly. The treating physician had listed the cause of Constantin Zhukovsky’s death as “thrombocytopenia.”

Associated cause of death: “aplastic anemia.”

Confused, Nina went back to the Web site. The site went on to quote an anxious letter from the tsarina in the early 1900s referring to Alexis’s bouts with fever. “It’s possible the diagnosis for his illness was in error, since hemophiliacs do not suffer fever during their attacks,” the Web page said.

She called Ginger. “You up?”

“Always.”

“First of all, is there any possibility Constantin Zhukovsky really was the tsarevitch? Was he misdiagnosed with thrombowhatchamacallit, but really had hemophilia?”

“I would have to examine his medical records to be sure,” she said, “but I would have to say no. He was born in 1904, before there was an adequate treatment for hemophilia. I don’t think he could have lived into his seventies. He would certainly have been an invalid from an early age. No, I don’t think it’s possible. He died of thrombocytopenia, which is also a hemorrhagic syndrome, but some of the symptoms are different.”

“Okay, then here’s something else. I’ve been doing some reading about hemophilia. This Web page says hemophiliacs don’t have fever during bleeding spells. Is that true?”

“Let me check. I know a lot, but not every single thing.” Ginger’s phone clunked down.

Nina rubbed her head, trying to move the aching from one side to the other while she waited for Ginger to return.

“It’s true. Fever isn’t associated with hemophilia in general, but Nina, people with that disease can get a lot of associated problems, infections, all kinds of things that might cause fever.”

They hung up, Ginger returning to her nocturnal lab ramblings, and Nina returning to the tsarina’s letter. So maybe the tsarevitch was a sick hemophiliac with complications that caused fever.

Or maybe the Web site was right and the tsarevitch was the one who was misdiagnosed, way back at the turn of the century. He didn’t have hemophilia, but had thrombo-thrombo-whatever.

His body was not buried at Ekaterinburg along with the rest of his family. Maybe he escaped.

Maybe Constantin Zhukovsky really was Alexis Nicholaevich Romanov. Then Christina had been heir to the tsar all along. Then Alex, then Gabe, and, ultimately, Stefan.