Juhle frowned at the suggestion. JaMorris Monroe was an excellent Homicide inspector but no better than the team already working the case; the difference was that JaMorris was black. “As you know, Wes,” Juhle said, “inspectors get assigned randomly. Eric and Kenny were on call and drew this one, so it’s theirs.”
“Okay,” Farrell said, holding up his hands. “Just sayin’. It was a thought.”
“I know, and not bad from one perspective, but this whole Liam Goodman crusade lately is bogus, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to play that game.”
“You might get hammered for it if you don’t.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
“For that matter, I’ll back you up. But it would be nice for both of us if we get ourselves a suspect identified in the next week or so.”
“Right. Yeah. Of course. But it ought to be the guy who actually did it, don’t you think?”
Farrell nodded. “In a perfect world, that would be preferable, I agree.”
6
A LAWYER NAMED Dismas Hardy slipped into the corner window booth at Boulevard, an upscale restaurant in the Audiffred Building at the corner of Mission and Embarcadero. It was a cool and sunny morning in the first week of May, and he’d walked briskly all the way down from his office on Sutter Street, ten minutes early for his lunch appointment. He settled into the comfortable leather seat and ordered a Hendrick’s martini straight up.
Hardy normally didn’t drink hard liquor at lunch, although he often had wine, but today was a bit of a special occasion—lunch with one of his former law partners—and he didn’t think it would do him any harm. He had to be a little careful with alcohol because he was moonlighting a couple of nights a week at the Little Shamrock, the bar he co-owned out on Lincoln Way. If he had gin at lunch, and a couple of glasses of wine, and then went to the Shamrock and had a pop or two . . . well, it added up.
Back when he was just out of college, Hardy had joined the Marines. He’d gotten out of Vietnam alive, then become a cop in San Francisco while attending law school. After passing the bar, he’d worked for a year as an assistant district attorney. Then came what he called the lost years, spent in a semi-alcoholic haze while bartending at that same Little Shamrock after his first child had died in a crib accident and then—in the wake of that—after his first marriage had broken up. Ages twenty-nine to thirty-seven, gone.
He didn’t want to go back there.
But today that didn’t seem remotely likely.
Life had changed for Hardy since then in a way that made Wes Farrell’s transformation seem comparatively trivial. Hardy had remarried successfully, now going on twenty-six years, to Frannie, whose child, Rebecca—“The Beck”—was Hardy’s adopted daughter. She was also the newest legal associate at his firm.
After The Beck’s birth, he’d left bartending behind and gone back to work as a full-time lawyer, this time on the defense side. Frannie and he had a son together, Vincent, who was twenty-three years old and doing something at Facebook that Hardy didn’t understand but that paid handsomely.
Hardy had won a lot of cases over the years, some of them nationally prominent. He had helped form a major city law firm—Freeman Farrell Hardy & Roake—and become its managing partner. In the past six years, the firm had shrunk from its all-time high of twenty-two lawyers and changed its name—it was now Hardy & Associates—but they were back up to an even dozen attorneys, and the work seemed to be flowing in.
So the martini wasn’t a threat to him or his future. Not today. He took his first sip and almost laughed out loud, it was so outrageously delicious. Roses and cucumbers as botanicals. Who woulda thunk?
He raised his hand in a subdued greeting to one of his business clients across the restaurant by the entrance, then a minute later to one of the city’s superior court judges, out with her husband. For a cultured and sophisticated city, San Francisco remained in many ways a small town, one of the things Hardy loved about it. He could not imagine living anywhere else.
He sipped again, closing his eyes to savor the drink, and when he opened them, Wes Farrell was making his way through the press of citizens, shaking hands here and there, heading toward Hardy, greeting him with a “Yo.”
“Yo, yourself. I would have ordered you a drink if I thought you were going to be this close to on time.”
Farrell checked his watch. “Am I not two minutes early?”
“My bad.”
“It certainly is. But luckily, here’s Steven, just in time to slake my thirst and save you from my wrath.”
The waiter took Farrell’s cocktail order, the tasty yet unfortunately named Negroni, and Hardy said, “If I were a public figure such as yourself, I wouldn’t order that drink on general principle. Somebody misinterprets or hears it wrong, and five minutes later, everybody thinks you’re a racist.”
“If that happens, I’ll just tell ’em I’m not, which, up until this year, my record clearly supports. Meanwhile, I get the drink I feel like drinking. Life’s complicated enough. If they gave it another name, that’s how I’d order it, but I think for now we’re stuck with the one it’s got.”
“Maybe we could start a campaign.”
“You go ahead. One campaign is plenty for me. Farrell for DA.” Steven arrived and set Farrell’s glass down before him. “Ah, just in time to drink to my reelection.” The men raised then clinked their glasses—“Four more years!”—and sipped.
“So you’re really going ahead?” Hardy asked.
“I never thought I wouldn’t, to tell you the truth. The longer I’m in it, the more obvious it is that this is the job I was born to do. I’m just surprised it took me so long to realize it. Although some days, speaking of the job and racism . . .” Wes launched into a quick recital of the events of the previous night, concluding with Devin Juhle’s entirely orthodox decision to leave the murder investigation in the hands of the non-black officers who had caught the case.
“You really think it would make any difference?” Hardy asked.
“You mean in the case itself? Hell, no. But in the perception that we’re not putting the most motivated people on it . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know. As if Waverly and Yamashiro aren’t motivated. Christ! It’s their job. These are skilled cops, seasoned inspectors, Diz. It’s taken them years to make Homicide. Of course they’re motivated. You don’t think the PD has black inspectors investigating crimes with black victims?”
“I bet it does.”
“Damn straight.” Farrell took a breath, leaned back, and turned sideways in the banquette, his arm out along the top of it. “What do they want us to do? Juhle needs a solid case before he can arrest anybody, and we need even more before we bring anybody to trial. Imagine the outcry if Homicide just beat the bushes and started bringing in suspects on little or no evidence. The damn thing is, we get accused of that, too. I mean, how do either of us win here? You tell me.”
Hardy cracked a small grin. “I thought you loved the job.”
Farrell nodded in sheepish acknowledgment. “I do. I know. I must be an adrenaline junkie, to add to the long list of my failings. But this is just a false crisis. Liam Goodman wants to be mayor. Here’s this rich white dude holding himself up as the go-to empathy guy for poor black victims. My heart goes out to the victims, too. Their families, friends, everybody. Really.”
“I believe you.”
“As if I want murderers to get away with it. As if I don’t care about black victims.”
“As if,” Hardy said.
Farrell reached for his drink. “Go ahead,” he said, “patronize me.”
Hardy kept his grin on. “Just ’cause it’s so much fun. But I do have a suggestion.”
“Shoot.”
“How about you put Abe on this thing?” Abe Glitsky was Hardy’s best friend in the world and, after a long career in the SFPD, now an inspector in the DA’s Investigations Unit. Glitsky was half-black. “Make him a plenipotentiary grand poobah or something to oversee these investigations, or at least th
is one.”
Farrell considered the suggestion. “Actually, Diz, that’s not a completely goofy idea.” It was not unheard of for the DA to assign one of his own investigators to assist the regular police department. “I get Juhle on board, then we both have ownership of the investigation. At least there’d be no finger-pointing between us about who wasn’t doing the job right. It’s an important homicide, we put on a united front. Who’s going to criticize that?”
“Goodman will find a way,” Hardy said, “but at least you’ll be out in front of it.”
“I’ll talk to Devin, get him on board. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stab him in the back.”
“Spoken like a man with actual ethics.”
“Now, now,” Farrell said, “let’s not get all carried away.”
7
WAVERLY AND YAMASHIRO wasted some time trying to track down where Anlya lived. The address on her driver’s license—apartment 5 in a building south of Geary Street on Divisadero—was no longer current. The resident in 3, an elderly woman who’d resided in the building for fifteen years, told them that Anlya and her brother had moved out a few years before. Anlya’s parents had fought a lot and moved somewhere shortly after, she couldn’t say where.
Since Anlya’s fingerprints were also in the Child Protective Services database, Yamashiro put in a call to that office and left a message on a machine, the bored tones of which did not inspire confidence. Someone, the voice assured him, would be back with him shortly, a term of limited specificity that in this case turned out to be three hours.
So it was early afternoon before they had another couple of addresses—one at Anlya’s mother’s house down near Daly City, and another at a group foster home on McAllister near Webster, not too far from the address where they’d struck out earlier and in the general area where they still found themselves. The two inspectors knew that the medical examiner’s office would be contacting Anlya’s mother as next of kin, a task neither of them envied. They decided to start at McAllister Street instead.
The house was a large three-story Victorian, freshly painted in bright colors so that it stood out on the street as a welcoming spot. The two inspectors parked right in front and climbed the twenty-two concrete steps to the covered front porch, then rang the bell.
The woman who opened the door looked to be around fifty. Packing maybe forty extra pounds on her medium frame, she wore a green and yellow cotton dress over blue jeans; she also had an apron tied around her waist. Sporting a graying Afro, she identified herself as Nellie Grange. She exuded a weary serenity, but as soon as the inspectors introduced themselves, what seemed to be a hopeful kindness in her eyes faded to a dull acceptance of what she clearly knew would be bad news.
More bad news.
“Is this about Anlya?”
Waverly nodded. “I’m afraid it is.”
Nodding, she said, “She didn’t come in last night, which sometime happen, but it always got me thinkin’ the worst.”
Waverly came right out with it. “Anlya’s been in an accident. I’m so sorry to have to break it to you, but she’s dead.”
Nellie shot a helpless look at both of them, then brought her hands up to her mouth, hung her head, and closed her eyes. “Oh my Lord.”
Yamashiro asked if they could come in for a minute. She ushered them inside, where the large circular first room on the right was cheerfully bright due to its huge, curved glass windows. Surrounded by an assortment of mismatched chairs, an enormous circular wooden table filled the center of the room.
The inspectors took their seats next to each other, but Nellie remained standing, gripping the back of a chair. “You mind I ask how it happen?”
“We’re not completely sure,” Waverly said. “She went over the parapet of the Sutter-Stockton tunnel downtown. There is some indication of a struggle.”
“So somebody pushed her? Off a tunnel?”
“We don’t know that,” Waverly said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“You’re saying somebody killed her.”
“That’s not definitely established,” Waverly said, “but it appears that might be the case.”
Yamashiro took over. “Do you know who she might have been with last night?”
“No.”
“She didn’t have to sign out or anything like that?”
The caretaker shook her head. “It’s not like they’re locked up.”
“What about a curfew?”
“None of that. We try to be home to these girls. They don’t need no jailers or curfews, no lockup, just a room and a safe place to stay. There’s not a single one of them bad.”
“How many girls live here, Ms. Grange?” Yamashiro asked.
“We got eighteen . . . well, now seventeen.” The number seemed to catch in her throat. “But we’ve been as high as twenty-three.”
“And what’s the age range?”
“Nobody really comes here until they’re fourteen. When they’re eighteen, they’re out of the program. So all of them are in that range.”
“Was Anlya close to any particular one of them? Or some of them?”
With a sigh, Nellie pulled out the chair she had been holding and sat on it. “We all get along most of the time. But, you know, teenage girls . . .”
Yamashiro nodded. “I’ve got two of ’em at home myself.”
“So you know. Some days . . . nothing anybody can do. But mostly they all good to each other, more like family.”
“Might Anlya have gone out with another of your girls last night?” Waverly asked.
“I don’t know. Like I say, we don’t keep track of them. They’re free to come and go.”
Waverly kept the questions coming. “Are any others of them here now?”
“No.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“Not for certain. Probably they’re in school. They start getting home any time now.”
“Sometime in the near future we’ll want to talk to each of them, if that’s all right with you.”
“Fine with me. But I don’t decide. You have to ask them one by one.”
Yamashiro asked, “How long has Anlya been living here?”
“Just about a year and a half.”
“And how’d she wind up here?”
“Same as them all. She got delivered one day. Some trouble at her home, the CPS come and do the evaluation and take the kids, but by the time they get here, mostly I don’t ask. Don’t tell, neither. The point is, they’re here and they’re welcome.”
“We heard she has a brother,” Waverly said. “Can you tell us anything about him?”
“Oh.” A fresh wash of emotion. “That poor child. Her twin, you know. Max.”
“Do you know where he’s staying?”
“With his auntie, I believe. Someplace in the city it must be, but I don’t know where.”
“This auntie, she couldn’t take Anlya, too?” Waverly asked.
“You mean to live with them? It ain’t like it’s free, you know, takin’ on a child. Even if you getting some money from the foster people, that ain’t going to cover it all,” Nellie said. “His auntie, his actual blood, she took him, and there’s a miracle by itself. But Anlya and Max, they still were seeing each other. Another miracle. He’s come by here a few times. A good boy.” Running her hands through her hair, she spoke in a strangled voice. “How does something like this happen? You want to tell me that?”
• • •
NELLIE WAS ACCURATE about when the girls would start showing up. The first one—Felicia Rios—came into the house in the next minute or two. After she heard the news, she walked halfway around the table before she shrugged out of her backpack and lowered herself onto a chair. She didn’t cry, but the news clearly rocked her. She stared at Nellie, cast quick glances at the two inspectors. “So,” she said, “are you saying somebody killed her?”
Yamashiro nodded. “We don’t know. Was she a good friend of yours?”
She shrugged. “I knew her okay. She was nice. We didn’t hang out together much. She was older, you know.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen. But she’s seventeen and a senior, and smart, way smarter than me. She helped me with homework sometimes. Helped everybody, really, whoever asked.”
“And did that happen frequently?” Waverly asked.
She lifted her shoulders, let them drop. “If the timing worked. It wasn’t like organized or anything, but we all knew we could go to her if we got stuck on stuff.” Suddenly, the enormity of it seemed to strike her. “I mean, she’s really just dead, and that’s all? She’s gone?”
Yamashiro nodded. “I’m afraid she is. Did you see her last night, Felicia?”
“No.” The girl turned to Nellie. “Was she even at dinner?”
Nellie frowned, trying to recall. “I don’t think so. I’m trying to think if she came home. I don’t remember seeing her.”
“Honor might know,” Felicia volunteered.
“And Honor is?” Waverly asked.
“Honor Wilson,” Nellie said.
Felicia’s expression clouded. “Her BFF. Or used to be, anyway.”
The front door opened again—more teenage-girl chatter—and Nellie pushed back her chair and stood up with a sigh, on her way out to intercept them and convey the horrible news.
• • •
BY THE TIME Honor came in at a little past four o’clock, more than half of the places around the table were taken, and through some sort of social osmosis, nearly all of the girls were teary-eyed. The inspectors hadn’t learned too much more about Anlya: Everyone seemed to agree that she was nice, smart, a bit of a loner, but always willing to chip in and help with homework or housekeeping. No one knew where she’d gone the previous night, whom she’d met, what she’d been doing downtown. The consensus was that she hadn’t been home for dinner.
Honor stood out in the hall and took in the situation at a glance. “What’s going on?”
At the sound of her voice, Yamashiro did a double take, so different did Honor come across. Almost everyone else at the table was recognizably a teenage girl; they mostly reminded him of his own mid-teenage daughters. Honor Wilson, by contrast, was immediately and obviously a woman. He had assumed that the maximum age in the group home was eighteen—this was when people typically left the foster system to go out on their own—but he realized that there must be exceptions to the rule and that Honor must be one of them.
The Fall Page 2