The Fall

by John Lescroart

  Hardy and Glitsky, largely immune to the building’s charms, climbed the grand staircase and found themselves outside Liam Goodman’s office. Hardy had called for an appointment to make sure Goodman would be in, before he called Abe, before he decided that Abe’s presence as a member of the DA’s Investigations Unit would add a certain gravitas to the proceedings. As they got to the door, Hardy was explaining to Glitsky that he may have inadvertently conveyed the impression to Goodman’s secretary that he was thinking about making a political donation.

  Glitsky broke what he probably thought was a smile, a tiny uptick at the corner of his scar-slashed mouth. “When he finds out you’re not giving him anything, he’s going to kick us right out.”

  “I’m betting he won’t.”

  “Don’t say ‘bet,’ ” Glitsky snapped. “Betting is off-limits today.”

  They opened the door and passed a small outer office where three well-dressed interns, who might have been in their teens, sat doing what looked like massive amounts of paperwork around a small conference table. A short hallway beyond that office brought them to the receptionist’s station, where an attractive black woman—Diane, according to the carved knickknack on her desk—sat behind a computer terminal at an uncluttered desk with empty “in” and “out” basket. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Hardy gave her a nod and a smile. “Dismas Hardy to see Mr. Goodman. I believe he’s expecting me.” He didn’t introduce Glitsky, whose unusual and distinctive name as well as his professional background would have been familiar to the supervisor.

  The omission didn’t seem to bother Diane, who got up from her desk, turned, and walked a few steps back to another door, where she tapped gently, then stuck her head in. They heard Goodman’s voice, nearly booming from inside. “Send him in, send him in.”

  Goodman was standing in front of an empire desk that matched the rest of the general high-toned decor of the room—bookshelves with law books and hardbacks, a large globe, dark wood, and burgundy leather couches and seats. “Dismas Hardy,” he said by way of greeting, shaking hands. “The famous lawyer. I thought I recognized the name. I confess I Googled you after Diane made this appointment.”

  Hardy knew that this was complete bullshit. When Hardy had subpoenaed Goodman to appear at the murder trial a little over a year before, he had responded to Hardy—albeit through his lawyer—that he would come to court but under no circumstances would he testify about anything. Hardy never got to call him, but he’d been there in the courtroom, as he’d been with Treadway. So he unquestionably knew who Hardy was, though he might not guess what he wanted today. For the moment, he wasn’t giving anything away. “Didn’t I see you at the Treadway trial yesterday? That’s still going on, isn’t it?”

  “As far as I know. It’s my daughter’s case, and as a courtesy, she was letting me sit in on opening day.”

  “I’m hoping that she doesn’t prevail in getting Mr. Treadway off, though I don’t suppose there’s much chance of that. Still, I’m a lawyer myself, and I must say I greatly admire defense attorneys like your daughter and yourself, who take on these hopeless cases. The best defense the law allows, and all that. Isn’t that right? Everyone deserves that. People don’t always realize it, but if I had to say one thing that makes our country great, that would be it, the unassailable right to an attorney. I’m sure you’d agree.”

  “It’s what I do for a living,” Hardy said.

  “A noble calling. Sometimes thankless, I’m sure, but noble. I’m not kidding you.” After his politician’s prologue, he turned to Glitsky, a silent question in his eyes. “I’m sorry, where are my manners? Sometimes I get caught up talking philosophy and get carried away.” He reached out his hand to shake Abe’s. “Liam Goodman.”

  “Abe Glitsky. Nice to meet you.”

  Hardy noticed a flicker of concern, perhaps of recognition, in the supervisor’s face. Goodman’s brow creased for an instant, then went smooth again, accompanied by a smile that struck Hardy as slightly uncertain. “So. What can I do for you gentlemen? Do you want to take a seat? Can I offer you some coffee? Tea? Something stronger?”

  “I think we’re good,” Hardy said. “Abe?”

  “I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea,” Glitsky said. “Plain, no sugar or milk.”

  “Have a seat. I’ll get Diane right on it.” Goodman strode over to the door, made the request, then came back inside, crossed around his desk, and sat at it. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked.

  “Well,” Hardy said, “it’s a little sensitive.”

  “I can do sensitive,” Goodman replied.

  “Good.” Hardy came forward in his chair. “This is really about what I believe you used to refer to as ‘the Army Business.’ ”

  It was as though a small electric current shot through Goodman’s face. His lips twitched and his eyes closed a fraction, although he maintained a neutral, interested posture, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him.

  Hardy didn’t want to give him a chance to respond right away. He had a lot more to say. “About a year ago,” he said, “you may remember getting subpoenaed in one of my cases after having a conversation with a private investigator named Wyatt Hunt, who was trying to get a handle on rumors he’d heard of you being blackmailed by your chief of staff, Rick Jessup. Who’d been murdered.”

  “Of course I remember that. It was a horrible time. I don’t think the office is quite over it yet. Rick was a wonderful person. The idea that he would even think about blackmailing me or anyone else is totally ludicrous. Which is what I believe your Mr. Hunt found.”

  “Well, no, not exactly,” Hardy said. “What he found was a conspiracy between you and Rick Jessup to defraud the U.S. government to the tune of several million dollars.”

  It had been a slick and lucrative scheme, hatched in the first years of the Afghanistan campaign. Women in the service would return from the war theater pregnant and nearing the end of their term. Here in the U.S., they would have their baby and then, still under enlistment, would have six months postpartum when they would not be deployed back to the war zone. Concurrently, the army had a policy not to send pregnant women to active theaters of war. So if they could just get pregnant again during those six months, they would remain safe.

  At the same time, Rick Jessup and Liam Goodman had found an opportunity to make connections with childless wealthy couples looking for a surrogate mother to carry their baby. For a fee of one hundred thousand dollars, Goodman put together these carefully vetted people—servicewomen and wealthy couples. He kept eighty thousand of that money, paid Jessup a finder’s fee of three grand, and gave the remaining twenty thousand to the surrogate mother. Hunt found evidence that in all, over a three-year period, Goodman had brokered no fewer than thirty-two of these deals.

  What made the scam a federal crime was the fact that the army was not only paying the active-duty female soldier the whole time but also covering all of her pregnancy-related medical expenses.

  Hardy had known about the arrangement for well over a year—as far as he knew, since Jessup was dead, he and Wyatt Hunt and now Glitsky were the only people besides Goodman who did know—but until this morning, when the idea randomly occurred to him, he had seen no advantage to be gained from revealing this knowledge.

  That had changed.

  “All right,” Goodman said.

  “All right? You admit it?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Goodman said. “This is bullshit, and you can’t prove any of it.” He did not, however, tell them to get out.

  “And yet,” Hardy said, “here we are, having this discussion.”

  “Fine, but so what? Those records are gone. And without them, you have no proof of anything you’re talking about,” Goodman said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you got rid of the records. But actually,” Hardy said, “there’s plenty of proof readily available in the persons of thirty or thirty-five kids walking around all over the city. I think if Wyatt H
unt, say, went to talk to the parents of these children, in exchange for immunity for their parts in the conspiracy, several of them might be willing to talk about your role in their children’s birth.”

  Goodman glared at him with reptilian coldness. “You’re an asshole,” he said.

  “Maybe, but that won’t put me in jail. Whereas you, as a hypocrite who’s defrauded the government, are looking at some serious prison time, I would predict. If someone decides to start telling this story to a federal grand jury. Oh, and I might add, that would be pretty much the end of your political career.”

  Goodman’s gaze traveled to the side. “Glitsky,” he said, “you’re with the DA.”

  “Not today,” Glitsky said. “Apparently.”

  “What’s your part in this?”

  Glitsky thought for a long moment. “Today I’m an overworked public servant who wouldn’t dream of thinking up more work to do. Unless my close friend Dismas Hardy were to present me with evidence of a crime that I could not ignore.” He cocked his head. “Sorry,” he said with unmistakable irony.

  “Fuck you, too.”

  Glitsky shrugged. “Creative,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, fuck you again.” To Hardy, Goodman said, “What do you want? Money?”

  “That would be blackmail,” Hardy said, “and that would be illegal.”

  “So? What?”

  “What I’d really like, Liam, is a fair trial for Rebecca’s client Greg Treadway. You could argue that as a rookie defense attorney, she should embrace the shenanigans you’re orchestrating in the courtroom and chalk it up to experience. Shit happens at trials, and she’s got to learn how to deal with all of it. Maybe I should just let it all play out, but that’s the other thing—I find it pretty offensive as well, the way you’ve got your team of rabble-rousers in the courtroom, poisoning the atmosphere. If Treadway goes down, I know Rebecca could base an appeal on their presence in the gallery, but that could take years, and she wouldn’t want her client to lose all that time out of his life.

  “In the here and now, the jury feels there’s going to be a riot or something very much like it if they don’t come back with a guilty verdict, so they’ll be twice as reluctant to let him go, since if they do that, the whole city might explode. Which is probably what you’ve been hoping all the while, so you can get more media face time.

  “So what I’d like, call it a demand if you want, is for all those people to get out of the gallery, now if not sooner, and for the rest of the trial. Beyond that, I don’t want to hear another word out of you about how this city doesn’t arrest and doesn’t convict on black homicides. It’s hard enough getting justice done without stacking the deck against it with all this political posturing so you can get your stupid votes.”

  Goodman waited, but nothing else was coming. At last he said, “Is that it? That’s all you want?”

  “That’s it. Call it your lucky day. Let’s go, Abe.”

  The two men got up. Hardy opened the door and held it for Glitsky, then closed it on Goodman just as Diane was returning with Glitsky’s tea. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you all done already in there? If I’d known . . .”

  Glitsky took the mug from her, blew on it and sipped, then handed it back. “Excellent,” he said. “Thank you.”

  On their way down the Grand Stairway, Hardy said, “Told you that was going to be fun.”

  “Oh, yeah. A laugh riot.”

  “You didn’t like it? I thought he was going to keel over and croak there for a minute.”

  “More than a minute. But you could have gotten a lot more out of him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Quit politics entirely. Join a monastery. A million bucks. Almost anything.”

  “I didn’t want to be greedy. I just wanted his goons out of the courtroom, and I suddenly realized I had a way to do it.”

  Glitsky clucked. “Wasted opportunity.”

  “Home run.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use those words.”

  34

  THE DNA EVIDENCE was crucial for the prosecution for no other reason than if Greg and Anlya were having sex, it helped fill in the three hours between the end of their dinner at the Imperial Palace and the time of the murder. Beyond that, it firmly established the true nature of the couple’s relationship—at least for that one night, they had been lovers.

  From Rebecca’s point of view, the most frustrating thing about the DNA was Greg’s adamant denial, even in the face of this apparently irrefutable evidence, that he and Anlya had ever had sex of any kind. As to the presence of his DNA on her underwear, he had no explanation except that the test must have been flawed.

  But that was between lawyer and client.

  Rebecca had already failed in her earlier motion to exclude the DNA testimony on the theory that the preservation of evidence and the testing were so flawed as to be unreliable. Besides, the DNA evidence did not place Greg at the scene of the crime. Indeed, the sexual encounter could have taken place at any time after they’d met that day. Or, not impossibly, on an earlier day. Bakhtiari had ruled, to no one’s surprise, that because Treadway had denied a sexual relationship, the DNA evidence was both reliable and relevant to prove motive, and that he would admit it.

  Now, in the courtroom, Braden had brought it in with over two hours of tediously detailed testimony. The lab analyst and forensics expert was a woman named Nancy Sciavo, about forty-five years old and dry as toast.

  Rebecca had about an hour before they adjourned for the day, but she was still pumped about what she considered her success with Sergeant Faro, and she knew just where she would begin. She didn’t think it was going to take longer than fifteen or twenty minutes.

  “Ms. Sciavo,” she began. “We have heard you describe the tests you ran on the DNA present on Anlya Paulson’s underwear, and the conclusions you drew from those results. Let me ask you, were you called in especially to run these tests?”

  “I’m not sure I understand. It’s part of my regular job. So no, I guess. It was just a normal day’s workload.”

  “And you work during the day shift, do you not?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “What time do you get in to work?”

  “Eight o’clock in the morning.”

  “But we have heard Sergeant Faro’s testimony that this evidence was delivered to the lab at seven-sixteen P.M. on Thursday, May eighth. Did you have an opportunity to inspect this evidence or supervise its storage that night?”

  “No. I had already gone home for the day.”

  “When did you first come into contact with the DNA evidence that you’ve just testified about in this case?”

  “I guess the next morning.”

  “You guess? You’re not sure?”

  “Well, it had to be the next morning, because I logged on to the computer for the analysis at eleven o’clock. So it was before then.”

  “It wasn’t first thing in the morning, then.”

  “It must not have been, but not too much after that, probably. If I had the sample ready by eleven.”

  “And how about the storage of the sample? Was it kept refrigerated?”

  “Yes. That’s standard procedure.”

  “After you got it to your workstation, while you were getting ready to work on it, did you happen to notice the packaging of the clothing evidence?”

  “Not particularly. There was nothing strange or unusual about it. It was all labeled correctly with the case number and so on.”

  “Were all the articles of clothing separately wrapped?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all in plastic Ziploc-type bags?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” Rebecca said. “No further questions.”

  Rebecca was setting up an argument, however feeble, that the difference between a paper and a plastic wrapping was an issue—just one more thing for a juror to hang his hat on.

  •  •  •

  THEY WERE IN recess, and the j
ury had been excused while Braden gathered his next witnesses, who had been kept out of the courtroom until it was their time to testify. Rebecca and Allie flanked Greg at the defense table, and they were conversing in muted tones. “Don’t get me wrong,” Greg was saying. “I thought that was great. I’m just not sure that the jury is going to make the connection between the long storage in plastic and the deterioration of the DNA.”

  “You’re right,” Rebecca said. “If we stop now, some of them might miss it, but fortunately, we’ve got Hiram Kincaid as our expert witness on DNA evidence for when we get to our case in chief. His job is to connect the dots, and I think so far we’ve made those dots pretty obvious. He’ll get it done, don’t worry.”

  “I’m trying, but it’s a little hard not to worry.” He looked at Allie on the other side of him and gave her a tight smile.

  She put her hand over his. “I know I’m the new kid, but I thought The Beck made it pretty obvious. Even without the expert witness to explain it, it seemed clear to me how the evidence got tainted.”

  “If, in fact, it is. At least it’s a theory,” Rebecca said.

  Allie reacted as if she’d been poked. “Beck! What are you saying? Of course it is.”

  “I didn’t mean it isn’t. I was just saying we want to avoid getting into the plain fact of whether it’s tainted or untainted. That’s not going to be Hiram’s testimony, in any case.”

  “So what’s he going to be doing?” Greg asked.

  “He’s going to be talking about the likelihood of deterioration given the storage time in plastic. And that’s all we need. Not the deterioration itself, which we can’t prove. We’re just trying to sow some confusion here. The point is, it doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me, Beck.” Greg spoke with some of his too-familiar heat. “Listen. We know that something clearly went wrong somewhere with this evidence, because I guarantee you that sample is not my DNA. If it is, they got it from someplace in my apartment when they did their searches there.”