The Fall

by John Lescroart

  “Decent,” she said. “The judge didn’t like it at all. Abdullah can’t testify, or should I say Copes? He’s got his own murder charges pending. Giving him immunity would look even worse than letting you go, and no one would believe him anyway. If he’s incompetent to stand trial, he’s an incompetent witness.”

  “But,” Donna Treadway said uncertainly, “isn’t that all they had putting Greg at the tunnel?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “So,” Greg’s mother continued, barely trusting herself to hope, “shouldn’t that be it?”

  “It’s not impossible. It’s going to depend on the judge.”

  “So it’s all true, then?” Allie asked. “Abdullah is really Copes? How did that happen?”

  “Braden doesn’t seem to know . . .”

  “Yeah, right,” Greg said.

  “No, that makes sense,” Rebecca said. “If he’d known, he’d have had to pull out. I think Copes just played everybody.”

  “This is the incompetent guy?” Barry asked.

  “Right.” Rebecca nodded. “Except maybe not so much.”

  Dismas, no longer on the phone, was leaning in to join them. “Okay, breaking news. Wyatt says the ID is a hundred percent solid. They ran his prints from the field, and Copes is Malibu is Omar Abdullah.”

  “It was that easy?” Allie asked. “That was all they had to do?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “Evidently, nobody thought to check out Abdullah earlier.”

  “You believe that?” Hardy raised an eyebrow. “You want to get the truth about that out in the open, Beck, your cross of Abe is coming right up. I’ll bet you a million dollars that without anybody saying anything, he got the message loud and clear.”

  “What message?” Allie asked.

  “Don’t rock the Abdullah boat. Keep him on board, no matter who he is. ’Cause who’s going to ask? And guess what? It almost worked. It would have if Abe hadn’t gone randomly looking for his elopers and one of them hadn’t turned out to be Leon. In the next hour, we’d have all been sitting here, listening to Abdullah say it was you, Greg, out in the tunnel.”

  With a grimace, Rebecca said, “You remember when you told me I’d have a chance to get back at Abe for some of that early stuff he tried with me, and I’d love it? Well, I don’t. Not that it’s going to stop me if I have to, but still . . . I hope it won’t happen.”

  “I’ve got another question,” Donna said. “How did this Abdullah—I mean, Copes—get a real rap sheet under Abdullah’s name if that wasn’t him?”

  “Because there is a real Omar Abdullah,” Hardy said. “Probably Copes knew him, knew they were about the same age, stole his name. When Braden runs the name, there he is, just what they’re expecting, and they stop there. Why look any further?”

  “So who killed Anlya?” Greg asked. “Leon? Royce Utlee?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “Leon was definitely there at the right time. He had a motive . . .”

  “What was that?” Allie asked.

  “He raped her when she was fourteen. If Anlya sees him anywhere—her mother’s place, out shopping, anywhere—she calls the police and tells them, and he goes back into custody.”

  “Except,” Hardy said, “dollars to doughnuts, he’s still incompetent and never goes to trial.”

  “But he’d still believe she’d turn him in. And if he saw her first . . . All I’m saying is it’s a real motive, and a good one. If he sees her at the top of the tunnel, just running into her, he wouldn’t have to think too much about it. One push and the problem is solved forever.”

  “We’ll never really know, then,” Greg said.

  “It’ll probably never get proven at trial, if that’s what you’re talking about,” Rebecca said, “because there’ll probably never be one.”

  “The main thing,” Barry said to his son, “is everybody will finally know it wasn’t you.”

  “Let’s hope, Dad,” Greg said. “Let’s hope for that.”

  •  •  •

  WHEN MAX WALKED into Bezdekian’s, the bell sounded, but nobody was at the counter. George called from the back room that he’d be right out, but Max didn’t wait around. He had the two wrinkled twenties from Juney’s stash in his hand, and he tucked them in a corner of the blotter by the cash register and then walked out, tripping the bell again.

  Wasting no time, Max slid into the passenger seat of Wyatt Hunt’s Mini Cooper, closed the door, and said, “Go!”

  “Mission accomplished?” Hunt asked. “That was fast.”

  “Wasn’t much to it.” After a minute, Max confessed, “I stole the Scotch from them this morning. I just went back and paid for it, with a little extra for the candy and ice cream. I don’t think I’m cut out to be a badass.”

  “You want to be?”

  “This morning I thought so. I wanted to have some power.” Max brought both of his hands to his head and squeezed. “Jesus.”

  Hunt looked over. “Still hurting?”

  “That’s one way to put it. Anyway, the only person left who I could punish was my mom. That’s why I went down there. To have it out with her. Beat her around a little.”

  “Bad idea, but lucky you had it.”

  “Yeah. Now I’m realizing that wasn’t the way to do it. Get down to her level. Why’d I think it was?”

  Hunt shrugged. “Trying things out?”

  Max was silent as Hunt turned a corner, came up on Max’s apartment house. “I also took all of my auntie’s extra money. And a knife.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted people to take me seriously. I’m going to put it all back. It makes me sick that I did it in the first place. I mean, really, what do I have to feel sorry for myself about?”

  “Is that what you felt?”

  “I felt abandoned.”

  Hunt had to chuckle. “Really, a foster kid feeling abandoned? There’s a first.”

  “You can laugh, but all of a sudden I felt like it was all too much. It didn’t matter how good I tried to be, what did that get me? So I go off the rails, who does that hurt besides me?”

  “Why would you want to hurt yourself?”

  “I don’t know. To show everybody? So they could feel as sorry for me as I felt for myself. And look, I had every excuse in the world—my background, my sister, my mom, you name it.”

  “So you could do anything you want?”

  “Not just could. Should. Show ’em all. I’d be some badass they’d have to reckon with.” Max blinked his eyes closed, squeezed them down. “How’d I let that victim shit into my brain?”

  “Give it a little opening, start feeling sorry for yourself,” Hunt said, “and it flies right in.”

  “It’s the goddamn devil, though, isn’t it? I’m putting all this stuff back where I found it and never letting him near me again.”

  “Well, if that’s the only thing you take home from what happened today,” Hunt said, “waking up was well worth your while.”

  •  •  •

  OVER AN HOUR had passed—Bakhtiari no doubt getting multiple-source corroboration on the Leon Copes identification—before the judge ascended to the bench and looked out over the SRO courtroom, now silent and tense with anticipation. He cast a glance out and down at Rebecca’s table, then brought it over to Braden, next to the jury, and finally, to the gallery. He took off his glasses and set them to one side. After hesitating one last moment, he began. “Since almost the very instant of the death of the victim in this case, Anlya Paulson,” he intoned, “both the San Francisco Police Department and the Office of the District Attorney were under extraordinary time pressure, first to identify and arrest a suspect in this homicide and then to prepare and try the prosecution case against that person.

  “In the course of this trial so far, albeit in chambers, counsel for the defendant has introduced alternative scenarios and motivations. While some of these were technically inadmissible as evidence, they brought into high relief the apparent re
ality that the prosecution, in its haste and zeal to get to trial, may not have pursued aggressively enough every avenue open regarding details of the victim’s life and possible motivations of others to do her harm. This is not, in itself, unheard of. Frequently, a homicide victim might have several antagonistic relationships, and it is the duty of law enforcement to identify one suspect who, by dint of the evidence assembled against that suspect, seems most likely to have committed the homicide.

  “In this case, defense counsel argued in chambers that another theory about Ms. Paulson’s murder ought to be admitted as evidence for the jury’s consideration. Up until now, I have reserved ruling on that evidence, and the trial against Mr. Treadway went on.

  “This morning, however, a much more egregious example of the prosecution’s undue haste in the preparation of this case came to light. One of the People’s critical witnesses, a homeless man known as Omar Abdullah, was taken into police custody on another matter, fingerprinted, and positively identified not as Omar Abdullah but as Leon Copes, a psychiatric patient and, not incidentally, someone with a motive to murder Anlya Paulson.”

  At the verification of this news, which until then had been rumor, the gallery all but exploded. Bakhtiari lifted his gavel but let the reaction continue for nearly half a minute before it wound down on its own.

  “Mr. Copes,” Bakhtiari went on, “was to testify about the presence of Mr. Treadway at the scene of and at the time of the murder. However, Mr. Copes is currently and technically in custody under what is called a Murphy Conservatorship because, even after three years of rehabilitation and psychiatric counseling, last December he was again found incompetent to stand trial. This renders his proposed testimony highly suspect. In addition, I have been advised that he will refuse to testify in this matter, citing his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, because he has his own murder charges pending.”

  At this, the courtoom erupted again. It took several minutes for the bailiffs to restore order. For these eruptions, Bakhtiari seemed to have developed a tolerance, perhaps reflective of his own pent-up fury. When the ruckus died down, he went on, “Not surprisingly, the prosecution has declined to offer immunity to Mr. Copes, so he will not be available as a witness.

  “I asked counsel for the People if he had any other witness or witnesses coming forward to address the critical issue about which Mr. Copes would have been testifying. Mr. Braden told me that he did not.

  “Absent Mr. Copes’s or any other proposed testimony on this point, there remains no physical, circumstantial, or eyewitness evidence that Mr. Treadway was present at the Sutter-Stockton tunnel at the time of Anlya Paulson’s death. Therefore, on motion of the defendant, I will direct the clerk to enter a directed verdict of acquittal, clearing Mr. Treadway of these charges. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I thank you for your service, and you are free to leave.”

  Bakhtiari brought his gavel down, and this time the courtroom erupted into chaos.

  PART

  * * *

  THREE

  41

  IN MID-OCTOBER, THREE months after the Treadway trial had ended, Leon Copes—aka Omar Abdullah, aka Malibu—finally had his long-delayed competency hearing. Wes Farrell’s office had argued, given the fact that Leon Copes had survived and even thrived on his own under at least a couple of aliases, that he was obviously competent to stand trial for the homicide he’d committed four years before. Nevertheless, the psychiatrists who’d examined him found otherwise and, much to the disgust of Farrell and his team, to say nothing of the Homicide detail, Leon had again been declared Incompetent to Stand Trial. He’d been returned to the Napa psychiatric facility.

  Still living with his Auntie Juney, Max Paulson started college at San Francisco State University, where he had already joined the Debate Club. He continued his part-time work at the Ace Hardware in Cow Hollow. The three-year extension on his foster eligibility had come through, and for the first time in his life, he had a bit of spending money. He convinced Auntie Juney to accompany him to dinner at his mother’s every Sunday, which gave Sharla a reason to keep the place reasonably clean and herself some degree of sober. He had almost worked up the nerve to say hello to a girl named Natalie in his psych class and ask her if she’d like to have some coffee with him.

  Sergeant Eric Waverly lost a ton of blood and nearly died from the shoulder wound he’d gotten courtesy of Royce Utlee. Ken Yamashiro, who had sat by his bed around the clock for the first two days of Waverly’s hospital stay, took all the credit he could claim for his partner’s survival, saying it was a result of the abuse he’d heaped upon Waverly every time he regained consciousness: How could he have been dumb enough to get shot that way? Though he was in physical therapy to combat his frozen shoulder syndrome, Waverly was back on the job, pretending to be as limber as he’d ever been, although the careful observer could note differences in the way he moved.

  Wes Farrell burnished his credentials as a stand-up guy when he took full responsibility for the fiasco in the Treadway trial. At a press conference in the aftermath of the directed verdict, he resisted the temptation to put the blame on Phil Braden, Abe Glitsky, or the police department. He was the district attorney, he said, and the buck stopped with him.

  Meanwhile, Abe got assigned to other work. In one of those assignments, locating the so-called elopers, he had been spectacularly successful. Within two weeks of the CityTalk column, four of the five elopers were back in custody, and the fifth man turned up a month after that in Arkansas.

  Allie Jensen passed the California state bar and came aboard as the latest full-time (and then some!) associate in Hardy’s firm. She started going out with Greg Treadway over the Labor Day weekend, after being part of a group he’d put together to take a limo and go wine tasting in Sonoma County.

  When Bakhtiari had announced his ruling on the directed verdict, the true believers in what had been the Liam Goodman group of protesters in the gallery of Department 24 had put on an impressive display of outrage. They were disgusted and appalled that yet another suspect in the murder of an African-American was being let off. A dozen courtroom bailiffs and several guards from the adjoining jail had to be called in to restore order. Four of the men were arrested, but the rest of the protesters overflowed out through the Hall of Justice, trying to take their message to the street. Over the next few days in the city at large, and in Oakland across the Bay, demonstrators managed to disrupt traffic in several locations and block entrance to a few public buildings, but basically the rage over the purported racial injustice in the Treadway case failed to gain national traction, possibly because the agitators’ charismatic leader had stayed out of sight, under the radar.

  With the mayoral election coming up in under a month, Liam Goodman, currently polling sixth in a field of nine, was no longer considered a factor in the race.

  •  •  •

  THE CASA HEADQUARTERS in San Francisco was upstairs over some graffiti-ridden retail shops on a block of Mission Street that had been perpetually under repair for at least two years, although to the locals it seemed like the improvements had been going on for a decade or more. The offices formerly belonged to a chiropractor, and the haphazard arrangement of the inside rooms reflected a disorganized if entrepreneurial soul—whenever the business needed to grow, the past owner had knocked out a wall or erected a new one, with little thought for symmetry or scale. The new tenants had not removed all of the body and skeletal charts from the walls in the various offices, nor all of the outdated medical equipment, and all of these leftovers gave the space a weird and funky charm.

  Adding to that charm (as well as to the general air of funkiness), a large and ancient library desk took up almost half the lobby, and on it, overflowing, were dozens of brochures explaining CASA’s work, announcements about classes and self-improvement programs, volunteer guidelines, knickknacks, craftsman bowls, several different magazines, and other specialty publications: the whole table a veritable smorgasbord of opportun
ity, commitment, and hope.

  The executive director, Rachelle Garza, worked out of one of the smallest internal offices off the lobby at the head of the stairs. She was there in the dimness, closed off from the lobby, eating a healthy lunch of carrots, celery, and yogurt, when a knock made her look up. “Yes. Come in.” The door swung open, and she felt a small twinge in her stomach but managed what she hoped was a believable smile. This visit was not completely unexpected, although the timing was. “Greg,” she said. “How nice to see you. I’m afraid, as you can tell, you caught me at lunch.”

  “No worries,” he said. “If you want, I could come back.”

  “No. That’s okay. You’re here now. It’s fine. Lunch will keep.”

  He stood silhouetted in the doorway. “Probably I should have made an appointment, but I was just in the neighborhood, and I’ve been meaning to come back and say hi for a while. How’s everything going?”

  She pushed her food to one side. “About the same. Things don’t seem to change that much. Come on in. Sit down.”

  “Thank you.”

  Easygoing, genial, polite, confident, and well groomed, Greg settled himself in the upholstered chair in the corner. “Great chair,” he said. “Has this always been here?”

  “At least since I’ve been,” she said. She took a breath, openmouthed, trying to calm herself. “So how have you been?”

  “Pretty good, considering.” He made a face mixing equal parts chagrin and embarrassment. “Still dealing with some of the fallout from the trial, actually. You’d think once you got acquitted, people would just accept that you weren’t guilty, but I’m finding that’s not always the case.”

  “That would be hard, I imagine.”

  He shrugged. “I guess it’s just what it is. You just try to keep moving ahead.”

  “I hear a ‘but.’ ”