The Fall

by John Lescroart

  The bar had filled up. Patrons filled every stool at the rail and crowded around the tables. Zac Brown was singing with his toes in the water, ass in the sand, and noise from the first round of darts was filtering in from the back room.

  Hardy remained behind the bar. He had told Juhle he’d recognize Waverly on sight—he was confident that at the very least he’d know a Homicide cop when he saw one. This turned out to be true. And apparently, the recognition was mutual, as Waverly raised a hand and nodded to Hardy, who directed him by another nod toward the back, where Rebecca and Greg had repaired to a relatively quiet seating area near the restrooms—three low-slung easy chairs and an antique couch surrounded a stained and pitted coffee table, the whole small area dimly lit by a pair of Tiffany lamps.

  Waverly wore jeans and a heavy sweater. Running shoes. His hair was unkempt, eyes heavy and dolorous. He all but flopped into his chair.

  Two minutes later, they’d done the introductions and Waverly had taken out his tape recorder, explaining that this was SOP. They taped everything in a murder investigation. He hoped Greg was okay with that.

  “Sure,” Greg said. “I called you, remember.”

  “And we appreciate it.” Waverly set the device down on the table between them and reached over as if to turn it on.

  Rebecca interrupted him. “You really need the tape?” she asked. “As Greg says, he called you. He’s not a suspect, is he?”

  Greg said, “Of course I’m not a suspect.”

  “I’m just asking,” Rebecca said.

  Waverly sat back. “We don’t have any suspects yet. But if you don’t mind, what is your relationship? The two of you?”

  “I’m a lawyer, but I’m not his lawyer. He didn’t hire me. In fact, we just met not much longer than an hour ago. He was having a drink at the bar, and we saw the picture of the dead girl on the news. When it came out that he’d had dinner with her last night, my dad insisted that he call you guys and tell you about it. Maybe Greg knows something that would be helpful. So he agreed, and my dad called your lieutenant and set this up.”

  “Got it,” Waverly said. “And we’re glad you did. But we still need to tape.” He frowned and brought his right hand up, squeezing his temples.

  “Are you hurting?” Rebecca asked. “You don’t look too good.”

  Waverly managed a wan smile. “Thirty-six hours without sleep can slow a guy down.”

  Rebecca asked, “Can I get you some coffee? Anything?”

  “A gallon of Diet Coke?”

  She hopped up. “Give me a sec.”

  The men, each worn down for his own reasons, followed her movements as she slipped under the bar rail and filled a glass with ice, then gave it a long shot from the bar gun. She walked farther down the bar to have a few words with her father. After the short discussion, she ducked under the rail again and was back with them. “Here you go. On the house.”

  Waverly thanked her, took a drink, and set the glass down. “I have to say, Ms. Hardy,” he began, “if you’re not Mr. Treadway’s lawyer, then he and I need to have this discussion together, just the two of us.”

  Rebecca telegraphed some resignation. “My dad told me you were going to say that.”

  “No flies on him. But it really is the way we do it. And if you’re not his lawyer . . .”

  “All right. I get it.” She turned to Greg. “I’ll just be hanging up front. Good?”

  Greg nodded, and Rebecca headed back toward the bar. “I don’t know what help I’m going to be to you,” Greg said to Waverly, “but whatever I can do . . .”

  “Let’s just start with the basics,” Waverly said, reaching over to turn on the tape recorder. After his standard introduction—date and location of the interview, identification of his subject, his badge number, and so on—he began by asking how long Greg had known Anlya.

  “A couple of years. My real connection to her is through her brother, Max.” Greg spent the next couple of minutes outlining the relationship that he’d developed with the twins, his involvement with Max as a CASA volunteer, the occasional field trip he got permission to take with both of them to ball games or museums, parks, wetlands, movies, films. “They’re great kids,” he said. “I mean, were . . . I mean . . .” He hung his head.

  “So what happened last night?” Waverly asked.

  “She called me. She said she was going crazy at her home and needed to talk to somebody who wasn’t a teenage girl. I hadn’t taken her out alone in a few months—we used to have what we called date nights—and I didn’t have any other plans, so I told her if she wanted, I could take her out to dinner in Chinatown. She loved Chinese. So I picked her up around the corner from her place . . .”

  “Why was that?”

  “Why was what?”

  “Why you didn’t pick her up where she lived?”

  “The other girls would give her grief if they saw me picking her up—you know, an old white man and all—so I met her around the corner at our spot—we called it our secret spot—which was just the bus stop, but far enough away that nobody saw us together.”

  “And where did you go to eat?”

  “The Imperial Palace. Cheap and good.”

  “Did she say what was bothering her?”

  “No. I wish. I’ve been trying to think of what it might have been ever since I saw . . . saw her on the television. She did say she was going stir-crazy, but it seemed to me that something more, something else, was bothering her. Almost like she was afraid of something, but I couldn’t get it out of her. She was the kind of girl where, you push her too hard, she shuts down. You kind of have to sneak up on her if you want to find things out, and I guess last night I didn’t.”

  Waverly lifted his soda. “Do you remember what time you picked her up?”

  “Five-thirty, quarter to six. It was still light out when we got to the restaurant.”

  “And you stayed how long?”

  “We were done by eight, I’m sure.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we said good-bye.”

  “You didn’t drive her home?”

  “No.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “A little bit. I thought I was going to—I usually dropped her off at home on date nights—but she wanted to stay out awhile.”

  “And do what?”

  “She said shop. We were in Chinatown, and one of the girls in the house was evidently having a birthday, and she thought she’d find a present down there.”

  “Did you offer to go with her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, first, she didn’t ask. We’d just spent a couple of hours talking, and I was somewhat frustrated that she wasn’t telling me what was bothering her. She was getting snippy with me that I was pushing her a little. So the idea of us sitting in my car together for another half hour while I drove her home wasn’t exactly appealing to either of us, I think. In any event, I had lesson plans to prepare and hadn’t counted on making it a late night anyway.”

  “So what did you do then? After you decided you weren’t driving her home?”

  The question seemed to stump Greg for a moment. Finally, he shrugged. “Nothing. I mean, we said goodbye, gave each other a hug, and then I went and got my car and drove home.”

  Waverly waited for a beat, then sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Did she give you any idea, while you were having this dinner, why she called you in the first place?”

  “Well, yes, but it wasn’t that. I mean, we settled that part early on.”

  “And what part was that?”

  Greg launched into a recounting of the foster extension-of-benefits program, from eighteen to twenty-one, that he’d argued for Max just that very afternoon. Anlya had been hoping to return to her mother’s home up until only a couple of months ago, hoping that Sharla had made strides in her battle with alcoholism.

  Greg explained that the state’s foster program liked to give formerly abusive or incom
petent parents eighteen months to get rehabbed or otherwise straighten up their act, after which they could be reunited in their home with their children. Max was happy with Auntie Juney and didn’t want to go back to Sharla’s dysfunctional life, but Anlya had wanted to give her mother another try—she could move back in and the two of them could make it. Sharla would stay sober and Anlya would get a job or go to college, maybe both.

  But when CPS had arrived to do the evaluation on Sharla, they found that she’d fallen off the wagon in a bad way (if indeed she’d ever been on it), so Anlya’s dream of moving back in with her mother had been shattered. Psychologically, Greg said, this was probably bad enough, but “worse, now she’s turning eighteen in three months, and without an extension for her at her group home, she’s out on her own with no high school diploma, no job, no place to live—although then she’d be eighteen, and if she wanted to, she could go back to her mom. But that would have been a disaster from the get-go. Sharla’s not getting sober any time soon. So the clock was ticking, and it was a real mess.”

  “And she wanted you to argue her case in family court?”

  “Essentially, yes. I knew the basics because of Max. Her group home on McAllister is fairly well run, I gather. They could just extend her payments for another three years. At the very least, the extension would give her some time and a place to live. So I told her I’d get on it if they let me—for obvious reasons, they usually don’t want a male CASA like me with a female juvenile—or I’d try to hook her up with a female CASA who could get it done.” Greg realized that he’d been talking for a while. “In any event, that’s what she’d called me about originally, but we covered all that in about the first fifteen minutes. After that, she just got more uptight.”

  “And you don’t have any clue what that might have been about?”

  “No. I sensed she wasn’t giving me the whole story about when she’d gone to see her mother. Pretty obviously, something else seemed to be going on, but she wouldn’t say what it was.”

  “What’d you make of that? After you’d already been talking, she just clammed up?”

  “Well, as I’ve said, it kind of frustrated me, but when you deal with these social service kids and their problems, that’s not unusual at all. They’re always throwing something at you that you don’t expect. So you either go with the flow or it burns you out. I figured she’d get around to telling me about it if it was important enough. I wish it had been. Or maybe it was and she just didn’t see it. Or I asked the wrong questions.”

  Changing tacks, Waverly asked, “Was she carrying a purse when you picked her up?”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure. Why?”

  “Because she didn’t have an ID when we found her.”

  “So,” Greg said, “it could have been a mugging or a purse snatching gone bad. She fought back, they struggled, the guy threw her over the tunnel? Or something like that?”

  “Not impossible,” Waverly said. “It fits the facts as well as anything.”

  12

  HONOR WILSON SAT with her boyfriend, Royce Utlee, at the tiny table farthest away from both the cashier and the front door at Starbucks. She tried to keep her hands from shaking, but every time she picked up her coffee, the surface of the liquid betrayed her. She hadn’t managed much more than a sip in the ten minutes they’d been sitting there, and when she put the cup down again, untouched, Royce moved up out of his slump on the tall stool and put his elbows on either side of his own cup. “Damn, girl, what is it bothering you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You shaking so much, you like to spill coffee all over yourself.”

  “I’m just cold.”

  “First nothing. Then you cold.”

  She just looked at him, flat-eyed, low affect.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Okay. Like I already told you. The police.”

  “What about them?”

  “Asking around, that’s what. ‘Weren’t you and Anlya best friends? How long you been best friends? You her best friend, how come you don’t know nothing about her?’ ”

  “That’s making you shake?”

  “No.” She picked up her cup and sipped. “Just what I do know.”

  “And what’s that? That she try to break up our business?”

  “Some of that, yeah. It’s not like it was a secret at the house.”

  “Nobody’s gonna say anything. How’s it help them if they do?”

  “They find out who’s trickin’, they let ’em go on that if they tell something about Anlya.”

  “They not lookin’ at who’s trickin’, Hon.” He pronounced it to rhyme with John. “Why they even gonna look for that when they tryin’ to get who killed her?”

  “They not gonna be lookin’ at our business, Royce. They don’t have to be lookin’ for anything special. That’s what I’m saying. Somebody’s gonna get nervous, the po-po snooping around. ‘What you know about Anlya? What you know about Anlya and Honor? Who’s this Royce dog we keep hearing about?’ ”

  “Why they be hearing about me?”

  She wanted to tell him to get real—there was no possibility that he didn’t understand what she was saying—but that was the kind of response that made him lose his temper. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want him to take it out on her. Not that he had ever really mistreated her—he’d only hit her once before, when she’d asked for it. But she was afraid and knew she had to take care with what came out of her mouth, because he could go off at any time, without warning. She took a deep calming breath. “Because,” she said, “it’s no secret in the house about you and me. Even the girls not working with us . . .”

  “They better not be talking.”

  “What I’m saying is we want to get out in front on that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I can tell ’em, get the word out, don’t nobody be talking. We all just hang in there and say nothing, and pretty soon it all blows over and we get back in business.”

  “You’re saying for now we close up shop? That ain’t happening, girl. It does, what do we do for scratch?”

  “Couple of weeks is all, I’m thinking. We’d get by.”

  “You’d get by, maybe. Me? What am I supposed to live on?”

  “You get by, darlin’. What I’m sayin’ is the main thing, we don’t want no police thinking we had troubles with Anlya. They start thinking that . . .” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t be good. They start lookin’ at you, they see maybe you got a reason, you already on strike one . . .”

  “So they ask, we tell ’em we was together the whole night.”

  “Which, you know, we weren’t. What if that comes out?”

  “How’s it do that?”

  She shrugged. “All I’m sayin’ is layin’ low awhile can’t hurt. We don’t even want ’em lookin’ this way. You know we don’t.”

  “So what about the girls? If they go out on they own, they never come back to me, then what?”

  “That won’t happen. I see to that. Plus, you take care of them, and they know it.” She reached over and put her hand over his. “It’s just better nobody’s lookin’.”

  •  •  •

  AFTER DEVIN JUHLE had gotten the call from Dismas Hardy at the Shamrock and located Eric Waverly, he’d told his inspector to report back to him that night if it turned out that the new witness had anything important to say. Or even not so important. Foolish though it might seem, Juhle wanted to make sure that this investigation, wherever it led, was going to proceed with a greater than usual sense of urgency.

  Whatever that meant.

  As if there weren’t always a sense of urgency about trying to identify and apprehend a suspect in a murder case. But Juhle wanted something he could point out in his defense if the criticism came up. No, when the criticism came up. He and his inspectors would be working around the clock if need be.

  So when he finished the interview with Greg Treadway, Waverly called Juhle, as instruct
ed. He did have something provocative to report. He hadn’t been positive until he’d gotten back to his car and dug out the framed photograph of the guy on the beach from Anlya’s room, but after he’d checked it, he was certain. “G.,” the man who’d signed his picture with the inscription “All my love,” was Greg Treadway. So there was undoubtedly a personal relationship between him and the victim.

  When Waverly arrived at the lieutenant’s house, his partner was already down in Juhle’s finished basement, a comfortable low-ceilinged room with a pool table, a television, sagging shelves of paperback books, a coffee table, a leather couch, and upholstered chairs that had seen better days. Earlier, Juhle had tried to contact both partners, but Yamashiro hadn’t been reachable on his cell phone—it turned out that one of his daughters was in the school play. But now here he was.

  Urgent, indeed.

  Connie Juhle made sure the men were happy with their coffees, and after she closed the door behind her, Waverly started right in. “I don’t know if there’s too much real information to analyze. Okay, he knew the woman, but he never pretended he didn’t. I didn’t pick up any sense that the guy—Treadway—was hiding anything. If anything, he seemed like he really had just found out about it. In shock, almost. And he called us, remember? He came forward on his own.”

  “And yet,” Yamashiro spoke up, “Devin says he was accompanied by his lawyer.”

  “A lawyer, but not his lawyer. She told me they’d just met, but I got the impression maybe she wouldn’t mind being his girlfriend. Dismas Hardy’s daughter.”

  “Nevertheless,” Juhle said, “a lawyer. He calls us and we show up and he’s next to a lawyer.”

  “I was there, guys,” Waverly said. “I wouldn’t make too much of it.”

  Juhle nodded. “Good enough. We’ll try not to rush to judgment. Maybe you want to play the tape?”

  “Sure.”

  For most of the next hour, they finished their coffee and listened without comment. After the interview ended and Waverly had shut off the tape recorder, Juhle drew in a breath and said, “So, it wasn’t clear to me. What was Treadway’s relationship to Anlya?”