The Fall

by John Lescroart

  The first bailiff she saw in the hallway—J. Finian, by his name tag—told her that they’d dropped off the first string of defendants only a few minutes ago. (Shackled together in chains, they came from one of the two jails attached to the Hall of Justice—across the building from one or downstairs from the other.) Finian said he would be happy to escort Rebecca down to see if Greg was one of the ones who’d already been dropped off and deposited in his five-by-seven-foot locked cage.

  He was.

  It was decidedly chilly in the hallway, and Greg had the suit coat draped over his shoulders, his hands cuffed in front of him. He sat on the cement bench that provided the only seating in the holding cell. Sitting hunched over, his tie hanging between his legs (in leg irons), his elbows resting on his knees, he was the very picture of despair. Rebecca had been visiting him in jail, and after the first few times, she had grown accustomed to the orange jumpsuit. Now, seeing him in regular clothes but handcuffed and shackled was nearly as great a shock as it had been the first time she’d seen him in jail.

  Finian put his key in the lock, and Greg looked up at the noise, then pulled himself to his feet. He made an effort to smile in greeting, but it didn’t take.

  “Hey, sailor,” she said. “Nice threads. How’s the jacket fit?”

  “I won’t know until I can get my hands in the sleeves.”

  “It’ll work. Your mom was careful about getting your exact sizes.” She stepped forward and adjusted the knot in his tie. Backing away, she gave him another quick up-and-down. “Pretty good,” she said. “The tie’s not too tight?”

  “The tie is fine. If it’s time to go in, maybe they could take these chains off?”

  “We’re still a little early yet. It’ll happen soon enough.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  She gave him a sympathetic look. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” And she was sorry. She shouldn’t have come back here early and allowed him to think they’d be unshackling him right away. He had at least another half hour before J. Finian or another bailiff would set loose his hands and his feet. She tried to imagine herself in handcuffs, her ankles bound in iron, a heavy chain between them. It was a terrifying thought. “I just wanted to stop by and make sure you were all right, see if you needed anything. Any last-minute questions about what to do out there?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea. I sit still. I pay attention. I take it seriously, which, believe me, I do. I’m never going to tell another lie in my whole life.”

  “Probably a good idea. I also wanted to remind you that their case isn’t strong, Greg. There’s no real evidence tying you to her murder. That’s the bottom line, so I’m not really worried. And that’s no lie.”

  But in reality, she knew it was.

  •  •  •

  DISMAS HARDY HAD remained edgy throughout his entire drive downtown. Taking his wife’s counsel, he had refrained from calling The Beck with some last-minute advice that she didn’t need.

  Expecting to see her in the courtroom, he felt his stomach tighten when he didn’t. This was playing a little fast and loose with her time, in his opinion. He knew that his daughter was somewhere in the building, because her briefcase was open on the defense table. Wherever she was, her old dad was thinking that she had better make sure she was back in the courtroom in the next fifteen minutes, when they would call the court to order and Judge Bakhtiari would ascend to his raised platform. It would be bad form, to say the least, if she were not in her chair when the judge sat down in his.

  Of course, this was not even close to The Beck’s first appearance in a courtroom. In her twenty months of practice, aside from a smattering of corporate litigation, she’d more than dipped her toe in the criminal side of the law, defending any number of DUIs, a couple of shoplifting cases, some small-time drug dealers, and an aggravated assault charge stemming from a fight after a Warriors game. But none of these, Hardy knew, held a candle to the inherent gravity of a murder case.

  Now he stood at the bar rail. Where was Rebecca?

  “Mr. Hardy?”

  Shaken from his reverie, Hardy turned to see a man in his early thirties—dark blue suit, white shirt, red tie. He had a thin, angular face, inset with piercing green eyes, under a handsome head of thick dark hair.

  “Guilty,” Hardy said.

  “I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Phil Braden.”

  “Ah, Mr. Braden.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “I heard the talk you gave at the Commonwealth Club last year and thought it was terrific,” Braden said. “I’ll confess I also slipped in to watch one of your crosses a couple of years ago. The forensic accountant?”

  “Oh yeah.” Hardy broke a grin. “Michael Jacob Schermer.”

  “You remember his name?”

  “It’s a curse,” Hardy said. “I remember everything. If I recall, and I do, I more or less ate his lunch that day.”

  “That’s my recollection as well. Anyway, as you probably know, I’m doing this Treadway case. And his counsel is, I presume, your daughter.”

  “Rebecca, yes.”

  “Well, I just wanted to say hello from a fan.”

  “That’s very nice of you. I’d say good luck, but . . .”

  “No problem,” Braden said. “I get it.” He hesitated. “So, are you sitting second chair to Rebecca?” Trying to sound casual and not entirely succeeding.

  Hardy took the question as a compliment of sorts. Clearly, Braden didn’t want him as an adversary. There were some elements about Hardy’s role that were none of Braden’s business, though if he knew about them, they might set his mind somewhat at ease. For one, Hardy wasn’t getting paid to sit second chair, that role being a victim of the financial negotiations among Rebecca, himself, and the Treadway parents.

  In fact, he had no official role in Treadway’s defense other than that of concerned and interested father. So he kept his answer simple. “Only informally.” He was here today to wave the flag for his daughter on her first day of jury selection. He probably wouldn’t be in the courtroom again until the opening statements, which might be as much as a week away or even longer. “I doubt if I’ll have a speaking role.”

  Braden clucked. “That’s a shame,” he said, but Hardy didn’t believe he was being sincere.

  •  •  •

  THIS, THE FIRST scheduled trial day of what was going to be a very high-profile case, would be taken up with relatively routine motions. Nevertheless, there was a good crowd in the gallery—several reporters, the usual trial groupies, Supervisor Liam Goodman, and apparently, his entire staff.

  To Hardy’s practiced eye, the contingent of about two dozen African-American spectators looked a lot more like professional agitators than family or friends of Anlya. It was clear to him that their presence in the gallery had been orchestrated by Goodman as a constant and visible manifestation of the black community’s support for the victim, Anlya Paulson—and this even though there was only the faintest, if that, hint of a racial overtone to the crime. True, Treadway was white and Anlya was black, but any objective reading of the bare facts revealed that it was, if anything, a crime of passion, not of racial prejudice. Not that the facts mattered to Goodman, who was riding a wave of publicity and popularity. Because apart from Greg Treadway’s arrest—in the wake of which Goodman had lauded Devin Juhle and his inspectors for their dogged and even brilliant police work, identifying a suspect in under a week—there had already been a constant stream of drama that had kept the case in the public eye.

  The first trickle in that stream was Goodman’s cynical but effective bifurcation (in the public eye) of the police and the DA’s office. Again. The police, Goodman spewed to anyone who would listen, had done their job admirably. But that was only half the equation. Identifying a suspect was all to the good but a long way from securing a conviction. That next step was up to Wes Farrell, and his terrible record prosecuting those who preyed on the African-American community spoke for itself
. For all intents and purposes, the police had identified Greg Treadway as a suspect on Saturday night, and still it had taken Farrell three weeks to get around to indicting him. Why was he dragging his feet?

  Wes and his team seethed under this patently ridiculous criticism. First of all, by indicting Treadway, the DA had eliminated at least a year’s wait for a preliminary hearing. And second, to assemble a grand jury and get all the witnesses and evidence together in only three weeks was rocketlike speed in the typically glacial world of the judicial system.

  That, too, was not enough for Goodman. Even after an indictment, it often took over a year for either side to prepare a murder case. There were motions, evidence issues, discovery delays, more motions, a hearing or two, and regular and expert witnesses to subpoena and schedule—plenty of work to keep both sides busy for months and months. After Treadway had refused to waive time for his trial, which meant it had to begin within sixty days, Goodman had kept up the press. Even that amount of time, which everyone in the law business knew to be stupidly short, wasn’t fast enough. “Okay, fine, they’ve charged Mr. Treadway,” Goodman had said. “Now let’s see if they’re really going to try to convict him.”

  The other hugely significant change was the charge. The prosecution had chosen to allege “lying in wait,” which essentially meant that Greg had bided his time, waiting for the moment to strike. This enhancement, called a special circumstance, meant that he faced life in prison without the possibility of parole, or potentially the death penalty.

  Farrell had drawn the line and elected not to ask for death. Like every district attorney in San Francisco over the last twenty years, he had pledged during his election campaign never to ask for the death penalty. With breathtaking hypocrisy, Goodman had pointed to this as another sign that Farrell lacked prosecutorial fervor, in spite of the fact that Goodman himself had denounced the death penalty as racist and unfair. Naturally, Rebecca had challenged the special circumstance, arguing that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support it, but her motions had been denied.

  The judge, perhaps sensitive to the political nature of the case, had said there was enough to go to the jury. “After all,” he had said, rendering his verdict at the preliminary hearing to bind Greg over for trial, “one fair reading of the evidence might be that Greg Treadway spent the entire evening with Anlya after their argument at the Imperial Palace. They had sex somewhere. Then, with Treadway threatened by her exposure of him as her lover—or whatever else they’d been fighting about—he walked with her to the tunnel. Instead of knocking her over the edge in a fit of rage, he had planned on that destination, seen the cars approaching the tunnel on the street below, and chosen his exact moment to throw her over.”

  •  •  •

  REBECCA MADE IT back into the courtroom with five minutes to spare. Her father pulled out the chair for her at the defense table and whispered in her ear, “Are you all right?”

  “Good,” she said. “I was just in the back there, talking to Greg.”

  “How is he?”

  “Nervous. Scared. I think he’s still having a hard time believing this is happening to him, since he just flatly didn’t do it.”

  Hardy cast her a sideways glance. “I hope you didn’t ask him.”

  “No. He volunteered it. Again. Which he does about every other time I see him.”

  “Well, if he testifies, he’ll get to tell that to the jury.”

  “What do you mean, if he testifies? He’s got to testify.”

  He reached over and patted her hand. “Maybe. Wait and see what develops. You don’t have to make a decision for a while now.”

  Rebecca half-turned toward him. “You don’t believe him?”

  Hardy hesitated. He loved his daughter. But he’d been through the naive idealism of any number of young attorneys getting their feet wet. Very few wanted to believe that their client had done the probably heinous thing they were charged with. Or if they did do it, something truly extraordinary, which they had no control over, had made them do it.

  He remembered his own baptism in these waters. His first client. Of course, it had been a little bit different for Diz because he’d been to Vietnam, then worked as a San Francisco policeman, and finally had become an assistant DA, so his vision of humanity was already far more skewed to believing in the basic evil nature of man than, God willing, his daughter’s might ever be.

  Still, the twenty-seven-year-old man he’d been dealing with back then, Jason Railey, had been charged with sexual assault of an eight-year-old girl named Sally Freed. Railey was one of the most personable guys Hardy had ever met, and while they had been waiting for a meeting with the investigating officers, they had cooled their heels in an interview room and, to pass the time, started talking about the Giants. Both were big fans. Then Hardy glanced at the case file and noticed not only that Railey’s birthday was the same as his, October 19, but that the two of them were also born in the same year.

  They chatted some more, and Railey finally, without any prompting, came right out and denied the accusations against him. The girl was the child of one of his friends, and she had serious problems, always looking for attention. Her dad was going nuts with her. And now this. He flat out didn’t do it. Hardy would see. And meanwhile, she’d ruined his life.

  Hardy’s heart went out to the guy. He knew these things happened, false accusations. It was heartbreaking, was what it was. No way had this Giants fan born on the same day as Hardy molested an eight-year-old. Hardy believed him absolutely.

  And then the cops showed up at the meeting, and they played him the tape of the pretextural phone call the girl had made to Jason, in which he had told her that he’d not only fuck the shit out of her again but kill her afterward if she didn’t drop the charges she’d leveled against him.

  So much for believing in your clients.

  “Dad?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I zoned out. What did you say?”

  “I asked if you believed him. Greg.”

  “I believe he’s been very good at lying about some things, Beck. Which, I grant you, doesn’t mean he lies about everything, including what went on with Anlya at the tunnel. So I don’t know if I believe him about that. I know I want to.”

  “But he wasn’t even at the tunnel. One crazy homeless guy picks him out of a six-pack and they—”

  “Is there any proof that Mr. Abdullah is crazy?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I wouldn’t say it. I don’t know if I’d even think it, lest it come out when you don’t want it to. He’s an eyewitness, sweetie. And eyewitness testimony, especially from somebody who’s got nothing to gain, carries a certain weight, you must admit.”

  “I realize that. But this time, he got it wrong. It was just another white guy with a tie.”

  Hardy looked around enough to get a glimpse of Goodman and his African-American troops seated in the gallery. He lowered his voice. “Not to overload you with advice, but I would not go there, either. Mr. Abdullah may be wrong in his ID of Greg, but no matter what, I would not play the race card. It just will not fly.”

  She let out a small sigh. “Okay, deal.”

  The door behind the judge’s bench opened and J. Finian came in, stepping to one side. The bailiff intoned, “Please rise. Department Twenty-four of the Superior Court of the State of California, Judge Karl Bakhtiari presiding, is now in session.”

  And with that, it began.

  20

  HARDY MAY HAVE planned to leave his daughter to her own devices, but he found himself incapable of doing so. He knew that he was setting a bad example both for The Beck and for the firm’s other associates, sitting there at the defense table as though he were part of the paid team, which he emphatically was not. But he didn’t care. He wasn’t about to let his daughter go through her first murder jury selection without availing herself of the benefit of his experience if she felt she needed it. If nothing else, she’d have someone besides the client to bounce ideas off.


  Picking the jury took three and a half days. The fireworks presaged by the presence of Mr. Goodman and his activists never went off, to the extent that by Tuesday afternoon, the gallery was all but empty except for the remainder of the jury pool. When the last juror was seated at eleven o’clock that morning, Judge Bakhtiari announced an early lunch recess and told the principals that they should be ready to go promptly at one o’clock.

  Word had gotten out that the trial proper was going to get under way, so the gallery was packed again, and not just with Goodman and his hand-picked team of rabble-rousers but with Sharla Paulson and, Hardy presumed, some of the girls who’d lived in the home with Anlya. Also on the prosecution side, Wes Farrell had come down and now sat in the front row, accompanied by several of his acolytes. He and Hardy exchanged an infinitesimal nod but otherwise pretended they didn’t know each other.

  Greg Treadway had his own supporters and believers sitting behind his table. His mother and father sat in the first row; they introduced Hardy and Rebecca to two of Greg’s brothers and a sister, as well as one of his uncles. Additionally, several of Greg’s teaching colleagues from Everett sat with a small posse of younger people he evidently knew from Teach for America or when he’d been in school at Berkeley and Stanford.

  As the wall clock clicked the hour, Phil Braden stood up at his table and walked to the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “Good afternoon. Before I begin my opening statement, I’d like to thank you for your patience during the jury selection process. Now I’d like to take just a few more minutes of your time before I begin calling the witnesses who will testify in this case and who together will prove the charges that have been brought against the defendant. But before I begin that process, I want to give you an outline of what that evidence will show. Hopefully, this will give you some insight and understanding into the questions that you’ll be hearing and help you to organize the information that we’ll be presenting to you.