Frannie reappeared from the bathroom. “Is she all right?” she whispered.
“Are you all right?” Hardy repeated, nodding at his wife, then spoke into the phone. “Are you still at the office?”
“No. I’m home now. Were you asleep? I’m sorry. I’ll let you go.”
“No. That’s all right. We’re night owls tonight. Uncle Abe and Treya came by and we ate your mom’s paella and it ran late. What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to let you know that I’ve gone ahead and put Wyatt on something with Greg.” In a few sentences, she laid out her idea. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Well,” Hardy said, “that’s why we have a private investigator. If you think it might do some good, it’s probably worthwhile. If anybody can get results, it’s Wyatt. But maybe you want to think now about hitting the sack, since if I’m not mistaken, you’ve got another day in court tomorrow.”
“I don’t see how I’m going to get any sleep. I’m too wound up.”
Hardy took a deliberate breath, slowing himself down. “Sleep is part of the gig, Beck. You’ve got to give it a try. Are you still in your work clothes?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe get them off, put on some pajamas, and lie down. That might be a start.”
“Good idea. I’ll do that.”
“All right. Sleep tight. I’ll see you tomorrow. I love you.”
“Love you, too. Say hi to Mom.”
“Hi, Mom. Now you, Beck, go to bed.”
“Okay. I will. Promise. Bye.”
Hardy hung up, let out a deep breath. “Have I told you how glad I am that this is The Beck’s trial and not mine? Not that I wish the insomnia on her.”
“And not that you ever had it yourself. Or still don’t sleep too well when you’re at trial.”
“Which is why I’m glad I’m not.” He shook his head. “She hired Wyatt Hunt.”
“To do what?”
“To find out who killed Anlya.”
Frannie sighed. “Well, I hope he does.”
“Me, too,” Hardy said. “Notice, though, I’m not holding my breath.”
22
OF COURSE, REBECCA’S lucky break on the suicide question with Dr. Strout was by no means where the first day of testimony had ended. They’d been back from the lunch recess only twenty-five or so minutes by the time Strout was done, and Braden hadn’t wasted any time trying to get away from that fiasco by calling Eric Waverly and walking him through the visit to Anlya’s apartment, finding the photo, and the interview with Greg Treadway. It had been a slow process, almost as long in the telling as it was in the living, and the court had adjourned for the evening just after Waverly’s description of visiting Anlya’s group home on the day after her death.
And now here it was, day two of the trial proper. Hardy and a bleary-eyed and somewhat spacy Rebecca were getting set up at their table, the client in the holding cell behind the courtroom, when Hardy nudged her, directing her attention to the prosecutor, who was limping up the center aisle in the gallery. As he was pushing open the gate, letting himself into the bullpen, Braden kept his eyes straight ahead, all business. He wore a portable cast on his right foot.
Hardy, suddenly on the verge of the kind of hysterical laughter that could only bloom in an inappropriate and restricted setting, had to cover his mouth and look down at the grain of the desktop in front of him.
Rebecca turned to him. “What?” Then “What happened to Braden’s foot?”
Hardy kept his hand over his mouth, leaned forward on his elbow, and looked to his right, away from the prosecution table. His shoulders shook with his silent laughter. “Oh God,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.
“What?” Rebecca asked again. “What’s so funny?”
At last Hardy got his breathing under control and risked a glance across to where Braden was arranging his props—legal pads, pens and pencils, briefcase. “Last night Abe told me that Phil was so mad about the suicide thing when he got back to his office that he kicked a chair and broke it. I thought he meant he broke the chair. But I guess not.”
She looked over at Braden, made a face of commiseration, came back to her father. “That is so not funny, Dad,” she whispered.
“No. You’re right.” But he couldn’t do anything about his reaction as he turned away, giggling, his eyes tearing up again. It was exactly like the time during a super-serious lecture in the strictest teacher’s class in his all-boys’ high school when the guy behind him had passed a note that said, “Smile if you’re wearing a bra,” and Hardy had just lost it. Laughed so hard he cried, got sent to the office, pulled a week of JUG—Judgment Under God. And totally worth it to laugh that hard.
“Not funny,” he now said, nearly recovered. “My bad. Not funny at all.”
• • •
“IF YOU CAN stand it, one last last-minute tip.” Hardy was leaning over, whispering to Rebecca, still before Greg had entered the courtroom. “This just occurred to me as I’ve been sitting here, so I might be wrong and you can overrule me, but you’re going to have a lot of opportunities to talk about the actual crime, the scene of the crime, the night of the crime, the gravamen of the crime, and so on.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, you might want to think about convincing yourself not to call it ‘the crime.’ ”
“What do I call it, then?”
“Anything else. The incident. The accident. The death. The street location. Anything but crime. You might even try potential suicide. And so let’s say Braden objects. Regardless of whether the judge sustains or overrules, the jury gets to hear again that this was a possible suicide. And if he doesn’t object, then you’ve got the jury halfway to believing it might have been an accident of some kind, not a murder. Either way, you win. You might just consider it.”
Rebecca knew that her dad had years of experience, but sometimes, she thought, he got carried away with esoteric minutiae. “You really think one word like that matters?”
“Guilty. Not guilty. One-word difference,” he said. “Just give it some thought. That’s all I’m saying.”
• • •
BRADEN FINISHED UP with Waverly in the first hour. With no break for a recess, Judge Bakhtiari turned to Rebecca and said, “Ms. Hardy. Cross-examination?”
Without quite realizing how she’d gotten there, Rebecca was standing facing the judge and the witness. “Inspector Waverly,” she said. “To begin at the beginning, you have testified that shortly after midnight, when you arrived at the scene of the accident”—she tensed for an objection, but none came—“you called your supervisor, Lieutenant Devin Juhle, the chief of Homicide, and requested that he come down and join you and your partner there, is that correct?”
This was not Waverly’s first rodeo. “Do you mean the scene of the homicide?” he asked innocently. “Yes, I did.”
“Is that your normal procedure when you’ve been called to an accident scene in the middle of the night?”
“It varies.”
“So sometimes you do not call your lieutenant and ask him to come down?”
“That’s correct, yes.”
“More often than not, do you call him or not call him?”
“As I said, it varies.”
“In the past two years, Inspector, how many times have you been called to the scene of an incident in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know, exactly.”
Rebecca, who had discussed with Hardy their suspicion that this would be the way to introduce the super-expedited handling of this case to the jury, had done her research and did know the exact answer. “Would it surprise you to know that you’ve had thirteen such calls?”
“No. It wouldn’t surprise me. That sounds about right.”
“Knowing that number, would you hazard a guess as to how often you asked your lieutenant to come down?”
Braden objected. “Irrelevant.”
“Bias of the witness, Your Hon
or,” Rebecca said. “They didn’t treat this case remotely like any other, and the jury is entitled to know why.”
The judge couldn’t suppress a small smile of appreciation at the adroitness of Rebecca’s tactic. Not only was she getting the line of questioning she wanted, she had gotten to explain to the jury the point she was driving at. “Overruled,” he said.
Rebecca repeated the question. “How often have you asked your lieutenant to come down?”
“I haven’t really thought about that. When there’s a compelling reason, my partner and I decide whether we think we’d benefit from the lieutenant’s presence.”
“And you have no idea how often this has happened in the past two years?”
“No, I don’t.”
Though the cross-examination had just begun, Rebecca found herself riding a wave of adrenaline. She was vaguely aware that it would take a while, and at the same time realized that she’d have to temper her inclination to get to everything at once.
There was, as her father had counseled her a million times, such a thing as a rhythm, and you had to be aware of it and sensitive to its presence. Like so much else she had been told over the past three or four years, the advice had sounded like so much mumbo-jumbo. But now, facing the apparently benign Eric Waverly, she found the rest of the courtroom, indeed the world, receding.
It was just her and him.
She was subliminally aware that she had to slow down if she didn’t want to skip past an important item. One small question after another, leading inexorably to her point. It was a long cave she’d entered, and she was just inside, blackness all around and a light at the end.
“Inspector Waverly,” she said, “do you remember any other time in the past two years when you have called Lieutenant Juhle or his predecessor, Lieutenant Glitsky, to come to a scene in the middle of the night?”
“Not specifically, no.”
“So calling him was an unusual situation, was it not? Not your normal procedure?”
Waverly shot a quick “What can you do?” glance at Braden’s table. “I suppose that’s right. Yes.”
“Was there one particular thing that made it unusual?”
“It wasn’t so much unusual as . . .” He paused.
“Inspector Waverly, you have just testified that calling Lieutenant Juhle was out of the ordinary. Would you like the court recorder to read back your reply?”
“No. That’s all right. It was a situation we’d talked about in the event that it happened, so when it did, I made the call.”
“And what was that situation?”
“Well, in the event that we had an African-American victim, and in this case we did.”
A loud buzz of comment cut through the gallery, enough so the judge felt compelled to tap his gavel twice in quick succession. “I would ask those of you in the gallery to refrain from further outbursts. Ms. Hardy, please continue.”
Rebecca nodded. “Inspector Waverly, what was the special significance of an African-American victim in this case?”
Waverly, obviously uncomfortable, pulled at the knot of his tie. Behind her, Rebecca heard the scraping of a chair—Braden standing up to object, doubling down on a counterproductive move. “Your Honor, relevance? There is nothing sinister or strange about Inspector Waverly calling his superior to the scene of a homicide. This happens all the time.”
Bakhtiari nodded. “Ms. Hardy?”
“Inspector Waverly has just told us that this was unusual, Your Honor.”
“Perhaps for Inspector Waverly,” Braden replied, “but other Homicide inspectors do it all the time. It’s well documented.”
Bakhtiari said, “Let’s hear why Inspector Waverly thought it was unusual this time. Objection overruled. Ms. Hardy, go ahead. Inspector, answer the question.”
Rebecca repeated it—what was the special significance of an African-America victim in this case?
“Well,” Waverly said, “over the past few months before this killing, the Homicide detail had been heavily criticized in the media for failing to identify suspects in homicides involving African-American victims.”
Someone yelled out in the gallery. “Damn straight!” And another round of interruption ensued, with Bakhtiari gaveling the gallery into a tense silence again: “Any more of this kind of behavior, and I’ll have the courtroom cleared and the individuals responsible charged with contempt. This is not a theater but a court of law.”
Thinking, So much for rhythm, Rebecca finally got to ask her next question. “Because of this criticism, Inspector—that your department had not been successful in identifying suspects in the deaths of African-American victims—you decided that you needed to call your superior, Lieutenant Juhle, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“This was to underscore a sense of urgency to solve the crime, if in fact it was a crime, is that correct?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“You were under pressure to find a suspect immediately, were you not?”
“We’re always under pressure to find a suspect in a homicide case.”
“But this one was, as you say, unusual, because of the race of the victim. Didn’t Lieutenant Juhle tell you that you needed to identify a suspect as quickly as you could?”
Braden tried another objection.
Bakhtiari looked down on Rebecca from his bench. “Is that the thrust of your questioning here, Ms. Hardy? To imply that the investigation was mishandled because there was an urgency to identify a suspect?”
“An unusual urgency, Your Honor, that led to a less than rigorous investigation.”
The judge was shaking his head. “You’ve made your point. The objection is sustained. Let’s move on.”
Rebecca, who had let herself believe that she was scoring a few important early points, realized that she’d been kidding herself. In spite of the haste with which Waverly et al. had settled on Greg, Homicide had built a very strong circumstantial case that had sold the grand jury. Rebecca might have hired Wyatt Hunt to pursue suspects perhaps not adequately examined by Waverly and Yamashiro, but here in the courtroom, there was one suspect, and it was her client. The police had investigated him. Bona fide solid evidence tied him to the victim. Based on that, the grand jury had indicted. The DA had charged him. He was a plausible suspect, and the jury might believe that he was a guilty one.
She had been planning to question Waverly and Yamashiro at length about the other potential scenarios that they’d failed to investigate—the girls at Anlya’s home, for example; or Sharla and Leon; or what Max may have known. Now she couldn’t go further down that road, and that left her feeling hollowed out and lost. She’d figured she’d have another half hour, at least, bringing the jury around to her belief that the cops hadn’t done a thorough or even marginally competent job, but the judge had cut her off before she’d really begun, telling her to move on, and that was what she would have to do.
She turned, walked back to her desk, forced a smile for Greg and her father. Taking a sip of water, she glanced at her yellow legal pad. In her near-panicked state, she saw nothing helpful. She went back to her place in front of the witness.
She cleared her throat and began again. “Inspector Waverly, you’ve testified that you first met Greg Treadway on the day after the incident, after he arranged through an intermediary for the two of you to meet, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And you tape-recorded the interview you had with him, did you not?”
“Yes, I did.”
“During that interview, did he volunteer the information that he had spent part of the previous night, the night she died, with Anlya Paulson?”
“Yes, he did.”
“He told you that he and Anlya ate dinner at a restaurant called the Imperial Palace in Chinatown, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“In other words, he told you the exact location where you could go to verify his movements on the night of the accident. Is that right?”
/> “Yes.”
Rebecca ground to a stop. She took a breath, hoping she wasn’t giving away too much of her frustration. After her rush-to-judgment strategy had fallen apart, she had precious little to criticize or call into question about how Waverly had conducted the investigation. He was an affable, good-looking professional who’d wasted no time identifying a suspect, collecting a persuasive array of evidence, and making a righteous arrest.
She might continue with her cross-examination, but it would be at her own peril, so she decided to cut her losses. “Thank you,” she said. “I have no further questions for this witness.” And she returned to the defense table.
23
AT ONE O’CLOCK, Wyatt Hunt had knocked on the door of 3B. He’d called and made his pitch for an interview earlier, and though Max Paulson hadn’t been too enthusiastic about it, he’d agreed to an hour. He had a job in a hardware store and he had to be there at three.
Now they’d said hello and Max had shown him in. They were sitting across from each other at a Formica table in Auntie Juney’s tiny but clean kitchen. Wyatt blew on a cup of tea that Max had poured for him. Outside the window, the late-June fog wasn’t going anyplace fast, and up here on the third floor, the feeling of isolation was palpable.
As was Max’s pure suspicion.
“Okay, I said I’d talk to you,” Max said. “But I really don’t know what you’ve got in mind. I’m not inclined to go out of my way to help Greg Treadway.”
“You think he killed your sister?”
“I don’t know. Probably. They wouldn’t have him on trial if they didn’t believe he did. Whether he killed her or not, he was having sex with my sister. He betrayed me. And her, too. Both of us. So I don’t really care how the trial comes out on the murder charge. Or what happens to him. I just don’t want to see him again.”
“But you did see him pretty regularly before he got arrested?”
“Once a week or so, sometimes twice.”
“And on these visits, was Anlya included?”
Max threw a look toward the ceiling, his eyes suddenly brimming at the mention of Anlya’s name. “Sometimes. Usually not during the work- week, though. We’d invite her along when we were doing what we called field trips.”
The Fall Page 15
