All right, there was that for starters.
Almost more upsetting than Sharla’s skewed and unreasonable expectations was the fact that Anlya hadn’t told him about any of this. Anlya, his confidante and twin with whom he shared all of his secrets, for some reason didn’t want him to know that Leon Copes had somehow escaped captivity and was now living not just in San Francisco but, at least part of the time, in their mother’s house.
How could she not have felt he needed to know this? How close had their relationship been after all?
This led, in the black of the night, back to Greg Treadway, his other confidant, his other betrayer, whom Max had truly and stupidly believed innocent in Anlya’s murder until they announced the DNA evidence. Which, face it, even if it had nothing to do directly with the murder, eliminated any doubt that they’d been fucking, even as that lying bastard had mouthed all of his platitudes about his responsibilities, his commitment to his near-sacred role as a CASA, his respect for Anlya, her age, and her troubled history. Of course he would never take advantage of her. Of course he would never use his position and experience to unduly influence her.
And yet that was precisely what he’d done.
If Greg had lied time and again about his sexual relationship with Anlya, why wouldn’t he lie about killing her? Or about anything else, including the connection he and Max had built up? Max now knew that had been a fabrication as well.
He had turned in bed, thrown off the covers, pulled them back over his head, moaned so loudly that Juney had come in. Was he all right? Could she get him anything? She had sat down and rubbed his head and told him that everything was going to be all right. Really, this was just a rough patch, and he’d been through many before, some worse than this. He had to be strong and carry on.
Try as he might, he could no longer believe her.
Now, in the morning sunshine, he still didn’t believe her. He couldn’t will the belief back. What little faith he had left was gone.
Not just his own mother and Anlya and Greg had betrayed him—the whole world had betrayed him.
Because he was weak, because he was stupid, he’d somehow convinced himself that the world was a place of decent people. But that was wrong. The world, he now knew, was a place of darkness and deception. Ever since he’d moved in with Auntie Juney, he’d brainwashed himself with the notion that he could better himself, better his life, turn everything around from his troubled childhood. Now he knew beyond all doubt that this was a cruel, false dream.
He wasn’t ever going to fall for it again.
38
HARDY CAME OUT of the courtroom and, way down to his right in the hallway, saw a grim-faced Abe Glitsky, in a sport coat and tie, involved in an animated conversation with another man who, as Hardy walked toward them, became recognizable as Phil Braden. As soon as he made that identification, Hardy stopped, keeping his distance.
Whatever they were talking about, it wasn’t pretty. Braden’s voice occasionally got loud enough to echo in the hall. Twice the prosecuting attorney turned all the way around in an obvious show of pique, throwing his arms in the air. Glitsky kept his stone face on and did not raise his voice, but there was no question he was taking Braden and his problem very seriously indeed.
Finally, Braden turned a last time, threw a parting volley over his shoulder, and disappeared behind the door that Hardy knew led to the floor’s internal hallway, used by the bailiffs, the shackled prisoners, and the judges on the way to their chambers.
Hardy watched as Glitsky’s shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell. Shaking his head in apparent misery, Abe stared at the door through which Braden had just passed. He sucked in a huge lungful of air, blew it out through his mouth, started walking up the hall with a heavy tread, and saw Hardy.
Who fell in next to him. “Well, that seemed to go pretty well,” he said with a stab at cheeriness.
Which Glitsky ignored. “You saw?”
“Did you guys just break up or what?”
“I can’t blame him. He’s in real trouble now.”
“Why’s that?”
Glitsky stopped walking and Hardy drew up next to him. “Because his main eyewitness—you may remember Omar Abdullah—has apparently decided not to honor his subpoena to appear in court today.”
“When was he due up?”
“Before my turn, and if you’re wondering, I was supposed to be going on directly after him, which is why I’m out here waiting in the hall for my summons when I could be doing something worthwhile with my life. When I went to the hotel we’ve been keeping him at, there was no sign of him. The guy has been a complete pain, trying to use more than his meal allowance, having his street friends stay with him in the room, and raising hell. We must have had four noise complaints since we put him up in the place. But we talked the manager into not throwing him out. I even talked to him last night, and I show up this morning to pick him up, and he’s gonzo. He’s got to be around here someplace close, and I know we’ll find him. How far could he go? But Braden has completely nutted out.”
“So does he blame you for this? Braden?”
“Essentially, although he doesn’t want me to remind him that he went along with it. I mean, we put the good Mr. Abdullah up somewhere safe, where we could keep our hands on him. We gave him a meal allowance. And for a month I’ve been listening to him complain about not having pay-per-view movies in his room. He’s our witness. We treat him better than right. So when we told him today looked like it would be the day, I thought he was all set. I don’t see what else we could have done, short of putting a guard on him twenty-four/seven.”
Hardy clucked in sympathy. “The best-laid plans,” he said.
Glitsky pointed at him, shutting him up. “Don’t start,” he said. “Don’t even start.”
“What are you going to do? What’s Braden going to do?”
“You’re the lawyer. You tell me. He told me to stick around, so I’m guessing he’s still planning to put me on the stand while half the city police force is out looking for Omar.”
“That would be kind of weird, wouldn’t it? Having you up as a witness to talk about Omar’s ID on Treadway before Omar gets on the stand and points him out? As your personal attorney, I can tell you that your early-ID testimony isn’t even admissible until the jury hears the guy himself ID Greg in court.”
Glitsky shrugged. “That’s Braden’s call. He thinks he can get the judge to take me out of order.”
“What else are you going to testify about?”
“Essentially, just my hooking up with Omar, or Malibu. How he came to my attention and so on.”
“What’s Malibu?”
“The name Omar goes by on the street. And it’s the car, by the way, not the town.”
“Major distinction. You wouldn’t want to mix them up.”
“Basically, I’m going to be the warm-up act, then Abdullah comes on and puts Treadway in the tunnel right after the scream. Positive ID. He’s the whole case.”
Hardy checked over the hallway, as always teeming with life up here near the front of the building, where the stairs and elevators deposited their loads of humanity—jurors, witnesses, attorneys, cops, spectators, groupies, media types—all eventually heading for the courtrooms. “He might still make it.”
“He might, but the smart money says he won’t.”
“Says the professional handicapper.”
At that moment, a bailiff approached, hesitated for a second, then came up to them. “Excuse me,” he said. “Lieutenant Glitsky? You’re up in Department Twenty-four.”
“Thank you,” Glitsky said. Then, to Hardy, “Wish me luck.”
• • •
BRADEN HAD OBVIOUSLY made the decision to soldier on as though everything were all right and the game plan for the trial was intact—a miracle might happen and Abdullah would appear out in the hallway, waiting to be called in to give his testimony—so before he sent for Glitsky, he had called another of the first-night witnesses,
Zhang Jun, the cashier at the Sutter-Stockton garage. Jun’s testimony was straightforward, simple, and from the prosecution’s standpoint, critical—it established the exact time of Anlya’s death, a fact that would play into Glitsky’s testimony on the accuracy of the surveillance video’s timeline. Jun testified that he worked in the tiny cashier’s booth inside the garage, and his cigarette breaks started exactly on the hour every two hours—he literally counted down the seconds, so he was one hundred percent certain. He’d gotten up and left his workstation at precisely the click of eleven. He’d not yet lit his cigarette, so it was less than one minute later when the scream had punctured the still of the night.
Rebecca didn’t have any problem with this testimony. It was prosecutorial housekeeping, touching the technical bases, and she let the witness pass without any cross.
As it happened, Bakhtiari did allow Glitsky to go out of order. With Glitsky in the witness box, Braden started off following Abe’s efforts to locate a critical eyewitness with an entertaining and even dramatic showing of the surveillance video from the tunnel, the highlights of which were what Glitsky knew to be the back of Omar Abdullah’s head and the appearance of a white male—his hands were visible and clearly belonged to a Caucasian—wearing a coat and tie within, arguably, minutes if not seconds of the scream and Anlya’s death. Braden stopped the playback at the moment of clearest resolution of the man’s head—maddeningly for the jury; several of them groaned in frustration—though he had been looking down at the steps the whole time and moving rather quickly, flitting in and out of the picture in under two seconds from the first glance until he was around the corner and going down the second half of the stairway into the tunnel.
All anyone could make out due to the light and the camera angle was a head of dark hair, a blur of movement. The face was absolutely unidentifiable.
Glitsky, on the stand, gave it another careful look to go with the dozens of times he’d studied the shot, hoping that he’d see something this last time that had eluded him, but that hope got dashed in the still photograph’s unchanging reality. The picture was not going to convict Greg Treadway or anyone else. But it wasn’t going to acquit him, either.
When the lights came back up, Braden started in again. “By the way, Lieutenant Glitsky, did you have occasion to check the timeline that appears at the bottom of the video screen?”
“Yes, sir.” Glitsky had explained his procedure. He’d taken a picture of the video camera with his cell phone, then gone to maintenance and had them pull the CD, verifying that its timeline exactly matched when Glitsky had taken the picture. He’d asked maintenance to do a similar test randomly a few weeks later, and again its timeline was accurate.
The white male had shown up on the video at precisely 11:04, within seconds of the scream, and the same time registered on Zhang Jun’s official clock. There didn’t appear to be any question about the time of Anlya’s death, nor the time of the white male’s appearance on the surveillance video.
“All right,” Braden said. “After you’d viewed this video, Lieutenant, what did you do next?”
“I decided to go to the tunnel myself.”
“To what end?”
“I hoped to identify a witness, an African-American homeless individual who’d been interviewed by another officer on the night of the crime. I thought it was possible, if not probable, that his was the back of the head we all just saw on the video. Before he had disappeared, his testimony indicated, and the video seemed to corroborate, that he might have had a good look at the person who came running down the stairs in the seconds after the scream.”
“Did you make any special preparations before going down to the tunnel?”
“I did.” Glitsky went on to describe the making of his six-pack of California driver’s license head shots, one of which was Greg Treadway’s. The six-pack was marked as an exhibit.
“And did you in fact locate someone who identified himself as the individual who had spoken to police that evening?”
“Yes. As I suspected, he is homeless. He goes by the street name Malibu, although apparently, his real name is Omar Abdullah. He admitted that he had been interviewed on the night of the crime. The night of the scream, he called it.”
“And did he say he saw anyone coming down the Bush Street steps in the immediate aftermath of the scream?”
“Yes. A white male in a coat and tie. He said he got a good look at him, face-to-face.”
“What did you do then?”
“I showed him the six-pack and read him the admonition on the back.” Glitsky dutifully read the admonition for the jury.
Braden asked, “Did he tell you he understood that admonition?”
“Yes, he did. I told him to take his time and asked him if he could recognize any of those six white males as the one he’d seen on the night of the scream.”
“And did he recognize any of them?”
“He did. The bottom row, farthest left.”
Braden was ready with the exhibit. “How, if at all, did you have him mark this exhibit to indicate the identification he was making?”
“He circled the photo and signed and dated it.”
“And is that signature and date present on this exhibit?”
“Yes, I see it here.”
“Is the lower-left photograph the one identified by your witness Omar Abdullah as the white male he saw on the landing in the tunnel on the night of the crime?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And it is a photograph of whom?”
“It’s a picture of the defendant, Greg Treadway.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. No further questions.” He turned to Rebecca. “Your witness.”
Bakhtiari cleared his throat and spoke up. “Ms. Hardy. It’s been a long morning of testimony. If you don’t object, I suggest we break for lunch and continue with your cross-examination of Lieutenant Glitsky at one-thirty.”
• • •
REBECCA’S FACE SHOWED her surprise. “I thought you were going back to the office.”
“Fate intervened,” Hardy said. He had come up through the bar rail and over to the defense table as soon as the judge called for the lunch recess, passing Glitsky with a curt nod and no words as his friend exited down the aisle of the gallery.
“Fate in what guise?” Greg asked.
Hardy looked around to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard and said, “In the guise of a missing witness.” He lowered his voice further. “Abe went out to pick up Omar Abdullah this morning, and he wasn’t there. It looks like he blew off testifying.”
“Can he just do that?” Allie asked.
“No,” Hardy told her. “Which is not to say that it doesn’t happen all the time.”
Rebecca’s eyes shone with hopeful disbelief. “They didn’t have him stashed someplace over the weekend?”
“Yes, they did, but it didn’t work,” Hardy said. “Pretty amazing, huh?”
Rebecca nodded. “Staggering.” She cast a prayerful glance at the ceiling. “Wow!” She put a hand on her client’s arm. “Okay,” she said to Greg, “I’ve been touchy about it so far, but starting now, you’re allowed to be optimistic. A little.”
Obviously happy with the news, Greg remained somewhat wary. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “But is this really that big a deal? I mean, they’ve already got his testimony. Couldn’t they just read it out and get it in the record that way?”
“Maybe, but not in this case.”
“Why not?”
Rebecca pointed to her roommate. “Al? Quick quiz. You want to take it?”
The paralegal waded in. “Because Omar testified in front of the grand jury before it indicted you. And in the grand jury, we know, there’s no cross-examination, so until he gives his testimony at the trial in open court, where he is subject to cross, that testimony’s not admissible. By contrast . . .” Allie looked for Rebecca’s tacit permission to continue and got the nod she wanted. “By contrast, if he’d given the testim
ony at a preliminary hearing, he would have been subject to cross, and just reading out what he said would be admissible if he was truly unavailable.”
“So once again,” Hardy said, “they hurried it up by going for the grand jury indictment first, and it’s come back to bite ’em on the ass. Which, I must say, doesn’t break my heart.”
“Mine, either,” Greg said, warming to the situation. “So what next? They lose a witness, do they ask for a mistrial? I’m telling you, I don’t want a mistrial. I don’t want to do this again.”
Rebecca shook her head. “The prosecution can’t get a mistrial. That would be double jeopardy. They can’t try you twice for the same crime.” She looked at her client. “I get it, Greg. You don’t want one. And I think under these circumstances, we don’t, either.” She marveled at how the calculus had changed even since this morning. “No, we want them to run with what they’ve got, which, without Omar, doesn’t have you anywhere near the tunnel at any time.”
“Great.”
“It is great. It’s basically the whole ball game,” Rebecca said with real excitement. “I think when they finish their case in chief, without Omar—and if you want the practice, Allie, you can start writing it up right now—we file an Eleven-eighteen.”
Technically, this was an 1118.1, named after its section of the California penal code. In this directed verdict of acquittal, the judge would have heard all the prosecution evidence and directed the jury to acquit because he’d determined that the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction. This was nearly always a standard boilerplate motion that the defense filed when the prosecution rested, which the judge summarily rejected. But this time, under these circumstances, it might fly. Rebecca turned to her father for corroboration. “Dad?”
“I would. Definitely. If they can’t put Greg here in the tunnel, then there’s no proof he was there. They got motive, maybe, and a damn thin one at that. Nothing more. I don’t see how the judge lets this go to the jury.”
The Fall Page 26
