The Fall

by John Lescroart

  “I figured we’re going on two people inside. We’ve got both their phone numbers.” Courtesy of Hunt calling Callie Lucente at AT&T and getting the number Sharla had called that morning. “We start there. That doesn’t work, we go to bullhorn. We’ve got the back covered. Whatever happens, he’s not getting away.” Rutledge took out his phone. “We rolling?”

  Juhle nodded.

  Rutledge punched in a number, waited, then said, “This is Lieutenant Steve Rutledge, San Francisco Police. Sharla Paulson, we have your house surrounded by armed police officers. We are here to arrest Leon Copes for homicide and unlawful escape from authorities. Mr. Copes, if you get this message, please show yourself at the front door with your hands raised, then come outside and surrender to officers.”

  Rutledge pressed the off button, punched in the second number, and when no one answered, left essentially the same message, except this one direct to Leon. He didn’t act like the nonresponse surprised him too much, although it did mean a greater interaction with the unknown and, hence, more uncertainty and more danger.

  “Okay,” he said to himself. “Showtime.”

  Juhle, Yamashiro, and Hunt, beside a sullen and brooding Max, all walked to the corner and watched Rutledge, keeping his head ducked lower than the roofs of the cars, make his way down the fifty yards to where a brace of black-and-white police vehicles blocked the street. Here he got his hands on a bullhorn. “Sharla Paulson and Leon Copes!” The electronic, almost disembodied sound bounced off the stuccoed buildings, unexpectedly loud against the otherwise dead silence of the street. “Your house is surrounded. Please surrender yourselves by coming to the front door with your hands raised above your heads.”

  On both sides of Rutledge, clustered behind police cars and holding armored barriers, police had weapons drawn and trained on the front of the house.

  For a full minute, nothing happened, and then suddenly, every policeman holding a gun of any kind went on full alert—something had moved behind the metal door.

  A woman’s voice carried out to them. “This is Sharla. I be coming out first.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Max said as he waited. “Don’t be dumb. Please don’t be dumb.”

  Carefully, she pushed the metal door all the way open. Facing all the police, she said in a strong voice, “I’m just going to unlock it so it stays open now.” She half-turned and pushed the locking mechanism at the top of the door. Then, her arms still high above her head, she came forward all the way to the police cars, where an officer gently took her arms down and put her behind one of the cars.

  A male voice got everyone’s attention again. “Okay,” he boomed, “now me.” His silhouette appeared in the door. And then, stepping out, he stopped. He was a very large man, heavily bearded, a full head of hair down below his shoulders. He looked nothing like the bald and clean-shaven man from Villanova’s mug shot of the elopers. His hands high over his head, he widened the gap between them imploringly. “But hey! I ain’t no Leon Copes.” He raised his voice even further, so there could be no misunderstanding. “I don’t know any Leon Copes,” he said. “People call me Malibu. You know, like the car, not the city.”

  Malibu, aka Omar Abdullah, came forward slowly, step-by-step, hands raised all the way up until he, too, made it down to the cars and let them take him peacefully into custody.

  •  •  •

  DOWN AT THE corner, Devin Juhle threw a withering glance at Hunt. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, “it’s not him! I’ll deal with you guys later.” Without another word, he started jogging up the street toward the center of the action. Yamashiro hung back for a long beat, shook his head dismissively at Hunt and Max, then took off after his lieutenant.

  Hunt brought his hands to his temples, brought them to his sides, and looked down at Max. “What happened here, dude?”

  The boy kept staring down the street, then off behind them, clearly on the edge of panic. “This is bullshit.”

  “What’s bullshit, Max?”

  “What he’s talking about. Malibu? That’s just shit.”

  “It’s what . . . ?” Hunt put a hand on his shoulder.

  And then Max, with a kind of garbled scream, shook Hunt’s hand off and broke away into a dead run. Not behind them and away, as Hunt would have suspected, but back toward Sharla’s.

  Hunt took off behind him but couldn’t catch up.

  Max might have made it all the way to the handcuffed suspects if one of the cops hadn’t seen him coming and gotten in his way, holding him as he tried to break through. “Mom!” he cried. “Mom! What are you doing? What are you doing?”

  She looked over and saw him, took a step in his direction. “Baby?”

  Max struggled with the man holding him. “Tell ’em. You’ve got to tell ’em.”

  “Babe.” She nearly moaned the word. “Oh, babe.”

  “Hey now, hey now.” Malibu getting into the act, moving in Max’s direction before someone held him back.

  Hunt pulled up behind Max, his hands on his shoulders. “I’ve got him,” he told the man who’d been holding him. “Max, easy,” Hunt said. “It’s all right.”

  Max twisted away from Hunt’s grip again. “It’s not all right.” Looking once more through the gathered crowd of cops, he yelled out, “That’s Leon, goddammit! Mom! Tell them!”

  “I ain’t likely no Leon,” Malibu said in a reasonable tone. “Check my pockets. I got ID in my kitchen name. Omar Abdullah, sometime Malibu. I’m a big witness for you all in a murder case. Call Abe Glitsky. Check it out.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Max shot back. “Ask my mom. She’ll tell you. That’s Leon Copes.”

  Sharla, in an agony of indecision, turned from one of her men to the other, unable to pick a side. Finally, meeting Max’s eyes, she managed another rejection. “I can’t . . .”

  At the same time, Steve Rutledge pulled a formal-looking certificate out of Malibu’s inside pocket, opened it up—the Glide Cathedral soup kitchen form identifying him as Omar Abdullah—and gave a nod of rueful acknowledgment.

  Seeing that, Max exploded again. “Take his fingerprints. Get his fingerprints. That ID’s a fake.”

  “It ain’t no fake,” Malibu said. “Who is this boy?”

  The general plea wasn’t doing him any good, so Max made it specific. “Mr. Hunt, get his prints. I promise you, that’s Leon.” Then to Juhle: “Lieutenant? Please?”

  Juhle realized that if Omar/Malibu was who he said he was—not Leon Copes but a homeless person who was the key witness in the Treadway murder trial—that would never justify the full SWAT team call-up he’d orchestrated. His career might be severely threatened. He had to know Malibu’s identity for sure, so he turned to Rutledge, nodded, and said, “I don’t see how fingerprints could hurt.”

  Omar shook his head, adamant. “Malibu don’t be giving no fingerprints. That be part of my deal.”

  “Well,” Rutledge said, “I don’t know anything about any deal, sir, but we take your prints, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Malibu’s voice toughened up. “I said I ain’t doing that.”

  Rutledge did a double take at the new sound of things, the cooperative victim of a misidentification turning surly and threatening. He gave a nod to one of his troops. “Ned,” he said, “we can settle this pretty quick. Get out the kit.”

  Malibu looked from one lieutenant to the other. His eyes fell on Sharla and he snarled. “Bitch.” Then, kicking out, he caught the cop nearest him, knocked him to the ground, and jumped over him, taking off up the street. Handcuffed as he was, he hadn’t made it more than ten steps when a couple of the officers giving chase brought him down, burning and rashing his arms and cheek on the pavement.

  Sharla shivered with either relief or fear. She watched in disbelief as half a dozen more policemen descended on Leon, restraining him. Looking over at Max again, she gave him a pallid, broken smile and said, “I’m sorry, baby. Wasn’t nothing else I could do.” And then, to Rutledge, she said, �
��My good boy over there ain’t lying. That be Leon Copes, all right. He’s a good man, too. He just needs to get hisself in a hospital.”

  40

  DISMAS HARDY GOT the urgent call about the remarkable events on Sharla’s street from Wyatt Hunt after lunch, just before Glitsky was about to take the stand for Rebecca’s cross-examination. Hardy had enough time to give Rebecca the broad outlines about what had just transpired. His daughter then conveyed these facts to the judge in a sidebar.

  Now they were in Bakhtiari’s chambers, the judge directing his sternest visage at a crestfallen and obviously shaken Phil Braden. “Can this possibly be true, counselor?” he asked. “After everything that’s gone before at this trial, now this?”

  “Apparently so, Your Honor. We’re waiting for a final corroboration on the identity question, but I’ve spoken to Lieutenant Juhle, and there seems to be a general consensus.”

  “For the record, you mean there seems to be a consensus that Leon Copes, the former common-law stepfather of the victim in this case, and a man ruled incompetent to stand trial, has successfully passed himself off to you and your inspectors as an entirely different person from who he actually is. Further, that this person, under the false identity of Omar Abdullah, was supposed to be the prime witness against Mr. Treadway. While he himself has an excellent motive to have committed the very murder where he is testifying as a witness.” With noticeably rising anger, Bakhtiari went on, “And none of this was known to any of you, much less revealed to the defense? Can this really be possible?”

  Braden swallowed. “There was no reason to doubt his identity, Your Honor. Many homeless people—”

  Bakhtiari cut him off. “Many homeless people have false IDs? Or IDs issued by the places they eat or sleep to keep track of who’s where? Yes, they do. And do you know what those IDs are typically based on? I’ll tell you. The fancy ones with photos attached are bought on the street for a few bucks. Alternatively, they’re simply sworn to at the site. You self-identify as Bob Jones, and the shelter on Eddy gives you a piece of paper saying that, for their purposes, you are Bob Jones. Does any of this sound familiar?”

  “Yes, Your Honor, but—”

  “But!” The judge held up a finger. “But then if one of these indigent citizens happens to get caught up somehow in the legal system—which I believe has occurred a little more often than, say, a thousand times—those IDs are typically verified against police records by the simple expedient of taking the subject’s fingerprints, are they not?”

  “They should be. Yes, Your Honor.”

  “But they were not in this case?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Apparently not.” The judge’s cheeks puffed out as he blew through them. “How could that not have happened in this case?”

  “But Your Honor—”

  “Mr. Braden, are you seriously going to try and defend any small part of this? Unbelievable.”

  Rebecca made bold to inject herself into the conversation. “With respect, Your Honor, I believe counsel for the People knows exactly why Mr. Copes’s fingerprints were never taken. It was part of the deal to get his testimony as Omar Abdullah into the record.”

  “There is no record of such a deal, Your Honor,” Braden said.

  “I should hope not, Mr. Braden, since any such deal would be moronic. But now I’m asking you directly if you are aware of any arrangement about fingerprints between your office and Mr. Copes or Mr. Abdullah such as that contemplated by Ms. Hardy. And be careful how you answer me, counsel, because either way, you’re guilty of gross stupidity. So you take your pick.”

  “The option was never overtly discussed, Your Honor.”

  “Overtly. I like that.” The judge shook his head. “So you just decided to believe that Mr. Abdullah was who he said he was?”

  “The question of his true identity never came up. We had a rap sheet on him, Your Honor.”

  “You had a rap sheet on him as Mr. Abdullah?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. He appeared to have a history consistent with who he said he was, and we, perhaps naively, went with that.”

  “Perhaps naively,” the judge said. “Perhaps naively. Perhaps criminally negligent as well. And so what about the rap sheet?”

  “It was a real rap sheet, Your Honor, but for a different Omar Abdullah. Black man, roughly the same age.”

  Bakhtiari’s mouth actually dropped open in stunned disbelief before he caught himself and closed it back up. “Did I already say ‘criminally negligent’?”

  “With respect, the People dispute the characterization of this oversight as criminal, Your Honor. But we do apologize for the admittedly egregious blunder.”

  “Really? You apologize? I’m not sure that’s going to cut it, Mr. Braden. Did anyone in your office, or under your guidance, consider surreptitiously lifting Mr. Copes’s fingerprints from something he’d touched?”

  “It appears not, Your Honor. If it would help us resolve this problem, the People would not object if you declared a mistrial.”

  “Hah!”

  Bakhtiari seemed to get a perverse kick out of that proposal. “Of course you wouldn’t object. You’d get another chance to start over without all these errors. Ms. Hardy, I don’t suppose that would be of much interest to you?”

  “That would depend, Your Honor, on whether the People still plan to call Mr. Abdullah. His public defender has told me that because he has his own murder charges pending, there is no way she’ll let him testify without a grant of immunity. She also says if he does testify, then he will say that his name is Omar Abdullah and that anyone who says he is Leon Copes is, and I quote, gravely disabled. But I guess if Mr. Braden does want to give immunity to a delusional, psychotic murderer who is a principal witness in his case, he can do it. Otherwise, Your Honor, unless the prosecution has other evidence of which I am not aware, then in light of these new facts and the polluted People’s evidence, we would move at this time for a directed verdict of acquittal.”

  “I don’t blame you,” the judge said. “That’s an entirely reasonable position, though I will reserve judgment for the time being.”

  “Your Honor, if I may,” Rebecca pressed. “Without Mr. Copes’s testimony, there is simply no proof that Mr. Treadway was at the crime scene on the night of the murder. Absent that proof, there is no case.”

  “Lieutenant Glitsky’s testimony puts him there,” Braden said.

  “Not a chance,” Bakhtiari shot back. “I let you call Glitsky out of order because you told me you’d have Omar Abdullah. No Abdullah, no courtroom ID. No courtroom ID, no previous ID from Lieutentant Glitsky. I’m going to strike it from the record. You’ve got nothing.”

  Rebecca saw her opportunity and took it. “Respectfully, Your Honor, it’s time to end this farce. Keeping my client in jail even one more day is a travesty. There is now no remaining shred of evidence tying him to the crime for which he’s charged. The only person we can positively place at the crime scene at the minute of Anlya’s death is Leon Copes, who once raped her and has a far better motive to have killed her than Greg Treadway. Anlya’s recognition of Leon at the scene could have sent him back into custody.”

  Bakhtiari sat straight up, shock in his expression.

  Braden jumped right in. “Your Honor, I object. There is nothing in the record about this alleged rape, and to introduce it in this fashion is irresponsible and prejudicial.”

  “Prejudicial to whom?” Rebecca shot back at him. “Leon Copes?”

  Bakhtiari slammed a palm against his desk. “Counsel will direct their comments to me and me alone. Ms. Hardy, without any foundation, this alleged rape has no place in this proceeding. If you can introduce it in your case in chief, if we get there, and it is deemed relevant at that time, I may allow it. In the interim, Mr. Braden’s point is well taken. We have enough irregularities to deal with as things stand. Let’s not introduce new ones.”

  Bakhtiari pondered for a moment, nodding all but imperceptibly. “Mr. Braden,”
he said at last. “Were you planning on calling anyone else on your witness list to address the issue Ms. Hardy raises concerning proof of the defendant’s presence at the crime scene? I assume that even your office would not be foolish enough to immunize and attempt to call Mr. Abdullah under these circumstances. So? Will you be calling other witnesses?”

  “No, Your Honor, the People will rest.”

  “And you will be offering no further testimony as to the defendant’s presence at the tunnel that night?”

  “No, Your Honor. Even without Mr. Abdullah’s testimony, the People believe they have made their case.”

  Bakhtiari gave him a deathless, incredulous stare for a few seconds. Finally, nodding brusquely, he said, “I’ll have a ruling on Ms. Hardy’s motion for a directed verdict of acquittal when court reconvenes in”—he checked his watch—“twenty-five minutes. That’ll be all for now.”

  •  •  •

  WORD MUST HAVE somehow leaked out to the world at large when they were in chambers, because when Rebecca stepped into the courtroom again, the place was jammed with reporters, other lawyers, courtroom groupies, and a decent smattering of the former Liam Goodman posse, who, perhaps no longer under Goodman’s active sway, seemed to be spread in a less than organized fashion around the courtroom.

  Allie and Greg had remained at the defense table the whole time—and were currently holding hands under the table, as Rebecca noted with a frisson of anger—and Greg’s parents, Barry and Donna, had moved up to the front row of the gallery right behind them. Also in the front row, Dismas Hardy spoke on his cell phone and, unable or unwilling to cut his connection, raised a hand to his daughter when she caught his eye. On the other side of the gallery, Wes Farrell huddled with Abe Glitsky, and when Phil Braden joined them, they did not make a happy group. Somewhat to Rebecca’s surprise, CityTalk writer Jeff Elliott had made it down from the Chronicle Building and sat near the back door in his wheelchair.

  As she got to her place and sat down, Rebecca turned her chair away from the jury, facing Allie and Greg and his parents. Her color was high, and she didn’t want to project the giddy confidence she felt. “How’d it go?” Greg asked her.