The Fall

by John Lescroart

  “Good call. But, not to burden you with my problems, the job thing is turning out to be a bit of an issue.”

  “You’re not teaching?”

  A bitter chuckle. “There’s a good example. It’s safe to say I won’t be teaching anymore. Anywhere. Two years experience, every district supposedly dying for good teachers, and I haven’t even gotten a callback.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged again. “As I say, it is what it is. Something will turn up, though probably not in the teaching field.” He crossed a leg, ankle on knee, casual and relaxed. “In any event,” he said, “the few friends I’ve got left are unanimous that I should try to get back to what used to be my regular life. Let some time go by, let things shake out a little. Meanwhile, I’m doing something, keeping busy, maybe making some kind of contribution instead of just sending out résumés all day.”

  “Probably a good plan.”

  “I thought so. Which is I guess what really brings me down here.”

  Rachelle let out a sigh and broke a tepid and, she hoped, kind smile. “I was afraid you might say something like that.”

  “And you’re afraid,” he said softly, “you’re not going to be able to help me.”

  “I’m really sorry, Greg. You know it’s nothing personal. I’ve always thought you were a good guy and an excellent CASA, but now . . .”

  “With me being a murderer and all . . .”

  “That’s not it.”

  “No? Then what is it?”

  “I guess the best word would be ‘perception.’ ”

  “So the actual facts don’t matter?”

  “Well, no, of course they matter. They matter a lot.”

  “But?”

  Someone was coming up the stairs, and Rachelle hoped that whoever it was would stop in and interrupt the conversation, but that didn’t happen, so she had to come back to Greg and his very difficult questions. “Like I said, it’s about perception as much as anything. You know we depend so much if not entirely on donations, Greg. And frankly, we got huge negative feedback from many, if not most, of our donors when you were arrested. They were all like, ‘How could we have let this happen? What kind of show were we running? Didn’t anybody supervise the volunteers?’ I mean it, it was a giant problem and still is.”

  “But I didn’t do it, Rachelle. You know me. You know the kind of person I am. I am not capable of killing anybody. And that’s what the trial found. Why can’t people see that?”

  Without a real response to give him, Rachelle inhaled and pursed her lips.

  “What?” Greg asked.

  Buying more time, Rachelle cleared her throat, inhaled again, finally found her voice. “I’m so very sorry.”

  Greg, sitting back in his comfortable chair, shook his head. “You realize how hard it is to accept this when all I’m trying to do is get some normalcy back in my life, and when I didn’t do anything except get caught in the system.”

  “I do. It must be terrible.”

  “But you can’t help me?”

  She kept hoping he would let it drop, thank her for her time, leave her office. But nothing in his body language spoke to that inclination. If she were going to get him to understand, if not accept, the basic problem, she would have to bring up the topic she’d been hoping to avoid, because the very idea scared her. “As you probably guessed, Greg, this has come up with the board, and it’s really not in my power to overrule them. They’ve made up their minds.”

  “How about if I came in and talked to them personally?”

  “That’s not a viable possibility. I think you just have to accept this, Greg. They’ve made their decision, and they’re going to stick to it. And you know, if I may say so, under these circumstances, I don’t know why you’d even want to come back. There have to be other jobs out there, and I’m not talking volunteer work—”

  He cut her off. “I’ve got to start someplace, Rachelle. I’ve got to have somebody be the first to trust me, to give me a chance, to get around the stigma. I don’t care about money. I need to be doing something and get my credibility back. I don’t understand how you can’t even let me talk to your board. You know me. I’m good at what I do. And you always need volunteers. I could help some of the kids, I know I could.”

  “Helping is not the issue, Greg. Again, perception is the issue.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  She held up her hand, stopping him. As she’d half expected and feared, he was going to make her tell him. “You didn’t kill her. All right. Maybe that’s the truth and—”

  “It is the truth.”

  “All right, Greg.” Her patience at an end, she came forward in her chair, elbows on her desk. Her voice took on an edge. “Even granting that you didn’t kill her, let me ask you this: How do you explain the DNA evidence? Because let me tell you, the perception, and the very strong presumption, of everyone I’ve talked to on the board is that you took advantage of Anlya sexually. Did you do that? Did you have sex with her?”

  His head snapped back as though she’d slapped him. He looked to the room’s corners as though he were trapped and seeking a way out. When he came back to her after a few seconds, he sat up straight. “The DNA was flawed.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” Rachelle said. “I’m asking if you had sex with her. Because the perception is that you did, and there doesn’t seem to be much arguing against that, is there?”

  He met her gaze. “So that’s how it is.”

  “It’s a simple enough question,” she said. “Your DNA was on her underwear. Nobody remembers that being in dispute. So the question again: Did you have sex with her, yes or no?”

  “What’s the point? I’ll never convince you or any of them, will I?”

  “You might. You might have some explanation that makes sense. And a simple no would be a good start.”

  He stared at her for another long beat before he got to his feet. “You’re mixing me up with a different kind of person,” he said. He strode to the doorway and out into the lobby.

  Rachelle brought her shaking hands up to her eyes and leaned back in her chair, nearly overcome with relief.

  That relief was short-lived, as almost immediately, she heard a guttural groan and then a sound that struck her as almost as violent as an explosion. The floor actually shook underneath her feet, and for the next second or two she thought it was an earthquake, but there was a different quality to what she’d felt, more like something had been dropped from a great height and shaken the floor to the building’s foundation.

  She jumped up, coming around her desk. When she got to her door, all three of her current staffers were appearing in the hallway from their rooms, the question clear on everyone’s shocked faces: What the hell was that?

  The answer was an insult hurled directly in front of her. The huge wooden library table lay on its side, all of its brochures and magazines and knickknacks covering nearly every square inch of the lobby floor.

  Down the stairs, a door slammed with another ungodly crash, and without seeing any part of it, Rachelle knew what the latest noise was—it was Greg Treadway letting himself out.

  •  •  •

  AT SEVEN-THIRTY ALLIE and Greg were sitting down to dinner at Verbena on Polk Street, a favorite place only a moderate walking distance from Allie and Beck’s apartment. She had come straight from work, hopeful that her new boyfriend would have something good to report on the job front, which otherwise was not progressing very well.

  “So how’d it go?” Allie asked after she’d kissed him hello and they’d taken their seats.

  “Not great. Much to my surprise and regret, Rachelle seems to hang with the ‘he still did it’ crowd.”

  “How can she think that? I mean, after the trial? I thought you said she was your friend.”

  “I did. She was, too. I didn’t know she was so afraid of the board. I guess it’s just easier for her not to have me come back in any capacity where she’d have to defend me.”<
br />
  A waiter came over and they ordered—white wine for Allie and a second or possibly third bourbon drink for Greg. “Well,” Allie said, “you thought it was a long shot, and it wasn’t like it was going to pay you anything.”

  “No. But I thought if they let me go back to volunteering, I’d at least have some leverage talking to other people. If CASA could trust me, it might be someplace to start.” He tipped up his glass. “But they can’t, and they were pretty much my last resort.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s the truth. I don’t see how this is ever going to end. I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”

  “Maybe try for some other kind of job, Greg. Forget about teaching. Forget about kids.”

  He made a face. “Starbucks?”

  She nodded. “If you have to. Or anyplace else. It wouldn’t matter to me.”

  “You say that now. But a few more months of this . . .”

  “I’ll say the same thing.”

  He let out a small breath. “You’re great. Thank you.” Their round of drinks arrived, and they clinked their glasses. “Here’s to us,” Greg said, “and getting through this.”

  “Deal.”

  He drank and put his glass down. “Can I ask your opinion about something?” he asked.

  “Anything. Shoot.”

  “Do you think it might be worthwhile to ask Rebecca to go talk to Jeff Elliott?”

  “About what?”

  “That night.”

  “What about it?”

  “About what really happened.”

  Allie considered. “And what do you think that was?”

  “Allie. We know what it was. We’ve got a witness and a deathbed confession.”

  “Royce Utlee.”

  “Right. And okay, I know it was ruled inadmissible in court, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and doesn’t matter. It matters a ton. As it stands now, people like Rachelle and the CASA board and the school district all think that since I’m the only suspect they’ve heard of, it must have been me, in spite of all the evidence problems. Whereas if CityTalk comes out with the real story . . . I don’t know. It’s just an idea. But it might convince some people that, hey, not only was I acquitted, I was acquitted because the judge actually knew who did it, although that wasn’t allowed to get into the trial record. And that the guy who did it was not me. Don’t you think that might be worth a try?”

  * * *

  CityTalk

  by JEFFREY ELLIOTT

  This is a small tale of social injustice.

  Last May, most readers will recall that a young African-American woman named Anlya Paulson died at the hands of an assailant who threw her over the side of the Sutter-Stockton tunnel and into the path of an oncoming car. At the time, Supervisor Liam Goodman was in the middle of his vociferous and politically charged campaign calling for more aggressive police investigation and prosecution of homicide suspects whose victims were African-American. In that environment, Devin Juhle’s Homicide Detail, and separately, District Attorney Wes Farrell’s prosecution staff, faced a great deal of pressure to identify, arrest, and swiftly bring to trial a viable suspect in Anlya’s murder, preferably somebody white.

  That suspect turned out to be Greg Treadway, a 27-year-old Teach for America instructor at Everett Middle School and a volunteer as a court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for children in the foster system. Mr. Treadway had no criminal record of any kind prior to his arrest for murder.

  Soon after Mr. Treadway’s trial began, Honor Wilson, one of the group home roommates of Anlya Paulson, was beaten and run over by a car in the Fillmore District. Near death, she was transported to County General Hospital and admitted to the emergency room. Accompanying her was a San Francisco patrol officer named Janine McDougal, armed with a tape recorder. Unexpectedly, and in spite of being in critical condition, Ms. Wilson regained consciousness long enough to talk into Officer McDougal’s tape recorder and to say who had beaten and—as it would turn out—killed her.

  But she was not finished with her statement. After identifying her assailant as her boyfriend, a pimp named Royce Utlee, she added a postscript: “Royce killed Anlya, too.” I have heard a copy of this tape, and it is unambiguous. Within minutes of this statement, Ms. Wilson died of her injuries.

  Because of an anomaly in California law, the statement that Mr. Utlee was the actual murderer of Anlya Paulson would likely not have been admitted in evidence. As a matter of fact, because the trial ended so abruptly, neither the jury nor, more important, the public ever heard it. Within a day, Mr. Utlee was dead, too, the victim in a gunfight between himself and the SWAT team. His death, of course, eliminated any possibility of questioning him about the murder of Anlya Paulson.

  Several days later, the prosecution’s main witness turned out to have been misidentified. He was the former boyfriend of Anlya Paulson’s mother. He was also an escaped psychiatric patient with a murder charge pending, who had an excellent motive to kill Ms. Paulson himself. Judge Bakhtiari dismissed all charges against Mr. Treadway due to lack of evidence.

  End of story, you might say—justice is done. The good guy walks away, the man who was positively identified by his dying girlfriend as the bad guy is dead.

  But it is not the end of this story.

  In the three-odd months since his acquittal, Mr. Treadway has been unable to find work, even as a volunteer. The specter of the murder charge against him remains, he believes, because Mr. Utlee’s alleged role in Ms. Paulson’s death has never become part of the narrative of the trial. In spite of his acquittal, that fact leaves Mr. Treadway struggling under the weight of suspicion against him as the only viable suspect in the murder, when Ms. Wilson’s deathbed statement should at the very least—one would think—prompt a Homicide investigation into Mr. Utlee’s relationship with Anlya Paulson and the likelihood of his involvement in her death. Not surprisingly, the authorities cannot close quickly enough the book on the series of blunders that brought about this sordid miscarriage of justice.

  Meanwhile, Greg Treadway needs a job.

  * * *

  42

  DISMAS HARDY PUT down his coffee cup, moved his section of the newspaper to one side, waited a moment, then pulled it back in front of him. He lifted his cup, stopped midway to his mouth, put it back down in the saucer.

  “What?” Frannie sat across the breakfast table.

  “What what?”

  “What are you reading that’s so upsetting?”

  “Jeff Elliott. If The Beck is any part of this, I’m going to have to flay her.”

  “Any part of what?”

  He pushed the paper over to her. “Check it out.”

  After a minute, Frannie looked back up at him. “What’s so troubling about this, Diz? He makes a good point. If they knew about another suspect, that should have made it to the trial, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t think. That kind of evidence is inadmissible for a reason, and the reason is because it’s unreliable. The Wilson girl might have accused Utlee for any number of reasons, just to pile on more bad shit that her boyfriend did being one of them. Nobody’s talking about it because the verdict went our way, but I never heard any evidence that put Royce anywhere near the crime. There’s just Wilson’s accusations, nothing else.

  “As far as I know, nobody’s even looked into what he was doing that night. What if they look and find out he wasn’t anywhere near downtown? Then what? Then our Mr. Treadway is back on the hot seat, even though, thankfully, he can’t be tried again. He could still have a really damn bad couple of years, if not the rest of his life, forget whether he’s got a job or not. And that doesn’t take into consideration how the wonderful Mr. Treadway, a twenty-seven-year-old teacher, was having sex with the seventeen-year-old sister of one of his charges. I think everybody on the defense would be well served by leaving this whole thing alone.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of the paper. “It’s just dumb,” he said. “It’s bad
for the firm. It’s a bad idea, period. I swear to God, if this is The Beck—”

  Hardy’s cell phone rang and he snapped it out of its holster. “Speak of the devil,” he said into the phone. “I’m hoping no part of CityTalk is you.”

  “No part at all. I told Allie it would just be opening another can of worms. But she wanted to help Greg.”

  “We’re done helping him, Beck. The firm is, anyway. He got off. We won. We broke out the champagne, and that should have been the end of it.”

  “I agree with you. Talk to Allie.”

  “I wish I had. And I wish you’d told me she was doing this.”

  “I didn’t know she was. I thought I’d persuaded her not to.”

  “So what’s it about?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “Probably not. I don’t like anything I’ve heard up to now.”

  “They’re going out. Allie and Greg.”

  Hardy went silent.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m here. I’m just swearing to myself.” He paused. “Are they serious?”

  “I would say so. Or at least moving in that direction pretty fast.”

  “I’d be lying if I said that didn’t worry me.”

  “Me, too. I’m a little afraid that she’s confusing ‘acquitted’ with ‘innocent.’ ”

  “A little?”

  “Okay, maybe mostly afraid. But I’ve got some residual reasonable doubt. Don’t you?”

  “Perhaps a drop. Basically, I don’t want it to be our issue anymore. The trial, as you might have noticed, is over. And so, in theory, should be our relationship with the client, unless he gets accused of killing somebody else.”

  “Don’t even kid.”

  “You think I’m kidding?”

  “I don’t believe Greg’s a cold-blooded killer, Dad. I really don’t.”

  “Okay. But we haven’t talked about whether he’s a hot-blooded killer.”

  “It’s just that I worry about Allie. This Jeff Elliott thing . . .”

  “And yet you just said you were mostly afraid that Allie has confused ‘acquitted’ with ‘innocent.’ Which means you don’t think he’s innocent, either, somewhere deep inside.”