The Fall (19 page)

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 Honor,” 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.

A
T 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.”

“And what were those?”

“You know.
Greg would pick someplace he thought was cool or educational or whatever—a concert or a movie or maybe a museum. And the three of us would make a day of it.”

“This happened frequently? With the three of you?”

Max took in a breath, closed his eyes. “Once or twice a month. Like I said, usually on a weekend.”

Hunt took a sip of his tea. “On these trips, did you notice any particular closeness between Greg and your sister? Any inappropriate behavior?”

Max brought his gaze down and leveled it at Hunt, who could almost feel the rage coming off the young man. “It doesn’t really matter what I saw between them, does it?” he asked. “There’s only one way she gets his DNA where they found it, isn’t there?”

“I guess his lawyers are hoping that the DNA evidence isn’t conclusive. Maybe somebody screwed up at the lab. Or they can make the jury believe that. If that happens, then it would be helpful to know if anyone else saw them acting like they were together. Or rather, if no one else did.”

“You mean me?”

Hunt gave him a nod. “You’d be a good place to start. Did you ever have reason to believe, from the way they were with each other, that they were romantically involved?”

Max shook his head and said, “But they were. Everybody knows they were by now. If you’re trying to get him off on that, you’re pretty much wasting your time. And mine.” Abruptly, he pushed his chair back and stood up, crossed to the window, looking out at the fog. After another few seconds, he turned around. “Sorry to be so uncooperative. I don’t mean to bust your chops. You’re just doing your job, but I don’t see how there can be any doubt.”

“About their relationship, maybe not. But do you have any doubt that he killed her?”

Something went out of Max’s shoulders. “I’ve tried to imagine that. I’ve got to say I can’t. I mean, he loved her. Loved us both, I would have said. Took care of us. He was always such a good guy.” This time tears broke from his eyes and coursed down his cheeks. “But if he could . . . fuck her, you know. It’s so weird because he talked about CASAs like him not being assigned clients of the opposite sex, how he understood it was
a smart policy. If he could do what he did after being hyper-aware of all that, I guess I really didn’t know him. He just fooled everybody.”

Hunt kept his eyes off Max’s face, leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, let the shimmering emotion of the moment subside. “Let’s be hypothetical for a minute,” he began in a different tone. “Let’s admit that taking unfair advantage of your sister was something he did. It’s bad, but it’s a very different thing from murdering her. And you’ve just been telling me that you can’t imagine he could have killed her or anybody else. Can’t imagine it, right?”