The Fall (21 page)

“I did.”

“Did you notice any other display of affection?”

“Yes.”

“And what was that?”

“The woman leaned over and kissed him.”

“I take it this was before the argument?”

“Yes. They were at dinner for about forty-five minutes, and the argument started maybe two-thirds of the way through.”

Satisfied with Fred Liu’s performance, Braden gave his witness a small nod. “Thank you. I have no further questions.”

•  •  •

F
ROM REBECCA’S PERSPECTIVE,
it was pure mercy that the judge, as soon as Braden had finished up with Fred Liu, asked if she’d mind holding her cross-examination until the next day, then adjourned court. She already felt as though she’d been defeated and then capitulated on the first major plank of her defense, which had been the hurried and therefore slipshod
investigation. Without that, she found herself empty-handed after Yamashiro’s testimony, and she hadn’t been able to muster even the most perfunctory of cross-examinations.

But it wasn’t until Braden was halfway through Liu’s direct that she started to realize the dimension of her miscalculations. Because here today had been Mr. Liu, clearly describing Greg and Anlya as a romantic couple out on a date on the fatal night, and Rebecca had no idea how she could refute any part of what he’d said. She had been thinking that she could at least call into question Liu’s identification of Greg, or Greg and Anlya together, but the plain fact was that he had admitted to being there with Anlya. That was not in dispute. And she knew that with the DNA evidence coming up, there was no point in trying to deny the carnal reality of the relationship.

It was a few minutes after five, and Allie Jensen sat in one of the client chairs in Rebecca’s small office, listening to her roommate’s litany of despair.

“The jury would laugh at me,” Rebecca said. “If they hadn’t already decided that I was extraneous baggage sitting in the courtroom anyway.”

“You’re not doing nothing,” Allie said, “there’s just not much to refute so far. It’ll be different when you bring out your own case in chief. You already zinged Braden on the suicide thing, and you’ve got a compelling alternative story once you start to tell it.”

“I do? Remind me what it is.”

“Come on. Look at Greg. His job, his volunteer stuff, two college degrees, for God’s sake. Plus, he’s got no criminal record of any kind. He comes across, and will when he testifies, as the nicest guy on the planet. You’re telling me that this guy decides out of nowhere that he’ll have to kill this woman whom, okay, he shouldn’t be having sex with, but even that’s only illegal by about three months.”

Rebecca didn’t want to rain on Allie’s parade, but she knew that nothing could be further from the truth. Sex between an adult and a seventeen-year-old was unlawful intercourse, the California equivalent of statutory rape. If convicted of even a misdemeanor, Greg would never work for any educational institution or youth group, even as a supervised volunteer, again. He would never get a security clearance. In the age of Google, he probably wouldn’t get any sort of responsible job for
years. And if Anlya had so much as suggested that her relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old white male who had power over her brother was for even a moment slightly less than one hundred percent consensual . . . The sex crimes inspectors had a saying: “Seventeen will get you twenty.” It was not meant as a wisecrack.

Greg Treadway could have had every reason to kill Anlya.

“Well, yes,” Rebecca replied evenly. “Except that somebody actually saw him.”

“No, they did not! Nobody saw anybody push or throw Anlya over that parapet. You can’t forget that, Beck. That’s the bottom line. After that, it was bad luck that someone who looks a little like Greg happened to be coming down those steps when he did. But Mr. Abdullah never even hinted that he saw Greg up on Bush. Nobody says they saw Greg up there, fighting with Anlya or anybody else. That’s the moment. The only moment. And nobody saw it. This was all very clear to you a couple of weeks ago, when you pitched it to me.”

“I know,” Rebecca said. “I know. But my vision back then was that I’d be fighting the good fight all the way along, cross-examining everybody on everything. Instead I just sit there like a bump on a log, letting Braden pile it on. I swear to God, if the judge hadn’t adjourned when he did today, I was dead. I’ve still got nothing to ask Fred Liu about. Everything he said was the gospel truth. How am I supposed to attack that?”

“Just leave it. You’ll get your turn. Especially when Greg testifies and you get to make an argument. It’s mostly circumstantial against him. And you know this town. It doesn’t like to convict.”

“Maybe not, but you remember what they told us about circumstantial evidence in school. Sometimes it can be very convincing,” Rebecca said. “Like a trout in the milk.”

•  •  •

H
ER FATHER SAT
behind his desk, which had papers spread out all over it. He’d been doing some of his own billable work, which had taken a hit over the past week while he’d been attending the trial.

But when Rebecca poked her head in, he put down his pen and listened to her concerns: that she was failing, that the trial was already lost, that she was unprepared and didn’t know what she was doing, that the jury thought she was an idiot.

Hardy listened to it all, and when she finished, he gave her a nod and said, “It’s always this way at the beginning. They trot out the case piece by piece, and you come to realize that if they didn’t have something pretty compelling, it never would have gotten to trial. So you wait it out. Some of the evidence is good and some is weak, and once in a while you get lucky with a small point, like your ‘maybe it was suicide’ moment. But this is the time when Braden gets his licks in, and you’ve to got to expect it to hurt a little. Or a lot.”

“I can take hurt. But I feel like I’m sitting in the middle of the road and he’s steamrolling me. I mean, take Fred Liu today. The whole time he’s testifying, I’m thinking that I’m going to get up on cross, pick apart his testimony, and generally kick his ass. But when he’s done, I freeze up and realize I don’t have anything to say. I’m sure everything happened just like he described it, and that’s what the jury believes, too. Thank God the judge adjourned us or I would have been a stammering fool.”

“Hardly that. You don’t have to cross-examine everybody. Only when you think you can draw blood. Oh, by the way, did you wind up getting any sleep last night?”

She gave him a weary smile. “I think I finally dozed off around four.”

“So today you were going on, what, two hours?”

“Maybe three.”

“And you were—I’m just guessing—planning to stay up again tonight and take notes and prepare for tomorrow.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Call me a radical thinker, but you might consider forgetting about that for tonight. Get a nice dinner someplace, then go home and go to bed.”

“Dad! I can’t do that. You never did that!”

“Actually, I did, quite often, and so can you. You’ve already got all the facts. Now what you need, mostly, is to be sharp and pay attention. Do you really want to talk about Mr. Liu, for example? You start out with him tomorrow, right? You’re sure you don’t want to cross him?”

Rebecca straightened in her chair and cocked her head with interest. “On what? He didn’t say anything that paints Greg in a worse light than he’s already in.”

“No? Really? What was the gravamen of his testimony?”

“If I had to say
anything, it would be that Greg and Anlya were romantically involved.”

Hardy nodded. “Good. And what if they weren’t?”

“The DNA evidence is going to clear that right up, don’t you think?”

“What DNA evidence? Has the jury heard any DNA evidence yet?”

“No, they haven’t, but when they do—”

Hardy raised a hand, stopping her. “We’re not there yet, are we? Right now the jury is still trying to figure out the relationship between Greg and Anlya. Mr. Liu says they were romantically involved, but how does he know that?”

“Well, they were holding hands.”

“They were? Were their fingers interlocked? Whose hand was on top? Is it possible Greg was holding his hand over hers to calm her down because he was delivering bad news about her foster extension? Did Mr. Liu hear any romantic or intimate language between the two of them? Any words of endearment? Actually, Liu’s testimony is that he was under the impression that they were fighting, wasn’t it? Was he waiting on other people? How much attention was he paying to Greg and Anlya? So his entire conclusion that they were romantically involved is based on his observation that their hands were touching?”

“You’re a little scary, Dad.”

Hardy grinned. “I like to think so. But I’m also well rested and logical, half of which at the moment you are, too.”

“Okay, then what about the kiss?”

“What about it? Did Mr. Liu see them share more than one kiss? Who kissed whom? Was Greg surprised? Was Liu paying attention at the exact moment of the kiss? Was it on the lips? If it wasn’t, if it was on Greg’s cheek, has Mr. Liu ever had someone—a child or a parent or an acquaintance, for example—with whom he was not romantically involved kiss him on the cheek? What was the difference between the kiss that he saw and the one Greg received? How could he tell, therefore, that this was a romantic kiss? Might it, for example, have been a quick thank-you kiss because Greg told her something that relieved her or made her happy? You’ve been known to give me a buss on the cheek to thank me for something, or even if you’re just glad to see me. Are you and I therefore romantically involved?”

“What if
the kiss was on the lips, though? Isn’t it the rule in court never to ask a question for which you don’t know the answer?”

“Yes it is. And luckily, in this specific case, we do know the answer.”

“We do? What is it?”

“You’ve seen it. It’s in your file.”

“No way. I’ve read that whole file through a million times. Where is it?”

“Liu’s statement, just after he tells about seeing them kiss, and Yamashiro follows up and asks what kind of kiss it was, and Liu says something like ‘She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.’ Braden, wisely, left that out in his direct. But it makes a huge difference. In fact, it makes all the difference. And if he says something different than he told the inspectors, it’s even better. If he decides now that Greg leaned over and kissed her, or that the kiss was on the lips, confront him with what he told the police. The jury will decide he either doesn’t remember what happened or never really saw it in the first place, which is good for you. Because if they don’t believe he has the story about the kiss right, how can they believe him about the argument?”

Rebecca brought both of her hands up and pushed on her forehead. She looked across at her father. “I’m never going to be good at this, am I?”

“Of course you will. You’re a whiz kid. This is your first murder trial, and my letting you deal with the burden of a murder trial within two years of finishing law school is probably criminally negligent on my part. But this case really chose you, and I know you can do it. You’ll get it all, you’ll see. Meantime, you’ve got to learn to walk that thin line between getting enough rest to stay sharp and beating yourself up every waking minute by constantly reevaluating everything and not sleeping so that you can’t focus on anything. When do you hear, by the way, from Wyatt Hunt?”

“He’s going to check in at six-thirty.”

Hardy glanced at his watch. “So. Half an hour. Clear your desk. Take his call. Get something to eat and go home and hit the sack. And then tomorrow, start off by cross-examining the living shit out of Fred Liu. Politely and respectfully, because he’s honest and the jury likes him. But kick his ass. Does that sound like a good time or what?”

G
LITSKY AND
T
REYA
, Wes Farrell, and his wife, Sam, had four adjoining seats in the club level on the first-base side of AT&T Park. The Giants had begun the year by running away with the National League West, but after a slew of injuries, the season had degenerated into a nail-biting funk. Still, any time the Dodgers were in town, the vibe was intense and interest was high. Tonight the temperature at game time had been 61 degrees, and now, in the bottom of the fifth inning, a bank of fog was starting to swirl in from left field and it was getting decidedly chilly. The four of them put on the coats they’d brought just in case.

The Giants were ahead 4 to 2, but regardless of the eventual outcome of the game, Farrell and Sam, both of whom loved Buster Posey—Sam had given him the poster that hung in his office—would go home happy, since the catcher had homered in his first two at-bats, accounting for all of the home team’s runs.

With the cold, the women had gone inside together for hot chocolate. The game was plodding along, and Glitsky cleared his throat. “Would it ruin your night if I brought up work?” he asked.

“Nothing’s going to ruin my night,” Farrell said. “I’m thinking Buster might hit four. He’s got two more shots, at least. If you give me odds, I’d bet you on it.”

“What kind of odds?”

Farrell pondered for a second or two. “Say a hundred to one?”

Glitsky threw Farrell a sideways glance. “Please. I wouldn’t give a hundred to one that the world isn’t going to end in the next ten minutes.”

“You are such a cheery guy.”

“I know. I work on it.”

“Okay, thirty to one. Ten bucks.”

“So I win, I get
ten. You win, you get three hundred. How is this a good deal for me?”

“He likely won’t do it, that’s how. Those odds are probably way in your favor.”

“Why don’t you give me odds that he will?”

“C’mon, Abe. Because the overwhelming odds are that he won’t.” Posey was coming to the plate. “Twenty bucks,” Farrell said. “Ten to one. I’m essentially giving you twenty bucks for nothing.”

Glitsky pulled his leather flight jacket closed. “I appreciate it. If you want, you can give me the twenty without a bet. I’d take that.”

“Look at this weather blowing in from left. He’d have to hit it into that. Are you kidding me?” Farrell gave him a nudge. “Okay, five to one. Twenty bucks. You can’t
not
take that bet.”