The Fall (29 page)

Somebody, anyway.

But so what? Everything felt pretty vague. The earlier pain had settled into a numbness that felt like it was spreading. He was probably going to die anyway.

The guy outside was saying that they knew he was hit, and if he just came out to the doorway, they’d get him to a hospital and he’d get a fair trial.

Really? he thought. He doubted it.

He wished he hadn’t done all that coke with Lilianne Downs, because face it, that was why he’d gone so off on Honor. He was a different person on coke. He wished he hadn’t killed Honor. She’d take care of him if she was here. Get him washed up, bandaged. She could talk to the po-po, make everything work out somehow.

A good woman, that’s for sure.

He’d been laying back in a chair and now pushed himself up. They weren’t going to give him no fair trial. He’d shot a cop. He knew what happened to brothers who shot cops. He could throw his gun out the front door and into the street and come out with his hands up—if he could even raise his hands, which he didn’t think he could—and somebody would still find a way to think he was carrying something and blow him away.

Or he could just sit here and bleed out.

He heard something outside. Not the bullhorn. Movement, somebody coming up on the building, maybe into the recess by the front doors. Charging.

He could get himself to his feet.

He could, though it took him three tries.

He looked to the apartment’s door—locked and dead-bolted, but they could shoot that out without a problem.

There wasn’t anything else left to do. Dragging his left foot, he got to the drawn curtains by the front window.

He stood a minute, listening to the guys breaking in the front door, thinking he never should’ve gotten hooked up with Lilianne.

They were at the front door.

He reached up and threw the curtains back.

Raised the gun.

The window exploded in a hail of gunfire.

•  •  •

T
HEY WERE IN
the Solarium, the large circular greenhouse that the firm used as a conference room. The associates and, occasionally, the partners often gathered here at the end of the working day and spent a more or less convivial half hour, sometimes with wine or spirits, sometimes not. By way of celebration after learning that his nonmonetary blackmail of Liam Goodman had apparently worked, and also because his daughter had survived her first full week of her first murder trial, tonight Hardy had broken out a pinot noir called Cherry Pie from Hundred Acre vineyard. He had been thinking lately that this was the finest wine made on the continent, if not in the world.

But Rebecca didn’t care about the wine. She’d just heard about her father and Liam Goodman. “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Is that what really happened? You did that?”

“He really did,” Amy Wu said. “Abe vouched for it, and Abe would never lie.”

Hardy took a sip, sloshed it around to get all the tastes, and swallowed. “Even though Abe thinks I should have tried to shake him down a little harder. I’ve been thinking maybe he was right. It’s possible I could’ve convinced the guy to retire, and wouldn’t that have been beautiful? But I just wanted those people out of the courtroom.”

“Believe me,” Rebecca said, “they left all at once, and it was amazing, like all of a sudden you could breathe in there. Everybody felt it.”

“Well,” Hardy said, “let’s hope at least one juror doesn’t feel so intimidated anymore. Aren’t either of you going to have some of this wine? It’s really pretty adequate.”

Neither of them got to answer, because just at that moment Allie pushed open the Solarium door, surprise and shock writ large on her face. “Sorry to butt in,” she said. “You’ve got to turn on the TV in here. You’re never going to believe what just happened.”

S
ATURDAY MORNING BROKE
fair, and Rebecca, caught up on her sleep, was out of bed by six-thirty and back from her run through Crissy Field an hour later. In the course of that hour, her brain went over every minute of the trial so far and ping-ponged between hope and despair, elation and gloom. She was winning; she was losing. Greg had actually done it; Greg couldn’t have done it. The DNA evidence was tainted; it was solid and incontrovertible.

When she got back to her building, she picked up the morning
Chronicle
on the stoop. Seconds later, when she entered her apartment, she was somewhat surprised to see Allie, not normally an early riser, dressed and apparently ready to go somewhere.

“Where are you off to so early?” Rebecca asked.

Allie, unexpectedly defensive, replied, “It’s not that early.”

“Okay. It’s not that early. So you’re not going out?”

“No, I am. I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

“I won’t be. I promise.”

“I thought I’d go down and visit Greg at the jail.”

To buy herself some time, Rebecca put the newspaper down on the kitchen counter. When she turned back around, she said, “You know when I just said I wouldn’t be mad at you? I lied.”

“I told you.”

“Yes, you did. But why in the world are you going to see Greg?”

“I think after this Royce Utlee thing, he needs a friend.”

“He’s got friends. His friends come to the courtroom and have been known to visit him in jail. He’s got more friends than I do. And what about the Royce Utlee thing?”

“You know, killed before he could confess to killing Anlya. I’ve been
thinking about that all night. If they’d just gotten to talk to him, even for a minute. Utlee, I mean. The trial could be over.”

“If he did confess, and if he actually killed Anlya . . .”

“Come on, Beck, we know he did.”

“We don’t, really. We think we do, but it’s not a hundred percent certain.”

“That’s not what you thought yesterday.”

“Okay. But still, so what? I think your going to see Greg alone is a really bad idea. Weren’t you even going to tell me?”

“I am telling you.”

“Why do I think, though, that if I hadn’t happened to come home right now, you would have been gone?”

“No. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“All right, I believe you. But I think if anybody should be seeing him today, and maybe they should not, it ought to be me. Besides, they won’t let you in the attorneys’ visiting room, Al. There’s no chance you could get any time alone with him. I don’t know what you’d be trying to accomplish.”

“I wouldn’t be seeing him as his lawyer, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not it. I don’t know how you can say that. Besides which, you couldn’t see him as his lawyer, since you’re not.”

“Oh, that’s right. Rub that in.”

“I’m not rubbing anything in, Al. It’s the simple truth. I just don’t know why it’s so important that you go see him.”

“You don’t see that? Really?”

“Really.”

“Beck, it’s because this Utlee thing is so devastating. It could have been—should be—all over, and now where’s Greg going to get another chance like that? He needs to know that somebody’s with him on this.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing for the past six weeks, Allie? I’m with him on this.”

“Okay, I know you are as his attorney. But I mean personally, not as his lawyer. I think he needs somebody to hold his hand.”

Since she’d brought it up, Rebecca considered telling her that she’d noticed maybe a little too much of that between Allie and Greg yesterday
in the courtroom. But that would only escalate things, and she didn’t want that. In her frustration, she let out a heavy sigh. “Look,” she said, “of course you can go and visit him. Of course I believe he’s innocent. He’s in a terrible position. But what are you going to accomplish by going in there and figuratively holding his hand? You’d just be underscoring a setback, and that’s going to make him feel like he’s snakebit, that things aren’t working out the way they should, when really I think the trial’s going pretty well. Omar Abdullah isn’t what I’d call the Platonic ideal of the great witness. And that’s essentially all Braden’s got.

“Even if they think Greg had sex with Anlya,” Rebecca continued, “that doesn’t remotely prove he killed her. Plus, with Liam Goodman’s peanut gallery pulling out . . .” She sighed again. “Given all that, Allie, the best thing for Greg—and I’m talking personally, not as his lawyer—is to try to stay optimistic. There’s no way he can construe a surprise visit from you, talking about Royce Utlee, no less, as anything but a sign that his defense team thinks that we’re screwed. And how’s that going to help him in any way? You tell me.”

Allie pulled around a kitchen chair and sat down on it. “I see what you’re saying.”

Rebecca spoke gently. “It’s really not a good idea, Al. It’s not going to help.”

Allie nodded. “It’s just that he’s such a good guy, Beck. I couldn’t sleep all of last night thinking about it. My heart’s breaking for him.”

“Mine, too. But the best thing we can do is win this trial, not visit him in jail to get him worked up over something we can’t do anything about. Don’t you think?”

Allie drew in a breath and let it out in a sigh. “I guess so. I guess you’re right.”

Rebecca nodded. “I’m pretty sure I am.”

•  •  •

B
Y THE TIME
Rebecca had finished her shower and gotten dressed, Allie had lit out for parts unknown. Rebecca could only persist in the hope that she’d taken their conversation to heart and wasn’t on her way down to Bryant Street to pay a completely inappropriate call on Greg.

She didn’t know what to do about Allie. It was more than bad luck to develop a crush on your client, and there was little doubt that this was what
was happening to her roommate. It made her uneasy, to say the least.

Meanwhile, being her father’s daughter, she possessed an eight-inch but very heavy version of Hardy’s famous black cast-iron frying pan, a gift from Dismas and Frannie when she graduated from college. It permanently resided over the front burner of her stove, and now she turned the heat up high under it, poured in a few drops of olive oil, and opened her refrigerator to scrounge.

Flour tortilla, cheddar cheese, mango chipotle salsa, refried beans, a small leftover bowl of already cooked baby shrimp—done, folded over, and plated in under three minutes, the hot pan wiped dry with a paper towel and shining as though it had never been used.

She grabbed the
Chronicle
and brought her breakfast over to the kitchen table.

The main headline, naturally, concerned the manhunt and death of Royce Utlee at the hands of the SWAT team. Rebecca skimmed over the customary San Francisco sidebar about the overzealous police response and noticed in the lead article that the name Anlya Paulson, and Utlee’s possible connection to her murder and the trial of Greg Treadway, did not appear.

She took another bite of her burrito—the salsa was insanely great—and turned the page, glancing next as she always did at Jeff Elliott’s
CityTalk
column, accompanied atypically by what looked like a mug shot. Noticing right away that her uncle Abe appeared in the lead paragraph, she pulled the paper a bit closer and stopped chewing.

•  •  •

“I
THOUGHT WE
had a rule about calls before nine o’clock on weekends,” Hardy growled.

Rebecca ignored him. “Have you seen the paper?” she asked. “
CityTalk
?”

“I haven’t seen anything today except the inside of my eyelids. What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“Too early. Call back in half an hour, by which time in a fair world I still shouldn’t be up, though I might be.”

“Daddy, don’t hang up.”

“Is
CityTalk
about me or you?”

“
No. But Uncle Abe’s in it.”

He blew into the receiver. “All right,” he said. “What?”

“You’ll see. Read it and call me right back. This could be huge.”

•  •  •

I
N THE WARM
morning, Hardy, Rebecca, and Wyatt Hunt sat in the shade of an umbrella over the picnic table on Hardy’s back deck. Of the five elopers named in the
CityTalk
column, one was identified as Leon Copes. According to the article, he had been found incompetent to stand trial on a murder charge about four years ago and had spent the next three years in Napa State Hospital. Last December, he’d come down to San Francisco for psychiatric reevaluation and once again been found incompetent, so he should have been ordered back to Napa under a Murphy Conservatorship, but due to a clerical error, he was assigned to a halfway house in the city, from which he apparently walked away sometime within the past several months.

No one at the picnic table needed to be reminded that Leon Copes had been the boyfriend of Sharla Paulson and, in all probability, sexually abused Anlya Paulson when she was fourteen. And all of the principals on the deck understood that his by no means definite, but very possible if not likely, presence in San Francisco might prove to be an extremely critical element in the murder trial of Greg Treadway.

“Although, first,” Hardy said, “we’ve got to find him.”

“Which is, let me guess,” Hunt said, “where I come in.”

Rebecca gave him a smile. “We were hoping. Any ideas?”

“I do, actually. Although maybe you want to call your friend Glitsky, and I’ll talk to Devin Juhle and see if between them, plus this column, they can get a fire lit under the regular cops out on the street, watching out for these guys. That’ll spread the net wider than I could. I’m a little shocked Abe didn’t mention this to you earlier, Diz.”

“What, exactly?”

“Leon Copes,” Hunt replied. “How could he not have known about the connection to your client? Especially when he found out he was one of these elopers out on the street?”

“Good questions. But he didn’t do any prep work for the trial. He stopped working the case as soon as they arrested Greg. I’ve got to believe
he never heard Leon’s name in connection with it. If he did, there’s no way he wouldn’t have told me. He certainly wouldn’t have let this
CityTalk
thing run without giving me a pretty serious heads-up. So I’ve got to believe he flat-out didn’t know. And he damn sure doesn’t know where Leon is now.”