The Fall (38 page)

“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.

D
ISMAS
H
ARDY 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.”

He heard her sigh into the phone. “I don’t know what to think.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“Sure.”

“I think he’s a classic heavyweight narcissist. He was involved in all this do-gooder activity because it fit his image of what a special guy he is, but woe betide anybody who gets in his way. That’s what I think. You notice he kept saying that he wasn’t the kind of person who would do this or do that. Just like OJ wasn’t the kind of person who would have killed his wife—I mean, he was a football player, he was a TV star, and he was charming to boot. To the point where I think at the end he might have believed it himself that he didn’t kill Nicole. Hell, he might still believe it. It was only one minute out of his whole life. One little slip. How could the whole world hold that against him forever?”

“And you think that’s Greg?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t my client, and I never got to know him that well. But if I’m trying to imagine the scenario where he’s involved in Anlya’s death—I’m not saying he planned it. It’s possible it even shocked him. They’re having an argument and it gets heated and he gives her a push and they’re at the parapet and she goes over. Holy shit! What happened?”

“ ‘Holy shit! What happened?’ That’s it?”

“Exactly,” Hardy said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“And you’re saying he can live with that?”

“Didn’t seem to be a problem for OJ, did it?”

•  •  •

“T
REVOR
A
MES HERE
.”

“Mr. Ames, this is Greg Treadway. Jeff Elliott gave me your number and said you’d like to speak with me.”

“Yeah, thanks for getting back to me. I read that
CityTalk
column this morning, and though I don’t often find myself agreeing with Elliott and all the liberal madness that makes it into his column every day, he’s a
pretty good writer. Anyway, I thought the story about what’s going on with you was pretty goddamn appalling, if you know what I mean.”

“I appreciate that.”

Ames went on, “I’m having trouble believing the mess this country’s in, where these legal shenanigans keep the truth out of the picture, bunch of lawyers scratching each other’s backs, deciding what’s allowed into a courtroom and what’s got to stay out. When, in your case, correct me if I’m wrong, they had this guy’s girlfriend who knew what really happened, and they flat wouldn’t let it in. It’s the last goddamn words she ever spoke. You think she’s about to die and she knows it and she’s telling a lie?”

“No, sir. I never thought that. She knew it, and I believe what she said is exactly what happened. Royce killed Anlya, and that’s all there was to it.”

“And Royce Utlee. Let me ask you something. That sounds like a black name to me. I’m betting he was black, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“All these people, they were black?”

“Right.”

“And this man Royce, he was a pimp, too?”

“Apparently so.”

Ames’s voice boomed. “Isn’t that just too perfect? They’re trying to protect the reputation of some black pimp lowlife who’s already shot a cop and got himself killed for his troubles. All I can say is it’s an act of God that you managed to get yourself acquitted when the whole might of the government already decided it was taking you down, even if it was going to ignore obvious evidence that you were innocent. And I mean that literally, a goddamn act of God.”

“Well, thank you.”

“It’s a goddamn miracle you got Elliott to write up the story.”

“Yes. He seems like a good guy. And I had a really pretty advocate, which probably didn’t hurt.”

A chuckle. “It never does. So, anyway, why I left my number. You still looking for work?”

Greg forced a small laugh. “Not to sound hungry, but I’m close to desperate. It’s been four months since my last paycheck, and I think my mom and dad are just about tapped out.”

“Standing by you, though.”

“Always.”

“Good
families. Strong families. That’s what makes this country great. The part of it that still is, I mean.”

“I hear you.”

“Point is, I run a little company here in the city, cleverly named Trevor Ames. Financial analysis, logistics consulting, good clean work. Kind of like a smaller version of Deloitte. And maybe we’re number two now, but in spite of all the goddamn regulations we’ve got to deal with at every turn, we got our heads way above water. And we’re always looking for young, smart, hardworking talent. I Googled you and saw you went to both Berkeley and Stanford. Is that true?”

“It is.”

“That’s about as good a pedigree as it gets in this neck of the woods, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve been fortunate, I’ll admit.”

“And modest to boot. How about we set up a meet in the next day or two and you come on downtown, see if we might be a fit, if you’re at all interested in this kind of work.”

“That would be outstanding. It sounds interesting, and I’d love to talk about it. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet, boy. You come aboard, you’ll work your ass off, I promise. But I got a feeling that before too long, I’ll be the one thanking you.”

•  •  •

P
ROBABLY IT WOULD
have been better if Rebecca hadn’t suggested that she and Allie have a glass of wine before they started to make dinner or ordered some food in. After all, both had worked a very long day—it was now close to nine-thirty, and they’d just gotten home after driving in together and being at their desks by eight that morning. So the one glass of chardonnay each had turned to two each, and then the bottle was gone, and they still had no food on the horizon, and they opened the second bottle and had put a good dent in it—already 10:22, by the digital clock on the decorative-only fireplace mantel—when Allie carefully set her glass down on the living room’s coffee table. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you,” she said. “How long have you been feeling that?”