The Fall (2 page)

“Hey, Treya,” he said to the district attorney’s administrative assistant. “This is Devin. Does his lordship have a minute this morning?”

“Maybe one. I’m expecting him momentarily, and his first meeting’s at ten-thirty, so if you hustle on down, you might get lucky.”

“I’m on my way.”

W
ES
F
ARRELL WAS
closing in on four years as district attorney. During that time, he’d come to understand that the duties and responsibilities of the job were serious, and his day-to-day demeanor reflected the change in his worldview. When he’d run for the office, he’d worn his hair over his ears and taken pride in his informality—many days he wouldn’t wear a coat or tie. He almost always sported a T-shirt with some wise-ass message, such as
How the heck did I get so sexy?
or
Yeah, you need gum.
He’d reveled in unveiling a new one to colleagues (and reporters) nearly every day.

Though rumor had it that the T-shirts remained in his arsenal, his public act had taken a strong turn toward the grown up. Now, with his Armani suits, Italian shoes, muted silk ties, and conservative coif, he cut an imposing, no-nonsense figure. Further burnishing the non-Bohemian image, he’d gotten married to Samantha Duncan, his longtime live-in girlfriend. He didn’t like to admit it, but he’d come to believe that all this shallow, superficial, external stuff mattered, at least to enough people that bowing to the conventions was worth it if he wanted to get reelected to his fascinating and challenging job.

But all the externals in the world couldn’t change the essential character of the man. When Treya waved Devin Juhle into Farrell’s office this morning, the lieutenant was struck—as he almost always was—by the similarities between Farrell’s office and the playrooms in his children’s preschools. Maybe, he thought, Farrell was really making the not so subtle statement that most of the people he entertained here were children.

There was no desk, for example. Farrell eschewed the hierarchy of the desk. He preferred low, comfortable chairs and couches, random seating arrangements (if any), and a wide assortment of games and sports paraphernalia—chess and checkerboards, a Nerf basketball setup, several
baseball bats, some footballs, a dartboard. Buster Posey’s jersey adorned the right-hand wall. Recently, Farrell had installed a Ping-Pong table to take the place of one of the library tables.

Juhle couldn’t hold back a smile. “I’ve got to get some of this stuff for my office.”

His suit coat draped next to him, Farrell sat perched on the remaining library table, a Nerf basketball in his hands. “Beware of possessions,” he said, “lest they come to possess you.”

Juhle kept his smile on. “Thanks,” he said, “I’ll try to keep that in mind. But I’m thinking a dartboard, for example, might liven up some of the dull hours.”

“Except if you’re not careful, it’ll eat up your whole day. My favorite”—he held it up—“is the classic Nerf ball. One or two shots, bam, the tension’s gone. Even if you miss. Plus, if you miss with the Nerf, and you will, you don’t have to deal with all those little holes in the wall. About which, trust me, Maintenance will give you hell.” Farrell boosted himself down to the floor, set, and pumped a shot at the basket he’d set up on the bookshelf, missing by a foot. Shrugging, he came out with his own “what can you do” smile and extended his hand, which Juhle took. “But I’m thinking that’s not why you came to see me today. What’s up?”

“Did you hear about the logjam in the tunnel last night?”

“I did. Somebody jumped, was that it?”

“Not exactly. We’ve got some witnesses now, and the consensus is the girl—a black girl—got pushed or thrown over during a fight. So it’s probably a homicide, likely a murder.”

Farrell’s eyebrows went up. “Ah, another opportunity for you guys to drag your feet on your investigation and otherwise deny justice to the African-American community.”

“Pretty much, yeah. Just before you guys get another chance to blow the trial and fail to convict. To avoid all that, I thought you’d want to know about the bare facts tout suite.”

“Well, I appreciate that. But you say it was a fight?”

“Three witnesses say they heard a man and a woman fighting.”

Farrell frowned. “So probably manslaughter, not murder.”

“I don’t know about that. I just bring ’em in. You get to charge ’em.”

“Thanks for reminding me. I’m just saying it would be super-helpful
if we could get to murder,” said Farrell with unmistakable irony. “That would prove our commitment, wouldn’t it? Going large on the charge. ‘Large on the charge’—that should be our motto on this.”

Juhle said, “I’d settle for being able to charge somebody with something, and not have to write this off as an accident.”

“Anything resembling a suspect?”

“No. We’ve just now identified her by her prints. Her assailant was male, but that doesn’t narrow things down a lot, does it?”

“Slightly less than half of humanity. It’s something.” Farrell smiled again and let out a breath. “Well,” he said, “forewarned is forearmed.” He scrunched up his face. “Is that how that saying goes?”

“Something like that, I think. But I know what you mean. Anyway, I’ve got a good team on it—Waverly and Yamashiro—and they’re aware of the urgency, if you want to call it that.”

Farrell took a beat. “You don’t think JaMorris might be a little better?”

Juhle frowned at the suggestion. JaMorris Monroe was an excellent Homicide inspector but no better than the team already working the case; the difference was that JaMorris was black. “As you know, Wes,” Juhle said, “inspectors get assigned randomly. Eric and Kenny were on call and drew this one, so it’s theirs.”

“Okay,” Farrell said, holding up his hands. “Just sayin’. It was a thought.”

“I know, and not bad from one perspective, but this whole Liam Goodman crusade lately is bogus, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to play that game.”

“You might get hammered for it if you don’t.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“For that matter, I’ll back you up. But it would be nice for both of us if we get ourselves a suspect identified in the next week or so.”

“Right. Yeah. Of course. But it ought to be the guy who actually did it, don’t you think?”

Farrell nodded. “In a perfect world, that would be preferable, I agree.”

A
LAWYER NAMED
Dismas Hardy slipped into the corner window booth at Boulevard, an upscale restaurant in the Audiffred Building at the corner of Mission and Embarcadero. It was a cool and sunny morning in the first week of May, and he’d walked briskly all the way down from his office on Sutter Street, ten minutes early for his lunch appointment. He settled into the comfortable leather seat and ordered a Hendrick’s martini straight up.

Hardy normally didn’t drink hard liquor at lunch, although he often had wine, but today was a bit of a special occasion—lunch with one of his former law partners—and he didn’t think it would do him any harm. He had to be a little careful with alcohol because he was moonlighting a couple of nights a week at the Little Shamrock, the bar he co-owned out on Lincoln Way. If he had gin at lunch, and a couple of glasses of wine, and then went to the Shamrock and had a pop or two . . . well, it added up.

Back when he was just out of college, Hardy had joined the Marines. He’d gotten out of Vietnam alive, then become a cop in San Francisco while attending law school. After passing the bar, he’d worked for a year as an assistant district attorney. Then came what he called the lost years, spent in a semi-alcoholic haze while bartending at that same Little Shamrock after his first child had died in a crib accident and then—in the wake of that—after his first marriage had broken up. Ages twenty-nine to thirty-seven, gone.

He didn’t want to go back there.

But today that didn’t seem remotely likely.

Life had changed for Hardy since then in a way that made Wes Farrell’s transformation seem comparatively trivial. Hardy had remarried successfully, now going on twenty-six years, to Frannie, whose child, Rebecca—“The Beck”—was Hardy’s
adopted daughter. She was also the newest legal associate at his firm.

After The Beck’s birth, he’d left bartending behind and gone back to work as a full-time lawyer, this time on the defense side. Frannie and he had a son together, Vincent, who was twenty-three years old and doing something at Facebook that Hardy didn’t understand but that paid handsomely.

Hardy had won a lot of cases over the years, some of them nationally prominent. He had helped form a major city law firm—Freeman Farrell Hardy & Roake—and become its managing partner. In the past six years, the firm had shrunk from its all-time high of twenty-two lawyers and changed its name—it was now Hardy & Associates—but they were back up to an even dozen attorneys, and the work seemed to be flowing in.

So the martini wasn’t a threat to him or his future. Not today. He took his first sip and almost laughed out loud, it was so outrageously delicious. Roses and cucumbers as botanicals. Who woulda thunk?

He raised his hand in a subdued greeting to one of his business clients across the restaurant by the entrance, then a minute later to one of the city’s superior court judges, out with her husband. For a cultured and sophisticated city, San Francisco remained in many ways a small town, one of the things Hardy loved about it. He could not imagine living anywhere else.

He sipped again, closing his eyes to savor the drink, and when he opened them, Wes Farrell was making his way through the press of citizens, shaking hands here and there, heading toward Hardy, greeting him with a “Yo.”

“Yo, yourself. I would have ordered you a drink if I thought you were going to be this close to on time.”

Farrell checked his watch. “Am I not two minutes early?”

“My bad.”

“It certainly is. But luckily, here’s Steven, just in time to slake my thirst and save you from my wrath.”

The waiter took Farrell’s cocktail order, the tasty yet unfortunately named Negroni, and Hardy said, “If I were a public figure such as yourself, I wouldn’t order that drink on general principle. Somebody misinterprets or hears it wrong, and five minutes later, everybody thinks you’re a racist.”

“If that happens, I’ll just tell ’em I’m not, which, up until this year, my
record clearly supports. Meanwhile, I get the drink I feel like drinking. Life’s complicated enough. If they gave it another name, that’s how I’d order it, but I think for now we’re stuck with the one it’s got.”

“Maybe we could start a campaign.”

“You go ahead. One campaign is plenty for me. Farrell for DA.” Steven arrived and set Farrell’s glass down before him. “Ah, just in time to drink to my reelection.” The men raised then clinked their glasses—“Four more years!”—and sipped.

“So you’re really going ahead?” Hardy asked.

“I never thought I wouldn’t, to tell you the truth. The longer I’m in it, the more obvious it is that this is the job I was born to do. I’m just surprised it took me so long to realize it. Although some days, speaking of the job and racism . . .” Wes launched into a quick recital of the events of the previous night, concluding with Devin Juhle’s entirely orthodox decision to leave the murder investigation in the hands of the non-black officers who had caught the case.

“You really think it would make any difference?” Hardy asked.

“You mean in the case itself? Hell, no. But in the perception that we’re not putting the most motivated people on it . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know. As if Waverly and Yamashiro aren’t motivated. Christ! It’s their job. These are skilled cops, seasoned inspectors, Diz. It’s taken them years to make Homicide. Of course they’re motivated. You don’t think the PD has black inspectors investigating crimes with black victims?”

“I bet it does.”

“Damn straight.” Farrell took a breath, leaned back, and turned sideways in the banquette, his arm out along the top of it. “What do they want us to do? Juhle needs a solid case before he can arrest anybody, and we need even more before we bring anybody to trial. Imagine the outcry if Homicide just beat the bushes and started bringing in suspects on little or no evidence. The damn thing is, we get accused of that, too. I mean, how do either of us win here? You tell me.”

Hardy cracked a small grin. “I thought you loved the job.”

Farrell nodded in sheepish acknowledgment. “I do. I know. I must be an adrenaline junkie, to add to the long list of my failings. But this is just a false crisis. Liam Goodman wants to be mayor. Here’s this rich white
dude holding himself up as the go-to empathy guy for poor black victims. My heart goes out to the victims, too. Their families, friends, everybody. Really.”

“I believe you.”

“As if I want murderers to get away with it. As if I don’t care about black victims.”

“As if,” Hardy said.

Farrell reached for his drink. “Go ahead,” he said, “patronize me.”

Hardy kept his grin on. “Just ’cause it’s so much fun. But I do have a suggestion.”

“Shoot.”

“How about you put Abe on this thing?” Abe Glitsky was Hardy’s best friend in the world and, after a long career in the SFPD, now an inspector in the DA’s Investigations Unit. Glitsky was half-black. “Make him a plenipotentiary grand poobah or something to oversee these investigations, or at least this one.”

Farrell considered the suggestion. “Actually, Diz, that’s not a completely goofy idea.” It was not unheard of for the DA to assign one of his own investigators to assist the regular police department. “I get Juhle on board, then we both have ownership of the investigation. At least there’d be no finger-pointing between us about who wasn’t doing the job right. It’s an important homicide, we put on a united front. Who’s going to criticize that?”

“Goodman will find a way,” Hardy said, “but at least you’ll be out in front of it.”

“I’ll talk to Devin, get him on board. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stab him in the back.”

“Spoken like a man with actual ethics.”

“Now, now,” Farrell said, “let’s not get all carried away.”

W
AVERLY AND
Y
AMASHIRO
wasted some time trying to track down where Anlya lived. The address on her driver’s license—apartment 5 in a building south of Geary Street on Divisadero—was no longer current. The resident in 3, an elderly woman who’d resided in the building for fifteen years, told them that Anlya and her brother had moved out a few years before. Anlya’s parents had fought a lot and moved somewhere shortly after, she couldn’t say where.