The Fall (31 page)

Again silence. Then, “He got spells, that’s all it was.”

“Spells?”

“You know.
Something goes off inside his head. He don’t mean nothing by it. That’s why they wouldn’t give him no trial and just locked him away. He ain’t a bad man.”

“But you and he broke up?”

“That’s because after Anlya . . . He couldn’t be in the house with her no more. It wasn’t really his fault, but she got so she couldn’t be around him.”

“Are you saying it was her fault? What happened between them?”

“He didn’t mean it, is all, like she thought. He woulda stopped. He did stop. But she couldn’t get over the one time, and she needed him to go, so wasn’t really nothin’ I could do. Wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t his. Just happened. So what could I do?”

Hunt had to fight to keep himself from saying, “You could have strangled the son of a bitch for raping your daughter.” Instead, he summoned calm from some deep reserve and said, “We thought he might have come back to where he felt comfortable, to some people he knew.”

“He knows a lot of folks.”

“Do you think you’d be able to put me in contact with some of them?”

“I don’t think he’d like that. But maybe, I see him, I can show him your card.”

“So you are seeing him?”

Hesitating, she finally answered, “I didn’t say that.”

“Do you think you might see him?”

“If he come around . . .”

“So he does come around? You think he might come around?”

“No. I don’t say that. I don’t know where he’s at. He’s moving around, most likely. Here and there.”

Hunt took a beat, gathered himself. “I understand you’re going to the trial of the man charged with killing Anlya.”

“My poor baby.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t know why he did that. That boy. Don’t seem like there was any reason.”

“Do you know if Leon’s following the trial, too?”

“I don’t know why he would.”

“Maybe he saw Anlya after he got out of Napa.”

“No. He would have . . . He wouldn’t have.”

“
Would have what, Sharla? Wouldn’t have what?”

“Talked to her. Went and looked for her.”

“Maybe he had another spell. Do you think that could have happened? Maybe he sought her out and she turned him down.”

“No. She would have told me, told the police.”

“Did she do that last time?”

“She told me.”

“What about the police?”

“No. The po-po don’t help nobody.”

“But didn’t she come over here just a short while before she was killed, to see if she could move back in with you?”

“Okay. She did that.”

“So why didn’t that work out? Your son, Max, said you were all ready for her, all set up, and then something changed and at the last second you couldn’t go through with it.”

“I wished I could have, but . . .”

“But?”

“But it wasn’t going to work, because it just couldn’t.”

“Why not? Was it because what else happened at almost that same time, or a few weeks before, was that Leon got out of custody and showed up here?”

“She wouldn’t live with him again.”

“So he did come back here?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Yes, you did, Hunt thought. Yes, you damn well did.

•  •  •

W
HEN HE LEFT
Sharla, Hunt went back to where he’d parked his Mini Cooper at the corner. Opening the driver’s-side door, he let the heat that had built up dissipate for a few minutes, then gingerly slid into the seat, started the engine, put all the windows down, and turned on the air-conditioning.

He could see the front of the house clearly, which meant that anyone in the house could see him, too. And the Cooper stood out amid the junkers lining the curbs on both sides. Still, he sat watching nothing move on the street for close to fifteen minutes. The place was eerily silent,
still, and deserted. Some instinct prompted him to stay where he was—Leon Copes might be in the house, he realized, hunkered down somewhere in the dim, shadowy interior rooms. Or he might show up at any minute. Hunt had five employees and considered calling in and having them start a rotating 24/7 stakeout here, but in reality, there was no telling when or if Leon would ever show up at Sharla’s again. It would just be an expensive waste of time.

Getting out his cell phone, he punched some numbers. “Well, I talked to her.”

“What did she say?” Rebecca asked.

“She said whatever happened, it wasn’t Leon’s fault. He has spells. He’s not a bad man.”

“Wyatt, he raped her daughter.”

“I know. And if you want my opinion, if he’s the one who killed her, Sharla’s going to say that wasn’t his fault, either.”

“Her own daughter? How could a mother ever forgive that?”

“I know,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine. But the important thing is that he’s almost undoubtedly in town, maybe hanging around with her from time to time, when he’s not having a spell or two.”

“
Almost
undoubtedly?”

Wyatt gave her the gist of the interview. “At the very least,” he concluded, “I got her to admit that he was the reason it didn’t work out with Anlya moving back in. Anlya didn’t want to live in the same house as Leon again.”

“No shit.”

“That’s what I thought. So I guess where I’m at now is: What do you want me to do next, if anything? I’m pretty sure he’s in town. And I did get one idea that isn’t too ridiculous to consider.”

“I’m listening.”

“It occurred to me that maybe they’re talking by phone—Sharla and Leon, I mean—and if we could get her phone records, recent calls, we could find out who she’s talking to. If the cops got the phone company to triangulate some positions, they’d have a chance of pinning the guy down. But that’s all going to take a warrant, which means you’re stuck with the regular cops, who I gather are still not on board.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “There may be a way.”

•  •  •

T
HE WEEKEND MAGISTRATE
judge, Oscar Thomasino, had retired from the active bench a few years before but liked to keep his hand in. When
Glitsky knocked on the door to his chambers in the Hall of Justice at four o’clock, Thomasino looked over the top of his paperback, took his feet off his desk, stood up, and stuck out his hand over his desk. “Abe Glitsky, as I live and breathe,” he said. “Until this morning, I thought I’d heard you’d hung ’em up. Then here you are, all over
CityTalk
, big as life.”

“Not all that big, Your Honor. Wes Farrell felt sorry for me, and because he loves my wife, he threw me a bone. I’ve been doing scut work with some of his investigations, but I suppose it is keeping me off the streets, which is all in all a good thing.”

“I’m sure it is. So what can I do for you?”

“It’s about one of the
CityTalk
guys, the elopers. Leon Copes.”

“You’ve located one of them already? That was fast.”

“We’ve almost located one. At least we’re hoping to. Which is why I’m here.”

“I somehow guessed as much,” Thomasino said. “What have you got?”

Armed with his affidavit outlining the discussion between Wyatt Hunt and Sharla Paulson, including her inadvertent admission that Leon was living with her as of a few months before, Glitsky made his case for a warrant to access the records of her cell phone number—a number her son, Max, had supplied at Hunt’s request.

Judge Thomasino thought this was all reasonable. Leon Copes was clearly a dangerous and unstable man who had run away from the custody of law enforcement. There was currently a warrant out for his arrest. He was still the prime suspect in the outstanding homicide of the man he’d allegedly killed in the bar fight. If Sharla’s telephone records could prove critical in locating this wanted felon, Glitsky should have access to them. Thomasino had no trouble at all signing the warrant and putting those events in motion.

Glitsky never had occasion to mention either Greg Treadway or Anlya Paulson.

T
HE REST OF
the weekend had been agonizing for Rebecca. And just when she’d thought there was a decent chance that she could pull a rabbit out of her hat, salvage the trial, and save her client.

But the plain truth was that though Leon Copes may very well have been somewhere in the city a few months before, and might be there today, there was no way Sharla’s phone records were going to provide that information. Reporting his failure to her, and not going to great pains to hide his own disappointment, Glitsky had opined that Sharla was possibly the least connected telephone user he’d ever run across. It had been over a week since she’d either sent or received a phone call, and the last one was from her son, Max. Her contacts list consisted of a whopping fourteen numbers, none of them identified as Leon or anything like it, and all of them demonstrably someone else’s—Juney’s, Max’s, Anlya’s (still), her mother, her manicurist, three girlfriends, and so on. There were very few received calls, and all of them, as it turned out, were from marketing companies.

A washout.

In the meantime, waiting for Abe or Wyatt to call with something definitive about Leon Copes, Rebecca had spent all day Sunday, despite her father’s assurance that she was wasting her time, preparing another motion to submit to Bakhtiari about Copes’s very existence, his likely presence in the city—including Wyatt Hunt’s statement about his interview with Sharla to buttress her claim—and his possible motive to want Anlya dead. Rebecca didn’t fool herself. She knew without a doubt that her father was right to tell her she was wasting her time and that this, too, would be inadmissible: Bakhtiari wouldn’t allow any part of it without more concrete evidence directly connecting Leon Copes to the homicide.

But she felt that no matter how he ruled on her motion, the judge needed to be aware of this reality. It might affect other rulings. It was, she felt, worth presenting.

Complicating matters at home, she and Allie disagreed about telling Greg about Leon Copes. Rebecca believed that the judge needed to hear about Copes in the context of this trial—hence her motion—but she did not see any advantage in sharing any of that information with her client.

She didn’t expect anyone to find Copes. She didn’t think evidence concerning him would be admitted unless or until he was found. And she knew now, goddammit, that at that point she would have to move for a mistrial, which would irrevocably destroy her relationship with Greg. She didn’t want to cross that bridge until she came to it.

As long as Leon remained off the radar, the fact that he may have been around when Anlya was thinking about moving in with Sharla was provocative but not admissible. The judge wouldn’t let it in. And it didn’t involve Leon, directly or not, in Anlya’s death. All this new lead would accomplish was to get Rebecca kicked off the case. In the end, Rebecca had told Allie she needed her to promise that she wouldn’t bring it up with Greg. And though her roommate had dutifully, finally, made that promise, the tension in the apartment was thick.

Now Rebecca sat in the courtroom at the defense table with Allie and Greg on Monday morning, waiting for court to be called into session, assailed by her doubts. And obviously not hiding them too well, since Greg leaned in to her and whispered, “Are you okay?”

She shrugged. “Just ready to get started. I’m fine.”

She spent the next forty minutes listening to Deion Johnson give his testimony about his walk up from Chinatown with his wife, Mercedes, on the night of the murder. Rebecca had read his original statement to the police, of course, and she knew that he was on the witness stand for one reason—to say that he’d heard a man and a woman arguing up the street where it crossed over the tunnel below, and then seen a man running down the street afterward. Since this was all he had to offer, she found it somewhat difficult to keep a concentrated and interested look on her face as Braden patiently and, with an almost breathless urgency, minute after minute, led him through his paces. In the end, she settled on admiring Braden’s
technique in creating a sense of import and drama when there was precious little.

When at last—at last—he gave her the witness, she rose swiftly and said, “Thank you,” so heartily that it sent a little titter through the gallery and brought a smile to a juror or two. After an initial stab of embarrassment, she allowed a small, self-effacing smile. If her behavior elicited any kind of sympathetic response from the jury, she’d take it. Somehow, she realized, the tension in her had dissipated. She nodded at the witness and got a relaxed nod in return.

“Mr. Johnson,” she began. “You’ve estimated that you were about fifty yards from where Bush crosses over the Stockton tunnel when you first heard raised voices coming from that direction, is that right?”

“Give or take. Yes.”

“And you were downhill from there?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear any specific words that you could identify?”

“No. As I said, it was more like the sound of a struggle.”

“So, not an argument, really, as it’s been called here? Not a back-and-forth, like a heated conversation?”

He considered for a longish moment. “Not like a conversation. No.”

“So what was it like?”

“Struggling, kind of. Grunting, like.”

“So a physical fight more than a verbal argument, would you say?”

“Yes.”

“And how long did this go on from the time you started hearing it?”

“Not long. Ten or fifteen seconds. Until the scream.”

“A series of grunts? Sounds of exertion?”

“Yes.”

“But no man’s voice? And no specific words?”

Mr. Johnson allowed himself a note of impatience. “It sounded like a man and a woman, fighting.”

Rebecca knew that because Mr. Johnson had shown some uncalled-for impatience, the jury would allow her a snarky question or two. “And how do you distinguish the sounds of a man and woman fighting, as opposed to two men fighting or two women fighting, when you don’t hear any voices?”

Mr. Johnson didn’t immediately reply.

“Would
you like to change your previous statement? Wouldn’t it be more fair to say that you heard two people struggling?”

The witness agreed that this could be so.