The Fall (32 page)

As Rebecca had hoped he might, Mr. Johnson threw a frustrated glance at Braden that brought the prosecutor to his feet with an objection. “Your Honor, irrelevant. Asked and answered,” he said. “Counsel is badgering the witness, trying to have him draw a difference without a distinction.”

But to Rebecca there was a clear difference between an argument and a struggle, and in defending herself against Braden’s objection, much to her delight, she would get to explain that difference to the jury. “Your Honor,” she said, “there is a true and important distinction here. An argument implies conversation, disagreement, interpersonal conflict; a struggle is more impersonal and perhaps transactional—as with a purse snatching and mugging, for example.”

Bakhtiari simply nodded. “Objection overruled. Go ahead, Ms. Hardy.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.” She came back to the witness. “So to rephrase, Mr. Johnson, you say that the sounds of struggle you heard above the tunnel just before the scream were a series of grunts and exertions that sounded like two people having a physical altercation. Is that right?”

“Yes. All right.”

“From what you heard, it was not then a verbal argument as such, was it?”

“No,” he said. “I guess not.”

Rebecca allowed herself the briefest moment of satisfaction, hoping that her body language would convey it to the jury. She felt she had clearly made her point, and it was an important one: According to this witness, Anlya and her assailant had struggled; they had not argued.

“No further questions,” she said.

•  •  •

D
ISMAS
H
ARDY HAD
some business in the Hall of Justice on another matter, and he’d sneaked in to catch some of the action, so he was in the back of the courtroom while his daughter conducted her cross-examination of Mr. Johnson.

In the recess that followed, he stopped first to share a few words with the Treadways, a few rows back as they always were, then came up to the bar rail and tapped Rebecca on the shoulder. “Hey, you.”

She turned around, greeting him. “Did you catch any of that?” she asked.

“I did. Nicely done,” Hardy said. “It sounds to me like she got mugged.”

“Good. I hope the jury picked that up, too.”

Hardy glanced over at the panel. “A couple of them must have. Anlya sure as shit didn’t walk up there with her boyfriend and then get in a fight with him there. It was all quicker than that.”

“I’m glad you saw what I was getting at.”

“I did. I also liked how you got it in, answering Braden’s objection. That was slick.”

She smiled. “I wasn’t sure it would work, but I had to try.”

“It flew on gilded wings.”

“Well, thank you. I think the idea might have come from your old playbook. But what are you doing here?”

“Just slumming.” He nodded at Greg and Allie. “No offense and nothing personal. How are you two doing? Holding up?”

“Staying out of trouble,” Greg replied.

“And how about you?” Hardy asked Allie. “You learning anything?”

“Every day,” she said, giving Rebecca a look that he couldn’t interpret, some drama going on between them.

“Are you staying around?” Rebecca asked.

“No. I’ve got to get back to the office. It seems like you’ve got things under control here.”

She gave him a hopeful smile. “Trying.”

“A little more than that, I think.”

•  •  •

E
VER SINCE
W
YATT
Hunt had come by over the weekend, wanting him to share Sharla’s phone number because they needed to find out if she’d been in contact with Leon Copes, Max had been in a low level state of shock.

Leon out?

Not just now. Apparently, he’d been out for several months. And if Hunt was to be believed, he had come back to hook up with Sharla and,
even more astoundingly after all he had done to harm them, she had taken him back in.

Lying in bed last night, after he’d tried to talk it through with Auntie Juney, with limited success, Max had wracked his brain for hours, trying to work out some of the permutations, to fit them somewhere in his rapidly changing view of what the world really was.

According to Hunt, the reason Anlya hadn’t moved in with Sharla wasn’t because she’d gotten back into her dependence on drugs and alcohol but because his mother expected his sister to live in the same house with the man who’d raped her.

All right, there was that for starters.

Almost more upsetting than Sharla’s skewed and unreasonable expectations was the fact that Anlya hadn’t told him about any of this. Anlya, his confidante and twin with whom he shared all of his secrets, for some reason didn’t want him to know that Leon Copes had somehow escaped captivity and was now living not just in San Francisco but, at least part of the time, in their mother’s house.

How could she not have felt he needed to know this? How close had their relationship been after all?

This led, in the black of the night, back to Greg Treadway, his other confidant, his other betrayer, whom Max had truly and stupidly believed innocent in Anlya’s murder until they announced the DNA evidence. Which, face it, even if it had nothing to do directly with the murder, eliminated any doubt that they’d been fucking, even as that lying bastard had mouthed all of his platitudes about his responsibilities, his commitment to his near-sacred role as a CASA, his respect for Anlya, her age, and her troubled history. Of course he would never take advantage of her. Of course he would never use his position and experience to unduly influence her.

And yet that was precisely what he’d done.

If Greg had lied time and again about his sexual relationship with Anlya, why wouldn’t he lie about killing her? Or about anything else, including the connection he and Max had built up? Max now knew that had been a fabrication as well.

He had turned in bed, thrown off the covers, pulled them back over his head, moaned so loudly that Juney had come in. Was he all right? Could she get him anything? She had sat down and rubbed his head and told him
that everything was going to be all right. Really, this was just a rough patch, and he’d been through many before, some worse than this. He had to be strong and carry on.

Try as he might, he could no longer believe her.

Now, in the morning sunshine, he still didn’t believe her. He couldn’t will the belief back. What little faith he had left was gone.

Not just his own mother and Anlya and Greg had betrayed him—the whole world had betrayed him.

Because he was weak, because he was stupid, he’d somehow convinced himself that the world was a place of decent people. But that was wrong. The world, he now knew, was a place of darkness and deception. Ever since he’d moved in with Auntie Juney, he’d brainwashed himself with the notion that he could better himself, better his life, turn everything around from his troubled childhood. Now he knew beyond all doubt that this was a cruel, false dream.

He wasn’t ever going to fall for it again.

H
ARDY CAME OUT
of the courtroom and, way down to his right in the hallway, saw a grim-faced Abe Glitsky, in a sport coat and tie, involved in an animated conversation with another man who, as Hardy walked toward them, became recognizable as Phil Braden. As soon as he made that identification, Hardy stopped, keeping his distance.

Whatever they were talking about, it wasn’t pretty. Braden’s voice occasionally got loud enough to echo in the hall. Twice the prosecuting attorney turned all the way around in an obvious show of pique, throwing his arms in the air. Glitsky kept his stone face on and did not raise his voice, but there was no question he was taking Braden and his problem very seriously indeed.

Finally, Braden turned a last time, threw a parting volley over his shoulder, and disappeared behind the door that Hardy knew led to the floor’s internal hallway, used by the bailiffs, the shackled prisoners, and the judges on the way to their chambers.

Hardy watched as Glitsky’s shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell. Shaking his head in apparent misery, Abe stared at the door through which Braden had just passed. He sucked in a huge lungful of air, blew it out through his mouth, started walking up the hall with a heavy tread, and saw Hardy.

Who fell in next to him. “Well, that seemed to go pretty well,” he said with a stab at cheeriness.

Which Glitsky ignored. “You saw?”

“Did you guys just break up or what?”

“I can’t blame him. He’s in real trouble now.”

“Why’s that?”

Glitsky stopped walking and Hardy drew up next to him. “Because his main eyewitness—you may remember Omar Abdullah—has apparently decided not
to honor his subpoena to appear in court today.”

“When was he due up?”

“Before my turn, and if you’re wondering, I was supposed to be going on directly after him, which is why I’m out here waiting in the hall for my summons when I could be doing something worthwhile with my life. When I went to the hotel we’ve been keeping him at, there was no sign of him. The guy has been a complete pain, trying to use more than his meal allowance, having his street friends stay with him in the room, and raising hell. We must have had four noise complaints since we put him up in the place. But we talked the manager into not throwing him out. I even talked to him last night, and I show up this morning to pick him up, and he’s gonzo. He’s got to be around here someplace close, and I know we’ll find him. How far could he go? But Braden has completely nutted out.”

“So does he blame you for this? Braden?”

“Essentially, although he doesn’t want me to remind him that he went along with it. I mean, we put the good Mr. Abdullah up somewhere safe, where we could keep our hands on him. We gave him a meal allowance. And for a month I’ve been listening to him complain about not having pay-per-view movies in his room. He’s our witness. We treat him better than right. So when we told him today looked like it would be the day, I thought he was all set. I don’t see what else we could have done, short of putting a guard on him twenty-four/seven.”

Hardy clucked in sympathy. “The best-laid plans,” he said.

Glitsky pointed at him, shutting him up. “Don’t start,” he said. “Don’t even start.”

“What are you going to do? What’s Braden going to do?”

“You’re the lawyer. You tell me. He told me to stick around, so I’m guessing he’s still planning to put me on the stand while half the city police force is out looking for Omar.”

“That would be kind of weird, wouldn’t it? Having you up as a witness to talk about Omar’s ID on Treadway before Omar gets on the stand and points him out? As your personal attorney, I can tell you that your early-ID testimony isn’t even admissible until the jury hears the guy himself ID Greg in court.”

Glitsky shrugged. “That’s Braden’s call. He thinks he can get the judge to take me out of order.”

“What else are you going to testify about?”

“Essentially, just my hooking up with Omar, or Malibu. How he came to my attention and so on.”

“What’s Malibu?”

“The name Omar goes by on the street. And it’s the car, by the way, not the town.”

“Major distinction. You wouldn’t want to mix them up.”

“Basically, I’m going to be the warm-up act, then Abdullah comes on and puts Treadway in the tunnel right after the scream. Positive ID. He’s the whole case.”

Hardy checked over the hallway, as always teeming with life up here near the front of the building, where the stairs and elevators deposited their loads of humanity—jurors, witnesses, attorneys, cops, spectators, groupies, media types—all eventually heading for the courtrooms. “He might still make it.”

“He might, but the smart money says he won’t.”

“Says the professional handicapper.”

At that moment, a bailiff approached, hesitated for a second, then came up to them. “Excuse me,” he said. “Lieutenant Glitsky? You’re up in Department Twenty-four.”

“Thank you,” Glitsky said. Then, to Hardy, “Wish me luck.”

•  •  •

B
RADEN HAD OBVIOUSLY
made the decision to soldier on as though everything were all right and the game plan for the trial was intact—a miracle might happen and Abdullah would appear out in the hallway, waiting to be called in to give his testimony—so before he sent for Glitsky, he had called another of the first-night witnesses, Zhang Jun, the cashier at the Sutter-Stockton garage. Jun’s testimony was straightforward, simple, and from the prosecution’s standpoint, critical—it established the exact time of Anlya’s death, a fact that would play into Glitsky’s testimony on the accuracy of the surveillance video’s timeline. Jun testified that he worked in the tiny cashier’s booth inside the garage, and his cigarette breaks started exactly on the hour every two hours—he literally counted down the seconds, so he was one hundred percent certain. He’d gotten up and left his
workstation at precisely the click of eleven. He’d not yet lit his cigarette, so it was less than one minute later when the scream had punctured the still of the night.

Rebecca didn’t have any problem with this testimony. It was prosecutorial housekeeping, touching the technical bases, and she let the witness pass without any cross.

As it happened, Bakhtiari did allow Glitsky to go out of order. With Glitsky in the witness box, Braden started off following Abe’s efforts to locate a critical eyewitness with an entertaining and even dramatic showing of the surveillance video from the tunnel, the highlights of which were what Glitsky knew to be the back of Omar Abdullah’s head and the appearance of a white male—his hands were visible and clearly belonged to a Caucasian—wearing a coat and tie within, arguably, minutes if not seconds of the scream and Anlya’s death. Braden stopped the playback at the moment of clearest resolution of the man’s head—maddeningly for the jury; several of them groaned in frustration—though he had been looking down at the steps the whole time and moving rather quickly, flitting in and out of the picture in under two seconds from the first glance until he was around the corner and going down the second half of the stairway into the tunnel.

All anyone could make out due to the light and the camera angle was a head of dark hair, a blur of movement. The face was absolutely unidentifiable.