The Fall (12 page)

“Well.” Rebecca sipped at her beer. “If only you hadn’t left out some of the details in what you told Waverly last night, that might be the working theory of the case.”

“But now it’s not?”

“I’d be lying if I said I thought it was.”

R
EBECCA
H
ARDY STOOD
over the sink in her Laguna Street apartment and tipped up the orange juice, drinking it straight from the mouth of the carton.

Delicious.

She’d just finished her run, nearly four miles, along the track by the bay and out to the end of Crissy Field, almost all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. A solid workout and another reason to love the weekend.

It wasn’t by any stretch a warm day, and though the bright orange shorts and green nylon T-shirt she wore hadn’t given her much thermal relief, the running had kept her cozy enough. Dying of thirst but cozy. She lifted the carton again.

Her roommate, Allie Jensen, appeared in the room’s doorway. She was two years older than Rebecca, three inches taller, and thirty pounds heavier; they’d been roommates their 3L year and graduated from Hastings College of the Law at the same time. “My mom would kill me if she ever caught me drinking right out of the carton.”

“My mom hates it, too, but she can’t kill me because my dad does it all the time, and then she’d have to kill him, too. Anyway.” Rebecca raised the carton again and let it pour.

“Good run?”

“Excellent.” Rebecca looked over and picked up on something. “Is everything okay?”

Allie was still in her pajamas. She stood with one foot on top of the other one, leaning against the door jamb. “Not great.”

Rebecca put down the OJ. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Letting out a breath, Allie said, “You want to sit down?”

“It’s sit-down bad?”

Allie shrugged and turned to take a chair at the table in what they called their breakfast nook, though it was more like a walk-in closet.

Rebecca followed and sat. Somewhat surprised to see that her roommate had tears piling up in her eyes, she reached over and patted her knee. “What?”

Allie couldn’t answer right away. She looked up, stared and then blinked at the ceiling. Wiping away the streak of a tear that had fallen onto her cheek, she took a breath and essayed a weak smile. “I think I’m going to have to give up.”

“What do you mean?” Although Rebecca thought she might know.

“I got my last two rejections from this round yesterday.”

Rebecca sighed in sympathy. “I’m so sorry. And I know that’s hard, but it’s just another round.”

“It’s, like, the tenth, Beck. Somewhere in there. I don’t think I’m hirable. Nobody wants a law student who can’t pass the bar. Twice.”

“You’ll get it this time. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, but in the meantime . . . I talked to my mom last night and told her. And she was real nice about it, but . . . The bottom line is they said they can’t help do the rent anymore. I’m welcome to come home and live with them until I get something, but they’ve given me a ride as long as they can, and it has to stop. I don’t blame them. I’d feel the same way. I mean, how long do you carry somebody who can’t make it on her own?”

The question didn’t call for an answer. Instead, Rebecca asked her, “You’d consider going back to Carbondale?”

Allie was shaking her head miserably. “I don’t know what choice I have.”

“You’ve always got choices. For starters, you could go for a non-law job.”

“After all my parents spent on law school? That doesn’t seem right.”

“At least it would pay the rent, Al.”

“If I could even get a job that paid enough for that.”

“There’s got to be something that could pay you more. Maybe my dad could bring you on part-time. I could ask him.”

“Then that would be him giving me charity instead of my parents. I don’t want any more charity. I want to work.”

Rebecca chortled. “Oh, he’ll make you work, believe me. And when you pass the bar, you’ll have the inside track on getting hired full-time.”

“If I pass the bar.”

“You will. I know you will.” Rebecca reached out and put her hand over Allie’s. “I really don’t want you to move out, Al. Just selfishly. We’re great roommates, aren’t we? Can you at least give it another month or two? I could lend you—”

“No. I don’t want that.”

“Why not? You can pay me back when you start getting paid. No interest.”

Allie sighed. “You’d really do that?”

“Come on. What are friends for? Give it two more months, and if nothing’s happening still, then okay, nobody can say you didn’t try. Meanwhile, I’ll talk to my dad and see what he can do, or one of his friends. Something will come up. We’ll make it happen.”

Allie sniffed. “You’re the best.”

“Okay, I think we’ll all agree to that.” Rebecca got to her feet. “Hug?”

Allie stood up and the two women embraced.

“Better?” Rebecca asked when they’d separated.

“Much. Thank you.”

Rebecca gave her a slight nod. “As my dad says, ‘I live to serve.’ ”

“Do you think he’d really take me on?”

“I don’t know, but it’s worth asking. I’m going over to see them for lunch today. If you want to get dressed in the next half hour, you could come with me, and we could call it an interview and ask him flat out.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Why not?”

“It just never occurred to me that . . . Oh!”

“What?”

“I forgot. I mean, I just remembered. You got a phone call on the landline when you were out running. Your uncle, he said. Abe?”

“Uncle Abe called here? Did he say what he wanted?”

“Just that he needed to talk to you as soon as you got back. I’m sorry I forgot to tell you till now.”

Biting back her frustration at the already lost time, Rebecca managed to conjure up a smile. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll give him a call. Mean
while, you go get some clothes on, and I’ll take a shower, and we’ll be ready to go.”

“Got it.” Allie disappeared down the hallway.

Rebecca followed her out the kitchen door but turned the other way, jogging to her own room, where she picked up the cell phone she’d left charging on her desk.

He picked up on the second ring. “Glitsky.”

“Uncle Abe? Hi. It’s The Beck. What’s up? Is everybody okay?”

“Sure. Everybody’s fine. Actually, the reason I’m calling? I’m afraid it’s business.”

“Business?” she asked, as if it were a foreign concept. “Okay.”

“I understand that you’re representing Gregory Treadway. The Anlya Paulson homicide.”

Rebecca felt her head go light. This was her father’s best friend in the world, her wonderful uncle Abe, who’d bounced her on his knee when she was a baby, whose children she’d babysat. On the other hand, this was the daunting and powerful Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, former head of Homicide and now an investigator with the district attorney’s office. If this call was business, as he’d just admitted, he was calling her in the latter capacity, and even the mere possibility of that scared the living shit out of her. “Yes, I . . . I am,” she stammered. “Is Greg all right?”

“I assume so. I was calling you because we’ve had a development in that case, Beck, and Eric Waverly told me you were the person we should contact if we wanted to talk to him.”

“Okay?” She took a breath, tried to gather her thoughts. “That’s true. It’s what I told him yesterday so they wouldn’t keep trying to hassle him. But why was he telling you about that? Are you back in Homicide?”

“Short-term only. Wes Farrell assigned me to assist on this case. I’m calling you now as a courtesy because we need to take a DNA sample from him. Your client.”

Rebecca found herself shivering from head to foot. She lowered herself into the chair at her desk. “What do you need the DNA for? What’s going on?”

“I really can’t say, Beck. As I did say, this call is more of a courtesy. We would like you to bring your client down and have him provide a sample.”

“So you
found something to compare his DNA with. What kind of sample was it? What have you got?”

“I’ve got a chance for him to prove that the DNA is
not
his. You know, it doesn’t take a minute for a swab. But I figured that if you didn’t want anybody to talk to him without you being present, you wouldn’t be too keen on the idea of the swab without you there, either.”

“Not too, no, I don’t suppose.” She ransacked her brain for the appropriate words. “I’m sorry, Uncle Abe.” Should she be calling him Uncle, or even Abe? “You’re saying . . . what, exactly?”

“I’m saying exactly what I said. We want a DNA sample from your client. We’d like you to bring him down. I thought the easiest way would be if I just asked.”

“I don’t see why not, but I’ve got to ask him first.”

“Sure. If it’s not his DNA, you know this can only help him.”

“I see that,” she said. “I get it. Let me talk to him, and I’ll get back to you. Would that be okay?”

“Perfect. Although sooner would be better.”

“Of course. As soon as I can reach him, I’ll call you back one way or the other.”

“I knew you would. Talk to you soon?”

“I’m sure you will. Bye, Uncle Abe.”

“Bye, Beck. Take care.”

•  •  •

T
HE FOG HAD
burned off and the temperature topped seventy, which in San Francisco happened about twenty times a year. Frannie and Dismas decided to take advantage of the weather by turning their lunch into a picnic on the grounds of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, which was a few hundred very uphill yards from the Hardys’ home on Thirty-Fourth Avenue.

Since both of them had known Allie for the past three years, the job “interview” lasted about five minutes and was over before they even left the house. She should start at Hardy & Associates the following Monday, if she could accept the wage of twenty dollars an hour. She would be doing paralegal work, which the firm billed out at eighty-five dollars per hour. She would be evaluated after three months and either kept on as a full-time employee or let go. If she passed the bar and had been retained to
that point, she would be offered a job as an associate, beginning at ninety thousand dollars a year, with full benefits. If she didn’t pass the bar, she could continue on as a paralegal, as long as her evaluations were positive.

When Allie began to express her gratitude, Hardy cut her off. “I can’t believe that between the two of you, you didn’t come to me sooner.”

“I didn’t think it would be fair,” Allie said, “since you’d already taken Beck. I wouldn’t even let her ask you.”

“But you said you applied to every other firm in the city.”

“Most of them twice,” Allie said.

“Okay, so why would you decide to deprive us of your skills and talents when everybody else in town was getting a fair shot at them?”

“I wasn’t thinking of it that way. Since I didn’t pass the bar—”

Hardy stopped her. “Allie, you graduated from one of the top law schools in the country. You are going to pass the bar, I guarantee it. Do you know my associate Amy Wu? She’s a genius, but the bar freaked her out, and it took her four tries to pass it. Four! And she’s probably done more to keep the firm afloat than any other single employee. So let’s put all this ‘I haven’t passed the bar’ nonsense behind you and start fresh Monday morning. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“All right, then. You’re hired. Let’s go have some lunch.”

The four of them were sitting on a blanket among the cypress trees, eating roasted chicken, sourdough bread, and potato salad, and drinking rosé wine (all except Rebecca, who was hoping to have a more or less imminent interview with her client). From this prime vantage, they could look straight north past the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, across the sailboat-studded bay, and all the way up beyond the green hills of Marin County.

For the third time, Rebecca got up, moved out to the edge of the cliff that fell off precipitously from their picnic spot, and made a phone call. Evidently, yet again, to no avail. When she got back to the blanket, she said, “Why do people have cell phones if they’re not going to turn them on or take them along?”

Frannie said, “If you’d just left one message, I’m sure he’d call you back.”

“But not as fast as if he got three messages.”

Frannie shrugged. “Well, that remains to be seen.”

“What’s so urgent?” Hardy asked.

The Beck sighed. “I don’t know if it really is, although it would be great to get Homicide off Greg’s case, and what I’ve got to talk to him about would move things along in that direction. At least that’s what Uncle Abe seemed to think, and I agree with him.”

Hardy finished his sip of wine and slowly lowered his glass. “You talked to Abe?”

A nod. “He called me this morning, letting me know as a courtesy that they wanted to ask Greg for a DNA sample. We talked an hour ago. Why? Does that bother you?”

“Not really.”

“Not really, but really yes? For the record, it looks like it bothers you.”

“Okay, it’s of some slight concern, yes.”

“How come?”

“First off, it means that Abe is formally part of the investigation.”

“Is that bad?” Beck asked.

“On the face of it, maybe not. After all, bringing him on was at least half my idea.”

This made Frannie sit up. “It was? How did that happen?”

He gave everybody the short version: his lunch with Farrell, the strategic political decision to convince Juhle to bring Abe aboard on the investigation.

“But then why would that be a problem?” Beck asked. “I always thought Uncle Abe was one of the good guys.”

“Of course. Personally, no question, he’s a great guy. But it would be bad luck to confuse that with thinking he’s got some sort of a soft spot for the defense. Even if he was just brought on to balance the ticket, so to speak. If he’s working a homicide, don’t kid yourself, whatever else he’s up to, his main commitment is getting a suspect behind bars. If he’s interested enough in Greg Treadway to call you about him, then I’m willing to bet that your boy is still very much a live suspect. It’s also disconcerting that he called you first and not me.”

“He should call me, shouldn’t he? I’m Greg’s lawyer, not you.”