Bear Is Broken (18 page)

I went into the bedroom. The gun was gone from the beside table.
No matter. It wasn’t like I wanted it.

I called the number Mrs. Locke had given me. She picked right up.

“What do you want, Mr. Maxwell?”

“Could you reach your daughter tonight?”

“I could, but I wouldn’t, not without a compelling reason.”

“I need to ask her some questions, and they’re the kind that have
to be answered tonight, in person. I’m leaving the East Bay now for
Stanford. I’ll be there in an hour. I’d appreciate it if you’d call her and
let her know that I’m coming. I’m happy to meet her wherever is
convenient. Maybe the student union?”

“No, Mr. Maxwell, I won’t have you disturbing my daughter. Why,
you won’t even be getting to Stanford until after ten.”

“Either you can phone or I’ll track her down without your help.
I have proof she’s been in contact with your son.” It was an educated
guess. “Just ask her where she was at seven on Wednesday evening and
whether she remembers having a shocking effect on anyone. Use those
words exactly. Then call me back and tell me where I should meet her.”

“I hate this. I hate it,” she said with such vehemence that for a moment
I thought she was about to throw down the phone. “I hate being
put in the position of antagonist to my daughter.”

She hung up. As I was winding down Redwood Road toward the
freeway twenty minutes later, she called me back. Her voice was husky,
with a slur that was either alcohol or depression or both. She was in a
quiet place now. “I hope you’re happy. You’ve managed to provoke a
full-blown fight. She’s too stubborn to back down, and I don’t know
how to appease her.”

I tried to apologize, but she spoke over me. “She’ll meet you at the
student union.”

“Thanks. I’ll try to smooth things over.”

“Don’t bother. It will just make things worse.” She hesitated. “Mr.
Maxwell, this is very awkward, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to
ask you where my daughter was Wednesday evening and how you
know about it.”

“Don’t worry about it, at least not for now. Give me a chance to
talk to her. Let me see what I can do. It may be that we can simply
put what happened behind us.” I didn’t mind leaving Greta Locke
sweating a little.

“For what it’s worth, she told me she hasn’t been in contact with
Keith.” She hung up.

I hadn’t lied to Greta Locke when I told her that I’d always wanted
to go to Stanford. With its palm trees, mission architecture, and open
vistas, the place had stood in my mind for paradise on earth since I
was fourteen, when Jeanie took Teddy and me there to show us the
campus. Jeanie wore her class of ’84 T-shirt, and walking beside her my
brother seemed to puff out his chest and square his shoulders. I knew
exactly what he was thinking: that people would notice her shirt and
assume he was a Stanford graduate, too.

The student union was really a bar, with abysmal techno music blasting
over the speakers. There weren’t any tables open, but Christine had
grabbed a booth by the rear exit. It was the girl who’d Tasered me, all
right. The stunning effect was achieved this time without mechanical
aids: She wore a black, low-cut sleeveless blouse and a pair of hiphugging
designer jeans with tan sandals. She had a pitcher of stout
before her and was in casual conversation with a tall young man with
shoulder-length red hair, a goatee, and the back and shoulders of an
ironworker. He refilled her glass as I walked up, and I noticed the
horny yellow calluses on his palms.

“Just keeping the chair warm for you,” he said, getting up.

Christine quickly drained what he’d poured for her. “So you’re
Teddy’s brother.” She emptied the rest of the pitcher into her glass. “I
can’t say I notice any family resemblance.”

“Look closer. Think of Teddy, subtract about eighty pounds, add
grooming.”

She looked, then shrugged. “Now that you’re here, let’s leave. Too
many people. Unless you want to keep getting interrupted.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of moving to a less public place.

“Don’t worry,” she said, draining her glass again and starting for the
door. “I don’t bite hard.”

“You may not know this, but people die from Taser shocks. A person
could have a preexisting heart condition, you give him a shock, and
down he goes. Then you end up facing a manslaughter rap.”

“Let’s walk.” She paused in the door, lifting her face to the evening
air. “I feel like walking.”

I didn’t, but I seemed not to be the one in charge. This puzzled me.

“So now my mother has stooped to hiring lawyers to harass me on
Friday nights.”

“I’m not working for her, but I’ll go to her again if I need to. I want
to ask you some questions. You give me the answers I need, and she’ll
never have to know where you were Wednesday evening.”

“Answers for whom? For Greta?”

“For Teddy.” I bit the words off.

“One way or another, you’re working for Greta. You people always
are. Whether you come clean to me or not, whether you know it or
not, you’re just another in a long line of handlers and spies my parents
have hired to keep tabs on me all these years. First the nannies, then
the private tutors, then the personal trainers—the list goes on. In high
school I even had a personal assistant, my own Chloe, and I wasn’t
allowed to fire her. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s how to deal
with people like you, so take my advice and don’t bully me.”

“How do you deal with them? With a Taser?”

“Believe me, it would have saved a lot of grief.”

We crossed the street and came to a path under the trees. A circle
of drummers was playing inept but heartfelt rhythms down the path;
otherwise we were alone.

Christine took a seat on a bench carved from a log. “Are you tracking
down all the girls your brother slept with?”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I couldn’t imagine Teddy knowing
Christine and not trying to sleep with her. “Just the ones that were in
his room on Wednesday. You and Martha.”

“Martha’s becoming a bit of a problem, actually. I didn’t expect
to see her there any more than I expected to see you. That’s one of
the reasons I didn’t hang around to chat. She’s a prostitute. She was
smuggled into this country five years ago and she’s been working ever
since. At one time I thought I could help her, but it turned out she
didn’t want to be helped. She went right back into it. She was arrested
again tonight, by coincidence. She called me about an hour ago from
jail. You could post her bail, get her story yourself.”

“You were looking for something in Teddy’s room. I want to know
what.”

“A camera. Pictures. Videos. Okay? Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“You mean of you and Teddy? So what was Martha doing there?”

“Waiting for me. She knew about the camera. She must have figured
I’d show up to look for it. Only it wasn’t there.”

I turned toward her and grabbed her wrist. “Look, stop jerking me
around.”

She twisted her wrist with deliberate ease from my grasp. “What is
it exactly that you want?”

“I want to know who shot Teddy, and I want to know why.” If it
was actually what I wanted most at this moment I wasn’t being very
convincing about it. I was finding it difficult to think about anything
but the cleft of her collarbone.

“And you think I know something about that?”

“I think Keith knows something. And that you know where to find
him. I need to talk to him. That’s all. I need his permission to go to the
police with some information that might lead them to the shooter.”
“So this is about my brother?”

“Why shouldn’t it be about your brother?”

“On a Friday night you come down here looking for Keith, but
instead of asking me straight out whether I know where he is you
launch into all of this blackmail stuff about what happened Wednesday
night.” She looked forlorn, sitting there staring off into the darkness
while the drum cadence rose to a crescendo. She stood and held out
her hand. “Okay. If that’s the way you want to play it, I can play it that
way.” She pulled me to my feet. “Let’s go.”

“What’s this?” I said, stammering, pretending not to understand.

I followed her. Her dorm stood beneath the rim of the lake just on
the other side of a parking lot. As we came up to it, I started to hear
what sounded like thousands of bullfrogs calling. The lot was filled
with Subarus and Volkswagons and even a few BMWs and Mercedes.

College students drove these cars.

Christine had a single on the second floor. She didn’t look in any
of the open doors we passed or say hello to any of the kids in the hall,
but I saw plenty of eyes flash in her direction, eyes that snapped away
as they met my gaze. Conversations stalled in our wake. At twenty-six,
I was a little too old to pass for a student.

Her small room was neat, with a Persian rug on the floor and a
thick duvet on the bed. I shut the door behind us. Halfway across the
room Christine turned, lifted off her blouse, and threw it on the bed.
She unhooked her bra and let it fall. It was her beauty that made
me look away, embarrassed at the squalor of being here with Teddy’s
lover, this college girl.

“Stop,” I told her, coming forward and grabbing her wrists as she
began to unzip her pants. My fingers grazed the taut, bare, thrillingly
warm flesh of her waist. A charge went through me. “I’m not doing
this,” I said.

She tried to kiss me, her eyes boring into my face, but I turned away
and dropped into her desk chair and sat there without looking at her,
afraid that even one more glance would break me.

Behind me, after a pause, I heard a drawer slide open. When I glanced
in her direction again she was wearing a sweatshirt and a frown. She
had out her laptop and hunkered over it on her bed.

“That might be the first time that’s happened to me,” she said after
several minutes. “I’ve been with a lot of men. A lot of boys, actually.
Prep school, college, it adds up. Most go right ahead, even if they know
it’s a stupid idea. Even if they work for my mother and know they’re
putting the knife to their throat. You being in here alone with me, you
might as well have done it.”

“So this is what you meant by knowing how to deal with people
like me?”

“One blackmailer deserves another.”

“I’m not working for your mother, and I didn’t come here to blackmail
you. I came because Teddy basically raised me, and they shot him
right in front of my eyes. Didn’t you care about him? Don’t you even
have some kind of reaction to what happened?”

She didn’t say anything. I went on in a pinched voice: “I caught him
when he fell out of his chair. I had his blood all over me, his brains.
I can smell it, that rusty smell. And the police don’t seem to be that
interested in finding the person who did it. They just want to pin it
on one of his old clients, on this guy who killed two cops and got off,
basically, because Teddy was his lawyer.”

“Santorez.”

“That’s right,” I said, surprised she knew the name. “They’re bringing
an informant before the grand jury on Monday. I don’t know what
he’s going to say, but the police seem to think it’s enough.” What could
our father know, I wondered? Was he lying?

She was still staring at her computer. “So you think Santorez isn’t
behind it. What’s your theory?”

Had Teddy not meant any more to her than this, that she could sit
staring at the screen while we chatted about him getting shot in the
head? I went on. “I think Teddy may have been shot to send a message
to your brother not to talk about a homicide. This professor, Marovich,
who was supposed to have gotten strangled in the Green Light, that sex
club where your brother worked. Maybe the two of you crossed paths.”

“Maybe I had a class with Professor Marovich last year.”

“Maybe? Like you don’t fucking remember?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Your father is pretty sure Keith was the murderer, that when the
police arrested him they got the right man.”

She closed the laptop and turned to face me. “Did he tell you that?”

“That’s what he told me when I saw him this afternoon. He said
there was a boy at Choate, your brother’s roommate, who was strangled
to death after being sexually tortured. The same way Marovich got it.”

All the defiance washed from her face. She looked far more naked
than she had been a minute ago. Then her lips parted, and hatred came
into her eyes. “Teddy and my brother were friends,” she finally said.

“Keith’s ten years older than I am, so I don’t have firsthand details, but I
guess Teddy was just getting established as a lawyer, and he represented
Keith on a sex-in-public charge and got him off, and after that he sort
of looked out for him. I hate to deflate my father’s sick fantasies, but
Keith never killed anybody.”

I was surprised to hear that Keith and Teddy were friends, but
I was always surprised by my brother’s tendency to form personal
relationships with his clients. “Whatever Keith has done or hasn’t
done is none of my business. I just want the right man arrested for
trying to shoot my brother. I think Keith knows who did this, and
I think I can persuade him that it’s in his interest to put the heat on
someone else.”

“Even if Keith is a sadistic killer?” She clearly had nothing but
contempt for her father.

I shrugged. “I just want the people who shot my brother. That’s all
I have time to worry about.”

“Ruthless.” She gazed at me steadily. “What if I asked you to help
me find something I’m missing? To look around for it in Teddy’s things.
At his office. His house. Would you have time for that?”

I didn’t immediately respond. “You mean this camera with the
videos of you and Teddy.”

She nodded with a little wince, as if that wasn’t exactly it, and then
went on: “Teddy isn’t on them, actually.”

“Who’s on them, if Teddy isn’t?”