Bear Is Broken (24 page)

“What kind of life is he going to have?”

“You can see for yourself. I’ve arranged for both you and Ms. Napolitano
to tour the rehabilitation facility.” Gottlieb’s face showed the
barest tick of impatience.

“I’m not interested in the rehabilitation facility.”

“That’s your choice.” He stood. “To answer your question, yes, at
the point where I deem that it has become medically futile for this
stasis to go on, I will inform you.” His voice was suddenly very, very
weary. He seemed on the verge of giving me a bit of fatherly advice,
then apparently thought better of it, pressed my arm, and walked out.

I went back to Teddy’s room and stood looking out the window
toward the sliver of the bay that was visible. My father must be on his
way to the city by now, I realized. It made me slightly queasy to think
of him on this side of the water, still in custody but perhaps one step
closer to freedom. Soon he’d be on the witness stand, taking an oath
he probably didn’t mean to keep. What would I do if he lied his way
to freedom before the grand jury? Would I have to see him?

I sat at Teddy’s bedside deep in my own thoughts. At some point
he must have stopped respecting the oath my father was about to
take. Defending the guilty must have drained away his respect for the
truth. Gerald Locke’s words returned to me, and I wondered what
I might do to keep my father in prison—to catch the person who
shot my brother.

On my way out an hour later I ran into Car, who was walking in with
Jeanie. Seeing me, Car grabbed my arm and spun me around, throwing
me off balance. “Ho, Monkey Boy.”

I kept going, but he was there beside me, matching my stride.
I glanced back. Jeanie was standing uncertainly near the elevators.

“Teddy’s upstairs,” I said to Car. “He was asking about you.”

“Yeah?” Car’s face was perfectly blank.

“You and Keith Locke. I caught both names.”

“You talking to Keith? Say hi to him for me.”

“Why, you looking for him?”

We were outside on the broad front entrance plaza of the hospital.

“See, I told your brother at the beginning, this kid’s no good, he has
no common sense, let him wet his dick with some other lawyer.” Car
gave me a push. “I hear you’ve been saying I murdered people.”
“That girl, Martha.” My voice came out hoarse. “She worked at
the Green Light.”

“Not for me, she didn’t. Nobody worked for nobody at that place,
but definitely not for me.”

“Maybe not anymore. She was shot yesterday with Teddy’s gun. The
one you locked in the safe. The police may not believe me, but as far
as I’m concerned, you were the only one who could have pulled the
trigger.”

Car looked bored. “Sorry to hear it. I suppose I shot Teddy, too. If
I did that, you’d have a bullet between the eyes. But hey, you’re still
breathing. Know why? Because it’s all a joke. You’re a joke.”

“I know what you and Keith were into. With Santorez’s money, no
less. What’s going to happen when someone tells Santorez the whole
story?”

“I told you, I didn’t have nothing to do with the Green Light or
with Keith, either. See, Monkey Boy, your trouble is you don’t know
smoke from fire. What happened to Teddy didn’t have nothing to do
with Keith or anyone else. It was Santorez all the way. Teddy tried to
hang on to some money he didn’t earn. He probably figured Santorez
was in the pen, what could he do about it? Ricky reasoned with him
for a while, then he saw he wasn’t going to get his money back, so he
had Teddy shot, sent a big loud message.”

“You were Keith’s partner, and Keith was going to talk,” I countered.
“Teddy was just about to set the deal up for him. Then Teddy got shot,
Ricky got blamed, Keith got the message to keep his mouth shut and
do whatever prison time comes his way, and you walked off into the
sunset. You and Jeanie.”

I saw the look in his eyes and was suddenly aware of my surroundings,
no one around, no pedestrians passing, not even a cat to track
through my blood if Car spilled it. His narrow Slavic face grew pale,
bringing out the redness of his lips. His muscles knit together beneath
his hoodie. Then his eyes narrowed in a catlike smile, and without any
visible relaxation the tension was gone. “You ought to forget the law.
There’s no money in it. Screenplays, that’s where the money is. An
imagination like yours, you could make bank. Safer too, way things
are going.”

“I’m trying to find my brother’s shooter.”

“Yeah, but you’re trying too hard.” He took a piece of paper from
his pocket and handed it to me. “Be seeing you, Monkey Boy. Don’t
forget to say hi to Keith.”

I didn’t drop my eyes to see what he’d given me until after he’d
walked back toward the hospital. Then I unfolded the sheet of paper
and saw that it was a printout showing a series of photographs, grainy
from the quality of the printer, a night scene with the camera looking
in the open front passenger door of a car. Car had a fancy digital
camera, I knew. It took me a moment to recognize Christine Locke
as the woman in the foreground; then a shock ran through me. It was
Teddy’s Rabbit in the photo, and the man kissing Christine was me.
Clearly a threat or a warning—if there was even a difference with
a man like Car. Or perhaps he hadn’t been following me. Perhaps he
had a reason for following her. That could only mean that he knew
something about Christine’s relationship with Teddy.

Something was printed on the back of the page, just a line at the
top, easy to miss if you were in a hurry—an empty page with a footer,
“page 4 of 4,” like the extra page you get when you print something.
It hadn’t been printed at the same time as the pictures. Instead,
someone had fed the sheet into the printer upside down so that the
blank backside could be used. Jeanie’s habit of reusing paper used
to drive Teddy nuts. More than once, I knew, he’d filed a brief with
some e-mail or map fragment appearing between the pages.

I’d meant to drive back to Teddy’s office, but instead I merged onto
the interstate toward the Bay Bridge, following a wild hunch that I
would find something more at Jeanie’s to help me catch the trail Car
seemed to think he was following.

Jeanie kept a key under a flowerpot at her townhouse. Twenty-six
minutes later I used it to let myself in.

The blanket I’d wrapped myself in two nights ago still lay in a heap at
the foot of the couch. Two glasses stood on the counter, and there was
a faint reek of smoke. Half a dozen filterless cigarettes were stubbed out
on a plate on the counter. I stood looking down at the saliva-stained,
half-folded butts. Jeanie didn’t smoke. Car did.

I took a tour of the place and saw more cigarettes stubbed out in a
cup on the bedside table. It shouldn’t have bothered me that Car had
been there, but it did.

I started opening drawers in her home office—an alcove off the
kitchen beneath the stairs—but they were crammed to overflowing
with old checkbooks and bills. I was stymied, but then I remembered
how paranoid Jeanie used to be about hiding her drugs—not paranoid
enough, as it turned out, because eventually I’d found all her hiding
places. She prerolled all her joints, and I would take them apart and
reroll them smaller, skimming off her stash.

Her most effective hiding place was so obvious it was brilliant. In
the apartment where we had lived during my teens, where I knew
every nook and cranny, every loose floorboard and grate, there hadn’t
been many places a person could conceal the tin in which Jeanie kept
the drugs she and Teddy shared, marijuana and hash and occasionally
something stronger. It stared me in the face every day, but I didn’t have
eyes to see it. I never took out the garbage, pig that I was, so I’d never
thought to wonder whether there might be anything underneath the
bag.

The wastebasket underneath the desk was nearly empty and too
light to contain anything substantial. I tried the kitchen garbage: nothing
under the bag, but in groping the outside of it I felt something
hard edged and heavy inside. I got a pair of tongs from the drawer
and fished around among the coffee grounds and melon rinds until I
came up with a small digital video camera and disks sealed in a double
layer of freezer bags.

Twenty thousand dollars in my hands, if Christine Locke was as
good as her word. Not that I planned to sell them. Tucking the bag
with the camera and disks under my arm, I murmured a silent apology
to Jeanie and put to rights the few items I’d disturbed.

I was back on the freeway to San Francisco ten minutes later when
my phone rang in my pocket.

“Verdict,” Judge Iris’s clerk said simply, and I could hear by her voice
which way the clerk thought it would go. “They’re bringing your client
up. Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”

It was going to be more like thirty, but I told her I’d make it as
soon as I could.

I drove fast, but not too fast, trying to think what I’d say to Ellis if
the verdict was guilty. By the toll plaza of the Bay Bridge the words
still hadn’t come. Sorry just wasn’t enough when the man you were
apologizing to would likely be sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Maybe he was guilty, and maybe he wasn’t, but that wasn’t the point.
Sorry was going to be the best I could do.

I parked in the underground lot, then walked up the stairs to Civic
Center Plaza and across the street to the courthouse. The clerk was
stamping documents and threading them into a gigantic civil docket.
Seeing me come in, the deputy yawned and put aside his Contra Costa
Times. It was all the same to them, whatever happened to Ellis. It was
just another day, another case, another set of administrative tasks. “You
want me to bring him out right now or wait for the DA?” the deputy
asked.

“Now, please.”

I ought to take Car’s advice, I thought as I waited, and forget about a
career in the law. Imagine a lifetime of this feeling, I thought, swallowing
back the acid that kept rising to my throat, hunching my shoulders
at the tickle of sweat in the small of my back.

The door at the back of the courtroom swung open, and the deputy
followed Ellis, who looked both sleepy and hyperalert, his gaze darting
around the courtroom but seeming to pass right through me, as if
I were no longer entirely present for him. Indeed, there was nothing
left for me to do but plead with Judge Iris for a lenient sentence if the
verdict went against us.

“What do you think my chances are?” he asked, moistening his lips.

I shrugged. “Just have to wait and see.”

“Pretty good, I’m thinking. They don’t reach a verdict Friday. That
means the ones on my side are standing firm. They go home over the
weekend, spend a few days thinking it over, verdict right away Monday
morning. You don’t hold out over the weekend to give in Monday
morning, do you? No way. They came back today holding firm. The
others, the guilty votes, they’re the ones who caved. It’s better to vote
not guilty than to risk convicting an innocent man. That’s what they
said to each other, I’ll bet. Your words. I’m optimistic.”

His voice trailed away. He wet his lips again. He didn’t look optimistic.
He looked like he had a lifetime of dread and fear clamped
onto the back of his neck.

“Whatever the verdict is, don’t react.” It was what Teddy always told
his clients. “If it’s bad news, be stoic.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“The judge is the one who sentences you if you’re guilty. She’s going
to be watching you when the verdict is read. If you get angry, if you
act sorry for yourself, she’s going to notice, and she’ll remember.” I
wondered if I was going to be able to live up to my own advice.

Melanie came in tight faced and nervous. Her skirt was so tight,
a seam creaked when she sat down at the DA’s table. She opened a
binder and began to scrawl notes on a pad.

She must be in trial on another case already, and I felt a stab of envy,
knowing that the only antidote to losing a case is to lose yourself in
the next one. I envied the lawyer who was going up against her in
whatever trial she was prosecuting next. A few hard-fought cases against
an opponent like her would make me into a lawyer.

Judge Iris walked brusquely into the courtroom. “Sit down, sit
down,” she said. “Anyone have a record to make before we get started?”
She was looking at me. After a moment I realized that Melanie
was, too.

Judge Iris went on more gently: “If you want to ask for a mistrial,
now is your last chance.”

The judge went on looking at me steadily, and I realized that she’d
grant the mistrial if I asked for it. I couldn’t look at Ellis, but I was
very aware of him breathing beside me with deep, almost unbearably
slow breaths. I noticed a Bible on the table. His hands rested close to
it, just his fingers touching the red-stained edges of the pages, the soft
leather binding.

“We’ll hear the verdict, Your Honor,” I said.

“Let’s bring in the jury, then.” She nodded to the bailiff. He went
out and a moment later came back in with his face transformed, as
if he’d been dipped in a vat of solemnity. He held open the door for
the jurors as they filed past him, one fumbling with his jacket, another
scratching her neck, the lot of them generally looking about as uncomfortable
as it is possible for a group of people to be who are not
facing prison time themselves.

I could make no sense of where their eyes went and where they
didn’t. Each of the jurors avoided looking at Ellis: a bad sign. None
looked at Melanie, either. Two of them met my gaze with flashes of curiosity
before their eyes flitted away, as if repelled by the naked entreaty
they found there. There was something splendid in their isolation. For
these few minutes they knew what no one else knew.

The judge waited until the jurors had filed into the box and taken
their seats; then she addressed them. In her voice I heard a respectful
withdrawal, as if even she partook of the awe that gripped me. “Ladies
and Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”