Bear Is Broken (34 page)
Authors: Lachlan Smith
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Legal Thriller, #Adult Fiction
“You must have become suspicious and hired a private investigator to
follow Gerald and take those pictures,” I said. “You wanted the children
to know the truth about their father. Keith must have been, what? Sixteen?
Maybe you drove him by the house, maybe he went there on his
own or followed his father. My guess is that he wanted sex and thought
he could get it from the mistress. Isn’t sex what all sixteen-year-old boys
want? When she wouldn’t give it up, he raped and killed her.”
“Shut your filthy mouth,” Keith said.
“I was ten years old. I was the one who found her. Afterward you
didn’t know more than you had to know. You bought off the private
investigator to keep his mouth shut, and you sent Keith away to school.
That should have been the end of it, but Keith flunked out. He came
home and started getting into trouble. And when my brother became
a lawyer, Keith looked him up. Became friends with him. Started whispering
in his ear. Eventually he pulled out the investigator’s pictures.”
“Teddy must have realized Gerald couldn’t have been the killer. He
figured out that Keith killed my mother. Caroline. And Keith shot him
for it. Martha drove the car. Keith shot her, too, once he figured out
I was on his trail.”
Greta’s hand was at her throat. Something I’d said seemed to
have stricken her, maybe that I’d been the one to find Caroline.
I was right, I saw. She’d covered for Keith all these years. She and
her husband.
“For God’s sake, Greta, don’t talk to him,” Gerald said.
Greta glanced at her husband, then bowed her head.
Gerald and Greta Locke denied everything, and Christine refused to
speak with the police. After the video emerged, she hired a hotshot
lawyer, an ex-prosecutor who arranged for her to appear at the police
station to answer a series of questions. There was a story in the papers,
but the scandal died away. A month later the charges against Santorez
were dismissed and new charges were filed against Keith in my brother’s
shooting. They had the physical evidence from the gun, and eyewitness
testimony from the people in the restaurant, and the previous incident
with Marovich hanging over Keith’s head. He pleaded guilty to attempted
murder and was sentenced to fifteen years.
He was never charged in Martha’s death. I never learned how he
got Teddy’s gun.
I sent my father a one-line note asking to be put on his list of approved
visitors at San Quentin. He wrote back eagerly, asking me to
take over his case, finish the habeas petition. I didn’t respond. It was
too much to ask, too soon. I wasn’t ready to visit him, knowing he
would repeat the request, but I kept the file in my drawer.
When it was time for Teddy to come out of the hospital I decided
to hang my shingle in Oakland. It was cheaper to live there than in
the city, and I wanted to be near the rehab center we’d chosen on
Telegraph Avenue just over the Berkeley border.
My brother is dressing for the funeral. Sensibly enough, he begins with the pants.
He holds them up, looks down at himself, then seems to realize he must get
undressed before he can put them on. He lays the pants on the bed, unbuttons
his khaki shorts, and slides them down.
He has forgotten to remove his shoes, however, and the shorts will not come off.
It is hard to believe that a year ago this slow-witted, off-balance, volatile
stranger was one of the most accomplished young criminal defense lawyers in
San Francisco. From the left side, all you can see is that he’s lost a great deal
of weight, more than sixty pounds, not by choice but because he has had to
relearn how to swallow. Only from the right do you notice the craterlike dent
in his brow, the scar left by the entry of the bullet that should have killed him.
He sits on the bed and fights to get the shorts off over the shoes. Despite
the difficulty of this, it doesn’t occur to him to take the shoes off now. As he
struggles against them, his face takes on a stubborn, defensive look, the look
that says that whatever I may think is wrong with him, I am making it all up,
I am the one with the problem.
It’s excruciating to hold my tongue as he makes mistake after mistake,
but if I don’t keep my silence, he will fly into a rage. The lack of dexterity
on his left side is only a small part of the problem. Even the simplest task
has become a labyrinth through which he stumbles with no sense of himself
or of his goal.
“You remember where we’re going today?” I ask to distract him from his
frustration.
He pauses to consider the question, then gives the answer he figures is bound
to be at least partially right: “In the car.” At moments like this you can still
tell that he is a lawyer. He uses his old tone of peremptory command, but his
voice is so slurred that no one who doesn’t know him well can understand him.
“We’re not going to the car, but we’re taking the car to where we’re going.”
I can only push him so far before he tells me to fuck off, get out of his room,
and get out of his life. His temper is a reflex, like the jerk of his leg when his
doctor taps the patella. In two months he will get out of rehab and come to live
with me, for lack of a better option.
He has the shorts off now, though he still wears his shoes. He does not
think of taking off the shoes before putting on the suit pants. But I don’t say
anything. One of the therapists has promised to check up on us. Caroline.
Our mother’s name. Whatever tangle Teddy gets himself into, he will permit
her to help him, but not me, never me; this reflex of his personality and of our
relationship remains.
He stands and holds up the suit pants, trying to figure out which way they
go on. He tries them backward—wrong guess. Not that it matters, since he is
still wearing the shoes. He makes little sideways kicks at the leg holes, the hip
pockets before him. I can see he has no faith in succeeding. He is merely going
through the motions, waiting for someone to show him what he’s doing wrong.
This resignation is new to my brother’s personality, and it chills me. No matter
how hopeless the case, no matter how guilty the client, Teddy always believed
there was a way to win.
A secret part of me still imagines that this brittle shell will crack and my
brother will emerge more or less as he used to be, smiling at the joke he has
played on us all, the left side of his face no longer sagging. “Just a hiccup, Monkey
Boy,” he’ll say, spinning away that awful four-footed cane. “An educational
experience, all in all.” And then he’ll get back to work.
If I let him continue this way he’s going to tear out the inseam. I’m about
to speak up when Caroline slips into the room.
Teddy regards the pants, now crumpled on the floor at his feet. Then his
gaze shifts hopelessly to the rest of the clothes I’ve brought him, and he gives
Caroline a look of abject dependence, so overwhelmed that he can’t find words
to express his confusion. If I don’t get out of here and let her work her magic,
he will explode.
I tell them I’ll wait in the hall.
I hear Tamara, another patient at the rehab center, keen, “No, no.” From where
I stand outside Teddy’s door I can see her family gathered down there in their
church clothes, the adults spilling out the door of her room. They have decided
to keep telling her the truth until the truth sinks in. Her nephews and nieces
stand slumped against the walls on both sides of the hall in stiff shoes and
too-tight pants and dresses.
Some part of Tamara must know by now that her husband is dead. Her
sobbing goes on and on, as if her body understands and remembers what’s still
too slippery for her intellect to grasp.
I think of her buttery brown skin, large almond-shaped eyes, her hair falling
in a velvet sheen down her back. The virus that ravaged her brain did not
touch her beauty. I always make a point of speaking to her when I come to visit
Teddy at the rehab center. No matter how long we’ve been standing together,
no matter how many times we’ve met, it’s always as if I’ve just appeared before
her that minute for the very first time.
Teddy’s door opens, and he comes out leaning on his cane. Behind him
stands Caroline with a taut smile. I haven’t seen him in a suit since the day
he was shot. I’ve had the pants taken in, but the rich wool still hangs on him,
and his shirt collar gapes. She’s knotted his tie in a simple schoolboy. Teddy
always favored the Windsor.
“How do I look?” he asks. “Hra dro I rook,” is what he says.
“Like a retard in a borrowed suit.”
He tilts his head and leers hideously, letting his mouth drool open, holding
the pose long enough for me to see he’s making a joke. He’s in a better mood
now. The suit probably makes him feel like his old self, almost.
Caroline’s smile runs off her face like cold water. That word is as offensive
to me as it is to her, but it’s the word Teddy would have used. The old Teddy.
His look of concentration returns as we walk toward the exit. “What’s going
on back there?”
“They’re explaining to Tamara what happened again. About her husband
being killed.”
“They can explain all day long, and she still won’t know what the fuck
they’re saying.”
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
He blinks. His brain no longer registers abstractions. The literal meaning
is the most you can expect him to get. He waits, then asks, “So where are we
going?” As if he hasn’t asked me ten times.
“Tamara’s husband was killed.” Oakland on track to break the record for
murders this year. “Jeremy.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going to Jeremy’s funeral. Just last week you were BS-ing with him
about the A’s.”
“Yeah. His name’s in my book.” Everyone who talks to Teddy is supposed
to write in his memory book.
“I thought we could get some food beforehand,” I say as we walk outside
into the cool, cloudy winter day.
And a beer for me, I don’t need to add. I’m drinking a lot these days, starting
earlier and earlier. It’s because of Oakland, I tell myself; the city depresses
me. Jeremy and I met as visitors at the rehab center, and when he needed a
lawyer for a marijuana arrest I got the case thrown out. We had a beer later
and talked about Jeremy’s wife and my brother, about how it was going to be
when they were home. Jeremy seemed like a normal, decent guy, not someone
you’d expect to be gunned down on his way to work at the post office. But in
Oakland there doesn’t need to be a reason for murder, apparently. Jeremy is my
third client to turn up shot to death. All of them young black men.
Later at the service Tamara will turn to her mother and ask in a too-loud
whisper, “Whose funeral is this again?” And from the back of the church one
of her teenage cousins, one of those boys about to become a man, will laugh.