Bear Is Broken (6 page)

From a short hallway outside the elevator I had to pass through
another metal door. The deputy who opened it checked my ID, then
closed the door behind me. I was now in the jail proper. An inmate
mopped the concrete hall. I signed the book, gave the guard Ellis’s name,
and was shown to a tiny, airless interview room down another hall.

Ten minutes later a different deputy brought him out from the
deeper reaches. He walked purposely but without haste, his head down,
like a man crossing an open field, and he didn’t look at me until he
was seated in the flimsy plastic chair that went with the flimsy plastic
table. He was a tall, thick man with a youthful face and a fringe of
gray at his temples. Along with his jail-issue orange jumpsuit, he wore
unlaced Timberland boots and half-rim reading glasses. The room was
so close that I could smell his breath, an acidic smell I recognized from
other meetings in these cubicles, somewhere between acetone and
algae, equal parts bad nutrition, anger, and despair. It was the smell of
a man digesting himself from the inside.

“This is some terrible shit,” he said.

Accepting that as commiseration, I nodded, waiting for him to be
done talking about what had happened, about what was still happening
to my brother and me.

“So this dude just walked in there and popped Teddy while you
two was eating lunch,” he said, shaking his head.

I had not yet relived that moment in memory, and I had no intention
of doing so now. I’d come here to put Ellis Bradley and his troubles
behind me as quickly as possible, but he’d likely been my brother’s
last client. At the moment when that bullet entered Teddy’s brain, Ellis
Bradley’s fate had been more important to him than anything else.

“You don’t look too good,” Ellis told me now. “I’m sure you need
to be getting with your people, so I won’t take up your time. I’ve been
thinking about my situation, as you can imagine. I figure I must qualify
for the public defender since your brother cleaned me out. No way can
I pay another private lawyer to go through this garbage all over again.
The DA will probably offer me some shitty-ass deal, and I’ll probably
end up taking the fall, doing two or three years, losing my kids. That
about sum up the situation from your perspective?”

I nodded. “The judge will probably declare a mistrial tomorrow
morning and dismiss the jury. There’s always the chance the DA will
drop the charges, but in a case like this, where it all comes down
to witness credibility, that’s not likely to happen. Any case with a
domestic violence label, you can pretty much expect the DA to go
for blood. We might be able to argue for reduced bail, given the circumstances,
the delay. But yeah, basically you’re going to be doing
this all over again. It’s too bad. The evidence came in pretty well for
you. And Teddy knows how to close a case like nobody else. Knew.”
I looked down.

Ellis nodded, and I could see that the fight was seeping out of him.
He couldn’t bring himself to eat anything on the mornings when he
had to appear in court. During the trial he’d had a tendency to react
visibly, sometimes audibly, to things that were said about him. Under
stress, he appeared to be precisely the angry, aggressive black man
whose portrait the DA had painted for the jury. No way was he going
to testify, Teddy had decided, because his discomfort would come
across as guilt. Seeing him now, I knew that he’d surrendered, that the
system had broken him.

“You can fight this. The new lawyer will get the transcript of what
happened this time around. He’ll be able to see all the weaknesses in
the DA’s case. The good news is you didn’t testify, so they won’t be
able to use your words against you like your lawyer will use Lorlee’s.”
He shook his head. “I just want to thank you for coming down
here this evening.”

It was time for me to leave, but I didn’t stand. I was remembering
the last thing my brother had said to me, with that half-serious smile
on his face: “I ought to let you close this one.” I wouldn’t have to try
the whole case over again, the way a new lawyer would. It was a closing
argument, a speech of an hour or two pulling together the evidence,
arguing to the jury how the facts supported Ellis’s version of events.

I wouldn’t have to cross-examine witnesses or argue fine points of
law, and we’d keep the same jury and the evidence as it had come in,
more in Ellis’s favor than not. By the end of the week it would all be
over, instead of dragging out for six more months with him sitting
in jail as a prelude to prison. I knew the case forward and back, and I
knew the closing statement Teddy had prepared, though he was also a
compulsive improviser, meaning that the statement he’d written was
almost certainly not the one he would have given. Most of the jurors
had probably made up their minds by now; Teddy always maintained
that most made them up during jury selection, before they’d heard
the facts, yet he fought as if the jurors’ hearts and minds were up for
grabs to the bitter end.

“Or I could do it,” I heard myself say. “I could get up there tomorrow
and give that closing argument, if you don’t mind taking your chances.”

“You?” Ellis was startled. “Don’t you have to be a lawyer?”

“I am a lawyer. I just passed the bar exam.”

Now he looked embarrassed. I meant a real lawyer, is what he wanted
to say. Instead he asked, “How you going to give a closing argument?”

“I know what Teddy was planning to say. So I’ll just get up there
and say it. Simple as that.”

I didn’t blame him for the skepticism that showed on his face. He
kept pressing together his lips in an attempt to hide it, but the look
kept returning.

“We’ll have to persuade the judge that the jury hasn’t been tainted
by what’s happened. No judge likes to burn a jury, not if she can help
it. And you have the right to an attorney of your choice, whether it’s
me or someone else. I’ve been there all along. You just say yes when the
judge asks if you want me as your lawyer, and you let me say whatever
else needs to be said.”

He sat very still, staring distantly. Finally he licked his lips and parted
his hands. He looked like a man who’d just been goaded into a stupid
bet, his life on the table between us. “Monkey Boy to the rescue.”

I nodded, my hand going reflexively to my shoulder with the tattoo.

“Go Monkey Boy,” I said. I reached across the table and shook his hand.

When I got back to the office Tanya was still there, working on her
computer. “They didn’t take us off the calendar tomorrow for Ellis
Bradley, did they?” I asked.

“No. You’re still on at nine AM. Why?”

“I’ll need that list of open cases by the weekend. I’ll be in Teddy’s
office.”

She didn’t speak. She didn’t look up. Probably as far as she was
concerned, hell was freezing over.

Outside the window the orange streetlights were diffused by the
fog. On the sidewalk whores and drunks were filtering southward. I
took off my jacket and tie and sat down at Teddy’s desk with the trial
binders. I had Teddy’s notes, along with ones I’d made during the trial
and during last night’s marathon practice session. I didn’t intend to
sleep until I figured out how to impersonate a trial lawyer.

For a while it seemed that Tanya would try to outwait me. She
worked at her computer in the outer office. On what I don’t know.
Her resume, maybe. At ten she ordered a pizza, but I couldn’t eat,
even though I hadn’t had lunch. It was as if my stomach had been
disconnected. Finally at eleven Tanya shut down her computer and
left without saying good-bye.

Alone, I paced from wall to wall, trying but failing to make Teddy’s
words sound natural on my tongue. Stepping into his place was not
going to be as easy as I’d thought when I made my offer to Ellis. Words
that sounded tough and forceful and utterly convincing when Teddy
spoke them became carping and petulant. Even his opening line fell
flat: “After forty hours of testimony and ten days of trial, we know
only one thing for certain. One of these two women is a liar, guilty
of perjury and seeking to convict an innocent man.”

To the jury, spoken by Teddy, this accusation would come as no
surprise. But while Teddy mercilessly attacked Lorlee in his crossexamination,
I had sat meekly, silently at the defense table making
notes and occasionally leaning over to whisper calming words to Ellis.
The jurors had never heard a word from me. I’d gained no authority
in their eyes; I’d banked no trust. When I stood up in Teddy’s place,
even the jurors who were with us were going to wonder who I was
and why I was there rather than simply listen to what I said. Trying
to parrot Teddy’s personality and tone was the surest way to close
their ears.

It was 2 AM before I finally accepted that I would have to go through
my notes and Teddy’s notes and the evidence and come up with a new
closing. I felt I wouldn’t have the latitude to argue the case as forcefully
as Teddy would have. I had to trust the jurors to have his voice
ringing in their ears.

All the while my eyes kept going to the phone, expecting it to ring
with news from the hospital. I found myself forgetting that Teddy
wasn’t there with me, guiding me through that wilderness of facts and
law. I had only to imagine his reaction to some point I was trying to
make to feel an instant, powerful surge of approval or disapproval, like
a compass needle spinning to North. A miniscule portion of Teddy’s
legal knowledge and wisdom must have lodged like a seed in my brain,
and that seed was now beginning to germinate.

Just before dawn I visited the restroom. Catching a glimpse of myself
in the mirror above the sink, I saw how badly I needed a shower and
a shave. My brown hair was mussed, my eyes were bloodshot, my jaw
gritty with stubble. Over the summer I’d lost weight, my slight frame
dwindling. Too much work, not enough biking. Washing my hands,
I noticed a black gummy residue under my cuticles. I stood rubbing
my hands under the water for a full minute before I realized it was
Teddy’s blood.

I gazed at my reflection, waiting to see if I was going to break down. If
I did, I’d be no use to anyone for a long time afterward, least of all to Ellis.
It didn’t come. After a minute the hot prickling feeling in my nostrils
and eyes went away, and I stopped feeling like I was going to throw
up. I finished washing, paying careful attention to my cuticles and
fingernails, then dried my hands.

I borrowed one of Teddy’s jumbo briefcases and filled it with the
trial binders, my notes for closing, a CEB practice book, and a copy
of the evidence code. It was a cool, clear morning. The night’s fog had
disappeared, and the sky was salmon colored. It was still early enough
that the lighted windows of the buildings showed brighter than the
sky, and the few cars on the street all had their headlights on, their
hoods and windshields beaded with dew.

I went home, took a shower, drank two cups of coffee, and put on
the second shirt Tanya had bought. My roommates were stirring, but
I avoided them. In my room, I called the hospital. Teddy’s condition
was unchanged. I was in the middle of calling a cab when I realized
I couldn’t possibly ride all the way out to Potrero and back. Even if I
had time, I didn’t know what it would do to me to see Teddy on his
hospital bed with his head wrapped in bandages, breathing through a
respirator. With so much on the line for Ellis, I couldn’t risk the chance
that it would be more than I could handle.

For Teddy’s sake I had to put Ellis first, I told myself. I was back at
the office in time to organize my notes and also do some last-minute
research into mistrials due to attorney withdrawal, illness, and death.

I expected Tanya to be in the office when I returned. She usually
showed up every morning around seven, no matter how late she’d
worked the night before. But the office was empty, the vinyl cover
still draped over her computer monitor, the air as stale and worried as
it had been when I’d left an hour before. The files I’d asked for were
rubber-banded together on a corner of her desk, with two lists on
top of them: one of active clients with contact information and/or jail
numbers, the other, longer, a spreadsheet of more than thirty pages,
listing chronologically all the clients Teddy’d ever represented. There
was no explanatory note, nothing to indicate that I was the one who
had asked her to produce these records. But there they were, waiting
for me since she’d left without saying anything.

I faxed the list of current clients to Detective Anderson.
I rode the elevator down at eight o’clock and set out on foot for the
Civic Center courthouse. The air was still cold enough to chill my hands,
but I’d sweated through my shirt by the time I turned up McAllister.
I’d walked the way Teddy and I usually did, forgetting that our normal
route would bring me past Coruna. I was in front of the restaurant
when my legs stopped, seemingly of their own accord.

I couldn’t see inside. A heavy velvet curtain blocked the front window.
Something made me try the door. It was unlocked. I pushed it
open, shouldered through the velvet curtain, and walked in.

In the long, narrow restaurant all the lights were on, and I heard water
running near the back. There was an empty place where my brother
and I had been sitting. The floor had been sanded, and someone had
hung a painting on the wall behind Teddy’s seat. The smell of bleach
was very strong. I guessed that by lunchtime they would be ready to
open for business.

The sound of water running stopped, and a tall, bearded guy wearing
a rubber apron and gloves came out from the back carrying a bucket
of foamy water in one hand and a scrub brush in the other. “We’re
closed,” he said. He gingerly knelt and began scrubbing at the place
where the floor met the wall. He rinsed out the brush and went at it
again, like Lady Macbeth at her housework. “We don’t do breakfast,”
he added when I didn’t move or say anything.