Bear Is Broken (9 page)

The room had a view of the building’s interior courtyard and probably
received no direct sunlight much of the year. With the lack of
creature comforts, it seemed to me a place meant for the dying rather
than the living. I pulled the chair from behind some disused equipment
near the window and positioned it near the bed, wishing I’d brought
something to read, one of the adventure travel guides I collected,
maybe. Anything not to have to look at my brother, to distract me
from that clockwork wheezing. I had the trial binders with me, but
the last person I wanted to think of now was Ellis Bradley.

Teddy’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. The machine
kept his lungs filled with air much longer than normal breathing, so
that Teddy seemed to hold each breath before letting it out with a
whoosh. With each one held, my claustrophobic dread increased.

When the nurse came back I had the evidence code open and
was mouthing the hearsay exceptions nervously, compulsively, like
a prayer. Studying for the bar exam, I’d learned the exceptions forward
and backward. In retrospect, those months of studying seemed
a happy time.

I closed the book when the nurse came in. Carol, her name tag
said. She wore scrubs and sturdy white tennis shoes. She was in her
midthirties, with the self-sufficient look of someone who spent most
of her time with people who didn’t talk back. “You’re the brother?”

“Yeah.”

“You just get in from out of town?”

“No, I live here. I was with him when he was shot.”

“What’s your name?” she asked, checking the IV.

I told her. Then I said, “He’s probably going to die, isn’t he.”

“I can’t tell you that,” she said, taken aback. “Dr. Gottlieb makes his
rounds at six AM and six PM. You’ll have to save those kinds of questions
for him. All I can tell you is that his vital signs are stable, and they’re
watching the pressure inside his skull. He has brainstem function, but he
scores pretty low on the coma scale. He’s been unresponsive to external
stimuli. But you never can tell. You just have to keep up your hope.”

She turned to walk out. I opened the evidence code again, biting
my lip. Where the hell was Jeanie?

When Carol reached the door she turned back. “You should talk to
him. Hearing a familiar voice might let him know that he’s not alone,
that there’s something to hang on for. And even if it doesn’t help him,
it might help you.”

We didn’t ever talk before, I wanted to say to her as she walked out.
How was I supposed to start now? Was I supposed to just sit here and
open my heart to an empty room while Teddy went on saying nothing
in return, the way he had all our lives? What kind of deal was that?

I wasn’t ready to talk to Teddy, but I would have liked to pray for him,
much as he would have hated it. Unlike my brother, I believed that a
higher power shaped our lives, and it had always seemed to me that
this power must be subject to pleading and intervention.

For a long time I used to wonder what the purpose of my life was
supposed to be. I could hear Teddy’s dismissive laughter at that phrase,
supposed to. The law drew me, but the law was Teddy’s domain, and for
that reason I initially avoided it. After majoring in history I traveled
for a summer, then taught at a private high school for two years, but
without conflict and contention I was like an engine running on the
wrong kind of gas. The best thing I ever did for those kids was quit
and go to law school. I figured that I’d be a public defender, that while
Teddy worried about fame and money, I would dedicate myself to
helping the poor and to safeguarding the Constitution. But I quickly
discovered that my passion lay with the law itself rather than with
any abstract principle of equality or justice. If you’re the best lawyer
in the room, you ought to be paid accordingly, no matter how guilty
your client or how unjust his cause—that was Teddy’s view, and it had
come to be mine.

And now it seemed a thumb had come down and squashed him.

I wanted to stay until six, and I meant to stay until six, but the longer
I stayed the easier it became to convince myself that Teddy would
want me out there looking for the person who had shot him rather
than sitting here like a lump beside his hospital bed. I found Carol
again and double-checked that they had my cell phone number at
the nurse’s station.

I took a cab back to the office. The door was locked, but I’d found
a spare key in Teddy’s desk last night, and I used it to let myself in.
Tanya’s computer screen was shrouded, the lights off, the blinds down,
motes swimming in the few shafts of sunlight that managed to get
through. I went into Teddy’s office and sat at his desk, laid my cheek
on the blotter, then quickly sat up, and ran a hand through my hair. I
had the voice-mail code, at least. One of my jobs over the summer had
been to transcribe Teddy’s messages, and I checked them now. There
was one from Detective Anderson thanking me for the list of Teddy’s
clients. Nothing from Jeanie.

As I hung up the phone I saw the flame of a cigarette lighter and
smelled smoke, and I froze. I hadn’t turned on the desk lamp, and the
blinds were closed, but I could see someone sitting on Teddy’s old
loveseat in the dimness by the door, the glow of the lighter and now
the cigarette lighting his downcast face. No one ever sat there. Teddy
used it for stacking file boxes.

I reached down to open the bottom desk drawer, where Teddy kept
a gun.

Car’s voice was hoarse and angry. “For Christ’s sake, leave the piece
in the drawer.”

I lifted my hand to the desk. “I didn’t know you had a key.”

“I’ve been getting after Teddy to change these shitty locks.”

“Looking for something? Or did you just need a place to drink?”

In response he took a pull from the tall can of beer he was holding.

“Maybe I should call the cops? See if they can help you find whatever
it is?”

“Just something I left here. Nobody’s business but Teddy’s and mine.”

His eyes must have betrayed him, because my gaze went to a framed
photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction that hung
on the wall opposite Teddy’s door. The picture was askew. I grabbed
the gun from its place in the frontmost hanging file in Teddy’s desk.

Car’s limbs seemed to loosen when he saw it. I rose and went over to
the picture, which, I saw, concealed a safe, now ajar. All summer I’d
been here without noticing it.

“Your brother gave me the combination,” Car said in a bored voice
behind me. “What do I look like, a safecracker?”

The safe was empty. “He owe you money? Or did you just figure
no one would miss it?”

“Oh, Christ. If you’re going to be waving that thing around—” Car
set his cigarette on the edge of the bookshelf, rose from the couch, and
came toward me helpfully. Before I knew it, he’d spun me around, jerked
my arm up behind my back, and made me drop the gun. I smelled the
sharp odor of his sweat and the reek of alcohol on his breath.

He used his shirt to pick up the gun, as if it might contaminate
him. He popped it into the safe, shut the door, and spun the dial. “Do
me a favor, don’t start thinking you’re a tough guy.” He drifted back
toward the couch and resumed his place. “I told him when I got him
those guns, I said, ‘Teddy, don’t ever pull it out unless you know you’re
going to shoot it. Otherwise you’ll just get it taken away from you,
and you’ll be in worse trouble than you were before.’”

I sat behind the desk gingerly bending my wrist back and forth, trying
to figure out how Car had done that when I’d known exactly what
he was going to do. With all the dignity I could muster I said, “I didn’t
tell the cops about that argument you and Teddy had in the stairwell.”
“Teddy and I didn’t have any argument.”

“If you say so. I only know what I heard.”

“I’m sure you hear a lot of things, Monkey Boy. But it’s a pretty big
leap from hearing to understanding.”

I had never noticed his accent before. Probably it only came out
when he was drunk. It was Russian or Eastern European, maybe. There
are a lot of Russians in San Francisco.

“I can call up this detective, tell him I forgot something. Let him
ask you about it.”

“You do what you want.” Car picked up the beer and drank from it
again, then retrieved his cigarette just as it was about to burn the shelf.

“Hear you gave Teddy’s closing argument today. I hope Ellis packed
his toothbrush. Maybe I’ll visit him, pay my condolences, put some
money on his commissary account for toothbrushes. A lot closer to
visit him here than in Pelican Bay. That’s, what, a seven-hour drive? His
kids can drive it in shifts. When they get their driver’s licenses, that is.

If they even remember by then that they ever had a father.”

“You think he would have been better off sitting in jail a few more
months, waiting for a new lawyer?”

“Don’t mind me, Monkey Boy. I get cranky when people show me
guns, threaten me with police. Not that I’ve got anything against police.
Police do good work. You got to have police. But I don’t like being
threatened with them. You want to call the police, call the police. I’m
sure they would love to hear from you.”

“Whatever you took from the safe, the cops haven’t seen it. They
haven’t been here yet.”

I had Anderson’s card in my wallet. I knew better than to threaten
Car again with calling him unless I was prepared to make good on
the threat. Car gave good advice. I wasn’t going to call the police. I
knew it, and he knew it.

Car dropped his cigarette butt into his beer, then crumpled the can,
tossed it neatly into the wastebasket, and stood, his tattoos rippling in
the slatted light, the intricate foliage moving like ivy in a breeze.
I followed him through the door into the outer office. “Car. They
shot him right in front of me. If you know anything, please tell me.
We’ve got to give the police the information they need to find the
people who did this.”

Car turned. “Maybe the cops are the ones who shot him.”
I felt a chill, facing him through the doorway. His eyes were bright
in his sculpted, skull-like face. In the light of the hallway I saw how
angry he was.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

From the pouch of his sweatshirt he took an envelope. There seemed
to be something else in the pocket, something heavier. “I want what
Teddy wanted. I don’t want to see his wishes disrespected. But maybe
this concerns you somehow. You’re so eager to do something, maybe
you can carry out his wishes. Maybe it’ll ease your mind.”

There was a malicious brightness in his eyes as he handed me the
envelope. It was a sealed letter. Across the seal on the back Teddy had
written “To be mailed unread in case of my death or incapacitation—
TM.” On the front, a tiny note in the upper right-hand corner read
“Affix postage here.” Just like my brother, not trusting me to remember
to add a stamp.

The letter was addressed to Lawrence Maxwell at San Quentin
State Prison.

Picture me sitting at Teddy’s desk through the rest of the afternoon into
the evening, the letter lying unopened on the blotter before me. Again
and again I thought, I will open it now, I will turn on the light, I will
tear the envelope and read what’s inside. But my hands would not obey.

In 1983, when it happened, Teddy was twenty-two and just starting
law school, no longer living at home. I was ten. In the beginning Teddy
had refused to discuss the subject with me; all he would say, when
pressed, was Lawrence was innocent. I didn’t believe it, and he could
never say who had killed Caroline, our mother, if Lawrence hadn’t.

In later years he would sometimes drop a comment such as Dad was
being moved again, or that he’d been sick but now was better. By then
I didn’t want to think about him. I wanted our father never to have
existed, and barring nonexistence, I wanted him to be dead. In my
darkest times at the ages of sixteen and seventeen, before I channeled
my anger into cycling, I used to visit the library on rainy afternoons and
read the newspaper accounts of my father’s trial. The stories were written
with an eye for the inconsistencies of the state’s case; they included
jailhouse interviews and detailed excerpts of Lawrence’s testimony in
which he protested his innocence and insisted that he’d been framed.

Fighting back a headache from squinting at the microfilm, I used to
imagine how it would feel to kill him.

Around eight o’clock I finally made some kind of decision. It didn’t
feel like a decision. It felt more like the end of a long, unrestful slumber,
the kind of half-drunk sleep where you wake up in the morning
feeling more tired than when you lay down. I locked the office door,
went down to the street, found a mailbox, and put the unopened letter
inside it, just as Teddy wanted.

It was like putting a black hole into another black hole. I could
not guess what my brother might have written in the letter, nor what
it would mean to our father to open it after hearing the news that
Teddy had been shot. I knew Teddy was still in contact with him, that
he wrote and occasionally visited him. I never asked what they talked
about, and Teddy didn’t volunteer any details.

I went back to my place, changed into jeans, then tried Jeanie again.
No answer. This time I didn’t leave a message. I called the hospital and
learned that Teddy’s condition was unchanged. Then I went out, bought
a six pack of beer and a pizza, and went back to the office.

My plan was to start going through the case files, put a few hours
into it. I had no idea what I was looking for—a motive, I suppose,
someone with a grudge against my brother or a secret Teddy had
exposed. As tired as I was, I knew that if I closed my eyes I would see
his body on the restaurant floor or in his hospital bed. The smell of
his blood kept coming to me in unguarded moments. I kept thinking
I had to get up and wash my hands again.