Bear Is Broken (2 page)

I noticed the black detective shoot the white one a glance.
“All right, all right,” the one I was talking to said. “You say you
didn’t see anything, then I agree, you didn’t see anything.” He lifted a
pair of linebacker’s shoulders, then let them fall. “There are plenty of
people who did.”

“You got a name, Detective?”

He was of that pink complexion that registers the slightest change
in blood-vessel dilation as a flush. If he was embarrassed at having
treated me so brusquely, his face gave no sign. “Anderson.” He handed
me his card.

There seemed to be some confusion. Two men in blue jumpsuits
with medical examiner patches had wheeled in a gurney. Now they
stood looking at the mess and the blood, clearly thinking, Where’s
the body? There’s supposed to be a body here. For some reason they
hadn’t gotten the information they needed, that, alive or dead, Teddy
was in the ambulance.

They exchanged glances and by wordless assent went to sit at one of
the tables. Maybe they thought the body might be coming back, and
they should wait for it. Not yet, I wanted to tell them, he’s not dead
yet. The table had been abandoned just after the food arrived, giving
the former occupants time to take only a bite or two. Two orders of
burgers and fries. One of the ME’s men eyed the plate before him.
After a moment I watched his hand dart down and seize a fry while
the man’s head swiveled lazily toward the window. The head seemed
to have no inkling of what the hand was doing, even as the hand
popped the french fry into its mouth. An instant later it struck again.
This time, on its way to the mouth the hand managed to swipe the
french fry in a pool of ketchup.

My stomach lurched. The room was wavering, sweat filming on
my forehead.

The detective had to repeat his question: “Your brother seem worried
about anything recently? Like he knew someone had it in for him?”
“No,” I said.

“Any conversations that sounded strange to you? Unexplained
meetings?”

“No,” I said, and realized this was wrong only after I said it. There
had been something, but instinctively I held it back. Anderson wouldn’t
have given a damn for my reasons.

“You spend much time with your brother?”

“Every day for the last four months, since August, after I took the
bar exam. I’ve been shadowing him.”

“Thinking of following in your brother’s footsteps?”

“Hoping to.”

He made a noise in his throat and stepped back, studying me with
his head tilted, disapproving of what he saw, and wanting me to know
it. Most cops, along with a substantial crosssection of American society,
do not differentiate between the criminal and the lawyer who defends
him, and I could see that Anderson was of this stripe.

“So tell me, Counselor,” he said, and through my grief I felt the
same confused rush of professional pride I’d felt in those seconds just
before Teddy was shot, when he made that joke about me giving the
closing argument. “When we catch the scumbags who did this, what
should we do with them?”

I just looked up at him from where I sat in my chair, covered in
my brother’s blood.

“Suppress the evidence? Maybe these bullet casings? Maybe the
gun if we manage to find it? Maybe suppress the confession if we
grab one of these guys and he talks before we finish reading him his
Miranda rights? Maybe after that we should just let these animals plead
to disturbing the peace?”

He was watching me closely.

“No, I didn’t think so,” he went on. “Just remember this the next
time you’re in court trying to embarrass some honest cop, make him
look as bad as the shitbag you’re trying to defend. Remember what it
feels like to be a victim, pal.”

I sat looking at him in astonishment. He watched me for a moment
more, then gave a dismissive shake of his head. Turning away, he suddenly
turned back. “Let me see that card again.”

I was still holding the card, and I handed it to him. He scrawled on
the back. “This is my home number and my cell. The city has killed off
the very idea of overtime, but I want you to call me when you decide
you want to remember something. And I mean right away. It doesn’t
matter if it’s nighttime or daytime or if the goddamn state is sliding off
into the Pacific Ocean. Your brother defended the scum of the earth,
and he ruined a lot of good cops, and I will personally piss on his
grave as soon as they get him in the ground, which isn’t fast enough
for me, I shit you not. And just to shove it up his ass I’m going to find
the people who did this, and I’m going to give the DA a case so tight
even your brother couldn’t get that tiny little dick of his inside it, and
I’m going to make sure the people who did this go to prison. I don’t
care that your brother probably did something to deserve what he got,
that he had it coming from eight different directions. Whatever shit
he was into, you can be damn sure I’ll be in it. This is my city, and no
one’s going to light up a restaurant a block and a half from city hall
and get away with it.”

He finished writing on the back of the card, then flicked it at me.
It hit my chest and slid down into my lap, where my hand caught and
clutched at it. “I’ll need a list of your brother’s clients. You can fax it to
me at the number on the card.” He turned away, and all of a sudden
his face was blank, placid. His partner, still standing over the crime
scene, met my eyes with a rueful smile and gave me a long, slow shake
of the head, as if to say, There he goes again.

“Officer, drive this man to San Francisco General Hospital,” Anderson
said to one of the uniformed officers milling over near the bar.
The medical examiner’s men were just finishing the hamburgers.

Teddy would have taken heart from that little scene. I have never known
a person to thrive on confrontation as he did. What makes that so especially
remarkable is that I have no memory of my brother losing his
temper or raising his voice in anger, not even when I was provoking
him, giving him every reason to shout at me. I’m talking about those
dark years when Teddy was establishing his legal reputation, and I was
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, living behind a wall of punk-rock music
and cannabis and focusing my considerable store of anger, confusion,
and resentment onto him.

The detective’s feelings were no surprise. Teddy was the lawyer responsible
for the now infamous acquittal of Ricky Santorez, who four
years ago killed two San Francisco police officers as they served a search
warrant on his Mission District home. The DA charged Santorez with
murder, but Teddy argued that the cops had failed to follow departmental
procedure and that Santorez did not know they were police officers
when he picked up his illegal assault rifle and fired a fusillade at the
men breaking down his door. One of the more notorious acquittals
in the city since the Twinkie defense, the case sparked outrage. For
several weeks after the verdict, the press and the city power structure
made out my brother to be public enemy number one.

I followed the uniformed cop out into the early afternoon sunlight.
In the car he didn’t try to make conversation, either out of respect for
me or knowledge of who my brother was.

It was as if they’d brought Teddy home. That’s because after my
mother’s death we’d lived for several years not four blocks from the
hospital. Returning to the neighborhood only strengthened the certainty
in the pit of my stomach that he was going to die.

People turned to look at me as I walked into the emergency room.
My clothes. Not to mention the way I was moving—too slowly for
that busy place. The emergency room at San Francisco General is the
collection point for the city’s misery and violence, a place of blood
and weeping. People looking more or less like me walked into that
waiting room every day. Probably not many of them were wearing
suits, though.

At noon on an autumn Wednesday the waiting room was not at
its fullest. I went to the desk and asked after my brother. The nurse
seemed to know who I was before I spoke. The clothes again. “Teddy
Maxwell?” she asked. “I’ll get a doctor out to talk to you.”
She lifted a phone, and I heard a page.

A young resident appeared after a few minutes, pulling down his
mask with one hand while offering me the other. He introduced himself
as Dr. Singh and told me that they were resuscitating my brother,
trying to get his blood pressure and oxygen up. If they stabilized him,
he would undergo an emergency CAT scan, then surgery if the doctors
thought it was warranted.

“Warranted?”

He hesitated. “If they think your brother has any chance of recovery.”
The good news, he went on, was that either Teddy had moved at the
last instant or the shooter had terrible aim, because the path of the
bullet had been glancing, and only Teddy’s right frontal lobe appeared
to have been damaged, leaving the rest of the brain intact. That was
how it looked from the outside, anyway. Only after a CAT scan would
they know for sure. “Realistically, for patients with this type of injury,
the survival rate is below ten percent. His chances depend on how
responsive he appears in the next few days and on whether we’re able
to control the pressure in his brain.”

He stretched the paper mask back over his face and disappeared
back through the doors.

I used my brand-new cell phone to call Jeanie, Teddy’s ex-wife
and former partner. I left messages on her cell, her home answering
machine, and on her voice mail at the Contra Costa County Public
Defender Office. This last had a message saying that she’d be out of
the office until Monday. When I rang the front desk they had no idea
where she was or how she could be reached. I called Teddy’s office
and left a message for Tanya, his secretary, who took long lunches and
might conceivably not return, since she’d be expecting us to be in trial
the rest of the afternoon.

There was no one else I could think to call. Few of my friends knew
Teddy. I’d formed a habit early on of dividing my life into compartments,
each hermetically sealed from the others—the effect of having
a father in prison, I suppose. I could have called my cycling friends, or
my law school friends, or the few friends I still kept in touch with from
high school. People always come through when you need them—but
then I would have had to admit needing someone.

Around two o’clock a hurried-looking doctor, not Singh but another
resident, came to tell me that Teddy had just been taken into emergency
surgery to remove a blood clot. At six the same guy returned
to tell me that Teddy was out of surgery. I would be able to see him
in a few hours, whenever he was moved from recovery into a regular
room. He was on a respirator, with minimal brain activity, and I should
prepare myself for the chance that he would be dead before morning.
The doctor spoke with the clipped bluntness of someone who disliked
the human aspects of his job.

Sitting alone, thumbing through the same grubby six-month-old
magazines I’d already thumbed through once, I realized that my brother
was going to die. My skin crawled. I was afraid, and I didn’t even know
of what—seeing him hooked up to machines, I guess, all his weakness
so terribly obvious.

I stood and walked straight out through the front entrance and into
a cab that had just let off an elderly woman. “Civic Center,” I told
the driver. Maybe some part of me thought that I could go back to
Coruna, sit at our table, and finish our lunch.

The cab let me off on Market Street, and I nearly stepped in front
of a Muni streetcar when a pedestrian grabbed my arm and yanked
me back to the curb. I didn’t hear what the person said to me, or how
I replied, if I did. When I came back to myself, I was in the gaudy
rococo elevator heading up to my brother’s fifth-floor office down at
Mission and Sixth.

It was only when I got to the office door that I remembered Teddy
hadn’t given me a key. I stood outside the door and laid my forehead
against the cool pebbled glass. Why couldn’t he just have made me a
key? He must have been afraid that once I got in, I wouldn’t leave, that
I would contrive some way of making him let me stay on after I passed
the bar. And to be perfectly honest, I suppose that was my intention.
I don’t know how long I stood there, but when I opened my eyes
again the light was different. It was dusk. The ding of the elevator
brought me to my senses. I just had time to square my shoulders before
Tanya came toward me in her hip-hugging skirt, her body perched
forward atop ultrahigh heels. As she walked she fumbled in her purse
for her keys.

She nearly ran into me, then gave a start. She stood looking at me
in frozen horror, then seized my arm so hard that I felt her nails almost
meeting through the layers of flesh and clothing. She opened the door
and pushed me into the office.

Tanya was five feet four inches tall, and amply padded. Her body
and face were a testament to years of ill use. Her hair was bleached
blonde, a puffy helmet that drooped over her eyes. Her shapeless body
was contained by undersized skirts, blouses, and undergarments. At
some point her nose had been broken and badly reset. It was hard to
imagine that there had ever been anything tantalizing about her, but
before her rehabilitation at Teddy’s hands she’d made her living on the
street. I had no doubt that even now a man could meet a quick end
by surprising her at the wrong moment.

“I went over to the courthouse,” she said. “They sent the jury home.”

“Teddy’s in the hospital. He’s not expected to make it. Someone
shot him in the head at Coruna.”

“Well, I can see that,” she said, raising her voice in outrage and
incomprehension.

I looked down, then smelled myself. My hands were shaking too
badly again to be of use to me. I got my jacket off okay but couldn’t
manage the shirt buttons. Tanya stood there watching me, her hands at
her sides. The shirt was ruined. I grabbed it by the lapels and yanked
downward, popping off the buttons, like Superman casting off his secret
identity, but I was the same person underneath. Just Leo.