Bear Is Broken (27 page)

I made toast and peanut butter for breakfast, with coffee. It was
all I had. “I talked to Keith while you were asleep,” Christine said
while we drank our coffee and munched on the toast. “You still
want to see him?”

“Okay.”

“We’ll have to drive. I don’t know where he wants to meet, only
that it’s in the city. He’s going to text us with directions.”

Finally, progress. We finished breakfast and went down to the street
to Teddy’s car. There was a new parking ticket, and I tossed it in the
glove compartment with the others. The police would come with the
boot soon enough, but I couldn’t imagine that the car had much life
left in it, anyway.

Christine’s cell phone chimed, and she glanced at it. “Head west
on Geary.”

The fog was spilling over the Twin Peaks toward the bay as we crested
the Geary hill and dropped down among endless rows of stucco houses
perched above single-car garages, the same basic design repeated from
here to the beach and selling for upwards of five hundred thousand
dollars. I’d spent the first ten years of my life in a house just like those.
Living downtown, I tended to forget that the outlying neighborhoods
still exist. When I saw the sea, it was usually from the saddle of my bike
along the coastal and mountain roads in Marin.

I was starting to feel bad about last night, the kind of guilt that gnaws
at you. Not that Christine had meant anything to Teddy, or he to her.
I knew there was only trouble at the end of this road.
A few more chimes of Christine’s phone circled us through the
Sunset. Then we ended up on the Great Highway heading north along
Ocean Beach.

“Those pictures you mentioned last night,” Christine said. “It’s true,
I’ve seen them, but Teddy didn’t show them to me. They were in a
drawer in my mom’s office, and I found them snooping when I was a
kid. Keith told me the whole story about ten years ago. He said I was
old enough to know the truth. The truth according to Keith Locke,
that is.”

“Ten years ago?” Keith’s choice of a lawyer must have been no coincidence;
he must have known who my brother was before he sought
him out. “But you didn’t believe him.”

“It’s very convenient for Keith to believe that my father is the villain
of all villains rather than face responsibility for his own crummy life.”

“Now you’re beginning to sound like your father.”

“Teddy’s basically got the same complex as Keith. He doesn’t want
to believe that your father murdered your mother, just like he’d never
believe that the people closest to him, the people he trusted more than
anybody else, could have betrayed him. For such a cynical person, he
was very, very trusting. But that’s probably what happened, if what
you’re telling me is true. Tanya must have either shot him or gotten
him shot.”

There was an eerie certainty to her voice. “You sound a lot more
sure than I am,” I said.

“Just don’t swallow one of Keith’s conspiracy theories the way Teddy
did. That’s all I’m saying.”

“How can you be so certain I’m right and Tanya was behind the
shooting? Did Teddy tell you something?” My voice became shrill.
“Have you been holding something back?”

“No, I’ve told you everything.” She stared out the window. “It’s
just the logical conclusion. And I don’t blame Teddy for what he was
trying to do to my father. I kind of liked screwing someone who was
out to screw my family.”

Her cool rationality was almost convincing. Almost. Yet last night
when she was drunk she hadn’t been able to hear her father’s name.
“Come on, Christine. Very little of what you’ve told me has turned
out to be true. Look at what’s happened to Marovich, Teddy, and
Martha. The only thing that connects the three of them is you. I don’t
think it’s a coincidence. You’re going to have to explain yourself at
some point. I want to help you out of whatever mess you’re in. But
you have to talk to me.”

Her voice was a knife. “You just don’t want to believe that Teddy
could have betrayed your little cult of hating your father.”

We crossed the west end of Golden Gate Park below the Cliff House
and continued north on the Great Highway toward Sutro Heights and
Point Lobos. I wondered what the idea behind the telephone directions
was. The messages added an element of surprise, but if anyone
was trying to follow us he would have had an easy time of it.

“He wants to meet out here?” I asked as the Great Highway climbed
onto the cliffs at the end of Ocean Beach. I didn’t like that at all.
She didn’t answer.

Something made me say, “I’m not the only one who has seen those
videos, just in case you’re wondering. I got them from Car.”

When she spoke again her voice was calm, not with indifference
but with serious concern. “Has anyone else seen them?”

“Why don’t you tell me whom you’re protecting?”

“Where are the disks now? At your place?”

“You would have found them if they were, I’m sure. Tell me why
you want them.”

“I just want them, that’s all. You made a deal with me—now you
have to hold up your end.”

“I told you last night the deal is off.”

“You don’t have all of the disks,” she said, and smacked the glove
compartment. “Jesus. You’re missing one, and that one’s the only one
that matters. You think you’re holding all the cards, but you don’t have
shit.” She turned to me and shook her head in disbelief.

“So Car has it,” I said after a pause.

“Maybe Teddy destroyed it. You knew you didn’t have it. You knew
the whole time.”

“Don’t you realize that those other videos that you don’t even care
about probably got Martha killed?”

“I thought Tanya killed her,” Christine said. She wasn’t responsible
for anything, and nothing was her problem.

“When Teddy told you what he was planning with that habeas brief,
you really were glad?”

“Fuck Gerald,” she said. “Whatever my father gets is less than he
deserves.”

She sat wedged against the door with her shoulders hunched, turned
so drastically away from me that she might have suffered from a spinal
deformity—the outward expression of how her hatred for her parents
had crippled her.

Crippled her, crippled me. But fuck Lawrence, I found myself thinking.
Hatred was survival; that’s what I’d learned, and that’s what I knew.
With my father on the cusp of freedom, I once again clung to the
belief that my anger made me strong.

I pulled as directed into the parking lot on the west side of Fort Miley
above Seal Rocks Beach, just south of Lands End. The beach was two
hundred feet below; we were atop the cliffs. A guardrail rimmed the
parking lot. On the other side of the rail was a row of pole-mounted
binoculars, like mouthless faces. Christine’s phone chimed again.

“He wants you to go down the path to the left. I’m supposed to wait.”

“I thought the whole point was that you were coming with me.”

“I guess the parking lot is far enough. We can leave. You’re the one
who was so hot to talk to him.”

“We’re staying,” I snapped, though I knew I might be walking into
a trap.

“Can you leave the keys at least so I can listen to the radio while
I’m stuck here waiting for you?”

I left the keys. As I walked away from the car, looking for the path,
my cell phone rang. I glanced back at Christine, saw her absorbed in
the radio dials, then turned my back to the wind, and answered the
call. It was Santorez. “I got my court hearing this afternoon. I couldn’t
believe it, but that’s what they said. They’re rushing this thing along.
One thirty, Department Twenty-two. You gonna be there, or should I
have my boys call someone else?”

He made even that sound like a threat, or perhaps it was just my
fear coupled with what I’d put together last night about Tanya stealing
his money, making Santorez a much more promising suspect. “I’ll
be there,” I heard myself say. Turning again, I took in the foggy view
of the ocean, the waves crashing on bird-whitened rocks below, the
Golden Gate Bridge in extreme foreshortening to my right. The air
was frigid, the fog clammy, my fingertips chilled. A few tourists wearing
shorts and windbreakers huddled together with their cameras at
the other end of the guardrail. Nobody visiting San Francisco for the
first time ever brings the right clothes.

I knew in the cold, hungry pit of my stomach that I was putting
my professional reputation—not to mention my bar card—on the line
before I had even gotten started and that the odds were against me. I
was beginning to see why the police had focused on Santorez from
the start. I felt a flash of anger at Anderson. I knew he hadn’t trusted
me because of this, because of the game I was playing with his suspect,
a game he’d foreseen and headed off.

I would have to decide whether to talk to the press after Santorez’s
arraignment, and what to tell them, but there was no time to think
about that now. If Keith Locke had his way, maybe I wouldn’t ever
have to think about it. After the flush of my victory in the courtroom,
I foolishly believed that all I had to do was talk to him, and
he would listen.

I pocketed the phone and started down a wide path through a
grove of wind-sculpted cypress. Below, the ocean crashed and boomed,
sounding now right next to me, now distant.

I don’t like the ocean, not at this latitude. There is simply too much
of it out there beyond the Golden Gate, and it is too violent and too
cold. My dislike of the sea is one of the reasons I could never imagine
living in one of the city’s far western neighborhoods, where the air is
perpetually tinged with salt and fog.

Ahead of me I saw a thin figure standing on a rocky promontory
with the tumbling ocean behind him, silhouetted against the
guano-stained bulk of Seal Rock. He wore tight black jeans ripped
at the knees, hiking boots, and a green jacket. As I watched, he
dropped from his perch and disappeared down the other side. I
stumbled and swore.

In a few minutes I stood on the rock where Keith had been standing.
Below was a large overlook area atop the cliffs, thirty or so feet
above the surf. To the south was a magnificent view of the Cliff House
and the entire length of Ocean Beach, the peninsula stretching away
arrow-straight into the distance. Immediately below me were the ruins
of the Sutro Baths, once a glass-enclosed swimming pavilion, now
little more than a tidal pool half-blocked off from the ocean by an
artificial breakwater.

For a moment it seemed that Keith had disappeared. Then, catching
movement to my left, I saw him hiking down a trail that led inland
from the vista point, then seaward to the ruins.

“caution,” a sign warned as I descended. “Cliff and surf area extremely
dangerous. People have been swept from the rocks and drowned.”
In the old bath foundations pieces of twisted iron jutted from the
ground among graffiti-covered remnants of crumbling walls. I skidded
on the loose gravel, and when I looked up Keith was gone. There was
nowhere to hide, yet he’d vanished as completely as if the earth had
opened up and swallowed him.

Then I remembered there was a cave, an artificial tunnel connecting
the baths with Point Lobos on the other side of the hill. I knew that I
should turn back from this desolate spot, but I went on, still convinced
that I could make him tell me what he knew.

“Leo!” a voice called from the cave as I approached.

The floor of the entrance was soft sand. I could see the round opening
at the other end a hundred feet away, silhouetting Keith’s head
and shoulders. “I just want to talk,” I said into the sudden silence as I
ducked inside, my voice strange to me after the din of the waves.

“Come on down here where it’s a little lighter and we’ll do that.”

It was my one chance to talk to the person who might know why
Teddy had been shot. I looked for weapons on him but didn’t see any
bulges. He wasn’t much bigger than I was. I came forward slowly, giving
my eyes time to adjust. He was standing at a railing near a hole in the
floor through which I heard the surf crashing on the rocks.

“Your sister’s waiting in the car,” I told him.

“Yeah.” A pause. “I hear you’re fucking her.”

“Keith, your mother offered me twenty thousand dollars to convince
you to see her. It’s all yours if you want it. I didn’t come here because
of her, though.”

We stood facing each other for a moment; then Keith turned. “Come
look at this hole, man. It’s pretty wild.”

I took half a step closer but no more, keeping my knees slightly
bent, ready to move. Through the man-size hole beneath us I dimly
saw surf washing over sand.

“I’m not interested in your mother’s money. The reason I wanted
to talk to you is that when Teddy got shot, he left your case up in the
air. I want to pick up where Teddy left off. I think we can beat this
murder charge, but first you have to turn yourself in. There’s no way
to clear your name when you’re on the run.”

“You want to be my lawyer?” Keith asked.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Everything we talk about is secret, then?”

“That’s right,” I said with reluctance.

Keith grabbed my arm. He tugged me on into the tunnel toward
the light at the end. I jerked free of him, then followed, trying to keep
out of his reach. “You’ve got to see the view out here. It’s primeval.”

As we approached the mouth he spun, quicker than I thought, and
slid sideways along the wall until he was behind me, a neat reversal.
I tried to move away but there was nowhere to go. The sea was at
my back, and Keith was between me and the tunnel. I tried to follow
my script but my voice kept sticking. “All you have to do is tell the
truth. Whatever you know about Marovich, about Teddy, about Martha.
You tell the truth and cut a deal and walk away.”

“The truth will set me free.”

“Who shot my brother?”

He blinked. “Who brought you here?”

“You’re insane.”

“Daddy’s little girl. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. That
whore pal of hers, Martha, drove the car. Christine walked right into
Coruna with the gun in her hand. She’s a pretty hot number, I know,
but she can play the man when she has to. Bang, bang, then out the
back. Cool as a cucumber.”