Lion Plays Rough (18 page)

“I own my place. We're doing fine on the mortgage. What do I need an apartment for?”

“I wasn't thinking about you.”

I kept my voice calm. “I can't afford the rent on a second place.”

“Teddy gets a disability check, doesn't he? It wouldn't be that much.”

“Well, he isn't ready. I was gone three days, in jail three days, and when I came back, it was no pretty picture. In fact, it was a miracle that he didn't burn the whole building down.”

“Tell me one thing you do for him that he couldn't be doing for himself.”

“Clean up his shit every day.”

“So he's a pig, so what? Jeanie thinks he's backsliding.”

“So why isn't Jeanie talking to me about this?”

“I don't know. Maybe she thinks you're pissed at her. Maybe she's pissed at you. That's between you and her. She didn't want me to say anything, but I'm saying it. Your brother's a good friend of mine.”

“So where were you all those months he was there in the rehab center? When he was relearning how to talk, how to walk, how to dress himself, when he was figuring out that he wasn't going to be a lawyer anymore. Where were you?”

Car didn't rise to the bait. “He wouldn't have wanted me to see him like that.”

“You weren't there then, you're not there now, yet you sit in front of me claiming I'm not helping him. Go ahead and tell me whatever you think you have to tell me, but let's get one thing straight. Teddy's my brother, and you're a guy who used to work for him, and who was fucking his wife behind his back.”

Car's face went stony. Without even realizing that such a thing was possible, I'd hurt him badly. I felt bad, but not too bad. I'd been wanting to say that to him for a long time, and it felt good to get it off my chest.

There was a lull in the conversations around us, people looking up and glancing our way.

Car's voice was sharp. “In the beginning it was like he had an ambition to get better, like he thought he was going to be a lawyer again if he worked hard enough. Now he doesn't seem to care. That's what bothers me. That's what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“How's he going to get better? There's no getting back to where he was.”

“What's he going to do with his life if he doesn't try?”

“You can't practice law with a hole in your head. He can't even make a sandwich.”

“What's the alternative? He sits at home on the couch? That isn't a life. At least to Teddy, it wouldn't be. It's a goddamn waste, is what it is. Everyone's got to have something to live for, and Teddy, he lived for being a lawyer.”

“I'm not arguing with you,” I said. “But that's all over.”

“So you keep insisting.” Car took out his wallet and dropped money on the table. “I've said my piece. I'm out.”

I caught the waitress's eye. She brought me another beer.

Chapter 23

In the morning I called Mrs. Walker and asked her if I could look through Jeremy's old things. I needed to retrace Campbell's steps in investigating his death over a year ago. If there were a connection to Sgt. Lucas, I hoped to find it among Jeremy's possessions.

Mrs. Walker told me to come right over, and suggested that I bring Teddy. The TV was still going, but he wasn't watching it. I found him sitting on his bed, one shoe on, one off, hands on his knees. “Teddy,” I said, and when he didn't respond I said his name again. He started to stand, then realized he had only one shoe on. “I'm going over to Mrs. Walker's to look through Jeremy's things.”

He sniffed himself, nodded, and stood. “I'll come.”

My car was in no condition for the streets; we had to call a cab. As we rode I kept glancing at Teddy. Car's interference—really, Jeanie's—still rankled me. I resented the implication that I found it convenient to keep Teddy with me, purposeless and dependent. True, his disability payments helped with the mortgage, and we lived more cheaply together than we could apart. And I knew that Car was right, that one of these days one of us had to broach the subject of Teddy living on his own, but Car's notion that Teddy could somehow practice law again was a fantasy.

Again Mrs. Walker's house was filled with the smell of rich food, and again the table was laid. As before, Tamara was polite, as if with a stranger whose status she couldn't puzzle out. Teddy talked constantly, messing up more than usual, dropping food in his lap, while she listened intently, pretending to understand.

He was trying to tell her about the early days of his practice, when half his clients were cases where the public defender's office had declared a conflict of interest—junkies, whores, and thieves. Teddy was a born raconteur, and his stories had a great effect on me growing up. When he was telling them he'd give me his attention in a way he did at no other time, and listening I'd feel as if I were resurfacing into the sunshine from the underwater world where I spent most of my adolescence.

The story he was attempting to piece together now was one I'd heard many times. It was the story of two of his early clients, a prostitute and a junkie-slash-car thief.

“Our tale begins with a crime of public indecency in the third-floor bathroom at the Hall of Justice,
”
Teddy liked to begin, whenever he used to tell it. “Angela Esmerelda and Billy Ray Rey, two of my clients whose court hearings were scheduled the same morning, found themselves in what might be called a compromising position, that is, if either had any moral dignity to compromise. Because they don't latch the stall door behind them it keeps banging Billy Ray in the ass. Word has it that the officers waiting to testify heard the thunking from the hall.”

Here, he'd pause and assume a tone of utmost seriousness. “And that, believe it or not, was the beginning of one of this city's great love affairs.”

However, what came out now was this: “I had these clients when I was a lawyer. She was a toaster”—he meant hooker —“and he used to steal cars for this Russian chop suey.” Russian chop shop, he meant.

“I'd like to try that,” Tamara said, listening intently.

Teddy gave a little nod of concentration and went on, his brow furrowed with the effort of translating the story he remembered into the speech he was now capable of, speech that barely allowed him to say what he meant, let alone imply something without saying it. “I'm trying to think of their names,” is how he began now. “They got arrested for fucking in the courthouse bathroom.”

Tamara blinked. She didn't look away from his face.

I had no appetite for hearing my brother stumble his way through a story that could only sound sordid, stripped of the high drama he used to give it. I turned to Mrs. Walker. “Let me help you clear the table.”

I helped her with the dishes, and then she took me into a bedroom that served as home office and storage room, with a desk and computer, and boxes stacked on every other available surface. “It's their things, Jeremy's and Tamara's,” she said, indicating the cartons with a despairing gesture. “I keep telling myself that one of these days I'm going to put it all in order—but it's just too hard.”

She showed me the boxes that contained Jeremy's papers, then left me with them. From the other room I heard Teddy's low voice, and snatches of Tamara's laughter. Then I didn't hear their voices anymore.

I went through box after box of bills, school papers, pictures, all the junk that accumulates during a life. It was tedious, depressing work, and it left me feeling like the desecrator of a grave, sitting cross-legged on the floor with so much stuff spread around me.

I missed it the first time and found it only because I dropped a stack of papers as I was putting them back into their box. It was a pocket folder like kids carry homework in. Inside I found a police review board complaint form that Jeremy had filled out halfway but not finished, and behind that a computer printout statement, single-spaced.

I'm writing this to inform you what I witnessed on May 29, 2001. I was walking to work when I see this van pull up and stop outside a house near Fifty-Ninth and Bancroft. A bunch of guys with guns jump out. They kick down the door and start shooting. One of them, I don't remember his name, I know works for Damon Watson, who runs a crew that is very active in this neighborhood. They have been attacking drug dealers and robbing them. They solicit “donations” from people who feel they have no choice but to pay up.

I ran around the corner. There I saw an unmarked police car. As I'm about to go up to it the white detective at the wheel sees me coming and drives away. I recognized him as a narcotics detective who arrested me a year ago and violated my rights. His name is Christopher Lucas.

I think the people of Oakland deserve better than to have white police officers sit by and watch while black men kill each other.

It wasn't signed or sworn. It was simply hearsay and, as such, it wasn't worth anything more than the paper it was printed on. But we weren't in court, and it told me everything I needed to know about why Jeremy Walker was dead.

I made the connection only now that Lucas had been the arresting detective on Jeremy's case. I'd cross-examined him during a suppression hearing. His report, like thousands of others, listed so-called furtive movements as the reason justifying his stop of Jeremy, who'd been walking home from work. When I'd cross-examined Lucas, he'd been unable to say what that furtive movement was, acting as if the hearing were a waste of his time. The dog, Trigger, had also been involved. Lucas claimed that the animal had reacted to Jeremy, justifying a search for drugs. I'd succeeded then in establishing that Trigger wasn't an official police dog and had no training. Disgusted by Lucas's attitude, the judge had suppressed the marijuana from evidence and thrown out the charges.

If the rumors were true about Lucas crossing to the wrong side of the law, he'd need muscle, firepower. That might be where Damon fit in.

From the other room I heard a piano. I went back out into the other room. Mrs. Walker was playing a hymn.

I was about to ask where Teddy and Tamara were when I heard a sound of pleasure from behind a closed door at the end of the hall, then Teddy's voice, and another moan from Tamara.

Mrs. Walker came to the end of one hymn and immediately began another, her hand rising to turn the page. “Find what you're looking for?”

My cheeks burned. I was too stunned to answer. She went on playing, but her music couldn't mask the sounds from the room.

After a moment I moved closer to the piano, trying to follow her lead. “Did Jeremy ever tell you about seeing something on his way to work in the morning? A shooting?”

“He probably would have figured that was one of the things I didn't need to know.”

“Did Campbell or anyone else ever look through those boxes?”

“No.”

“So you never heard of a Sgt. Lucas?” Jeremy's case hadn't gone to trial; Mrs. Walker hadn't been present at the suppression hearing, and so would have had no occasion then to learn the name of the detective who'd arrested her son.

“Don't know why I should. I don't have doings with the police myself.”

“How about Lavinia Perry?”

She lifted her hands and the music stopped. From the other room came Teddy's loud groan. My cheeks heated again, but the look on Mrs. Walker's face was far away, her abstraction genuine. “Why, I just dreamed about that child. It's so odd that you would mention her name now, after all these years. She was the first one, the girl my Jeremy wanted to marry. This was back when they were in high school. He broke her heart.”

~ ~ ~

“I've never been so embarrassed,” I said to Teddy on the bus on the way home.

He didn't respond. It was loud. Maybe he didn't hear. We were surrounded by a bunch of kids heading home from Skyline High. My head was pounding.

“You can't just do that.” I'd known that sexual inappropriateness could be a symptom of brain damage, but this was the first I'd seen of it.

Teddy was looking out the window. He resembled nothing so much as a kid who'd just eaten too much candy, and was both satisfied with himself and about to be sick.

I tried again. “Look, you can't have sex with a girl who doesn't know who you are from one moment to the next. I'm talking as your lawyer here. I don't even think Tamara is legally capable of giving her consent.”

“Oh, she consented. I've never seen consent like that.”

“The walls are thin. The woman's seventy years old.”

Teddy didn't have anything to say to that, but I knew what he could have said—that he was only taking what was offered, and that Mrs. Walker wasn't going to accuse him of anything. When we were leaving, she'd said, “We'll see you on Sunday. We leave for chuch at nine
am
.”

“Okay,” Teddy had told her. I knew then that the bargain was sealed, and that Mrs. Walker would make sure Teddy lived up to his end.

“She thinks you're going to marry her daughter-in-law,” I told him. “She's old school. That's what it means to traditional people when you go to bed with a girl. She thinks you're going to take Tamara off her hands.”

His face went through a series of contortions. Finally he said. “I don't have a problem with that.”

“You do whatever you want to do.” I turned to the window. It seemed to me that I'd been teetering on the edge of exhaustion for a long time, ever since Teddy was shot, and now I was sliding over the edge. I didn't have the energy to do anything but lay my head against the grimy seat back and watch the streets slide by. My life was veering out of control, or rather I'd never had it under control. I'd been like a child making believe that I could steer the vehicle I was riding in. A city bus. Goddamn it.

At home there was a message from Jeanie, asking when I'd be back at work. There was a hearing coming up in one of the DUIs she'd dropped on my desk. She was right, I realized. It was high time that I stopped worrying about dead clients and started paying attention to the live ones, while I still had the chance.