Bear Is Broken (12 page)

She brightened. “Oh God, of course. Congratulations.” She leaned
over to give me a hard squeeze, her chin digging into my shoulder,
her gin breath hot in my ear. For good measure she added a kiss, a
wet smack right on the eye. Everything went all fuzzy and crackly for
a moment.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice for someone to finally say it.”

“You mean Teddy didn’t…”

“Nope. And it’s not like I was hoping for the corner office.”

“Welcome to the club. He wouldn’t let me stand in for him even in
the most basic scheduling hearings when we were partners. He’d have
the clerk redocket the case if he was delayed and couldn’t be there, even
if I was already at the courthouse for something else. He didn’t want
his clients to think that any other lawyer could be trusted with one
of Teddy Maxwell’s cases for even the most routine status report. Like
he was just so much better than anyone else. I was astonished, frankly,
to learn that he was letting you shadow him this summer. Because the
Teddy Maxwell I know works alone.”

“That about sums it up, doesn’t it,” I said, feeling the gin hit me on
top of all the beer I’d drunk.

She went on, not entirely successful in her attempt to reassure me.
“He might actually have seen you as a rival, Leo, ridiculous as that may
sound. So you shouldn’t be hurt. You should take it as a compliment
that he was too insecure to congratulate you.”

“What’s so ridiculous about me and Teddy being rivals?” I snapped.
She gave me an appraising glance, then looked away again, smiling
a strained nonsmile, old memories resurfacing. “So, Ellis Bradley. You
gave the closing. How’d it go?”

I pretended to quote myself, raising an arm and assuming an oratorical
style: “Ladies and germs, just because my client is a scoundrel
who cheated on his wife with her best friend and probably beat her
on any number of occasions, only not on this particular occasion, it
doesn’t mean he should go to prison.”

“You didn’t.”

“And I found this great case from 1865 saying rape isn’t rape if
she’s your wife, unless the marriage was fraudulent. I don’t know how
Teddy missed that in his research. I hammered that idea pretty hard.”
I shrugged. “I’m not Teddy. I’m not even me yet. As a lawyer, I mean.
The jury’s still out. Literally. They resume tomorrow. That closing may
well turn out to be the last thing I’ll ever get to do for Teddy, or so
I keep thinking, and I can’t shake the feeling that I screwed it up. So,
basically, I’m a wreck.”

“Well, maybe not the last thing. You can figure out who tried to
kill him.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

She went on: “If he lives, Teddy’s going to seriously depend on you.
On us all, for just about everything, and I’m not talking about rides
to the doctor. I mean eating, going to the bathroom, dressing himself,
learning how to talk again. I’ve had a couple of clients with similar
injuries. It’s a long, long road, and you never get back to where you
started.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said, trying to cut off the thought of
my brother needing help for basic everyday chores. “I can’t imagine
him depending on me or anyone.”

She spoke sharply. “You can’t imagine him depending on you? Or
you can’t imagine being there for him?”

I waited until I was sure I could control my voice, and then I said,
“I owe him. Is that what you’re telling me? For all those years he was
stuck with me? All those years you were stuck?”

She shook her head. “I’m not saying that. It’s just that this is going
to be very, very hard for all of us, no matter what happens.”

After a pause I asked, “You think Teddy’d be pissed at me for giving
up that list of his clients?”

“Yes,” she said after consideration. “But it was still the right thing
to do.”

“Tanya thinks the cops just want an excuse for harassing the clients.
She probably has a point. They see them all as scumbags, getting away
with murder. So why not use this as an excuse to do some mopping up?”

“Detective Anderson, you said?”

“He’s the one I’ve been talking to.”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a
bell.”

Her glass was empty again. She sat looking at it for a moment, then
stood, got the gin bottle from the freezer, and brought it back to the
table.

“Since the police were so interested in his clients, I figured I might
as well take a look at some of the old files,” I said. “Ricky Santorez,
for instance.”

“He’s still in prison,” Jeanie said quickly. “Out at San Quentin. They
got him on a parole violation.”

“I wasn’t thinking Santorez did it. Or any of Teddy’s clients. What
I’m thinking is more along the lines of witnesses, victims. Someone
he humiliated on the witness stand, someone who feels Teddy screwed
them out of justice.”

“Someone with connections,” she said, picking up from me without
missing a beat. “There was both a shooter and a driver, right? It was well
planned, well executed. If I were on the outside looking in, I’d say it was
a drug hit, but Teddy doesn’t represent drug dealers. Except Santorez.”

“You said earlier that this looked like a shooting meant to send a
signal to someone. What were you thinking?”

“You remember that S-and-M homicide a month ago,” she said.

“That’s a case of his.” She paused, then frowned. I wondered what was
going through her mind. “Teddy had a meeting scheduled a week ago
Wednesday with someone from the DA’s office. His client was supposed
to finger the killer and receive immunity. But the client didn’t show
up. He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.”

That would have been about the time of Teddy’s argument with
Car in the stairwell during the Bradley trial. “Who was the client?”

“Keith Locke. Dad’s a big-time cancer researcher at UCSF; mom’s
a professor of some sort. Keith must be in his late thirties now, kind of
a grown-up idiot child. Teddy represented him, what, eight years ago
on a charge of oral cop on a minor. He was caught giving cunnilingus
to a sixteen-year-old girl on a bus-stop bench at 4 AM Christmas
morning. Wearing a Santa hat. The girl didn’t want to testify but they
had him cold. We made it go away.

“Anyway. Two weeks ago, down in a parking lot near Candlestick,
middle of the night, Keith was trying to push this grown man’s body
over the side of a Dumpster when a San Francisco police car pulls up.
Cue spotlight, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. The
body was this Stanford professor, Marovich. Young guy, good-looking.
Made a career writing sociological papers about his sex life. He had
a cord around his throat and plenty of other marks, as well. Like he’d
been sexually tortured.

“Turns out that Keith’s place of employment is the Green Light, that
sex club downtown. Closed down now, of course. The police raided
it a week after he was arrested.

“Keith calls up his esteemed lawyer and says, ‘Mr. Maxwell, I did
not commit murder, I was just stupidly trying to cover up this terrible
accident, won’t you please help?’ And Teddy says, ‘Give them the real
killer and you walk away.’ Teddy sets up the meeting, then does some
fancy dancing, and gets Keith out on bail.”

“So who was he going to finger?”

“I don’t know. Teddy does, presumably, but he and Keith weren’t
talking to anyone until Keith had those immunity papers in front of
him. And Teddy certainly wasn’t going to violate that kind of confidence
with me.”

“So you think the person who killed Marovich tried to have Teddy
murdered to send a message to Keith?” It sounded pretty dubious.

“It’s a theory. It’s more than I should have told you and more than
Teddy should have told me. And the key points in that little bedtime
story are covered by attorney-client privilege. The privilege belongs
to the client, not the attorney, so it doesn’t matter that Teddy violated
it. You’d have to get Keith’s permission to reveal any of what I just
told you to the police.”

“I know about attorney-client privilege,” I told her.

She didn’t acknowledge the edge in my voice. “But to get Keith’s
permission you’d have to find him, and that almost certainly means
dealing with his family. They might even be hiding him. Teddy hates
dealing with those people. He had some way to reach Keith before all
this came to a head, but I doubt he wrote it down.”

Something clicked in my brain. “You were going to turn this place
upside down looking for a phone number,” I said.

Her voice came out hoarse. “Like I said, I doubt he wrote it down.
Doesn’t mean I can’t look.”

“It just seems far-fetched to me.”

“Fine.” She downed the rest of her drink. “You tell me what happened.”

And then she was crying, sloppy Jeanie crying into the dregs
of her martini. She wiped her eyes. “I just had to think of a reason to
come up to the house tonight, to be here. I thought it would make
me feel better, but it doesn’t. It makes me feel miserable. God, Leo, I
don’t think I can stay a minute longer.” She put her hand on mine and
said woozily, “Are you sober?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“Bring the gin.” She went back to the master bedroom and closed
the door behind her. Then I heard the bathroom door shut.

When Jeanie came out a moment later she’d washed her face and
pulled her hair back into a ponytail, but her eyes were still teary. With
a laugh she held her keys in front of her face, and when I reached for
them she pulled them behind her back and kissed me again, this time on
the cheek. “You’re sweet,” she said. “You’ve always been sweet to me.”

I grabbed the keys and put a hand behind her back to steady her,
but with a toss of her head she stepped away. I turned off the lights
and checked the sliding glass door, but I didn’t see any immediate sign
of what she might have been doing in the bedroom, if she’d taken the
opportunity to look for something. She grabbed her glass, tucking the
gin bottle under her arm, and we went out to her car. I was grateful to
see that she drove a Volvo now. I figured my chances of getting pulled
over in the Volvo were a lot lower than they would have been in the
little Lexus she used to drive.

“Where am I taking you? Home?”

“No, God. I’m not ready to go home. Just drive. Head up Pinehurst.”

She poured more gin into her glass.

At Pinehurst I turned right, heading up the valley. The towering
redwoods gave way to intimate crookings of moss-hung oak and laurel
as the hillsides steepened and drew closer to the road. The road made a
switchback, the headlights shining on a crumbling rock face, then into
the tops of the trees on the mountainside beneath the road.

A last steep rise caused the Volvo’s engine to race; then we crested
the hill and turned left onto Skyline Boulevard. On the downhill side
of the road only the garages of the houses were visible; the rest of the
houses were beneath road level on the steep slope. Above the garages
the lights of Berkeley and north Oakland glimmered. I thought wistfully
of cycling. It would probably be a long time before I pedaled
this route again.

I pulled over on the next curve to take in the view. The fog had
enveloped San Francisco. Above its roiled ceiling, which seemed to
have more definite substance than the water below, the devil-horned
prong of Sutro Tower and the tip of the Transamerica Pyramid were
visible. The Bay Bridge emerged from the fog like a sleeper’s outflung
leg. Nearer but startlingly far beneath us, Oakland’s shabbiness was
partly redeemed by height and distance. At the port near the bridge
terminus, shipping cranes stood like vigilant sentinels, bathed in yellow
orange light.

Beside me Jeanie meditatively drank.

“What were you looking for in the bedroom?” I asked.

Her reply came after a long delay. “I wasn’t looking for anything.”

“Everyone in this case seems to be looking for something. Everyone
except me.”

I could have pushed harder, but I didn’t want to tell her about my
confrontation with Car, or Teddy’s letter and how I’d agonized over
mailing it, or the women at the residence hotel.

“I wonder if you’ve seen this.” From my pocket I took out the copy
of the hand-drawn map I’d found in the Santorez file.

Her shoulders jerked as she took it, an involuntary movement between
a shudder and a shrug. “So this is your theory, huh? This loser
bides his time for four years waiting for his opportunity, then shoots
Teddy in about the most public way you could imagine?”

“It’s worth checking out, don’t you think?”

“Car checked it out four years ago. The guy got all this information
from public records. He’s just a loser, one of these rent-a-cop types
with an off-the-lot Crown Vic tooled up at Radio Shack. What Car
did is he started following the guy, spying on him, sending little love
notes detailing his personal movements. Then he paid him a visit. Car is
very, very good at having difficult conversations with difficult people.”

“How’d Teddy hook up with Car, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” she said, instantly withdrawing. “Found him in the
phone book, I guess.”

Again I didn’t push. I’d decided not to mention Car’s theory about
police involvement in the shooting. Something told me that even he
didn’t believe it.

With one last glance at San Francisco, the spires floating higher now
on their pillow of clouds, I put the Volvo into gear and slid noiselessly
back onto Skyline. Beside me Jeanie gave a snort, then jerked awake.
It was after midnight, and it would soon be too late for me to make
it back on the BART. But Jeanie was in no shape to drive, and there
was no question of leaving her at Teddy’s. So I did the gentlemanly
thing and drove her home to Walnut Creek.

We followed Skyline down through Joachin Miller Park to the Warren
Freeway, which I took north to Highway 24 and the Caldecott
Tunnel. I kept the cruise control at sixty-five and gripped the wheel
with both hands, watching for CHP, trying to convince myself that
my sweating nervousness was fear of being pulled over rather than
that near kiss on top of the memory of that long-ago, completed kiss
and my sorry history of wanting Jeanie. I couldn’t relax until she fell
asleep before the tunnel.