My brother lay surrounded by equipment on all sides, his bulk covered by a doubled sheet. His head and eyes were thickly bandaged. An ooze of bloody fluid showed through the brown elastic overwrapping. A faint beard had grown on his neck and cheeks, and the skin underneath his stubble looked very pale. The respirator tube was in his throat rather than his mouth, connected to an accordionlike air pump on a stand beside the bed. The air smelled drily of disinfectant.
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 ex
actly 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.
Chapter 9
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.
I opened the pizza on Tanya’s desk. It was anchovy and sausage and mushroom, and the smell of cheese and oregano was strong. I hadn’t eaten since yesterday evening, but I felt no hunger until I lifted the first piece. I ate the whole thing so steadily that I kept having to pause to breathe. I drank three cans of beer very fast, without registering the alcohol except as a general loosening, an absence of fatigue. My brain felt sharp. I was ready to work.
With a fourth beer in hand I contemplated the filing cabinets. So much paper. The files were organized alphabetically by clients’ last names. My tentative plan was to go through them by date, starting with the open cases, working back from the present. Then I remembered what Car had said, insinuating that the cops were behind the shooting, and I felt that chill again, the rush of indignant disbelief.
The Ricky Santorez files were huge, taking most of an entire drawer, the documents haphazardly organized into binders and Redweld folders, the binders still exhibiting the chaos that takes over in the heat of trial: pages folded back, Post-it notes everywhere, and yellow sheets of hurried, incomprehensible notes in Teddy’s scrawl, nothing quite where it should be. The size of the file reflected the outsize space the case had occupied in my brother’s life.
The case went to trial the summer after my first year in law school. I should have been teaching summer school to pad my meager savings when I couldn’t find a paying legal job, but I’d decided instead to sit in the gallery with the reporters and the dozens of off-duty police officers who showed up in uniform each day for the jurors’ benefit.
Teddy was brilliant. He’d spent the better part of two years preparing. There was no substantial dispute about what had happened, the actual events. Santorez conceded that he had fired the shots that had killed Ser
geant Craig Espinoza and Officer Greg Davis. Espinoza was a twenty-year veteran, Davis a relative rookie. Both had left behind families.
The officers had been serving a search warrant in a drug case, but the address on the warrant was actually the address of the house next door. By the time the case went to trial, the police were claiming that Santorez was the intended target of the raid, but his name appeared nowhere on the warrant. To hear my brother tell it, the police broke down the wrong door. But by dumb luck they happened upon an ex-con drinking beer with an illegal assault rifle on the kitchen table in front of him, a man who’d learned in prison that the only response to violence was violence and who believed that the men breaking into his house could only be intent on murdering him.
According to the testimony of other officers on the scene, the officers announced themselves as police both before and after they broke down the door. Santorez testified that they’d said nothing, given no warning, and that Espinoza fired first, forcing him to defend himself. Under Teddy’s cross-examination, one of the surviving officers admitted that he did not remember hearing any officer call out until after the shooting started, though another officer remembered hearing Espinoza shout, “Police, hands in the air!” before the firing started. Santorez was wounded six times but lived. He was immediately returned to prison on a parole violation and would have to do time no matter what happened in the trial. The only question was whether he’d ever be able to get out.
I flipped through the trial binders. There were tabs for each of the DA’s witnesses with police reports, transcripts of Santorez’s parole revocation and preliminary hearings, and other prior statements for use in holding officers to the stories they’d told before, along with Teddy’s notes and outlines. Nothing here was unfamiliar to me. And none of it seemed useful in identifying whether any players in the Santorez case might have had a motive for killing my brother.
Bear is Broken Page 7
