How confused I was, how alone in my adolescent throes. And Teddy never spoke up, though he must have known what was going on, and there were times when a kind word or even a harsh one from him might have made all the difference. He did the best he could, or so I tell myself now, when there is no point in accusing him or myself any longer.
Thirty-six hours after the shooting, ten years after I had first met Jeanie, she was still beautiful: a few inches taller than me, big-boned, with wispy brown-blonde hair and a freckled face, and a way of looking you frankly and directly in the eye. Her attractiveness was not in any collection of features, and it would have been easy to make her sound plain, but to me and Teddy and others she was remarkable, amazing. It was all in her quickness, in her willingness to sting and then soothe the stung place, and in her intelligence, which always seemed to be working on some knotty problem, like she could solve me if she only thought hard enough.
“Have you been to the hospital yet?” I asked.
She pulled from our embrace, swiping at her eye with the back of her hand. “I’ve been in Mendocino. I didn’t get your message until this afternoon. I called the hospital, and they told me how serious it was. It was too late to go there, so I thought I’d come here. I saw the lights and I saw Teddy’s car, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”
It was a pleasure and affirmation to step away from her and remember that I was a man and not the child who’d decided long ago that he was in love with his brother’s girlfriend.
“I was hoping I might find something here that would help me understand what happened,” I said.
“It was just so public,” she said, like she’d been sitting on this thought during her whole drive, just waiting for someone to share it with. “Like they were trying to send a message.”
“You’re right.” I glanced around me. It would have been so very simple to shoot him here, follow him home one night from the BART and do it. “But a message to whom?”
She turned away. Suddenly she seemed nervous, tense. “Do you want a drink? I need one.”
I wasn’t about to turn her down, though I’d had plenty already. She’d left a canvas shopping bag by the front door. I followed her as she went to retrieve it. Inside was a sweating bottle of Tanqueray gin she must have taken straight from her freezer. Jeanie liked to drink, and sometimes she liked to get drunk. I suppose that’s what she had in mind.
She took down a pair of tumblers and poured two Jeanie Martinis, our old household term for ice-cold gin in a glass. Then she seemed at a loss. To sit at the kitchen table we had to clear away layers of junk mail.
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“Last week.” She tossed her head as if to clear it. “We’ve been talking all the time lately, actually. He calls me up late at night to chat about cases, throw ideas around. He keeps trying to talk me into coming back here to live with him, but we both know he’s bluffing.” She took a long drink of gin, then stared straight at me. “He’s going to die?”
“I don’t know. The nurse said his brain activity is minimal.” I hesitated, then said, “I keep wavering between hoping he’ll live and hoping he won’t. I mean, he’ll be a vegetable, won’t he? With his head half blown away?”
Her voice was stern. “I don’t think either of us can know that, Leo.” She was a Catholic, if a lapsed one, resistant to better-off-dead thoughts.
“I just can’t help feeling that Teddy wouldn’t want to live like that. What would he do without his work? Can you imagine him ever being forced to depend on anyone?”
“He’d want to live no matter what. Let’s not talk this way, Leo.”
She seemed tense and distracted, as if only one part of her mind was participating in the conversation, and she went through her first Jeanie Martini very quickly. I poured her another, then put the gin away in the freezer. It had been several years since I’d seen her sopping drunk, and I didn’t care to repeat the experience. Not under these circumstances. For both of our sakes, I wanted Jeanie to keep her dignity, which was considerable, given her stature in the criminal defense community.
“Who’s the detective on the case?” she asked.
“Anderson. You haven’t heard from him?”
She shook her head.
“He hasn’t been here, as far as I can tell. He wanted a list of former clients. I had Tanya draw it up, and I faxed it over to him this morning. I saw him in court this morning, but he didn’t stick around to talk.”
“Court?” She gave me a quizzical look.
“The closing statement in the Ellis Bradley case. They shot Teddy before he could give it. So rather than have the judge declare a mistrial and let the client cop a plea to put this all behind him, I stepped in and gave it.”
Her look deepened into an expression of worry and concern.
I was flushed, my cheeks getting hotter as I remembered how things had gone in court. “I got my bar results Friday. It’s okay.”
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 we
re 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?”
Bear is Broken Page 9
