Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  Beside me Ellis remained quiet. I’d meant to give him a pep talk before I let the deputies take him back down to holding, but as I gathered up my belongings I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him. If Sharla had lied, Ellis had probably put her up to it.

  “I sure as hell hope Sharla told the truth up there,” I said low enough not to be overheard.

  “You know she did.”

  “She better have.” It wasn’t him I was angry with. I could only be disappointed with Ellis, disgusted with him, even, but I couldn’t be angry.

  Ellis signaled that he was ready to go. “If I were you, Monkey Boy, I wouldn’t think too hard on it.” He didn’t meet my eyes. The deputy handcuffed him and led him out.

  Melanie was still standing at the prosecutor’s table. I picked up my copy of the investigative report and walked toward her, stopping when I was a few feet away. When she looked up, I threw it at her face. The pages fluttered, spread, and missed their mark, sailing over the railing into the gallery. Melanie opened her mouth but didn’t make a sound.

  For anyone keeping score, that was a criminal act. Third-degree assault.

  “Your brother was as big a criminal as any of his clients,” she said when I turned to walk out of the courtroom. “Suborning perjury is just the tip of the iceberg, from what I hear.”

  I thought better of leaving the investigative report lying around for anyone to find, and I scooped it up as I passed the spot where it had fallen.

  Melanie went on: “You all pretend that you’re serving the Constitution, but in reality you’re just in it for the thrill of helping criminals break the law.”

  I was too furious to respond. It was not something I normally would have done, throwing that document at her. It wasn’t typical behavior.

  In the hallway I thought about that argument I’d overheard between Teddy and Car. Could I have missed the fact that evidence was being manufactured under my nose? You have to fix this, Teddy had said. Was it that he didn’t think Sharla’s testimony would hold up?

  If Teddy had been crooked, he must have assumed I was naive enough not to catch wind of what was going on. This realization made me as angry as anything, if it was true.

  I went downstairs to the courthouse café for a much-needed coffee and croissant, which I carried out to City Hall Plaza. Straddling a concrete bench, I flipped through the Keith Locke file, holding my head to one side to avoid scattering crumbs over the pages. I skimmed the patrol officer’s account of spotting a suspicious vehicle in a lot near Candlestick and coming upon Keith Locke trying to maneuver the professor’s body into the Dumpster, then spotlighting him and arresting him without incident.

  The official cause of death was listed as asphyxiation due to strangulation from a cord that had been wrapped around his neck. The autopsy file confirmed what the newspapers had reported, that before his death Marovich appeared to have been sexually tortured. Bruises at his wrists and ankles showed he’d been bound. There was a picture that looked like it came from a book jacket: a man in his thirties, well built, with a broad smile. As part of his workup for the case Teddy had compiled a profile of the victim, including a list of academic publications and a CV. The professor’s credits included a paper on the local S-and-M community and another on the illegal sex trade. On his CV Marovich indicated that his current research was an investigative report examining San Francisco’s role in the international sex trafficking market.

  A shadow fell across the file folder, and I looked up to see Detective Anderson. He stood with his arms folded and a grin on his face, as if we were friends or neighbors running into each other on the wrong side of town. I closed the folder and tucked it under my arm.

  “You fucked up my crime scene,” he said without altering his grin. “You were in your brother’s house.”

  “So you really are a detective.” I threw the heel of my croissant to the pigeons, who fell on it with a flurry of dipping heads and slapping wings. “I was surprised you hadn’t been there yet.”

  “Every investigation has its priorities.”

  I thought of the phone messages on Teddy’s voice mail. “You mean you’re harassing my brother’s former clients and dragging them into jail on flimsy pretexts.” The phone was probably ringing again as we spoke, the mailbox filling up if it wasn’t filled already.

  “I’m on my way to court to testify in another case. I just saw you sitting here and I thought, Hey, maybe I should come over and apologize for the way I acted the other day. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “Why apologize?”

  “Because a murder victim is a murder victim is a murder victim.”

  “He’s not dead yet. In any case, apology accepted. Any developments?”

  “Look, no more bullshit. You and I both know what your brother’s game was.”

  “I don’t. I really don’t.” I gazed over his shoulder toward the gold dome of city hall.

  “You know,” he repeated. “You’ve got it right there beside you.” He nodded down at the investigative report from the DA’s office. “And so do I, and so does everyone who knows anything in this town. Your brother bought witnesses, bribed jurors, fabricated evidence. Not just in one case, but in a lot of them. He was about as crooked as a lawyer can be, and devious as hell, so we’ve never managed to catch him at it. He and that investigator of his have been pulling this shit for years, and it’s only recently that the DA’s office has started to get on top of them.”

  I could only go on gazing over his shoulder. “You actually believe this nonsense?”

  “What I believe doesn’t matter. The question is, did your brother’s clients believe it? Way I see it, once a lawyer gets a reputation like that—and sure as shit your brother had it even if he was clean as a whistle—he better understand that every new client is going to expect that A-one service. And when they don’t get it, pow.” He made a gun of his thumb and forefinger and shot it off toward the Asian Art Museum.

  “These allegations were bullshit when the DA filed that state bar complaint after the Santorez case, and they’re bullshit now.” I pulled out my wallet and unfolded the copy of the hand-drawn map I’d showed Jeanie last night. “You must have seen this. In a file of death threats in the Santorez folder.”

  The detective didn’t even look at the map. “This nut job didn’t shoot your brother. It was a hit. That pretty much rules out anyone who isn’t in the game. And guess what?” He flicked the creased copy with his index finger. “This guy wasn’t.”

  “You don’t think it’s worth checking out?”

  “Not when this department’s refusing overtime. We’ll find the killer on the client list, you’ll see. Some disgruntled player who thought he should be getting a whole lot more for his money.” The detective started to walk away as if I’d been wasting his time.

  “Detective, you don’t really think that my brother could have gotten away with a scheme like that, do you?”

  He stopped. “Kid, it should be pretty obvious by now that he didn’t get away with it.”

  I sipped my coffee, watching the pigeons fight over the stub of croissant that remained. One carried it about fifteen feet, but none of them could manage to swallow it. One bird would pick it up, then drop it, and the others would flock around again.

  I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I realized. I was going to have to listen to those phone messages.

  Chapter 11

  It was nearly one o’clock. I had a headache and my stomach felt queasy. As I walked, I thought about what Melanie had said to me. I kept at a simmer for six blocks before I was able to admit to myself that she was right, at least partially. When you got down to it, all the trial lawyers I knew—all the good ones—were in it not for the righteous purpose of defending the Constitution but for the power a skilled lawyer has over a hostile witness, the power to make a person
say the opposite of what he intends, the power to sway jurors’ minds, the thrill of being the center of attention. He’s somewhere between the quarterback who throws the winning pass, the stage actor with an audience hanging on every word, and the gambler who puts his chips on red. The deadly serious game of it is what my brother loved, and I’d caught the bug from him.

  I heard the phone ringing in the empty office as I got off the ele­vator. The ringing stopped as I put my key in the door. I went in, shrugged off my jacket, and lay down on the couch. I closed my eyes, willing the world to shrink until there was nothing left but my head on the cushion. In the other room the phone resumed its ringing. My eyes snapped open.

  I rose, went into the other room, put on Tanya’s headset and hit answer. “Lawyer’s office.”

  “Teddy, thank God. They taking me for a ride.” The man let out an incredulous laugh. “They telling me you was dead. Everybody been saying it.”

  “Teddy was shot two days ago. He’s not dead, but he’s not going to be making any court appearances anytime soon, either. This is his brother, Leo.”

  There was a pause. I could hear him breathing deep and slow through his mouth.

  “Are you a client?” I asked.

  He let out a held breath. “They got me in the parking lot after work, right in front of my boss. Been asking all sorts of questions.”

  “Tell them you won’t speak without your lawyer present. Tell them you want a public defender.”

  “Nah, man, I don’t want no public pretender.”

  “Let me take down your name and jail number.”

  I wrote down the caller’s information. Alan Davis. I promised to call a lawyer I knew at the public defender’s office and explain the situation. There were likely a whole lot of other clients of Teddy’s picked up. “They’re looking for someone to take down for what happened to Teddy. Whatever you do, don’t talk to anyone, don’t trust anyone.” The San Francisco police were not above building a case on the bartered lies of a jailhouse snitch.

  I wished him good luck and cut off the call, then went to the file cabinets, found his file, and opened it to the summary sheet: a murder case from five years back, with an assortment of lesser included charges, and a more recent burglary conviction. I paged through the trial binder to the copy of the verdict form, where Teddy had neatly checked “Not Guilty” four times.

  Returning to the chair, I accessed the voice-mail system. There were thirty-two new messages, and I listened to them all. It took more than an hour. Some had left names, some hadn’t. Occasionally there was just breathing followed by a click. Others were rambling monologues. White voices, black voices, Asian voices, Hispanic voices, men and women, educated and not, straight and gay, the whole human spectrum. Some of the callers were in custody; some had been questioned; others had found out about the shooting in the paper or on TV. All knew what had happened but hadn’t believed it and felt compelled to call. I wrote down each name along with any details provided. The line rang once more while I was working. I let it go to voice mail.

  When I had finished listening, I went to the cabinets and started pulling files. I doubted that anyone connected with Teddy’s killing would have called the office; on the other hand, maybe the killers had calculated I’d make precisely this assumption. For lack of a better system, I sorted the files I pulled according to the type of crime involved: crimes of passion, crimes of violence, sexual assault and domestic violence, white-collar, and property crimes. There was a whole stack of prostitution cases. Teddy had started out representing hookers, and so-called B cases remained a mainstay of the practice.

  I scanned the files for names on my list. My arms were full as I flipped through the L-M-N drawer, and I almost missed it. Then I saw the name Lawrence Maxwell on a much-handled, begrimed, and faded series of Redweld folders. They took up more than half the drawer.

  My father was in prison for murdering my mother. Knowing our background, most people would find it hard to believe that Teddy and I would devote our lives to defending people accused of crimes. To an outsider my brother and I must have seemed natural-born prosecutors.

  I bent down to set a stack of files on the floor. My hands shook.

  There is a scene in every Hollywood depiction of domestic abuse where the elder son jumps between the father and the mother and stops what is happening, but in real life I doubt it happens more than one time in a dozen. Over the summer I’d gotten the uneasy feeling that Teddy despised all victims and that this moral cauterization served him well in his work. Anyone inquiring into root causes would have to conclude that such a failure of empathy must have been born in the experience of watching our mother’s bullying at our father’s hands.

  From the files it was obvious that they’d been in close contact, that Teddy had visited him at San Quentin numerous times over the last decade. Perhaps he’d meant to spare me by hiding his legal work on our father’s behalf. In retrospect, I ought to have guessed.

  The entire record of our father’s trial was before me, three Redweld folders filled with transcripts, evidence logs, and docket sheets. And pictures. My God, pictures.

  I didn’t mean to look at them—I didn’t look at them—but even flipping through them in a hurry I couldn’t help glimpsing a particular piece of scroll-worked wainscoting above the threshold between the hall and the foyer of the Sunset District house where we’d lived when we were still a family. It was at the very top left-hand edge of a photograph taken by a police photographer who’d been standing at the back corner of our living room, looking toward the front door. I willed myself to see nothing, and then I was past the photographs and back onto safer ground, but it was too late: I might as well have looked at them. The glimpse of wainscoting was enough to bring it all flooding back, maybe worse than if I’d actually looked at the pictures of Caroline’s body laid out on the floor where my father had finally managed to beat the life out of her, and where I would find her one afternoon when I came home from school.

  Save that. Leave it for later. It does no good to describe these things, no more good than it would have done me to look at those pictures or not to look at them, once I knew they existed.

  I flipped through the other folders. Almost as soon as Teddy got his California bar number he’d taken over our father’s appeals, which were voluminous. My father had never stopped protesting his innocence. Teddy had also filed a civil rights lawsuit after Lawrence lost his left eye to an infection that the prison medical system had left untreated. In that case he’d negotiated a settlement for forty thousand dollars. There was a new-looking folder marked “notes for habeas corpus petition.”

  I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there with the files spread out before me when the shock gave way to anger. My hands shook; my veins filled with poison. I might have been fifteen again, squinting at microfilm, stewing in rage, imagining how it might feel to kill my father, to beat him to death the way he’d beaten Caroline. If I’d learned of my brother’s efforts on Lawrence’s behalf while he was still whole in body and mind, Teddy could at least have tried to justify himself, explaining his reasons for what he did.

  If he even felt he owed me an explanation, that is. I remembered the letter that Car had tried to hide, the one Teddy had left in the safe to be mailed in case of his incapacitation or death. I still couldn’t imagine what it said, and I felt even more of a coward for not opening it. I should have been left a letter. I was the one who deserved an explanation, not our father.

  I had no desire to look at the original trial record, with its promise of a lurid trip into the abscess at the center of my life. I shut that file and put it in a drawer of Tanya’s desk. That left the civil rights case and the folder labeled “notes for habeas corpus petition.” I put the first aside, since that old, closed civil case was unlikely to be relevant to what had happened.

  Paging through Teddy’s handwritten notes, I
understood that he intended his argument to rest on the idea that the DA had unlawfully withheld evidence suggesting that someone else might have killed our mother. Teddy had no definite proof of our father’s innocence, but his argument raised the specter that the police had arrested, the DA had prosecuted, and the jury had convicted the wrong man.

  I had to throw down the brief and pace the office for several minutes until I was able to see what was in front of me again. Cheap defense-lawyer bullshit was all it was, and for a quarter of an hour I shared the visceral, principled contempt that a champion of justice like Melanie had acquired for Teddy and all the rest of us, the whole sordid guild.

  At last I was calm enough to return to the file. Teddy’s argument for reopening the case was that new evidence had come to light. There was an unsigned draft of an affidavit in Teddy’s handwriting indicating that the affiant had once worked in the San Francisco Police Department property room and that, according to old records, there had once been evidence that another man had been in the apartment with my mother the day of her murder—fingerprints on a beer bottle, blood spatters on the wall, and semen from our mother’s body—but the evidence had either been lost, destroyed, or withheld. There was another affidavit from Teddy stating that none of the exculpatory evidence had come to light at trial or had ever been disclosed to the defense.

  Again I had to get up from the desk. Everything here stank, like Sharla’s testimony in Ellis’s trial. The problem was not that Teddy had drafted the affidavit—lawyers regularly did so, but rarely before they knew the name of the affiant.

  My head was reeling. I couldn’t think straight.

  Glancing up, I saw that it was just after four o’clock, which meant that Ellis’s jury was being sent home for the weekend. I felt a shock of surprise, followed by elation. The jurors had not reached a verdict, or the court would have called. If they couldn’t decide on a verdict before the weekend, there was a good chance they wouldn’t be able to reach one at all.