Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  In the morning I rose as cottony and frustrated as if I’d really spent all night failing to make love.

  I drank a cup of coffee and showered, then found the Rabbit and drove to the hospital. Jeanie was gone, thankfully, but the room was filled with signs of her presence: an old cup of coffee, a cardigan sweater, a fat paperback spread facedown on the floor.

  As I came in, my phone rang in my pocket: one of my biking buddies, a law school classmate, no doubt calling to see if I wanted to ride with him. I switched off the phone and pocketed it.

  The bandages still covered the upper half of Teddy’s face. I found myself longing for a sight of his eyes, fighting an urge to peel back the tape. Still his chest rose and fell, rose and fell with the sighing of the machine. They’d turned on the bed’s automatic tilt function, and with a mechanical whirring it shifted his position every few minutes, tilting him to the left five degrees, then center, then to the right, then back to center again.

  I felt relieved now that I hadn’t slept with Christine. Sitting by my brother’s bedside, I felt bad enough about the kiss.

  The nurse had told me to talk to him. “Teddy,” I said. “I’m going to find the people who did this to you, and I’m going to make them pay.” Hearing myself, I blushed so deeply that sweat sprang out on my scalp. What else was I supposed to say? That I loved him? I could never say it aloud, and I’m sure he didn’t want to hear that.

  I wondered whether anyone had told him about his situation. That was the one thing he would want to hear, how bad it was. I took a breath and leaned in close, summoning my voice from my chest. “Teddy,” I said. “You got shot in the head. We don’t know who did it. You’ve got pretty bad damage, but it might be possible to recover and have some kind of life. The doctors say you’ll probably never practice law again and that you’ll have all sorts of problems with memory and thinking. You’re never going to be the person you were. That’s a hard thing to hear but I know you’d want to hear it. You’d want to know how bad it was.”

  I took a deep breath, gathering myself, then went on. “I’ll be here for you, if it comes to that. If you want to live, I’ll be here every step of the way. Because you were there for me, and I’ll never forget it. I’m sure I won’t be perfect, but neither were you. And if you want to die, if you want to let go, I understand. Go ahead if that’s how you feel. It’s your choice, and none of us would blame you for it. But if you want to live, we’re here for you. Me and Jeanie.”

  I didn’t want Teddy to live because he was a fighter or because surviving was another challenge to overcome, the way Jeanie seemed to think of it. I wanted him to live because he believed he had something to live for. I wanted him to care about being there to see my career unfold, to care about me, to care about something other than himself, his lost work. But I couldn’t say that.

  When I looked up, Jeanie was there, standing just outside the doorway. I could see by the way she was looking at me that she’d heard at least some of what I’d said. When our eyes met her face softened, and she came in and sat down, scooping the book up off the floor. “Are you trying to piss him off, make him want to live just to spite you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I hope it works. You crack the case?”

  “No.” I told her about the police focusing on Santorez and that the DA was supposedly putting an informant before the grand jury on Monday. She didn’t react with the outrage I’d expected. She just opened her book. I didn’t tell her about Martha or Christine or my visit with Greta and Gerald Locke, and I didn’t tell her that Lawrence was the DA’s informant.

  With Jeanie there every second ticked by palpably. Through her vigil she had established the hospital room as her territory, and to be there was to be under her eye.

  After half an hour I jumped up and started toward the door with an excuse about needing to do some research. “Good-bye,” Jeanie said, visibly disappointed, as if the length of my visits corresponded with my love for Teddy. By her standards, I owed him more.

  I agreed with her wholeheartedly, but I couldn’t bring myself to stay.

  ~ ~ ~

  I drove home and went back to bed with a beer and Christine’s thesis, which was titillating, but not nearly as titillating as going back to bed with Christine would have been.

  The first section was a not-so-brief history of prostitution in the Bay Area. She’d done her time in the library—that was clear. She’d dug up old newspaper articles, arrest records, and birth and death statistics, but her analysis relied mostly on other researchers’ published work. The second section was a picture of the current state of the city’s sex industry. For that section she had also conducted interviews with prostitutes and johns, prosecutors and cops, sex-worker advocates and defense attorneys.

  The last section was the only part of the thesis that attempted to live up to its title. Told in the present tense, the chapter narrated a week Christine claimed to have spent turning tricks. It was filled with lurid details and narrated in a tone of breathless confession, describing her supposed reaction to sleeping with a series of nameless men. I didn’t believe a word of it. Maybe it was just wishful thinking that a gulf lies between ordinary sexual fantasy and actually following through with it. The same might be said for crime, but that does not mean there are no criminals.

  I clipped my old bike onto a stationary trainer—basically a stand with a metal roller that provides resistance for the back tire—put on a movie, and rode hard for forty minutes, until the sweat poured off me. It was a poor substitute for the real thing, but for me exercise is like a drug, like medicine, and lately I’d missed too many doses.

  I took a shower, went to my computer, and found the number for the Cartwright Center, San Francisco’s largest nonprofit resource center for sex workers. Christine’s thesis had described the Cartwright as the leading resource for San Francisco’s sex workers, dedicated to bettering the lives of the women who filled its massage parlors and brothels or simply walked the street at night. I figured it would be open on the weekend. I told the person who answered the phone that I was a lawyer looking for some background information on a case involving an underage girl. She put me through to the social worker on call.

  The center kept a database on every brothel or suspected brothel in the city, the social worker told me. The Green Light had a permit as a social club, a venue for casual encounters between consenting adults—perfectly legal in San Francisco. However, many of the female club “members” had, in fact, been prostitutes. A number were undocumented. I asked if she knew who had put up the money for the Green Light. All I learned was that the name on the permits was Keith Locke. That was definitely useful.

  I thought about the money missing from Santorez’s client trust account. Keith, it seemed, had signed the commercial lease for the Green Light six months ago.

  Too many coincidences. Keith, Teddy, the missing money; Keith, Christine, Marovich. Maybe Marovich’s death was connected directly to my brother’s shooting, or maybe it was precisely the accident it appeared to be—an accident with consequences. If Teddy had stolen the money from Santorez and invested it in the Green Light, he would have been in serious trouble when the Green Light was raided and shut down.

  I typed Gerald’s name into the search engine and learned that he ran his own lab at UCSF, and that his research focused on the cellular mechanisms of cancer formation. He seemed to be at the top of his field; about the only thing he was missing was the Nobel Prize. A lot of people were missing that. I didn’t hold it against him. All three of his degrees were from Stanford, and he taught classes at the medical school.

  I called Christine. When she answered the phone she sounded like I’d woken her up. “Still in bed?”

  “Back in bed,” she said in a hoarse drone. “We row at six am.”

  “I wanted you to know that I’ve been thinking, and you’re right. Keith
never killed anyone, at least not at boarding school.”

  “That’s the reason you’re calling? I thought you were going to say you had the disks.”

  “Why’d your father lie to me like that?”

  She hesitated. “There’s a lot of history there, and most of it happened when I wasn’t old enough to have a clue. When Keith was a teenager. A lot of history, Leo.”

  “You showed me just about everything last night. We might as well drag out the family skeletons.”

  She sighed. “I don’t deserve to be spoken to that way, Leo. I woke up feeling pretty embarrassed about last night. I think I could actually like you.”

  “I like me, too. That’s something we can both agree on, and I’m glad for it, especially now that I know you would have turned me out of bed at six am.”

  “You could have gone on sleeping and waited for me to come back.”

  “Okay, maybe I could like you,” I admitted. “But I’ve got to say, I think this story you’re giving me about these videos is a load of crap. I just finished reading your thesis, and it also strikes me as crap. The last chapter especially. I’m not looking to deflate anyone’s literary ambitions here, but Jesus.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  I didn’t know if I was or not. I remembered Gerald Locke’s anger when I asked why he didn’t have any pictures of his daughter up in his office. “Tell me, didn’t Martha work at the Green Light?”

  Christine’s tone was suddenly wary. “I don’t know. She might have.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Did you do any research there?”

  “Call me when you’ve got the camera,” she said and hung up.

  ~ ~ ~

  I was beginning to feel that everyone was lying to me. I was paranoid, maybe, but it’s hard not to feel paranoid when you’re alone, isolated by a grief the world does not share, and out of your depth. Check, check, and check.

  If I was going to be lied to, I decided, I might as well be lied to straight from the source. It occurred to me that I needed to go to Santorez, look him in the eye, and hear him deny having my brother shot. I wasn’t so naive as to believe that I could tell if he were lying. Maybe Car could sniff out a liar, but I couldn’t. Still, I thought I would be able to tell something.

  My bubble of determination lasted only a few minutes. I figured out pretty quickly that there were no attorney visits at San Quentin during the weekend and that my chances of getting in to see Santorez during the week were slim.

  Suddenly I remembered what Christine had told me about Martha being arrested last night. From what Martha had said at the Seward, she knew something about the circumstances leading up to the shooting. If she was still in jail it would be easy to talk to her.

  It was a plan of action, anyway. It was better than sitting around my apartment smoking dope and playing Nintendo or riding my bike on the stationary trainer and trying not to think about Christine.

  I dressed in my suit and drove over to Teddy’s office to pick up what he called his “jail kit,” a canvas briefcase filled with all the things he liked to have with him when he met a client for the first time: legal pads, retainer agreements, waivers for release of medical records, cards for bail bondsmen, authorization forms, a digital camera, a preliminary interview sheet, a tape recorder, various court forms, and a copy of the penal code. I wasn’t about to sign Martha on as a client, but the jailers didn’t know that.

  While I was there I glanced at Santorez’s main file. On the inside cover Teddy had noted a cell number along with a recent date. He must have gotten the date wrong, I thought at first. It was against CDC regulations for prisoners to have cell phones, and they could be disciplined for being caught with one. It didn’t stop them.

  It was as simple as dialing. The phone rang three times before someone answered. “You a ghost?” a man’s voice asked, as if he didn’t actually care one way or the other.

  “Ricky Santorez?”

  “Or maybe what I should ask is, are you a good ghost or a bad ghost?” He sounded as cool as if he were stretched out on a recliner in front of a big-screen TV.

  “I’m calling to warn you that you’re going to be indicted sometime next week for attempting to murder my brother. I found this number in Teddy’s files, and I thought you deserved to know that the cops think you did it.”

  “Leo, right?”

  I was taken aback that he knew my name. “Right.”

  “You think I had your brother shot?”

  “If you didn’t, tell me who did.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “They’re bringing a witness before the grand jury tomorrow. I don’t know what he’s going to say, but the cops seem to think they’ll get the indictment.”

  “That’s not a witness. That’s a snitch.” There was a pause. “You know, one of these days you ought to come visit your father.”

  “Visit him?” The suggestion was like a slap in the face.

  “He must be getting pretty lonely over there in protective custody. He doesn’t get to see any of his old friends anymore. But if he had a visitor he could maybe get some air.” Some air between the ribs was what he meant. He seemed to know already that my father was the snitch. “He’s not such a bad guy, your old man. He’s made a life for himself in here. I don’t know what he’s looking forward to on the street. Without Teddy, there’s no one who gives a shit.”

  “Did my brother steal from you, Ricky?”

  “You showed a lot of respect calling me like this, not to mention a lot of balls. So I’m going to be straight with you, even though the truth isn’t exactly in my interest, know what I mean? I paid your brother the biggest retainer he ever earned, and the balance was supposed to come back to me on request. Your brother and I were having some ongoing conversations about that. It’s true, I have a big mouth. I blabbed about him owing me, he better pay me, all that shit. Plenty of people heard me talking like that, inside and out. But we were on good terms. It was going to get resolved. Now I’m guessing it ain’t.”

  “You’re going to need a good lawyer.”

  “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? Teddy told me you were waiting on your bar results.”

  I felt a flush of pride. If Santorez was trying to work me, he was pushing the right buttons. “I passed.” I hesitated. “I could handle the arraignment for you if you haven’t found a lawyer by then.”

  “It’s shooting your brother they’ll be arraigning me for, right? Know what I’m saying?”

  “There’s a potential conflict of interest, sure. You can sign a waiver form. You wouldn’t want me as the trial attorney on this one, not least because I’m likely to be called as a witness. You probably wouldn’t even want me on the preliminary hearing if there was going to be one, which there won’t if the DA gets the indictment. I’m just talking about the arraignment. There’s nothing substantive to be decided. You’re already incarcerated, so there’s no bail. You take a bus ride into the city, enter your plea, then they bus you back to San Quentin. What I’m thinking is how it would look for you in the press if I’m the one who says, ‘Mr. Santorez pleads not guilty,’ if I’m the one standing beside you, if I’m the one who goes out on the courthouse steps afterward and tells the press what bullshit these charges are and that the person who shot my brother is still at large.”

  “Man, you’re crazy.” He gave a laugh. “Guess I’m crazy, too. What kind of retainer we talking?”

  “I’ll do it for free. Pro bono. Not out of the goodness of my heart, either, but because I want to light a fire under the cops, get the press to realize that they’re going after the wrong man. And frankly, the publicity wouldn’t be half bad for me as I’m starting my practice.”

  I was playing a dangerous game. I thought Santorez was telling me the truth, but I couldn’t be sure.

  �
�Shit, man, it’s probably the cops who shot your brother. Because of what he did for me, the verdict in my case. Two for one. Knock Teddy off and at the same time make sure I never get out of San Quentin. I got two of theirs—you know they want revenge.”

  The pride in his voice made me feel sick to my stomach. “I’m working on that possibility,” I said, though I didn’t even know how to begin to run it down. “The grand jury will convene on Monday. The proceedings are sealed, which means no one but the DA, the witness, and the jurors gets to be in the room. If I hear anything about what happens I’ll give you a call.”

  “Yeah, holler at me. Just leave a message if I don’t pick up.”

  I gave him my cell phone number and told him to call anytime.

  “Don’t forget about what I said about coming to visit your pops,” Santorez told me in parting. “Honor thy father, that’s what the Bible tells. You got to make peace with the past.”

  The peace of the grave, is what I thought he meant.

  ~ ~ ~

  After pulling a parking ticket off the windshield, I fought inexplicable Saturday afternoon traffic down to San Bruno. All for nothing. After arguing with the deputy at reception I finally persuaded her to dig deep enough into her computer to determine that Martha had posted bail a few hours ago and been released. To me the implication was obvious: A pimp had bailed Martha out.

  I sent Christine a text message, asking for Martha’s address. A few minutes later she texted me back. The address was a second-floor apartment on Sycamore Street, an alley off Mission not far from the Sixteenth Street BART. People like Gerald Locke probably still thought of the Mission as dangerous, but it was pretty much like the rest of the city, now filled with trendy restaurants and coffee shops replacing bodegas and bars. It wasn’t the neighborhood that made me nervous. It was one thing to interview Martha behind bars, quite another to seek her out on her home turf, where she likely lived under the protection of a dangerous, violent man.