Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  If she’d been one of the girls at the Green Light, she would know what had happened to Marovich. Maybe she could tell me if it was an accident or if he was killed because he’d been researching sex trafficking. She’d been in my brother’s room waiting for Christine, and she needed to explain that, too.

  The entrance to her duplex was guarded by a metal grate. I rang. No answer. I pushed the grate, and it creaked loudly. I called hello up the stairs. Hearing nothing, I started up, my heels echoing on the bare wood. The door at the top was ajar.

  I paused at the open door, then stepped cautiously into the living room. A canvas wing chair was parked in front of the television, with an ashtray overflowing with butts on the floor beside it. In the next room an enormous jade plant towered above a green painted dining table. There was a smell of cat piss.

  I clicked my tongue, and a young energetic black cat appeared with a friendly chirrup from the bathroom. She arched her back and rubbed against my shin; as I bent to stroke her, my eyes settled on the string of rust-colored prints that trailed behind her, the four-toed impressions as clear as printer’s ink on the tiled threshold of the bathroom, fading across the rug.

  Her muzzle was wet. Smelling the ferric sweetness of whatever she’d been dipping into, I straightened. There was a streak of what looked like blood on my hand where I’d brushed her cheek. I stomped my foot wildly and she galloped into the dining room, continuing to trail an ever-fainter series of prints.

  I stepped forward. The bathroom window was half-open, revealing the hinged frame of a fire escape. More bloody cat prints came and went on the sill. Beneath the window lay the body of a young Asian woman—Martha.

  Her bathrobe had come open to reveal her breasts and a pubic bush like a tight snarl of thread. She’d been shot in the face at least twice, and the blood had pooled on the floor. Brains splattered the window frame. One eye was a hole and the other was squeezed through the socket, giving her a look of inconceivable surprise, but she hadn’t been surprised by the shot. She’d locked herself in the bathroom and had probably just gotten the window open to climb onto the fire escape when her attacker kicked in the door. She lay half-twisted against the tub, as if she’d been in the process of turning to face him when he pulled the trigger.

  On the counter by the sink a gun lay as casually as if it were a tube of toothpaste. The air was heavy with the mingled smells of gunpowder and blood, but the feminine odors of shampoo and incense lingered.

  I turned into the kitchen, just managing to make the garbage before I threw up the contents of my stomach in one long retching heave.

  After a while I went back to the bathroom and looked in again. This time the gun caught my eye. I recognized it as one of Teddy’s. The police had taken the one from Teddy’s bedside table, or so I assumed. That left the other one unaccounted for—the gun Car had taken away from me and locked in Teddy’s safe.

  Car.

  I suddenly felt very cold. The room began to spin. I fled the bathroom again and dropped onto the sofa. Take the gun and get out of there, my brain said, throw it off the fishing pier into Mission Bay.

  She couldn’t have been dead long. I forced myself to stand and walk back into the bathroom, lean over the pooled blood, and feel the arm that was flung up over the rim of the clawfoot tub. Not warm, but not cold. Not too many hours, probably, but I was no pathologist. I went back out to the kitchen sink, washed the vomit taste from my mouth, and scrubbed my hands. I went on washing them long after all traces of Martha’s blood had disappeared.

  I dried my hands on a dish towel, then searched the apartment halfheartedly, using the towel to open drawers in her dresser and in a desk that stood under the window in the bedroom, always with the sense that Martha could hear me going through her private things. But, of course, my secret observer was not Martha but the police, who would soon be here.

  One dresser drawer was filled with economy-size packages of condoms and lube. The rest of the drawers and one closet contained the most shocking assortment of sexual torture instruments I’d ever seen. There were collars and whips, elaborate harnesses, chains, batons, and a set of strange hooks connected through a system of elastic cords. It took me a moment to realize that these hooks were meant to be inserted in the skin. There were prods and dildos and just about every instrument of mingled pain and pleasure you could imagine.

  Incredible that no one had called in the gunshots, but maybe someone had. Maybe the police were on their way.

  I knew the gun had only my fingerprints and Teddy’s on it, and certainly not Car’s—I remembered him holding the gun by the edge of his shirt when he’d picked it up off the floor in Teddy’s office.

  I was going to need a lawyer. I should have dialed Jeanie, but something kept me from calling her: embarrassment, I guess, and also the dismal certainty that she wouldn’t believe me if I told her that I suspected Car.

  I still had Anderson’s card in my wallet. I don’t know what I was hoping for—a miracle of understanding, I guess.

  Anderson answered on the third ring.

  “It’s Leo Maxwell.”

  I heard the cries of seagulls and the throaty grumble of a marine engine.

  “Hold on.” The background noise faded. “You get your memory back?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve made a pretty grisly discovery. I’m in an apartment at the corner of Sycamore and San Carlos in the Mission. A woman’s been murdered.”

  The tone of his voice didn’t shift. “You’re the one who found her?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hold on.” I heard the static crackle of a radio and Anderson’s voice in the background saying something; then he came back on the line. “They’ll have someone there in less than ten minutes. Don’t touch anything. You didn’t touch anything, did you?”

  “No,” I told him in a hollow voice.

  “Well, don’t. I’m out fishing, but I’ll be there when I can. And you better be ready to tell me everything.”

  He hung up, and I sat on the couch, letting my head sink into my hands. I was still sitting that way when I heard sirens approaching from at least two different directions.

  As the police cars pulled to a stop outside I shook the tension from my arms and composed myself. Things began to happen very quickly. I heard feet clomping on the stairs, and a uniformed officer appeared with his gun unholstered but down at his side. He called for me to stay where I was and to keep my hands where he could see them.

  “She’s in the bathroom,” I said, and saw myself as he must have seen me, the killer caught red-handed, an angry boyfriend or john resigned to being led away in handcuffs.

  “I’m a lawyer,” I told him as he poked his head in the bathroom, then glanced back at me. “I came upstairs and found her.”

  Another uniformed officer came up the stairs and went through the dining room into the bedroom, his gun also drawn, checking to make sure the apartment was empty. Then he came back into the living room and told me to stand, face the wall, and place my hands against it. He frisked me, then brought down my arms one at a time and cuffed them behind my back.

  I’d never been cuffed before. The steel was cold against my wrists. “She was dead when I found her. I didn’t kill her.”

  Finally he spoke, but with great reluctance. “Come on, pal, it’s none of my business. You talk to me, I got to make a report. I make a report, and someone might decide they don’t like something that’s written there, and then it’s why the hell am I talking to the guy in the dead girl’s apartment? So do me a favor and keep your mouth shut until someone shows up who actually wants to hear it.”

  I kept my mouth shut, and they took me downstairs and put me in the back of a squad car. More squad cars appeared, jamming the alley along with an ambulance and a pair of unmarked Crown Vics. These had to be moved to make way for the ME van, piloted by the same two
guys who had shown up at the restaurant on Wednesday.

  By the time Anderson arrived an hour later I was relieved to see him. “I have to get someone to open this,” he said, and came back a moment later with the uniform who’d handcuffed me and put me in the car.

  “He said he didn’t do it,” the officer said as he opened the door. This was a joke to him.

  “You swab his hands?” Anderson asked the cop, who gave him a funny look.

  “Word was wait for you, so we waited.”

  “I’m taking him to Southern,” Anderson said. “We can do it there.”

  He didn’t speak as he maneuvered his unmarked car out into traffic. I tried to keep my mouth shut. I’d read enough police reports to be aware that it would be simple for Anderson to deliberately misconstrue my statements or put words in my mouth, if that was his intention. That’s why Teddy advised all his clients that they should never under any circumstances talk to the police. “No detective is your friend,” he would say. “If he’s acting like your buddy or your shrink, it’s because he’s trying to hang a felony on your neck.” To me he explained, “You’d be surprised how many clients will put their heads in the noose for a little human understanding. They’re guilt-ridden and afraid and they let themselves care what the cop thinks of them. They’re desperate for understanding and respect, and the detective’s the only person who can give those things to them, because the detective is the only person there. But the only way to get understanding from a detective is to confess.”

  Easy for Teddy to say. He never sat in the back of an unmarked police car under suspicion of murder. He was so used to dealing with guilty clients, it probably never occurred to him that the best way for an innocent man to clear his name is to talk. The need to somehow mark myself as different from all the killers who’d sat where I was sitting was too powerful to control, and as we turned off of Mission onto Bryant I said, “That was Teddy’s gun in there. At least it looks like the gun he used to keep in his office. If it is Teddy’s gun, it’s possible you’re going to find my fingerprints all over it.”

  “You wash your hands?” Anderson asked, like somebody’s mother at the dinner table.

  “Yeah. I petted her cat and got blood all over my hands from its fur. Fucking cat was lapping up the fucking blood.”

  “Too bad. See, if you hadn’t washed them, or if you’d said you hadn’t, we could have done the swab test, and if it comes up negative, that’s evidence you didn’t fire the gun. But since you say you washed them, a negative wouldn’t mean a hell of a lot. We can still do it, though. A lot of times people wash their hands but they don’t manage to get the residue off. A positive still works for us. Negative won’t do you much good, though.”

  The Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street houses both the criminal courts and the police department’s Southern Station, which serves as police headquarters. Anderson parked in the subterranean garage, and we took the elevator up to the fifth floor. I’d been up there a few times that summer to serve subpoenas for Teddy in the court liaison office at the end of the hall. Thankfully it was a Saturday and we had the elevator to ourselves—on a weekday it would have been packed with attorneys and cops, jurors and witnesses and defendants.

  Anderson walked straight ahead out of the elevator, seeming to take it for granted that I’d follow him, and I did. Much as I feared and distrusted this new pose of reserved silence, I believed that my fate depended on his believing me. Barely five months from the bar exam, I’d forgotten that there were such things as judges and juries and prosecutorial discretion, and that I was a lawyer and had the right to remain silent and the right to remain free unless I was placed formally under arrest. From the elevator we walked to a plain door with a frosted glass window. A placard above the door read homicide. We went in.

  The large office was filled with desks. Despite the open floor plan, the supportive square columns that alternated with the desks gave the room a claustrophobic effect. In the wall beside me were tinted windows looking into what I supposed were interview rooms.

  A few heads turned as Anderson led me into the one nearest the entrance. I was dressed more nicely than your average murder suspect; otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my presence. Another day, another murderer with a better than even chance of walking away, was probably what they were thinking. I’d seen enough cop shows to know that the interrogator always leaves you alone in the interrogation room to sweat and fidget and stare at your reflection while he drinks a cup of coffee and watches you from the other side of the glass.

  He left me alone, and I sweated. I fidgeted. I wriggled out of my coat but then was reluctant to drape it over the back of my chair, knowing that if I did I wouldn’t be able to stop worrying about it sliding off. I ended up just putting it back on again.

  The first thing Anderson did when he came back into the room was read me my Miranda rights. He got through them before he finished pulling out his chair, and he sat down heavily, as if making that recitation had been laborious. “I’ll talk to you,” I told him. “I’m the one who called you, for God’s sake. I told you driving over here that you might find my fingerprints on that gun. It looks just like the gun my brother kept in his office.”

  I kept insisting on this fact as if it exculpated rather than inculpated me.

  There was a knock on the door, and in walked a slender, graying man in jeans and a T-shirt with a name tag around his neck. No badge. Anderson told me to put my hands on the table. The man swabbed my hands with a pad and cleaned under my fingernails with a plastic scraper that screwed into a bottle of preservative. “I have a couple of toenails that could use some work,” I told him, but my hands were shaking. He turned to walk out, but Anderson stopped him and told me to remove my jacket and shirt.

  The so-called technician took my shirt and jacket away with the samples, leaving me there in my white T-shirt.

  Anderson had a notepad on the table before him. “Your brother have a permit for that gun?”

  I told him I didn’t know. “The last time I saw that gun was Thursday afternoon. I came back to Teddy’s office after court, and Teddy’s investigator, Car, was there with the lights off. He had Teddy’s wall safe open, and he’d taken something out of it—he wouldn’t show me what. He startled me, and I grabbed the gun from the drawer. He took it away from me and locked it in the safe. He was careful not to touch it. I don’t have the combination to the safe.”

  Halfway through this recital Anderson began shaking his head, and he capped his pen and set it on the table without writing a word. “Look, Leo. We could charge you now, but I was hoping you might give me your side of the story. You told me yourself, your fingerprints are on the gun. I want to help you get through this, but you’ve got to give me something to start the wheels turning. Give and take, Leo. Why not tell me what you were doing there at the apartment, to start.”

  “She was one of my brother’s clients. I was over at County Jail Five asking about her this morning. Deputy Lopez was kind enough to help me at the lobby window. Check with her. She’ll remember. I was a big enough pain in the ass.”

  Again Anderson wrote nothing. “So what happened when you got to the apartment?”

  “First check what I just told you, Detective. Deputy Lopez. Cee-Jay-Five. Call her up.”

  With a scowl he rose and went out. He was gone five minutes. I didn’t move a muscle.

  “You get through?” I asked him. I could see in his face that he had, but I wanted to hear him say it.

  “Yeah. For what it’s worth. Not much, in my book, but if it makes you feel better, sure, Lopez confirmed that you were a pain in the ass.”

  I told him about the street door being ajar, ringing the bell, getting no answer, and finally going upstairs, petting the cat, seeing the blood, and finding the body in the bathroom.

  “And you didn’t touch anything, and you didn’t know her
. That’s your story?”

  “I never saw her before,” I said, and flushed at this lie I hadn’t even known I was going to tell. “I touched her leg to see how warm she was. I puked in the garbage and washed my hands. I touched the cat.” I shrugged. “I poked through some of her things. Dresser drawers, desk drawers, her closet. A lot of curious stuff in there.”

  His brow furrowed. “You knew she was a prostitute before you went in there, right?”

  “Of course. I was going to try to get her to hire me as her lawyer.”

  “We have a witness that can put you and the victim together in your brother’s hotel room Wednesday evening. Cut the bullshit. I’d rather be fishing, believe me, but here we are, so stop beating around the bush. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Human sexuality is a mysterious thing. Believe me, working in this city, I’ve seen it all. It’ll all come out sooner or later. It always does.”

  I doubted that the front desk clerk had talked. I couldn’t imagine that guy remembering anything when the police were the ones asking the questions. Maybe it was him, though. Maybe Hamilton wasn’t his favorite founding father. He could have been a Benjamin Franklin man.

  Then I thought of the junkie with the dreadlocks who’d followed me downstairs, the one who kept trying to tell me about the case he’d caught and about all the magic Teddy would have worked for him. I could have been nicer to him, I supposed.

  “Okay, so I saw her before,” I admitted. “She was in Teddy’s room when I went there to look through his things.”

  He gave me a smile of perfect sweetness, as if he expected me to break down and confess.

  “I’ll tell you two things,” I went on. “One. Santorez didn’t shoot my brother. He had no reason to. I’ll be representing him at his arraignment, and I’ll be talking to the press afterward. That’s how confident I am that you’ve got the wrong man. Two. Car killed that girl. He shot her with the gun he took from Teddy’s office. What he didn’t count on was me being the one to find the body, and he definitely didn’t count on me coming clean, telling you the gun belonged to Teddy. He messed up there, and if you’re any kind of detective you ought to make him pay.”