Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  I was starting to feel bad about last night, the kind of guilt that gnaws at you. Not that Christine had meant anything to Teddy, or he to her. I knew there was only trouble at the end of this road.

  A few more chimes of Christine’s phone circled us through the Sunset. Then we ended up on the Great Highway heading north along Ocean Beach.

  “Those pictures you mentioned last night,” Christine said. “It’s true, I’ve seen them, but Teddy didn’t show them to me. They were in a drawer in my mom’s office, and I found them snooping when I was a kid. Keith told me the whole story about ten years ago. He said I was old enough to know the truth. The truth according to Keith Locke, that is.”

  “Ten years ago?” Keith’s choice of a lawyer must have been no coincidence; he must have known who my brother was before he sought him out. “But you didn’t believe him.”

  “It’s very convenient for Keith to believe that my father is the villain of all villains rather than face responsibility for his own crummy life.”

  “Now you’re beginning to sound like your father.”

  “Teddy’s basically got the same complex as Keith. He doesn’t want to believe that your father murdered your mother, just like he’d never believe that the people closest to him, the people he trusted more than anybody else, could have betrayed him. For such a cynical person, he was very, very trusting. But that’s probably what happened, if what you’re telling me is true. Tanya must have either shot him or gotten him shot.”

  There was an eerie certainty to her voice. “You sound a lot more sure than I am,” I said.

  “Just don’t swallow one of Keith’s conspiracy theories the way Teddy did. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “How can you be so certain I’m right and Tanya was behind the shooting? Did Teddy tell you something?” My voice became shrill. “Have you been holding something back?”

  “No, I’ve told you everything.” She stared out the window. “It’s just the logical conclusion. And I don’t blame Teddy for what he was trying to do to my father. I kind of liked screwing someone who was out to screw my family.”

  Her cool rationality was almost convincing. Almost. Yet last night when she was drunk she hadn’t been able to hear her father’s name.

  “Come on, Christine. Very little of what you’ve told me has turned out to be true. Look at what’s happened to Marovich, Teddy, and Martha. The only thing that connects the three of them is you. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. You’re going to have to explain yourself at some point. I want to help you out of whatever mess you’re in. But you have to talk to me.”

  Her voice was a knife. “You just don’t want to believe that Teddy could have betrayed your little cult of hating your father.”

  We crossed the west end of Golden Gate Park below the Cliff House and continued north on the Great Highway toward Sutro Heights and Point Lobos. I wondered what the idea behind the telephone directions was. The messages added an element of surprise, but if anyone was trying to follow us he would have had an easy time of it.

  “He wants to meet out here?” I asked as the Great Highway climbed onto the cliffs at the end of Ocean Beach. I didn’t like that at all.

  She didn’t answer.

  Something made me say, “I’m not the only one who has seen those videos, just in case you’re wondering. I got them from Car.”

  When she spoke again her voice was calm, not with indifference but with serious concern. “Has anyone else seen them?”

  “Why don’t you tell me whom you’re protecting?”

  “Where are the disks now? At your place?”

  “You would have found them if they were, I’m sure. Tell me why you want them.”

  “I just want them, that’s all. You made a deal with me—now you have to hold up your end.”

  “I told you last night the deal is off.”

  “You don’t have all of the disks,” she said, and smacked the glove compartment. “Jesus. You’re missing one, and that one’s the only one that matters. You think you’re holding all the cards, but you don’t have shit.” She turned to me and shook her head in disbelief.

  “So Car has it,” I said after a pause.

  “Maybe Teddy destroyed it. You knew you didn’t have it. You knew the whole time.”

  “Don’t you realize that those other videos that you don’t even care about probably got Martha killed?”

  “I thought Tanya killed her,” Christine said. She wasn’t responsible for anything, and nothing was her problem.

  “When Teddy told you what he was planning with that habeas brief, you really were glad?”

  “Fuck Gerald,” she said. “Whatever my father gets is less than he deserves.”

  She sat wedged against the door with her shoulders hunched, turned so drastically away from me that she might have suffered from a spinal deformity—the outward expression of how her hatred for her parents had crippled her.

  Crippled her, crippled me. But fuck Lawrence, I found myself thinking. Hatred was survival; that’s what I’d learned, and that’s what I knew. With my father on the cusp of freedom, I once again clung to the belief that my anger made me strong.

  I pulled as directed into the parking lot on the west side of Fort Miley above Seal Rocks Beach, just south of Lands End. The beach was two hundred feet below; we were atop the cliffs. A guardrail rimmed the parking lot. On the other side of the rail was a row of pole-mounted binoculars, like mouthless faces. Christine’s phone chimed again.

  “He wants you to go down the path to the left. I’m supposed to wait.”

  “I thought the whole point was that you were coming with me.”

  “I guess the parking lot is far enough. We can leave. You’re the one who was so hot to talk to him.”

  “We’re staying,” I snapped, though I knew I might be walking into a trap.

  “Can you leave the keys at least so I can listen to the radio while I’m stuck here waiting for you?”

  I left the keys. As I walked away from the car, looking for the path, my cell phone rang. I glanced back at Christine, saw her absorbed in the radio dials, then turned my back to the wind, and answered the call. It was Santorez. “I got my court hearing this afternoon. I couldn’t believe it, but that’s what they said. They’re rushing this thing along. One thirty, Department Twenty-two. You gonna be there, or should I have my boys call someone else?”

  He made even that sound like a threat, or perhaps it was just my fear coupled with what I’d put together last night about Tanya stealing his money, making Santorez a much more promising suspect. “I’ll be there,” I heard myself say. Turning again, I took in the foggy view of the ocean, the waves crashing on bird-whitened rocks below, the Golden Gate Bridge in extreme foreshortening to my right. The air was frigid, the fog clammy, my fingertips chilled. A few tourists wearing shorts and windbreakers huddled together with their cameras at the other end of the guardrail. Nobody visiting San Francisco for the first time ever brings the right clothes.

  I knew in the cold, hungry pit of my stomach that I was putting my professional reputation—not to mention my bar card—on the line before I had even gotten started and that the odds were against me. I was beginning to see why the police had focused on Santorez from the start. I felt a flash of anger at Anderson. I knew he hadn’t trusted me because of this, because of the game I was playing with his suspect, a game he’d foreseen and headed off.

  I would have to decide whether to talk to the press after Santorez’s arraignment, and what to tell them, but there was no time to think about that now. If Keith Locke had his way, maybe I wouldn’t ever have to think about it. After the flush of my victory in the courtroom, I foolishly believed that all I had to do was talk to him, and he would listen.

  I pocketed the phone and started down a wide path through a grove of wind-sculpted cypres
s. Below, the ocean crashed and boomed, sounding now right next to me, now distant.

  I don’t like the ocean, not at this latitude. There is simply too much of it out there beyond the Golden Gate, and it is too violent and too cold. My dislike of the sea is one of the reasons I could never imagine living in one of the city’s far western neighborhoods, where the air is perpetually tinged with salt and fog.

  Ahead of me I saw a thin figure standing on a rocky promontory with the tumbling ocean behind him, silhouetted against the guano-stained bulk of Seal Rock. He wore tight black jeans ripped at the knees, hiking boots, and a green jacket. As I watched, he dropped from his perch and disappeared down the other side. I stumbled and swore.

  In a few minutes I stood on the rock where Keith had been standing. Below was a large overlook area atop the cliffs, thirty or so feet above the surf. To the south was a magnificent view of the Cliff House and the entire length of Ocean Beach, the peninsula stretching away arrow-straight into the distance. Immediately below me were the ruins of the Sutro Baths, once a glass-enclosed swimming pavilion, now little more than a tidal pool half-blocked off from the ocean by an artificial breakwater.

  For a moment it seemed that Keith had disappeared. Then, catching movement to my left, I saw him hiking down a trail that led inland from the vista point, then seaward to the ruins.

  “caution,” a sign warned as I descended. “Cliff and surf area extremely dangerous. People have been swept from the rocks and drowned.”

  In the old bath foundations pieces of twisted iron jutted from the ground among graffiti-covered remnants of crumbling walls. I skidded on the loose gravel, and when I looked up Keith was gone. There was nowhere to hide, yet he’d vanished as completely as if the earth had opened up and swallowed him.

  Then I remembered there was a cave, an artificial tunnel connecting the baths with Point Lobos on the other side of the hill. I knew that I should turn back from this desolate spot, but I went on, still convinced that I could make him tell me what he knew.

  “Leo!” a voice called from the cave as I approached.

  The floor of the entrance was soft sand. I could see the round opening at the other end a hundred feet away, silhouetting Keith’s head and shoulders. “I just want to talk,” I said into the sudden silence as I ducked inside, my voice strange to me after the din of the waves.

  “Come on down here where it’s a little lighter and we’ll do that.”

  It was my one chance to talk to the person who might know why Teddy had been shot. I looked for weapons on him but didn’t see any bulges. He wasn’t much bigger than I was. I came forward slowly, giving my eyes time to adjust. He was standing at a railing near a hole in the floor through which I heard the surf crashing on the rocks.

  “Your sister’s waiting in the car,” I told him.

  “Yeah.” A pause. “I hear you’re fucking her.”

  “Keith, your mother offered me twenty thousand dollars to convince you to see her. It’s all yours if you want it. I didn’t come here because of her, though.”

  We stood facing each other for a moment; then Keith turned. “Come look at this hole, man. It’s pretty wild.”

  I took half a step closer but no more, keeping my knees slightly bent, ready to move. Through the man-size hole beneath us I dimly saw surf washing over sand.

  “I’m not interested in your mother’s money. The reason I wanted to talk to you is that when Teddy got shot, he left your case up in the air. I want to pick up where Teddy left off. I think we can beat this murder charge, but first you have to turn yourself in. There’s no way to clear your name when you’re on the run.”

  “You want to be my lawyer?” Keith asked.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Everything we talk about is secret, then?”

  “That’s right,” I said with reluctance.

  Keith grabbed my arm. He tugged me on into the tunnel toward the light at the end. I jerked free of him, then followed, trying to keep out of his reach. “You’ve got to see the view out here. It’s primeval.” As we approached the mouth he spun, quicker than I thought, and slid sideways along the wall until he was behind me, a neat reversal.

  I tried to move away but there was nowhere to go. The sea was at my back, and Keith was between me and the tunnel. I tried to follow my script but my voice kept sticking. “All you have to do is tell the truth. Whatever you know about Marovich, about Teddy, about Martha. You tell the truth and cut a deal and walk away.”

  “The truth will set me free.”

  “Who shot my brother?”

  He blinked. “Who brought you here?”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Daddy’s little girl. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. That whore pal of hers, Martha, drove the car. Christine walked right into Coruna with the gun in her hand. She’s a pretty hot number, I know, but she can play the man when she has to. Bang, bang, then out the back. Cool as a cucumber.”

  “You shot him, didn’t you, Keith,” I said. “You’re the one who did it.”

  “I’ll tell you what I told Teddy. I don’t need a lawyer cutting me any deals, because that would mean testifying against my own sister, and that I will not do. In confidence, though, she was fucking her thesis adviser. She went too far, maybe on accident, maybe on purpose. He was an asshole anyway. She called me, I came to the rescue, and I got busted. That’s how it went down. So you going to represent me? We got a deal?”

  Keith was still between me and the tunnel.

  “Teddy knew too much. Then Martha knew too much. And now you’re the one who knows too much,” Keith said.

  My hands shook and my chest was heaving. I took a half step closer to him, away from the end of the tunnel, then glanced back. Just below us a wild landscape of waves swirled and thrashed and climbed the rocks, as if the waves themselves feared the ocean and were seeking desperately to break free.

  He held out his hand, and I took it. Not because I wanted to be his attorney but because I felt a need to reassure myself that he was not some whirling figment of a madness into which I was descending. Because there was nothing else to grab.

  Then we were breathing in each other’s faces, our feet scrabbling for purchase on the sand. With a convulsive heave Keith broke free and pushed me out the mouth of the cave, and the water seemed to leap up at my back.

  Chapter 22

  I should have died from the fall. As I lost my balance I saw the rocks coming toward me, one in particular the size of my torso and jutting like a rhinoceros’s horn. I managed to twist in midair and take the brunt of the impact on my hip, sending a searing shock through my body. The collision absorbed the energy of my fall, and I crumpled and rolled into the water. Then the cold grabbed me by the nuts and throat, and the waves sucked and churned around my face.

  This is how the ocean kills you, I thought as I caught a wave in the face, then another, and felt a third slam me against a rock and drag me down, each from a different direction. The sea’s victims are found with their skin stripped off, faces pulped by impact, lungs filled with seawater, throats packed with sand.

  I’ve never been a strong swimmer. As a kid I never even learned to tolerate putting my face in the water—not that being a good swimmer would have mattered. I had as little control over my fate as an ice cube in a cocktail shaker.

  It was a tiny, V-shaped cove filled with dangerous rocks, and I owe my life to the fact that the notoriously strong currents outside the Golden Gate quickly swept me free of it. My shoes and pants weighed me down, but I was no longer being thrown against those rocks. With every convulsive, gasping breath I choked on seawater. I hadn’t seen Keith Locke since the instant I’d fallen. I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t fallen, too.

  I was just about to go under when someone shouted, and then there was a splash, and strong hands grabbed my arms. I f
lailed, thinking it was Keith coming to push me under, finish me off. Then I felt a surfboard being shoved under my elbows. “Take it easy, take it easy,” the surfer was shouting.

  I was shivering so violently that it was all I could do to hold on. The guy wore a full wet suit, and he stayed in the water, guiding the half-submerged board. The lower two-thirds of my body was in the water, and the cold touch of it continued to terrify me.

  “We have to get through the break here,” he warned. “Try not to drown. When I tell you to hold your breath, hold it until we come up.”

  “Okay. Now,” he said, and I felt the sea turning over beneath us, as if someone had decided it was time to roll it up and put it away. We were gaining speed, then the wave left us behind and water pounded down on top of me and I was turning over and over, and then there was no more up or down. I lost my grip on the board, and the surfer lost his grip on me, and I felt my face press the sand. In surprise I gasped, and seawater filled me. Inside my lungs and stomach the water was cold and completely hostile to the continuance of my life, but after a while it started to feel okay. I drifted and the breeze warmed my back. Roll over and breathe, a voice urged, but I let my head fall onto the pillow.

  Just five more minutes, I promised, then I’ll get up.

  ~ ~ ~

  When I came to I was lying on my side vomiting seawater.

  The current had swept us about half a mile down Ocean Beach, and it took me a minute to get my bearings. The surfer was on his ass next to me without his board. Behind me I heard the waves crashing. The sound made me shudder. I didn’t turn to look.

  The surfer was breathing hard. Evidently he had just dragged me onto the beach. He was in his midthirties, with a bleached ponytail and a face lined by the sun and wind. “Next time try the bridge,” he said, getting to his feet. “At least out there in the gate you won’t be fucking with anyone’s break.”