“I can’t tell you inside?”
“You can, but the house is wired for sound. It’s probably better if we talk out here until you get your story straight.”
She stood looking at me with astonishment and fear.
“You see, Car and Jeanie are convinced you shot Teddy, but they’re a little short on proof. My job is to make you confess. Maybe you killed Marovich, maybe you didn’t. I want to be on your side, Christine, I really do. I told you this morning, I want to help you with whatever mess you’re in. I like you. But first you’ve got to convince me you didn’t shoot my brother and that you didn’t set me up this morning.”
“I didn’t,” she said, her voice even smaller.
“Why don’t you start by telling me about Marovich,” I suggested again.
I put my shirt back on and eased myself down into my chair, warding off the chill with a long sip of gin. After a moment Christine turned and came to sit on the deck before me. “It was—sex. There’s not much to tell. I took a class with him on immersion ethnography. That’s how I got the idea for my thesis. After the course he hired me on an unofficial basis as his research assistant. My job was to interview girls. I got paid, but more important I got to use the interviews for my thesis.
“We started sleeping together. He lived in the faculty ghetto, so we couldn’t go to his place, and my dorm room was no good. I’d interviewed Martha at her apartment, and she let me use it. Little did I know she’d set up the camera. Sam liked—well, you saw the clip. You know what he liked. Then he turned up strangled and Keith was arrested.”
“The police never questioned you?”
“I kept waiting, but they never did.”
There was a pause. Then I said, “You liked it, didn’t you? Strangling him.”
“Maybe I did. That kind of power can be—exhilarating. But I didn’t kill him.”
“Who killed him, then? Martha?”
“About a week after it happened she came to Stanford and showed me a copy of the disk. She wanted twenty thousand dollars.”
“I bet you regret not paying her.”
Sitting cross-legged before me, staring down at her hands, Christine just shook her head.
“So Martha killed Marovich because she had this video, and she figured with Marovich dead she could shake you down,” I mused. “Never mind that the video shows her apartment and that twenty thousand seems cheap for murder. Let’s put that aside. If Martha killed Marovich, then who killed Martha?”
Again Christine could only shake her head.
“You’re the only one with a clear motive and opportunity. Work backward, then. Let’s say Martha was killed because she knew who shot my brother. Who shot Teddy, if you didn’t do it?”
“I don’t know. Santorez. The one they indicted.”
“That still leaves you holding the bag for Martha. You’ve got to tie her in somehow if you’re going to walk away from this.”
She sagged forward and pressed her face against my knees. “Keith shot Teddy.”
“That’s a little better. Keith shot Teddy, Martha was the driver, and Keith killed Martha to shut her up. But why shoot his own lawyer?”
“To protect me,” she said. “Teddy was going to turn over the disk.”
“But now we’ve got the same problem all over again,” I said. “You’ve got Martha and Teddy wrapped up, but who killed Marovich? If no one else did, then you must killed him.”
“Martha.” She lifted her face. “It was an accident. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“But that doesn’t work, either. If Keith shot my brother, you can’t get rid of the disk entirely, because without the video Keith doesn’t have the motive of protecting you from exposure. But maybe you never slept with Marovich.”
Her shoulders tensed and she went very still.
“Who shot Teddy if Keith didn’t do it? Say the video of you and Marovich didn’t exist.”
She stared longingly into my face. “Tanya.”
“We’ve been over that. Tanya’s in the clear, even if she stole Santorez’s money, which I’m certain she did. So is Car.”
Christine didn’t say anything.
I shrugged. “There isn’t anyone left. You must have shot Teddy.”
She hid her face. “My father paid to have him shot. Isn’t that what you want to hear?”
“Tell me about your father.” I took another hasty swallow of gin.
“It was a huge fight. That’s what Keith said. I was six. They were going to get divorced. Because our father had another woman. Then my parents sent Keith away to school. I remember the house being very quiet. Time passed. When I was twelve I saw the private detective’s report. I was snooping in my mother’s room. I guess that was the first time I realized that my father knew the woman who’d died. That she was the one he’d been with.”
She turned her head from side to side on my knee. “I didn’t want to think about it. I put it out of my mind. But when no one was home I kept going into my mother’s room to look at the pictures. The file disappeared after Keith got kicked out of school. I always assumed she or my dad finally threw it away. But Keith must have taken it. He must have given it to Teddy.”
“Your father had to have known that Teddy was writing that habeas brief, that he was going to argue your father killed my mother,” I interrupted. “Otherwise it doesn’t work. If Gerald didn’t know the contents of the brief, he could have no reason for wanting Teddy dead.”
Again she was silent. Finally she said, “I confronted him. About a month ago. I showed him copies of the pictures, the ones Teddy had showed me, the ones I’d seen all those years ago in the investigator’s file. He denied having anything to do with her death, but he admitted he’d known your mother. I told him about me and Teddy.”
“What about Martha?”
Christine looked up. “Someone must have shot her for planting that camera in the Green Light.”
I seized her arms and pulled her to me, and she half rose, half fell, bracing her elbows on my thighs. I kissed her breathlessly. “I don’t care about Marovich.” I wanted her so badly that I might have forgotten any number of dead Maroviches. “I’ll destroy the disk. All you have to do is help me prove that your father had my brother shot.”
She returned my kiss.
~ ~ ~
We ate some cheese and drank some wine, sitting huddled together on the boards of the porch with our backs against the wall, the cushions of the chaise beneath us, sharing a blanket I’d found inside. Christine leaned against my shoulder. “Do you think it’s possible for a person to get away from her family and just be—herself? Start a new life?”
I thought about my own situation, my own family. “You would have to believe in it. The new life, I mean. Because otherwise the old life would still be there, and eventually the new one would just sort of melt away, and you’d be in your old life again.”
“What about—this?” She stroked my leg with her fingertips. “Can I believe in this?”
The skin of my leg crawled where she was touching it. Instead of answering her I turned to her and tugged up her shirt, pushed my face into her chest.
It was too cold out there for bare skin, and soon we had to move into the bedroom.
When she moaned, I tried to silence her, putting a hand over her lips, thinking of Car and Jeanie, but she would not be silenced, tilting back her head, exposing her neck. I moved my hand down, my wrist nestled between her collarbones, my elbow between her breasts, and stroked the tendons of her neck. How would it feel to squeeze and go on squeezing?
She came just as I began to come, my hand clenching around her throat.
~ ~ ~
“Did you really think I shot Teddy?” she asked later. “Tell me you didn’t believe it.”
“I didn�
�t know what to believe,” I told her.
“I didn’t do it. You have to believe I didn’t.”
I held her. “I believe you,” I said.
I was thinking about what would happen in the morning, about what I would tell Car and Jeanie.
“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered. “Let’s go to Reno and forget about everything for a night.”
~ ~ ~
As we reached the bottom of the hill a pair of headlights appeared in the rearview. It was the Volvo.
Christine dozed in the passenger seat beside me. Car and Jeanie stayed on our trail into Moraga, as far as the last exit before the Benicia Bridge.
I find it difficult to fully describe my feelings as I watched the Volvo’s lights grow smaller and curve away onto the exit behind us. It was like watching my old life close up behind me as I drove into the dark distance. There was a sense that I’d broken irrevocably from Jeanie and Car, and from Teddy. Alone with Christine, I knew how it was going to end.
After we’d arrived in Reno and been gambling for an hour it hit me: Today was Teddy’s thirty-eighth birthday.
~ ~ ~
We slept for a few hours before dawn. Christine woke up sober and anxious to get back for her afternoon class. I paid for the hotel room, we got into the Rabbit, and drove again.
Playing blackjack, I’d come up with a plan for how best to use Christine to get at her father. After filling the tank outside Sacramento, I took Christine’s hand. “We got married last night,” I said. “Don’t worry, I didn’t pull a fast one during your blackout. We’re going to pretend we went to Reno, which we did, and that we got married there on the spur of the moment. You’ll break the news to your parents this afternoon, and you’ll insist on having me for dinner tonight.”
She took a breath and let it out through her nose.
“What did you expect?” I asked. “A diamond ring?”
“I’ll go along with you, and we’ll milk this for all it’s worth. I’m a pretty good actress. I’ll have to be. But I don’t see how this is going to get my father to admit anything. You don’t have any real proof, so what are you going to do? Just accuse him?”
“That’s my problem,” I said. And it was. I knew how to make Gerald angry, but I had no idea how to get from there to an admission of the secret he’d been keeping all these years.
We didn’t say anything the rest of the way. When we reached Teddy’s, where Christine had left her sleek little BMW, she leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek. She didn’t want to come inside. She had to get back to school, she said.
She backed out of the driveway. I sat there a moment, wondering where the nearest place to get coffee was. Then I gave a mean little laugh, put the Rabbit in gear, and drove to San Francisco.
Chapter 26
About halfway through the night I’d remembered that I didn’t have my cell phone: It was still in pieces on my radiator. After dropping Christine at her car I drove straight to the hospital, drawn by the certainty that something had happened in my absence. I didn’t actually believe the situation had changed, but I felt impelled to Teddy’s bedside so that I could see that everything was the same as it had been yesterday afternoon, that he was still straddling the line between death and life. I arrived at two o’clock.
When I got there my premonitions seemed confirmed in the worst possible way. The bed was empty and remade, all the medical equipment pushed back against the wall, the lights turned off, the flowers and personal stuff swept away.
I came in and stood by the bed, looking down at the creaseless sheets. I touched the pillow. After an interval of shock I turned from the room. At the end of the hall I spotted Carol, the nurse I’d met the first day, going into another patient’s room. I jogged after her.
Carol turned from the bed where she’d bent to check the pulse in an unconscious man’s jaundiced, spotted old arm, her face registering an emotion between sympathy and reproach.
“When—” I said, and my breath failed me, and I stood gasping before her. “When—” I tried again, but it came out as a squeaking wheeze, like an asthma attack.
“He’s still here,” she said. She stared at me worriedly. “He started becoming responsive this morning. He was trying to breathe on his own and showing higher-level responses, enough that they decided to move him into long-term care. They’re keeping him in a coma for now, but in a few days they may let him wake up as much as he’s able to. He’s got a difficult road ahead, but it looks like he’ll pull through. We’ve been calling and calling all morning, Leo, trying to reach you.”
A week ago I might have believed that it would be better for Teddy to die than to live in a brain-damaged state, but now elation flooded through me. What I hadn’t dared to think possible was suddenly probable: I was going to have my brother back. He would never be the same, but he was going to live.
“Where—” I began, but my voice was choked off this time by thankful, ashamed weeping.
She touched my cheek, then flipped through her charts, and told me the room number. “Go,” she said, with a suppressed smile. “I’ve got work to do.”
~ ~ ~
Teddy’s new room was brighter than the old one, with wallpaper, a closet, TV, and a window with a view of the bay—a room designed for the living rather than for the dying. He lay under the sheet with his head bandaged as before. He still had the stoma in his throat, but the machine wasn’t hooked up to it. The unprompted rise and fall of his massive chest seemed to me nothing short of miraculous.
When I’d been there only a minute Jeanie appeared, as if she’d just stepped out for a moment; she must have been here all morning. Her purse was on the floor beneath a chair at the window, her book beside it. She walked around me to Teddy’s bedside as if I weren’t there, and with a proprietary motion straightened the hem of the sheet. Only then did she turn, standing between my brother and me.
“How did this happen?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Then she walked over, grabbed my arm, pushed me out of the room into the hallway, and closed the door behind us.
“How long have you been here?”
“Almost since we left you. They called around midnight. Where were you?”
“Jeanie—”
“Or maybe you’d better not tell me. I don’t want to know, not really.” She breathed out hard. “He’s probably going to live. You could start by saying something about that, about how glad you are. Or maybe you aren’t glad.”
“That’s good news. I’m really, really glad.” It was like a kick in the head that she could think I wasn’t.
“Is it? Are you? I thought your brother was better off dead than needing someone’s help to dress himself. Not your help, though. You made that abundantly clear with your behavior last night. Don’t worry, we got it all on tape, your sick little fuck session.”
“I’ll be there for him. Whatever it takes. I’m glad he’s going to have a chance at—at some kind of life.”
“You’ll be there just like you’ve been here since this happened.” Seeing the tears in my eyes, she seemed briefly to soften. Then her face hardened again.
“Jeanie—last night—”
“I told you, I don’t want to hear it.”
“She didn’t pull the trigger. She didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I’m glad you think so. I’ve got to hand it to you, Leo, you’re quite the advocate. You represent one suspect and screw another. Maybe for your next trick you can get yourself adopted by Gerald Locke.”
I winced. It was madness, all madness. “We’re going to set up her father tonight. Pretend we got married in Reno. So you’re coming around to thinking Gerald might have done it?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. You’ve used up all your trust with me, Leo.”
Just then Ca
r turned the corner, coming toward us down the hall. Just as Jeanie had done, he stared right through me. Then with no warning he set his feet and punched me in the stomach harder than I’d ever been punched before. I dropped.
“You pissant,” Car said. “Next week maybe Teddy wakes up and tells the world she’s the one who shot him. You’ll have to fuck her in one of those little prison trailers.”
I gathered my feet, stood, and swung at him. He stepped back, and as I flailed by him he landed a neat uppercut to the chin that left my head whirling and sat me back down on the floor.
“Get the hell out of here,” I said, staying down this time, swallowing saliva tinged coppery with blood. “You goddamn thug.”
“Sure, I’ll leave. I been here all day today making sure that bitch doesn’t show up to finish the job. And I’ll be here all day tomorrow, too, and the day after that, and every day until she’s locked up safe. Right now I’m going for a burrito, and when I come back you better be gone, and you better not show your face here again unless you want more of what you just got.”
He walked out. When I thought I could stand without puking I got to my feet. Jeanie now had settled herself in the chair by the window. She’d turned on some music, cool jazz.
“You better start thinking how you’re going to explain all this,” she said.
“Can I talk to you in the hall again, please?”
~ ~ ~
My voice was tight. “He doesn’t ever have to know about Christine and me.”
She stood shaking her head. “What could you have been thinking?”
I forced myself to look her in the face, though my cheeks were burning. “Maybe at heart I’m still a teenage kid obsessed with stealing his brother’s girlfriend. Or maybe this is my best shot at trapping Gerald and proving he killed Caroline and had Teddy shot to cover it up.”
She met my eyes briefly, then looked away. “You’re not a kid anymore, Leo. My God, you think you’re using her? Can’t you see she’s using you?”
I stood there, trying not to be angry with her. Finally I said, “I’m going to give a good shake to Gerald’s tree, and we’ll see what happens. I’m having dinner with the family tonight to break the news of my supposed marriage.”
Bear is Broken Page 24
