Wolf's Revenge

by Lachlan Smith

  But, on the other hand, I had my suspicions, and I had to know if they were true.

  Taking out my phone, I thumbed through the pictures until I found the ones from our Saturday afternoon at the Coliseum, just a few hours before Edwards’s murder. I pinched it in on the man’s face and upper body, framing Carly out of the picture, then turned the screen to show him.

  “Did the man you saw look anything like this guy?” I asked.

  My witness frowned, squinting nearsightedly. He reached up and pushed my hands back, leaning away at the same time to get a better view of the screen through his bifocals. Then he nodded. “That’s him,” he said. “That’s the guy.”

  “You’re sure,” I said.

  “You don’t forget a guy like that. Where is that, the Coliseum?”

  “He’s no one,” I said, darkening the screen of the phone with a feigned sigh of disappointment. “That’s just a generic picture I’ve been using to test people who claim to have seen the girl before the shooting. It couldn’t possibly be the guy she was with—if there even was a guy. I’m not calling you a liar, but I don’t think your information’s any good.”

  “Hey, come on.” He half-rose, then paused, looking down at me nervously. “It is him, isn’t it? Is this some kind of a trap? Am I going to walk out of here and get a bullet in my back because of what I saw? I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

  He was shaking, his bent legs giving little inward jigs as if he were doing a dance, only his feet weren’t moving. It made him look like a kid who had to go to the toilet, his fingers braced on the edge of the table.

  “You heard the man,” Car said to him. “Get the fuck out of here. I told you at the beginning, I got no patience for junkies who waste my time.”

  The guy went with stiff-legged steps. Car and I both watched him until he was out of sight, me feeling a pang of regret at the way we’d treated him but hoping, at the same time, that we’d seen the last of him. I gave him enough time to get a block away at a swift walk. As I started to move toward the door, Car half-rose from the booth and grabbed my arm in a firm grip.

  “Hold on a minute,” he said, using my weight as leverage to bring his face close to mine. “What else have you been holding back?”

  “I’m not holding back anything. I gave you a job to do and you did it. Now let me go.”

  He eased back down into his chair, his continued grip making it clear that neither of us was going anywhere until we’d had it out. Finally, I slid in across from him, feeling with distaste the way my jeans caught on the greasy molded plastic seat.

  “I’m wasted,” I told him. “I just want to get home and fall into bed.”

  He nodded toward my phone. “Who’s that in the picture? And why didn’t I have that before you sent me out here tonight? Jesus, I could have just been showing it on the street. Save me a hell of a lot of time. We both might have been home in bed hours ago.”

  “You know that’s not how it works. If I had the answers, I wouldn’t need your help. Just now, we both learned something we didn’t know before.”

  “You had the fucking picture on your phone.” His voice was like a hiss of pressure escaping. “Now, you either tell me the truth, or go find yourself a new investigator. From the look on your face, we just stepped in some shit. How am I supposed to keep that from happening if I don’t know what you know?”

  The look on his face was knowing, expectant, as if even now his thoughts were one step ahead of mine. I looked away. A tired-looking employee wandered near, sweeping under the tables. Nearby, a homeless guy dozed with his head on his arms.

  I looked back at Car.

  “You must have known Teddy was dirty all those years you worked for him.”

  “You’ve got this obsession about your brother’s bathing habits. Long as I knew him, he took a hot shower every day.”

  “There’s some dirt you can’t wash off.”

  “What do you want me to say? This obsession of yours … Jesus.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t all black-and-white,” I said. “I figure the jobs he gave you were always straight. Or almost always. I’m sure the two of you never said a word about the alibi witnesses who kept magically turning up, the eyewitnesses who suddenly forgot what they saw. I don’t for a second believe that you ever paid anyone, or that you ever held a gun to a witness’s head. Santorez had other people for that.”

  “Santorez,” he repeated, as if the name was foreign to him. Except I knew Car had played a starring role in Teddy’s most famous case, coming up with the witness who swore the police hadn’t announced themselves before they burst into Santorez’s crib and found him waiting with his AK ready.

  Good cops died that day, men with families and the future ahead of them. Now, years after my brother won his acquittal, Santorez, too, had no future. This was because he’d been murdered in prison on the orders of Bo Wilder. Who, as a result, had concluded that every criminal asset of Santorez’s now belonged by right of inheritance to him. This included my brother, and, by natural extension, me.

  As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Car looked away. “It does no good to talk about it.” His eyes remained on the door as if presaging the appearance, a moment later, of two of San Francisco’s finest.

  During my time at the PD’s office, I’d probably cross-examined one or both of these two uniformed officers. Most likely they came in here for a mid-shift break every night at this time; it was only that right now I couldn’t place their faces. They ordered coffees, then lingered at a table on the other side of the restaurant, keeping a casual eye on the sleeping homeless guy whom it would probably be their business to roust on their way out. They also kept an eye on Car and me.

  “I’m not my brother,” I told him in a lower voice. “I didn’t get myself into this situation. And, one way or another, I’m going to get myself out of it.”

  I had his attention now, and his interest. “So I take it this guy in the picture from the game is part of the ‘situation,’ as you call it.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “And here I thought I was working a legit case.”

  “You are working a case. That’s exactly my problem.”

  “So don’t you think you have a little conflict of interest?”

  “Maybe. But on the other hand, I’m the only lawyer in town who can possibly understand my client’s predicament. Because I’m in it, too. You think she’d open up to the PD if I bowed out? We’re talking about a girl who stabbed herself in the neck with a ballpoint pen.”

  Car looked aggrieved. For the first time since I’d sat down, I could see his fatigue. A few minutes ago I’d been ready to drop, but as 4 A.M. neared, I felt the irrational energy of our all-nighter beginning to gather in me for the rebound. I’d given up on the idea of sleeping anymore tonight.

  Car, too, was in no hurry, “So what’s his name and who’s he work for?”

  “Jack Sims, according to my father. They were in the Q together. He works for Wilder.”

  “I figured as much.”

  For reasons I didn’t fully understand, I wasn’t ready to tell Car about Sims’s abduction of Carly at the baseball game. I suppose it must have had to do with my sense that, in the wake of what ought to have been an intolerable trespass, we’d gone on as if nothing had changed. My father had promised to deal with Sims, but what did his promise really mean?

  “They think they have me by the balls,” I told Car, omitting that, in fact, this was true. “This case, the girl—I don’t know yet what it’s about. But I do know that I’m not supposed to find out the truth. It’s been made crystal clear to me that she’s not to enter into any plea that involves her cooperating with the police. My role is to make sure she keeps her mouth shut. My first task is to get her to trust me. My second is to convince her to tell me what I need to know to defend her.”

  Car glanced behind him. I was reminded of my father’s reaction to being questioned over beers about his role in Wilder
’s organization. The cops, having finished their coffees, now had risen and were headed for the door without so much as a glance at the homeless guy, who remained slumped over his table, deeply asleep, enjoying a warmth and safety that must have been rare.

  Car brought my attention back to the subject at hand. “Why should she trust you? It sounds to me that you’ve got some idea of using her case as a means of getting yourself out from under Wilder’s thumb. Only I wonder how carefully you’ve thought that plan through. Maybe this client isn’t interested in putting herself in the line of fire.”

  He seemed to expect me to begin explaining or justifying myself. However, I kept my mouth shut, meeting his gaze, waiting for him to be finished. He was right, and we both knew it, but it didn’t help me to hear it from him.

  “I get it,” Car went on. “Your plans are none of my business. Thus far you’ve made clear I’m on a need-to-know basis. But don’t also forget, there may be some things I don’t want to know.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  Car gave me a pained, exasperated look. “In answer to your first question—your brother didn’t start out intending to work for guys like Santorez. No one jumps into quicksand on purpose. He got blackmailed. Same as you. You see, once a guy like Santorez or Bo Wilder knows your biggest weakness, the one thing in your life you won’t risk losing, it’s impossible to beat him. That’s because you’re civilized and he’s not, and he’ll always have the capacity to be more ruthless than you. You know what Teddy’s weakness was, don’t you?”

  Car was right: There were some things we were better off not knowing. Unfortunately, I’d already guessed the answer. “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “I don’t need to say it, because you know. I see it in your eyes. You learned it the day they asked you where your big brother was going to be living after he got out of the rehab facility. Just the way they must have asked Teddy who was going to take care of you, when they put the screws to him. It was the question Santorez must have asked him: ‘Who’ll look after little Leo if Teddy Maxwell suddenly needs to disappear?’”

  I had to hand it to Car for turning the tables on me, making it seem my fault that my brother had crossed the line that separated ethical criminal defense lawyers from the criminals they defended. After our parents died, Teddy had barely seemed to notice my existence. I was like a piece of furniture he was used to walking around. He showed no curiosity about me, and similarly shared no details with me about his personal or professional life. My teenage angst might have existed in another dimension, a layer of reality he wasn’t capable of perceiving.

  Yet in Car’s version, all the most important decisions Teddy had made, the ones that had shaped his life and, perhaps, even sealed his fate, had turned out as they had because he’d shouldered the burden of raising me.

  I didn’t fully buy it, and told Car so. “I think it was a thrill for Teddy to work for a guy like Santorez. He was a true anarchist. He loved nothing better than to stick a thumb in the eye of authority, to see a guilty man get off. Tell me this—once he realized the mess he was in, did he ever try to get out of it?”

  Car shrugged. “He was smart enough to understand that you only leave one way.”

  We were at an impasse, it seemed. I changed the subject by asking him something I’d always wanted to know—how he’d ended up working for my brother in the first place. At first, he seemed not to want to talk about it. Then he changed his mind, as if it’d occurred to him that hearing the story might do me good.

  “Teddy and I knew each other from when we were kids,” he said. “I was in the cops for a few years, and I got out right about the time he was starting as a lawyer. I guess you could say I had a bad experience.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing unusual, in retrospect. A bad shooting that got made to look good.” His voice caught, but only for an instant. “Here’s how it went down. Dude was crouched beside a car and we pulled up right beside him. Suddenly he takes off running. I jumped out and chased him while my partner called it in.

  “We round a corner, running uphill. He stops, and I fly smack into him. The gun’s in my hand and as I’m falling onto my ass I squeeze off a round. The bullet blasts away the top of his skull. Dude’s dead before he hits the concrete. My partner shows up a minute later, following us in the car. He takes a look at the guy, then a long look at me, and shakes his head. He goes back to the trunk and pulls out a rag. Inside’s a .38 with the serial number filed off. He lifts the guy with his toe, finds his hand, and puts the gun in it. Never says one word.”

  Car had never before spoken to me about his past, or even told me anything meaningful about himself. I’d talked about wanting to gain trust with my client, Jane Doe. Now I was stunned to realize that Car was trying to do the same with me.

  He went on. “I never went back on the street after that night. I kept reliving it. Telling myself the gun just went off, that it must have misfired, but I knew it wasn’t the case. Truth is, I was scared, and I reacted, squeezed the trigger. Lack of training, failure of nerve, cold-blooded murder, call it what you will. I went along with it at first. But I had enough sense eventually to realize that if I was able to go back out there after what I’d done, after letting my partner cover for me, then I was the worst kind of cop, and I’d never be able to look myself in the mirror again.

  “As I said, your brother was just getting started as a lawyer around this time. Shortly after I turned in my badge, I got a call. Teddy was thinking about representing the dead guy’s family in connection with a possible civil suit over the shooting. He asked me if I’d be willing to talk to him. Seemed like fate, and so I told him yes, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to be talking to any plaintiff’s lawyers.

  “We met at his office and I described exactly how it’d gone down—what I’d done, how my partner covered it up. I wasn’t going to lie again. What I wanted was to own up to what I’d done, get it off my chest. Your brother listened without interruption, without making a single note on his pad. I expected him to get angry, make me feel like a killer, the way most lawyers do when they’ve got you in a tough spot, even if they secretly know they can’t make it stick. But he didn’t do that. He listened, and at the end, he thanked me. He said that he believed every word I’d said, and that he was sure it’d happened just the way I’d described.

  “It made me feel human again to have told it, and for him to give me the respect of listening and thanking me for being honest. I figured it meant I was going to be a defendant in a lawsuit, have my name all over the papers. From now on, every cop and ex-cop in the city would cross to the other side of the street when they saw me, because I’d broken the code, betrayed my partner. I thought I’d come out of my apartment in the morning and find my tires slashed, that kind of thing. I was ready to accept the consequences.

  “So finally I got the nerve up to ask him, ‘What happens next? Will I need to testify?’ I thought I might even end up in jail, that’s how green I was. He must’ve heard the fear in my voice, because he gave me this sad smile. You know the one I mean. The smile that said he’d done everything right but he wasn’t going to get paid for his time and he knew it. The look that made you understand that for some secret reason, it had all been worth it anyway. That if he had to go back and do it over again he’d still take the case.”

  Car glanced at me, and I nodded. I knew exactly the look he meant, a look that was gone forever, obliterated by the bullet that had nearly killed Teddy, a look that seemed to express perfectly my brother’s tragic brilliance in service of a profession and clientele that continually disappointed his expectations and betrayed his faith.

  He went on: “‘Nothing happens,’ was your brother’s answer. ‘I’m not filing the case. I’d have to prove that you killed him intentionally; mere negligence doesn’t suffice. I don’t think any jurors in the world would return a plaintiff’s verdict if they heard you tell them the story you’ve told me today. Y
ou’re not a murderer, and the most brilliant lawyer in the world couldn’t make eight upstanding citizens think so.’

  “It was like he’d handed me back my life. I don’t remember what I said next. I know I thanked him. Probably asked if there was anything I could do for the family to make amends. But Teddy waved that away. ‘I’ll talk to them,’ he told me. ‘The only thing you’d be doing is exposing yourself to more punishment. If that’s your kick, have at it, but I’ve got a better idea. I need a good investigator. Come work for me.’

  “And so I did,” Car said. “Told him yes on the spot. I worked under the table until I got my PI license, and then I set up shop for myself. I took other jobs, but most of my work was for your brother. He trusted me, and I always gave it to him straight. He knew I’d tell the absolute truth on the stand, and that’s exactly what I did. Case after case. He never asked me to do anything that wasn’t legitimate. After how I’d felt when my partner put that throw-down gun in the hand of the guy whose head I’d blown half off, I wasn’t going to cut another corner. Not again, not ever. That’s why your brother trusted me the way he trusted no one else. Maybe he was dirty, like they say. But if he was, he was damn careful not to involve me in the dirt.”

  “He’s told me himself that he was dirty, Car.”

  “I don’t put much stock in that. The thing about your brother is that he was always his own biggest critic. You ever talk to him right after he’d won a trial? Most lawyers would be looking forward to a drink, patting themselves on the back. Teddy did his share of celebratory drinking, don’t get me wrong, but all he wanted to talk about after a win was what he’d done wrong, the things he could have done better. Just because he told you he was dirty doesn’t make it so.”

  I made a sound that was neither agreement nor disagreement, more like appreciation. Car’s faith in my brother was absolute, a faith consecrated by the loss of the qualities he’d respected most in Teddy. And, to be fair, Car had known him longer and better than I had, at least prior to the shooting. He’d ridden along in the passenger seat of Teddy’s brilliant career, while I’d always had the feeling of standing on the sidewalk, watching his taillights speed away.