I ended the call, then dialed the hospital, and learned that Teddy was now in the recovery room. He wouldn’t be allowed any visitors until the morning, starting at six. I left my cell phone number, then dialed Jeanie again, hoping that she’d heard the news, that I wouldn’t have to be the one to break it to her. I was relieved when the call went to voice mail. I left a second message telling her that Teddy was out of surgery and clinging to life, that no one would be able to see him until morning, and that she could reach me at his office.
I hung up and went to stand in the window. My people, Ellis had said. The very idea was like a foreign concept. Who should I be with now, I wondered—Jeanie? The guys from my cycling club? Around my normal friends, the very idea of Teddy seemed unreal.
Even at the height of the dot-com boom, the neighborhood around Teddy’s office was mostly free clinics, residence hotels, and liquor stores. This time of year the sun hit the west side of Sixth midmorning, the east side midafternoon, rousing the homeless from their doorways. In the evenings from Teddy’s window we watched the hookers parade toward the feeding grounds at Tenth and Mission. Those are some of the unfortunates on whose shoulders Teddy built his practice in the early years, when much of his income came from court appointments on cases where the public defender’s office had declared a conflict of interest.
The area is considered a dangerous neighborhood, but there’s danger and then there’s danger. You can come to feel a grudging affection for the drunks and addicts, the stink and the noise and the squalor. I know Teddy did. He made a life for himself among those people and their problems. The city you live in comes to feel like a projection of yourself, mirroring both your aspirations to splendor and your darkness. In the same way that Teddy felt more comfortable with clients than he did with ordinary people, even his own brother, I know that Teddy only really felt at home in those parts of the city avoided by others.
Not that he lived in such a place. He and Jeanie had been building a house in Contra Costa County, in the hippie enclave of Canyon, over the first range of East Bay hills. The divorce two years ago had interrupted construction. Teddy had left the house as it stood, half-finished and barely habitable. He worked late most nights and often missed the last BART train. He kept a room at one of the neighborhood residence hotels, the Seward—the manager was a former client who’d given him the room in lieu of a fee—and on nights when he didn’t make the train, he’d sleep there, oblivious to the noise of the drunks, junkies, and prostitutes.
I heard the rattle of the elevator, then the clacking of Tanya’s heels in the hall. She came in wiping her eyes, with a vinyl suit bag over her shoulder. She’d gone to Nordstrom instead of Men’s Wearhouse, and she’d bought me a suit and two shirts instead of a shirt and slacks. “They had a sale,” she said, handing me the credit card and receipt.
Even on sale the suit had cost seven hundred dollars.
“Teddy bought all his suits at Nordstrom,” she said.
There was nothing for me to do but change if I expected to go out in public. I borrowed one of Teddy’s ties from the closet, then went back out front and asked Tanya to pin up the unhemmed pant legs.
“Men’s Wearhouse,” she said with a sniff of disdain.
While she knelt beside me I asked her to get together the list of Teddy’s clients for Detective Anderson. Though I’d decided not to tell Anderson about that argument in the stairwell, at least not until I knew what it was about, I intended to do everything else in my power to help him find the shooter. It seemed to me that the client list was the logical place to start.
She was holding a pin in her mouth as I spoke. There was a frozen moment in which neither of us moved a muscle. Then with a sharp inward breath she took the pin and jabbed it hard into the top of my foot. I jumped back away from her, hopping on one foot to avoid stepping on the other unpinned leg.
“Are you out of your mind?” she asked, rising and taking a menacing step toward me.
I stepped backward again, my hands up. “He wasn’t running a candy store. They can’t all be satisfied customers.”
She was still advancing, still holding the pin, her eyes making little darting movements to different parts of my body, her shoulders rigid, as if she might strike again at any moment. “We’re not giving the police any list,” she said in a low voice. “We’re not giving them anything from this office. Until Teddy recovers, I’m in charge of this law practice, and you’d better do as I say, or you’ll get a lot worse than you already got. Monkey Boy.”
I flushed. “Don’t you think Teddy’s killer is probably connected to a case?”
Her voice came from deep in her throat. “Teddy’s clients loved him. No matter how their cases turned out, he always did right by them, and they knew it.” She had taken up a position between me and the tall oak filing cabinets, indicating her willingness to defend Teddy’s secrets with violence.
“It’s not just about the clients. What about witnesses, victims? Someone Teddy might have humiliated, somebody who thinks they didn’t get justice.” There was a person like that in literally every case, a whole sorry trail of Lorlees littering my brother’s career. My foot was throbbing but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. Passing the bar exam had not prepared me to deal with a legal assistant who resorted to corporal discipline in matters of attorney-client ethics.
“Teddy always did right by his clients,” she repeated, “and now you want to have the cops all up in their business, busting them for no reason. People who are just trying to put the past behind them.” Her voice kept breaking. She might have been speaking of herself. “You know what the cops are going to do with that list. You give them the names, they’ll start busting doors, bringing people in for parole violations, probation violations, bullshit charges, busting them for whatever they’ve got in their pockets, anything they can think of to haul someone in and lock him up. That way they can pretend to be doing something, but in reality they’re just undoing all your brother’s work, getting back at him for all the times he made cops look like morons. That’s how you want your brother to be remembered, as a lawyer who sold his clients down the river?”
“I don’t see how they can avoid taking a look at the clients. They’re going to do it one way or another. Someone walked up to him in that restaurant and shot him. Tried to murder him. He’s probably going to die. The police are on our side this time, Tanya. Let’s try to separate courtroom rhetoric from reality, here.”
“It wasn’t a client. It wasn’t anyone who had anything to do with any of Teddy’s cases. And the San Francisco Police Department is not on our side, and they aren’t on Teddy’s side, either. They’re glad he got shot, but that’s not enough for them. They have their own ax to grind.”
I rubbed my brow. I felt very tired. I would have liked nothing better than to stretch out on the couch and close my eyes, sleep until morning, and be on my bike as the sun came up, riding across the bridge into the hills of Marin County, or better yet, with saddlebags and a trailer heading up the Pacific Coast; I’d often dreamed of repeating that long trip. “How can you be sure the killer wasn’t connected with one of Teddy’s cases?”
She tossed her head but gave no answer.
“Do you know something, Tanya?”
“I don’t know anything.”
I wanted to ask her whether Teddy had been mixed up in anything serious enough to be shot over, but I didn’t want to ask that question until I had a better sense of what she might be hiding. I stood rubbing one knuckle into my eye. “Better get that list together, then.”
“No.”
“Get the list together or pack up your desk.” I felt tired enough now that I didn’t really care whether I had any authority to fire her. I was no longer afraid of her, or maybe I was coming to see that her pugnacity was mostly bluster, a shield for her grief at what had happened, maybe also for her fear of what would become of her
without my brother. Teddy had meant just as much to Tanya as he did to me, maybe more. In one way or another she depended on him for every aspect of the life she had now.
Her eyes narrowed, and she crossed her arms, but there was no longer threat in her posture. I went on: “If you want to go down the list and call anyone you think might benefit from a warning, do that. But until we’ve got a more definite lead, the cases are all we have to go on. I want the cops to find this guy. You want it as much as I do, I’m sure. And that means offering our cooperation, even if it goes against the grain of business as usual around here. So we’re going to give the police that list, and you and I are going to spend a whole lot of time together going through every file.”
I walked past her to the cabinet and tugged open one of the heavy drawers. It was so full that you couldn’t have inserted a sheet of paper between any of the folders. I knew that each of the four drawers in each of the five cabinets was as tightly packed as this one. All the much-thumbed yellow file folders were raggedy with notes and documents, transcripts, and photographs. Here and there were gaps marking the smaller bulk of audio- and videotapes. To my eyes all the layers of information took on almost geologic significance as the fossil record of Teddy’s career.
I slid the drawer closed and fingered the handle of another one. I felt strongly that I was in the presence of my brother’s would-be killer, that somewhere in all these documents the shooter’s name was written. If I just knew what to look for, his identity would stand out as obviously as if it were written in blood.
I turned back to Tanya. “I’ll also need a list of Teddy’s active cases and the files themselves. For me, not the police. Someone’s going to have to sit down with each of his clients in the next few weeks, if not sooner, and explain what’s happened and what their options are. I suppose I’ll have to be the one to do that, now that Jeanie’s gone.”
She went slowly around behind the desk, sat down, and made a note. “Okay.” A pause. “I’m sorry about your foot.”
I nodded, preferring to pretend it hadn’t happened.
I grabbed a pad and fastened the top button of my new suit coat.
“Are you going somewhere?” she demanded.
“I’m going to see Mr. Bradley.”
Chapter 5
It was a ten-minute walk to the Hall of Justice. With the sun down and the fog pulled over the city’s head, the air was twenty degrees cooler and so clammy that it numbed my cheeks and fingertips. We were fortunate that Ellis had been housed here during his trial, rather than at the jail in San Bruno, which was unreachable by public transportation. Teddy didn’t keep a car in San Francisco, and of course I didn’t have a vehicle. In the room I rented in a house with six strangers in Hayes Valley, I had a queen-size mattress, a desk, a computer, a TV and stereo, an original Nintendo that I liked to play when stoned, some books, and my bikes, but little else of consequence.
The walk brought me past the Ninth Circuit courthouse, which had gotten itself stranded in this neighborhood of junkies and residence hotels. Suddenly I realized I was standing in front of the Seward Hotel, where Teddy kept a room.
I should let Anderson know about this little hidey-hole here in the city, I thought—or maybe he’d even found it without my help. A pair of squad cars was double-parked on Mission, and an ambulance with its doors open and its lights flashing stood fifty yards farther down, the driver relaxing with one elbow out the window.
I hesitated, then pushed open the heavy, splintered door, and went inside.
The dark entrance hall hadn’t been renovated in at least fifty years, I guessed. To my left was a closed door and beside it a scarred window with a pass-through and a grille. Behind the window was a room with a desk, a board with hooks for keys, and cubbyholes for mail. A miniature black-and-white TV pushed up against the Plexiglas showed me myself.
The small but tough-looking man behind the desk took one look at my new suit and tie and shook his head slowly, as if this just wasn’t his day. He waved me on. “They’re up there,” he said. “Go on up. I’ll buzz you through. They all got here about five minutes ago.”
I hesitated. “What was that number again?”
“Six-oh-nine. Take the stairs. Elevator’s broke.”
On the second-floor landing a single used needle lay in a dingy spill of light on the windowsill. On an impulse I touched the needle’s plastic shaft. It was still warm. The tip was smeared with blood. After that I stopped paying attention to the scenery.
Only as I came to the sixth floor and heard the sounds of a woman sobbing and a man muttering something over and over again did it occur to me that the police would have no use for an ambulance crew if they were here merely to search Teddy’s room.
I went out into the hall anyway.
Two uniformed officers stood outside the door of room 609 at the far end of the hallway. Only a few doors were open between here and there. Seeing a couple sitting on a bed in one of the open rooms, I stopped and asked what happened.
“She killed him, that’s what,” said the man, a white guy in his late thirties in a sleeveless undershirt that crumpled over his ribs. He had unclean dreadlocks dangling above an oversize brow, a shadowy beard, and black, broken fingernails. “Waited till he was sleeping, then stuck a knife in his ribs.” He gave a barking laugh, and the petite dark-haired woman on the bed beside him smiled like someone who didn’t understand English. The man looked me over with a hungry eye, as if trying to determine which of the suited classes I belonged to.
I went down the hall to the room. The paramedics were inside. I got close enough to see blood spattered on the wall, and then one of the uniformed cops blocked my path. On the bed a naked man sat flinching while the paramedics worked on a gash in his shoulder. Contrary to what the dreadlocked man had said, he was very much alive and cut rather than stabbed. Still, there was a lot of blood. It had made a dark pool on the sheets and spattered the floor. A woman huddled in the corner with her head bowed against her handcuffed hands. “Just looking for a client,” I told the cop and retreated, though it was difficult to tear away my gaze.
I continued down the hallway to the open door, in shock that my brother had actually lived in such a place, that he apparently considered it restful. “You wouldn’t happen to know which room was Teddy Maxwell’s?” I asked the dreadlocked guy.
“Third floor. Three-oh-eight, three-ten, one of those two,” the man said. “Hey, did he really get shot up?”
“Yeah. I’m his brother.”
His face brightened. “Cause I’ve been trying to get hold of him all week. You see, I caught this case . . .”
I had already turned away and was walking toward the stairwell, hoping he wouldn’t follow me. He didn’t.
Three floors down things were quieter. I didn’t know which room was Teddy’s, and in any case I didn’t have the key. I went back down the stairwell and into the lobby.
“I must have gotten confused,” I told the guy behind the Plexiglas. “I’m actually Teddy Maxwell’s brother. It’s his room I’m looking for.”
The man just stared through me as if I were an apparition that might disappear at any moment.
“I’m here to pick up some things for him. He’s in the hospital.”
He stirred, his eyes finally coming to rest somewhere between my forehead and the ceiling. “Lemme see some ID.”
I pressed my driver’s license against the window.
“All you people barging in here all of a sudden, it’s like I’m runnin’ some kind of damn store.” He spoke with rising vehemence, his eyes sliding away from me, not bothering to look at the license. “All I know is when Teddy was around I never knew him to have even one sibling, let alone a pair of them. Or maybe you’re the kind of brother who keeps clear until a man goes down, then starts nosing around to see what he might have tucked away under the mattress
.”
“Someone else came here claiming to be Teddy’s brother?”
“Claiming. You the one claiming. I have half a mind to make you come back with the sheriff, prove you are who you say you are.”
“Look at my license.” I was still holding it up. “My name is Leo Maxwell. I’m Teddy’s only brother. Did this other person show you any kind of identification?”
He still didn’t look at it. “You a lawyer? ’Cause I don’t talk to no lawyers. Your brother excepted, but I hear he’s gonna be dead, and then there won’t be a lawyer left in the world I care to talk to.” His voice lowered insinuatingly. “Unless the name on that damn driver’s license is Alexander Hamilton, we ain’t got nothing to talk about.”
“What did this guy look like? Tall, short? Fat, thin? White, black?” It was no good, though. He wasn’t going to budge. Anticipating his demand, I’d palmed a twenty-dollar bill in the stairwell, mindful of the security camera, and now I slipped it to him through the pass tray, keeping my hand flattened so that the camera couldn’t make out the exchange.
Like a fish snapping up bait his hand came down and made the bill disappear from beneath my fingers. “See for yourself, I guess.” He buzzed open the door, his manner now one of satisfaction. “Went up there an hour ago and hasn’t come down. Room three-oh-eight. And look, I can’t be responsible for all the lies people tell in here. I had to answer for those, I’d be in the jailhouse long ago.”
He reached behind him for the key and slid it toward me the same way the twenty-dollar bill had come.
“You should have checked his ID,” I said, taking it. He muttered something about lawyers coming into his place, but the closing door cut him off.
I went up the stairs slowly. I had no idea what I was going to say to the person who’d evidently impersonated me and was now searching my brother’s room. Again it occurred to me that I ought to be calling the police.
Bear is Broken Page 3