Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  Anderson just sat there with the smile on his face.

  I stood up. “Book me now, or I’ll assume I’m free to leave.”

  He didn’t say anything. I walked out, feeling the flesh crawl up and down my back, expecting Anderson to grab me, shove me against the wall, cuff me. My shirt and jacket were lying across an empty desk. Seeing them, I felt my cheeks burn. He’d never had any intention of testing them; he’d never seriously believed I was the shooter. This was just a game he was playing with me, an elaborate prank. I grabbed both articles of clothing and stopped to thread my arms through the sleeves of the shirt. I didn’t try to button it. My hands were shaking too badly for that. Now that I knew there had never been any danger, the fear hit me powerfully. My quadriceps cramped, but with my jacket over my shoulder I managed to walk out.

  It was nearly four in the afternoon.

  Chapter 16

  I caught a cab, retrieved Teddy’s car, bought a twelve-pack of beer and a pizza, and spent the next five hours getting drunk and winning Super Mario Brothers 3. In those early Nintendo games everything is always the same, down to the pixel. Sometimes I think I could play it blindfolded.

  When I had defeated Bowser for probably the thirtieth time in my life, I put the remaining six beers in the fridge and switched to water, took a shower, and finally let my mind begin to turn over the day’s events. It was clear to me that Anderson had meant not only to humiliate me but also to warn me that I should stop digging, stop finding bodies. Whether he was trying to thwart me from discovering the truth or merely protecting his turf remained unclear.

  Had Car bailed out Martha, then killed her? No one else had access to the gun in Teddy’s safe. Had someone been to Teddy’s house after I was there and before the police, taking the matching gun from Teddy’s bedside table? It occurred to me that Jeanie might have had time to take it. I could have checked her purse after she passed out Thursday night, but I hadn’t thought of it.

  Or maybe my fingerprints on the gun were Car’s insurance policy. Except the gun connected him to Martha’s murder as much as it connected me.

  I went out and walked up Powell from Market into the heart of the Tenderloin. The girls were out in force, wearing a thin overlay of boredom to mask the nervous energy of danger and drugs. I’d never paid for sex before, though I knew it was a cash service like anything else, available just a short walk from home.

  After recrossing Market I found myself at the office. The door was locked, and inside everything was as it had been. The door to the safe was closed, and the safe was locked.

  All my theories had collapsed now that Martha was dead, and Car was most likely her killer. Car was plenty tough and plenty smart. Working for my brother all these years, he could have built up quite a stable of prostitutes from Teddy’s clients. And he could have learned plenty about trafficking, if he wanted to bring in girls from Asia or Eastern Europe—young girls, not hardened by the street; girls who would have depended on him for everything, girls like Martha must once have been.

  “Fix this,” Teddy had said to Car in the stairwell, within a week after the Green Light was raided and shut down. What had Martha known? That Car shot Teddy? Or had she known what Teddy knew, about Car’s role in the Green Light and the source of the money Car put up and lost?

  I went to Tanya’s desk and took the files marked “Lawrence Maxwell” from the drawer. I decided to go through the case from beginning to end, including the original arrest report and the trial transcripts, continuing through the motions, appeals, and lawsuits my brother had filed on our father’s behalf and the notes he’d compiled for the habeas brief.

  I had known one version of the story—the story that was told by the prosecution in court. Then when I was a teenager prowling through microfilm I discovered another, my father’s strident, half-coherent protestations of innocence and conspiracy. Now I confronted a third.

  My conscious, willing memory stretches back to a few weeks after her murder; before that, the images swim and run. Whenever I think about my mother’s death it is the years afterward that come most readily, those lonely years living with Teddy, taken care of by a succession of nineteen-year-old girls.

  This is to say that much of what I was reading felt new to me, though at the same time it hit home with all the shock of memories uncovered and relived.

  The story the file told was an ugly one. In a few notes Teddy had sketched out an accurate portrait of the final period of my parent’s marriage: periods of calm alternating with explosions of rage, my father’s paranoia and violence, and my mother’s disenchantment.

  I remembered my father as always angry. He would sit at the kitchen table for hours nursing a grudge. The whole world was in on a conspiracy to keep him from getting what he wanted, which was always something other than what he got.

  Teddy was the only one who was able to talk to him. For Teddy, Lawrence would let his bitterness melt, and I could see how he might have been. But he was never like that with me. For me and my mother, the ones who lived with him, because Teddy had moved out when he turned eighteen, the violence was always right under the surface, and the more he drank the more it would build, until he would accuse Caroline of terrible things.

  She would lash out, tell him how worthless he was, and he would make a show of controlling himself, not reacting, but of course what he was doing was provoking her, and he knew it. The angrier she got the more beautiful she seemed. She would grab his hair, pull as hard as she could, or take a swing at him with a bottle. That was his green light. She’d fold and crumple, but he wouldn’t stop until he’d worked it out of his system, all the hatred. I’d hide in the bedroom until it was over and she came to me.

  Those fights were a shameful secret. I would tell Teddy about them, but he did nothing, and I took my cue from him. I never talked about them to anyone outside the family. Now, reading the file in astonishment, I wondered what Teddy had known then about her secrets.

  His notes outlined the missing evidence, all of it tending to show that my mother had been with a man besides my father the day of her death—information the defense never had. My first reaction was indignation. How dare they? Along with the affidavit from the former property-room attendant, the file contained photocopies of receipts for what appeared to be samples from the crime scene, blood and semen and fingerprints, none of which had been turned over. If it was true, it was a shocking miscarriage of justice.

  I felt my world shifting beneath me, as if the ground had begun to slide. Reading Teddy’s notes, giving way to them, I felt the excitement a lawyer feels when he realizes he has a case, mixed with the dread of the angry teenager I still was deep inside, living in a prison of my own making. Holy shit, I thought. The old bastard might actually be innocent.

  And in all these years I hadn’t even been to visit him. If what I was reading was true, I had made a colossal, wrongheaded mistake. I couldn’t face it, not all at once. I wanted to go on blaming him. I didn’t want to owe him anything.

  The notes made no attempt to articulate a theory of innocence. They pointed to no new suspect. My father had been convicted by a jury, and the conviction had been upheld by the appellate courts, despite Lawrence’s continual clamoring for justice. I couldn’t figure out what Teddy was hoping to achieve with a habeas corpus writ, if he wasn’t able to point to the real killer, who’d gone free.

  I closed the file and pushed it away. As I did, I dislodged an envelope I’d somehow failed to find before, made of stiff yellow cardboard. It contained glossy five-by-sevens, high-quality darkroom prints that had faded only slightly with age.

  My hands trembled even as I opened it. I wanted to go no further. Let it stop now, let the past stay put, a voice protested. I didn’t want to see what the envelope held, but I’d come too far to put the pictures away.

  The first was a wide-angle view of our old house in the Sunset, s
howing a man walking up to our door. I gave a cry of pain and astonishment as I recognized a younger but already imperious Gerald Locke. No, I thought. This cannot be, it simply cannot be.

  Another astonishing photo had caught Gerald and Caroline on the grass in the park, leaning close together, their faces clearly visible, my mother’s bare legs youthful and trim, though she must have been over forty. There were ten pictures in all.

  For more than an hour I studied them, the smallest details striking me like fists, a poison I remembered from adolescence filling my veins, the muscles of my neck tightening as they’d used to ache when I long spent afternoons in the microfilm room, my adolescent rage now turned on its head. How could she? I thought, stoking the same rage Lawrence must have felt. How could she—with Gerald Locke?

  I didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it, but no matter how long I sat staring at the pictures, it was his face, his hand, her smile as she looked at him. Was Teddy right? I wondered. Was it all her fault, the beginning of their troubles? Where could Teddy have discovered these pictures after all these years?

  Nothing about my mother having an affair with Gerald Locke had come out in my father’s trial. The DA’s case had focused narrowly on the recent history of abuse in the marriage. My father’s prints had not been found on the baseball bat she was beaten with. There were no witnesses. If and when my father’s writ of habeas corpus was granted—and it remained a long shot, though the pictures gave them a fighting chance—and if the DA retried my father, Teddy must have planned to make that courtroom ring with Locke’s name. And if Locke knew what Teddy was up to, he had a motive to silence him before Teddy could file that habeas brief.

  After a dreadful hesitation I flipped to the crime scene and autopsy photographs. I had been the one to find the body, but if I had any memory of what I’d discovered, I’d blocked it out. Now I saw how savagely she’d been beaten. The killer had used one of my aluminum baseball bats. As I looked I again felt the anger that had crippled me during my teenage years returning to its proper focus, not on Caroline but on the person who had done—this. I went through the stills again, studying each one carefully. I opened myself to the anger, taking it in like an alcoholic taking his first drink after fifteen years.

  I remembered what it felt like to love her and need her, to want to be with her, but the truth is I did not remember her at all.

  Santorez was right. One of these days I was going to have to visit my father.

  Chapter 17

  There were so many things I needed to do before I could hope to prove or even be certain in my mind that Gerald Locke had killed my brother—but on Sunday, paralyzed by the weight of my suspicions, I did nothing to further my search for the shooter.

  In the morning I went for a purging, punishing ride starting at the Rockridge BART. I climbed to Skyline Boulevard on the ridge of the East Bay Hills, followed it for several miles, then dropped over into Contra Costa County. I wound through grassy hills before crossing the coastal range again and ending up at the Richmond BART, my legs cooked.

  Anderson had wanted to scare me, and I was scared. I was in the unenviable position of knowing more than I wanted to and suspecting worse. What good did it do me to suspect that Gerald Locke was behind the shooting, I asked myself, if I could never prove it? He would likely escape justice now just as he’d done fifteen years ago, if he had, if it were possible to believe that such an astonishing secret could have lain undisturbed all these years.

  I got to Teddy’s room by eleven and found Jeanie established with her paperback in the chair by the window. A glance at her tired face told me nothing had changed. Still the bed automatically turned him, and the respirator deeply wheezed. If she saw me pause in the doorway, she gave no sign.

  ~ ~ ~

  I went home, avoiding my roommates, and went to my room. I had some marijuana that Teddy had given to me over the summer; he’d simply dropped it on my keyboard like a turd in a bag. I smoked some of it on the back porch, had lunch, smoked some more, then fell asleep on the bedroom floor where I’d lain down to stretch.

  It was dusk when my phone rang in my pocket.

  “Leo.” Jeanie’s voice. “Did I wake you?”

  I checked the time. Twelve after five. I’d slept for three hours. “Yeah,” I said, so thick-headed I almost dropped back to sleep.

  “I just got one of your old messages. I thought maybe you were calling to tell me why you’ve been avoiding me. Why you can’t be in the room with me, with your brother.”

  Jeanie always wanted to talk, even when she knew it did no good. “I can’t sit there and pray for a miracle, hoping everything’s going to work out great when I know it isn’t.”

  “So what did you do today? The same thing you’ve been doing all week?”

  “I went for a bike ride. Then I got stoned and fell asleep on the floor.”

  “Jesus, Leo. I need to feel like we’re in this together, but right now I feel like, I don’t know, like you blame me somehow. Blame me for what, I keep thinking? What have I done? Can you tell me what I’ve done?”

  “Nothing. It’s me.”

  “I’m at the hospital all day, and you’re off God knows where, chasing God knows what. And then when you do show your face, you see me and you turn right around and walk out, and you don’t come back. How’s that supposed to make me feel?”

  “It has nothing to do with you. I thought I could handle being there today, but I realized I was wrong.”

  There was a long pause I couldn’t bring myself to fill. I wanted to tell her about everything that had happened, but I didn’t know where or even how to start. Maybe it was better if she thought I was off getting stoned every day.

  “I’m coming over there,” she finally said. “We need to talk.”

  “Not here,” I said, not wanting to be trapped with Jeanie in my place, with my roommates around. “How about I meet you at Teddy’s office.”

  “Fine,” she said and hung up.

  On my way over there I picked up a bag of ice and a fifth of gin. I stuck them in an empty wastebasket and sat behind Tanya’s desk with my father’s files spread before me.

  It wasn’t long before I heard the elevator churn its way down to the ground floor, pause, then come rattling up.

  Jeanie must have brought a change of clothes to the hospital with her. Her eyes moved immediately to the file folders on the desk, took in the name written on their tabs, then looked away.

  “For what it’s worth, I always said that he should tell you what he was doing,” she said. “You were bound to find out sooner or later.”

  “Well, now I’ve found out.” I took the gin out and poured some for her into a coffee mug. “Why did you and Teddy split up?”

  “The marriage or the practice?”

  “Were there different reasons?”

  “What are you driving at, Leo?”

  “They’re convening a grand jury tomorrow. I told you, they’ve got a snitch from San Quentin who’s going to testify that Santorez was behind the shooting.”

  “And—?”

  “I don’t know what his testimony is going to be. Only that the detective on the case, Anderson, seems to think it’ll be pretty damning. Supposedly Teddy stole a lot of money from Santorez.”

  She blinked, then knocked back a slug of gin. “If that’s true, then the Santorez idea suddenly makes a lot of sense.”

  “You told me before you thought it was this other guy, whomever Keith was covering for. His partner, I guess.”

  “Maybe it was.” She watched me over the rim of her mug.

  “Teddy was putting together notes for a habeas brief for Lawrence.” I opened the file, took out the stiff envelope, and opened it. My voice wanted to quit on me but I went on. “These pictures were in the file. That’s Gerald Locke going into my parents’ old
house. That’s Gerald and my mother in the park.”

  “This would be Keith Locke’s father, I presume?” Jeanie studied the prints as if she’d never seen them before. Maybe she hadn’t. “You’ve got to hand it to Teddy,” she finally said. “Imagine the odds of something like this turning up after all these years.”

  “Teddy obviously was going to argue that the police knew another man had been with my mother the day she was killed. If she’d been having an affair with Gerald, that’d make him suspect number one. But why wasn’t he? There was evidence of her having been with another man, evidence that was either lost or deliberately destroyed and never disclosed to the defense. When Teddy filed that brief, Gerald’s name was going to be all over it.”

  She started to say something, then didn’t.

  I put the pictures back in the envelope. “Do you think these are real?”

  “As opposed to figments of our imagination?” She tried for a smile.

  “We both know that Teddy has a reputation for fabricating evidence. That’s what I was getting at when I asked why you split up. Was it because you found out how dirty he was?”

  “If you believe that, you’re just as bad as the rest of them.” She was pale with anger. She went on: “This stuff about your brother fabricating evidence and putting on perjurers started in the DA’s office. The truth is that Car went out there and pounded the pavement and found the witnesses Teddy needed to win tough cases. He’s the best investigator in the city. And Teddy’s light years better than any other defense attorney in town. He’s smarter and he works harder. He has no life. That’s the reason we broke up, if you need to know.” She took another swallow of gin. “I wanted a life. I still do.”