Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  “What happens when the money runs out?” I asked. “And it will run out, possibly much sooner than you expect. What happens the next time he shows up on your doorstep?”

  “An excellent question.” Gerald shot me another glance; then his eyes went back to Greta. “How much did you give him?”

  “Yes, how much?” Christine was perking up beside me, as if the show she’d been waiting for was finally about to start. She took a sip of her drink and moved her hand up my thigh. The skin of my leg twitched and crawled.

  “Enough,” Greta said.

  Gerald chopped the air in disgust and stalked from the room.

  “We might as well go in,” Greta finally said. “There’s no point waiting for your father.”

  The food was in a pair of warming dishes on the sideboard in the dining room. The first warming dish held grilled salmon. The second, roasted potatoes and sliced beets.

  It made me increasingly uneasy to know that Keith had been here since our encounter.

  “She’s lying,” Christine whispered as her mother served the food. “Keith’s still here.”

  I gasped. “How do you know?”

  Her mother was coming toward us from the sideboard with a steaming plate in each hand.

  “His shoes in the closet,” was all Christine had time to say as we parted toward opposite sides of the table.

  Greta took her place at the head of the table. She sat thoughtfully for a moment, then looked up at me with a completely changed face, a look of resignation. Her voice when she spoke was also changed. “I’ll write you a check now for two hundred thousand dollars.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “If?”

  “If you agree to annul the marriage and stay away from us. Christine included.”

  “You could have bargained me lower, but all right. Two hundred it is.”

  “Wait, don’t I have a say?” Christine asked. But her heart wasn’t in it.

  Greta rose. “I’ll write you a check immediately.”

  “I don’t get to stay for supper?”

  She sounded almost happy. “You’re welcome to eat all you want before I come back.”

  I looked across the table at Christine as the door swung closed behind her mother. “Presumably that includes you,” I said. “One last kiss and good-bye?”

  She flushed, frowning.

  “What’s she think she’s buying with the two hundred thousand?” I mused. “Surely she doesn’t give a damn one way or the other about me and you. She must know it’s a sham.”

  “She’s afraid of something,” Christine said. “She doesn’t like having you here. It makes her nervous.”

  “At least your father knew what he was paying for. I told him about the disk. About the photos. But Greta hasn’t heard any of that. As far as she knows, I’m just some rude kid who wormed his way into her little girl’s heart.”

  She gave a curt laugh. “Not into my heart. You’re getting your money, more than you could ever have bargained on. I want the disk.”

  “What’s Keith doing here, though? It would be a shame if we left without seeing him.” Then something shifted in me, like an iceberg rolling over, and I saw everything in a new light. “He did it. It wasn’t Santorez, and it wasn’t your father. Keith shot Teddy, and now he’s scared. He came running to Mommy and begged her to fix it. She knows, and she thinks I know, too. She thinks I have proof. That’s why she’s so eager to buy me off.”

  I rose from my chair just as Greta came in.

  “Here’s your check, Mr. Maxwell,” she said, holding it out to me. “Now if you’ll permit me, I’ll show you the door. My lawyer will be in touch to confirm the terms we discussed.”

  I looked down at the check in my hand. Two hundred thousand dollars. An incredible sum. “There’s no marriage,” I said and looked back up at her. “It’s just a little joke we were playing. Maybe that changes things.” I made to hand the check back.

  She wouldn’t take it. “I want you to have the money. Please. Just leave.”

  “What if money wasn’t what I came for? What if I want something else?”

  “Please,” she said again. “Just take it and go. It’s all you’re ever going to get from this house. Perhaps if it does you some good—”

  From somewhere above us there came a shout, then a thump. Followed by the sound of a heavy object rolling very fast down the stairs.

  Christine was first through the door to the hall, and I was right behind her. We found Gerald Locke lying unconscious on the landing, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. At the top of the stairs stood his son.

  Keith had a gun in his hand down at his side, a nine-millimeter automatic like the one that had been used to shoot my brother. As soon as he saw me he raised it in our direction.

  “See, I told you he would come,” he said to Greta. “We can’t ever get rid of him.”

  “You didn’t expect to see me?” I asked.

  “Mother, what should I do?”

  “Put the gun down,” Greta said.

  Christine straightened as her father groaned and sat up, holding his head.

  “I’ve written him a check for two hundred thousand dollars,” Greta said, going to her husband’s side and putting her hand on his shoulder. “I should think that would be more than sufficient to keep him quiet. Now put the gun down, Keith.”

  Instead, he aimed it at my chest. “I thought you were dead for sure. That’s what I told Christine. I said, ‘He’s dead, we’ve got nothing to worry about, you’re in the clear.’”

  I was frozen, staring at the barrel of the gun, wishing it in my own hand.

  Christine scoffed. “You’re such a liar,” she said. Then to me: “He’s lying.”

  “Your father’s going to be okay,” Greta said. “He didn’t know you were here. You surprised him, that’s all.”

  “I’m okay,” Gerald said in a gravelly voice. “I’ll be fine.”

  “He was going to throw me out. Right down the stairs. Instead I threw him down the stairs.”

  “Let’s at least go in and sit in the living room,” Greta said. “Can we do that?”

  Keith came down. Gerald got to his feet with his wife’s help, and we all went into the living room. Christine and I sat on the couch as before. Gerald sat in one of the armchairs, Greta in the other. Keith stood.

  I was still holding the check in my hand. I looked down at it for a moment, then tore it slowly in half, put the pieces together, and tore again, repeating until there was nothing but tiny shreds. I let them snow down on the carpet.

  Keith addressed his mother: “What are we going to do?”

  Gerald frowned. “We?” Greta didn’t have an answer.

  Keith glowered at his father; then his look settled on Christine. He stepped forward and slashed her viciously across the face with the pistol. “You’re such a whore.”

  Blood ran from the gash on Christine’s cheek. Her eyes blazed.

  “You think you can buy me off just like him?” Keith said, his anger returning to his mother. “There isn’t any difference for you between your own son and that—person?”

  “The difference is you take her money and I don’t,” I said.

  Keith pointed the gun at me. “Fuck you.”

  “You’ve got two choices. One, you shoot me dead and make a better shot than you did when you shot my brother. Yeah, I know you’re the one who shot him. Two, you walk out of here with your mother’s money and do a better job of disappearing than you did the last time.”

  He walked toward me, holding the gun straight-armed. To reach me he had to pass Christine. She stuck out her leg and tripped him, and he came crashing down onto the coffee table. The gun fired. I didn’t see where the shot hit. I looked down and saw the gun on the carpet at my feet. I scooped it up. />
  Nobody seemed to be hurt. I let out a deep breath. “Get up,” I told Keith. “Sit on the couch with your sister.”

  He sat.

  Still holding the gun, I took out my phone and dialed Detective Anderson’s number. I told him where I was, that I’d been attacked by one of my brother’s former clients, that I’d disarmed him, and that the gun appeared to be the same one that Teddy had taken a bullet from.

  I ended the call and turned to Greta. “Gerald was having an affair with my mother. You found out, and shortly afterward Caroline was killed. Do I have that much right?”

  She wasn’t stupid. She knew better than to talk. We weren’t in a court of law, and there was nothing in the world I could do to make her.

  “You must have become suspicious and hired a private investigator to follow Gerald and take those pictures,” I said. “You wanted the children to know the truth about their father. Keith must have been, what? Sixteen? Maybe you drove him by the house, maybe he went there on his own or followed his father. My guess is that he wanted sex and thought he could get it from the mistress. Isn’t sex what all sixteen-year-old boys want? When she wouldn’t give it up, he raped and killed her.”

  “Shut your filthy mouth,” Keith said.

  “I was ten years old. I was the one who found her. Afterward you didn’t know more than you had to know. You bought off the private investigator to keep his mouth shut, and you sent Keith away to school. That should have been the end of it, but Keith flunked out. He came home and started getting into trouble. And when my brother became a lawyer, Keith looked him up. Became friends with him. Started whispering in his ear. Eventually he pulled out the investigator’s pictures.

  “Teddy must have realized Gerald couldn’t have been the killer. He figured out that Keith killed my mother. Caroline. And Keith shot him for it. Martha drove the car. Keith shot her, too, once he figured out I was on his trail.”

  Greta’s hand was at her throat. Something I’d said seemed to have stricken her, maybe that I’d been the one to find Caroline. I was right, I saw. She’d covered for Keith all these years. She and her husband.

  “For God’s sake, Greta, don’t talk to him,” Gerald said.

  Greta glanced at her husband, then bowed her head.

  Chapter 28

  Gerald and Greta Locke denied everything, and Christine refused to speak with the police. After the video emerged, she hired a hotshot lawyer, an ex-prosecutor who arranged for her to appear at the police station to answer a series of questions. There was a story in the papers, but the scandal died away. A month later the charges against Santorez were dismissed and new charges were filed against Keith in my brother’s shooting. They had the physical evidence from the gun, and eyewitness testimony from the people in the restaurant, and the previous incident with Marovich hanging over Keith’s head. He pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to fifteen years.

  He was never charged in Martha’s death. I never learned how he got Teddy’s gun.

  I sent my father a one-line note asking to be put on his list of approved visitors at San Quentin. He wrote back eagerly, asking me to take over his case, finish the habeas petition. I didn’t respond. It was too much to ask, too soon. I wasn’t ready to visit him, knowing he would repeat the request, but I kept the file in my drawer.

  When it was time for Teddy to come out of the hospital I decided to hang my shingle in Oakland. It was cheaper to live there than in the city, and I wanted to be near the rehab center we’d chosen on Telegraph Avenue just over the Berkeley border.

  ~ ~ ~

  My brother is dressing for the funeral. Sensibly enough, he begins with the pants. He holds them up, looks down at himself, then seems to realize he must get undressed before he can put them on. He lays the pants on the bed, unbuttons his khaki shorts, and slides them down.

  He has forgotten to remove his shoes, however, and the shorts will not come off.

  It is hard to believe that a year ago this slow-witted, off-balance, volatile stranger was one of the most accomplished young criminal defense lawyers in San Francisco. From the left side, all you can see is that he’s lost a great deal of weight, more than sixty pounds, not by choice but because he has had to relearn how to swallow. Only from the right do you notice the craterlike dent in his brow, the scar left by the entry of the bullet that should have killed him.

  He sits on the bed and fights to get the shorts off over the shoes. Despite the difficulty of this, it doesn’t occur to him to take the shoes off now. As he struggles against them, his face takes on a stubborn, defensive look, the look that says that whatever I may think is wrong with him, I am making it all up, I am the one with the problem.

  It’s excruciating to hold my tongue as he makes mistake after mistake, but if I don’t keep my silence, he will fly into a rage. The lack of dexterity on his left side is only a small part of the problem. Even the simplest task has become a labyrinth through which he stumbles with no sense of himself or of his goal.

  “You remember where we’re going today?” I ask to distract him from his frustration.

  He pauses to consider the question, then gives the answer he figures is bound to be at least partially right: “In the car.” At moments like this you can still tell that he is a lawyer. He uses his old tone of peremptory command, but his voice is so slurred that no one who doesn’t know him well can understand him.

  “We’re not going to the car, but we’re taking the car to where we’re going.”

  I can only push him so far before he tells me to fuck off, get out of his room, and get out of his life. His temper is a reflex, like the jerk of his leg when his doctor taps the patella. In two months he will get out of rehab and come to live with me, for lack of a better option.

  He has the shorts off now, though he still wears his shoes. He does not think of taking off the shoes before putting on the suit pants. But I don’t say anything. One of the therapists has promised to check up on us. Caroline. Our mother’s name. Whatever tangle Teddy gets himself into, he will permit her to help him, but not me, never me; this reflex of his personality and of our relationship remains.

  He stands and holds up the suit pants, trying to figure out which way they go on. He tries them backward—wrong guess. Not that it matters, since he is still wearing the shoes. He makes little sideways kicks at the leg holes, the hip pockets before him. I can see he has no faith in succeeding. He is merely going through the motions, waiting for someone to show him what he’s doing wrong. This resignation is new to my brother’s personality, and it chills me. No matter how hopeless the case, no matter how guilty the client, Teddy always believed there was a way to win.

  A secret part of me still imagines that this brittle shell will crack and my brother will emerge more or less as he used to be, smiling at the joke he has played on us all, the left side of his face no longer sagging. “Just a hiccup, Monkey Boy,” he’ll say, spinning away that awful four-footed cane. “An educational experience, all in all.” And then he’ll get back to work.

  If I let him continue this way he’s going to tear out the inseam. I’m about to speak up when Caroline slips into the room.

  Teddy regards the pants, now crumpled on the floor at his feet. Then his gaze shifts hopelessly to the rest of the clothes I’ve brought him, and he gives Caroline a look of abject dependence, so overwhelmed that he can’t find words to express his confusion. If I don’t get out of here and let her work her magic, he will explode.

  I tell them I’ll wait in the hall.

  ~ ~ ~

  I hear Tamara, another patient at the rehab center, keen, “No, no.” From where I stand outside Teddy’s door I can see her family gathered down there in their church clothes, the adults spilling out the door of her room. They have decided to keep telling her the truth until the truth sinks in. Her nephews and nieces stand slumped against th
e walls on both sides of the hall in stiff shoes and too-tight pants and dresses.

  Some part of Tamara must know by now that her husband is dead. Her sobbing goes on and on, as if her body understands and remembers what’s still too slippery for her intellect to grasp.

  I think of her buttery brown skin, large almond-shaped eyes, her hair falling in a velvet sheen down her back. The virus that ravaged her brain did not touch her beauty. I always make a point of speaking to her when I come to visit Teddy at the rehab center. No matter how long we’ve been standing together, no matter how many times we’ve met, it’s always as if I’ve just appeared before her that minute for the very first time.

  Teddy’s door opens, and he comes out leaning on his cane. Behind him stands Caroline with a taut smile. I haven’t seen him in a suit since the day he was shot. I’ve had the pants taken in, but the rich wool still hangs on him, and his shirt collar gapes. She’s knotted his tie in a simple schoolboy. Teddy always favored the Windsor.

  “How do I look?” he asks. “Hra dro I rook,” is what he says.

  “Like a retard in a borrowed suit.”

  He tilts his head and leers hideously, letting his mouth drool open, holding the pose long enough for me to see he’s making a joke. He’s in a better mood now. The suit probably makes him feel like his old self, almost.

  Caroline’s smile runs off her face like cold water. That word is as offensive to me as it is to her, but it’s the word Teddy would have used. The old Teddy.

  His look of concentration returns as we walk toward the exit. “What’s going on back there?”

  “They’re explaining to Tamara what happened again. About her husband being killed.”

  “They can explain all day long, and she still won’t know what the fuck they’re saying.”

  “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”

  He blinks. His brain no longer registers abstractions. The literal meaning is the most you can expect him to get. He waits, then asks, “So where are we going?” As if he hasn’t asked me ten times.