Bear Is Broken (11 page)

For three years Jeanie toughed it out. I have to give her credit. In the
end, though, it wasn’t having to live in that gutted shell of a house that
made her leave. That was just a symptom of deeper problems in their
marriage, as well as in Teddy’s heart. I don’t know exactly what it was
that drove the final wedge between them, but at bottom I suppose it
had to be the way my brother was, because of what our father had done.

After Jeanie left, he kept the work on the house going to the point
where rain couldn’t get in and he had the basic necessities of life: a
furnished bedroom, a functional kitchen, a back deck where he could
sit late at night and think. The rest of the place remained half finished,
plywood on the floors and drywall on the walls, plastic sheeting over
the eaves. To reach the front door you had to clamber up onto the
waist-high porch. He never got around to installing steps. He’d gone
with the lowest bidder and the cheapest materials, cutting corners
wherever he could. If I built a house, I would build it to last, I told
myself, and if I found the right girl, I was going to hang on to her. I
had Teddy to thank for showing me how not to live.

As I gained the porch I heard the phone ringing, echoing as sounds
can only echo in a large, unfurnished, uncarpeted structure. I unlocked
the front door, heading for a nook in the living room where my
brother had set up a cheap IKEA corner desk. The instant I got to the
phone it stopped ringing, and the answering machine clicked on even
though the caller had hung up. The tape must have been full, because
the machine clicked off as soon as Teddy’s message played.

Was it possible the police hadn’t driven here yet? I wondered. I
remembered Anderson’s promise to run down every lead, to bring
the killer to justice if only to spite Teddy. Thirty-six hours had passed
since the shooting, and it seemed odd that I was the first person to
set foot here. Again I remembered what Car had said about the cops
being involved. How many times would Anderson’s name come up
in Teddy’s files?

I picked up the phone and hit *69, but a recorded message informed
me that the number was blocked. I replaced the handset and turned
away, but at once it started ringing again. When I answered, a woman’s
voice said in a rush, “Teddy, thank God.” She sounded desperate, on the
edge of tears. “I knew it wasn’t true,” she said to someone on her end.
“This is Teddy’s brother, Leo,” I told her. “Teddy’s in the hospital.”

She gave a gasping cry and slammed down the phone.

I sat there, flipped on the light, and opened my other beer. Teddy had
a lot of girls—on the sly when he was married and in the open now
that he was not. I hit the play button and waited while it rewound.

“Teddy, I—look, just call me.” A different voice, this one with an
Asian accent. Then another time: “Teddy, it’s Martha. It’s Monday evening,
and I’m here with Chris. Call us right away.” Then she rang again.

And again. The repetition of her pleas was mesmerizing as the messages
grew more and more tense. There was also a call about a dentist
appointment Teddy had missed and another from a contractor saying
that he had a crew ready to start work on Monday, and all Teddy had
to do was fax over the papers. Had he finally decided to finish work
on the house?

All the messages had been left before the shooting. I was sure that
Martha’s voice belonged to the woman who’d held the gun on me
at the Seward.

I sat for a while drinking beer and turning over the objects on
Teddy’s desk, little more than a temporary workspace a person might
set up in a borrowed room. I hadn’t been here since Jeanie and Teddy
still shared the house. Even though I’d known more or less what to
expect, its emptiness was shocking. When Teddy and Jeanie were together
here there were books and music and art on the walls. I could
see that it would be a real house someday. Now that illusion was gone.

I realized how little of what other people thought of as life my
brother had set aside for himself. Our family had shattered when Teddy
was twenty-two and I was ten. If he’d turned unremittingly to work,
it must have been partly because of his responsibility for me.

It wasn’t just work, however, and it wasn’t my fault. There was a
quality of self-indulgence in his asceticism, a neurotic’s pleasure in
yielding to neurosis, an aversion to feeling at home. The house, which
more than any other place should have been a home, showed how
completely this aversion had thwarted every satisfaction and reward
that work is supposed to bring.

Documents were scattered across the desk, copies of police reports
and transcripts of preliminary hearings, all of them from open cases,
none of which I had yet had the chance to review. The drawers held
the same assortment of alligator clips, burned-out tape recorders, and
half-used tablets that had filled his desk drawers in the city. The rest
of the room was empty except for a couch and an armchair—both
shrouded in plastic—a stepladder and drop cloth, and a roller immobilized
in solidified latex. Two of the walls had been painted, and two
were plain drywall.

I wandered into the kitchen, which wasn’t much more welcoming.
It was finished, at least. On the stove was a pan with scum around the
rim. The cupboards held bottles of tomato sauce and an assortment
of dishes. The freezer was jammed with packets of frozen ravioli and
Costco hamburger patties, with a few ancient-looking bags of vegetables.
In the fridge I found a half-full case of light beer. I threw out
my empty and opened one.

Martha, I wondered. Martha and Chris. I’m here with Chris. Where?
I went back to the master bedroom. Its sliding glass doors gave out
onto the deck. Here, at least, Teddy had made a modest effort, I suppose
because this room and the deck were the only parts of the house that
the girls he brought home had leisure to examine. Or perhaps of all the
rooms, Jeanie had taken the least from this one when she left. On the
deck stood a pair of Adirondack chairs. The slope dropped off steeply,
and the broad lower branches of a young redwood brushed the deck
railing and carpeted the boards with needles. One of the chairs had a
bare space around it, with an ashtray, empty beer cans, and a few crusted
plates, but the rest of the deck and the other chair were covered with
a thin layer of needles. It was clear that Teddy never went to stand by
the railing, never did anything but sit, eat, drink, and smoke his dope.

I stood listening to the night birds’ calls and to the creaking of the
tree trunks all around me. In the forest I saw no lights. A tinge of wood
smoke rose to my nostrils. In that moment I thought I understood
what it was that my brother had loved about this place and, conversely,
why he kept that room at the Seward.

I was startled by a noise from the house behind me, the click of the
front door latch as somebody eased it closed.

I turned back inside and went quickly to the bedside table, expecting
exactly what I found when I opened the drawer: Teddy’s other
gun, the twin of the one in his office, and a pack of condoms. I slid
the drawer closed, leaving the contents in place. No way was I going
to shoot anyone.

I pressed my shoulder against the wall just inside the bedroom. I’d
left on all the lights, so the intruder had to realize he wasn’t alone. We
were each waiting for the other to reveal himself.

Finally a woman’s voice startlingly near called out breathlessly, tremulously,
sounding a note beyond hope: “Ted?”

“Jeanie!” I called back at once, my voice cracking as I sucked a great
gulp of air. “It’s Leo.”

From the living room came a volley of choked sobs that stopped
abruptly.

I came out. Jeanie stood three feet away with a huge barbecue knife
in her hand, her face wet. I didn’t doubt that she would have used the
knife if she’d had to, and used it well.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, lowering the knife to her
side and giving me a hard punch in the chest with her free hand.

I stepped back with the punch, thinking I could have asked her the
same thing, then moved close again. She gave a little gasp of dismay
and embraced me, the knife clattering to the floor. “Oh, honey,” I said,
my breath catching with the intensity of our shared grief and my sheer
wonder at holding Jeanie again.

The history of that wonder is easy enough to tell. I had self-consciously
fallen in love with Jeanie shortly after she became my
brother’s girlfriend and moved in with us when I was fifteen. We kissed
once shortly before I moved out of the Potrero apartment for college.
That night we were all drunk because Teddy and Jeanie had just lost
their first big felony trial. He’d said something crude, I don’t remember
what, and she walked out. When he wouldn’t go after her, I did.

I caught her within a block, and she put her hands on my shoulders
and kissed me deeply. In a few weeks she and Teddy patched things
up. She never told him about the kiss.

How confused I was, how alone in my adolescent throes. And Teddy
never spoke up, though he must have known what was going on, and
there were times when a kind word or even a harsh one from him might
have made all the difference. He did the best he could, or so I tell myself
now, when there is no point in accusing him or myself any longer.

Thirty-six hours after the shooting, ten years after I had first met
Jeanie, she was still beautiful: a few inches taller than me, big-boned,
with wispy brown-blonde hair and a freckled face, and a way of looking
you frankly and directly in the eye. Her attractiveness was not in any
collection of features, and it would have been easy to make her sound
plain, but to me and Teddy and others she was remarkable, amazing.

It was all in her quickness, in her willingness to sting and then soothe
the stung place, and in her intelligence, which always seemed to be
working on some knotty problem, like she could solve me if she only
thought hard enough.

“Have you been to the hospital yet?” I asked.

She pulled from our embrace, swiping at her eye with the back of
her hand. “I’ve been in Mendocino. I didn’t get your message until this
afternoon. I called the hospital, and they told me how serious it was.
It was too late to go there, so I thought I’d come here. I saw the lights
and I saw Teddy’s car, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

It was a pleasure and affirmation to step away from her and remember
that I was a man and not the child who’d decided long ago that
he was in love with his brother’s girlfriend.

“I was hoping I might find something here that would help me
understand what happened,” I said.

“It was just so public,” she said, like she’d been sitting on this thought
during her whole drive, just waiting for someone to share it with. “Like
they were trying to send a message.”

“You’re right.” I glanced around me. It would have been so very
simple to shoot him here, follow him home one night from the BART
and do it. “But a message to whom?”

She turned away. Suddenly she seemed nervous, tense. “Do you
want a drink? I need one.”

I wasn’t about to turn her down, though I’d had plenty already. She’d
left a canvas shopping bag by the front door. I followed her as she went
to retrieve it. Inside was a sweating bottle of Tanqueray gin she must
have taken straight from her freezer. Jeanie liked to drink, and sometimes
she liked to get drunk. I suppose that’s what she had in mind.

She took down a pair of tumblers and poured two Jeanie Martinis,
our old household term for ice-cold gin in a glass. Then she seemed at a
loss. To sit at the kitchen table we had to clear away layers of junk mail.
“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“Last week.” She tossed her head as if to clear it. “We’ve been talking
all the time lately, actually. He calls me up late at night to chat about
cases, throw ideas around. He keeps trying to talk me into coming
back here to live with him, but we both know he’s bluffing.” She took
a long drink of gin, then stared straight at me. “He’s going to die?”
“I don’t know. The nurse said his brain activity is minimal.” I hesitated,
then said, “I keep wavering between hoping he’ll live and hoping
he won’t. I mean, he’ll be a vegetable, won’t he? With his head half
blown away?”

Her voice was stern. “I don’t think either of us can know that, Leo.”
She was a Catholic, if a lapsed one, resistant to better-off-dead thoughts.
“I just can’t help feeling that Teddy wouldn’t want to live like that.
What would he do without his work? Can you imagine him ever
being forced to depend on anyone?”

“He’d want to live no matter what. Let’s not talk this way, Leo.”

She seemed tense and distracted, as if only one part of her mind was
participating in the conversation, and she went through her first Jeanie
Martini very quickly. I poured her another, then put the gin away in the
freezer. It had been several years since I’d seen her sopping drunk, and
I didn’t care to repeat the experience. Not under these circumstances.
For both of our sakes, I wanted Jeanie to keep her dignity, which was
considerable, given her stature in the criminal defense community.

“Who’s the detective on the case?” she asked.

“Anderson. You haven’t heard from him?”

She shook her head.

“He hasn’t been here, as far as I can tell. He wanted a list of former
clients. I had Tanya draw it up, and I faxed it over to him this morning.
I saw him in court this morning, but he didn’t stick around to talk.”

“Court?” She gave me a quizzical look.

“The closing statement in the Ellis Bradley case. They shot Teddy
before he could give it. So rather than have the judge declare a mistrial
and let the client cop a plea to put this all behind him, I stepped in
and gave it.”

Her look deepened into an expression of worry and concern.

I was flushed, my cheeks getting hotter as I remembered how things
had gone in court. “I got my bar results Friday. It’s okay.”