Bear Is Broken (22 page)

It was nearly four in the afternoon.

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,
showing 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.

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.