Bear Is Broken (25 page)

“We have, Your Honor,” said a woman from the back row, a software
engineer Teddy had identified immediately as the foreperson and whose
signature had appeared on each of the jury’s notes.

“The bailiff will now retrieve the verdict form.”

He crossed the courtroom, the solemnity beginning to wear off him
now but still clinging in patches. He reached across the front row of
jurors, took the verdict form, glanced at it, then delivered it to the clerk,
who stood from her computer, scanned the form, and read aloud: “As
to count one, we the jury find the defendant, Ellis Bradley, not guilty.”

I was tingling all over, and I heard a rushing sound in my ears.
“As to count two, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.”

Ellis was on his feet, waving the Bible and shouting “Praise Jesus.”

The judge sat looking at him with a grim little smile. “The Lord
came down into this courtroom,” Ellis said. “The Lord was back there
with you in that jury room.” As if only now remembering that I was
there he turned to me and pumped my hand, pulling me half out of
my chair. He smelled strongly of sweat with the release of his fear. I’m
sure I was worse.

“The Lord Jesus came down into this courtroom today,” he said,
faltering a bit, still grinning, half standing over his chair, smiling blindly
at the judge, the jury, the prosecutor. “Yes he did.”

He sat down and slapped my shoulder with excess force, as if he
were drunk. The clerk laid aside the verdict form, sat back down at
her desk, and reached for her mouse. Just another day, another verdict,
another docket to update.

“You have now completed your jury service in this case,” Judge Iris
read from the official jury instructions. “On behalf of all the judges of
the court, please accept my thanks for your time and effort.”

As she dismissed the jury, I basked in the feeling of having won. It
was better than sex, booze, anything. I wondered if it was like this every
time, if there had still been sweetness in it for Teddy after he stopped
expecting to lose. I felt like a brilliant lawyer; I felt newborn. My
misgivings drained away like water after a storm. I would do anything
to have this feeling, I thought in the rush of the moment. Anything.

It was one of those few moments in a life when one door closes
behind you and another opens ahead, and you step forward to take
your first definite possession of the life that will be yours. After the
Ellis Bradley verdict, for better or worse, there was no going back.
It wasn’t until we’d parted, Ellis a free man, me wandering down the
windowed hallway toward the stairwell, that I remembered it was Teddy
who had tried the case, Teddy who’d put on the probably perjurious
testimony that had gotten Ellis off.

I ended up in the basement cafeteria. I had a splitting headache and
needed caffeine. When Teddy was in trial he used to send me down
there for a double espresso during every break. The espresso was bitter
and burned the throat, like swallowing a coal, and always left me feeling
parched and quivery. I don’t know how he could stand the stuff.

As I stood in line staring at the menu board, wondering if it was
worth the wait for a sandwich, someone tapped my shoulder in an
expert straight-fingered jab right where the bones knit together. I
turned and saw Detective Anderson smiling at me.

“This must be some place for doughnuts,” I said, my heart jumping
as my body remembered that interview room where I thought he was
going to nail me for murder.

“Come on, Leo, if you’re going to follow in your brother’s footsteps
you’re going to have to come up with something more original than
doughnut jokes.”

It was my turn to order. “Double espresso for me and a glazed, please.”
I paid. Anderson ordered two coffees.

“Extra one for dipping,” I suggested. “Good thinking.”

The woman handed me the doughnut in a fold of waxed paper and
I took a quick bite, just in case Anderson thought he was going to get
it. His eyes narrowed.

My coffee came, and so did Anderson’s. I was about to walk out of
there when he said, “I’ll give you one guess who this second coffee
is for.”

Something in his voice froze me.

“I don’t think I want to,” I said, but didn’t walk away.

“Want to see him?” He shook packet after packet of creamer into
one of the coffees. “You’ll be the first defense attorney to get a peek
inside that door. The first on my watch, at least.”

He smiled, showing me once again that I was in his power, and I
knew I couldn’t just walk away now as I’d done for so many years. I
was tired of being afraid of my father and what he’d done—what he
was supposed to have done. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to
face Lawrence, now that he was evidently trying to leverage Teddy’s
shooting into a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I gave Anderson a nod. We went toward the jury assembly room at
the end of the short hall. Walking beside him, I remembered my old
fantasies of killing my father. I’d rehearsed patricide in my imagination
so often that I believed that I knew the feel of my flesh impacting his
flesh, my skin tearing his skin, my bones breaking his bones. I’d stopped
believing myself capable of murder, but as I followed Anderson through
the cavernous room I once more breathed in the fury that had long
been my only alternative to loneliness and fear.

As we approached the unmarked door at the far end, Anderson
handed me one of the cups. I didn’t have to ask whose coffee I was
holding. It was for my father, I knew. Anderson knocked and the door
was opened from within. At the end of a short hall I saw a room with
a jury box not unlike the one in a criminal trial court, only this one
had more chairs. There was a witness stand, a court reporter’s and
clerk’s table, and one for the prosecution. There was none, however,
for the defense. At the witness stand sat a slight, lean man in an orange
jumpsuit and plastic-framed glasses, bald on top with gray hair cropped
close at the sides of his head.

Two alarmed-looking sheriff ’s deputies barred my path. In no uncertain
terms I was told to step back, that I had no business here. Anderson
stood watching. Over the deputies’ shoulders my eyes locked
with my father’s.

I could not tell whether he recognized me; the glance we shared
was too brief. His face changed, however. His eyes hardened, and I
recoiled. What they seemed to hold was not apology but accusation,
as if all these years I’d been the one in the wrong.

For the first time I wondered why he hadn’t sought me out, sent
me a letter. All these years he’d spent trying to convince the world
that he was innocent, he hadn’t wasted even a single breath trying to
convince me.

The last thing I saw as they shoved me out the door, my father’s coffee
sloshing over my hand, was Anderson’s face creased in amusement.

All the thrill of my triumph in the courtroom had melted into the
exhaust-laden air, and my headache was worse than ever.
I wandered up Market Street toward the Ferry Building. Ellis Bradley
was past; now only one case mattered. I didn’t really believe that Car
was the one who’d shot Teddy. I wanted to believe it, because I didn’t
like how close he’d gotten to Jeanie, but I couldn’t.

Or maybe Car had been working for Gerald all along. That might
explain why he was taking pictures of me with Christine Locke. Yet
there were no apparent connections between my brother’s shooting,
Marovich’s death, and Martha’s murder. That seemed wrong to me,
not least because it required entertaining the idea that my father was
innocent. Gerald was the wild card.

I had to find out what was on the disks, but first I owed it to Teddy
to tell him about the Ellis Bradley verdict.

I caught a cab out to the hospital. Except for Teddy, the room was
empty. I pulled a chair up to his bedside. “The jury came back not
guilty,” I said. “Ellis yelled and waved his Bible around and walked out
of there. I gave the closing argument for you last week. I didn’t want
to tell you before, in case we lost. But we won. Not guilty, Teddy.”
I held my breath. I took his hand. I couldn’t remember the last time
we had touched before the shooting. “If you understand, squeeze my
hand.”

The bed whirred and tilted him away from me. Teddy’s breath
wheezed in and out, in and out.

I stayed for half an hour, then went back to the office to watch the disks.
When I opened the office door I found myself facing Tanya over
the barrel of the Saturday night special she’d just withdrawn from her
purse. She held me in her sights, then put the gun down. Her eyes
dropped to the desk, as if I’d ceased to be of any interest once I was
no longer a target. The lights were off, the blinds half-slatted.
I waited for her to say something. Finally I let out my breath and
said, “Jesus, you might have killed me.”

“Be glad you were you.”

I dropped Teddy’s briefcase on the waiting room chair. “What rock
have you been hiding under?”

“I just came to pick up a few things.”

“Don’t be too hasty about leaving. If you stay you won’t be working
for me, you’ll be working for Jeanie. She’s taking over Teddy’s practice.”

“I could never work for a woman,” she said.

She could never work for a woman who’d been married to Teddy,
is what I sensed she meant.

“What are you going to do?”

She shrugged. “Your brother always promised I’d be taken care of.
I don’t suppose that means anything now.”

I glanced into the inner office and saw the safe hanging open. Of
course she’d had the combination. If she’d opened it earlier and taken
the gun, there’d be no reason to open it again, and if she’d taken the
gun, there was no way she’d admit it. I decided not to say anything.

“You must have known Teddy was going to file a habeas brief for my
father,” I said.

Her face closed down.

“I saw the file. He’s been representing him for years.”

She stepped around the desk and moved toward the door.

“Tanya,” I said. “Listen to me.
I have to know.
Does Teddy really
believe my father is innocent?”

She turned, screwing up her face with deep offense. “What the hell
does that matter?”

“You must see that it would matter to me. We’re talking about my
mother’s murder.”

“I just put in the line numbers and the headings and file them with
the court. I don’t ask Teddy what he
believes.
”

“But you must have some idea.” I wanted to ask her about Gerald
Locke, but I didn’t know how much she knew of what Teddy had
known.

“If you think so then you don’t know Teddy. It never mattered to
him if they were guilty or innocent. Never. And he never speculated.
With your father it would be no different. A client is a client is a client.
That was Teddy. He was a
lawyer,
Leo.”

She was radiant with the pride of possession, a possession somehow
more complete now that Teddy was on his deathbed. She looked ten
years younger, and I was shocked to see that under all the accumulated
detritus of hard living, under all the damage that had been done to
her, a furtive beauty remained.

For an instant I wondered whether she and Teddy—
No way, I told myself as she walked out the door.

I moved the little TV down from the bookshelf to Teddy’s desk and
connected it to the camera to see what Christine was willing to pay
twenty thousand dollars for.

You could call them interviews, I guess. Interviews of the wordless
kind. The clips all took place in the same room dominated by a fourposter
bed hung with mosquito netting. One wall of the room was
painted with an amateurish mural of a beach complete with naked
sunbathers. Fake palm trees stood in the corners. It had to be the
Green Light.

Whoever put that camera in the room could only have had extortion
in mind. Each clip showed a single session, and in each Martha
played a leading role. The men were mostly older, wealthy-looking.
I noticed how the camera would catch the glint of a wedding ring,
the way Martha would make sure to turn them toward the camera at
crucial moments.

I fast-forwarded through the clips just looking at faces, but none
of the men was Marovich. Stupid girl, I whispered as I watched, you
stupid, stupid girl. But she had aspirations, I had to give her that; she
wasn’t content with her place in the world. She probably made the
mistake of thinking her power over those men was real rather than
a disguise they put on and stripped off again when they walked out.
Maybe she thought she could handle them in the outside world the
same way she handled them in the Green Light.

I sealed the videodisks into a padded envelope, and I got another,
larger envelope, putting both the pictures of my mother and Gerald
Locke and the videodisks inside it. I used the office meter to print
out postage fifty cents short and addressed it to myself. Anyone who
wanted to retrieve that package would have to wait in line at the post
office for at least an hour to pay the postage due, and even then the
clerk might not feel like looking for it, if my experience with that
dysfunctional bureaucracy was any guide. It was the safest place I could
think of on short notice.

I dropped the envelope into the same mailbox in which I’d dropped
Teddy’s letter to my father.

I went back to my apartment and called Christine’s cell phone. She
didn’t answer, and I didn’t expect her to. I left a message saying I’d
found what she was looking for and that she should call me back.
She called within an hour. Her voice sounded different, more privileged
and with assumed sophistication, more like her mother’s voice
than her own.

“I assume you’ve watched the disks.”

I didn’t reply.

“My offer stands.”

“Which one?”

“I’ll take you to dinner. If we end up not sleeping together I’ll write
you a check for twenty thousand dollars, but if you fuck me you don’t
get a penny, and I get the disks.”