Lion Plays Rough (20 page)

“I understand.”

He closed his eyes and nodded. Then we went back to the car and he drove me back across the bay to my office.

Chapter 26

I didn't sleep that night, but by morning I knew what I wanted to do. I called Mrs. Walker and asked if she and Tamara would meet me at my office. Whatever else happened, I owed her an explanation. “You asked me to look into Jeremy's death and the police investigation,” I said to her in the conference room that afternoon. “I think I know what happened, but I can't prove it.”

I summarized what I'd found, telling her that Jeremy had witnessed an attack by Damon's men on an East Oakland drug house, and that he'd been able to place a crooked narcotics officer, Chris Lucas, on the scene. He'd intended to file a citizen complaint but evidently he'd spoken with the wrong person about it, and before he could finish the complaint Lucas had shot him dead.

“I want to sue Lucas and the city for wrongful death,” I told her. “This is a huge scandal, and in a matter of weeks or months it's going to break wide open. With luck I think I can get the proof I need before that happens.”

I'd prepared a new retainer form, one with my name alone. “You don't pay me anything unless I get a settlement for you,” I explained. “Then we take our expenses off the top and split the rest, sixty for you and forty for me.”

She seemed about to sign, then squinted up at me. “Make it even splits. Third for you, third for Tamara, third for me.”

I didn't try to bargain, but simply made the change, and she signed for herself and for Tamara. She and Teddy were at the window, with him leaning close to her, talking a blue streak of nonsense, something about the gondola drivers in Lake Merritt, Tamara half-listening, standoffish.

The more I saw of her the more it seemed to me that behind her protective wall lay an intact core of self that had somehow survived catastrophic illness, and that she was beginning to reassert herself. Her confusion seemed both an act and not. If she didn't remember who Teddy was, she unmistakably knew him and intuited the contours of their relationship. She couldn't make plans or form intentions, but she'd become adept at assessing the texture of the moment she was in.

When they left, Teddy went with them, not because Tamara asked him to but because she seemed to assume that they'd arrived together and together was how they would leave.

Jeanie came into my office. “Who was that?”

“Debra and Tamara Walker. I just signed them up.” I handed her the retainer form. “Don't worry. Your name isn't on it. They're not your clients. Only mine.” Seeing the anger in her face, I quickly looked away. “You said you didn't want anything to do with this case, remember?”

“What case?”

“Those pictures I took, the guy that died in jail. He wasn't the only one. Mrs. Walker's son Jeremy, Tamara's husband, was murdered by a crooked narcotics officer, the same person who set me up. I once represented Jeremy Walker and now I'm going to represent his family against the city. A civil suit. Wrongful death.”

“You know how expensive those cases can be?”

“I'm not asking you for any money. That's why I had them sign a separate retainer.” I hadn't thought how I'd pay for the commitment I'd just made to them, but that was a problem for another day. First I needed the proof; first I needed Lavinia.

“Did Teddy leave with them?”

“Teddy and Tamara were in the same group at the rehab center. That's how I met her and her mother. Jeremy, too, for that matter.”

“Ah.” She turned, seemingly about to go. But first she paused. “By the way, have you talked to Car? I haven't been able to reach him. You wouldn't know what he's working on, would you?”

“I might.”

She nodded. “You're an asshole,” she said and walked out.

~ ~ ~

Car didn't answer his phone, didn't return my messages. That was hardly unusual, but I found Jeanie's worry infectious. I reminded myself that he knew how to take care of himself, that he'd been in dangerous situations before and no one had gotten the drop on him yet.

I went home around six. Teddy wasn't there. He must still have been at Tamara's. Finally, around eleven, my cell phone rang. It was Car. “I was starting to worry about you,” I said, and I told him briefly about the police finding the Pontiac, leaving out the part about Campbell and me. “Looks like someone got cut up in the trunk,” I told him. “There was a huge amount of blood.”

“Well that figures, because I couldn't find her. I checked relatives, friends, nothing. It's probably safe to assume she's either at the bottom of the bay or in the ground. Anyway, I've done what I said I would do. I'm not going to spend any more time on this case when I don't see any chance of getting paid.”

I swallowed my disappointment. “Thanks for your help.”

“I'll be sending you a bill. What you do with it, that's your business.”

“I'll pay you,” I said. “I don't know how or when but I will.”

“That's your choice. It's not like I'm going to come after you.”

He sounded fed up, but not with me. I wondered if the case had gotten under his skin the way it had gotten under mine. “You spend any time looking for Lucas?”

“That's police business. Out of my league. Risk versus reward. The sooner you learn to balance that equation, the better off you'll be. Enough people have gotten themselves cut up already.”

After we hung up I drank a beer and went to bed. I tossed and turned for a few minutes, then fell into a sudden deep sleep. I was in a bicycle race. It seemed to twist on and on downhill. I had no teammates and the pack was at my wheel. I would slip ahead of them on the curves but on the straightaways they would catch me, nudging my back wheel. Then, without transition, my bike was gone and I was running, chased by a dog, a big husky with a head like a bull's, one eye milky and the other blue, silent except for its breathing. I felt its warm breath and smelled the stink of the Pontiac's trunk.

I woke up sweating, twisted in the sheets, a scream frozen at the back of my throat. Teddy still wasn't home, I saw as I crossed to the bathroom. I pissed, then went out to the kitchen and popped a beer, drank it standing in the cold light of the open fridge, my heart still racing. My mind, though, was beginning to range back over something the dream had triggered. The dog, I realized. Wherever Lucas was he would have that dog, with the cast on its leg that needed to come off.

I would have to call every veterinarian's office in the Bay Area, maybe in the state, and then what would I do if I found him—call Campbell?

I couldn't sue a missing man. He had to be served with papers, and that meant he had to be found. Except it wasn't my job to find him, I told myself. I wasn't the one charged with enforcing the law. I was a criminal defense attorney; at least that's what I was as long as I worked for Jeanie.

~ ~ ~

I was at the office by six thirty, and had my desk packed by seven. I took the DUI files and put them on Jeanie's desk, dead center where she'd see them as soon as she came in. Then I went back to my office and sat running the math in my head: the balance of my savings and my few paltry investments plus the limits on my credit cards against what it would cost to set up a practice. Even if I planned on working out of our living room, it wasn't enough. It was nowhere near what it would take to do it right.

Jeanie came in around eight fifteen, called, “Good morning, Sunshine.” I heard her briefcase thud to the floor, then a pause, then the chime of her PC starting up. Still I waited. I had the scene blocked out in my head, where she would stand, how I'd sit waiting for her to come in, what I'd say, then how I would rise and walk out past her. But she didn't come. Finally I rose and went in to her. “I'm quitting,” I said. “I know you don't want this case, but I have to take it.”

She was at her computer, facing half-away from me, the sun in the window on her other side, making it impossible to gauge her expression. She clicked her mouse to close a window and turned. “Okay.”

Her face was blank, like a stranger's.

When I didn't move she turned back to the screen. “What do you want me to say? Don't quit? You do what you want. Take that crazy case. There's no way I'm going to fund it.”

I had a plunging feeling, and I realized that I'd expected her to talk me out of it. Quitting was what I wanted, but it was the end of something more than this job, the last strained umbilical breaking. She wasn't going to help me, wasn't going to make it easy; in her passivity I read resentment. She had every right.

The only thing I could do was leave.

~ ~ ~

I was at the kitchen table with my laptop and the telephone when Teddy came back later that morning. I'd changed out of work clothes into jeans and a T-shirt and flip-flops. If he was surprised to see me there he didn't show it. “Where've you been?” I asked. “At Tamara's?”

“Yeah.” His voice was hoarse.

“How'd you get home?”

“Bus.”

I was impressed. It was a long ride with a transfer. “Get some sleep,” I said. “You look like you've been up all night.”

“Nah. Think I'll just go into the office.”

“Got some work burning a hole in your desk?”

I saw a ripple of anger cross his face, something wild and uncontainable, reminding me of the way Teddy had been before the accident; though rawer now, the spark was still there.

“You'll have to go without me,” I told him more gently. “I quit this morning. I'm taking Jeremy's case with me. I'll be representing Tamara and Mrs. Walker.”

“Won't that cost a lot?”

“I don't know. Depends.”

He looked at me for a moment, then said, “I'm working on something, too.”

“A case, you mean? You don't have a license to practice law anymore.”

“You do,” he said with a look of challenge and reproach. “And besides, I can get it back. The same way I got back on the visitor list out at San Quentin.
”
There was an accusatory edge in his voice, and I realized with a sudden chill of inevitable insight that he was talking about our father
.
Wrongfully imprisoned all these years. My premonition that my brother would want to revisit the case that had nearly killed him might explain why I hadn't wanted to hear Car's suggestion that he could practice law again.

~ ~ ~

By the fifth or sixth call I had my approach down. Veterinarians' offices tend to have helpful receptionists, guileless, with no expectation of subterfuge. “It's about Trigger,” I would say. “The big husky mix. He came in to get the cast off his leg.”

They would ask for the owner's name; the first few times that threw me off. I played dumb. “He's huge, head the size of a bull's. Blind in one eye. You can't miss him.”

I made call after call, talking myself hoarse, each conversation a variation on a tiny theme, my little mechanism of deceit. I called from morning to night for two and a half days. In the evenings I drank beer and watched TV with Teddy, trying to drown the sickening feeling that I'd scratched my lottery ticket.

Technology gave me the illusion that I was doing something, but the validity of that illusion depended on a guess that was no more valid now than it would have been thirty years ago, before a chump like me could find all the veterinarians' offices in the world from his kitchen table. Thirty years ago, to enjoy the illusion of accomplishment, I would have had to get off my ass and do something. Call it progress, but I wasn't convinced.

On the third day I scored. “Trigger. Yes, the big husky mix. He's doing just fine. He's got quite a fan club,” said the woman who answered the phone. “Are you still planning to pick him up tomorrow?”

“Are you the one who was there when I dropped him off?” I asked.

“No, that was Lisa, but she wrote everything down. We do ask that you give advance notice of any changes. Our kennel is very full right now. We don't have many spaces for a dog that size. Will you be needing to leave him an extra day?”

“No, tomorrow,” I told her, then confirmed the address. They were in Kings Beach, on the north side of Lake Tahoe not far from the Nevada border.

The table was strewn with the detritus of my search, lists of numbers and cities checked off or question marked, scrawled over in pencil. I brought over the garbage can, cleared it all off, and next dialed another number, one I knew.

“I found him,” I told Car when he picked up.

“Say what? Found who?”

“Lucas. At least I found the dog. Or I think it's the dog. At a vet's office in Tahoe.”

He figured I was out of my mind. I had to explain it twice to him and still he didn't believe me. “That's why we have to check it out in person,” I said.

“We?”

“I wanted to give you the chance to tag along.”

“If this pans out, it's the luckiest guess you ever made. And I don't mean good luck. You go up there you're going to get your guts spilled out.”

“He's not going to know I'm there.”

Car breathed into the phone. “Why'd you call me? Why didn't you just go? You already got Jeanie pissed as hell at me. She thinks I've been helping you poach her clients. Now she gets to blame me for whatever happens if I let you go up there alone. If I come along, same thing.”

“You can't win, I guess.”

“I sure as hell can't.”

“So you might as well be where the action is.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You're sure there's a case here. And by that I mean a case that pays my bills.”

“There's a case,” I told him. How I was going to prove it without witnesses was another question.

“Tahoe,” he said skeptically.

“I'm going to get a rental car,” I said. “Why don't you tell me where you want me to pick you up.”