Bear Is Broken

Bear Is Broken
A Leo Maxwell Novel
Lachlan Smith
The Mysterious Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
New York

This is how it happens. I am standing on the sidewalk with my brother,
Teddy, while he listens to this morning’s phone messages. We are outside
Coruna, where Teddy always eats when he’s in trial at 400 McAllister,
the Civic Center courthouse, which has increasingly been forced to
receive the overflow from San Francisco’s criminal docket at 850 Bryant,
down under the elevated freeway eight and a half blocks south
of Market.

Message after message, client after client, he listens long enough
to identify the caller, then deletes. It is 1999, and cellular telephones
have only recently become universal accessories. Teddy is one of the
few private criminal defense lawyers I know who gives out his cell
number to clients. I’m not sure why, since he never answers the phone
and always deletes the messages before he hears them.
It’s the last week of November and warm as summer, the kind of
day people think of when they imagine how it must be to live in
California. I got my bar results last Friday and took the attorney’s oath
Monday morning.

I thought Teddy might at least take me to dinner, give me some
subtle but unmistakable sign that, in his eyes, I’ve become someone.
In wishful daydreams I imagine him leading me to the empty office
beside his own, unused since he and Jeanie split two years ago, and
telling me, “This is yours now, kid. Try to remember how ignorant
you are and you might make a good lawyer. Now you’re just a halftrained
monkey in a suit, but with God’s help someday you’ll be a
man.” My brother often talks like this, although he hasn’t done anything
so magnanimous as offer to bring me into his practice. Jeanie’s
office is still locked, her unwanted stuff still boxed up in there, the
desk coated with dust, and I am still my brother’s monkey boy, as
he calls me, and it does not occur to him to trust me with any task
more complicated than filing papers with the court clerk’s office. My
workspace is a precarious corner of Teddy’s desk, with hardly room
to balance a legal pad.

I catch the sound of a woman’s quavering voice serving up unheard
entreaty; then Teddy hits delete one last time and slides the phone into
his pocket. The car is coming, though neither of us can know to look
for it. It must have already turned off Market onto McAllister. Probably
it’s waiting in the throng of noontime traffic behind the red light
at Leavenworth. My brother stabs out his cigarette in the sand bucket
and turns to me with a sardonic look, as if to say, You’re still here? I
open the heavy door of the restaurant, wait for a group to come out,
then nod to Teddy, and follow him in.

The hostess smiles at him, and he leans in close to whisper something
into her ear, looking past her with a wolfish smile. I don’t know
what he says, but it causes her to blush, her hand going to the base
of her jaw as she turns to lead us to our table, giving Teddy a smile
and a hand on the shoulder as she does so. At two hundred fifty
pounds, you would think my brother would have lost some of his
attractiveness to women; you’d also think he would be slow on the
tennis court, but on both counts you would be wrong. My brother
reminds me of one of those glamorous movie stars starting to go to
seed, a bloated Brando or Welles. A brilliance realized most fully in
its decadent form.

He is brilliant—no one doubts that. Through win after win Teddy
has become one of the most sought-after criminal defense lawyers in
northern California.

He likes Coruna for precisely the reason many other lawyers avoid
it: At lunchtime it’s packed with city hall types, people who come
to see and be seen. A juror or two invariably wanders in, and there’s
my brother sitting at his table in this upstanding establishment as
calmly and seriously as if he hasn’t any doubt of winning the case, as
if he’s already won, his briefcase unopened on the bench beside him.
He hasn’t explained this to me, but after four months of shadowing
him and doing what he calls his monkey work, I’m beginning to
understand.

The waitress comes, and Teddy orders what he always orders, the
Caesar salad with double anchovies and a glass of cabernet. I get the
club sandwich and fries. We were up half the night practicing his closing
statement, and my head feels stuffed with cotton. Almost as soon
as Teddy begins the argument he will abandon his prepared script, yet
he’s compulsive about certain things, treating preparation as a superstitious
ritual, like the extra anchovies on his salad or our father’s cuff
links on his wrists.

The shooter must be out of the car now, crossing the street to the
restaurant, the driver continuing around the block to the parking lot
that adjoins the back patio. We hear nothing, see nothing. We wait for
our food. Teddy looks up with a smile. You wouldn’t know he got only
four hours of sleep. He looks animated, fresh. He has evidently decided
to be charming. The shooter must be coming through the door now,
walking toward us between the tables in the crowded dining room.
“I ought to let you close this one,” Teddy says, tilting his head and
giving me a pondering look. I know he must be kidding—he hasn’t
let me so much as question a foundational witness or even be alone
in a room with one of his clients—but I feel a rush of warmth. It’s
only a scrap he has thrown me, but it gives me a fleeting giddiness to
finally be recognized by my brother as a fellow lawyer, a member of
the California bar, someone who in theory could stand up and give
this afternoon’s closing argument in his place.

And now the stranger has come up behind me. Aiming over my
shoulder, he shoots my brother in the head.

My ear was still ringing, and the fabric of my suit was starting to stiffen.
The smell was in my nostrils, and the taste was in my mouth, as if I’d
been drinking from a rusty can. I hadn’t even seen the guy, and the
shot was so close that I didn’t really hear it, like a punch to the head,
but I hadn’t been touched. All I saw was my brother. I didn’t realize
Teddy had been shot. I didn’t know what had happened.
The police were there within minutes. I was sitting on the floor
with my brother’s head in my lap. Then someone was coaxing me up,
pulling me by the arms, while two paramedics wearing latex gloves
moved in to take my place.

I sat very still in the chair where the cops propped me, my eyes on
the back of the paramedic kneeling beside my brother, working on him.
“He didn’t even blink, he just kept walking,” I heard. “Did you hear
a car squeal its tires back there?” A woman was sobbing, but soon the
police got the diners out of there. I gathered that the killer, a man in a
Giants cap and sunglasses, wearing a heavy sweatshirt and baggy pants,
had walked in, calmly pulled a nine-millimeter handgun, and shot my
brother before Teddy or I had a chance to see the weapon. He then
put away the gun and, walking slightly faster, proceeded through the
restaurant and out the back door to the patio, where he hopped the
low fence and jumped into a waiting car.

They kept trying to get me out of there, but I wouldn’t budge. I
would have fought them rather than be moved from where Teddy was.
I’d walked in there with my brother, and it looked like I was going
to walk out alone.

Teddy had raised me, more or less, getting me out of bed and off
to school each morning from the Potrero Hill apartment where we’d
lived with a series of housekeepers after our mother died and our father
went to prison, while Teddy worked to establish his practice. He was
twelve years older than I was and my only close relative unless you
counted our father serving a life sentence across San Francisco Bay at
San Quentin. We didn’t.

They had Teddy on the stretcher and were lifting him, no easy task.
It took four paramedics, one at each corner, plus a fifth to hold the
oxygen mask, and a sixth with the IV bag. I tried to stand up but my
legs wouldn’t hold me. There was a pair of bricks in my chest where
my lungs should have been. I wanted to go with him but I couldn’t.
Two men in suits, one black and thin, the other husky and redheaded,
with badges around their necks and guns at their waists, stood near the
pool of blood on the floor pointing out details to each other. They
wore thin blue latex gloves. As my lungs opened and I breathed the
sweet air of life, the black detective prodded the white one and the
white one came over to me, stripping off his gloves and offering me
his right hand.

“You’re the brother?”

“Where are they taking him?” I didn’t know what I wanted from
him, but the need was powerful.

“Think you’d be up to riding down to the station and giving one
of the technicians there a composite?”

“A what?” I said, though I knew what he meant. “I need to go
wherever they’re taking Teddy.”

“A composite drawing. From your description of the shooter.” He
flipped open a notebook. “Black, white, brown?”

“I didn’t see him. He was behind me.”

“You didn’t look to see who shot your brother?”

“I was looking at my brother.”

He flipped the notebook closed. “So you didn’t see anything?”
A thought passed through his eyes, like the sun breaking through
clouds.

“Or you didn’t want to see anything.” Nothing in his face had
changed, but his eyes became venomous.

He didn’t believe me. He thought I was stonewalling. It was as if he
assumed that Teddy or I had a dirty secret, that any defense attorney
who got shot probably got what was coming to him. “That was my
brother they just carried out of here. You don’t think I would tell you
what I saw?”