Bear Is Broken (10 page)

I opened the pizza on Tanya’s desk. It was anchovy and sausage and
mushroom, and the smell of cheese and oregano was strong. I hadn’t
eaten since yesterday evening, but I felt no hunger until I lifted the
first piece. I ate the whole thing so steadily that I kept having to pause
to breathe. I drank three cans of beer very fast, without registering the
alcohol except as a general loosening, an absence of fatigue. My brain
felt sharp. I was ready to work.

With a fourth beer in hand I contemplated the filing cabinets. So
much paper. The files were organized alphabetically by clients’ last
names. My tentative plan was to go through them by date, starting with
the open cases, working back from the present. Then I remembered
what Car had said, insinuating that the cops were behind the shooting,
and I felt that chill again, the rush of indignant disbelief.

The Ricky Santorez files were huge, taking most of an entire drawer,
the documents haphazardly organized into binders and Redweld folders,
the binders still exhibiting the chaos that takes over in the heat of
trial: pages folded back, Post-it notes everywhere, and yellow sheets
of hurried, incomprehensible notes in Teddy’s scrawl, nothing quite
where it should be. The size of the file reflected the outsize space the
case had occupied in my brother’s life.

The case went to trial the summer after my first year in law school.
I should have been teaching summer school to pad my meager savings
when I couldn’t find a paying legal job, but I’d decided instead to sit
in the gallery with the reporters and the dozens of off-duty police
officers who showed up in uniform each day for the jurors’ benefit.

Teddy was brilliant. He’d spent the better part of two years preparing.
There was no substantial dispute about what had happened, the
actual events. Santorez conceded that he had fired the shots that had
killed Sergeant Craig Espinoza and Officer Greg Davis. Espinoza was
a twenty-year veteran, Davis a relative rookie. Both had left behind
families.

The officers had been serving a search warrant in a drug case, but
the address on the warrant was actually the address of the house next
door. By the time the case went to trial, the police were claiming that
Santorez was the intended target of the raid, but his name appeared
nowhere on the warrant. To hear my brother tell it, the police broke
down the wrong door. But by dumb luck they happened upon an excon
drinking beer with an illegal assault rifle on the kitchen table in
front of him, a man who’d learned in prison that the only response to
violence was violence and who believed that the men breaking into
his house could only be intent on murdering him.

According to the testimony of other officers on the scene, the officers
announced themselves as police both before and after they broke
down the door. Santorez testified that they’d said nothing, given no
warning, and that Espinoza fired first, forcing him to defend himself.
Under Teddy’s cross-examination, one of the surviving officers admitted
that he did not remember hearing any officer call out until after the
shooting started, though another officer remembered hearing Espinoza
shout, “Police, hands in the air!” before the firing started. Santorez
was wounded six times but lived. He was immediately returned to
prison on a parole violation and would have to do time no matter
what happened in the trial. The only question was whether he’d ever
be able to get out.

I flipped through the trial binders. There were tabs for each of the
DA’s witnesses with police reports, transcripts of Santorez’s parole revocation
and preliminary hearings, and other prior statements for use
in holding officers to the stories they’d told before, along with Teddy’s
notes and outlines. Nothing here was unfamiliar to me. And none of
it seemed useful in identifying whether any players in the Santorez
case might have had a motive for killing my brother.

The only trial materials that seemed to offer any possibilities were the
redacted excerpts from the police officers’ personnel files that Teddy had
received in discovery, containing information on allegations of misconduct
and violations of department rules. There was dirt on Espinoza, who,
as it turned out, had been involved in a shooting eight years previously
under similar circumstances, raiding a drug house in Hunters Point. That
time Espinoza had emerged unscathed and the suspect had died. Teddy
had succeeded in getting evidence of that shooting admitted at trial,
through a bystander witness Car had brought back to town from L.A.,
a former addict who’d been too scared or cynical to come forward at
the time of the original internal investigation.

I remembered overhearing some officers in the hallway during a
recess, clearly talking with the intention of being overheard, tossing
around the rumor that Car had flown down to L.A. and offered ten
thousand bucks to this woman if she’d tell the story Teddy wanted her
to tell. The rumor took on a life of its own, and the DA cross-examined
the junkie on it, but Teddy’s witness denied every word and made
the DA look like a fool. It didn’t end there. After the verdict the DA’s
office filed a state bar complaint against my brother, accusing him of
suborning perjury. They had no proof, of course. I figured the file on
that complaint and the press clippings must be in these cabinets. One of
Tanya’s duties was to comb the papers and clip any article mentioning
Teddy or his clients. It wasn’t vanity on Teddy’s part, exactly. However
good or bad the coverage was, he needed to know what the papers
were saying about him, what potential jurors might have heard.

None of this seemed to me a likely motive for attempted murder.

I fingered back through the file. At the very end was a Redweld with
a yellow smiley face on its tab and a label in Teddy’s hand that read
“Death Threats.”

It was hefty. There was a log for phone calls, with summaries by
each entry, and a manila envelope for threats received by mail. There
was also an envelope containing all the police reports Teddy had filed,
one for each threat he’d received. They were what surprised me. Teddy
didn’t even call the police when he got mugged outside his office.

I paged through photocopies of letters and notes. He must have given
the originals to the police. Most simply suggested in various unpleasant
ways that the world would be a better place without Teddy and his
clients in it, yet there was one that made my skin crawl. It resembled
a treasure map, with blowups around the center drawing showing
details too small to include there. Everything in Teddy’s life was on it.

On the right side was a miniature sketch of Teddy’s unfinished house
in Contra Costa County, and then a blowup insert with a diagram
of the rooms showing the closets, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, and
even the bed. The writer had labeled which side of the bed was Teddy’s
and which was Jeanie’s. Beside the house were pictures of their cars,
including make, model, year, license number, and VIN. From the house
a line ran across the bay to a cartoon version of San Francisco and the
office Teddy and Jeanie had shared, where I was sitting now. Another
inset showed an accurate rendering of the floor plan.

There was nothing else, no explicit threat, but there didn’t need to
be. I made a copy of this one. I thought it might interest Detective
Anderson, though somehow I didn’t believe that the person who made
it was responsible for Teddy’s lying there at SFGH. Suddenly I felt I
had to get out of the office, out of San Francisco, if only for a night. It
was as if I were trapped, suffocated by a city that until now had always
seemed an extension of myself.

I slipped the last two beers into my coat pockets, locked the door,
and went down to the street, where I walked quickly, my head down,
dodging drunks; the sidewalk was thick with voices and bodies in the
block between Mission and Market. I went down the piss-reeking
steps of the Civic Center BART and paced the yellow line, impatient
to be on a train.

That time of night there were no direct trains to Orinda. I changed
at MacArthur in Oakland. As I waited on the platform I watched the
fog pushing up around the spires and boxes of San Francisco in the
distance. The air was crisp. The Mormon temple perched on the hillside
above me like a spaceship bathed in light, ready to abandon this
world on a moment’s notice. Cars and trucks clattered over joints in
the concrete on the freeway beneath the tracks.

In Orinda I had to walk up and down the station parking lot before
I found Teddy’s car, a white VW Rabbit with the stereo ripped out
and a “nothing to steal” sign in the window. I’d taken the spare keys
from the office, and soon I was maneuvering the unreliable little car
with its squeaky brakes and stripped gears up Moraga Way toward the
unincorporated community of Canyon, a network of dirt roads and
footpaths in a steep valley between Moraga and Oakland, separated
from Oakland’s Skyline Boulevard by a swath of water-district land.

In Moraga I turned right on Canyon Road, and within half a mile
I left behind all signs of civilization. I was driving through a forest of
oaks and madrone that soon dropped down into the redwoods. Through
the open windows the clean scent of their bark and needles filled
the car. The undergrowth was all ferns, and the headlights penetrated
deeply into the woods.

Pinehurst Road runs up the valley floor through a remnant of the
redwood forest that once towered above the bay. It was one of my favorite
biking roads in the Bay Area, with killer hills in both directions.

San Leandro Creek runs on one side of the road, then crosses beneath
it. A mile from the junction of Canyon and Pinehurst Roads are a post
office and a K–8 school under the trees. The residents maintain their
own roads and water system and take pride in composting, recycling,
and solar power. They feed their kids organic produce and Niman
Ranch beef and teach them Zen meditation.

This is where Teddy and Jeanie once tried to make a life together.

I drove across the WPA bridge above the creek into the school’s
gravel parking lot. Pulling over to the farthest, most shadowy corner
of the lot, I put the Rabbit temporarily out of its pain. I didn’t know
why Teddy refused to buy a real car. Jeanie used to drive a Lexus while
they were married. I cracked one of the remaining beers. I’d meant to
get out and walk along the road, clear my head, but instead I let the
seat back as far as it would go, about forty-five degrees, and lay there
taking small sips of beer as the night sounds of the forest reasserted
themselves. The outside world and all its cares and problems drifted
further and further away.

I fell asleep with the beer propped between my legs and immediately
slipped into a dream, in which it turned out that Caroline was
still alive, that we’d been mistaken all these years. She had just been
standing very still, pretending to be a statue. Look, I said to my father,
turning him physically to face her, she’s alive, she’s breathing, feel her
breath. Lawrence was in despair, and I was trying to convince him
what he’d done was not irrevocable after all, that there was still time
to make amends, there was always time. The past was gone, washed
away, and we were prepared to forgive him. At first he didn’t want to
see that she was alive. Look, we kept telling him. Look at her.

Never had I dreamed of Caroline so vividly as I did that night, dozing
in Teddy’s car under the redwoods. I used to dream about her, but her
face would always be turned away, or it would become another face
when I tried to hold it in my gaze, so that it seemed she was running
away from me. Now she held still. Now, sixteen years after her death,
I was able to see her as she’d been when she was alive, the way her
brown hair faded to downy wisps behind her ears, the softness of her
skin, the smell of her, which I’d forgotten and which was like rediscovering
a lost self, a younger self, me as I had been before my childhood
was uprooted by her absence, me as I might have been if she’d lived.
The roar of a motorcycle hitting ninety on Pinehurst awakened me.

My face felt cold in the night breeze. The beer had not spilled, and I
swallowed the rest. I hadn’t been asleep long. A few minutes, maybe.
I lay there staring at the ceiling of the car, getting myself together.
Then I straightened the seat, started the engine, and pulled out of the
parking lot.

I drove slowly, because the turnoff was easy to miss, just a rough
gravel road heading up a steep grade through the trees, not much more
than a fire trail, the entrance blind from this direction. You had to look
for a reflector stuck to a tree. I put the Rabbit in low gear and drove
up, ignoring private road, no trespassing signs. My destination was
about a mile up, past a geodesic dome and a ramshackle structure with
bay windows that resembled a crouching grasshopper.

Teddy’s house was set back among the trees with a view through
the redwoods, just high enough that on cloudy nights you could make
out Oakland’s orange glow. I left the key in the ignition the way Teddy
always did and walked down the footpath toward the house. A motion
light came on, but even without it my steps would have been guided
by the sound of plastic sheeting flapping in the breeze. The redwood
needles made a soft carpet underfoot, and the scent of them filled my
lungs as my feet stirred them up.

Teddy was an idiot about this house: I will say that now, so that no
one thinks I was blindly on his side. It had been his idea to live up
here, which meant a good ninety minutes of commuting each way.

The school down on Pinehurst was what finally persuaded Jeanie;
that and the steep dirt roads, the communal saunas, the yards cluttered
with arcane salvage, and the neighbors who looked after one another.
I believe that Teddy even promised that they would eventually move
their office to Walnut Creek. A false promise if I ever heard one. He’d
insisted on tearing the house down and rebuilding. A necessity, I suppose,
given that the former owner had used it primarily as a set for his
avant garde films. His first big mistake was to insist that they live there
during remodeling. His second was to stop construction each time
the cash flow dropped at their two-person, husband-and-wife firm.