Bear Is Broken (14 page)

“So the state would have me refer them to one-oh-five, and the
defense would point them to two-two-zero.” Judge Iris had her big
green California Criminal Jury Instructions book out and was flipping
from one instruction to the other. “Well, I’m not going to do either.
The jurors have been instructed, and I’ll just tell them to refer to the
instructions they’ve already been given. I’m not going to point them
toward one instruction or the other.”

She closed the book and looked up. “Anything else?” Her eyes went
to Melanie.

Melanie rose. “Yes, Your Honor. The state would like to renew its
motion for a mistrial. I’ve just been informed by a member of my
office that the San Francisco Police Department and the DA’s office
were this week intending to seek a grand jury indictment against Teddy
Maxwell for subornation of perjury and manufacturing of evidence in
numerous cases stretching back over the past decade. After the recent
tragedy, the DA’s office will likely postpone those plans. Given the
seriousness of these allegations, however, the state believes that a mistrial
is warranted in any case that Mr. Maxwell appeared in as counsel
while this investigation was under way.”

“You have no specific evidence of misconduct in this case, I take it.”

“Your Honor, I have a draft copy of the investigative report prepared
by the district attorney’s office.”

I gazed at her with disbelief as she walked around the DA’s table
and dropped my copy on the defense table before me, ignoring my
outstretched hand.

I stood looking down at it, unwilling to touch it. I’d heard the rumors
before, of course, but never on this scale. I knew there was no
justification for a mistrial. There was no proof that Sharla had lied or
that Teddy knew it if she had. Ellis sat absolutely silent, absolutely still
beside me. I could feel the intense focus of his attention.

“I don’t see how this document has anything to do with this case,”
I said.

“Me neither,” the judge said, surprising me. She addressed Melanie:
“You’ve made your record.”

Judge Iris stepped down from the bench without another word and
without looking at Melanie, who stood just as prim and proper as ever
at the prosecution table, her embarrassment revealed only by the color
of her cheeks. She had finally gone too far.

Beside me Ellis remained quiet. I’d meant to give him a pep talk
before I let the deputies take him back down to holding, but as I
gathered up my belongings I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him.
If Sharla had lied, Ellis had probably put her up to it.

“I sure as hell hope Sharla told the truth up there,” I said low enough
not to be overheard.

“You know she did.”

“She better have.” It wasn’t him I was angry with. I could only be
disappointed with Ellis, disgusted with him, even, but I couldn’t be angry.
Ellis signaled that he was ready to go. “If I were you, Monkey Boy,
I wouldn’t think too hard on it.” He didn’t meet my eyes. The deputy
handcuffed him and led him out.

Melanie was still standing at the prosecutor’s table. I picked up my
copy of the investigative report and walked toward her, stopping when
I was a few feet away. When she looked up, I threw it at her face. The
pages fluttered, spread, and missed their mark, sailing over the railing
into the gallery. Melanie opened her mouth but didn’t make a sound.
For anyone keeping score, that was a criminal act. Third-degree assault.

“Your brother was as big a criminal as any of his clients,” she said
when I turned to walk out of the courtroom. “Suborning perjury is
just the tip of the iceberg, from what I hear.”

I thought better of leaving the investigative report lying around for
anyone to find, and I scooped it up as I passed the spot where it had
fallen.

Melanie went on: “You all pretend that you’re serving the Constitution,
but in reality you’re just in it for the thrill of helping criminals
break the law.”

I was too furious to respond. It was not something I normally would
have done, throwing that document at her. It wasn’t typical behavior.
In the hallway I thought about that argument I’d overheard between
Teddy and Car. Could I have missed the fact that evidence was being
manufactured under my nose?
You have to fix this,
Teddy had said. Was
it that he didn’t think Sharla’s testimony would hold up?
If Teddy had been crooked, he must have assumed I was naive
enough not to catch wind of what was going on. This realization made
me as angry as anything, if it was true.

I went downstairs to the courthouse café for a much-needed coffee
and croissant, which I carried out to City Hall Plaza. Straddling
a concrete bench, I flipped through the Keith Locke file, holding my
head to one side to avoid scattering crumbs over the pages. I skimmed
the patrol officer’s account of spotting a suspicious vehicle in a lot near
Candlestick and coming upon Keith Locke trying to maneuver the
professor’s body into the Dumpster, then spotlighting him and arresting
him without incident.

The official cause of death was listed as asphyxiation due to strangulation
from a cord that had been wrapped around his neck. The
autopsy file confirmed what the newspapers had reported, that before
his death Marovich appeared to have been sexually tortured. Bruises
at his wrists and ankles showed he’d been bound. There was a picture
that looked like it came from a book jacket: a man in his thirties, well
built, with a broad smile. As part of his workup for the case Teddy had
compiled a profile of the victim, including a list of academic publications
and a CV. The professor’s credits included a paper on the local S-and-M
community and another on the illegal sex trade. On his CV Marovich
indicated that his current research was an investigative report examining
San Francisco’s role in the international sex trafficking market.

A shadow fell across the file folder, and I looked up to see Detective
Anderson. He stood with his arms folded and a grin on his face, as if
we were friends or neighbors running into each other on the wrong
side of town. I closed the folder and tucked it under my arm.

“You fucked up my crime scene,” he said without altering his grin.
“You were in your brother’s house.”

“So you really are a detective.” I threw the heel of my croissant to
the pigeons, who fell on it with a flurry of dipping heads and slapping
wings. “I was surprised you hadn’t been there yet.”

“Every investigation has its priorities.”

I thought of the phone messages on Teddy’s voice mail. “You mean
you’re harassing my brother’s former clients and dragging them into
jail on flimsy pretexts.” The phone was probably ringing again as we
spoke, the mailbox filling up if it wasn’t filled already.

“I’m on my way to court to testify in another case. I just saw you
sitting here and I thought, Hey, maybe I should come over and apologize
for the way I acted the other day. I won’t take up any more of
your time.”

“Why apologize?”

“Because a murder victim is a murder victim is a murder victim.”

“He’s not dead yet. In any case, apology accepted. Any developments?”

“Look, no more bullshit. You and I both know what your brother’s
game was.”

“I don’t. I really don’t.” I gazed over his shoulder toward the gold
dome of city hall.

“You know,” he repeated. “You’ve got it right there beside you.”

He nodded down at the investigative report from the DA’s office.

“And so do I, and so does everyone who knows anything in this town.
Your brother bought witnesses, bribed jurors, fabricated evidence.
Not just in one case, but in a lot of them. He was about as crooked
as a lawyer can be, and devious as hell, so we’ve never managed to
catch him at it. He and that investigator of his have been pulling this
shit for years, and it’s only recently that the DA’s office has started
to get on top of them.”

I could only go on gazing over his shoulder. “You actually believe
this nonsense?”

“What I believe doesn’t matter. The question is, did your brother’s
clients believe it? Way I see it, once a lawyer gets a reputation like
that—and sure as shit your brother had it even if he was clean as a
whistle—he better understand that every new client is going to expect
that A-one service. And when they don’t get it, pow.” He made a gun of
his thumb and forefinger and shot it off toward the Asian Art Museum.

“These allegations were bullshit when the DA filed that state bar
complaint after the Santorez case, and they’re bullshit now.” I pulled out
my wallet and unfolded the copy of the hand-drawn map I’d showed
Jeanie last night. “You must have seen this. In a file of death threats in
the Santorez folder.”

The detective didn’t even look at the map. “This nut job didn’t
shoot your brother. It was a hit. That pretty much rules out anyone
who isn’t in the game. And guess what?” He flicked the creased copy
with his index finger. “This guy wasn’t.”

“You don’t think it’s worth checking out?”

“Not when this department’s refusing overtime. We’ll find the killer
on the client list, you’ll see. Some disgruntled player who thought
he should be getting a whole lot more for his money.” The detective
started to walk away as if I’d been wasting his time.

“Detective, you don’t really think that my brother could have gotten
away with a scheme like that, do you?”

He stopped. “Kid, it should be pretty obvious by now that he didn’t
get away with it.”

I sipped my coffee, watching the pigeons fight over the stub of
croissant that remained. One carried it about fifteen feet, but none of
them could manage to swallow it. One bird would pick it up, then
drop it, and the others would flock around again.

I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I realized. I was going to have to listen
to those phone messages.

It was nearly one o’clock. I had a headache and my stomach felt queasy.
As I walked, I thought about what Melanie had said to me. I kept at a
simmer for six blocks before I was able to admit to myself that she was
right, at least partially. When you got down to it, all the trial lawyers
I knew—all the good ones—were in it not for the righteous purpose
of defending the Constitution but for the power a skilled lawyer has
over a hostile witness, the power to make a person say the opposite of
what he intends, the power to sway jurors’ minds, the thrill of being
the center of attention. He’s somewhere between the quarterback who
throws the winning pass, the stage actor with an audience hanging on
every word, and the gambler who puts his chips on red. The deadly
serious game of it is what my brother loved, and I’d caught the bug
from him.

I heard the phone ringing in the empty office as I got off the elevator.
The ringing stopped as I put my key in the door. I went in,
shrugged off my jacket, and lay down on the couch. I closed my eyes,
willing the world to shrink until there was nothing left but my head
on the cushion. In the other room the phone resumed its ringing. My
eyes snapped open.

I rose, went into the other room, put on Tanya’s headset and hit
answer. “Lawyer’s office.”

“Teddy, thank God. They taking me for a ride.” The man let out an
incredulous laugh. “They telling me you was dead. Everybody been
saying it.”

“Teddy was shot two days ago. He’s not dead, but he’s not going
to be making any court appearances anytime soon, either. This is his
brother, Leo.”

There was a pause. I could hear him breathing deep and slow through
his mouth.

“Are you a client?” I asked.

He let out a held breath. “They got me in the parking lot after work,
right in front of my boss. Been asking all sorts of questions.”

“Tell them you won’t speak without your lawyer present. Tell them
you want a public defender.”

“Nah, man, I don’t want no public pretender.”

“Let me take down your name and jail number.”

I wrote down the caller’s information. Alan Davis. I promised to call
a lawyer I knew at the public defender’s office and explain the situation.
There were likely a whole lot of other clients of Teddy’s picked
up. “They’re looking for someone to take down for what happened to
Teddy. Whatever you do, don’t talk to anyone, don’t trust anyone.” The
San Francisco police were not above building a case on the bartered
lies of a jailhouse snitch.

I wished him good luck and cut off the call, then went to the file
cabinets, found his file, and opened it to the summary sheet: a murder
case from five years back, with an assortment of lesser included
charges, and a more recent burglary conviction. I paged through the
trial binder to the copy of the verdict form, where Teddy had neatly
checked “Not Guilty” four times.

Returning to the chair, I accessed the voice-mail system. There were
thirty-two new messages, and I listened to them all. It took more than
an hour. Some had left names, some hadn’t. Occasionally there was
just breathing followed by a click. Others were rambling monologues.
White voices, black voices, Asian voices, Hispanic voices, men and
women, educated and not, straight and gay, the whole human spectrum.
Some of the callers were in custody; some had been questioned; others
had found out about the shooting in the paper or on TV. All knew
what had happened but hadn’t believed it and felt compelled to call. I
wrote down each name along with any details provided. The line rang
once more while I was working. I let it go to voice mail.

When I had finished listening, I went to the cabinets and started
pulling files. I doubted that anyone connected with Teddy’s killing
would have called the office; on the other hand, maybe the killers
had calculated I’d make precisely this assumption. For lack of a better
system, I sorted the files I pulled according to the type of crime involved:
crimes of passion, crimes of violence, sexual assault and domestic
violence, white-collar, and property crimes. There was a whole stack
of prostitution cases. Teddy had started out representing hookers, and
so-called B cases remained a mainstay of the practice.