Bear Is Broken (19 page)

She acted like she hadn’t heard the question, inclining her head, her
eyes going to her desk. She pulled open one drawer, then another, and
finally she came up with a sheaf of paper and clapped it against my
chest. “I’ve been interviewing girls for my thesis. Most of them were
from Asia, girls brought over here illegally to work in so-called massage
parlors. The woman I’d gotten closest to was Martha. I wouldn’t
want those videos to fall into the wrong hands. I loaned the videos to
Teddy, because he wanted to look at them. Then he got shot. I want
those videos back.”

I lifted the document she’d dropped on me and looked at the title. It
was called “Ho for a Week: One Sociologist’s Journey into the Underground
of San Francisco’s Sex Trade.”

“I’d maybe switch the word order on this title,” I suggested, just to
have something to say while my head spun. “San Francisco’s Underground
Sex Trade would sound better. Or maybe San Francisco’s Sex
Trade Underground.” I flipped through the pages. The last chapter was
titled “Turning Tricks: One Researcher’s Journey to the Other Side.”

I rolled the document in my hand and looked at her, remembering
Marovich’s research subjects from the CV in the file. She’d evidently
learned quite a bit from this professor whose class she wasn’t sure she’d
taken. “So what’s on those disks? Just interviews?”

“That’s right. I’m not asking you to work for free. I’ll pay you. I have
some money from my grandmother, and I can get more.”

“How much more?”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

That was a hell of a lot of money for a set of videotaped interviews.
But then again, her family was paying for Stanford tuition each year.

“Funny, your mom offered me the same amount to find Keith.”

“See. I knew you were working for her.” She reached for the laptop
again.

“I turned her down, Christine. I’m not working for your mother,
and I’m not working for your father, and I’m not working for you.
I’m working for Teddy and for myself.”

“You’re looking for Keith, aren’t you? And Keith doesn’t want to
be found? And my mother wants you to find him?” Her voice paused.

“Take my advice and take her money. Take it in advance. Either way,
she’ll end up getting what she wants.”

“How about you pay me in advance if you want me to keep my
eyes open for that disk.”

“I tried to.” She didn’t even blink. “You turned me down, too. Or
are you reconsidering?”

“Both of your offers have been generous. What I have in mind is
you setting up a meeting for me with Keith. In return I’ll keep an eye
out for the camera and the disks.” I stood and tapped the rolled-up
thesis against my leg. “We can talk about money if and when I find
them. Mind if I keep this?”

“Where are you going?”

“Home,” I said.

“Wait,” she said, and now there was a breathless edge to her voice.
“I can help you find Keith. I haven’t talked to him, but I’m sure he’s
scared to death. Usually it takes a couple of days to get ahold of him.
In the meantime, do you feel like going out for a drink and telling me
a little about Teddy? About what he was like when he wasn’t trying
to get laid?”

We went to a bar on El Camino Real called Antonio’s, where you
can eat all the peanuts you want and throw the shells on the floor. We
talked about Teddy, and Christine cried a little. I didn’t, but I found
myself telling her about the DA’s investigation of him.
I thought it would make me feel better to tell someone. But it only
made me feel worse.

I kept saying it was time for me to drive her home, and she kept
ordering more rum and cokes. She was a big girl in every sense of the
word; if I didn’t try to stop her, I didn’t try to keep up with her, either.
I thought she was probably working around to saying what she really
wanted to say; I kept waiting for her to come clean and tell me the
real story about the videos, her professor, and Teddy.

Around midnight she went to the ladies’ room, and when she came
out the hair at her brow was damp. She announced she was ready to
go, and I drove her home. As I let her off in front of her dorm she
leaned across the seat and kissed me sloppily. A kiss was okay. I didn’t
object to a kiss.

I wrote down her number and drove back to the city, circled for
half an hour until I found a parking place for the Rabbit, and climbed
glue-eyed up to my apartment, where I fell gratefully onto my mattress
without getting undressed.

I wish I could say that I slept like a baby until noon. I can’t. Almost
as soon as I closed my eyes I was dreaming of Christine bare-chested
in my arms, the clean smell of her in my nose, the warm touch of skin
on skin. I kept waking and finding myself alone, twisted up sweating
in the covers, my face deep in the pillow. I would fight to stay awake,
trying to claw my way back to reality, but again and again I slipped
back under the surface, and each time she was there waiting for me,
ready to pick up where we’d left off.

In the morning I rose as cottony and frustrated as if I’d really spent
all night failing to make love.

I drank a cup of coffee and showered, then found the Rabbit and
drove to the hospital. Jeanie was gone, thankfully, but the room was
filled with signs of her presence: an old cup of coffee, a cardigan sweater,
a fat paperback spread facedown on the floor.

As I came in, my phone rang in my pocket: one of my biking buddies,
a law school classmate, no doubt calling to see if I wanted to ride
with him. I switched off the phone and pocketed it.

The bandages still covered the upper half of Teddy’s face. I found myself
longing for a sight of his eyes, fighting an urge to peel back the tape.
Still his chest rose and fell, rose and fell with the sighing of the machine.
They’d turned on the bed’s automatic tilt function, and with a mechanical
whirring it shifted his position every few minutes, tilting him to the
left five degrees, then center, then to the right, then back to center again.
I felt relieved now that I hadn’t slept with Christine. Sitting by my
brother’s bedside, I felt bad enough about the kiss.

The nurse had told me to talk to him. “Teddy,” I said. “I’m going
to find the people who did this to you, and I’m going to make them
pay.” Hearing myself, I blushed so deeply that sweat sprang out on my
scalp. What else was I supposed to say? That I loved him? I could never
say it aloud, and I’m sure he didn’t want to hear that.

I wondered whether anyone had told him about his situation. That
was the one thing he would want to hear, how bad it was. I took
a breath and leaned in close, summoning my voice from my chest.

“Teddy,” I said. “You got shot in the head. We don’t know who did it.
You’ve got pretty bad damage, but it might be possible to recover and
have some kind of life. The doctors say you’ll probably never practice
law again and that you’ll have all sorts of problems with memory and
thinking. You’re never going to be the person you were. That’s a hard
thing to hear but I know you’d want to hear it. You’d want to know
how bad it was.”

I took a deep breath, gathering myself, then went on. “I’ll be here
for you, if it comes to that. If you want to live, I’ll be here every step
of the way. Because you were there for me, and I’ll never forget it. I’m
sure I won’t be perfect, but neither were you. And if you want to die,
if you want to let go, I understand. Go ahead if that’s how you feel. It’s
your choice, and none of us would blame you for it. But if you want
to live, we’re here for you. Me and Jeanie.”

I didn’t want Teddy to live because he was a fighter or because surviving
was another challenge to overcome, the way Jeanie seemed to
think of it. I wanted him to live because he believed he had something
to live for. I wanted him to care about being there to see my career
unfold, to care about me, to care about something other than himself,
his lost work. But I couldn’t say that.

When I looked up, Jeanie was there, standing just outside the doorway.
I could see by the way she was looking at me that she’d heard at
least some of what I’d said. When our eyes met her face softened, and
she came in and sat down, scooping the book up off the floor. “Are
you trying to piss him off, make him want to live just to spite you?”
“Something like that.”

“I hope it works. You crack the case?”

“No.” I told her about the police focusing on Santorez and that
the DA was supposedly putting an informant before the grand jury
on Monday. She didn’t react with the outrage I’d expected. She just
opened her book. I didn’t tell her about Martha or Christine or my
visit with Greta and Gerald Locke, and I didn’t tell her that Lawrence
was the DA’s informant.

With Jeanie there every second ticked by palpably. Through her
vigil she had established the hospital room as her territory, and to be
there was to be under her eye.

After half an hour I jumped up and started toward the door with
an excuse about needing to do some research. “Good-bye,” Jeanie said,
visibly disappointed, as if the length of my visits corresponded with
my love for Teddy. By her standards, I owed him more.

I agreed with her wholeheartedly, but I couldn’t bring myself to stay.

I drove home and went back to bed with a beer and Christine’s thesis,
which was titillating, but not nearly as titillating as going back to bed
with Christine would have been.

The first section was a not-so-brief history of prostitution in the
Bay Area. She’d done her time in the library—that was clear. She’d dug
up old newspaper articles, arrest records, and birth and death statistics,
but her analysis relied mostly on other researchers’ published work.
The second section was a picture of the current state of the city’s sex
industry. For that section she had also conducted interviews with
prostitutes and johns, prosecutors and cops, sex-worker advocates and
defense attorneys.

The last section was the only part of the thesis that attempted to live up
to its title. Told in the present tense, the chapter narrated a week Christine
claimed to have spent turning tricks. It was filled with lurid details and
narrated in a tone of breathless confession, describing her supposed reaction
to sleeping with a series of nameless men. I didn’t believe a word of
it. Maybe it was just wishful thinking that a gulf lies between ordinary
sexual fantasy and actually following through with it. The same might be
said for crime, but that does not mean there are no criminals.

I clipped my old bike onto a stationary trainer—basically a stand
with a metal roller that provides resistance for the back tire—put on a
movie, and rode hard for forty minutes, until the sweat poured off me.
It was a poor substitute for the real thing, but for me exercise is like a
drug, like medicine, and lately I’d missed too many doses.

I took a shower, went to my computer, and found the number for
the Cartwright Center, San Francisco’s largest nonprofit resource center
for sex workers. Christine’s thesis had described the Cartwright as the
leading resource for San Francisco’s sex workers, dedicated to bettering
the lives of the women who filled its massage parlors and brothels
or simply walked the street at night. I figured it would be open on
the weekend. I told the person who answered the phone that I was a
lawyer looking for some background information on a case involving
an underage girl. She put me through to the social worker on call.

The center kept a database on every brothel or suspected brothel
in the city, the social worker told me. The Green Light had a permit
as a social club, a venue for casual encounters between consenting
adults—perfectly legal in San Francisco. However, many of the female
club “members” had, in fact, been prostitutes. A number were
undocumented. I asked if she knew who had put up the money for
the Green Light. All I learned was that the name on the permits was
Keith Locke. That was definitely useful.

I thought about the money missing from Santorez’s client trust account.
Keith, it seemed, had signed the commercial lease for the Green
Light six months ago.

Too many coincidences. Keith, Teddy, the missing money; Keith,
Christine, Marovich. Maybe Marovich’s death was connected directly
to my brother’s shooting, or maybe it was precisely the accident it appeared
to be—an accident with consequences. If Teddy had stolen the
money from Santorez and invested it in the Green Light, he would
have been in serious trouble when the Green Light was raided and
shut down.

I typed Gerald’s name into the search engine and learned that he
ran his own lab at UCSF, and that his research focused on the cellular
mechanisms of cancer formation. He seemed to be at the top of his
field; about the only thing he was missing was the Nobel Prize. A lot
of people were missing that. I didn’t hold it against him. All three of his
degrees were from Stanford, and he taught classes at the medical school.
I called Christine. When she answered the phone she sounded like
I’d woken her up. “Still in bed?”

“Back in bed,” she said in a hoarse drone. “We row at six AM.”

“I wanted you to know that I’ve been thinking, and you’re right.
Keith never killed anyone, at least not at boarding school.”

“That’s the reason you’re calling? I thought you were going to say
you had the disks.”

“Why’d your father lie to me like that?”

She hesitated. “There’s a lot of history there, and most of it happened
when I wasn’t old enough to have a clue. When Keith was a teenager.
A lot of history, Leo.”

“You showed me just about everything last night. We might as well
drag out the family skeletons.”

She sighed. “I don’t deserve to be spoken to that way, Leo. I woke
up feeling pretty embarrassed about last night. I think I could actually
like you.”

“I like me, too. That’s something we can both agree on, and I’m
glad for it, especially now that I know you would have turned me out
of bed at six AM.”