Bear Is Broken (21 page)

I was going to need a lawyer. I should have dialed Jeanie, but something
kept me from calling her: embarrassment, I guess, and also the
dismal certainty that she wouldn’t believe me if I told her that I suspected
Car.

I still had Anderson’s card in my wallet. I don’t know what I was
hoping for—a miracle of understanding, I guess.
Anderson answered on the third ring.

“It’s Leo Maxwell.”

I heard the cries of seagulls and the throaty grumble of a marine
engine.

“Hold on.” The background noise faded. “You get your memory
back?”

“I’m afraid I’ve made a pretty grisly discovery. I’m in an apartment
at the corner of Sycamore and San Carlos in the Mission. A woman’s
been murdered.”

The tone of his voice didn’t shift. “You’re the one who found her?”

“That’s right.”

“Hold on.” I heard the static crackle of a radio and Anderson’s voice
in the background saying something; then he came back on the line.

“They’ll have someone there in less than ten minutes. Don’t touch
anything. You didn’t touch anything, did you?”

“No,” I told him in a hollow voice.

“Well, don’t. I’m out fishing, but I’ll be there when I can. And you
better be ready to tell me everything.”

He hung up, and I sat on the couch, letting my head sink into my
hands. I was still sitting that way when I heard sirens approaching from
at least two different directions.

As the police cars pulled to a stop outside I shook the tension
from my arms and composed myself. Things began to happen very
quickly. I heard feet clomping on the stairs, and a uniformed officer
appeared with his gun unholstered but down at his side. He
called for me to stay where I was and to keep my hands where he
could see them.

“She’s in the bathroom,” I said, and saw myself as he must have seen
me, the killer caught red-handed, an angry boyfriend or john resigned
to being led away in handcuffs.

“I’m a lawyer,” I told him as he poked his head in the bathroom,
then glanced back at me. “I came upstairs and found her.”

Another uniformed officer came up the stairs and went through
the dining room into the bedroom, his gun also drawn, checking to
make sure the apartment was empty. Then he came back into the
living room and told me to stand, face the wall, and place my hands
against it. He frisked me, then brought down my arms one at a time
and cuffed them behind my back.

I’d never been cuffed before. The steel was cold against my wrists.

“She was dead when I found her. I didn’t kill her.”

Finally he spoke, but with great reluctance. “Come on, pal, it’s none
of my business. You talk to me, I got to make a report. I make a report,
and someone might decide they don’t like something that’s written
there, and then it’s why the hell am I talking to the guy in the dead
girl’s apartment? So do me a favor and keep your mouth shut until
someone shows up who actually wants to hear it.”

I kept my mouth shut, and they took me downstairs and put me
in the back of a squad car. More squad cars appeared, jamming the
alley along with an ambulance and a pair of unmarked Crown Vics.
These had to be moved to make way for the ME van, piloted by the
same two guys who had shown up at the restaurant on Wednesday.
By the time Anderson arrived an hour later I was relieved to see
him. “I have to get someone to open this,” he said, and came back a
moment later with the uniform who’d handcuffed me and put me
in the car.

“He said he didn’t do it,” the officer said as he opened the door.
This was a joke to him.

“You swab his hands?” Anderson asked the cop, who gave him a
funny look.

“Word was wait for you, so we waited.”

“I’m taking him to Southern,” Anderson said. “We can do it there.”

He didn’t speak as he maneuvered his unmarked car out into traffic.
I tried to keep my mouth shut. I’d read enough police reports
to be aware that it would be simple for Anderson to deliberately
misconstrue my statements or put words in my mouth, if that was his
intention. That’s why Teddy advised all his clients that they should
never under any circumstances talk to the police. “No detective is
your friend,” he would say. “If he’s acting like your buddy or your
shrink, it’s because he’s trying to hang a felony on your neck.” To
me he explained, “You’d be surprised how many clients will put
their heads in the noose for a little human understanding. They’re
guilt-ridden and afraid and they let themselves care what the cop
thinks of them. They’re desperate for understanding and respect, and
the detective’s the only person who can give those things to them,
because the detective is the only person there. But the only way to
get understanding from a detective is to confess.”

Easy for Teddy to say. He never sat in the back of an unmarked police
car under suspicion of murder. He was so used to dealing with guilty
clients, it probably never occurred to him that the best way for an innocent
man to clear his name is to talk. The need to somehow mark
myself as different from all the killers who’d sat where I was sitting was
too powerful to control, and as we turned off of Mission onto Bryant
I said, “That was Teddy’s gun in there. At least it looks like the gun he
used to keep in his office. If it is Teddy’s gun, it’s possible you’re going
to find my fingerprints all over it.”

“You wash your hands?” Anderson asked, like somebody’s mother
at the dinner table.

“Yeah. I petted her cat and got blood all over my hands from its fur.
Fucking cat was lapping up the fucking blood.”

“Too bad. See, if you hadn’t washed them, or if you’d said you hadn’t,
we could have done the swab test, and if it comes up negative, that’s
evidence you didn’t fire the gun. But since you say you washed them,
a negative wouldn’t mean a hell of a lot. We can still do it, though. A
lot of times people wash their hands but they don’t manage to get the
residue off. A positive still works for us. Negative won’t do you much
good, though.”

The Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street houses both the criminal
courts and the police department’s Southern Station, which serves
as police headquarters. Anderson parked in the subterranean garage,
and we took the elevator up to the fifth floor. I’d been up there a few
times that summer to serve subpoenas for Teddy in the court liaison
office at the end of the hall. Thankfully it was a Saturday and we had
the elevator to ourselves—on a weekday it would have been packed
with attorneys and cops, jurors and witnesses and defendants.

Anderson walked straight ahead out of the elevator, seeming to
take it for granted that I’d follow him, and I did. Much as I feared
and distrusted this new pose of reserved silence, I believed that my
fate depended on his believing me. Barely five months from the bar
exam, I’d forgotten that there were such things as judges and juries and
prosecutorial discretion, and that I was a lawyer and had the right to
remain silent and the right to remain free unless I was placed formally
under arrest. From the elevator we walked to a plain door with a frosted
glass window. A placard above the door read homicide. We went in.

The large office was filled with desks. Despite the open floor plan,
the supportive square columns that alternated with the desks gave the
room a claustrophobic effect. In the wall beside me were tinted windows
looking into what I supposed were interview rooms.

A few heads turned as Anderson led me into the one nearest the
entrance. I was dressed more nicely than your average murder suspect;
otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my presence. Another
day, another murderer with a better than even chance of walking away,
was probably what they were thinking. I’d seen enough cop shows to
know that the interrogator always leaves you alone in the interrogation
room to sweat and fidget and stare at your reflection while he drinks
a cup of coffee and watches you from the other side of the glass.

He left me alone, and I sweated. I fidgeted. I wriggled out of my coat
but then was reluctant to drape it over the back of my chair, knowing
that if I did I wouldn’t be able to stop worrying about it sliding off. I
ended up just putting it back on again.

The first thing Anderson did when he came back into the room
was read me my Miranda rights. He got through them before he finished
pulling out his chair, and he sat down heavily, as if making that
recitation had been laborious. “I’ll talk to you,” I told him. “I’m the
one who called you, for God’s sake. I told you driving over here that
you might find my fingerprints on that gun. It looks just like the gun
my brother kept in his office.”

I kept insisting on this fact as if it exculpated rather than inculpated me.
There was a knock on the door, and in walked a slender, graying
man in jeans and a T-shirt with a name tag around his neck. No badge.

Anderson told me to put my hands on the table. The man swabbed
my hands with a pad and cleaned under my fingernails with a plastic
scraper that screwed into a bottle of preservative. “I have a couple of
toenails that could use some work,” I told him, but my hands were
shaking. He turned to walk out, but Anderson stopped him and told
me to remove my jacket and shirt.

The so-called technician took my shirt and jacket away with the
samples, leaving me there in my white T-shirt.

Anderson had a notepad on the table before him. “Your brother
have a permit for that gun?”

I told him I didn’t know. “The last time I saw that gun was Thursday
afternoon. I came back to Teddy’s office after court, and Teddy’s
investigator, Car, was there with the lights off. He had Teddy’s wall
safe open, and he’d taken something out of it—he wouldn’t show me
what. He startled me, and I grabbed the gun from the drawer. He took
it away from me and locked it in the safe. He was careful not to touch
it. I don’t have the combination to the safe.”

Halfway through this recital Anderson began shaking his head, and
he capped his pen and set it on the table without writing a word.

“Look, Leo. We could charge you now, but I was hoping you might
give me your side of the story. You told me yourself, your fingerprints
are on the gun. I want to help you get through this, but you’ve got
to give me something to start the wheels turning. Give and take, Leo.
Why not tell me what you were doing there at the apartment, to start.”

“She was one of my brother’s clients. I was over at County Jail Five
asking about her this morning. Deputy Lopez was kind enough to
help me at the lobby window. Check with her. She’ll remember. I was
a big enough pain in the ass.”

Again Anderson wrote nothing. “So what happened when you got
to the apartment?”

“First check what I just told you, Detective. Deputy Lopez. Cee-
Jay-Five. Call her up.”

With a scowl he rose and went out. He was gone five minutes. I
didn’t move a muscle.

“You get through?” I asked him. I could see in his face that he had,
but I wanted to hear him say it.

“Yeah. For what it’s worth. Not much, in my book, but if it makes
you feel better, sure, Lopez confirmed that you were a pain in the ass.”

I told him about the street door being ajar, ringing the bell, getting
no answer, and finally going upstairs, petting the cat, seeing the blood,
and finding the body in the bathroom.

“And you didn’t touch anything, and you didn’t know her. That’s
your story?”

“I never saw her before,” I said, and flushed at this lie I hadn’t even
known I was going to tell. “I touched her leg to see how warm she
was. I puked in the garbage and washed my hands. I touched the cat.”
I shrugged. “I poked through some of her things. Dresser drawers, desk
drawers, her closet. A lot of curious stuff in there.”

His brow furrowed. “You knew she was a prostitute before you
went in there, right?”

“Of course. I was going to try to get her to hire me as her lawyer.”

“We have a witness that can put you and the victim together in your
brother’s hotel room Wednesday evening. Cut the bullshit. I’d rather
be fishing, believe me, but here we are, so stop beating around the
bush. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Human sexuality is a mysterious
thing. Believe me, working in this city, I’ve seen it all. It’ll all come out
sooner or later. It always does.”

I doubted that the front desk clerk had talked. I couldn’t imagine
that guy remembering anything when the police were the ones asking
the questions. Maybe it was him, though. Maybe Hamilton wasn’t his
favorite founding father. He could have been a Benjamin Franklin man.
Then I thought of the junkie with the dreadlocks who’d followed
me downstairs, the one who kept trying to tell me about the case he’d
caught and about all the magic Teddy would have worked for him. I
could have been nicer to him, I supposed.

“Okay, so I saw her before,” I admitted. “She was in Teddy’s room
when I went there to look through his things.”

He gave me a smile of perfect sweetness, as if he expected me to
break down and confess.

“I’ll tell you two things,” I went on. “One. Santorez didn’t shoot my
brother. He had no reason to. I’ll be representing him at his arraignment,
and I’ll be talking to the press afterward. That’s how confident I
am that you’ve got the wrong man. Two. Car killed that girl. He shot
her with the gun he took from Teddy’s office. What he didn’t count
on was me being the one to find the body, and he definitely didn’t
count on me coming clean, telling you the gun belonged to Teddy.
He messed up there, and if you’re any kind of detective you ought to
make him pay.”

Anderson just sat there with the smile on his face.

I stood up. “Book me now, or I’ll assume I’m free to leave.”

He didn’t say anything. I walked out, feeling the flesh crawl up and
down my back, expecting Anderson to grab me, shove me against the
wall, cuff me. My shirt and jacket were lying across an empty desk.
Seeing them, I felt my cheeks burn. He’d never had any intention of
testing them; he’d never seriously believed I was the shooter. This was
just a game he was playing with me, an elaborate prank. I grabbed both
articles of clothing and stopped to thread my arms through the sleeves
of the shirt. I didn’t try to button it. My hands were shaking too badly
for that. Now that I knew there had never been any danger, the fear
hit me powerfully. My quadriceps cramped, but with my jacket over
my shoulder I managed to walk out.