Bear Is Broken (29 page)

He held up a hand. “I don’t want to hear any bullshit. Whatever
you need to say, I’ll say you said it. Just show me where I’ve got to
sign to shut you up.”

I took out the forms: first, the one informing him of the conflict of
interest in my serving as his lawyer; second, the limited retainer form
establishing that I was acting as his lawyer for today’s hearing only, and
that I would do nothing more than assert his right to a speedy trial
and enter a plea of not guilty.

Making a show of not reading anything that was printed on the
forms, Santorez signed his name quickly. “Get me off and you don’t
owe me a penny,” he said, handing me back the forms. “That’s not
written down here, but that’s our deal.”

And if you’re found guilty? I wanted to ask. “No lawyer could get
you off today. But if things go well out there I don’t think you’ll have
any trouble finding an attorney. A good one.”

“Flies to shit, man.”

I slid the signed forms into a file folder and stood, but Santorez
wasn’t done. He beckoned me closer, and like a lackey I bent to hear
him. “I didn’t kill your brother, but I could have,” he said in a voice
not quite low enough to be a whisper, his lips two inches from my ear.

“I know you think you’re pulling a fast one on everyone, but you’re
not pulling a fast one on me. You try to fuck me on this, I can hurt
you, and I will. Anywhere, anytime. You remember that, Monkey Boy.”

As I straightened, my skin felt on fire, and the room tilted around
me. For a moment I was back under the churning surf, being pummeled
against the rocks. Then I regained the moment, though chills
ran over me where the fire had been.

Without looking at Santorez I turned and walked to the door,
banged on it, and waited for the deputy to open up.
Monkey Boy he’d called me. The anger didn’t come until I was
safely out of that cell.

The clerk called Ricky Santorez’s case at two fifteen, after a string of
short hearings scheduled for the convenience of the public defenders
and DAs who had business in other courtrooms. I watched the public
defenders with curiosity, wondering if I’d soon be joining their ranks.

“Counsel, please state your appearances.”

The DA had sent down one of his top prosecutors, Lou Ferrino.
Beside him sat a young assistant DA and Detective Anderson.
When I stood and said, “Leo Maxwell on behalf of Mr. Santorez,
Your Honor,” the courtroom was all hushed attention.

Judge Dowling looked directly at me, then turned his eyes away.
A conscientious judge would have called a recess and summoned us
into chambers. Dowling wanted no part of it. As curtly as if this were
an ordinary case, he asked if my client would waive instruction and
arraignment. I said yes, just as I’d seen every lawyer before me do.

“We’ll send the case to Department Seventeen for a trial date and
put it on for a status conference there in one month.”

“The real show’s outside,” I told Santorez as I gathered up my folders.

“Catch it on the news.”

He didn’t take his eyes off me as the deputies led him away, back to
the bullpen and San Quentin. I couldn’t tell what his scrutiny signified.
It was menacing, but there was vulnerability in it, as well. I wondered
if he regretted threatening me. Then the door closed and he was gone.
Before I could move away from the defense table Detective Anderson
came up. “You ought to join me outside,” I told him. “You’d make
the perfect prop. They’d probably even put your picture in the paper.”

“Please don’t do this,” he pleaded. “You know we’ve got the right
man.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then tell me who we should look at. Tell me who, if not Santorez.
Jesus, Leo, your brother stole the man’s money. You don’t steal a
hundred thousand dollars from someone like that and expect to walk
away without consequences.”

Another attorney had approached the defense table. The court clerk
called the next case. “I can’t help you,” I said. I was thinking of Christine
again, of our night together, of what Keith had said.

Anderson walked with me toward the exit. “Can’t or won’t? That’s
the question I’ve been asking myself all along. Because it seems that
if anyone knows what’s going on, you do. The question is whether
you’ve got the guts to bring justice for your brother.”

“This conversation is over,” I told him as I pushed through the doors.

His words had stung me, though, and the sting would linger longer
than the sting of the wounds on my legs and back.

The reporters were waiting for me in the hallway, milling around. I
could tell they were thinking they must have missed me. As I came
out, they converged, cameras held aloft, a dozen questions at once. I
ignored them and stuck to my script.

“I have appeared on behalf of Ricky Santorez today because I’m
one hundred percent confident that he is innocent of these charges. I
would be dishonoring everything my brother stood for if I failed to
speak out on Mr. Santorez’s behalf. This is not the time for the police
department and the DA’s office to be settling old scores. The person
who shot Teddy Maxwell remains at large, and I urge the police and
the district attorney’s office to abandon their farcical prosecution of
Mr. Santorez and focus their efforts on finding the person who actually
pulled that trigger, just as they would do in any other case of
attempted murder.”

It was considerably less than I’d meant to say, and my voice lacked
the stridency I’d intended it to have. I wanted Santorez to be guilty
and I didn’t. I wanted Christine tonight and every night; I wanted her
behind bars. If only I could know whether she’d set me up, whether
she’d waited for me to return from my walk down to the baths.

I walked two blocks blindly back toward my apartment, thinking
that I would go to the hospital next and spend the rest of the day
with Teddy, when an obstacle appeared in my path, a person standing
rooted in the center of the sidewalk. I veered around him, and it
wasn’t until he grabbed me by both arms that I recognized Car. “Let’s
go for a ride, Leo.”

I saw Jeanie driving slowly along the line of parked cars at the curb
beside me, hunched over the steering wheel. Something in Car’s face
made me break free and run.

He caught me in five steps and wrapped me in a bear hug, killing
our shared momentum with a few heavy-heeled steps. The Volvo was
there. Jeanie came around to open the back door.
I let them him shove me into the car.

“Consider this an intervention,” Jeanie said from the driver’s seat. “No
more press conferences, no more court appearances, no more bodies,
no more breaking into people’s houses and digging through their
garbage. You’re going to spend the next few days lying low.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. We were on the Bay Bridge
crossing toward Oakland. I stretched out across the backseat and
promptly fell asleep.

When I awakened after a dreamless interval we were on Pinehurst
winding down through the oaks and madrone from Skyline Boulevard.
We rounded the last switchback and were beneath the redwoods
on the valley floor beside the creek. The afternoon light hung like a
golden haze within the darkness of the trees.

The undercarriage of the Volvo scraped against ruts as we made our
way up the steep gravel road. The plastic sheeting still clattered on the
roof, and the Contra Costa sheriff ’s notice was still stapled to the door,
the paper wrinkled from the dew.

“God, what a dump.” Jeanie dropped her keys on the kitchen table.

It was cold in the house. Jeanie was in the kitchen making coffee.
Car had gone through the bedroom to the deck and was smoking,
staring broodily at the trees. “I offered a dozen times to finish it for
him,” he said. “No sweat, couple weeks work.”

“You called this an intervention.” I waited a beat. “So intervene.”

Car stabbed out his cigarette. He went to the car and came back
with a camera case. It was the one I’d found in Jeanie’s garbage. I’d left
it on Teddy’s desk. He bent over the TV and plugged the camera into
it. He was evidently going to show me what was on the missing disk,
the one Christine wanted.

Jeanie handed me a cup of coffee, and set one on the floor for Car.

“Leo, I can’t even begin to tell you what a huge violation that was,
breaking into my apartment. I’m so angry with you about it I can
hardly look at you. I was tempted to go to the police.”

“Call them up now if you want. I’ll admit it. Of course then you’ll
have to tell them how you got the camera, and the disks might turn
up, and they might look at them and ask difficult questions. Like what
were you planning to do with them?”

“Enough BS, okay? Nobody’s calling the police, nobody’s blackmailing
anybody. We brought you here to have a serious conversation.”

“Isn’t it funny how people use that word, have? Have sex, have a
baby, have a fight, have a conversation, as if it’s just something that
happens by itself?”

Car’s face puckered. He turned on the television. The screen was
blue; then it flickered and showed an empty room with a bed, a room
I recognized immediately as Martha’s, a different setting from the other
disks, which had been filmed at the Green Light.

The image was muzzy, as if some thin material were hanging in front of
the lens. Car fast-forwarded through an empty twenty minutes, then slowed
the tape to normal speed as a woman and a man walked into the room.

They were kissing. The woman was Christine, and the man was the college
professor Marovich. I recognized him from the picture in Keith’s file.
They seemed practiced with each other’s bodies, sure of themselves
and of their responses. The camera angle was a bit off for how they
were lying, showing them only from the waist up, so we were spared a
direct view of their coupling, but the camera saw enough, more than
enough. It made me feel excited, embarrassed, and ashamed to watch
a woman I’d just made love to make love to another man.

Marovich said something, and she tied his wrists to the bed, then
slipped a cord around his neck and began to draw the slip knot tighter.
She rode him faster, and I saw her come but keep going, shudders
running through her as the motion of her hips became spasmodic. The
veins on his neck stood out from the cord, and his eyes bugged; then
his hips convulsed. Christine ground to a halt and let herself collapse
forward on top of him.

A moment passed before she sat up, looking down at him. Her
breathing slowed. He was unconscious, and still she waited. An agony
to watch. She began scrabbling at the cord with her fingernails. Her
hands were shaking almost too badly to undo the knot, but it loosened
and she yanked it off. She sat motionless, then gave a scream, and
brought her fists down on his chest.

Marovich coughed once, twice, then his eyes opened and he twisted,
gasping, and she touched him tenderly on the side of the head.

I was flooded with relief. “She didn’t kill him,” I said. My pulse was
racing. It was hard to catch my breath.

“This time,” Jeanie said.

“That was Martha’s apartment. He died at the club.” It was a non
sequitur, I knew. Marovich could have died anywhere.

“I was the one who opened the package when it arrived,” Car said.

“Completely anonymous, no markings, no nothing, sent directly to
the office. No note. And then we watch the videos, and lo and behold
here’s this clip that seems to exonerate Teddy’s client while hanging
Christine up by her twat hairs. And since Teddy is Keith’s lawyer, it’s
his job to string her up.”

“You really think Christine killed Marovich?”

“The point is not what she did or didn’t do,” Car said. “The
point is what she’d do to keep that video secret. Teddy knew she
was Keith’s sister and he confronted her about it, let her know he
was going to turn it over to the prosecution. Then someone puts a
bullet in his head.”

We all sat in silence for a moment. I was guessing that Christine’s
relationship with Teddy had begun more recently than she’d implied—
probably right after he confronted her about the video. “I think I could
use one of your martinis,” I said to Jeanie.

She seemed about to tell me to fix it myself, then changed her mind,
and went into the kitchen. She came out with three glasses of cold gin.
“Christine said that she had a class with Marovich. She was helping
him with his research and writing her thesis about prostitution.
Keith said the guy was her thesis adviser.” I left out the part about
Keith telling me she’d killed him. Part of me still wasn’t ready to
admit it.

“We want to be able to prove she shot Teddy,” Car said. “To do
that we probably have to prove she killed Marovich. Before we go to
the cops we need to have her case tied up neat. Because she’s going
to have a lawyer every bit as good as Teddy was. We build the case
against her, then hand it all over. We do their job for them, and we do
it right, and then—only then—we go public if they drag heels. You
have the proof, you have the power. Until then you’re just pounding
sand. What you did this afternoon, you might as well have been
jerking off in public.”

“So I guess you didn’t kill him. I probably owe you an apology.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Monkey Boy. Your brother was my bread
and butter. See, I like working for winners, and Teddy was a winner.
Now I got to go back to working for lawyers who can’t find their
dicks without a compass. No offense to Jeanie. You’re a winner, too,
aren’t you, babe?”

Jeanie frowned. I wanted to ask Car whether he and Teddy had
ever manufactured evidence, whether they’d knowingly put a liar on
the stand in Bradley’s trial. For an instant I wondered if Car could
have faked the video he’d just shown, pasted Christine’s face onto
another body. I felt a surge of hope and fear that died away as soon
as it was born.