Bear Is Broken (3 page)

Her eyes went straight to the tattoo. They registered no emotion,
no reaction, but they were fixed, almost entranced. Probably she didn’t
realize what she was seeing, but part of her saw, and later she’d remember.
On my upper left arm I have a fist-sized rendering of the
Batman symbol, the stylized bat inside the oval. This is the symbol
Gotham City sends into the nighttime clouds by spotlight whenever
the Dark Knight is needed. I got it when I was seventeen and beset by
the conviction that my life couldn’t keep going the way it had been
going, that without change I might do something crazy, hurt myself
or someone else.

When I got the tattoo I was in need of strength and protection, and
somehow it worked. It still works. Whenever I’m feeling beleaguered
or inadequate or wronged, I have only to think of that tattoo beneath
my shirt, and I am suffused with peace and strength, as if my true
powers are a secret I’ve been keeping from the world.

The tattoo changed nothing, of course; it was just the outward sign
of changes I’d begun to make in myself. I got it around the same time
I bought my first racing bike and began riding on Saturday mornings
instead of moping around the apartment or hanging out in Golden Gate
Park and smoking dope, waiting for something bad to happen. Cycling
wasn’t a purpose in life, but it helped me blow off steam. And it got me
out of my self-created prison. The summer after I graduated from high
school I bought a used mountain bike and, with a friend, rode through
California, Oregon, and Washington, then took the ferry to Alaska.
I had no other clothes at the office. This was my only suit. “I need
you to go out and buy me slacks and a shirt. Can you do that?”

Tanya didn’t answer. She was still staring at my arm, and her gaze
had turned derisive.

“Tanya.” I wanted to snap my fingers in her face. “Please, there are
things I need to be doing, things I need to take care of, people I need to
talk to, and I have to be back at the hospital as soon as possible. Please,”
I repeated. “I’ll give you my credit card. Just go to Men’s Wearhouse.”
Her gaze slowly rose to my face as if she were seeing me for the first
time, not understanding who I was or what I was doing here. Then
she reached out and took the card.

I wrote out my measurements, and with a doubtful backward glance
she left me standing there, feeling too soiled to sit, though it hadn’t
bothered me at the hospital, and too distraught to think of spreading
a newspaper over a chair.

As I waited, I replayed the past few days. I wondered if I really had
noticed something or if it was just hindsight playing tricks on my
imagination. And if what I’d noticed was meaningful, I wondered if I
should tell the cops about it.

What I was thinking of had occurred a week ago, during one of the
recesses in the prosecution’s portion of my brother’s current trial, the one
in which he was supposed to give his closing argument this afternoon.
It was a domestic violence trial, an ugly case. Ellis Bradley was a middleaged
man whose wife, Lorlee, had accused him of raping her. Teddy had
successfully defended Bradley ten years ago on a battery rap; there was
almost a cozy atmosphere in the pen each morning as he and Teddy sat
together going over the day’s strategy like two old friends. I tried not
to let it bother me that Teddy seemed easier and more natural with a
client accused of a violent crime than he was with me, his own brother.
After Lorlee had finished describing what Ellis had done to her, the
judge called a ten-minute recess. I’d gathered the heavy trial binders
in my arms and followed Teddy to one of the small conference rooms
just outside the courtroom.

As we came down the aisle, a small, muscular man stood up in the
back row. This was Car, the private investigator Teddy used in all his
most important cases. Car’s neck was covered with abstract tattoo
work of tangled foliage, and he carried so little fat on his body that
his face might have been sculpted by a flint knapper. He looked about
nineteen, but in his eyes you could see many more miles than that.
He had a knack for tearing apart the work of law enforcement, going
back over ground the police had covered and spotting inconsistencies
they’d glossed over, evidence they’d missed or disregarded, the seemingly
harmless but potentially meaningful lies they’d told to cover the
inevitable shortcuts in their investigations. When he succeeded, Car’s
reward was to play a starring role as Teddy’s chief witness. When Car
testified, Teddy usually won.

That day he was wearing his standard uniform of black jeans and
high-tops and a brown hooded sweatshirt, his wallet attached to his
belt by a chain. Over at 850 Bryant he fit right in. You wouldn’t look
twice. He might be a defendant waiting for a court appearance or a
plainclothes cop waiting to testify. Here at Civic Center, where the
typical fare was multimillion-dollar asbestos cases, where the hallways
were floored in marble and the courtrooms were oak-paneled visions
of civic taste, with not a scrawled gang symbol in sight, anyone not
wearing at least a five-hundred-dollar suit looked out of place.
Car had fallen into step with Teddy, forcing me to drop back. He
put his arm at the small of Teddy’s back and leaned in close to whisper
something that made my brother draw himself up and shoot Car a
look. They went on out through the doors.

Dumping the trial binders in the conference room, I’d followed
them. The hallway in a courthouse is a terrible place to have any kind
of private conversation, and they were making for the stairwell. The
windows to my left showed the gold dome of city hall, the parking
lot, and kid’s playground in back. My brother glanced back furtively
as they went through the door. If he saw me, his face didn’t show it.
I was stopped a foot from the door by an explosion of curses from
Car. “Well, you’ve got to fix it,” my brother said. My hand was on the
handle but I didn’t open it. I heard a series of angry, stomping footsteps
coming up: my brother’s. Then I heard Car’s lighter steps going down
a flight below, all but running, a final loudly spoken “God damn!” and
the echoing report of the fire door slamming against the wall at the
bottom three flights down.

My brother was just on the other side of the door. I heard him
breathing deeply, as if catching his wind after mild exertion. I waited
for him to appear, but he didn’t move. After a moment I turned away
as if I’d forgotten something and walked back toward the courtroom.
I was sitting in the conference room when Teddy came in a moment
later, looking calm and composed, as if he and Car had just been having
a quick strategy consultation. He sat next to me, pulled a binder
toward him, and began taking out documents he thought would be
useful in his cross-examination of Lorlee. He was about to confront
her with the fact that she’d supposedly told her best friend, Sharla,
who happened to be sleeping with Ellis, that she’d fabricated the rape
charges to get custody of the children.

When we went back into the courtroom it was the Wild West. Sharla,
Teddy’s only witness, fell apart under the DA’s cross, coming across
as a skank and a sneak and a liar, and Teddy accused Lorlee of lying
when he recalled her for questioning, after Sharla testified about the
phone conversations in which Lorlee admitted to fabricating the rape
story. “So you told nothing but the truth in your testimony here,” he
said, then reminded Lorlee of her oath, asking if she understood that
perjury was a crime. Then he went into her reasons to lie, the divorce
she and Ellis were going through, her admitted desire to deny him
custody of their children.

It was a pretty typical case, so I didn’t think anymore about what
happened or didn’t happen in the stairwell until my brother was lying
in the hospital with a hole in his head.

The phone rang three times before my grief-addled brain registered
the sound. I was going to let it ring, but then I picked up. “Law office,”
I said, because that was what Tanya always said when she answered. My
voice sounded like the voices you sometimes hear between elevator
floors.

There was a tremendous amount of noise in the background on
the other end of the line, shouts and echoes reverberating off concrete.

“Who’s that? Monkey Boy?”

It was Ellis Bradley calling from the lockup down at 850 Bryant.
I flushed. I hadn’t ever heard Teddy use that nickname in front of
him. “Yeah, Mr. Bradley, it’s Leo.”

“Okay, I only got five minutes, so listen close. They brought me back
over here after lunch, said no court this afternoon. So I’m sweating,
wondering what’s going on with my trial that all of a sudden there’s
no court and no lawyer to tell me why. When I get back in here I’m
hearing lots of stories, the kind I don’t want to believe. So you tell me
straight. What happened to your brother?”

“A guy walked into the restaurant at lunchtime and shot him. Right
in front of me. Shot him in the head. He’s probably going to die.”
Ellis let out a long, wondering exhalation. “I am sorry to hear that,
Monkey Boy. Real sorry. Your brother’s the best. Ask anyone in here.
I can’t take a leak in here without some dude asking for his number.”

“I thought they had it written on the wall in there.”

“Yeah, they keep erasing it, changing the numbers. The ones who
know your brother, they want to cut out the competition.”

“It’s a hard world,” I said, but Ellis didn’t deserve my attitude. It was
only natural for him to worry about his situation. The shooting meant
he would have to find a new lawyer, who’d be forced to retry the
case from the beginning. I doubted the evidence would come out as
well for him the second time around. The DA wouldn’t be caught by
surprise by Sharla’s testimony this time, that was for sure. Bradley had
paid Teddy his cash retainer rather than try to make bail. I doubted he’d
be able to afford to go to trial with the new lawyer, who would likely
do little more than negotiate with the DA for the best plea bargain he
could get. The DA would have him over a barrel.

We had to wait for some echoes to die away before either of us was
able to hear the other. This was all too much to break to Ellis over the
phone. I would have to sit down with him face-to-face and explain
the situation, and his options. I would need to do this for all Teddy’s
clients who were in jail awaiting trial or sentencing or something else.
I didn’t feel in any shape to give legal advice, but someone would have
to pick up the pieces of Teddy’s practice.

“Look, Mr. Bradley, I’m going to come see you tonight or tomorrow.
We need to talk about what’s going to happen with your case now
that Teddy isn’t going to be able to continue, and there’s too much to
cover over the phone. I want to assure you that I’m going to do what
I can to help you find another lawyer. A good one.”

“I know you will, Leo. I’m sorry to trouble you at a time like this,
with your brother lying in the hospital. You want to be with your
people. But I’m in a bad situation here. I don’t think I can go through
this all over again.”

“I understand. We’ll talk. I’ll be seeing you soon.”

I ended the call, then dialed the hospital, and learned that Teddy was
now in the recovery room. He wouldn’t be allowed any visitors until
the morning, starting at six. I left my cell phone number, then dialed
Jeanie again, hoping that she’d heard the news, that I wouldn’t have
to be the one to break it to her. I was relieved when the call went to
voice mail. I left a second message telling her that Teddy was out of
surgery and clinging to life, that no one would be able to see him until
morning, and that she could reach me at his office.

I hung up and went to stand in the window.
My people
, Ellis had
said. The very idea was like a foreign concept. Who should I be with
now, I wondered—Jeanie? The guys from my cycling club? Around
my normal friends, the very idea of Teddy seemed unreal.

Even at the height of the dot-com boom, the neighborhood around
Teddy’s office was mostly free clinics, residence hotels, and liquor stores.
This time of year the sun hit the west side of Sixth midmorning, the
east side midafternoon, rousing the homeless from their doorways. In
the evenings from Teddy’s window we watched the hookers parade
toward the feeding grounds at Tenth and Mission. Those are some of
the unfortunates on whose shoulders Teddy built his practice in the
early years, when much of his income came from court appointments
on cases where the public defender’s office had declared a conflict of
interest.

The area is considered a dangerous neighborhood, but there’s danger
and then there’s danger. You can come to feel a grudging affection
for the drunks and addicts, the stink and the noise and the squalor. I
know Teddy did. He made a life for himself among those people and
their problems. The city you live in comes to feel like a projection of
yourself, mirroring both your aspirations to splendor and your darkness.
In the same way that Teddy felt more comfortable with clients than
he did with ordinary people, even his own brother, I know that Teddy
only really felt at home in those parts of the city avoided by others.
Not that he lived in such a place. He and Jeanie had been building
a house in Contra Costa County, in the hippie enclave of Canyon,
over the first range of East Bay hills. The divorce two years ago had
interrupted construction. Teddy had left the house as it stood, halffinished
and barely habitable. He worked late most nights and often
missed the last BART train. He kept a room at one of the neighborhood
residence hotels, the Seward—the manager was a former client
who’d given him the room in lieu of a fee—and on nights when he
didn’t make the train, he’d sleep there, oblivious to the noise of the
drunks, junkies, and prostitutes.

I heard the rattle of the elevator, then the clacking of Tanya’s heels
in the hall. She came in wiping her eyes, with a vinyl suit bag over
her shoulder. She’d gone to Nordstrom instead of Men’s Wearhouse,
and she’d bought me a suit and two shirts instead of a shirt and slacks.
“They had a sale,” she said, handing me the credit card and receipt.
Even on sale the suit had cost seven hundred dollars.