Bear Is Broken (31 page)

“We started sleeping together. He lived in the faculty ghetto, so we
couldn’t go to his place, and my dorm room was no good. I’d interviewed
Martha at her apartment, and she let me use it. Little did I know
she’d set up the camera. Sam liked—well, you saw the clip. You know
what he liked. Then he turned up strangled and Keith was arrested.”

“The police never questioned you?”

“I kept waiting, but they never did.”

There was a pause. Then I said, “You liked it, didn’t you? Strangling
him.”

“Maybe I did. That kind of power can be—exhilarating. But I didn’t
kill him.”

“Who killed him, then? Martha?”

“About a week after it happened she came to Stanford and showed
me a copy of the disk. She wanted twenty thousand dollars.”

“I bet you regret not paying her.”

Sitting cross-legged before me, staring down at her hands, Christine
just shook her head.

“So Martha killed Marovich because she had this video, and she
figured with Marovich dead she could shake you down,” I mused.
“Never mind that the video shows her apartment and that twenty
thousand seems cheap for murder. Let’s put that aside. If Martha killed
Marovich, then who killed Martha?”

Again Christine could only shake her head.

“You’re the only one with a clear motive and opportunity. Work
backward, then. Let’s say Martha was killed because she knew who
shot my brother. Who shot Teddy, if you didn’t do it?”

“I don’t know. Santorez. The one they indicted.”

“That still leaves you holding the bag for Martha. You’ve got to tie
her in somehow if you’re going to walk away from this.”

She sagged forward and pressed her face against my knees. “Keith
shot Teddy.”

“That’s a little better. Keith shot Teddy, Martha was the driver, and
Keith killed Martha to shut her up. But why shoot his own lawyer?”

“To protect me,” she said. “Teddy was going to turn over the disk.”

“But now we’ve got the same problem all over again,” I said. “You’ve
got Martha and Teddy wrapped up, but who killed Marovich? If no
one else did, then you must have killed him.”

“Martha.” She lifted her face. “It was an accident. It doesn’t have
anything to do with me.”

“But that doesn’t work, either. If Keith shot my brother, you can’t
get rid of the disk entirely, because without the video Keith doesn’t
have the motive of protecting you from exposure. But maybe you
never slept with Marovich.”

Her shoulders tensed and she went very still.

“Who shot Teddy if Keith didn’t do it? Say the video of you and
Marovich didn’t exist.”

She stared longingly into my face. “Tanya.”

“We’ve been over that. Tanya’s in the clear, even if she stole Santorez’s
money, which I’m certain she did. So is Car.”

Christine didn’t say anything.

I shrugged. “There isn’t anyone left. You must have shot Teddy.”

She hid her face. “My father paid to have him shot. Isn’t that what
you want to hear?”

“Tell me about your father.” I took another hasty swallow of gin.

“It was a huge fight. That’s what Keith said. I was six. They were
going to get divorced. Because our father had another woman. Then
my parents sent Keith away to school. I remember the house being
very quiet. Time passed. When I was twelve I saw the private detective’s
report. I was snooping in my mother’s room. I guess that was the first
time I realized that my father knew the woman who’d died. That she
was the one he’d been with.”

She turned her head from side to side on my knee. “I didn’t want to
think about it. I put it out of my mind. But when no one was home
I kept going into my mother’s room to look at the pictures. The file
disappeared after Keith got kicked out of school. I always assumed she
or my dad finally threw it away. But Keith must have taken it. He must
have given it to Teddy.”

“Your father had to have known that Teddy was writing that habeas
brief, that he was going to argue your father killed my mother,” I
interrupted. “Otherwise it doesn’t work. If Gerald didn’t know the
contents of the brief, he could have no reason for wanting Teddy
dead.”

Again she was silent. Finally she said, “I confronted him. About a
month ago. I showed him copies of the pictures, the ones Teddy had
showed me, the ones I’d seen all those years ago in the investigator’s
file. He denied having anything to do with her death, but he admitted
he’d known your mother. I told him about me and Teddy.”

“What about Martha?”

Christine looked up. “Someone must have shot her for planting that
camera in the Green Light.”

I seized her arms and pulled her to me, and she half rose, half fell,
bracing her elbows on my thighs. I kissed her breathlessly. “I don’t care
about Marovich.” I wanted her so badly that I might have forgotten
any number of dead Maroviches. “I’ll destroy the disk. All you have to
do is help me prove that your father had my brother shot.”

She returned my kiss.

We ate some cheese and drank some wine, sitting huddled together on
the boards of the porch with our backs against the wall, the cushions
of the chaise beneath us, sharing a blanket I’d found inside. Christine
leaned against my shoulder. “Do you think it’s possible for a person
to get away from her family and just be—herself? Start a new life?”

I thought about my own situation, my own family. “You would
have to believe in it. The new life, I mean. Because otherwise the old
life would still be there, and eventually the new one would just sort
of melt away, and you’d be in your old life again.”

“What about—this?” She stroked my leg with her fingertips. “Can
I believe in this?”

The skin of my leg crawled where she was touching it. Instead of
answering her I turned to her and tugged up her shirt, pushed my
face into her chest.
It was too cold out there for bare skin, and soon we had to move
into the bedroom.

When she moaned, I tried to silence her, putting a hand over her
lips, thinking of Car and Jeanie, but she would not be silenced, tilting
back her head, exposing her neck. I moved my hand down, my wrist
nestled between her collarbones, my elbow between her breasts, and
stroked the tendons of her neck. How would it feel to squeeze and
go on squeezing?

She came just as I began to come, my hand clenching around her
throat.

“Did you really think I shot Teddy?” she asked later. “Tell me you
didn’t believe it.”

“I didn’t know what to believe,” I told her.

“I didn’t do it. You have to believe I didn’t.”

I held her. “I believe you,” I said.

I was thinking about what would happen in the morning, about
what I would tell Car and Jeanie.

“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered. “Let’s go to Reno and forget
about everything for a night.”

As we reached the bottom of the hill a pair of headlights appeared in
the rearview. It was the Volvo.

Christine dozed in the passenger seat beside me. Car and Jeanie
stayed on our trail into Moraga, as far as the last exit before the Benicia
Bridge.

I find it difficult to fully describe my feelings as I watched the
Volvo’s lights grow smaller and curve away onto the exit behind us.
It was like watching my old life close up behind me as I drove into
the dark distance. There was a sense that I’d broken irrevocably from
Jeanie and Car, and from Teddy. Alone with Christine, I knew how it
was going to end.

After we’d arrived in Reno and been gambling for an hour it hit
me: Today was Teddy’s thirty-eighth birthday.

We slept for a few hours before dawn. Christine woke up sober and
anxious to get back for her afternoon class. I paid for the hotel room,
we got into the Rabbit, and drove again.

Playing blackjack, I’d come up with a plan for how best to use Christine
to get at her father. After filling the tank outside Sacramento, I
took Christine’s hand. “We got married last night,” I said. “Don’t worry,
I didn’t pull a fast one during your blackout. We’re going to pretend
we went to Reno, which we did, and that we got married there on
the spur of the moment. You’ll break the news to your parents this
afternoon, and you’ll insist on having me for dinner tonight.”

She took a breath and let it out through her nose.

“What did you expect?” I asked. “A diamond ring?”

“I’ll go along with you, and we’ll milk this for all it’s worth. I’m a
pretty good actress. I’ll have to be. But I don’t see how this is going
to get my father to admit anything. You don’t have any real proof, so
what are you going to do? Just accuse him?”

“That’s my problem,” I said. And it was. I knew how to make Gerald
angry, but I had no idea how to get from there to an admission of the
secret he’d been keeping all these years.

We didn’t say anything the rest of the way. When we reached Teddy’s,
where Christine had left her sleek little BMW, she leaned over and
kissed me lightly on the cheek. She didn’t want to come inside. She
had to get back to school, she said.

She backed out of the driveway. I sat there a moment, wondering
where the nearest place to get coffee was. Then I gave a mean little
laugh, put the Rabbit in gear, and drove to San Francisco.

About halfway through the night I’d remembered that I didn’t have my
cell phone: It was still in pieces on my radiator. After dropping Christine
at her car I drove straight to the hospital, drawn by the certainty
that something had happened in my absence. I didn’t actually believe
the situation had changed, but I felt impelled to Teddy’s bedside so
that I could see that everything was the same as it had been yesterday
afternoon, that he was still straddling the line between death and life.

I arrived at two o’clock.

When I got there my premonitions seemed confirmed in the worst
possible way. The bed was empty and remade, all the medical equipment
pushed back against the wall, the lights turned off, the flowers
and personal stuff swept away.

I came in and stood by the bed, looking down at the creaseless
sheets. I touched the pillow. After an interval of shock I turned from
the room. At the end of the hall I spotted Carol, the nurse I’d met the
first day, going into another patient’s room. I jogged after her.
Carol turned from the bed where she’d bent to check the pulse in
an unconscious man’s jaundiced, spotted old arm, her face registering
an emotion between sympathy and reproach.

“When—” I said, and my breath failed me, and I stood gasping
before her. “When—” I tried again, but it came out as a squeaking
wheeze, like an asthma attack.

“He’s still here,” she said. She stared at me worriedly. “He started
becoming responsive this morning. He was trying to breathe on his
own and showing higher-level responses, enough that they decided
to move him into long-term care. They’re keeping him in a coma
for now, but in a few days they may let him wake up as much as
he’s able to. He’s got a difficult road ahead, but it looks like he’ll
pull through. We’ve been calling and calling all morning, Leo, trying
to reach you.”

A week ago I might have believed that it would be better for Teddy
to die than to live in a brain-damaged state, but now elation flooded
through me. What I hadn’t dared to think possible was suddenly probable:
I was going to have my brother back. He would never be the
same, but he was going to live.

“Where—” I began, but my voice was choked off this time by
thankful, ashamed weeping.

She touched my cheek, then flipped through her charts, and told
me the room number. “Go,” she said, with a suppressed smile. “I’ve
got work to do.”

Teddy’s new room was brighter than the old one, with wallpaper, a
closet, TV, and a window with a view of the bay—a room designed
for the living rather than for the dying. He lay under the sheet with
his head bandaged as before. He still had the stoma in his throat, but
the machine wasn’t hooked up to it. The unprompted rise and fall of
his massive chest seemed to me nothing short of miraculous.

When I’d been there only a minute Jeanie appeared, as if she’d just
stepped out for a moment; she must have been here all morning. Her
purse was on the floor beneath a chair at the window, her book beside
it. She walked around me to Teddy’s bedside as if I weren’t there, and
with a proprietary motion straightened the hem of the sheet. Only
then did she turn, standing between my brother and me.

“How did this happen?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Then she walked over, grabbed my arm, pushed
me out of the room into the hallway, and closed the door behind us.
“How long have you been here?”

“Almost since we left you. They called around midnight. Where
were you?”

“Jeanie—”

“Or maybe you’d better not tell me. I don’t want to know, not really.”

She breathed out hard. “He’s probably going to live. You could start by
saying something about that, about how glad you are. Or maybe you
aren’t glad.”

“That’s good news. I’m really, really glad.” It was like a kick in the
head that she could think I wasn’t.

“Is it? Are you? I thought your brother was better off dead than
needing someone’s help to dress himself. Not your help, though. You
made that abundantly clear with your behavior last night. Don’t worry,
we got it all on tape, your sick little fuck session.”

“I’ll be there for him. Whatever it takes. I’m glad he’s going to have
a chance at—at some kind of life.”

“You’ll be there just like you’ve been here since this happened.”

Seeing the tears in my eyes, she seemed briefly to soften. Then her
face hardened again.

“Jeanie—last night—”

“I told you, I don’t want to hear it.”

“She didn’t pull the trigger. She didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I’m glad you think so. I’ve got to hand it to you, Leo, you’re quite
the advocate. You represent one suspect and screw another. Maybe for
your next trick you can get yourself adopted by Gerald Locke.”