Bear Is Broken (4 page)

“Teddy bought all his suits at Nordstrom,” she said.

There was nothing for me to do but change if I expected to go out
in public. I borrowed one of Teddy’s ties from the closet, then went
back out front and asked Tanya to pin up the unhemmed pant legs.
“Men’s Wearhouse,” she said with a sniff of disdain.

While she knelt beside me I asked her to get together the list of
Teddy’s clients for Detective Anderson. Though I’d decided not to
tell Anderson about that argument in the stairwell, at least not until I
knew what it was about, I intended to do everything else in my power
to help him find the shooter. It seemed to me that the client list was
the logical place to start.

She was holding a pin in her mouth as I spoke. There was a frozen
moment in which neither of us moved a muscle. Then with a sharp
inward breath she took the pin and jabbed it hard into the top of my
foot. I jumped back away from her, hopping on one foot to avoid
stepping on the other unpinned leg.

“Are you out of your mind?” she asked, rising and taking a menacing
step toward me.

I stepped backward again, my hands up. “He wasn’t running a candy
store. They can’t all be satisfied customers.”

She was still advancing, still holding the pin, her eyes making little
darting movements to different parts of my body, her shoulders rigid, as
if she might strike again at any moment. “We’re not giving the police
any list,” she said in a low voice. “We’re not giving them anything from
this office. Until Teddy recovers, I’m in charge of this law practice, and
you’d better do as I say, or you’ll get a lot worse than you already got.
Monkey Boy.”

I flushed. “Don’t you think Teddy’s killer is probably connected to
a case?”

Her voice came from deep in her throat. “Teddy’s clients loved him.
No matter how their cases turned out, he always did right by them,
and they knew it.” She had taken up a position between me and the
tall oak filing cabinets, indicating her willingness to defend Teddy’s
secrets with violence.

“It’s not just about the clients. What about witnesses, victims? Someone
Teddy might have humiliated, somebody who thinks they didn’t
get justice.” There was a person like that in literally every case, a whole
sorry trail of Lorlees littering my brother’s career. My foot was throbbing
but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. Passing the bar exam had
not prepared me to deal with a legal assistant who resorted to corporal
discipline in matters of attorney-client ethics.

“Teddy always did right by his clients,” she repeated, “and now you
want to have the cops all up in their business, busting them for no
reason. People who are just trying to put the past behind them.” Her
voice kept breaking. She might have been speaking of herself. “You
know what the cops are going to do with that list. You give them the
names, they’ll start busting doors, bringing people in for parole violations,
probation violations, bullshit charges, busting them for whatever
they’ve got in their pockets, anything they can think of to haul
someone in and lock him up. That way they can pretend to be doing
something, but in reality they’re just undoing all your brother’s work,
getting back at him for all the times he made cops look like morons.

That’s how you want your brother to be remembered, as a lawyer who
sold his clients down the river?”

“I don’t see how they can avoid taking a look at the clients. They’re
going to do it one way or another. Someone walked up to him in that
restaurant and shot him. Tried to murder him. He’s probably going to
die. The police are on our side this time, Tanya. Let’s try to separate
courtroom rhetoric from reality, here.”

“It wasn’t a client. It wasn’t anyone who had anything to do with
any of Teddy’s cases. And the San Francisco Police Department is not
on our side, and they aren’t on Teddy’s side, either. They’re glad he got
shot, but that’s not enough for them. They have their own ax to grind.”
I rubbed my brow. I felt very tired. I would have liked nothing better
than to stretch out on the couch and close my eyes, sleep until morning,
and be on my bike as the sun came up, riding across the bridge
into the hills of Marin County, or better yet, with saddlebags and a
trailer heading up the Pacific Coast; I’d often dreamed of repeating
that long trip. “How can you be sure the killer wasn’t connected with
one of Teddy’s cases?”

She tossed her head but gave no answer.

“Do you know something, Tanya?”

“I don’t know anything.”

I wanted to ask her whether Teddy had been mixed up in anything
serious enough to be shot over, but I didn’t want to ask that question
until I had a better sense of what she might be hiding. I stood rubbing
one knuckle into my eye. “Better get that list together, then.”

“No.”

“Get the list together or pack up your desk.” I felt tired enough
now that I didn’t really care whether I had any authority to fire her.
I was no longer afraid of her, or maybe I was coming to see that her
pugnacity was mostly bluster, a shield for her grief at what had happened,
maybe also for her fear of what would become of her without
my brother. Teddy had meant just as much to Tanya as he did to me,
maybe more. In one way or another she depended on him for every
aspect of the life she had now.

Her eyes narrowed, and she crossed her arms, but there was no
longer threat in her posture. I went on: “If you want to go down the
list and call anyone you think might benefit from a warning, do that.
But until we’ve got a more definite lead, the cases are all we have to go
on. I want the cops to find this guy. You want it as much as I do, I’m
sure. And that means offering our cooperation, even if it goes against
the grain of business as usual around here. So we’re going to give the
police that list, and you and I are going to spend a whole lot of time
together going through every file.”

I walked past her to the cabinet and tugged open one of the heavy
drawers. It was so full that you couldn’t have inserted a sheet of paper
between any of the folders. I knew that each of the four drawers in
each of the five cabinets was as tightly packed as this one. All the muchthumbed
yellow file folders were raggedy with notes and documents,
transcripts, and photographs. Here and there were gaps marking the
smaller bulk of audio- and videotapes. To my eyes all the layers of
information took on almost geologic significance as the fossil record
of Teddy’s career.

I slid the drawer closed and fingered the handle of another one.
I felt strongly that I was in the presence of my brother’s would-be
killer, that somewhere in all these documents the shooter’s name was
written. If I just knew what to look for, his identity would stand out
as obviously as if it were written in blood.

I turned back to Tanya. “I’ll also need a list of Teddy’s active cases
and the files themselves. For me, not the police. Someone’s going to
have to sit down with each of his clients in the next few weeks, if
not sooner, and explain what’s happened and what their options are.
I suppose I’ll have to be the one to do that, now that Jeanie’s gone.”
She went slowly around behind the desk, sat down, and made a
note. “Okay.” A pause. “I’m sorry about your foot.”

I nodded, preferring to pretend it hadn’t happened.

I grabbed a pad and fastened the top button of my new suit coat.

“Are you going somewhere?” she demanded.

“I’m going to see Mr. Bradley.”

It was a ten-minute walk to the Hall of Justice. With the sun down and
the fog pulled over the city’s head, the air was twenty degrees cooler
and so clammy that it numbed my cheeks and fingertips. We were
fortunate that Ellis had been housed here during his trial, rather than
at the jail in San Bruno, which was unreachable by public transportation.
Teddy didn’t keep a car in San Francisco, and of course I didn’t
have a vehicle. In the room I rented in a house with six strangers in
Hayes Valley, I had a queen-size mattress, a desk, a computer, a TV and
stereo, an original Nintendo that I liked to play when stoned, some
books, and my bikes, but little else of consequence.

The walk brought me past the Ninth Circuit courthouse, which had
gotten itself stranded in this neighborhood of junkies and residence
hotels. Suddenly I realized I was standing in front of the Seward Hotel,
where Teddy kept a room.

I should let Anderson know about this little hidey-hole here in the
city, I thought—or maybe he’d even found it without my help. A pair
of squad cars was double-parked on Mission, and an ambulance with
its doors open and its lights flashing stood fifty yards farther down, the
driver relaxing with one elbow out the window.

I hesitated, then pushed open the heavy, splintered door, and went
inside.

The dark entrance hall hadn’t been renovated in at least fifty years,
I guessed. To my left was a closed door and beside it a scarred window
with a pass-through and a grille. Behind the window was a room with a
desk, a board with hooks for keys, and cubbyholes for mail. A miniature
black-and-white TV pushed up against the Plexiglas showed me myself.
The small but tough-looking man behind the desk took one look
at my new suit and tie and shook his head slowly, as if this just wasn’t
his day. He waved me on. “They’re up there,” he said. “Go on up. I’ll
buzz you through. They all got here about five minutes ago.”

I hesitated. “What was that number again?”

“Six-oh-nine. Take the stairs. Elevator’s broke.”

On the second-floor landing a single used needle lay in a dingy
spill of light on the windowsill. On an impulse I touched the needle’s
plastic shaft. It was still warm. The tip was smeared with blood. After
that I stopped paying attention to the scenery.

Only as I came to the sixth floor and heard the sounds of a woman
sobbing and a man muttering something over and over again did it
occur to me that the police would have no use for an ambulance crew
if they were here merely to search Teddy’s room.
I went out into the hall anyway.

Two uniformed officers stood outside the door of room 609 at the
far end of the hallway. Only a few doors were open between here and
there. Seeing a couple sitting on a bed in one of the open rooms, I
stopped and asked what happened.

“She killed him, that’s what,” said the man, a white guy in his late
thirties in a sleeveless undershirt that crumpled over his ribs. He had
unclean dreadlocks dangling above an oversize brow, a shadowy beard,
and black, broken fingernails. “Waited till he was sleeping, then stuck
a knife in his ribs.” He gave a barking laugh, and the petite darkhaired
woman on the bed beside him smiled like someone who didn’t
understand English. The man looked me over with a hungry eye, as if
trying to determine which of the suited classes I belonged to.

I went down the hall to the room. The paramedics were inside. I got
close enough to see blood spattered on the wall, and then one of the
uniformed cops blocked my path. On the bed a naked man sat flinching
while the paramedics worked on a gash in his shoulder. Contrary
to what the dreadlocked man had said, he was very much alive and
cut rather than stabbed. Still, there was a lot of blood. It had made a
dark pool on the sheets and spattered the floor. A woman huddled in
the corner with her head bowed against her handcuffed hands. “Just
looking for a client,” I told the cop and retreated, though it was difficult
to tear away my gaze.

I continued down the hallway to the open door, in shock that my
brother had actually lived in such a place, that he apparently considered
it restful. “You wouldn’t happen to know which room was Teddy
Maxwell’s?” I asked the dreadlocked guy.

“Third floor. Three-oh-eight, three-ten, one of those two,” the man
said. “Hey, did he really get shot up?”

“Yeah. I’m his brother.”

His face brightened. “Cause I’ve been trying to get hold of him all
week. You see, I caught this case…”

I had already turned away and was walking toward the stairwell,
hoping he wouldn’t follow me. He didn’t.

Three floors down things were quieter. I didn’t know which room
was Teddy’s, and in any case I didn’t have the key. I went back down
the stairwell and into the lobby.

“I must have gotten confused,” I told the guy behind the Plexiglas.
“I’m actually Teddy Maxwell’s brother. It’s his room I’m looking for.”
The man just stared through me as if I were an apparition that might
disappear at any moment.

“I’m here to pick up some things for him. He’s in the hospital.”

He stirred, his eyes finally coming to rest somewhere between my
forehead and the ceiling. “Lemme see some ID.”

I pressed my driver’s license against the window.

“All you people barging in here all of a sudden, it’s like I’m runnin’
some kind of damn store.” He spoke with rising vehemence, his
eyes sliding away from me, not bothering to look at the license. “All I
know is when Teddy was around I never knew him to have even one
sibling, let alone a pair of them. Or maybe you’re the kind of brother
who keeps clear until a man goes down, then starts nosing around to
see what he might have tucked away under the mattress.”

“Someone else came here claiming to be Teddy’s brother?”

“Claiming. You the one claiming. I have half a mind to make you
come back with the sheriff, prove you are who you say you are.”
“Look at my license.” I was still holding it up. “My name is Leo
Maxwell. I’m Teddy’s only brother. Did this other person show you
any kind of identification?”

He still didn’t look at it. “You a lawyer? ’Cause I don’t talk to no
lawyers. Your brother excepted, but I hear he’s gonna be dead, and then
there won’t be a lawyer left in the world I care to talk to.” His voice
lowered insinuatingly. “Unless the name on that damn driver’s license
is Alexander Hamilton, we ain’t got nothing to talk about.”