Bear is Broken Read online

  I followed the uniformed cop out into the early afternoon sunlight. In the car he didn’t try to make conversation, either out of respect for me or knowledge of who my brother was.

  It was as if they’d brought Teddy home. That’s because after my mother’s death we’d lived for several years not four blocks from the hospital. Returning to the neighborhood only strengthened the certainty in the pit of my stomach that he was going to die.

  People turned to look at me as I walked into the emergency room. My clothes. Not to mention the way I was moving—too slowly for that busy place. The emergency room at San Francisco General is the collection point for the city’s misery and violence, a place of blood and weeping. People looking more or less like me walked into that waiting room every day. Probably not many of them were wearing suits, though.

  At noon on an autumn Wednesday the waiting room was not at its fullest. I went to the desk and asked after my brother. The nurse seemed to know who I was before I spoke. The clothes again. “Teddy Maxwell?” she asked. “I’ll get a doctor out to talk to you.”

  She lifted a phone, and I heard a page.

  A young resident appeared after a few minutes, pulling down his mask with one hand while offering me the other. He introduced himself as Dr. Singh and told me that they were resuscitating my brother, trying to get his blood pressure and oxygen up. If they stabilized him, he would undergo an emergency CAT scan, then surgery if the doctors thought it was warranted.

  “Warranted?”

  He hesitated. “If they think your brother has any chance of recovery.” The good news, he went on, was that either Teddy had moved at the last instant or the shooter had terrible aim, because the path of the bullet had been glancing, and only Teddy’s right frontal lobe appeared to have been damaged, leaving the rest of the brain intact. That was how it looked from the outside, anyway. Only after a CAT scan would they know for sure. “Realistically, for patients with this type of injury, the survival rate is below ten percent. His chances depend on how responsive he appears in the next few days and on whether we’re able to control the pressure in his brain.”

  He stretched the paper mask back over his face and disappeared back through the doors.

  I used my brand-new cell phone to call Jeanie, Teddy’s ex-wife and former partner. I left messages on her cell, her home answering machine, and on her voice mail at the Contra Costa County Public Defender Office. This last had a message saying that she’d be out of the office until Monday. When I rang the front desk they had no idea where she was or how she could be reached. I called Teddy’s office and left a message for Tanya, his secretary, who took long lunches and might conceivably not return, since she’d be expecting us to be in trial the rest of the afternoon.

  There was no one else I could think to call. Few of my friends knew Teddy. I’d formed a habit early on of dividing my life into compartments, each hermetically sealed from the others—the effect of having a father in prison, I suppose. I could have called my cycling friends, or my law school friends, or the few friends I still kept in touch with from high school. People always come through when you need them—but then I would have had to admit needing someone.

  Around two o’clock a hurried-looking doctor, not Singh but another resident, came to tell me that Teddy had just been taken into emergency surgery to remove a blood clot. At six the same guy returned to tell me that Teddy was out of surgery. I would be able to see him in a few hours, whenever he was moved from recovery into a regular room. He was on a respirator, with minimal brain activity, and I should prepare myself for the chance that he would be dead before morning. The doctor spoke with the clipped bluntness of someone who disliked the human aspects of his job.

  Sitting alone, thumbing through the same grubby six-month-old magazines I’d already thumbed through once, I realized that my brother was going to die. My skin crawled. I was afraid, and I didn’t even know of what—seeing him hooked up to machines, I guess, all his weakness so terribly obvious.

  I stood and walked straight out through the front entrance and into a cab that had just let off an elderly woman. “Civic Center,” I told the driver. Maybe some part of me thought that I could go back to Coruna, sit at our table, and finish our lunch.

  The cab let me off on Market Street, and I nearly stepped in front of a Muni streetcar when a pedestrian grabbed my arm and yanked me back to the curb. I didn’t hear what the person said to me, or how I replied, if I did. When I came back to myself, I was in the gaudy rococo elevator heading up to my brother’s fifth-floor office down at Mission and Sixth.

  It was only when I got to the office door that I remembered Teddy hadn’t given me a key. I stood outside the door and laid my forehead against the cool pebbled glass. Why couldn’t he just have made me a key? He must have been afraid that once I got in, I wouldn’t leave, that I would contrive some way of making him let me stay on after I passed the bar. And to be perfectly honest, I suppose that was my intention.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, but when I opened my eyes again the light was different. It was dusk. The ding of the elevator brought me to my senses. I just had time to square my shoulders before Tanya came toward me in her hip-hugging skirt, her body perched forward atop ultrahigh heels. As she walked she fumbled in her purse for her keys.

  She nearly ran into me, then gave a start. She stood looking at me in frozen horror, then seized my arm so hard that I felt her nails almost meeting through the layers of flesh and clothing. She opened the door and pushed me into the office.

  Tanya was five feet four inches tall, and amply padded. Her body and face were a testament to years of ill use. Her hair was bleached blonde, a puffy helmet that drooped over her eyes. Her shapeless body was contained by undersized skirts, blouses, and undergarments. At some point her nose had been broken and badly reset. It was hard to imagine that there had ever been anything tantalizing about her, but before her rehabilitation at Teddy’s hands she’d made her living on the street. I had no doubt that even now a man could meet a quick end by surprising her at the wrong moment.

  “I went over to the courthouse,” she said. “They sent the jury home.”

  “Teddy’s in the hospital. He’s not expected to make it. Someone shot him in the head at Coruna.”

  “Well, I can see that,” she said, raising her voice in outrage and incomprehension.

  I looked down, then smelled myself. My hands were shaking too badly again to be of use to me. I got my jacket off okay but couldn’t manage the shirt buttons. Tanya stood there watching me, her hands at her sides. The shirt was ruined. I grabbed it by the lapels and yanked downward, popping off the buttons, like Superman casting off his secret identity, but I was the same person underneath. Just Leo.

  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 middle-aged 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.

  Chapter 4

  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 deser
ve 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.”