Chapter 10

I woke up at 5 am on Jeanie’s couch to the clatter of a pan of eggs dropping and her saying “fuck damn” in the tone of someone who’s failed to sober up gracefully. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face pale. She was dressed for the gym and looked about as hungover as anyone ever deserved to be.

“We can still make six am rounds if you get your butt in the shower,” she said.

Once again I drove, battling the early commute while Jeanie sat with her eyes slitted, her face mashed against the window. We arrived at the hospital at six and were in Teddy’s room just ahead of the chief neurotrauma specialist, Dr. Gottlieb, and his flock of four residents, among them the doctors who’d spoken to me in the ER.

After introducing himself and the residents to Jeanie and me, Dr. Gottlieb quizzed Dr. Singh on the minutest aspects of my brother’s condition, forcing him to recite Teddy’s roster of blood chemistry and vital signs and to conduct a Glasgow test, which involved poking a pin under Teddy’s fingernail and shouting in his ear. Teddy scored a six out of fifteen, according to Singh, fifteen being full consciousness. From what I could see, my brother didn’t react at all.

Dr. Gottlieb asked us to leave the room while they changed the dressings on the wound.

In the waiting area Jeanie sat with her elbows propped on her knees, her palms against her brow, her hair hanging in front of her face.

“This is really happening, isn’t it,” she finally said from underneath the curtain of her hair.

I nodded, feeling thick-headed but not too bad, considering. I eased back against the wall and closed my eyes.

When I opened them Jeanie was looking up at me. “You’re wrong, what you said last night. No matter how bad it was, he’d want to go on fighting.”

She seemed to think that I wanted Teddy to die and that I wanted that because it would be inconvenient for me if he lived, because I would have to be there for him in ways that would humiliate him and me. I was too wounded to respond.

The doctors emerged from the room. We made to stand, but Gottlieb sent on the four residents and came to sit with us. Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he looked at us in turn. “It’s a miracle he’s made it this far,” he said. “Even so, the prognosis is grim. He’s in a very deep coma. There’s brain stem activity, meaning that he could theoretically recover to breathe on his own. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a recovery of any kind isn’t likely. After a head wound like this, people usually don’t wake up.”

He’d said what I expected to hear. So why did I feel an abyss yawning before me? It hadn’t been real to me until now, I realized. Some part of me had expected a reprieve, as if some doctor would snap his fingers and we’d all wake up.

This one parted his hands in sympathy. His movements were gentle and deliberate. “We have a hospice here that provides support for people in your situation. Eventually, if his situation doesn’t change—and this is just to warn you, not to push you toward any kind of premature decision—we will need to ask you whether you want to continue life support, hydration, and the feeding tube. Right now I have to ask whether he had a living will, some kind of document expressing his wishes for an end-of-life situation, a situation where he wouldn’t be able to make these kinds of decisions for himself?”

Jeanie shook her head. “When we were married he refused even to draw up a last will and testament. That’s the equivalent of a doctor smoking three packs a day. Lawyers are supposed to take care of those kinds of things, but Teddy hated the thought of dying so much he refused even to consider making the most basic plans.”

“These issues can be very delicate. I can promise you that if and when we come to believe that further efforts to preserve his life would be futile, we will tell you. Ultimately, however, the actual decision to continue or discontinue life support is the family’s. And I want to emphasize again that we’re still quite some way from having that discussion.”

I spoke up for the first time: “My decision, in other words.”

The doctor nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose it would be yours.”

A high color had come into Jeanie’s cheeks.

“What if he does come out of it?” I asked. “Is he going to be a vegetable? Could he ever practice law?”

Doctor Gottlieb nodded, back on what he undoubtedly considered less treacherous ground. “Generally speaking, anyone surviving a cranial injury of this magnitude should expect to contend with some degree of permanent disability. With a frontal lobe injury, especially, there can be a huge range of impairments. You should expect memory problems, certainly, both short- and long-term, and cognitive difficulty, usually involving problem solving and planning and initiating actions. Depending on what part of the frontal lobe is injured you may see changes in personality such as pseudopsychopathic behavior, resulting from injury to the brain’s inhibition centers, or pseudodepressive conditions. And there is often physical impairment, sometimes localized to one side of the body, ranging from full paralysis down to loss of fine motor skills. Again, a very wide and often unpredictable range.

“We won’t have any idea, really, until he wakes up. If and when. And if he does wake up, he won’t be a vegetable. There will be something there. He may improve dramatically in a few months, or he may come to a plateau and sort of tail off. As for practicing law—I won’t tell you it’s impossible, but it would be the most miraculous recovery from this type of injury I’ve ever seen. With these patients, it’s considered excellent progress if they’re eventually able to dress themselves, cook breakfast without lighting the house on fire, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds like a great life.”

Gottlieb shrugged. “Relationships continue, even though people change. They find meaning in unexpected places. We’re getting pretty far ahead of ourselves, but if you’d like to educate yourselves, I can make some calls, get you in to visit our inpatient rehabilitation center here at the hospital, maybe also one of the residential rehabilitation centers people usually transition to for six months to a year after they’re well enough to leave the hospital.”

“I’d like that,” Jeanie said. “It’s very important to me to be able to envision what kind of life Teddy might have.”

I didn’t want any part of that scene. I wanted to find the person who’d done this to Teddy, and I wanted to hurt him.

“I’ll arrange it,” he told her.

“Thank you. Here’s my card.”

He pocketed it and stood. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got it set up. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” He glanced uncertainly but with kindness at me, then first shook Jeanie’s hand, then mine. “Take care of yourselves. Of each other. You’ve got a long road ahead.”

“One more question, Doctor,” I said. “If Teddy does wake up, could he identify the person who shot him?”

“Usually people are left with no memory of the injury-causing event,” he told me. “I wouldn’t hold out too much hope, though anything’s possible.”

When he’d gone we sat in silence.

“It’s not your decision,” Jeanie finally said. “It’s our decision. I don’t care if that’s the law or not. That’s how it is.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

“Leo.” Her voice was sharp. “Don’t do this.”

I leaned against the wall again, grimacing with the agony of this discussion, the idea of it. “We’ll decide together,” I conceded. “But I’m not going to let him be a vegetable.”

“No one’s talking about that,” Jeanie snapped.

I glanced at my watch. It was seven thirty. “Are you going into work?”

She shook her head. “If I go into the office I’ll only get mired. I came back from Mendocino early to be with Teddy, so I guess I’ll just stay.”

It made me feel better to be leaving, knowing that Jeanie would be here. I could see by the disappointment in her eyes that she already knew some excuse was coming, but I was eager to be gone. I glanced at my watch again. “I should probably get home and put on a suit in case this jury comes back today.”

“Go,” she said. “Put on your suit and come back.”

“I thought I might keep reading through the files. Someone has to be working on this.”

“The police are working on it. Don’t you think you should be here?”

“This Detective Anderson, I don’t trust him. Someone who cares about Teddy needs to be out there, trying to find the person who did this. I think that’s what he’d want me to be doing right now.”

I was halfway down the hall before I remembered. I turned back. “By the way, do you know anyone named Martha or Chris?”

~ ~ ~

I went home, changed back into my suit, drank some more coffee, then walked over to the office. The phone was ringing as I arrived. Tanya wasn’t there to pick it up. The call went to voice mail. I saw that there were fourteen new messages. Tanya must have been right, I thought with a sinking heart. The police must be out rounding up Teddy’s clients from the list I’d faxed to Anderson.

I called the court to check in. Judge Iris’s clerk answered and told me breathlessly that they were looking for me, that they’d been calling Teddy’s office, that they were getting ready to go ahead without me.

My heart stopped, then beat again. Not a verdict already, I hoped. I took a deep breath. “Did you try calling my cell phone?”

“The jury has a question,” she said instead of answering. “They came back with it first thing this morning.”

I tried to ask again why she hadn’t tried to get ahold of me, but she cut me off and gave me an earful. I was supposed to check in with the court every morning at nine thirty while the jury was out, and I had to be within fifteen minutes of the courtroom at all times. The judge and prosecutor were waiting for me now. They could proceed in my absence, if I was willing. I almost said yes, because I had just pulled Keith Locke’s file and wanted to look through it. Then I thought of the look in Melanie’s eyes when she rose to make her rebuttal to my closing argument.

As I was locking the door on my way out the phone began ringing once more. I let it ring.

The sun made my eyeballs feel like they were popping out. I kept glancing over my shoulder for a cab as I walked up Sixth Street, earning myself a crick in the neck, but there weren’t any. No surprise in this part of town, or in any part of San Francisco, really.

I arrived at Judge Iris’s courtroom sweating and disheveled. The deputies had brought in Ellis, who sat shackled all alone at the defense table. He was still in his jail uniform.

Judge Iris was looking right at me when I came in. Apparently she’d been sitting for some time staring at the unopened doors, like a terrier at a squirrel hole.

She started speaking before I’d reached the defense table, her eyes fixed on my forehead. “You’d better have a good reason for keeping us waiting, Mr. Maxwell, but that doesn’t mean I have any desire to hear it. You’re aware of my fifteen-minute rule. There are no excuses for tardiness in my courtroom. I’ve brought your client here to witness the consequences.”

She ordered the court clerk to enter a finding of civil contempt, which carried with it a fine of a thousand dollars.

I tried to persuade myself that her heart wasn’t in it, that what she really wanted to do was invite me back into her chambers, sit me down, serve me tea in slender-handled cups, and listen to all my troubles. She had her reputation to consider, though.

I hadn’t said a word and didn’t intend to. I felt Melanie’s eyes on me but I didn’t turn.

Judge Iris went on with cheerful relief, evidently feeling refreshed now that she’d managed to bleed me. “All right, now down to business. It’s ten fourteen am, and the jury has submitted a question form.”

Ellis made a soft clucking sound with his tongue. “They took me away from my program,” he whispered.

“Catch the rerun.”

Judge Iris glanced at us sternly. I allowed myself a sigh and bowed my head.

She went on: “The question reads, ‘If we decide that one side has committed perjury, does that mean that the other side automatically wins?’” She looked up toward the DA’s table, her eyebrows raised, as if ready to defer to Melanie.

“The way I see it, there’s only one way you can answer a question like that,” Melanie said. “I think the only thing you can do is refer them to the jury instructions you’ve already given. One-oh-five and two-two-six are right on point. ‘If you decide that a witness deliberately lied about something significant in this case, you should consider not believing anything that witness says.’”

“Counsel?”

“It sounds to me like they’ve taken two-two-six to heart already, Judge,” I said. “The jury’s question goes much more directly to the burden of proof and the presumption of innocence. I don’t know which witness they’re referring to, whether it’s the state’s witness or the defense’s, but their question doesn’t make any distinction between perjury by a prosecution witness and perjury by a defense witness. Given the state’s burden of proof, it matters very much which side the jury believes committed perjury, and I think Your Honor should make that clear. My fear is that they’re asking whether in a case of suspected perjury they can disregard the state’s burden of proof and find against the defense simply as a matter of principle. I think you should reinstruct the jury that the state has the burden of proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and if the state fails to do so, Mr. Bradley is entitled to an acquittal.”

“So the state would have me refer them to one-oh-five, and the defense would point them to two-two-zero.” Judge Iris had her big green California Criminal Jury Instructions book out and was flipping from one instruction to the other. “Well, I’m not going to do either. The jurors have been instructed, and I’ll just tell them to refer to the instructions they’ve already been given. I’m not going to point them toward one instruction or the other.”

She closed the book and looked up. “Anything else?” Her eyes went to Melanie.

Melanie rose. “Yes, Your Honor. The state would like to renew its motion for a mistrial. I’ve just been informed by a member of my office that the San Francisco Police Department and the DA’s office were this week intending to seek a grand jury indictment against Teddy Maxwell for subornation of perjury and manufacturing of evidence in numerous cases stretching back over the past decade. After the recent tragedy, the DA’s office will likely postpone those plans. Given the seriousness of these allegations, however, the state believes that a mistrial is warranted in any case that Mr. Maxwell appeared in as counsel while this investigation was under way.”

“You have no specific evidence of misconduct in this case, I take it.”

“Your Honor, I have a draft copy of the investigative report prepared by the district attorney’s office.”

I gazed at her with disbelief as she walked around the DA’s table and dropped my copy on the defense table before me, ignoring my outstretched hand.

I stood looking down at it, unwilling to touch it. I’d heard the rumors before, of course, but never on this scale. I knew there was no justification for a mistrial. There was no proof that Sharla had lied or that Teddy knew it if she had. Ellis sat absolutely silent, absolutely still beside me. I could feel the intense focus of his attention.

“I don’t see how this document has anything to do with this case,” I said.

“Me neither,” the judge said, surprising me. She addressed Melanie: “You’ve made your record.”

Judge Iris stepped down from the bench without another word and without looking at Melanie, who stood just as prim and proper as ever at the prosecution table, her embarrassment revealed only by the color of her cheeks. She had finally gone too far.

Beside me Ellis remained quiet. I’d meant to give him a pep talk before I let the deputies take him back down to holding, but as I gathered up my belongings I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him. If Sharla had lied, Ellis had probably put her up to it.

“I sure as hell hope Sharla told the truth up there,” I said low enough not to be overheard.

“You know she did.”

“She better have.” It wasn’t him I was angry with. I could only be disappointed with Ellis, disgusted with him, even, but I couldn’t be angry.

Ellis signaled that he was ready to go. “If I were you, Monkey Boy, I wouldn’t think too hard on it.” He didn’t meet my eyes. The deputy handcuffed him and led him out.

Melanie was still standing at the prosecutor’s table. I picked up my copy of the investigative report and walked toward her, stopping when I was a few feet away. When she looked up, I threw it at her face. The pages fluttered, spread, and missed their mark, sailing over the railing into the gallery. Melanie opened her mouth but didn’t make a sound.

For anyone keeping score, that was a criminal act. Third-degree assault.

“Your brother was as big a criminal as any of his clients,” she said when I turned to walk out of the courtroom. “Suborning perjury is just the tip of the iceberg, from what I hear.”

I thought better of leaving the investigative report lying around for anyone to find, and I scooped it up as I passed the spot where it had fallen.

Melanie went on: “You all pretend that you’re serving the Constitution, but in reality you’re just in it for the thrill of helping criminals break the law.”

I was too furious to respond. It was not something I normally would have done, throwing that document at her. It wasn’t typical behavior.

In the hallway I thought about that argument I’d overheard between Teddy and Car. Could I have missed the fact that evidence was being manufactured under my nose? You have to fix this, Teddy had said. Was it that he didn’t think Sharla’s testimony would hold up?

If Teddy had been crooked, he must have assumed I was naive enough not to catch wind of what was going on. This realization made me as angry as anything, if it was true.

I went downstairs to the courthouse café for a much-needed coffee and croissant, which I carried out to City Hall Plaza. Straddling a concrete bench, I flipped through the Keith Locke file, holding my head to one side to avoid scattering crumbs over the pages. I skimmed the patrol officer’s account of spotting a suspicious vehicle in a lot near Candlestick and coming upon Keith Locke trying to maneuver the professor’s body into the Dumpster, then spotlighting him and arresting him without incident.

The official cause of death was listed as asphyxiation due to strangulation from a cord that had been wrapped around his neck. The autopsy file confirmed what the newspapers had reported, that before his death Marovich appeared to have been sexually tortured. Bruises at his wrists and ankles showed he’d been bound. There was a picture that looked like it came from a book jacket: a man in his thirties, well built, with a broad smile. As part of his workup for the case Teddy had compiled a profile of the victim, including a list of academic publications and a CV. The professor’s credits included a paper on the local S-and-M community and another on the illegal sex trade. On his CV Marovich indicated that his current research was an investigative report examining San Francisco’s role in the international sex trafficking market.

A shadow fell across the file folder, and I looked up to see Detective Anderson. He stood with his arms folded and a grin on his face, as if we were friends or neighbors running into each other on the wrong side of town. I closed the folder and tucked it under my arm.

“You fucked up my crime scene,” he said without altering his grin. “You were in your brother’s house.”

“So you really are a detective.” I threw the heel of my croissant to the pigeons, who fell on it with a flurry of dipping heads and slapping wings. “I was surprised you hadn’t been there yet.”

“Every investigation has its priorities.”

I thought of the phone messages on Teddy’s voice mail. “You mean you’re harassing my brother’s former clients and dragging them into jail on flimsy pretexts.” The phone was probably ringing again as we spoke, the mailbox filling up if it wasn’t filled already.

“I’m on my way to court to testify in another case. I just saw you sitting here and I thought, Hey, maybe I should come over and apologize for the way I acted the other day. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“Why apologize?”

“Because a murder victim is a murder victim is a murder victim.”

“He’s not dead yet. In any case, apology accepted. Any developments?”

“Look, no more bullshit. You and I both know what your brother’s game was.”

“I don’t. I really don’t.” I gazed over his shoulder toward the gold dome of city hall.

“You know,” he repeated. “You’ve got it right there beside you.” He nodded down at the investigative report from the DA’s office. “And so do I, and so does everyone who knows anything in this town. Your brother bought witnesses, bribed jurors, fabricated evidence. Not just in one case, but in a lot of them. He was about as crooked as a lawyer can be, and devious as hell, so we’ve never managed to catch him at it. He and that investigator of his have been pulling this shit for years, and it’s only recently that the DA’s office has started to get on top of them.”

I could only go on gazing over his shoulder. “You actually believe this nonsense?”

“What I believe doesn’t matter. The question is, did your brother’s clients believe it? Way I see it, once a lawyer gets a reputation like that—and sure as shit your brother had it even if he was clean as a whistle—he better understand that every new client is going to expect that A-one service. And when they don’t get it, pow.” He made a gun of his thumb and forefinger and shot it off toward the Asian Art Museum.

“These allegations were bullshit when the DA filed that state bar complaint after the Santorez case, and they’re bullshit now.” I pulled out my wallet and unfolded the copy of the hand-drawn map I’d showed Jeanie last night. “You must have seen this. In a file of death threats in the Santorez folder.”

The detective didn’t even look at the map. “This nut job didn’t shoot your brother. It was a hit. That pretty much rules out anyone who isn’t in the game. And guess what?” He flicked the creased copy with his index finger. “This guy wasn’t.”

“You don’t think it’s worth checking out?”

“Not when this department’s refusing overtime. We’ll find the killer on the client list, you’ll see. Some disgruntled player who thought he should be getting a whole lot more for his money.” The detective started to walk away as if I’d been wasting his time.

“Detective, you don’t really think that my brother could have gotten away with a scheme like that, do you?”

He stopped. “Kid, it should be pretty obvious by now that he didn’t get away with it.”

I sipped my coffee, watching the pigeons fight over the stub of croissant that remained. One carried it about fifteen feet, but none of them could manage to swallow it. One bird would pick it up, then drop it, and the others would flock around again.

I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I realized. I was going to have to listen to those phone messages.