Chapter 11

It was nearly one o’clock. I had a headache and my stomach felt queasy. As I walked, I thought about what Melanie had said to me. I kept at a simmer for six blocks before I was able to admit to myself that she was right, at least partially. When you got down to it, all the trial lawyers I knew—all the good ones—were in it not for the righteous purpose of defending the Constitution but for the power a skilled lawyer has over a hostile witness, the power to make a person say the opposite of what he intends, the power to sway jurors’ minds, the thrill of being the center of attention. He’s somewhere between the quarterback who throws the winning pass, the stage actor with an audience hanging on every word, and the gambler who puts his chips on red. The deadly serious game of it is what my brother loved, and I’d caught the bug from him.

I heard the phone ringing in the empty office as I got off the ele­vator. The ringing stopped as I put my key in the door. I went in, shrugged off my jacket, and lay down on the couch. I closed my eyes, willing the world to shrink until there was nothing left but my head on the cushion. In the other room the phone resumed its ringing. My eyes snapped open.

I rose, went into the other room, put on Tanya’s headset and hit answer. “Lawyer’s office.”

“Teddy, thank God. They taking me for a ride.” The man let out an incredulous laugh. “They telling me you was dead. Everybody been saying it.”

“Teddy was shot two days ago. He’s not dead, but he’s not going to be making any court appearances anytime soon, either. This is his brother, Leo.”

There was a pause. I could hear him breathing deep and slow through his mouth.

“Are you a client?” I asked.

He let out a held breath. “They got me in the parking lot after work, right in front of my boss. Been asking all sorts of questions.”

“Tell them you won’t speak without your lawyer present. Tell them you want a public defender.”

“Nah, man, I don’t want no public pretender.”

“Let me take down your name and jail number.”

I wrote down the caller’s information. Alan Davis. I promised to call a lawyer I knew at the public defender’s office and explain the situation. There were likely a whole lot of other clients of Teddy’s picked up. “They’re looking for someone to take down for what happened to Teddy. Whatever you do, don’t talk to anyone, don’t trust anyone.” The San Francisco police were not above building a case on the bartered lies of a jailhouse snitch.

I wished him good luck and cut off the call, then went to the file cabinets, found his file, and opened it to the summary sheet: a murder case from five years back, with an assortment of lesser included charges, and a more recent burglary conviction. I paged through the trial binder to the copy of the verdict form, where Teddy had neatly checked “Not Guilty” four times.

Returning to the chair, I accessed the voice-mail system. There were thirty-two new messages, and I listened to them all. It took more than an hour. Some had left names, some hadn’t. Occasionally there was just breathing followed by a click. Others were rambling monologues. White voices, black voices, Asian voices, Hispanic voices, men and women, educated and not, straight and gay, the whole human spectrum. Some of the callers were in custody; some had been questioned; others had found out about the shooting in the paper or on TV. All knew what had happened but hadn’t believed it and felt compelled to call. I wrote down each name along with any details provided. The line rang once more while I was working. I let it go to voice mail.

When I had finished listening, I went to the cabinets and started pulling files. I doubted that anyone connected with Teddy’s killing would have called the office; on the other hand, maybe the killers had calculated I’d make precisely this assumption. For lack of a better system, I sorted the files I pulled according to the type of crime involved: crimes of passion, crimes of violence, sexual assault and domestic violence, white-collar, and property crimes. There was a whole stack of prostitution cases. Teddy had started out representing hookers, and so-called B cases remained a mainstay of the practice.

I scanned the files for names on my list. My arms were full as I flipped through the L-M-N drawer, and I almost missed it. Then I saw the name Lawrence Maxwell on a much-handled, begrimed, and faded series of Redweld folders. They took up more than half the drawer.

My father was in prison for murdering my mother. Knowing our background, most people would find it hard to believe that Teddy and I would devote our lives to defending people accused of crimes. To an outsider my brother and I must have seemed natural-born prosecutors.

I bent down to set a stack of files on the floor. My hands shook.

There is a scene in every Hollywood depiction of domestic abuse where the elder son jumps between the father and the mother and stops what is happening, but in real life I doubt it happens more than one time in a dozen. Over the summer I’d gotten the uneasy feeling that Teddy despised all victims and that this moral cauterization served him well in his work. Anyone inquiring into root causes would have to conclude that such a failure of empathy must have been born in the experience of watching our mother’s bullying at our father’s hands.

From the files it was obvious that they’d been in close contact, that Teddy had visited him at San Quentin numerous times over the last decade. Perhaps he’d meant to spare me by hiding his legal work on our father’s behalf. In retrospect, I ought to have guessed.

The entire record of our father’s trial was before me, three Redweld folders filled with transcripts, evidence logs, and docket sheets. And pictures. My God, pictures.

I didn’t mean to look at them—I didn’t look at them—but even flipping through them in a hurry I couldn’t help glimpsing a particular piece of scroll-worked wainscoting above the threshold between the hall and the foyer of the Sunset District house where we’d lived when we were still a family. It was at the very top left-hand edge of a photograph taken by a police photographer who’d been standing at the back corner of our living room, looking toward the front door. I willed myself to see nothing, and then I was past the photographs and back onto safer ground, but it was too late: I might as well have looked at them. The glimpse of wainscoting was enough to bring it all flooding back, maybe worse than if I’d actually looked at the pictures of Caroline’s body laid out on the floor where my father had finally managed to beat the life out of her, and where I would find her one afternoon when I came home from school.

Save that. Leave it for later. It does no good to describe these things, no more good than it would have done me to look at those pictures or not to look at them, once I knew they existed.

I flipped through the other folders. Almost as soon as Teddy got his California bar number he’d taken over our father’s appeals, which were voluminous. My father had never stopped protesting his innocence. Teddy had also filed a civil rights lawsuit after Lawrence lost his left eye to an infection that the prison medical system had left untreated. In that case he’d negotiated a settlement for forty thousand dollars. There was a new-looking folder marked “notes for habeas corpus petition.”

I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there with the files spread out before me when the shock gave way to anger. My hands shook; my veins filled with poison. I might have been fifteen again, squinting at microfilm, stewing in rage, imagining how it might feel to kill my father, to beat him to death the way he’d beaten Caroline. If I’d learned of my brother’s efforts on Lawrence’s behalf while he was still whole in body and mind, Teddy could at least have tried to justify himself, explaining his reasons for what he did.

If he even felt he owed me an explanation, that is. I remembered the letter that Car had tried to hide, the one Teddy had left in the safe to be mailed in case of his incapacitation or death. I still couldn’t imagine what it said, and I felt even more of a coward for not opening it. I should have been left a letter. I was the one who deserved an explanation, not our father.

I had no desire to look at the original trial record, with its promise of a lurid trip into the abscess at the center of my life. I shut that file and put it in a drawer of Tanya’s desk. That left the civil rights case and the folder labeled “notes for habeas corpus petition.” I put the first aside, since that old, closed civil case was unlikely to be relevant to what had happened.

Paging through Teddy’s handwritten notes, I understood that he intended his argument to rest on the idea that the DA had unlawfully withheld evidence suggesting that someone else might have killed our mother. Teddy had no definite proof of our father’s innocence, but his argument raised the specter that the police had arrested, the DA had prosecuted, and the jury had convicted the wrong man.

I had to throw down the brief and pace the office for several minutes until I was able to see what was in front of me again. Cheap defense-lawyer bullshit was all it was, and for a quarter of an hour I shared the visceral, principled contempt that a champion of justice like Melanie had acquired for Teddy and all the rest of us, the whole sordid guild.

At last I was calm enough to return to the file. Teddy’s argument for reopening the case was that new evidence had come to light. There was an unsigned draft of an affidavit in Teddy’s handwriting indicating that the affiant had once worked in the San Francisco Police Department property room and that, according to old records, there had once been evidence that another man had been in the apartment with my mother the day of her murder—fingerprints on a beer bottle, blood spatters on the wall, and semen from our mother’s body—but the evidence had either been lost, destroyed, or withheld. There was another affidavit from Teddy stating that none of the exculpatory evidence had come to light at trial or had ever been disclosed to the defense.

Again I had to get up from the desk. Everything here stank, like Sharla’s testimony in Ellis’s trial. The problem was not that Teddy had drafted the affidavit—lawyers regularly did so, but rarely before they knew the name of the affiant.

My head was reeling. I couldn’t think straight.

Glancing up, I saw that it was just after four o’clock, which meant that Ellis’s jury was being sent home for the weekend. I felt a shock of surprise, followed by elation. The jurors had not reached a verdict, or the court would have called. If they couldn’t decide on a verdict before the weekend, there was a good chance they wouldn’t be able to reach one at all.

More pertinent, the end of court hours meant that I was free to go wherever I wanted without having to worry about being held in contempt again for breaking Judge Iris’s fifteen-minute rule.

Making a quick decision, I grabbed the Keith Locke file from the briefcase I’d been carrying earlier. There was a contacts sheet with a home phone number for Greta and Gerald Locke. I picked up the phone and dialed.

The phone rang twice; then a woman with an African immigrant’s accent answered. “Yes?”

“I’d like to speak with Mrs. Locke, please. Tell her that Mr. Teddy Maxwell is calling.”

I don’t know why I said that, except that I wanted to hear what that name would do to the mother of Teddy’s wayward client.

After a moment a composed voice said, “Teddy Maxwell was shot Wednesday morning. Now please tell me who you are and what your business is.”

“I see. Your maid must have caught the wrong name. This is Leo Maxwell calling. Teddy is my brother. I’m over here at the office trying to get his affairs in order. You see, I’ll probably be taking over his practice, at least until he’s well enough to return to work.” It was the first time I’d spoken the idea out loud. “I hope you don’t mind me just picking up the phone.”

“I suppose whether I mind or not will depend on the reason for your call, now, won’t it?”

It threw me that she didn’t offer even perfunctory condolences. She might have been talking to a plumbing contractor about some shoddy tile work that was going to have to be ripped out and done over—at the plumber’s expense, of course.

“What reason could I give that wouldn’t be offensive to you? Maybe we should start there.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Maxwell. I’m afraid I don’t have time to play twenty questions.”

“Fair enough. I’d like to have a few words with you about your son. This evening, if possible. I can make it brief. If you’d rather not talk to me, I’ll have to go to the police.”

“It isn’t possible. We’re having guests for drinks before the opera.”

“Bad timing for both of us. I was planning to go to the opera this evening myself,” I lied. “We could speak at intermission. I’ll buy you a glass of champagne, and we’ll drink a toast to your boy Keith and all his accomplishments. I’ve heard great things about their new Faust. The soprano is supposed to be marvelous. Don’t worry, you won’t have to look for me. I’ll find you.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

I took satisfaction in having cracked her composure. It had not proved nearly as difficult as I’d guessed. The desperate edge in her voice made her seem human. I liked her a little better for it.

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes, then. I hope you’ll be able to fit me into your schedule.”

I hung up the phone without waiting to hear her response. I remained sitting at the desk for a moment, nodding to myself. That was how it was done, I thought. That was how to handle a situation where you couldn’t take no for an answer.

Then I realized how stupid I’d been to say thirty minutes. It might take me that long just to find a cab.