Chapter 18

Monday morning found me once again standing in the doorway of Teddy’s hospital room. It was early, too early even for Jeanie. I’d passed a restless night. I’d kept dreaming that he was dying and I couldn’t get to him. I ran up and down stairways and halls in a building more sprawling and labyrinthine than any hospital in existence—but always I found the last door locked. Meanwhile the alarms sounded code blue, code blue.

The arrival on rounds of Dr. Gottlieb and his four residents prodded me into the room, if only because I knew they’d quickly kick me out. Teddy had gotten a shave but otherwise looked no different, maybe slightly gaunter, like something that had wilted in the refrigerator.

I went down the hall to wait in the lounge. I kept expecting Jeanie to show up, but she hadn’t arrived by the time Dr. Gottlieb came down the hall to talk to me.

“I was hoping I might catch you this morning,” he said, sitting down by me. “How’s the legal profession?”

I was dressed for court. “It won’t ever be the same without my brother.” I steeled myself. “Where are we at with what we discussed?”

“In regards to that conversation I told you we might have? Nothing’s changed. Your brother’s condition hasn’t improved; but at the same time, it hasn’t gotten noticeably worse. Of course, lack of improvement is itself a concern. At this point we can only wait and hope. Every day that passes without improvement, however, makes the prognosis slightly worse.”

“I can’t stand having him like this,” I heard myself say. “I can’t stand it. I know he’d hate it. I don’t want this—this suffering—to go on a second longer than it has to.” It was not what I’d meant to say, but I’d said what I meant.

“Whose suffering—yours or his?”

“What kind of life is he going to have?”

“You can see for yourself. I’ve arranged for both you and Ms. Napolitano to tour the rehabilitation facility.” Gottlieb’s face showed the barest tick of impatience.

“I’m not interested in the rehabilitation facility.”

“That’s your choice.” He stood. “To answer your question, yes, at the point where I deem that it has become medically futile for this stasis to go on, I will inform you.” His voice was suddenly very, very weary. He seemed on the verge of giving me a bit of fatherly advice, then apparently thought better of it, pressed my arm, and walked out.

I went back to Teddy’s room and stood looking out the window toward the sliver of the bay that was visible. My father must be on his way to the city by now, I realized. It made me slightly queasy to think of him on this side of the water, still in custody but perhaps one step closer to freedom. Soon he’d be on the witness stand, taking an oath he probably didn’t mean to keep. What would I do if he lied his way to freedom before the grand jury? Would I have to see him?

I sat at Teddy’s bedside deep in my own thoughts. At some point he must have stopped respecting the oath my father was about to take. Defending the guilty must have drained away his respect for the truth. Gerald Locke’s words returned to me, and I wondered what I might do to keep my father in prison—to catch the person who shot my brother.

~ ~ ~

On my way out an hour later I ran into Car, who was walking in with Jeanie. Seeing me, Car grabbed my arm and spun me around, throwing me off balance. “Ho, Monkey Boy.”

I kept going, but he was there beside me, matching my stride. I glanced back. Jeanie was standing uncertainly near the elevators. “­Teddy’s upstairs,” I said to Car. “He was asking about you.”

“Yeah?” Car’s face was perfectly blank.

“You and Keith Locke. I caught both names.”

“You talking to Keith? Say hi to him for me.”

“Why, you looking for him?”

We were outside on the broad front entrance plaza of the hospital. “See, I told your brother at the beginning, this kid’s no good, he has no common sense, let him wet his dick with some other lawyer.” Car gave me a push. “I hear you’ve been saying I murdered people.”

“That girl, Martha.” My voice came out hoarse. “She worked at the Green Light.”

“Not for me, she didn’t. Nobody worked for nobody at that place, but definitely not for me.”

“Maybe not anymore. She was shot yesterday with Teddy’s gun. The one you locked in the safe. The police may not believe me, but as far as I’m concerned, you were the only one who could have pulled the trigger.”

Car looked bored. “Sorry to hear it. I suppose I shot Teddy, too. If I did that, you’d have a bullet between the eyes. But hey, you’re still breathing. Know why? Because it’s all a joke. You’re a joke.”

“I know what you and Keith were into. With Santorez’s money, no less. What’s going to happen when someone tells Santorez the whole story?”

“I told you, I didn’t have nothing to do with the Green Light or with Keith, either. See, Monkey Boy, your trouble is you don’t know smoke from fire. What happened to Teddy didn’t have nothing to do with Keith or anyone else. It was Santorez all the way. Teddy tried to hang on to some money he didn’t earn. He probably figured Santorez was in the pen, what could he do about it? Ricky reasoned with him for a while, then he saw he wasn’t going to get his money back, so he had Teddy shot, sent a big loud message.”

“You were Keith’s partner, and Keith was going to talk,” I countered. “Teddy was just about to set the deal up for him. Then Teddy got shot, Ricky got blamed, Keith got the message to keep his mouth shut and do whatever prison time comes his way, and you walked off into the sunset. You and Jeanie.”

I saw the look in his eyes and was suddenly aware of my surroundings, no one around, no pedestrians passing, not even a cat to track through my blood if Car spilled it. His narrow Slavic face grew pale, bringing out the redness of his lips. His muscles knit together beneath his hoodie. Then his eyes narrowed in a catlike smile, and without any visible relaxation the tension was gone. “You ought to forget the law. There’s no money in it. Screenplays, that’s where the money is. An imagination like yours, you could make bank. Safer too, way things are going.”

“I’m trying to find my brother’s shooter.”

“Yeah, but you’re trying too hard.” He took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. “Be seeing you, Monkey Boy. Don’t forget to say hi to Keith.”

I didn’t drop my eyes to see what he’d given me until after he’d walked back toward the hospital. Then I unfolded the sheet of paper and saw that it was a printout showing a series of photographs, grainy from the quality of the printer, a night scene with the camera looking in the open front passenger door of a car. Car had a fancy digital camera, I knew. It took me a moment to recognize Christine Locke as the woman in the foreground; then a shock ran through me. It was Teddy’s Rabbit in the photo, and the man kissing Christine was me.

Clearly a threat or a warning—if there was even a difference with a man like Car. Or perhaps he hadn’t been following me. Perhaps he had a reason for following her. That could only mean that he knew something about Christine’s relationship with Teddy.

Something was printed on the back of the page, just a line at the top, easy to miss if you were in a hurry—an empty page with a footer, “page 4 of 4,” like the extra page you get when you print something. It hadn’t been printed at the same time as the pictures. Instead, someone had fed the sheet into the printer upside down so that the blank backside could be used. Jeanie’s habit of reusing paper used to drive Teddy nuts. More than once, I knew, he’d filed a brief with some e-mail or map fragment appearing between the pages.

I’d meant to drive back to Teddy’s office, but instead I merged onto the interstate toward the Bay Bridge, following a wild hunch that I would find something more at Jeanie’s to help me catch the trail Car seemed to think he was following.

Jeanie kept a key under a flowerpot at her townhouse. Twenty-six minutes later I used it to let myself in.

The blanket I’d wrapped myself in two nights ago still lay in a heap at the foot of the couch. Two glasses stood on the counter, and there was a faint reek of smoke. Half a dozen filterless cigarettes were stubbed out on a plate on the counter. I stood looking down at the saliva-stained, half-folded butts. Jeanie didn’t smoke. Car did.

I took a tour of the place and saw more cigarettes stubbed out in a cup on the bedside table. It shouldn’t have bothered me that Car had been there, but it did.

I started opening drawers in her home office—an alcove off the kitchen beneath the stairs—but they were crammed to overflowing with old checkbooks and bills. I was stymied, but then I remembered how paranoid Jeanie used to be about hiding her drugs—not paranoid enough, as it turned out, because eventually I’d found all her hiding places. She prerolled all her joints, and I would take them apart and reroll them smaller, skimming off her stash.

Her most effective hiding place was so obvious it was brilliant. In the apartment where we had lived during my teens, where I knew every nook and cranny, every loose floorboard and grate, there hadn’t been many places a person could conceal the tin in which Jeanie kept the drugs she and Teddy shared, marijuana and hash and occasionally something stronger. It stared me in the face every day, but I didn’t have eyes to see it. I never took out the garbage, pig that I was, so I’d never thought to wonder whether there might be anything underneath the bag.

The wastebasket underneath the desk was nearly empty and too light to contain anything substantial. I tried the kitchen garbage: nothing under the bag, but in groping the outside of it I felt something hard edged and heavy inside. I got a pair of tongs from the drawer and fished around among the coffee grounds and melon rinds until I came up with a small digital video camera and disks sealed in a double layer of freezer bags.

Twenty thousand dollars in my hands, if Christine Locke was as good as her word. Not that I planned to sell them. Tucking the bag with the camera and disks under my arm, I murmured a silent apology to Jeanie and put to rights the few items I’d disturbed.

~ ~ ~

I was back on the freeway to San Francisco ten minutes later when my phone rang in my pocket.

“Verdict,” Judge Iris’s clerk said simply, and I could hear by her voice which way the clerk thought it would go. “They’re bringing your client up. Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”

It was going to be more like thirty, but I told her I’d make it as soon as I could.

I drove fast, but not too fast, trying to think what I’d say to Ellis if the verdict was guilty. By the toll plaza of the Bay Bridge the words still hadn’t come. Sorry just wasn’t enough when the man you were apologizing to would likely be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Maybe he was guilty, and maybe he wasn’t, but that wasn’t the point.

Sorry was going to be the best I could do.

I parked in the underground lot, then walked up the stairs to Civic Center Plaza and across the street to the courthouse. The clerk was stamping documents and threading them into a gigantic civil docket. Seeing me come in, the deputy yawned and put aside his Contra Costa Times. It was all the same to them, whatever happened to Ellis. It was just another day, another case, another set of administrative tasks. “You want me to bring him out right now or wait for the DA?” the deputy asked.

“Now, please.”

I ought to take Car’s advice, I thought as I waited, and forget about a career in the law. Imagine a lifetime of this feeling, I thought, swallowing back the acid that kept rising to my throat, hunching my shoulders at the tickle of sweat in the small of my back.

The door at the back of the courtroom swung open, and the deputy followed Ellis, who looked both sleepy and hyperalert, his gaze darting around the courtroom but seeming to pass right through me, as if I were no longer entirely present for him. Indeed, there was nothing left for me to do but plead with Judge Iris for a lenient sentence if the verdict went against us.

“What do you think my chances are?” he asked, moistening his lips.

I shrugged. “Just have to wait and see.”

“Pretty good, I’m thinking. They don’t reach a verdict Friday. That means the ones on my side are standing firm. They go home over the weekend, spend a few days thinking it over, verdict right away Monday morning. You don’t hold out over the weekend to give in Monday morning, do you? No way. They came back today holding firm. The others, the guilty votes, they’re the ones who caved. It’s better to vote not guilty than to risk convicting an innocent man. That’s what they said to each other, I’ll bet. Your words. I’m optimistic.”

His voice trailed away. He wet his lips again. He didn’t look optimistic. He looked like he had a lifetime of dread and fear clamped onto the back of his neck.

“Whatever the verdict is, don’t react.” It was what Teddy always told his clients. “If it’s bad news, be stoic.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“The judge is the one who sentences you if you’re guilty. She’s going to be watching you when the verdict is read. If you get angry, if you act sorry for yourself, she’s going to notice, and she’ll remember.” I wondered if I was going to be able to live up to my own advice.

Melanie came in tight faced and nervous. Her skirt was so tight, a seam creaked when she sat down at the DA’s table. She opened a binder and began to scrawl notes on a pad.

She must be in trial on another case already, and I felt a stab of envy, knowing that the only antidote to losing a case is to lose yourself in the next one. I envied the lawyer who was going up against her in whatever trial she was prosecuting next. A few hard-fought cases against an opponent like her would make me into a lawyer.

Judge Iris walked brusquely into the courtroom. “Sit down, sit down,” she said. “Anyone have a record to make before we get started?”

She was looking at me. After a moment I realized that Melanie was, too.

Judge Iris went on more gently: “If you want to ask for a mistrial, now is your last chance.”

The judge went on looking at me steadily, and I realized that she’d grant the mistrial if I asked for it. I couldn’t look at Ellis, but I was very aware of him breathing beside me with deep, almost unbearably slow breaths. I noticed a Bible on the table. His hands rested close to it, just his fingers touching the red-stained edges of the pages, the soft leather binding.

“We’ll hear the verdict, Your Honor,” I said.

“Let’s bring in the jury, then.” She nodded to the bailiff. He went out and a moment later came back in with his face transformed, as if he’d been dipped in a vat of solemnity. He held open the door for the jurors as they filed past him, one fumbling with his jacket, another scratching her neck, the lot of them generally looking about as uncomfortable as it is possible for a group of people to be who are not facing prison time themselves.

I could make no sense of where their eyes went and where they didn’t. Each of the jurors avoided looking at Ellis: a bad sign. None looked at Melanie, either. Two of them met my gaze with flashes of curiosity before their eyes flitted away, as if repelled by the naked entreaty they found there. There was something splendid in their isolation. For these few minutes they knew what no one else knew.

The judge waited until the jurors had filed into the box and taken their seats; then she addressed them. In her voice I heard a respectful withdrawal, as if even she partook of the awe that gripped me. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

“We have, Your Honor,” said a woman from the back row, a software engineer Teddy had identified immediately as the foreperson and whose signature had appeared on each of the jury’s notes.

“The bailiff will now retrieve the verdict form.”

He crossed the courtroom, the solemnity beginning to wear off him now but still clinging in patches. He reached across the front row of jurors, took the verdict form, glanced at it, then delivered it to the clerk, who stood from her computer, scanned the form, and read aloud: “As to count one, we the jury find the defendant, Ellis Bradley, not guilty.”

I was tingling all over, and I heard a rushing sound in my ears.

“As to count two, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.”

Ellis was on his feet, waving the Bible and shouting “Praise Jesus.”

The judge sat looking at him with a grim little smile. “The Lord came down into this courtroom,” Ellis said. “The Lord was back there with you in that jury room.” As if only now remembering that I was there he turned to me and pumped my hand, pulling me half out of my chair. He smelled strongly of sweat with the release of his fear. I’m sure I was worse.

“The Lord Jesus came down into this courtroom today,” he said, faltering a bit, still grinning, half standing over his chair, smiling blindly at the judge, the jury, the prosecutor. “Yes he did.”

He sat down and slapped my shoulder with excess force, as if he were drunk. The clerk laid aside the verdict form, sat back down at her desk, and reached for her mouse. Just another day, another verdict, another docket to update.

“You have now completed your jury service in this case,” Judge Iris read from the official jury instructions. “On behalf of all the judges of the court, please accept my thanks for your time and effort.”

As she dismissed the jury, I basked in the feeling of having won. It was better than sex, booze, anything. I wondered if it was like this every time, if there had still been sweetness in it for Teddy after he stopped expecting to lose. I felt like a brilliant lawyer; I felt newborn. My misgivings drained away like water after a storm. I would do anything to have this feeling, I thought in the rush of the moment. Anything.

It was one of those few moments in a life when one door closes behind you and another opens ahead, and you step forward to take your first definite possession of the life that will be yours. After the Ellis Bradley verdict, for better or worse, there was no going back.

It wasn’t until we’d parted, Ellis a free man, me wandering down the windowed hallway toward the stairwell, that I remembered it was Teddy who had tried the case, Teddy who’d put on the probably perjurious testimony that had gotten Ellis off.