Bear Is Broken Read Online Free PDF Page A

receipt.
Even on sale the suit had cost seven hundred dollars.
    “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