The low brown dog strained toward Seeley's car, barking angrily, stopping only when the woman trying to give Seeley directions yanked sharply at its leash. The Stanford game had already started, but Seeley missed the first freeway exit for the university, and the next one took him onto a residential section of the campus. The large homes on deep, shaded lots belonged, he supposed, to a pampered faculty. While the woman quieted the dog, the attractive girl with her gave Seeley directions to the stadium. “After the dormitories,” she said, “just follow the noise.”
The girl's directions took Seeley past parking lots, playing fields, and low sandstone buildings under red tile roofs. Students in shorts and T-shirts tossed Frisbees or punched volleyballs. Tufted palm fronds were green against the cloudless sky.
Seeley grew up playing football in the northeast, and he couldn't dislodge from his visceral passion for the game the memory of freezing mud and raw numbed fingers. Still, when ahead of him a huge, throaty roar went up-a touchdown? a crucial pass completed? — his nerves quickened. He found a place at the edge of a dirt lot already crowded with cars, collected his field pass at a booth on the other side of the stadium, and had to restrain himself from running down the ramp to the game.
Men in chinos, white turtlenecks, and cardinal red windbreakers moved up and down the sidelines, black-shirted television crews maneuvering between them. Seeley showed his pass to a security guard and made his way to the yellow-bordered rectangle, twenty yards on each side of the fifty-yard line, reserved for the team. Looking surprisingly young and vulnerable in jerseys pumped up with protective gear, some players watched from the bench, others milled about, and a few huddled with coaches. Renata, trim in jeans and a white polo shirt, was talking with two men in Stanford windbreakers, but broke away when she saw him.
She touched a hand to Seeley's back by the way of greeting, and when he glanced at the scoreboard, said, “Don't get your hopes up. We're a heartbreaker.”
There was no score yet, but Seeley knew what she meant. In the end, in college football, strong teams beat smart ones. He said, “I only root for underdogs.”
“Leonard called last night. He said you're doing a great job on the case.”
Seeley imagined his brother worrying that he was going to tell Renata about their confrontation over Steinhardt's second set of books.
One of the men who had been talking to Renata approached, but before he could speak, she told him to go to the locker room to see if her X-rays were ready.
“Second play of the game,” she said to Seeley, “one of our wide receivers gets hit and cracks his femur.”
From his playing days, Seeley remembered the yellow-chalked rectangle as a world apart. Bodies constantly brush past as offense, defense, and special teams come on and off; from moment to moment there is the concussive, sledgehammer force of the game that no spectator in the stands can hear or feel. The hoots and calls from the crowd were a disembodied wall of noise, and a smell like ozone crackled all about. The giant scoreboard clock moved erratically toward triple zero, but inside the rectangle it was timeless. The immediacy of the next play sucked every atom out of the dense air.
Renata put a hand on Seeley's arm and nodded downfield. On the sideline was the lumpish figure of Joel Warshaw, football jammed under his arm, hands cupped around his mouth, shouting advice to the team.
“He's in the top tier of Buck Club donors,” Renata said. “That gets him a field pass whenever he wants. I've never seen him miss a home game.”
Seeley watched the entrepreneur. At every down, he moved with the play, running along the sidelines, screaming at the players, stopping only to talk with other men, dressed like him in chinos and Stanford sweatshirts and caps. Several times he passed by the chalked-in rectangle but didn't appear to notice Seeley or Renata.
Renata's other assistant rushed up with the suitcase-sized surgeon's kit and in the next moment was following her onto the field.
Seeley thought about the trial. No matter how many times he told himself that his examination of Steinhardt had violated no legal or ethical rules, he came up short. He should have caught the discrepancy in dates earlier and refused to let Steinhardt testify. It was no consolation that the American justice system left it to his adversary through cross-examination to root out untruth, nor was it a comfort that his remaining witnesses had been as honest and seamless in their testimony as the first three, and that St. Gall's attacks had left few bruises on his case.
Renata's assistant returned from the locker room with a legal-sized black envelope under his arm.
“The doc's amazing,” he said to Seeley. “How do you know her?”
“We're related,” Seeley said.
When Renata came off the field, she took the envelope the assistant gave her to a bench to study the film. Seeley looked away, and in the next moment a mass of bodies tumbled toward him like the onrush of a wave. Less than a yard from him, a healthy farm boy's face, pink except for the black smudge of grease high on each cheek, looked up at him from under the pile. The quarterback had taken some elbows going down and there was a glimmer of pain in the intelligent eyes, but what took Seeley back to his own college play was the humor he also saw there: What am I doing here, with all these big guys on top of me?
Renata came to Seeley's side.
“Hey, Doc,” the boy said.
The players peeled themselves off the boy and he managed a smile.
“You okay, Ron?”
“Never better.” He lifted himself into a crouch, steadied himself for a moment, then rose and limped off to the huddle that was forming.
Seeley said, “How's your receiver?”
“His season's over.” She slid the X-ray back into the envelope. “When Leonard said you were doing a great job in the trial, I figured something was wrong.”
She knew Leonard almost as well as he did.
“Nothing important,” Seeley said.
Washington scored a touchdown and the extra point, then it was halftime, and Renata went off to the locker room with the team.
Warshaw came to the edge of the rectangle and gestured to Seeley. The air had turned cool, but sweat streamed down his unlined face, and his voice when he spoke was several decibels louder than necessary, as if he was still exhorting the players. “What do you think of my team?”
“Which team is that?” Seeley knew that Warshaw wouldn't be listening for an answer.
“How's my trial going?”
“Your top scientist was ready to commit perjury.” Even after the near-disaster of Steinhardt's testimony, Seeley was confident he could win the case. He had promised victory to clients before, but he'd be damned if he would do so for Joel Warshaw.
Warshaw was looking out at the field, where the Stanford band was gathering for its halftime performance. “Do you know how many wins we had last year?” He held up a plump index finger with a dimple where a knuckle would be. “One.” With the other hand, he rolled the football along the side of his thigh. “But do you know what we did to USC last month? USC's the favorite by forty-one points, and what do these rocket scientists do-beat them 24–23!”
“Steinhardt just made this a harder case than it was before.”
For the first time, Warshaw looked directly at Seeley. Perspiration had created a damp V at the neck of his cardinal sweatshirt. “That's why I hired you. Your brother and Ed Barnum told me you specialize in hard cases. I want you to do anything you have to- anything — to win this case.”
“Is that what you tell your team?”
Warshaw looked away, his gaze taking in the stadium. “They've got fifty thousand people watching. They have to play fair. You don't.”
Seeley remembered his exchange with Warshaw outside the auction tent. Here was a man who thought that slicing an infant in half was a solution, not a threat.
“You know,” Warshaw said, tossing the football from one hand to the other, “if you lose, it's going to wipe out your brother.”
Before Seeley could ask what he meant, Warshaw was on his way down the sideline, throwing the football to another man in chinos and Stanford sweatshirt.
In the third quarter, Stanford scored its first touchdown, but Washington was making fewer on-field mistakes and, if Seeley's instincts were right, was gathering physical momentum just as Stanford was losing it. The sun was going down and Renata pulled on a wind-breaker. She'd gone onto the field two more times with her crew, and when she wasn't on the field, she was busy with one player or another or with the coaches. Seeley noticed that, unlike the first half, her jaw was tight and her hands balled into fists.
Early in the final quarter, Washington made another touchdown, and then Renata was on the field again, this time attending to the downed quarterback. His helmet was off and he had propped himself up on his elbows. Renata's hand was on his leg, her assistants and the trainer looking on. For a moment she turned from the youth to look across the field to the sidelines, and her gaze, when it found Seeley, was so filled with longing that he had to turn away. When he looked again, Renata had the quarterback's hands in hers and, like playmates on a seesaw, the armored giant rose as Renata, slight but determined, pulled back.
When she returned to the sidelines, Renata said, “Why do I get stuck on these guys? Leonard says I should stick with the winners.”
That was the kind of thought that Leonard would call a philosophy. Seeley said, “Winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
In the last minute, Washington scored another touchdown and won the game.
Renata said, “I could use a glass of wine.”
Renata was in the shower at the other end of the house. In the dining room, Seeley opened the bottle of Bordeaux that she had set out earlier with two glasses. When he went into the kitchen to fill a glass with water from the tap, a salver on the countertop was piled with crab legs cracked open to reveal pink-and-white meat.
Seeley asked himself what he was doing in his brother's house alone with his brother's wife. He dismissed the obvious reason-Lily was the only woman he wanted a relationship with right now-but could think of no others.
The sensual figures in Renata's painting gave out no more secrets about the artist than they did on Seeley's first visit. Logs and kindling waited in the fireplace, and striking a match against the rough brick-work, it occurred to Seeley that he was re-creating that last visit and, in doing so, invoking his brother's disquieting presence. He thought of how just the other day he could have clubbed Leonard in the corridor outside the courtroom.
Since he stopped drinking a year ago, Seeley had fallen into the habit of counting other people's drinks. No one, he concluded, drank as much as he did, and no one he'd met since coming to California drank the way Renata did. It occurred to him that this was why he had come home with her. Like probing an old but still-sensitive wound, he was revisiting the one great romance of his life, alcohol, to see if a spark of feeling remained. He had no desire to drink; he just missed the companionship of his old friend. Sometimes the notions that came into his head astonished Seeley. My mind, he thought, should have a warning label glued to it: for entertainment use only.
Renata came in, a glass of wine in her hand. She had put on a blouse, skirt, and heels, and either the wine or the shower had given her pale skin a gentle flush.
She glanced at the fire as she took the chair across from him. “There's a cracked crab in the kitchen if you're hungry.”
“I saw.”
She noticed the water in his glass. “No wine? We have beer, too. Gin, vodka.”
“I've already had more than my share.” He tilted the glass in a mock toast. “To Stanford's next win.”
“What was it like being a college football player? I bet the girls never left you alone.”
“Between part-time jobs and football and baseball practice, there wasn't much time for girls.” Seeley didn't like talking about that time in his life. “What about you?”
“My parents didn't approve of the crowd I hung out with in high school. I always seemed to wind up with the guys who were on suspension. So they sent me to a small Methodist school in Ohio. All the preachers sent their sons there.” She laughed. “My freshman year, Playboy rated it one of the top-ten party schools in the country.”
Renata talked more about her time in college, the flickering firelight softening the delicate planes of her face. After a while, when the silences grew longer, she drained her glass and crossed the room to refill it. When she returned, she took a place on the couch next to Seeley, crossing her legs beneath her. “When you came here for dinner the other night, did you have any idea how hard I was shaking?” She touched the back of his hand.
The touch saddened him; Seeley felt cheated, but of what, he couldn't say. A fantasy escaped from a corner of his memory that Renata's whispered message to him at her wedding was that she had chosen the wrong brother.
A log snapped in the fireplace and there was a hiss and the sharp fragrance of resin.
Seeley said, “I need to be going.”
“What are you afraid of?” Her voice trembled.
“This isn't right.”
“Because of Leonard?”
“Yes.” It was a lie, but there was nothing else he could say.
“So, now we know.” Her voice was bitter.
“What's that?”
“The question I asked you at dinner. You're someone who'd rather be admired than loved.”
“You're my brother's wife, Renata.”
“And I'm a flirt. You don't think I'd go through with it, do you?”
“I guess we'll never know.”
She lifted the wineglass from the table, put it to her lips, and emptied it. “You think I drink too much.”
“It's none of my business how much you drink.”
“You judge people.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Who gets to judge you?”
“Believe me, I'm hardest on myself.”
“Do you have any idea how important your approval is to Leonard?”
“Look, Renata, I have to go. I'm in the middle of trial.”
“From the day I met him, all Leonard could talk about was his big brother. “Mike did this' or ‘Mike did that.’ Mr. Perfect.”
No tears with this woman, Seeley observed, only fury burning in her too-clear eyes.
“Leonard could never live up to your standards. Now that I've seen what you're like, I don't think anyone can.”
Seeley rose to go.
“Do you want to know why he begged you to come out here?”
Seeley had the feeling that he hadn't even begun to penetrate the layers of Leonard's motives.
“So you could see how well he's done. What a success he's been.”
“Warshaw told me it's going to wipe you out if I lose the case.”
“He's right. Every dime we have is in Vaxtek. We sold everything, all our stocks and bonds. We took a second mortgage on the house.
Leonard said it was our one chance to make some real money, Silicon Valley money. He told Joel that Michael Seeley doesn't lose cases.”
“That doesn't sound like Leonard.”
“Then you don't know your brother.”
“The problem is, I do.”
“You are going to win, aren't you?”
Unlike Warshaw, she waited for reassurance from him that, yes, he would win the case.
“Good night, Renata.”
The railroad crossing where the 4:30 a.m. commuter train out of San Jose struck and killed Robert Pearsall was twenty minutes from Leonard's house, a drive that took Seeley through a neighborhood of small, neat homes, and then a succession of shabby strip malls, warehouses, and auto body shops. The run-down industrial area was as dark and deserted at 8:30 on a Saturday night as it doubtless was in the early morning that Pearsall died here. Other than parked pickups and panel trucks, the street was empty, and the only sound was the hum of distant freeway traffic.
Seeley left his car on the gravel-strewn hardpan next to the track, where the dense shrubs would hide it from the street, and walked to the railbed. It was, he knew, useless to think that by pacing the tracks he could somehow reconstruct Pearsall's thoughts in the last minutes of his life, or re-create the events and images of his death. But Seeley never defended a criminal case without first visiting the crime scene, and he would do no less for Pearsall.
Seeley did not accept that Pearsall took his own life, but neither did he believe that the lawyer's discovery of Steinhardt's fraudulent notebook entries was responsible for his death. As important as AV/AS was to Warshaw, no client kills his lawyer for uncovering a hole in his case. Seeley had only been taunting Leonard when he asked whether he pushed Pearsall in front of the train. Still, Leonard's gamble on Vaxtek stock surprised him. Leonard was someone who squirreled away nickels and dimes in a pickle jar. He didn't make financial wagers.
Without realizing it, Seeley had walked more than fifty yards along the track. When he looked out to the street through a gap in the rough screen of hedge, he noticed a dark sedan parked among the panel trucks and pickups that he was certain hadn't been there before. No one was visible in the sedan, and although the rattling sound nearby could have been a car engine cooling, it could also be dry leaves blowing across the street.
There was a rustling in the shrubbery across the tracks and, when Seeley turned, a hulking presence emerged from the foliage. Moonlight glinted off the silvery white bone of a modest rack of antlers, and the instant the buck saw him, it froze. The two of them remained absolutely still, studying each other. Ears twitching, depthless eyes alert, the buck heard the locomotive before Seeley did, and by the time the train was upon him, the only evidence of the buck's appearance was the receding white bun of a tail bounding between two dark warehouses.
The moon-size headlamp of the locomotive passed in an instant, followed by a racket of driven steel and the hellish reek of fire, oil, and pulverizing metal. The force of the rocketing cars was like an arm's blow across Seeley's chest.
As if crystallized from the blast of sweet night air that trailed the train's passage, a thought dropped into Seeley's head. The thought-it sent a shiver through him-was that the motive for Robert Pearsall's murder lay not in Warshaw's perspiring progress up and down a football field, measuring every yard of his team's advance and retreat, but in the entrepreneur's observation at a charity auction that the two bleeding warriors should split their bid. It was a spark of intuition, nothing more. But if it was true, then everything Seeley had accomplished in the trial so far was now irrevocably going to recoil back at him.
The juniper fragrance of gin blossomed on Seeley's tongue, and he craved a drink-gin, vodka, scotch, anything so long as it was alcohol. The dark sedan, when he went into the street to look for it, was gone.