The last time Michael Seeley saw his brother it was in a hotel kitchen in San Francisco and Leonard was arguing with the hotel's catering manager over the bill for his wedding reception. Workers were cleaning up and the pulsing bass from the dance band in the next room echoed over the clatter of silverware. Seeley had to catch the red-eye back to New York City, but the caterer was implacable and Leonard wouldn't let up, even when Seeley signaled that he was going to leave. Only after Seeley started out the door did Leonard stop, flinging his arms open to pull him into an awkward embrace.
“Let's stop being strangers, Mike.” Leonard's breath tickled his ear.
Seeley broke away without answering. He loved his younger brother in the sense that he cared about his well-being, but he neither liked nor trusted him.
In the nine years since the wedding Leonard had called three or four times and sent his annual Christmas card. There was a printed announcement when he moved his medical practice from Palo Alto to San Francisco, and another last year when he took a job as chief medical officer at a biotech company in South San Francisco.
The announcement, mailed to Seeley in Manhattan, caught up with him in Buffalo, where he had moved his law practice. His first job out of law school had been in Buffalo. However, this time he was practicing not in the city's largest firm but by himself, and not in a steel-and-glass office tower but in a small office in the Ellicott Square Building, an ancient pile of bricks in the center of the city's half-deserted downtown.
Seeley's feet were up on a corner of his desk. Behind him, the single window looked out onto Swan Street, four stories below. His large shoulders hunched forward as if he was trying to warm himself against the chill scene outside. Rudy, the building's boiler man, was maneuvering a giant wrench beneath the decrepit steam radiator by the door and offering his views on whether the radiator was the oldest in western New York or in the Western world when a movement of yellow and gold flashed by the open door.
Seconds later, Seeley's part-time receptionist leaned into the office. “Someone to see you.” There was an unfamiliar thrill in Mrs. Rosziak's voice, as if the visitor were a celebrity, or at least a client more prosperous than the ones who usually came to the office. “ From California. ” She underlined the words. “Your brother.”
It was Leonard's sandy hair and the lemon V-neck under a brass-buttoned blazer that created the impression of yellow and gold. The wariness in Leonard's eyes when he came into the room didn't match the broad smile and outstretched arms. His arms dropped when he saw Seeley's frown. Leonard transferred a thick manila envelope to his left hand and reached the other across the desk. Seeley's single thought as he took his brother's hand was how quickly he could get him out of the office. He had already planned his day: reviewing client files, preparing for two court appearances in the early afternoon, visiting a jailed client who had been unable to make bail.
Rudy packed his toolbox and, going through the door, saluted Seeley with a promise that the radiator would be fine for at least another century. Seeley gestured for Leonard to take the client's chair across from him.
“It's nice to see you, Len, but I'm busy, and if you flew out here to pitch your case, you wasted your time.”
“I left a message with your girl that I was coming.”
The thought of Mrs. Rosziak being called a girl amused Seeley, but not enough to make him smile. “She told me.”
Leonard had been leaving messages with Mrs. Rosziak for a week. His company, Vaxtek, had filed a lawsuit against St. Gall, the giant Swiss drug producer, for infringing the patent on Vaxtek's entry in the race for an AIDS vaccine. With the trial three weeks away, Vaxtek's lead lawyer suddenly died. Seeley understood that the company's future depended on winning the lawsuit, but he also knew that any one of hundreds of lawyers could try the case. Leonard was looking for something more.
“Why didn't you call back?”
“I didn't want to encourage you.”
“Always looking out for your little brother.” Leonard smiled around the words. “Still the college quarterback. A little thinner, maybe, but still a full head of hair.” He patted the top of his own head where, Seeley guessed, the hair had been carefully barbered to hide a bald spot. The color, though Leonard's as a boy, now surely came from a bottle.
Leonard's eyes moved around the office, taking in the metal bookshelf stuffed with a worn, black-bound set of McKinney's New York Code, the half-dozen vintage prints of the Buffalo harbor that leaned against the bottom shelf waiting to be hung, two ancient file cabinets, and the window with its gray outlook.
Leonard was perspiring. Was he wearing a great deal of gold, or did it just seem that way? It struck Seeley that the charm on which Leonard survived as a boy had lost some of its polish.
“This is your kind of case, Mike. Little guy takes on big guy. David against Goliath. You get to be David's lawyer.” “
Your little guy is a publicly held corporation. I don't represent corporations anymore. I sue them.”
Leonard said, “In a single day, St. Gall makes more off its cure for erectile dysfunction than we make on all of our products in a year. They're a thousand times our size. In broad daylight they steal our biggest patent, and do you know what they say? I'm at a conference in Miami, giving a presentation, and when I finish, St. Gall's vice president for research-an MD, the guy with the same job as me-comes up and says, ‘We're going to crush you. ’That's it. He doesn't say hello, or I slept through your speech, or your patent's no good. Just, ‘We're going to crush you. ’Then he walks away.”
Across the room, the radiator banged as if it had been struck by a hammer. The hiss of steam that followed had a rusty, boiled smell.
“You could take them down, Mike. I followed every one of your cases when you were in New York.” He patted the hidden bald spot again. “You didn't know I did that, did you? I took subscriptions to a couple of legal newspapers just so I could keep track.”
That wasn't the kind of thing Leonard would do.
“I clipped out the stories and gave them to Mom.”
“That's the past, Len. I don't do that kind of case anymore.” His brother's persistence was making Seeley repeat himself, and he resented it.
“I went out on a limb for you. I had to sell you to our general counsel, and then the two of us sold you to our chairman. He's counting on you.”
“Then he's going to be disappointed.”
“I thought that if I could make you understand how important this is to me, you'd take it.”
Leonard removed a handkerchief from an inside pocket of his jacket and wiped his forehead. When he unbuttoned the jacket, Seeley saw that he had put on weight since the wedding nine years ago. Seeley felt a moment's sadness for Leonard and for his brother's dream of repairing a family that was broken from the start.
Seeley said, “I never saw you as a corporate type. I pictured you in a white coat, healing the sick.”
“Or telling them they're going to die. I spent four years doing that. Half my patients in San Francisco were HIV positive. The other half already had AIDS. It's why I took the job at Vaxtek. What we have is as close as anyone's come to a real AIDS vaccine. Do you know how many lives this is going to save when we get our FDA approval? Here. Africa. Around the world. How many lawyers get the chance to defend a patent like this?”
“How did he die?” If he changed the subject, Seeley thought, Leonard might give up and leave. “The lawyer who was trying the case.”
“Bob Pearsall was a fine lawyer. He was in your league, Mike. He orchestrated the case like Beethoven. A family man, too. Everyone loved him.”
What Seeley heard was, a beloved family man, unlike Michael Seeley.
Leonard waited, and when Seeley didn't speak, said, “He threw himself in front of a train.”
“How do you know that?”
“How else does a fifty-eight-year-old man end up dead on the railroad tracks?”
“Do you know why?”
“Who knows? His health was perfect-I know his doctor. He was an outdoors nut. Camping. Bird-watching.”
“What do the police say?”
“What I said. Suicide. One of life's mysteries. Who knows what's beneath the surface?”
When Leonard read in the legal newspapers about Michael Seeley's courtroom triumphs, could he have imagined the dark corners that his older brother was navigating on his own precipitous slide? Trying big cases back to back, winning trials that he had no right to win, all the time retreating deeper into shadows that were visible only to him. It was no mystery to Seeley that despair could so engulf someone riding the crest of his career that he would decide to end his life.
“What time of day did it happen?”
“Early in the morning. Before dawn. Why would it matter?”
Seeley said, “I was wondering if anyone saw him do it.” He could almost hear the wheels turn as Leonard calculated whether the lawyer's death might be the hook that would bring his brother to San Francisco. “Where did it happen?”
“A half hour south of San Francisco. He lived in the city. There weren't any witnesses.”
“Why would he go that far from home? Was it close to a station?”
“Somewhere between stations, I think. Would it make any difference for you taking the case?”
“I was just wondering why someone would go so far out of his way to take his own life.”
“Like I said, who knows what he was thinking? Look at the photographs in the obituaries. Half the time, a guy kills himself and in the picture he's got a big smile on his face.”
“In Pearsall's photograph-was he smiling?”
“Like he was having the time of his life.”
Leonard leaned forward and with his index finger pushed the thick manila envelope on the desk toward Seeley. “What can I say to get you to come to San Francisco?”
Two questions fought in Seeley's mind, one asking why he would let himself slip into his brother's plans for him, the other, why he wouldn't. When Leonard first called, Seeley turned him down at once, making the decision even before his brother could describe the lawsuit. After that, from the messages Mrs. Rosziak passed on to him, Seeley knew that, although the case was big, it could be tried in less than a month. For that short a time he could easily arrange continuances for his few cases in Buffalo. Wasn't this why he left his large corporate firm in New York City-not just to pick his clients and have no partners to answer to, but to be free to take cases of moral consequence. How many of his current cases came close to the heft of this one? Vaxtek was hardly the helpless victim that Leonard painted, but the multinational St. Gall was a war machine, and if Leonard was telling the truth his company's survival depended on this patent.
Seeley said, “I'm not admitted to practice in California.” If Leonard was in fact following his career, he knew that his brother regularly tried cases outside New York State. A simple motion to the court, granted virtually as a matter of course, was all that it would take for him to appear.
“You've done it before-practiced in other states.”
Seeley said, “Why are you smiling?”
“Because you're-”
“I didn't say I'd take the case.”
Leonard lifted his hands, placating. “I was just going to say I'm glad you'll consider it. That's all I'm asking for. Willingness.” He pressed his palms against his lap and rose. “Let me take you to lunch. Give me a chance to find your weak spot.”
Leonard's confidence annoyed Seeley. “I have to be in court at two.”
“My flight's at three-thirty. Is the Hatch still open?”
“The places on the lake close down after Labor Day.”
“Let's go and look. It's worth a try.”
The Hatch was little more than a lunch counter on a built-up part of the Lake Erie shore, locally famous for its grilled bologna sandwich-a massive slab of meat tucked into a hard roll along with a pile of grilled onions and a slathering of bright yellow mustard. Seeley remembered childhood outings when Leonard would inhale the sandwich as greedily as if it were a communion wafer.
Seeley again thought about motives-Leonard's in pursuing him, his in resisting-as he lifted the camel-hair coat from the stand by the anteroom door and handed it to his brother. He took a maroon scarf from the other hook and threw it around his neck. At her desk, the surface filled with a collection of creams and lotions, Mrs. Rosziak beamed. The office's exterior walls were the original lath and plaster, but the partition that divided Seeley's office from the receptionist's anteroom was thin wallboard, and from the officious bustle of papers Seeley knew that she had eavesdropped on the conversation. As soon as the door closed behind him, she would be on the phone to the airlines, checking on flights to San Francisco.
The sky had been a muddy gray since the beginning of October, and Buffalo wouldn't see the sun again for months. Over the past week, an errant snowflake or two would materialize out of the crisp air and as quickly disappear. Any day could bring the first snowfall. But more than the snow and bitter cold, it was the prospect of this unrelenting, joyless sky that defined the season for Seeley.
The cold slowed Leonard's chatter as they walked, and he seemed almost contemplative. The three or four blocks that radiated south and west from the Ellicott Square Building resembled a bustling downtown, but once the brothers passed the city's police headquarters, a squarish afterthought of dirty yellow brick, the office buildings gave way to a grim patchwork of low anonymous structures, weed-choked lots behind chain-link fences, and here and there a darkened church. The bundled-up pedestrians disappeared, and closer to the thruway overpass the downtown traffic dwindled to the occasional car cruising Erie Street, hip-hop blasting from behind rolled-up windows. In the shadow of the overpass, the temperature suddenly dropped ten degrees. Thruway traffic drummed the vaulting concrete.
Leonard huddled into his topcoat. “One thing I'll take to the grave with me is the bleakness of this place. I can be at the beach in the middle of July, but if I think about Buffalo, I feel the cold in my bones.”
Seeley said, “Austerity has its virtues.”
“And that's why you left New York? Not enough austerity? This city is falling apart, Mike. It's no place to live.”
“You know as much about Buffalo as the tourists on their way to Niagara Falls.” Apart from a terrifying childhood, he and Leonard had little in common. As a boy, Seeley was the explorer, taking his bicycle to every corner of the city while, other than on the occasional family outing, Leonard rarely strayed outside their dark immigrant neighborhood on Buffalo's far east side. “What California architect can match Louis Sullivan? H. H. Richardson? Daniel Burnham? Your idea of a boulevard is a street lined with strip malls.”
Leonard said, “I'm surprised you came back. You're not the kind of person who comes back.”
Even when you left home, Seeley finished his brother's thought. When Leonard Seeley Sr., the drunkard who was their father, stormed through the house in his underwear, railing at the boys and their mother, waving a loaded revolver and firing live rounds into the ceiling, it was Seeley who hurried his brother behind the living-room sofa or under the bed and faced his father alone. By the time Seeley was fifteen, and almost as heavy-framed and strong as he was today at forty-seven, it was inevitable that the confrontations would one day turn more violent. He couldn't explain this to Leonard at the time-he barely understood it himself-and for his twelve-year-old brother, Seeley's leaving must have seemed nothing less than a callous abandonment.
Leonard said, “And this is the law practice you dreamed about? Nickel-and-dime cases. A receptionist in a housedress. No offense, Mike, but your office is a dump.”
Seeley said, “It's a work in progress.” He had left New York and the big-stakes corporate cases that fueled the life of his law firm at the bottom of a long alcoholic slide that undid not only his practice but his marriage. The rent in the Ellicott Square Building was reasonable and Mrs. Rosziak worked for little. But the paying clients were few and, with the recent county budget cuts, court appointments, even for felony cases, barely paid for the paperwork. The irony was that it had been easier for Seeley to attract $100 million intellectual property cases in New York City than it was to get a client to sign up for a no-money civil rights case in Buffalo. More than once it occurred to him that the rivers of alcohol which had brought him to the bottom had also flattened his acuity the way water smooths a stone.
A single snowflake, as thin as a wisp of smoke, landed on Leonard's collar and, in the same instant that Seeley felt the impulse to brush it off, dissolved.
“You're in cold storage, Mike.”
“It's a transition.”
“Purgatory's a transition. This is a rut. No matter how good you are, you never hit better than the guy you're playing against.” Leonard's sport had been tennis, Seeley's football; Seeley drilled hard passes over center while Leonard's every return had a topspin on it. “Who do you go up against here? Government lawyers counting the days until they retire? Kids two years out of law school?”
Was this was why Leonard had come-to rescue him? As a boy, Seeley protected his younger brother, then abandoned him. Now it was Leonard's turn to be the hero.
“You're afraid you've lost your edge, aren't you? That you're not up to handling a big case.”
Leonard was here to save him, and to remind him that no one knows your fears better than a kid brother.
Two joggers in velour suits, mufflered against the cold, passed them on the asphalt path that traced the contours of the lake. The brothers continued past the Naval and Military Park where a guided missile cruiser, a destroyer, and a submarine as black as carbon clustered like tamed, implausible beasts. It had taken years for Seeley to observe the incongruity of it: none of these oceangoing vessels, now mothballed, would ever have seen action on Lake Erie.
Out on the lake, a few rubber-suited kids were hotdogging hydroplanes, oblivious to the cold, and a tugboat made its careful way through the small sailboats that flitted across the water. Farther out, a low unmoving barge could have been of a piece with the horizon, and on a deserted jetty was a Chinese-roofed pavilion, its former painted brilliance now a rusty gray. One of Seeley's aunts, or sometimes a neighbor family, would bring Leonard and him here for evening picnics as children, and the pavilion, its lively dance music audible on the shore, had embodied for Seeley all of the exotic possibilities of grown-up life. Years later, he learned that it was a weekend dance hall for workers from the Bethlehem Steel and Chevrolet plants in nearby Lackawanna.
Leonard was thinking about the past, too, because he said, “Was it really that bad for you?”
“I don't think about it much.”
“Mom does.” Leonard checked for a reaction, but Seeley's eyes were fixed on the horizon. Leonard's last Christmas card reported that their mother had moved to a retirement home in Palo Alto, not far from where Leonard and his wife lived in Atherton. Other than at Leonard's wedding, Seeley hadn't talked to her since he left home.
Leonard said, “She still feels sorry about your leaving.”
If that was true, his mother had changed. “Feel” and “sorry” had never been part of her vocabulary.
Finally, Seeley said, “Some wounds can't heal.”
“I'm a doctor, Mike. I like to think they can.”
An iron railing and a narrow strip filled with concrete picnic tables separated the Hatch from the lake. The squat cinder-block structure was locked and shuttered, closed for the season. The tables were empty, except for one at which three ancient, animated black women, dressed as if for church, were holding on to their hats against the gusts coming off the lake, shooing the gulls that swooped over the tall thermos and sandwiches from their picnic basket.
The brothers leaned on the railing, looking out at the water. Seeley knew he had no good reason to ask, but he did anyway. “When does your case go to trial?”
“October twenty-sixth. Two weeks from today.”
“You're kidding, right?” Except that, for all his smiles, Leonard rarely joked.
“The case is in shape to go to trial tomorrow. Our law firm has a whole team working on it. It's a purring engine, just waiting for you to shift it into drive.”
“Who's your firm?”
“Heilbrun, Hardy.”
Heilbrun, Hardy and Crockett had roots in post-gold rush San Francisco and was known for its strong litigation practice. Seeley said, “Pearsall must have had a second chair. Why can't he take over?”
Leonard didn't understand.
“A lieutenant. Another lawyer at the firm who helped him run the case.”
“There's a young partner, Chris Palmieri. I'm sure he's competent, but he doesn't have the experience to take the lead on a case this size. We need someone with your instincts. Your judgment.”
“San Francisco's a trial lawyer's town. There have to be two dozen lawyers there who could do the job.”
“You don't know our general counsel. There are only four lawyers in town Ed Barnum thinks are any good. Two of them are already booked, and another's a prima donna who won't work with a team that some other lawyer put together. The fourth one is representing St. Gall.”
Seeley turned his back to the lake. “I've handled big patent cases, but most of them were mechanical inventions. Railroad couplers. Dumpsters. Stents. I've done some electronics and chemicals, but vaccines are science.” By the time biotech suits were first reaching the courts, Seeley's law practice in New York had already collapsed.
“Do you think Bob Pearsall knew anything about immunology? You can learn the science the same way he did. We wouldn't want you if we weren't certain you could do it. We have an expert witness from UCSF who can fill you in on anything you can't figure out for yourself. If you want, I'll tutor you.”
A gull came in low past the railing, distracting Seeley. Ignoring the gloved, shooing hands of the three ladies, it snatched a crust from their table and continued on, out over the lake, all in a single sweep. A
warning stenciled on the railing read DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS. To himself, Seeley filled in the punch line: BECAUSE THEY CAN FEED THEMSELVES.
“When your lawyer, Pearsall, got hit by the train, Lenny-you didn't push him, did you?”
Seeley didn't know why he asked the question. Maybe it was Leonard's lecturing him about the poverty of his life in Buffalo, or maybe it was Leonard's having an answer for every excuse Seeley could give for not taking the case. Seeley knew the excuses were weak. Who was he angry at, Leonard or himself?
Leonard said, “You wouldn't even have to drop your practice here. The trial won't be more than three weeks. You don't seem particularly
… busy.”
“Why are you pushing so hard on this, Lenny?”
The look Leonard gave him could have been part of the landscape, it was that parched.
Seeley said, “This dream you have about the family. Let it go.”
Leonard looked at his watch. It was a relief to Seeley that his brother now wanted their meeting to be over as much as he did.
“I left the envelope in your office. A paralegal at Heilbrun, Hardy put it together. Everything you need is there-witness list, deposition summaries, Chris Palmieri's number. Ed Barnum's number is there so you can work out the details-your fee, whatever you want. My number, in case you've lost it.”
They walked to the short line of taxis on the corner where two sweeping marble slabs made up the city's Vietnam memorial.
“I didn't say I was going to take the case.”
Leonard reached over and touched the lapel of Seeley's jacket. “Do you still have some good suits you can wear to court?”
Seeley's suit was from Brooks Brothers, like all his others, and no different from what he'd worn for years. He said, “I can remember when you were happy to wear the clothes I grew out of.”
Leonard rested a hand on the open taxi door. “Another thing, Mike. When you get to San Francisco, it's Leonard. Not Len or Lenny. Leonard.”
Leonard Sr. would say the same to anyone who used the diminutive. With their father, though, it was a demand, not a request, and the sanction for disobeying was a vicious pummeling. Seeley wished his brother a safe trip home.
At the time it was built in 1896, a grand birthday cake of granite, brick, cast iron, and terra-cotta tile, the Ellicott Square Building was the largest building in the world. Daniel Burnham's masterpiece was located at the center of the city's downtown, not far from the Y where Seeley lived from time to time after moving out of his parents' house. As impressive as the building's ornately figured exterior was, it was the vast interior courtyard, rising to a glass-paneled dome ten stories above, that instantly captured the fifteen-year-old's imagination. The potted tropical greenery that filled every corner, the colorful storefronts opening onto the courtyard, couples at cafe tables, men rushing to significant business engagements-the space was a Turkish bazaar out of an adolescent's storybook. When Seeley left his New York firm to return to Buffalo, there was never a question about where he would set up his one-man practice.
The heavy fragrance of lavender greeted him in the anteroom. Mrs. Rosziak worked half days and Seeley hadn't expected to find her at her desk, massaging yet another lotion into her hands. She was long retired from a bookkeeping job at a car dealership in the suburbs, and her familiarity with the details of litigation papers and procedures suggested that the dealer had more than passing encounters with the legal process. She was bossy and her manner sometimes crowded Seeley, but she was smart and efficient and brought an order to the office that had escaped his own halfhearted efforts. Most important, she depended on him for nothing.
She nodded her head in the direction of the office, anticipating Seeley's question. “Whatever he did to the radiator, he didn't fix it. I was going to stick around until he's done.”
Seeley looked into the office. The radiator cover was off and tilted against the wall. Hanging from a corner was a blue jacket with “Rudy” woven in red script beneath the letters “ESB.” Work boots and white socks extended from behind the radiator.
“I thought he was finished.”
“It was making noise when you were in there with your brother.”
“What else did you hear?”
“I think you should take your brother's case.”
Seeley took the chair next to her desk. “Why would I want to do that?”
“How long can a trial take-two weeks? Three?”
She hadn't only listened in on the conversation, and she hadn't just taken Leonard's telephone messages. Mrs. Rosziak and Leonard had talked; they had conspired. Leonard was a natural seducer, someone who would know exactly how to pluck the strings of this practical woman's sympathies.
“AIDS, San Francisco. Suing a big company. You could use the publicity, taking on a case like this.”
“You know what the Chinese say, Mrs. Rosziak: The nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered.”
“I'm not talking about making a TV commercial. What can you lose if someone sticks a microphone in front of you? I bet your brother wouldn't run the other way.”
Seeley understood her frustration. But if his legal career wasn't headed in the direction of redemption, she would have to accept that.
“Harold and I are grateful for what you did for him.”
Mrs. Rosziak's cut-rate services were Seeley's reward for winning a modest settlement for her bachelor son who was beaten by three uniformed patrolmen in a downtown duplex where he had gone to meet a friend. A part-time housepainter with a rap sheet for getting into fights at the local 7-Eleven, Harold was white and overweight with a sour disposition, which meant there was nothing about him to win sympathy from the local press or political activists-or, Seeley feared, from a law-and-order jury. Seeley persuaded the city to settle the civil case when no one could explain how a handcuffed man managed to sustain a broken nose, six cracked teeth, and a gash across his forehead requiring twenty-four stitches without having his civil rights violated. The settlement was large enough to keep Harold in twelve-packs for years to come. Seeley also got the DA to drop the resisting charge.
“I'm sure all your clients are grateful to you for winning their cases. But if you started getting clients who could pay you what you're worth, would that violate your principles?”
As she spoke, Mrs. Rosziak smoothed more lotion onto her hands, one hand wringing the other. It occurred to Seeley how little he knew of women's habits.
“How many lawyers can say they're doing what they want to do?”
“Whatever dark cloud you have hanging over you, it's not going to go away by your hiding out here. Down at the cafeteria in the county building they say you're the mystery man. You lost a big case in California and someone died who shouldn't have.”
Buffalo, though a city of 300,000, was in many ways a small town.
“Tell your friends they watch too many crime shows.” He just wanted her to leave. “Thanks for sticking around,” Seeley said. “I'll keep an eye on Rudy.”
“You have a court date at two.” She started collecting the bottles from the desktop to drop into her oversized purse. “You know, to look at the two of you, you wouldn't think you were brothers.”
“Leonard takes after his mother.” Fair, soft Leonard, always the victim. And, Seeley thought, I take after my father. Large and coarseboned like him, but chased by my own demons.
“I wasn't just talking about your looks.”
“I wasn't either,” Seeley said.
“With the holidays coming, you want to be with your family.” That had been Leonard's unspoken plea: Come for Thanksgiving. Christmas.
“I'm sure that whatever happened between the two of you, he's forgiven you.” She was watching Seeley carefully to see if she had overstepped. When he didn't respond, she said, “Why else would he call? Why would he fly out here and beg you to take his case?”
To rescue me, Seeley remembered. Do the conditions of my life look so disastrous that I would need to be rescued? He put a laugh in his voice. “You should have been a trial lawyer.”
“And you're not going to find the answers hanging around here. You could use some sunshine. The one time Mr. Rosziak took me to San Francisco, everyone was smiling.”
Sure, Seeley thought, even when they throw themselves in front of commuter trains.
“Are you going to go?”
Seeley said, “You'll be the first to know.”
She gave him a resigned look and finished collecting her creams and lotions and keys from the desktop. Seeley had been married for eight years-and divorced for less than one-and he had been in relationships with women before and since, but the unfairness of the imbalance still galled him. As profound as his ignorance was of what they were thinking and of what drove them, women knew exactly where the buttons and levers were that could turn or twist him in any direction, giving him no choice but to resist. Not just Mrs. Rosziak; women.
He went into the office to get ready for court and to find out from Rudy what the spread was for the Bills game on Sunday.