Lieutenant Herbert Phan had the San Francisco Chronicle open on his lap in Heilbrun, Hardy's thirty-seventh-floor reception area and looked up only when Seeley approached. “We've been trying to find you all morning.”
Seeley glanced at his watch. It wasn't even eight thirty. He wondered, Why is it that I can have a level conversation with someone as deeply corrupt as Emil Thorpe, yet if a police detective makes a mild crack, I want to throttle him?
Phan took his time folding the paper before following Seeley up the open staircase, past Tina's empty desk, to Pearsall's office. Seeley took the chair behind the desk and the detective the one across from it, resting a notepad on his crossed knee. He had on the same zippered boots as the last time.
“Why don't you tell us what you know about the murder of Robert Pearsall.” The small smile didn't disturb the hairline mustache.
“You've decided it's murder.”
“First degree, probably-that's up to the district attorney. But definitely homicide.”
“Lucy Pearsall identified Dusollier? The Swiss.”
“We spoke with your Swiss colleague yesterday evening at his hotel.”
“Adversary,” Seeley said, “not colleague.” If Lucy made the identification, Phan was playing with him and Seeley didn't know why.
“The night of Pearsall's murder, Mr. Dusollier was in Calistoga, at the mud baths.”
“That doesn't mean he didn't arrange it.”
Phan opened the notepad, but didn't look at it. “How do you think Mr. Dusollier fits into this?”
Phan was trolling. Seeley said, “I'd only be speculating.”
“I like lawyers' hypotheticals. I had a year of law school. USF, here in the city.”
“No offense,” Seeley said, “but this is for the DA.”
“You obviously think St. Gall Laboratories arranged this murder. Why else would you send us after Mr. Dusollier?”
Seeley swiveled his chair to the view outside so that he faced the window. A single sailboat was making its way toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
“In our experience,” Phan said, “corporations don't kill off innocent lawyers.”
Seeley watched the sailboat's progress. “Corporations don't, but their employees do, particularly if they think their lives are about to fall apart.”
“And how was Mr. Dusollier's life about to fall apart?”
“Start higher up. Say you're St. Gall's general counsel, in Switzerland. You're making and spending more money than you ever dreamed possible. Expensive clothes for the second wife, private school for the new kids, cars, a servant or two, the small villa on the Cote d'Azur. You're fifty-five, sixty years old, you don't have a franc in savings and, because you haven't really practiced law for the past twenty years, there's no one who will hire you. You helped your CEO set up a collusive lawsuit in a major case and you've sworn to him that the deal is airtight. Then your opponent's lawyer threatens to wreck the deal. If he does, you know you'll lose your job. So you order someone lower down the ladder, the ambitious young lawyer who's directly responsible for the case, to eliminate the problem. Maybe you point him toward the company's head of security, who might know someone who could help.”
The only fl aw in Seeley's theory was that Leonard said Pearsall had helped to set up the collusion. Either Leonard was lying or, once having set the collusive lawsuit in motion, Pearsall changed his mind.
Seeley said, “People are fearful. The thought of losing something they value can drive them to acts that, a day earlier, they couldn't even imagine.”
“You can't believe-”
“Leaders of countries have started wars for less.”
“And you think the person at the bottom was Dusollier?” The detective sounded unimpressed.
“An order from the boss to a bureaucrat.”
“Not a bureaucrat,” Phan said, “a lawyer.”
“Law schools teach ethics, not morals.”
When Seeley turned back from the window, Phan's features had slipped into indifference, even boredom.
Phan said, “After the story appeared in the Chronicle, we started thinking in the same direction. Except, the way we see it, anything that applies to St. Gall also applies to you.”
Seeley said, “If you went to law school, you know I can't talk to you about my client.”
Phan's fine features narrowed; the bored expression disappeared. “We don't mean your client. We mean you.”
Seeley had never liked the police, their arrogance and unearned authority. But it was a long time since he made the mistake of underestimating their cunning or their power. “This is a wet dream you had, right?”
“We've been watching you since the first time you called us, misrepresenting yourself as Mrs. Pearsall's lawyer. What would that look like to a criminal jury-a complete stranger inserting himself into a murder case, just like that, for no good reason? Then there was that incident in Chinatown. You are brutally attacked, but you make no report to the police. When the desk man at your hotel asks, you tell him it was nothing.”
“Your men saw me being beaten and they didn't stop it?” Phan shrugged. “They said you handled yourself very ably.” He gave Seeley another of his miniature smiles. “And-don't ask me why-juries are always impressed when the accused returns to the scene of the crime.”
At first, Seeley didn't understand. Then he remembered the dark sedan parked by the train tracks in San Mateo. Phan's people had been there, too.
Through the glass panel next to the office door, Palmieri looked in and, when Seeley shook his head, pointed in the direction of his own office. Seeley nodded.
“And you think I'm involved in the murder of Robert Pearsall?”
“This is one of the questions we are looking into.”
“I never even met Pearsall. I was in Buffalo when he was killed.”
“But, as you said of Mr. Dusollier, that doesn't mean you weren't in some way responsible.”
Dozens of sailboats were on the bay now, a swarm of moths zigzagging toward the Golden Gate.
“And my motive would be, what? To take over his case?”
Phan frowned. “We're fully aware that your law practice in Buffalo barely pays the rent.”
“So I kill lawyers to drum up business.”
“Possibly. Maybe your life was, as you say, about to fall apart. But the motive we're looking into is that your brother is an employee of Vaxtek. Evidently his entire wealth is tied up in the company. He took a big bet that you would win the case for him.”
“And we didn't win.”
Phan yawned. “Maybe that's because you're not a very good lawyer.” He handed the newspaper across the desk to Seeley.
The story, on the front page beneath the fold, reported that Arnaud Baptiste, a sometime resident of Quebec City, with a record of criminal assaults across Quebec Province, had been arrested by the San Mateo police for the murder of San Francisco lawyer Robert Pearsall. The photograph next to the article was of one of those faces that look out from mug books in station houses around the world: cheeks drawn and sunken by missing teeth, eyes partly closed as if squinting into the sunlight or a police photographer's flash, lank hair falling across a too-narrow forehead.
Seeley was aware of Phan watching him as he read the story. “The first rung of the ladder,” he said.
Phan said, “Do you recognize him?”
“No.” Seeley remembered the fax that he'd asked Tina to send to Phan. “Did you show him Dusollier's picture?”
“He says he may know him. But he's not going to talk until he thinks we're ready to make a deal.”
“Did Lucy recognize Dusollier as the man who was talking to her father?”
“Last night,” Phan said. “We had to wait until the doorman came on at six this morning, but he identified both Baptiste and Dusollier. He puts them outside the apartment building one morning last week.” In the same flat tone, Phan said, “Dusollier's being taken into custody now.”
“And the reason you're talking to me?”
“Because we think you're involved with this.”
“Well,” Seeley said rising, “call me in Buffalo if you ever get any evidence.”
“For right now, we would prefer that you stay in San Francisco.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you can't stop me from leaving.”
“We can hold you as a material witness.”
Phan was bluffing. “If you want to hold me as a material witness, you'll need a subpoena and, with what you have, you'll never get one.” Seeley reached into his jacket for his wallet. “I'll be around for a few days, but after that, you can get me in Buffalo.” He took a business card from the wallet. “I'm sure you already have the number.”
Phan rose. “We'll be seeing you again.”
This time the bluff was so absurd that Seeley laughed. “Not if I see you first.”
Palmieri was at his desk in the neat white office working at his laptop. Seeley lifted the Chronicle off the corner of the desk. “Did you talk with Phan?”
“Friday afternoon,” Palmieri said. “After Gail Odum's piece came out.”
Seeley returned the paper to the desk. “This guy Baptiste is going to implicate Dusollier.”
“Is any of this going to splash onto our client?”
Seeley said, “Phan hinted at it, but he's a cop, and that's what cops do. Did you tell him anything about Vaxtek's part in the collusion?”
“And get disbarred?”
“What was Pearsall's part in it?”
Palmieri pushed back from the desk, but his eyes remained open. In this crisp pink-and-white striped shirt and dark tie, he was as collected as ever. “I finished my grieving for Bob. This doesn't change anything.”
“He was part of it, wasn't he?”
“Bob and Emil Thorpe,” Palmieri said. “Warshaw and the higher-ups in Switzerland made the deal, but Bob and Emil executed it.”
So Leonard had not been lying. “I wouldn't think that Pearsall was the kind of person who'd do that.”
“He wasn't,” Palmieri said. “It was one of those drawn-out negotiations where, when you're in the middle of it, it looks like you're just making one small tactical decision after another. Only later, when the negotiations are over and you've moved on to other things, you realize you've made a moral choice. We didn't discover Steinhardt's double bookkeeping, Emil's people did. Emil tried to use it to get Vaxtek to drop the case. But one of our associates had just found the record of Lily Warren's visit to Steinhardt's lab. That gave each side a lock on the other. Bob suggested that the parties settle, and Emil said he'd talk with his client. That's when the two companies came up with the idea of going through the motions of a trial, and getting a judicial stamp of validity on the patent. It didn't seem unreasonable to Bob at the time, so he went along.”
But, Seeley thought, if Pearsall was involved in the collusion, why would Dusollier have to arrange for his murder?
Palmieri said, “I can't understand why Bob had to be involved. All he had to do was what any trial lawyer does for his client-prove that the patent was valid. It was Emil who had to pull his punches.”
Seeley said, “Someone had to tell Thorpe where the soft spots were in Vaxtek's case so that he could avoid them.” Seeley wondered what Palmieri's part was. “Pearsall didn't tell you about the collusion, did he?”
Palmieri shook his head. “A couple of months into depositions, I figured out what was going on. Questions that didn't get asked. Requests for admissions and interrogatories that didn't get served.”
“And you confronted Pearsall?”
“Too many people I know have died of AIDS for me to be responsible for any more. I wouldn't repeat this to the lieutenant, but I could have killed Bob myself, I was so furious.”
“What did Pearsall say?”
“Bob said I should stop working on the case, but I told him I was going to go to the state bar, and if they didn't do anything, I'd go to the press.”
“But instead,” Seeley said, “Pearsall went to Warshaw and told him that the firm was withdrawing from the case.”
“Worse than that.” Tears suddenly filled Palmieri's eyes. “He told Warshaw that if Vaxtek didn't drop the lawsuit, he was going to the press with the story. I don't think he forgave himself for being part of this.” Palmieri wiped his eyes with his fingers. “So he got killed instead of me.”
“You were very brave.”
Palmieri shook his head. “If I were brave, I would have gone to the press myself.”
“With what? Your suspicions, and what Pearsall told you? No one would have believed you.”
“After Bob was killed, I could have gone to the police.”
“You were braver than that. Think of all those things you did to try to sabotage Vaxtek's case.”
“They weren't very effective, were they?”
“We got a hung jury, didn't we? I'd say, if there's a hero anywhere in this mess, it's you.” And, Seeley told himself, Lily.
“It's nice of you to say that, but-”
“You still have work to do,” Seeley said. He told Palmieri about the meeting in Judge Farnsworth's chambers, and explained how the judge was effectively forcing Vaxtek to license AV/AS on reasonable terms to any company that wanted to manufacture it. “You get to close the deal, Chris. Does the firm have an intellectual property transactions group? You'll need someone to draft a license agreement.”
“Sure.”
“Have them put together a license for Barnum to review. Once he's approved it, send a copy to Emil and get it to the judge by Friday.” The party that prepares the first draft of a contract has the upper hand in the negotiations that follow and, after what he'd done to his client in court, Seeley owed it that much.
“What about the royalty rate?”
“Get Nicolas Cordier to fax you a declaration of what he thinks a reasonable royalty should be. Get one from your friend Phil Driscoll, too. Use the lower number.”
“And if Vaxtek thinks it's too low?”
“Tell them the judge won't approve anything higher.” Seeley nodded at the laptop. “And you can turn that thing off. There won't be a retrial. No appeals. The case is over.”
Palmieri turned the screen toward Seeley. It was filled with blue sky, green waters, a white beach, and a jungle of palm trees. “Maui. My partner and I are going for a couple of weeks.”
Seeley forgot that Palmieri had been working on the case from the beginning, long before the trial itself began, through unending days of depositions, document review, and legal research. He didn't look it, but he had to be exhausted. Seeley felt a flood of affection for this lawyer who had, by himself, attempted to destroy Vaxtek's case.
Palmieri came from behind the desk. “It's been good working with you, Mike. I never thought I'd meet a trial lawyer as good as Bob Pearsall.”
“It was a privilege to work with you.” Seeley offered his hand, and resisted the impulse to hug Palmieri, or even to touch his shoulder as a way of embracing what they'd accomplished together. “I couldn't have done this without you.”
Palmieri's eyes didn't let Seeley go. He seemed unembarrassed by the quiet intimacy of the exchange. Finally, he withdrew his hand. “I learned a lot from you.”
“Like what?”
“How hard it can be to lose a case.”
Seeley said, “Only when you're trying.”
“You have great timing, Seeley.”
For some reason, he liked the sound of Lily calling him by his last name.
“I don't have to be back in the lab until Sunday afternoon. That gives us three days for ourselves.”
The night was clear, and from the chaises on Lily's terrace they could see all the way to where a procession of trawlers, their lights strung like Christmas trees, crossed the dark horizon.
“We need to talk about what happened.”
“You're the silent one,” Lily said. “I don't mind.”
“You had a lot of courage, going to the newspaper.”
“Not really. Five minutes after you left, I knew I didn't have a choice.”
“Why did the story take so long to come out?”
“You're the most impatient person I know!”
“What do you mean?”
“Gail had to check facts and give Vaxtek and St. Gall a chance to return her phone calls. Alan, too.”
She rested her fingers on the back of his hand. “You better stick to law. You don't have the patience to make it as a scientist.”
Seeley said, “Neither does Steinhardt. He couldn't wait for his own results, so he stole yours.”
“What's going to happen to him?”
“In the courts?” It was absurd, but Lily's interest in Steinhardt made him jealous. “Nothing. As much as he wanted to commit perjury, and as close as he came, in the end he didn't.”
“Only because you stopped him. Do you regret that?”
As usual, Lily was at least a step ahead of him. “He won't get his reputation back, but he'll try. Don't be surprised if his lawyer calls and offers to put your name next to Steinhardt's on the AV/AS patent.”
“If he does, will you be my lawyer?”
“Sure,” Seeley said. The thought of helping to attach Lily's name to her discovery pleased him. “The Patent Office also has a procedure for removing a person's name from a patent and replacing it with the name of the true inventor. Yours.”
Lily sipped at the jasmine tea that she had brought out to the balcony, but said nothing.
Seeley said, “Think about it.”
“I know you can't understand, but there's a part of me that still feels loyal to Alan.” After a long moment, she said, “Do it. Don't wait for his lawyer to come to us. Go to the Patent Office and do it.”
Seeley knew that there would be no opposition from Vaxtek or St. Gall. Follow-up stories had appeared under Odum's byline and there were others in the national press, but the news of Dusollier's arrest had shut down any plans that the two companies might have had to question Lily's part in the discovery of AV/AS. They now had other battles to fight in the press. This morning's Chronicle article had mentioned Lily's role in only a single paragraph, and by the time indictments started coming in and the prosecutions got under way, she would be forgotten.
Seeley said, “What are you going to do next?”
“There've been some phone calls. E-mails. A few of them look serious.”
“Any of them interesting?”
“One from Rockefeller University in New York. It's where I got my doctorate. Another from the Scripps Institute in La Jolla.”
“Why do I hope you'll choose the Atlantic over the Pacific?”
“There's also a nonprofit in Illinois, near Carbondale, that's talking about giving me my own lab. It's small, but it's well funded. I'm visiting there next week.”
Seeley felt the same panicky flutter in his stomach as when he was on the phone with Mrs. Rosziak and imagined the collapse of the Ellicott Square Building. This was a new feeling for him. He knew that he had no claim on Lily, but why did the thought of losing her make him feel this way?
She took his hand in hers.
Seeley said, “What's it like for you, looking at the ocean every day and knowing that your home is on the other side?”
“What was it like for you to look at all those bottles of beer lined up on the wall at Barbara's Fish Trap?”
“I could always take a drink. But I won't. Just like you won't go back to China.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I'm not sure,” Seeley said. “I'm thinking about moving back to New York.” He let her fingers interlace his.
“What about San Francisco? Your brother's here.”
Seeley shook his head.
“Are the two of you close?”
The seriousness in her voice forced Seeley to think about the answer, and he realized that, as much as he might want to obliterate it, the bond between Leonard and him would be there forever. “Like two peas in a pod.”
“What's going to happen to him?”
“If the government indicted people for being cowards, Leonard would need to hire a lawyer. He knew about the collusion. But nothing will happen.” Nothing, Seeley thought, unless he knew of the plan to murder Pearsall.
Neither of them spoke for what seemed like minutes, and then Lily slipped her fingers from Seeley's. “Have you talked with him since the trial?”
“No.”
“Where does he live?”
“Atherton.”
“It's only a thirty-minute drive.” As she spoke, Lily moved her head slowly from side to side. “You weren't planning to say goodbye to him, were you?”
Seeley frowned.
“You need to do that.”
“I'll think about it.”
“No,” she said, “I mean now.”
“Why?”
“How many big brothers does he have?” Her face came close to his. “I'll still be here when you get back.”
“I don't even know if he's home.”
“Come back as soon as you can.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “We'll watch the fog come in.”
Water spun from sprinklers on Leonard's lawn, draining into pools on the black pavement. The now-familiar scent of eucalyptus, field grass, and wood smoke reminded Seeley of the pumped-in perfume at a suburban mall. He preferred the yeasty scents of San Francisco, the iodine smell of the ocean.
Leonard must have heard the car because he was at the door.
“I'm glad you came.” He had an open bottle of beer in his hand. Behind him, lights burned in the living room and a fire blazed in the huge stone fireplace. “I wish you'd called. Renata's on rounds.”
Seeley followed his brother into the room.
“She won't be more than half an hour.”
It struck Seeley that Leonard lied even when he had nothing to gain.
“Do you want a drink? Beer? I can get you something stronger.”
“I just came to say goodbye.”
“Stay until Renata gets back. You're part of the family. She'll want to see you.”
“Why do you keep pressing that button, Len?”
Leonard shook off the question. “Well, then, take a good look.” He threw his arms wide to encompass the glass-walled room. “This is the last you're going to see of the place. The bank will let us stay for another two, three months, but the equity's gone.”
When Seeley looked at Vaxtek's stock price that afternoon, it was down more than forty percent. It might rise a few points on Monday, when the two companies announced the settlement of their lawsuit, but Leonard had bought on margin, and his account had to be wiped out by now.
“Still, with Renata's salary and mine, we're fine. The company, too. We're shutting down Steinhardt's lab-no one's seen him since that newspaper article-but we have other products in the pipeline.”
If Leonard believed that, he was kidding himself. In less than a week, disappointed shareholders would begin filing lawsuits against Vaxtek's management and, with AV/AS producing no more than the modest royalties approved by Judge Farnsworth, Warshaw would put the company up for sale for whatever he could get from one of the large multinationals.
“I wouldn't count on it, Lenny.”
Leonard winced. “Why not?” He took the hassock by the fire and tilted the green bottle to his mouth. Seeley took the couch opposite him.
“Your chairman's going to be spending more time talking to his lawyers than running his company.”
“Criminal?”
“That depends on how high the DA thinks he can go. The killer, Baptiste, is going to try to make a deal by implicating Dusollier. If he does, and if Dusollier's got anything on Warshaw, I'd say your boss is in trouble.”
“Joel always lands on his feet.”
“I don't think the DA is going to give him special treatment for being a juvenile.”
A light snapped on in the entryway, and Seeley started.
“The timer,” Leonard said.
“What about you?” Seeley said. “Did you do anything the DA would be interested in?”
“You mean that crack you made about my pushing Pearsall in front of the train? I thought you were kidding.”
“You tell me.”
“Come on, Mike. Sure, I lied about Steinhardt. I knew about the collusion. But I don't go around killing people.”
It wasn't Seeley's best judgment, but he decided to believe his brother.
Leonard drained the beer. “Stay for Thanksgiving. Mom will really be excited to see you.”
“You've got to give up on this, Len. It won't work.”
“What do you mean? This is family.”
“What family?”
“You. Mom. Me. Renata. It's not perfect, the way you always want things, but it's good enough.”
“There never was a family,” Seeley said.
“Whose choice was that?”
“Why is this so important to you?”
Leonard slumped on the hassock, and Seeley caught a glimpse of what his brother would look like as an old man.
Leonard said, “After everything else is gone-your job, your friends-who else is there but your family?”
“Why does there have to be anyone?”
“I suppose that's the difference between us.” For an instant, a spark of acceptance flickered into Leonard's tired eyes, then disappeared. “The story in the Chronicle — that was your idea, wasn't it?”
Seeley had told no one, not even Palmieri, what he had done to sabotage Vaxtek's case, and he was not going to start with his brother. “On Friday the judge is going to approve a settlement agreement that will commit Vaxtek to licensing AV/AS to any company that wants to produce it. It's not why I took the case, but I can't say I'm unhappy about the result.”
“Why did you take the case?”
Seeley started to answer, but the memory of his brother hiding behind their bedroom door stopped him. “Because you asked me to.”
Leonard's spirit recovered. “So family does count for something.”
“I thought I owed you after walking out thirty-two years ago.”
“You count the years, too.”
“Did you know that I had my finger on the trigger? That if it weren't for the safety catch, I would have killed him?” Not Father, or even Lothar. Him. Seeley reached for his rage-at Leonard, at his father-but found nothing there.
“I didn't know that.”
Seeley rose. “I need to go.”
Leonard followed him into the hallway. “You realize,” he said, “leaving was the best thing you ever did for me.”
That jarred Seeley. “How's that?”
“Do you think I liked being your kid brother? You judging me all the time? Always being measured against you? Why do you think I went out for tennis? It was the only sport you didn't play.”
“I was only trying to protect you, Len.”
“Well, if you want a doctor's opinion,” Leonard said, “that's the worst thing you can do to someone. If he messes up, let him fix it for himself.”
Seeley smiled to himself. Leonard hadn't lost his alchemist's ability to turn his own faults magically into someone else's responsibility. Seeley looked around the large glass room. The wind had picked up, rattling tree branches across the skylight. He moved to the brightly lit entry, but Leonard was quicker and blocked the door.
Leonard appraised Seeley with the same clinical eye as when he had examined the bruises from his Chinatown beating. “Did you ever think that maybe it was us who abandoned you?”
When Seeley didn't answer, Leonard said, “No, you only think about things that you can fix.”
“I'm nothing if not practical.”
Leonard grinned. “If you believe that, you're a dreamer. You're the most romantic idealist I'll ever know.”
“Then that's another difference between us.”
“Are we going to see each other again?”
“I don't know,” Seeley said.
“Whatever happened, Mike”-Seeley didn't know if Leonard meant the trial or what happened thirty-two years ago-“it was good to see you. It was good for us to get to know each other again.”
Seeley reached out a hand, as did Leonard, but at the last moment-a boxer's fake-Leonard threw his arm around Seeley's neck and drew him into a clumsy embrace. When Seeley tried to pull back, Leonard's lock on him was that of a wild man. Seeley thought, Was this in fact why I came to California? To reconcile with my brother? He looked about, as if the house might reveal an answer, but the windows, the skylight, the hall mirror all reflected back the same baffling image: a grasping thing; some prehistoric being; a benign beast from a dark fable.