Heilbrun, Hardy occupied five floors of an office tower on Battery Street, off the Embarcadero at the edge of the city's financial district. In the conference room adjoining the office that before his death had belonged to Robert Pearsall, Michael Seeley shifted comfortably in a leather-cushioned chair. Thirty-eight stories down, sailboats scudded across the sun-speckled bay and the Golden Gate Bridge was a cupid's bow across the water. To Seeley, the scene was as flat and trite as a picture-postcard.
Fat loose-leaf binders labeled Vaxtek, Inc. v. Laboratories St. Gall, S. A. filled the conference room's wall-to-wall shelves. The black binders held the deposition transcripts of witnesses who would be testifying at the trial; the red binders collected patents and scientific papers related to the development and efficacy of Vaxtek's discovery, AV/AS; and the blue binders contained legal research memos. The black and red binders outnumbered the blue binders fifty to one, confirming the trial lawyer's truth that in litigation facts count more than law.
The footwork for a case this size entails months of depositions, reviewing mountains of interrogatories, camping out in chilly warehouses to examine documents, researching the applicable law, and arguing motions in court. St. Gall had overstaffed the case the way giant companies usually do, with lawyers drawn from firms in Zurich, New York, and Chicago, as well as San Francisco. Pearsall, by contrast, had staffed the case leanly, with no more than two dozen lawyers, paralegals, document clerks, and typists. Although Seeley and Chris Palmieri, Pearsall's second chair, would be Vaxtek's only trial lawyers in the courtroom, the team from the office would feed them facts, research, and law as needed.
Running big cases had not been part of Seeley's dream when he set out for law school, but, like the conference room in the sky, responsibility for a case like this offered a reassuring familiarity. He was still uncertain about his motive for coming to San Francisco. It could have been to prove that Leonard, and Seeley's own deepest fears, were wrong, that his professional edge was as sharp as ever. Or perhaps it was no more complicated than escaping the onset of another gray Buffalo winter which, if it was like the last one, would hold a perfect mirror to his soul. In either case, coming to San Francisco was the only way he was going to find out.
Before leaving Buffalo, Seeley spent a week of eighteen-hour days working through the binders that Palmieri express-shipped to him, all the while arranging continuances for his cases in the state and county courts. By the end of the week, as he began to connect the jigsaw pieces of Vaxtek's case, Seeley had a good measure of Pearsall's qualities as a lawyer. He would not have assembled the case the same way, but neither could he find anything to fault in the shrewd care with which Pearsall had gathered his facts and witnesses.
Pearsall's secretary, assigned to Seeley for the duration of the trial, came into the conference room while he was rechecking the witness list to locate a misplaced deposition binder. Christina Hoff couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, young to have worked for a partner as senior as Pearsall, and in her neat skirt and oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was mostly elbows and knees. She had shown him around the firm's five floors of offices when he arrived earlier in the morning, and although she had touched up her makeup, it still failed to mask the bleariness in her eyes, from fatigue, Seeley thought, or grief.
“I just wanted to see if you needed anything.” She had a nice voice.
“Should I call you Christina or Tina?”
“Tina. How'd you know?”
She was almost six feet tall, just an inch or two shorter than Seeley, and he guessed that, as a gawky adolescent, the shortened name might have helped inch her toward invisibility. There was a vulnerability about her that, along with the earnestness, seemed out of place amidst the hard polished surfaces of the conference room.
Seeley said, “Have you seen the deposition binder for Lily Warren?” Warren was a St. Gall vaccine researcher, and she should have been deposed along with the others on St. Gall's witness list. But the binder was missing. The last transcripts Seeley reviewed in Buffalo had traveled on the plane with him as freight and were now back on the conference-room shelf with the others. He had called Mrs. Rosziak, but she said he hadn't left any Vaxtek papers in the office.
“We have a sign-out system for them.” Tina took a slender file from the credenza at the far end of the room and quickly paged through it. “No one's checked it out.”
That meant nothing. Litigators, meticulous about observing court procedures, regularly overlook office protocol, particularly as they get close to trial.
“How long did you work for Mr. Pearsall?”
“It would have been one and a half years next month.” Her fingers fluttered first at the file, then at a few stray hairs at her neck. She didn't seem to know what to do with her hands.
“Did he keep a trial notebook for his cases? You know, his thoughts about the case, the way he planned to try it.” Sooner or later someone would return the binder containing the transcript of Warren's deposition, but if there was anything important in it that needed attention at trial, Pearsall would have mentioned it in his notes.
Tina shook her head. “He never said anything about a trial notebook.”
A lawyer with Pearsall's experience would not prepare for a trial of this size without outlining his strategy, setting down the main points for his direct and cross-examinations, noting whether a deposition witness seemed overly forgetful or remembered events that had not occurred. By this point in his preparation, Pearsall also would have sketched out his theory of the case, the story interweaving fact and law that would, or so every lawyer hoped, give the jury no choice but to decide for his client.
“After Mr. Pearsall died, who moved his things out of the office?”
“I did. Any documents related to the case, I sent down to the workroom.” One floor down, the workroom had been part of Tina's office tour that morning. The size of three conference rooms, it was where the paralegals working on the case had their cubicles. The storehouse of last resort, the workroom was also where the team kept the correspondence files and documents that were not in the conference room.
Tina said, “I gave the papers for his other cases to Chris.”
Palmieri had evidently been Pearsall's lieutenant on other cases, not just Vaxtek. The young partner had been in the workroom talking with one of the paralegals when Tina and Seeley came through, and he seemed annoyed at the interruption when Tina stopped to introduce Seeley.
“What about his correspondence file?”
“I have it, but it's only letters.”
“Briefs?”
“Mr. Pearsall didn't write them. Usually one of the associates did, or sometimes Chris. Mr. Pearsall marked them up, crossed things out and wrote comments on them. Sometimes he rewrote them. But someone in the pool typed them.”
“Was anything else removed from his office?”
“I filled some boxes with personal things-you know, diplomas, family pictures.” She remembered something and gave Seeley a small, tentative smile. “There were the steno pads he used to draw in. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, I'd come in and he'd be looking out the window with a stenographer's pad open, drawing.”
Boats on the bay, Seeley imagined.
“I put them in the boxes along with the other stuff and had them delivered to Mrs. Pearsall.”
Papers and belongings dispersed, Seeley thought, how long would it take Pearsall's partners to forget him completely? He was thinking about his own former partners in New York, some of whom, he was sure, were still working hard to forget him.
“Could you leave me her telephone number and address? And tell Chris I'd like to see him.”
“She'll appreciate that,”Tina said.
“What's that?”
“Mrs. Pearsall. Your visiting her. Paying your respects.”
After Tina left, Seeley continued working down the list of witnesses, preparing for each a brief summary of his or her testimony, the first draft of his order of proof.
Other than the travel-poster view, the conference room was virtually identical to the dozens in which Seeley had spent a good part of his professional life, plotting strategy with his trial team, taking or defending depositions, negotiating settlements. Law firm interior designers all had the same shopping list: dark gleaming wood for the bookshelves and conference table, plump leather-and-steel chairs, chrome carafes and ice buckets to sit next to the telephone on the sleek credenza. On one off-white wall was a generic painting, neither offensive nor banal, that looked as if it had been ordered by the yard.
Seeley was near the end of the witness list when there was a knock at the open door and Chris Palmieri came in. In a firm where the younger lawyers went without ties and jackets, Palmieri wore a trimly cut gray suit, starched dress shirt, and silk tie. A pale pink pocket square was carefully folded to look like a casual afterthought, and his light hair was cropped close.
“Tina said you wanted to ask me about something.”
Seeley had wondered about Palmieri's prickliness not only when Tina introduced them in the workroom but also in their telephone conversations the week before. He assumed it was the young partner's resentment at being passed over to run the case when Pearsall died. But it could also have been ill will toward any lawyer who tried to replace his mentor and, probably, friend.
“Do you know where the Warren deposition is?”
“Warren?”
Seeley slid the witness binder down the conference table to where Palmieri was. “Lily Warren. The scientist who St. Gall says invented AV/AS first.” Vaxtek's case turned on its claim that one of its own scientists, Alan Steinhardt, invented AV/AS. If St. Gall could prove that Warren invented AV/AS first, it would win.
“Oh, her.” He left the binder on the conference table, unopened. “We didn't depose her.”
Seeley waited. Not to depose a key witness was unthinkable.
“St. Gall dropped her. It turns out she's a crackpot. They were afraid her testimony would backfire on them.”
In a deposition, the deposing attorney-for Warren it would have been Pearsall or another Heilburn, Hardy lawyer-gets to ask the witness anything he wants. If, on questioning, Warren said something that hurt Vaxtek's position, the deposition transcript would be there to warn the lawyer against asking the same question at trial. However, if Warren said something that was favorable to Vaxtek and later contradicted herself at trial, Vaxtek could introduce the deposition transcript to impeach her testimony. Otherwise, no member of the jury would ever get to see the deposition. From Vaxtek's viewpoint deposing Warren was a no-lose proposition. Why, then, hadn't its lawyer done so?
“So there's no record of her story?”
“I think she talked to one of the newspapers, maybe the Chronicle, but after St. Gall dropped her, there wasn't a story.” Palmieri tilted his chair back from the table and closed his eyes. “No deposition, either.”
“Do you know how we can reach her?”
Palmieri was looking at him again, but made no effort to hide how boring he found this. “I think St. Gall fired her right after they cut her from the witness list.”
“You'd think Pearsall would want to get her story down, for the record. She could still turn out to be a problem for us.”
Palmieri flushed. He half rose and leaned over the table. “Warren was St. Gall's witness, not ours.” For the first time, he looked squarely at Seeley. “Bob never missed an angle that mattered.”
“I'm not saying he did. He may have been planning to depose her when he died.” Seeley didn't mind that Palmieri idolized his mentor; he admired loyalty. But if they were going to work together, the young partner would have to calm down. “Did Pearsall seem any different before he died? Had he changed?”
Palmieri drew back. “You mean, what happened that he would throw himself in front of a train?” He started to answer his own question, but changed his mind. “Bob was as passionate about this case as he was about all his cases.”
That told Seeley nothing. What looks like passion can in fact be nothing more than a driving fear of failure. In his last years in New York, even as he was winning most of his cases and favorably settling the others, Seeley could never shake the conviction that he had failed his clients by not obtaining a larger damage award or more generous settlement terms.
“Maybe Warren isn't a problem,” Seeley said, “but I want to nail this down. If there's someone out there with a halfway legitimate claim that he-or she-made this invention before Steinhardt did, I need to know it before I put him on the stand. I'm seeing him this afternoon, but I want you to go through his lab notes and mark anything that could raise a question.”
Again Palmieri reddened, and this time Seeley caught the meaning at once.
“This is too important for an associate. If it weren't important I wouldn't ask you to do it. I'll look at whatever you come up with tomorrow morning.”
Palmieri pushed back to leave.
“Look, Chris, when Vaxtek asked me to take this case, I told them they should let the second chair run it, but they wouldn't listen.”
“What did they say?”
“That you didn't have enough experience.”
“And you believe that?”
“It wasn't my decision to make.” Seeley remembered the missing trial notebook. “Did you get a look at Pearsall's trial notes?”
Palmieri said, “Look, Mr. Seeley-”
“The people I work with call me Mike. What about the notebook?”
“He didn't keep one.”
“You're sure of that.”
“I worked for Bob from the day I started here. Eleven years. He never kept a trial notebook. Maybe it's something New York lawyers do.”
Seeley was growing tired of the barbs. “Did he talk to you about his theory of the case?”
“Sure. Except he didn't call it that. For him it was the ‘path to victory. ’ We worked it out together.”
“And what does it look like-Vaxtek's path to victory?”
“Nothing that would surprise you: Vaxtek's a small American company that has nothing going for it except the brilliance, creativity, and dedication of its handful of scientists and the protection of the American patent system. St. Gall is a multinational octopus that knows nothing about science, lacks any creative aptitude or spirit, and survives by poaching on the hard work of small companies like Vaxtek.”
“And what's Emil Thorpe's ‘path to victory’ going to be?” Thorpe, St. Gall's lead trial counsel, was a legend of the San Francisco trial bar and, for major cases like this one, was at or near the top of the list of preferred counsel for any company that could afford him. Seeley guessed that Vaxtek would have hired Thorpe if St. Gall didn't already have him on retainer.
“Bob and I never got the chance to talk about it.” Palmieri was at the conference-room door, looking down the corridor.
Seeley wondered if he was like this with everyone, or reserved his detachment for interlopers.
“You're running this case,” Palmieri said, “so you get to choose your second chair. If you want to work with someone else, that's fine with me. I'll do everything I can to support him.”
Seeley had reservations about Palmieri, but he knew that if he hesitated for a moment he would lose him. “You're the one I want sitting next to me at counsel's table.”
“Thanks”-Palmieri turned back into the room-“but you'll have to talk to the client about my being at counsel's table.”
“Why?”
“Ask Ed Barnum when you see him.”
As Vaxtek's general counsel, Barnum was the person Seeley was supposed to answer to.
“It doesn't matter what Barnum says. I want you there.”
“Just ask him.” Palmieri started out the door.
“Have you taken care of the pro hac papers?” Because Seeley wasn't a member of the California bar he would have to be admitted, just for this trial, pro hac vice.
“One of the paralegals is taking care of it.”
“Good. If I don't get admitted, you'll be sitting at counsel's table all by yourself.”
For the first time since he met him, Palmieri smiled.
Seeley checked his watch. Vaxtek was in South San Francisco, a half-hour drive from downtown. On his way out, he stopped at Tina's desk. She wasn't there, but had left a message slip for him with Judy Pearsall's address and phone number on it.
Lawyers occupy forty-story office towers to inscribe their presence on the skyline. Scientists stay closer to the ground. Vaxtek's building in South San Francisco was two floors of glass and polished stone, one of dozens of such facades along the commercial boulevard that exited from the freeway. Signs on some of the buildings indicated biotech companies, but others were more mundane-a restaurant-supply firm, a marble-and-granite works, outlet stores for several big retail fashion brands. A temp agency was next door to Vaxtek. For a long stretch of boulevard, the grass was overgrown and clogged with windblown debris, but the lawn in front of Vaxtek's building was neatly trimmed. Low hedgerows separated the parking lot from the street.
Seeley signed in at the security desk and let the receptionist clip a laminated visitor's pass to his lapel. The sparely furnished lobby could have been an airport waiting area with its empty walls and industrial gray carpeting. A slender potted tree guarded two chairs and the carpet gave off a chemical smell as if it had been recently installed. There was no movement in the broad corridor on the other side of the glass double doors leading into the building's interior. After a while, an attractive middle-aged woman in jeans and a turtleneck sweater came through the doors to take Seeley to Leonard's office.
Seeley had heard somewhere that cramped quarters were common in biotech, even for senior executives, and Leonard's office was no larger than Seeley's in the Ellicott Square Building. The desk was a slab of blond wood, part of a combination cabinet-bookshelf. The desktop was empty and the bookshelf nearly so. A beefy man in chinos and polo shirt had propped himself against the desk's outer edge, facing the open door. His bulk partially obscured Leonard, who was sitting behind the desk. There was a tension in the room, as if the two had been arguing.
“Ed Barnum,” Leonard said, introducing them. “Michael Seeley.”
Barnum studied Seeley unhurriedly through aviator glasses and said nothing while Seeley walked around the office. The photographs were mostly of Leonard on vacation, posed against a ski slope or beaming under a baseball cap on a fishing charter. A woman was with him in the photographs. The view out the wall-sized window was of a succession of mud-brown hills, relieved in their monotony only by a bright ribbon of cheap-looking houses.
Leonard started to speak, but Barnum said, “Ray Crosetto sends his regards. So does Sandy Eyring.” The two were well-known trial lawyers, Crosetto from Los Angeles and Eyring from Salt Lake City. Seeley had litigated against them in a couple of long trials before he left his New York firm. This was Barnum's way of letting Seeley know that he had asked around before agreeing to take him on as his new trial counsel.
“They said you're a good lawyer, but that you have an independent streak. I don't know if Leonard impressed on you how important this case is to our company.”
“All my cases are important.”
Barnum moved so that Seeley could no longer see Leonard's eyes. “I don't think you understand. St. Gall already has its product on the market. If we lose this patent the generics will flood the market with knockoffs inside of a year. We've sunk almost half a billion dollars into AV/AS. If you lose this case, we'll never see a dime of it.”
From behind Barnum, Leonard said, “We have other drugs in the pipeline, Mike, but AV/AS is why Wall Street loves us.”
Barnum's large pink face was just inches from Seeley's. “If you lose our case-”
“I'm not planning on losing your case,” Seeley said. “But you're the ones who came looking for me to run this trial. If you changed your mind, now's the time to tell me.”
Barnum paced the small room. He had a sluggish way of responding, and Seeley didn't know if the silence was deliberate or if he was just slow.
Leonard leaned back in his chair. “What Ed's saying is, we're betting the company on this case. If-”
Barnum said, “How does the case look to you?”
“Bob Pearsall did a good job putting it together.”
“That's why I hired him. I don't want any loose ends.”
When Seeley didn't respond, Leonard said, “There aren't any loose ends, are there?”
“There's Lily Warren.”
Annoyance crossed Barnum's face. “Who?”
Leonard said, “The woman who thinks she invented AV/AS.”
“Oh,” Barnum said. “The crackpot.”
It was what Palmieri had said, but Seeley thought it was more likely that the description came from Barnum.
Leonard said, “Why should that be a loose end?”
Seeley said, “Even if she's not on St. Gall's witness list, she could be a problem.”
“There won't be a problem.” Barnum's impassive face moved in front of Seeley so that he again lost eye contact with his brother. “St. Gall already stipulated that Alan Steinhardt invented the vaccine first.”
The information stunned Seeley. When two companies flog their researchers around the clock to come up with a cure for the same disease, it is no accident when they arrive at virtually identical drugs, sometimes within days of each other. Often the margin of difference is so thin that, outside a courtroom, no one can say for sure which team produced the invention first. Alexander Graham Bell's competitor, Elisha Gray, got to the patent office on the same day as Bell, forcing Bell to prove that he invented the telephone first. And, like Bell, whoever reaches the finish line first not only gets the prize they were all competing for-a patent-but, with that patent, the power to stop anyone else, including the runner-up, from producing or selling the invention.
For St. Gall to concede priority was no less than for a country to cede half its territory to a despised foe, and without a shot being fired. There were still important issues to be litigated at trial, among them, whether the discovery of AV/AS was sufficiently novel to deserve a patent. But for St. Gall to stipulate that Vaxtek won the race even before the trial began was startling. It also bothered Seeley that, if he hadn't asked about Warren, Barnum might never have told him about the stipulation.
“Why did they concede priority?”
“Probably,” Barnum said, “because we were first.”
“If you were first, why are they already in the market, and you're just starting phase-three trials?”
“Resources,” Leonard said. “They got a late start, but their money and connections got them through the FDA in half the time we could.”
That still didn't explain St. Gall's stipulation of priority-particularly if they thought one of their employees made the discovery first. “What about Warren?”
“I told you,” Barnum said, “she's a crackpot.”
St. Gall's concession that Steinhardt invented AV/AS first would explain why only two lawyers, Thorpe for St. Gall and Pearsall for Vaxtek, were present when Thorpe deposed Steinhardt. For a witness this important, the deposition room would usually be crowded with lawyers and experts from both sides to advise the two principal lawyers as Thorpe pressed the scientist to pin down the exact moment that he completed the invention.
Barnum said, “Is that your only loose end?”
“So far,” Seeley said. “I still have two more shelves of depositions to read.”
“Did you get your pro hac motion granted?”
“Chris Palmieri's taking care of it.”
Barnum gave him a doubtful look. “What do you think of him-Palmieri?”
“Why?” Seeley remembered Palmieri's uncertainty about joining him at counsel's table.
Barnum said, “It didn't seem to you that he's maybe… a little light in the loafers?”
As he spoke, Barnum moved and Seeley caught a warning look from Leonard. It took him a moment to understand what was on Barnum's mind. The trim build, the close-cropped hair, the pink pocket handkerchief.
Seeley said, “That's none of my business.”
“If you want to win this case, you'll make it your business. The jury's impression of Vaxtek, what kind of company we are, is what they see when they look at counsel's table. I don't want them to see a queer sitting there.”
Seeley decided not to ask Barnum how many jury cases he'd tried. “If you count up who a lot of the AIDS victims are in San Francisco, I'd think having him at counsel's table would be an advantage.” It was cheap tactical point that Seeley regretted as soon as he made it.
“There's a big difference between the San Francisco you read about in the newspapers and the San Francisco that sits on a federal jury.”
Leonard had come around to the front of his desk. “Mike has a great track record with juries. I'm sure he'll pick his jurors carefully.”
“Not before Ellen Farnsworth, he won't.” Barnum's eyes hadn't moved from Seeley's. “She runs her own voir dire. She picks the jury.”
Seeley reminded himself that he hadn't yet done his research on District Judge Ellen Farnsworth, who would preside at the trial.
Seeley said, “Palmieri's the only one on the team who knows where the evidence is. He has all the exhibits and depositions indexed and cross-indexed on his laptop. If he's not next to me, I can't cross-examine witnesses.”
“Get someone else on the team up to speed.”
“No. I already told Palmieri it's going to be him.”
Barnum turned to Leonard. “Your brother's a real piece of work.”
“I already told you, if you don't want me to run your trial, I can be on a plane tonight.”
“I'm going to be up there with you at counsel's table.”
Barnum would use his bulk, Seeley thought, to hide Palmieri from the jury. “That's fine,” Seeley said. “So long as there's room.”
“I might as well tell you now, I'm not like other GC's you've worked for. They see a trial coming and they run the other way. My first job out of law school was in the San Mateo County DA's office. I like going to trial and, when I get there, I keep a tight grip on the wheel.”
Seeley said, “I'm sure you've taken the company's trial work to a new level.”
After Barnum left, Leonard said, “You haven't lost it, have you? Your talent for pissing off a complete stranger.”
“My only interest is in winning this case. But I'm not going to let your general counsel abuse my team.”
Leonard unfolded and buttoned a sleeve of his sport shirt. “Ed's okay. Give him some room.” He buttoned the other sleeve. “Steinhardt's waiting for you. I'll take you to his office.”
Seeley followed Leonard down a carpeted corridor lined with rows of cubicles, only a few of them occupied.
“Once we scale up and go to market, every one of these desks is going to be busy with marketing and backup.”
They crossed a wide corridor, and linoleum tile replaced the carpeting.
“What you told Ed, that there aren't any holes in the case-you're sure?”
Seeley said, “There's no case that isn't a crapshoot. Things come up. But, as far as I can see, you're in good shape.”
Leonard put a hand on Seeley's arm, pleased. “We can crack open a bottle of champagne tonight.”
Leonard's dismay when Seeley told him that he'd decided to stay at a hotel and not at his house in Atherton left Seeley no choice but to accept his brother's dinner invitation.
The walk to Steinhardt's office took them past laboratories that looked little different from the high-school labs at St. Boniface, where he and Leonard were students thirty years ago. There were more plastic containers than Seeley remembered, and there hadn't been laptops on the scarred black lab counters, but the shelves lined with reagent bottles were the same, as were the spaghetti of tubing that looped down from fat-globed flasks into glass beakers and the neatly labeled drawers, the refrigerator posted with black-and-yellow warnings, and the exhaust hood under which the class clown manufactured his stink bombs. White lab coats hung from hooks along the walls. Somehow science had made all these extraordinary leaps using little more than a high-school junior's lab tools.
Seeley said, “How closely did you monitor Steinhardt's work?”
Leonard heard the concern behind the question. “You just told me there weren't any loose ends.” His good humor had evaporated.
“I want to make sure Warren isn't a problem.”
Leonard took Seeley's arm and steered him around a jumbo-size doormat at the entrance to one of the labs. The white vinyl mat looked as sticky as flypaper and was clotted with shoe prints. “Real high tech,” Leonard said. “It's to get the crud off your shoes when you go into the lab.”
He continued on, holding Seeley's elbow. “I review Steinhardt's work as closely as anybody's. When he started getting results, I looked even more closely. But remember, Mike, I'm running seven fully staffed labs here.”
“Did you review his lab notes?”
Leonard gave him a hard look. “You're not listening, Mike. If I get three or four hours at night to review the science we do here, I've had a good day. Most of my time I spend explaining to the FDA why AV/ AS is safe and effective. Do you know how many trips I had to make to Washington to get us on track for phase-three trials? It's a full-time job just convincing our insurance companies that they're not going to be defending liability lawsuits the day after we go to market. The World Health Organization's watching us. So are the nonprofits. And there's the AIDS activists. You'll see them when you go to court.”
“I'd think they'd be supporting you.”
“This is the globalization crowd. They say we're going to use our patent to gouge the Africans on price. We haven't told them, but in sub-Sahara we're prepared to price AV/AS as low as fifteen dollars a dose.”
“Why don't you tell them that? The AIDS group.”
“Because then I would have to explain to the American AIDS groups how, if we can go to market for fifteen dollars in Kenya, we can justify charging two hundred fifty dollars here. They don't understand that fifteen dollars doesn't support this kind of research.”
Seeley wondered where the money went. Vaxtek certainly wasn't spending it on offices or laboratories.
They were at the door to Steinhardt's office. Leonard, his voice suddenly thick, said, “You don't approve of how I do my job.”
“It's none of my business, Len, to approve or disapprove.”
“I'm looking forward to dinner tonight. Renata, too.” Leonard tried to make it light, the charming host, but the emotion in his voice reminded Seeley that, whatever his accomplishments as a physician and executive, part of his brother was still the kid hiding out behind the living-room couch.
The open box of imported chocolates on the marble end table, not a single piece removed, told Seeley everything he needed to know about Alan Steinhardt. The chocolates, the translucent silk drapes, Oriental rugs, antique furniture, and the scale of the room-the office was at least five times the size of Leonard's-were all for show. Steinhardt might at one time have been a dedicated researcher, but the surroundings made Seeley wonder how much of his energy he now invested at the laboratory bench. A recording of a string quartet played from speakers hidden in the ceiling.
A side door opened and Steinhardt entered the room, moving quickly but gracefully. He tilted his head and arched an eyebrow in the direction of the room he had just left. The scientist's fingertips no more than grazed Seeley's hand. “You must forgive me. There are always crises in the lab and-I am sure someone told you-I must be on a plane to Paris in three hours. You will excuse me if I keep our meeting brief.”
“That's up to you,” Seeley said. “We can go over your testimony now or the day before trial.” “I don't think a rehearsal will be necessary.”
Steinhardt's narrow face, the neatly trimmed goatee and mustache, the slicked-back gray hair were moderately forbidding. Seeley imagined that it was a long time since anyone had called him Al. Still, he thought that with some sandpapering he could turn the scientist into a passable witness-not lovable but authoritative. A juror who was looking for a father's approval might be persuaded to believe in him.
“As I said, it's your decision. But I'd recommend that you leave yourself some time. Right now, you're my lead witness and St. Gall is going to go after you on cross-examination like you're the only thing that stands between them and a profitable fourth quarter. If you're not prepared, you're going to wind up looking look like a real horse's ass.” He stopped to make sure the scientist was paying attention. “The press loves it anytime a prominent witness gets torn apart on cross-examination.”
“The press?”
“The local papers will be there. I'm sure the Times and Wall Street Journal will send stringers. This is a big case. Time should have someone. Maybe Newsweek.”
Steinhardt's expression darkened. He shot the cuffs of his white lab coat. The coat looked like it had been custom-tailored to his small, trim frame. “What would I need to do?”
“You can start by telling me what AV/AS is about.”
“If you need me to explain that to you, I'd say you're not the man to conduct my case.”
“This isn't for me,” Seeley said. “It's for the jury. You're the one who's going to have to explain the science to the jury.”
Steinhardt considered that, and for a moment stood even more erect. He gestured to Seeley to take one of the antique upholstered chairs and took one himself. Then he checked his watch and appeared to change his mind. “I could give you the five-minute version, but I expect you will have questions. This will have to wait until I return from Paris. I promise you, it will be a brief trip.”
“If I were you, I'd cancel the trip.”
“You obviously fail to understand. I have an important paper to deliver. Not to go would be out of the question.”
Seeley had worked with scientists before, and it was a puzzle to him why anyone would spend good money to put these people on airplanes and lodge them at luxury hotels just so they can read papers to each other that they could more conveniently and at less expense read at home. Steinhardt could at least answer one question for him. “What does AV/AS stand for?”
“AV is standard nomenclature. AIDSVAX. One of the first vaccines tested-this was years ago-was AIDSVAX B/B.” Steinhardt's smug expression told Seeley he didn't have to ask what AS stood for.
“And this was entirely your work? No one else contributed to it?”
The scientist didn't flinch. “Of course it was. I have people working for me, assistants, but their work is entirely routine, on the order of cleaning test tubes. None of them does any science.”
“And Lily Warren?”
Steinhardt frowned, and Seeley expected to hear yet again that Warren was a crackpot.
“She was my graduate student at the university.”
“Which university is that?”
“UCSF. The University of California at San Francisco. I had my laboratory there before I brought it here. Surely, you've read my resume.”
“And Warren worked with you at UCSF.”
“ For me. We only did the most basic science there. Nothing patentable. In any event, she was little more than a glorified lab technician.”
Seeley had seen Warren's resume in the black witness binder, as he had Steinhardt's. She did her undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins, took her doctorate at Rockefeller University, and then got a postdoctoral fellowship in Steinhardt's lab at UCSF. She wasn't just his graduate student, as he said; she was a postdoc. And she was not someone who cleaned test tubes.
“You're aware, she's made a claim that she discovered AV/AS.”
“I'm also aware that no one, not even St. Gall, has displayed the poor judgment to take her claim seriously.”
Was it possible, Seeley wondered, for this man to utter one word without condescension? In theory, Pearsall's decision to make Steinhardt Vaxtek's leadoff witness was correct. Corporations may pay for the research and development that it takes to produce a new drug, but jurors want to see the invention's human face, the scientist whose genius and tireless effort produced a miracle out of nothing more than an idea and a few cell cultures. Seeley revised his estimate of Steinhardt's prospects as a witness. In the hands of a capable trial lawyer, which he knew Thorpe was, arrogance like this was going to destroy Steinhardt in the courtroom. If Seeley kept him as the leadoff witness, the damage to Vaxtek's case could be irreparable.
Seeley said, “If new facts come out, St. Gall can still change its mind and call Warren to testify. I need to know if we're going to find her fingerprints anywhere near AV/AS.”
“I can assure you, Lily Warren has no claim to my discovery.”
Steinhardt saw that this didn't satisfy Seeley, and with a curt gesture motioned him closer. “You are my lawyer, is that right? Anything I tell you is confidential?”
“I'm Vaxtek's lawyer, not yours.”
“A technicality.” Steinhardt drew closer. The eyebrow arched; the shoulders shrugged. “You are a man of the world, Mr. Seeley, so you will understand. This young woman was infatuated with me. Such things happen. She is attractive, and she can even be charming, but of course it would have been unprofessional of me to take an interest. This ridiculous claim of hers is revenge, nothing more.”
“Did you tell Leonard about this? Ed Barnum?”
“What is there to tell? As I said, I don't want to injure her professional opportunities.”
Even if Seeley believed Steinhardt, Warren must have had a substantial enough claim to the invention that St. Gall had not initially thought her a crackpot. Why, then, had they so precipitously dropped her and stipulated that Steinhardt was the sole inventor?
“Is there anyone else who might make a claim to AV/AS?” Seeley knew the question would infuriate Steinhardt.
Steinhardt shook his head.
“You are the sole inventor of AV/AS?”
“Of course I am!” He came out of the chair, directly at Seeley, his face twisted in anger and dark from the rush of blood. “What have I been telling you?”
“You're going to have to learn to control your temper. I'm being gentle with you. Emil Thorpe, who will be cross-examining you, will not. The jury will turn against you if you can't do better than this. But, if it's a consolation, the press will love it.”
“Have you looked at my laboratory notebooks?”
Seeley remembered asking Palmieri to review Steinhardt's notebooks.
Behind Steinhardt, a slender woman came into the office. Her suit and the way she wore the scarf knotted at her neck told Seeley that she was either European or had mastered the look. She had a small stack of euros in her hand and a slender envelope.
Steinhardt took the bills and envelope and placed them on the desk. The exchange was wordless, and she left.
“You need have no concerns, Mr. Seeley. I will return from Paris on Sunday, in ample time to testify. It is imperative that I be the one to explain my discovery to the court.” He started to unbutton the starched white jacket. “You do have me on your list as the lead witness?”
Pearsall had already told him he was. The man's insecurity was as staggering as his ego.
“He left you instructions to put me first, didn't he-the poor fellow who jumped in front of the train?”
“Rest assured,” Seeley said, “you will be the most important witness in the trial.”