A Patent Lie (2 page)

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 café 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.