A Patent Lie (21 page)

No tears with this woman, Seeley observed, only fury burning in her too-clear eyes.

“Leonard could never live up to your standards. Now that I've seen what you're like, I don't think anyone can.”

Seeley rose to go.

“Do you want to know why he begged you to come out here?”

Seeley had the feeling that he hadn't even begun to penetrate the layers of Leonard's motives.

“So you could see how well he's done. What a success he's been.”

“Warshaw told me it's going to wipe you out if I lose the case.”

“He's right. Every dime we have is in Vaxtek. We sold everything, all our stocks and bonds. We took a second mortgage on the house.

Leonard said it was our one chance to make some real money, Silicon Valley money. He told Joel that Michael Seeley doesn't lose cases.”

“That doesn't sound like Leonard.”

“Then you don't know your brother.”

“The problem is, I do.”

“You are going to win, aren't you?”

Unlike Warshaw, she waited for reassurance from him that, yes, he would win the case.

“Good night, Renata.”

The railroad crossing where the 4:30 a.m. commuter train out of San Jose struck and killed Robert Pearsall was twenty minutes from Leonard's house, a drive that took Seeley through a neighborhood of small, neat homes, and then a succession of shabby strip malls, warehouses, and auto body shops. The run-down industrial area was as dark and deserted at 8:30 on a Saturday night as it doubtless was in the early morning that Pearsall died here. Other than parked pickups and panel trucks, the street was empty, and the only sound was the hum of distant freeway traffic.

Seeley left his car on the gravel-strewn hardpan next to the track, where the dense shrubs would hide it from the street, and walked to the railbed. It was, he knew, useless to think that by pacing the tracks he could somehow reconstruct Pearsall's thoughts in the last minutes of his life, or re-create the events and images of his death. But Seeley never defended a criminal case without first visiting the crime scene, and he would do no less for Pearsall.

Seeley did not accept that Pearsall took his own life, but neither did he believe that the lawyer's discovery of Steinhardt's fraudulent notebook entries was responsible for his death. As important as AV/AS was to Warshaw, no client kills his lawyer for uncovering a hole in his case. Seeley had only been taunting Leonard when he asked whether he pushed Pearsall in front of the train. Still, Leonard's gamble on Vaxtek stock surprised him. Leonard was someone who squirreled away nickels and dimes in a pickle jar. He didn't make financial wagers.

Without realizing it, Seeley had walked more than fifty yards along the track. When he looked out to the street through a gap in the rough screen of hedge, he noticed a dark sedan parked among the panel trucks and pickups that he was certain hadn't been there before. No one was visible in the sedan, and although the rattling sound nearby could have been a car engine cooling, it could also be dry leaves blowing across the street.

There was a rustling in the shrubbery across the tracks and, when Seeley turned, a hulking presence emerged from the foliage. Moonlight glinted off the silvery white bone of a modest rack of antlers, and the instant the buck saw him, it froze. The two of them remained absolutely still, studying each other. Ears twitching, depthless eyes alert, the buck heard the locomotive before Seeley did, and by the time the train was upon him, the only evidence of the buck's appearance was the receding white bun of a tail bounding between two dark warehouses.

The moon-size headlamp of the locomotive passed in an instant, followed by a racket of driven steel and the hellish reek of fire, oil, and pulverizing metal. The force of the rocketing cars was like an arm's blow across Seeley's chest.

As if crystallized from the blast of sweet night air that trailed the train's passage, a thought dropped into Seeley's head. The thought—it sent a shiver through him—was that the motive for Robert Pearsall's murder lay not in Warshaw's perspiring progress up and down a football field, measuring every yard of his team's advance and retreat, but in the entrepreneur's observation at a charity auction that the two bleeding warriors should split their bid. It was a spark of intuition, nothing more. But if it was true, then everything Seeley had accomplished in the trial so far was now irrevocably going to recoil back at him.

The juniper fragrance of gin blossomed on Seeley's tongue, and he craved a drink—gin, vodka, scotch, anything so long as it was alcohol. The dark sedan, when he went into the street to look for it, was gone.

SEVENTEEN

Seeley slept little and spent most of the night and early morning sorting, arranging, and rearranging facts, rejecting some, adding others—each one felt like the touch of a dentist's drill—to the gradually expanding picture. If he was right, Leonard's purchase of Vaxtek stock had not been profligate at all, but was the sort of shrewd, cowardly calculation that he expected of his brother. Alan Steinhardt's secrets were trivial when compared to Emil Thorpe's. How many other facts still escaped his grasp? What did Chris Palmieri know?

Rain poured steadily outside the hotel window as Seeley dressed. He borrowed an umbrella from the desk clerk, but passed up the hotel taxi line to walk the mile to Battery Street and the office. Abandoned on an early Sunday morning, the streets and sidewalks of the financial district underlined in thick charcoal strokes the isolation that Seeley now felt from his client and his case. Rain silvered the gray buildings and streamed onto the sidewalks. What client, Seeley thought. What case?

A war room in the middle of trial would ordinarily be a shambles of notebooks, half-used legal pads, and the remains of Chinese takeout, but Tina had done a good job keeping papers filed and notebooks reshelved. When Seeley came into the conference room, Palmieri was already there, his back to the rain-streaked glass, studying the black deposition binder for Thomas Koosmann, the Washington University epidemiologist who would be Thorpe's first witness tomorrow morning. In chinos, loafers, and polo shirt, his face flushed with health, Palmieri looked like he had come directly from a workout at his gym. A sweater was draped over his slender shoulders.

Seeley glanced quickly through the papers that Palmieri slid across the polished tabletop. There was a summary of Koosmann's deposition, proposed questions for cross-examination, and a memo from a junior associate at Heilbrun, Hardy collecting gossip from lawyers around the country about the epidemiologist's tics and foibles as a witness. Seeley pushed them to the side.

“How do you think we're doing, Chris?”

“Pretty well. We've taken a few hits, but the jury looks like it's with us.”

“Do you think we're doing
too
well?”

The question should have surprised Palmieri, but for a long moment it didn't, and this indicated to Seeley that his second chair already knew what he himself had just begun to piece together.

Finally Palmieri said, “What do you mean?”

“Why didn't you tell Chaikovsky that she had no choice—that she had to stay at a hotel in the city?”

Palmieri reddened. He had a habit, when defending himself, of closing his eyes and pushing back from the table, and he started doing this now, but caught himself. “I didn't think it was important. She told me she always got up early and there wouldn't be any problem making it to court in time.”

“Why did you wait until the last minute, when Steinhardt was about to perjure himself, before you showed me the discrepancy between his lab notes and his travel dates?”

Palmieri shot out of the chair, his eyes fierce. “You've been after me since that mistake with your pro hac papers.”

If there wasn't a conference table between them, Seeley was sure the young partner would have lunged at him.

“If you think I'm not carrying my weight, then run the damn case by yourself. That's pretty much what you've been doing anyway.”

A gust of wind drove a sheet of rain in crazed patterns across the glass. Instinct told Seeley not only that Palmieri knew that Vaxtek and St. Gall had made a deal, but also that the young partner had reacted to it just as Seeley had: he had no choice but to sabotage his own client's case.

“I'm sorry, Chris.” He waited for Palmieri to take his chair again. “My point wasn't to criticize you.”

“Whatever your point was, you certainly did a good job disguising it.”

Seeley knew that if he couldn't tell Palmieri about his suspicions, he could tell no one. He had weighed the alternatives for, it seemed, most of last night. There was the risk, a real one, that Palmieri was himself a part of the puzzle, just one that Seeley had not yet connected to the rest. But the fact remained that if completing the trial was the only way Seeley could reverse what had happened, he could not do so without Palmieri's help.

Watching Palmieri for his reaction, Seeley said, “I think this is a collusive lawsuit. I think Vaxtek and St. Gall set this case up between them to get a court to hold that the AV/AS patent is valid, and then to split the profits.”

The young lawyer's expression revealed nothing. Seeley had given him too much time to prepare himself.

Palmieri said, “And you think I'm part of this collusion.”

“No,” Seeley said, “just the opposite. I think you're trying to sabotage their deal. You're trying to wreck Vaxtek's case so the jury will vote against the patent.”

Palmieri pushed back from the table, and this time closed his eyes. “Why would they need to collude?”

Palmieri didn't trust him and, for that reason, wouldn't admit that he knew about the collusion or that he had done anything to obstruct it. Otherwise, Seeley thought, he just would have told him that he was wrong, and that he wasn't trying to undermine the deal between the two companies.

“Let's say . . .” To his surprise, Seeley found that his heart was racing. He took a breath and started over. “Let's say that a small pharmaceutical company develops a blockbuster drug and gets a patent on it. Time passes. The company's chairman receives a visit from an executive at another pharma company, but this one's a giant, a multinational.”

Seeley remembered Leonard's story about his encounter with St. Gall's head of research at a scientific conference.
We're going to crush you
.

“We can copy AV/AS, the executive tells Warshaw, and you can sue us for patent infringement. We would put on a strong defense and, with our resources, we'd overpower you. In all probability we'd convince a jury that your patent's invalid. But how would that benefit us? AV/AS would no longer be protected by a patent, and anyone would be free to manufacture it. After you spent all this money to develop AV/AS, and we made our lawyers rich, where would that leave the two of us? We'd be scrambling to compete with the generic houses to sell AV/AS at Wal-Mart prices.”

Palmieri was listening, but his expression told Seeley nothing.

“All of this is informal,” Seeley said. “The St. Gall executive says, ‘On the other hand, wouldn't it be interesting if . . .’ and Warshaw says, ‘Very interesting if . . .’ and by the time they're done, they've agreed—nothing in writing of course—that Vaxtek will sue St. Gall for patent infringement, as it planned to do, and that St. Gall will attack the patent's validity. But, as its part of the deal, St. Gall will mount the weakest possible attack on the patent, guaranteeing that the jury will uphold the patent. Vaxtek will win the lawsuit and St. Gall will lose.”

“What's does St. Gall get out of the deal?”

“Vaxtek gives them a license to manufacture and sell AV/AS and agrees not to license the patent to anyone else. The two companies divide the world market between them. I figure Vaxtek gets North and South America and St. Gall gets Europe, Africa, and Asia.”

“They could get the same result by settling the case without a trial.”

Palmieri knew better than that, and Seeley wondered why he was still resisting.

“No,” Seeley said. “They need a formal judgment from a court that the patent is valid. That's the only way they can be sure they'll have the AV/AS market entirely to themselves. Some other company could challenge the patent, but when was the last time you heard of a competitor doing that? Once a court decides that a patent is valid, no one is going to go to the expense of trying to prove that it's invalid. But, for this to work, they have to have a court decision that the patent is valid.”

That was what Warshaw had said about the two crazed bidders at the charity auction. If they were smart, they'd stop the auction and split the prize. This is what Warshaw did with St. Gall. If keeping his patent meant making a deal with his adversary, he would do that. That the scheme would price AV/AS beyond the reach of AIDS victims who needed it most meant no more to him than did implicating his lawyer in a fraudulent lawsuit.

“The federal circuit could reverse the decision on appeal.”

Palmieri had to know that this objection, too, was weak.

“There won't be an appeal,” Seeley said. “And St. Gall won't move for a new trial or for the judge to overrule the jury's verdict. It's all part of the deal.”

“This is just a theory,” Palmieri said. “It's all hypothetical.”

Do you want facts, Seeley thought, a glimpse of the treacheries that kept me up all last night? He said, “Did it seem unusual to you how gentle Thorpe and Fischler were with our witnesses on cross? I kidded myself that it was because we prepared the witnesses so well. Why didn't they go after the discrepancies in Steinhardt's dates? They had to know about them.”

“If they knew our case was that weak they could have fl attened us.”

“That's exactly my point. They did know, and they could have fl attened us. But if they did that, if our patent was declared invalid, the price of AV/AS would fall through the floor.” Why was his bright second chair being so willfully obtuse? “They'd rather have half a loaf than none.” Another slice of Warshaw's wisdom. “And, remember,” Seeley said, “each company had a hammerlock on the other. St. Gall may have known about Steinhardt's double bookkeeping, but Vaxtek had its security officer's report on a St. Gall employee being in Steinhardt's lab alone, at night.”

It occurred to Seeley that, in a puzzle that fit with all the precision of a nightmare, he hadn't thought about Lily's role. Or Leonard's. “Some people,” he said as much to himself as to Palmieri, “are going to make a fortune if they bought Vaxtek stock, betting on the outcome of this case.”

“It's strange,” Palmieri said, “you spinning out a conspiracy theory.”

“Why strange?”

“Bob Pearsall dies, and of all the lawyers Vaxtek could hire to take over the case, they choose you—the brother of the company's head of research. No offense”—his voice was taut and close to breaking—“but if I were speculating about collusion, you'd be right at the center of it.”

This was why Palmieri was resisting. He was terrified. Someone had killed Pearsall because of what he knew, and now Palmieri was afraid for himself. Michael Seeley—Leonard Seeley's brother—was the last person he would confide in. It was Seeley who had been obtuse, not Palmieri.

“You're wrong about me,” Seeley said.

“How would I know that?”

“Farnsworth hears motions tomorrow morning at seven-thirty. I'm going to ask for a mistrial.”

“You're going to do this in open court—in front of Barnum and Thorpe?”

“I'll do it ex parte. Just the judge and me in chambers.”

“She'll never see you alone in the middle of a trial.”

“She's going to have to.”

“Even if she does, what makes you think she'll believe you? Where's your proof?”

“Farnsworth's been around a lot of trials. She'll understand.”

“And if she doesn't give you a mistrial, she's going to watch everything you do. Every question you ask Thorpe's witnesses. Or don't ask.”

Cross-examination, when it works, does so in only one direction—to weaken an adversary's case. Seeley didn't need Palmieri to remind him that it would be impossible to try to reverse the course of the trial through cross-examination of Thorpe's witnesses. This was why he had to get Farnsworth to declare a mistrial.

“You mean she'll be watching to see if I try to sabotage my client's case on cross the way you tried to do on direct?”

“I never said I did that. You did.”

Seeley slumped back in his chair and picked up the Koosmann papers. Deciding what questions to ask the epidemiologist was going to consume even more time than he ordinarily gave to preparing for cross-examination. Palmieri was right. If Farnsworth didn't believe him about the collusion, and refused to declare a mistrial, she would be watching his every step in the courtroom. But so, too, would the lawyers who helped set up the collusive lawsuit, Barnum and Thorpe.

“Let's get to work,” he said.