A Patent Lie (27 page)

At 11:20 a.m., she adjourned for the day.

TWENTY-THREE

For Seeley, the hardest part of a trial was the waiting. He turned down an offer to spend the weekend with Palmieri and his partner at their cabin in Sonoma. Lily was going to be working at the lab until late Saturday night, but invited him to come to Half Moon Bay on Sunday. He filled the rest of Saturday aimlessly walking through surprisingly empty San Francisco neighborhoods and visiting art museums. As a boy in Buffalo, he had found consolation, even meaning, in the city's single art museum, but now the prints and paintings on the walls only left him feeling restless and on edge. At the peak of his practice in New York, he would fill the vacuum at the end of a major trial with preparations for the next one. But no big trial awaited him.

On Sunday, Lily had prepared a picnic for the beach, and when Seeley objected that it might be unwise for them to be seen together—if he saw any reporters outside the town house in Cypress Cove he would have just driven by—she insisted that the gray sky and strong winds at the shore would keep all but the hardiest picnickers away.

As Lily promised, the beach was almost empty, and the steep dunes offered fine shelter for a lunch of roast chicken, French bread, and green salad, with fresh lemonade from a thermos. Surfboarders in their black wet suits looked like water sprites against the horizon, and Seeley envied them the patience with which, straddling their boards, they waited hours, it seemed, for the right wave.

Seeley took off his shoes and rolled up his pants at the water's edge. The firm sand made him want to run, not walk. He and Lily talked about movies, art, places they had visited, but not about Odum's story. It was as if they had just completed a marathon and were too consumed by exhaustion to revisit the race. Still, Seeley's thoughts drifted back to the trial. If the jury voted that Vaxtek's patent was valid, the company's public relations people would immediately crown Steinhardt as a savior and brand Lily as a thief. Any hope that she might have for a future in science in the United States, or anywhere else, would dissolve.

Lily said, “My friends tell me I'm pretty poor company when I'm waiting for a result in the lab that's completely out of my control.”

Distracted by the water and wind, as well as thoughts of the trial, it took Seeley a moment to catch her meaning. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I can't get my mind off the jury. I'm sure I'm lousy company.”

“Let's just say you're a little preoccupied.” She squeezed his hand. “We can get together after the trial's over. I'll make dim sum this time.”

On Monday morning, the Golden Gate Bridge was lost in fog and the light falling onto Pearsall's desk—Seeley still thought of it as belonging to him—was a watery gray. He tossed a handful of telephone messages taken by the weekend operator into the wastebasket along with a note from Tina that his voice mailbox was filled to capacity. From the scraps of notes that he kept over the last two weeks, he methodically filled in the neat grids of Heilbrun, Hardy's time sheets, pausing once to consider a question of legal ethics that he had never faced before: Is it ethical to bill a client for time spent trying to destroy the client's case? The question stopped him for no more than a few seconds. Vaxtek had bought his time, not his moral choices.

Until Tina came into the office and switched on the light, Seeley didn't notice that he was working in the dark. She handed him two days of trial transcripts that a paralegal had marked with yellow tags where he or Palmieri made an objection at trial so that he could identify any overruled objections that might be the basis for an appeal. He didn't tell Tina, but it was just another necessary charade. There would be no appeal. If Vaxtek won, neither party would risk having the result overturned by a higher court, and if it lost they wouldn't risk having the result affirmed. Warshaw had been exaggerating when he said that he didn't mind risk, only competition. In his sandbox, there was no room for either.

Tina said, “The rest should be ready for you this afternoon.”

Palmieri called from the courthouse. The jurors had asked Judge Farnsworth to clarify two points of law in the instructions she read to them that morning. Jury instructions in patent cases usually follow a standard format, but before the trial started Farnsworth allowed the parties to propose changes to the usual formula. Seeley's proposed changes slanted the instructions in favor of the patent's validity, and he had been surprised when Thorpe didn't object. He regretted those changes now, but reminded himself that he needed just one juror who had seen or guessed about the news coverage of Lily's story to vote for a mistrial. That lone juror—Seeley's compass regularly pointed to the kid—would need to be sufficiently obstinate to resist the others and, ultimately, to withstand Judge Farnsworth's ardent seduction.

On Tuesday morning, Seeley called his office in Buffalo, but Mrs. Rosziak didn't answer. She hadn't been there yesterday, either, and this worried him. She had not missed a morning since she started working for him, and never left the office before noon. His feeling of dread—had something happened to her husband or son?—was, he knew, irrational, another affliction of his idleness.

Barnum came in after ten and took the chair across from Seeley, propping his feet on the desk. “That was a real roller-coaster ride you took us on the last couple of weeks.”

“Like the county fair,” Seeley said. He had no desire to pick over the details of the trial with Barnum and wondered why the general counsel had come. “Everything except the cotton candy and corn dogs.”

“You sent the Chinese girl to the
Chronicle,
didn't you?”

Seeley decided that it was Barnum who had told Thorpe about his lunch with Lily. He said, “If you ever met Lily Warren, you'd know that no one gets to send her anywhere.”

Barnum's smile disappeared. “You don't really believe what that reporter wrote in the
Chronicle
about Thorpe?”

“What do you believe, Ed?”

“I thought Thorpe was brilliant. I would have hired him if St. Gall hadn't already retained him.”

The weekend had obviously been busy for Barnum, with meetings and conference calls with Warshaw, Thorpe, and Dusollier. Doubtless, St. Gall executives in Switzerland had also been involved. The two companies that had set out to collude in a trial were now coordinating their positions for the aftermath. If, as they had planned, the jury voted to uphold the AV/AS patent, everyone would agree that Thorpe had fought gallantly to attack it. And if the jury voted against the patent, or failed to reach a verdict . . .

Now Seeley saw the reason for Barnum's visit. The lawyers and executives had not only scripted their companies' response to the possible trial outcomes; each, including Barnum, had plotted to protect his own future. Seeley was certain that Thorpe had begun building his own protective wall the day he took the case.

Barnum said, “We thought Bob Pearsall designed a brilliant offense.”

“We?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said, ‘we.’ You and who else?”

“Well, me . . . and Joel, of course.”

Warshaw hadn't been near the trial, nor would he have read the transcript. “We” was Barnum, Thorpe, and Dusollier, and it was now clear to Seeley who would bear the blame if the jury came back with less than a victory for Vaxtek. A criminal defendant can sometimes win a reversal of his conviction by arguing that his trial lawyer was less than effective. This didn't happen in patent cases, that Seeley knew, but items leaked to the press by Vaxtek's public relations firm, hinting at Seeley's distractions during the trial, might salvage Barnum's career.

Seeley pushed the pile of transcripts across the desk to Barnum. “If you think I wasn't effective as your counsel, look at the record. I built as strong a case for the AV/AS patent as any patent owner could hope for, even when I had to save your star scientist from committing perjury.”

Barnum rested shaking fingers on the papers, but Seeley didn't give him a chance to speak. “You were in the courtroom every day, except for closing argument when you were too scared to show your face. If you thought I was wrecking your company's case, it was your job to let me know. To let Warshaw know, too.”

Barnum's smile was a grim scar. Seeley had left him no room to distance himself from his trial counsel.

“What was it you told me when we were in Leonard's office—you run your cases with an iron hand.”

“The Chinese girl's going down, you know.”

“How's that?”

“When the jury votes that the patent's valid, it's going to vindicate us and Steinhardt. You can be sure our people will be available for interviews. And, if anyone asks who this girl is, what can we say? She's an ambitious single woman from a country that leads the world in piracy and industrial espionage.”

“It sounds like you and your friends had a productive weekend.”

“Let me know as soon as the jury comes back.”

“You'll be the first on my list, Ed.”

At 12:30 Palmieri called to tell Seeley that the jury was deadlocked. Judge Farnsworth had ordered them back to the jury room, and told the jurors not to return until they reached a unanimous verdict.

Seeley waited until 3:30 before calling Mrs. Rosziak at home. She picked up at once and, before he could ask, apologized for not being in the office the last two mornings. “I was visiting Harold at Buffalo General.”

Harold, her son, had been in a bar fight. Seeley wondered how gentle the police had been if they recognized Harold as the man who, just months ago, successfully sued their department for excessive use of force. “Are you okay with bail?”

“We've already posted it.” He heard the fatigue in her voice. “He's coming home as soon as the doctors let him.”

“Tell him not to talk to anyone. I'll take care of it as soon as I get back.”

There was a hesitation at the other end. “I already got him Andy Lewandowski.” Anticipating Seeley's reply, as she always did, she said, “We didn't know when you were coming back.”

“No more than a week.” Whether the jury reached a verdict or remained deadlocked, the trial would be over long before then, and he wanted to spend time with Lily. “Andy's a competent lawyer. Tell Harold he's in good hands.” Seeley would look into it when he got back.

“Are you going to stay?”

She could have been inviting a visitor to dinner, but Seeley knew what Mrs. Rosziak was asking. It was the question he'd been avoiding all the time he was in San Francisco. For years, when he was practicing in New York City, Seeley romanticized the prospect of a return to Buffalo, to a solo practice. Now, from this distance, he could see the move for what it was. Leonard was right: he'd dug a rut for himself and begun decorating it.

As Mrs. Rosziak talked, Seeley idly paged through the steno pads that Pearsall used for sketchbooks and that he had left on the credenza almost three weeks ago.

“You know what Harold says—wherever you go, there you are.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Rosziak, that's very helpful.”

In the first pad was the sketch of Farnsworth, intelligent and self-confident, and in the next, the portrait of Steinhardt, boundlessly arrogant. Seeley studied the drawings of Thorpe, looking for even the faintest trace of the man's depravity, but could find none. If Leonard was telling the truth and Pearsall had in fact conspired with Thorpe to bring the collusive lawsuit, perhaps it was because, debased himself, Pearsall was blind to it in others.

“A lawyer named Girard called last Friday. He said it wasn't a rush. He didn't want to bother you in trial.”

Nick Girard had been Seeley's partner at Boone, Bancroft and Meserve in New York. Seeley's last piece of business at Boone, Bancroft had not gone well either for the client or for the firm's partners, and when Seeley left for Buffalo, neither he nor they were unhappy about the move. But, a year later, Seeley was certain that Girard had called to ask if he would return to the partnership.

“I'll call him when I get back.” Absently, Seeley continued turning the pages in the sketchbook. At one, his hand froze. He had seen the portrait—the steel-rimmed glasses, the odd, incipient double chin—the first time he went through Pearsall's steno pads, but that was before he met St. Gall's young in-house lawyer in Judge Farnsworth's chambers. What if Dusollier was the stranger with the French accent Lucy Pearsall saw talking to her father at choir rehearsal?

Seeley cursed himself for being so preoccupied with the trial that he failed to make the connection earlier. In the etiquette of a lawyer's life, a company's in-house lawyer rarely speaks to the outside counsel of his adversary. Even if they were colluding, if St. Gall had a message to deliver to Pearsall, it would be through Thorpe or Fischler. Or Dusollier could have spoken with Barnum. If it was Dusollier who talked to Pearsall in the hallway of Lucy's school, there was no good reason for him to do so. And if Lucy had seen him, he had probably seen her.

Mrs. Rosziak said, “This lawyer, Girard, sounded like he'd be glad to talk with you.”

Talking like this with Mrs. Rosziak, about Girard, phone calls, and families, Seeley felt a spasm of panic, a sudden premonition of the Ellicott Square Building collapsing into dust, as if consumed by an explosion or a wrecking crew. “How's the building?”

“You mean the office? The usual. The radiator's on the fritz again.”

“Call Rudy. Get him to fix it.”

Tina was in the doorway and Seeley put his hand over the phone.

“Chris called. The jury's coming back. The judge wants everyone there in an hour.”

Seeley held up a hand for Tina to wait. “I'll be back on Monday. Tell Rudy to get it fixed by then.” And, forgetting about Andy Lewandowski, he said, “Remember, tell Harold not to talk to anyone.”

He rose and handed the steno pad, open to Dusollier's portrait, to Tina. “Make a copy of this picture and get it to Judy Pearsall. I think Pearsall had a fax machine in his office at home.”

Tina nodded. “I have the number.”

“Ask her to show it to Lucy. See if she recognizes him. Send it to Lieutenant Phan, too. Tell him it's from me.”

“About the jury—should I call Ed Barnum?”

“Please.”