A Patent Lie (7 page)

Seeley's father cried out, “This is the ungrateful monster you raised.” He threw Seeley against the stove, and brought the gun up to his son's face. “How are you going to pay for this?”

Inside Seeley, the snapping spark of mischief fired into something fiercer. His eyes, when they caught his father's, turned defiant. As if on its own, his hand shot up and in a single swift motion seized the gun. His other hand, clenched into a fist, swung forward, striking his father high on the jaw. Seeley felt every whisker of the man's stubble. As much from surprise as from the force of the blow, his father dropped in an instant, crashing onto the floor, blood pouring from his nose. Seeley stood above the sprawling figure, his heart throbbing, but holding the gun steady with both hands. He aimed at his father's heaving chest. He heard himself shouting, “What kind of bully threatens his family with a gun? What kind of coward does that?”

His mother came away from the wall. “Don't speak to your father like that! You put that gun away and apologize this instant!”

Squeeze the trigger.
Seeley remembered the seasoned cop instructing the rookie on some long-ago television show.
Squeeze, don't pull
. Seeley tasted metal at the back of his mouth. Carefully, he pointed the barrel toward where he imagined his father's heart would be, inches from the center of the man's chest. He squeezed. Nothing happened; the trigger, locked by the safety catch, failed to move.

His father lay motionless, the blood now bubbling from his nostrils onto the linoleum. Seeley's mother came away from the wall and grabbed for the gun, but Seeley caught her by the wrist, wrenching her arm upward. An emotion flashed behind her pale eyes that Seeley had seen before, but this time he didn't know whether it was hatred or fear, or both. Her look stopped him as he realized what he had almost done. He had never struck his father before nor stopped his mother from striking him. Now everything had changed in an instant. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief, but at the same time he understood that when he seized the gun, when he aimed it at his father, when he squeezed the trigger, he had crossed a line from which retreat was impossible. He could no longer live in his parents' house.

Seeley took a room that night at the downtown Y and for the remaining years of high school he shuttled between the Y and couches in his teammates' homes. He went to a local college, Canisius, on an athletic scholarship and took a one-room apartment off Chippewa Street, downtown, supporting himself from tutoring and part-time jobs. He did much the same when he left Buffalo to go to Harvard for law school.

Thirty-two years later, adjusting the heater vent in the rental car, Seeley could still smell the fumes of his father's alcohol. He could see the four of them frozen there in that afflicted house: him holding his mother's arm aloft, as if he were a referee and she a victorious prizefighter, her mouth locked in a wordless
O
; his father, sprawled dumbstruck and bleeding on the linoleum floor; and Lenny hiding in the bedroom behind the closed door. It was at that moment, Seeley now remembered, that a burst of canned laughter exploded from the television.

FIVE

There is a quality to the early-morning light in San Francisco that exists in no other American city. The sun shines silver, burnishing the stone-and-brick buildings like a jeweler's cloth. Only in the medieval quarters of old European cities had Seeley seen such light. Stepping out from the lobby of the Huntington Hotel, he smelled the scent of freshly mown grass from the pocket park across California Street at the top of Nob Hill. A large bird crowed, and the breeze coming off the bay mixed the smells of roasting coffee and just-baked sourdough.

Seeley hadn't taken a break from work for years; he had no talents as a tourist and idleness made him irritable. Setting out for the half-mile walk to the Pearsall apartment on Vallejo Street on a morning like this was all the vacation he needed. The day bristled with challenge, starting with Alan Steinhardt. Seeley had no reason to believe that St. Gall's corporate ethics were above industrial espionage, but he was also certain that neither Leonard nor Ed Barnum had told him the full story of Lily Warren's visit to Steinhardt's lab or her attempted theft of Vaxtek secrets. If, as Leonard said, Vaxtek had caught her alone in Steinhardt's lab, it would have given the story to the DA and to the press—unless Vaxtek, too, had something to hide.

What mattered right now was that St. Gall had dropped Warren as a witness, which meant that Seeley was free to talk to her without going through the company's lawyers. Before leaving the hotel he left a message for Tina to track down her telephone number.

The apartment building on Vallejo was 1930s Art Deco, and the lobby, which rose two stories, was all dark wood and ceramic tile the color of sandstone. The plaster molding along the ceiling was a maze of geometric designs, Aztec in their complexity. Seeley could imagine that, however warm it was outside, the temperature in the lobby never rose above the coolness of a crypt.

At a small desk, the doorman was talking to a girl. Seeley asked for the Pearsall apartment and, before the man could respond, the girl stuck out her hand.

“You're Mr. Seeley. I'm Lucy Pearsall, Robert Pearsall's daughter.”

In her green plaid school uniform, the girl was of a piece with the morning: clear-eyed, bright, self-assured. Seeley studied her face for some sign of loss or sorrow, but other than the dark shadows beneath her eyes, found none. Her hand, when Seeley took it, was small, but the grip was a young athlete's.

“My mother's expecting you. She said you're taking over Dad's case.” It was a statement of fact. Nothing in her voice or her expression asked for sympathy. “He was the best.”

“That's what I heard.”

When she leaned to look around him, Seeley turned. A yellow school bus had pulled into the space in front of the building.

“It was good to meet you,” she said. She swung a bulky backpack over her shoulder and was out the door.

“Impressive kid,” Seeley said to the doorman.

“Mr. Pearsall's death was a knockout blow to the two of them.” The man was looking at the school bus, not at Seeley. “But neither of them would ever let you know that.”

“Could you call up to the apartment for me?”

The man talked as he dialed the apartment telephone. “Since it happened, Mrs. Pearsall won't let her wait for the bus outside. She has to stay in here with me.”

A voice came on the line, and after the man finished and put down the receiver he said, “You know, Mr. Pearsall wasn't the kind of man that can be replaced.”

Seeley thought to tell him that he hadn't come courting. Instead, he just thanked the man for his help.

“Apartment 7C,” the man said. “Second door on your right.”

When Judy Pearsall opened the door, Seeley saw at once the source of Lucy's forthright manner. The face was handsome and intelligent and her handshake was the same firm grip as her daughter's. She wore no makeup and had made no effort to disguise the lines at the corners of her dark green eyes. Her sandy hair was cut short.

She led Seeley into a living room with tall French windows looking out onto Vallejo Street, busy with traffic. Seeley declined the offer of coffee and quickly surveyed the room. Any one of the three up-holstered chairs could have been Robert Pearsall's favorite. He took a corner of the couch.

“I'm sorry about your loss.”

“I appreciate your saying that.” The words were measured, honest. “But, you know, I can't just curl up into a hole and disappear. It wouldn't do my daughter any good, or me.”

Already, Seeley thought, she had fallen into the habit of the singular.
My
daughter.

“I know you're here to look through Bob's papers, and I'm glad to help you if I can. But, so you don't waste your time, you need to know right off, Bob did not kill himself.”

When Seeley called to arrange the visit, he told her that he was looking for her husband's trial notebook. There was no reason for her to connect this to an interest in how Pearsall died other than that, in Judy's mind right now, everything was connected to his death.

“What do the police say?”

“You don't look like a foolish man, Mr. Seeley, and if you're a trial lawyer, you've had experience with the police. The police don't know anything. Whatever they say is speculation. It's not factual and it's not based on anything they know about Bob.”

The framed black-and-white photograph on the side table showed an erect, wide-shouldered man in corduroys and denim shirt. Binoculars were slung around his neck and he was smiling broadly. In the distance behind him, the face of a mountain was split by a waterfall of astonishing height. Pearsall looked like a grown-up Eagle Scout.

“Did he seem different in any way?”

“That's what the police asked.”

“What did you tell them?”

“He seemed to be distracted the last few days before he died.”

“He was in the middle of preparing for a trial,” Seeley said. “That wouldn't be unusual.”

“I've seen Bob through a lot of trials, and that was one of the things about him: he was totally devoted to his cases, but only in the office or the courtroom. He never brought any of that home.”

“And you didn't ask what was bothering him.”

“Just once. He said he couldn't tell me, and left it at that. I knew better than to ask him what he meant.”

Judy didn't strike Seeley as a woman who could be dismissed so easily.

She must have seen the skepticism in his expression. “You have to understand, Mr. Seeley, in our marriage there was nothing we couldn't talk about, unless it was something to do with one of Bob's cases. Bob would never betray a client's confidence.”

“So you think that, whatever was bothering him, it was something a client wouldn't want anyone to know about.”

“That would seem logical, wouldn't it?”

Sure it would, Seeley thought, along with at least a dozen other possibilities, including a romance gone wrong, money problems, blackmail, drugs, or—he looked again at the good-humored face in the photograph—a despair so profound that living no longer made sense.

“Is it possible that someone made a threat on his life?”

“I don't know. The police asked me that. It's not the kind of thing Bob would talk about. Bob was old school. He thought his role was to protect his family, not worry us.”

And, if Seeley's speculation about despair was right, to put on an upbeat front even though he was in the most excruciating pain.

“And that's why you won't let your daughter wait for the school bus outside the building. To protect her.”

For the first time, there was a break in Judy's composure. She pressed her hands against the arms of the chair, as if to steady herself. “A mother's instinct,” she said. “Bob and I didn't marry until late. He was already in his forties when Lucy was born. She's our only child.” She rose. “This isn't helping with why you're here. I'm sure you have a great deal to do. Let me show you Bob's study. It's where I had them put the boxes from the office.”

There was a desk in Pearsall's study with a computer and what looked like a fax machine. Books filled the ceiling-high shelves and spilled over into piles on the floor. Seeley examined a precarious stack of hardcover and paperbound books next to a well-used leather recliner. Kant's
Critique of Practical Reason
was on top, works by Hume, Rawls, and Dworkin beneath it.

“Moral philosophy,” Judy said. “It was one of Bob's hobbies. Like his bird pictures.”

Seeley hadn't noticed the photographs of brilliantly colored birds lining the one wall where the bookshelves were only chest-high. The pictures were close-ups taken with a long lens and, Seeley imagined, a great deal of patience. They weren't snapshots, either. Each photograph was carefully composed and captured its subject in full light. Pearsall had an artist's eye.

On the floor, at the foot of the shelves, were six corrugated bankers boxes with
HEILBRUN, HARDY AND CROCKETT
printed in large block letters.

Judy said, “Those are the boxes the firm sent over.” She hadn't moved from the doorway. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Seeley cleared away a corner of a library table piled with still more philosophy books and set a box on it. On top, when he opened the box, was a silver-framed photograph of a younger Lucy in a bathing suit, seated on her mother's lap. Beneath this was a stack of framed certificates acknowledging Pearsall's good work for the Legal Aid Society, the Sierra Club, the San Francisco Bar Association, and a prisoners' rights project in Chicago. A certificate attesting to Pearsall's membership in the exclusive American College of Trial Lawyers reminded Seeley that he had misplaced his own certificate long ago.

He tried the next box, and the one next to it, but found nothing that looked like a trial notebook. In the fourth box, under a layer of bar association magazines, he found the stenographer's pads that Tina said she saw Pearsall sketch in at the end of the day. Seeley selected one. “U. S. v. Gunnison Oil, 6-17-95,” was printed neatly in ink on the cardboard cover, and when Seeley flipped the cover open, the notebook gave off the musty smell of old paper. He riffled quickly through the pages. The book was a sketch pad filled with pen-and-ink drawings. Some were of sailboats on the bay, as Seeley expected, but most were portraits.

Seeley turned back to the first page. On it was a quick but accurate sketch of a well-known university economist who often testified as an expert witness in antitrust cases. Then Seeley saw that in the same loose hand as the drawings—which is why he had at first missed it—Pearsall had written, “Theory of lost profits has hole in it. Check with WFB.” Paging through the rest of the notebook, Seeley found similar comments, no more than a line or two on any sheet, written with a flourish beneath, or sometimes above, the portraits.

From Pearsall's comments, and two or three recognizable faces, Seeley immediately understood what the steno pads were.
U. S. v. Gunnison Oil
was an antitrust case in the 1990s and here, in pictures of the key players—witnesses, lawyers, the trial judge—Seeley had found Pearsall's trial notebook. Pearsall knew what any experienced trial lawyer knows: not only are cases mostly about facts, but no facts are more important than the personalities of the participants. Instead of writing extensive notes to himself, Pearsall did what an artist would naturally do: he captured the theory of his case, and the holes in his adversary's, by sketching the cast of characters, with the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Seeley rapidly searched through the fifth box, but the notebooks went no further than the 1990s. Only at the bottom of the sixth box—Tina had organized the notebooks in reverse chronological order—did he find three stenographer's pads labeled “Vaxtek v. St. Gall.” The notebooks, like the one from the Gunnison case years earlier, had a few street scenes, but were mostly filled with pen-and-ink sketches of witnesses and lawyers. Some pages had only pictures, not words. On one of these, a cluster of three spare drawings of Chris Palmieri revealed not only the young lawyer's intensity but also Pearsall's affection for him. On most of the pages, a sentence or two connected the portrait to a concern Pearsall had about the case or a trial tactic he planned to employ. A head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman in judicial robes took up a whole page in the second Vaxtek notebook.
Ellen Farnsworth. First patent trial. Build legal foundation slowly.
Pearsall probably made the drawing during an early hearing. The information on the judge, and the caution, though mundane, would be useful.

Several drawings of St. Gall's lead lawyer, Emil Thorpe, were scattered through the second notebook. From the changing backgrounds, it appeared that Pearsall had sketched the portraits over a period of time, each portrait depicting Thorpe's dissolute features from a different angle. Studying the images, it struck Seeley that Pearsall had made them with the same patience and keen observation as he had given to his bird photographs. The trial lawyer made the sketches to gain a purchase on his adversary, to understand what was driving him.

The early pages of the last notebook were sketches of St. Gall witnesses made during their depositions, each with a name and a comment or two beneath the portrait. Following these was a single portrait of Alan Steinhardt. With features that verged on caricature, Pearsall had uncannily captured the man's self-absorption and pomposity. An eyebrow arched ever so slightly; the ears elongated and sharpened; the goateed chin pointed, as in life. For a glancing moment, the portrait could have been of the devil himself. The words beneath were,
What else is A. S. hiding?

Seeley put the steno pads back in their boxes, keeping out the three that Pearsall had filled with sketches for the Vaxtek trial, and returned the boxes to their place beneath the shelves. He sank into the worn leather recliner and leafed through each of the Vaxtek notebooks a second time, looking . . . looking for what? Easing the recliner back, he stared for several minutes at the ceiling, letting his thoughts slide back and forth past each other. Then he pulled the chair upright and looked again at the bird portraits on the wall and the volumes of moral philosophy stacked on the floor and on the table. His right hand resting on the small stack of stenographer's pads, like a witness about to take an oath, Seeley decided that Pearsall had not taken his own life.