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 cafe 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.
“I'm sure all your clients are grateful to you for winning their cases. But if you started getting clients who could pay you what you're worth, would that violate your principles?”
As she spoke, Mrs. Rosziak smoothed more lotion onto her hands, one hand wringing the other. It occurred to Seeley how little he knew of women's habits.
“How many lawyers can say they're doing what they want to do?”
“Whatever dark cloud you have hanging over you, it's not going to go away by your hiding out here. Down at the cafeteria in the county building they say you're the mystery man. You lost a big case in California and someone died who shouldn't have.”
Buffalo, though a city of 300,000, was in many ways a small town.
“Tell your friends they watch too many crime shows.” He just wanted her to leave. “Thanks for sticking around,” Seeley said. “I'll keep an eye on Rudy.”
“You have a court date at two.” She started collecting the bottles from the desktop to drop into her oversized purse. “You know, to look at the two of you, you wouldn't think you were brothers.”
“Leonard takes after his mother.” Fair, soft Leonard, always the victim. And, Seeley thought, I take after my father. Large and coarseboned like him, but chased by my own demons.
“I wasn't just talking about your looks.”
“I wasn't either,” Seeley said.
“With the holidays coming, you want to be with your family.” That had been Leonard's unspoken plea: Come for Thanksgiving. Christmas.
“I'm sure that whatever happened between the two of you, he's forgiven you.” She was watching Seeley carefully to see if she had overstepped. When he didn't respond, she said, “Why else would he call? Why would he fly out here and beg you to take his case?”
To rescue me, Seeley remembered. Do the conditions of my life look so disastrous that I would need to be rescued? He put a laugh in his voice. “You should have been a trial lawyer.”
“And you're not going to find the answers hanging around here. You could use some sunshine. The one time Mr. Rosziak took me to San Francisco, everyone was smiling.”
Sure, Seeley thought, even when they throw themselves in front of commuter trains.
“Are you going to go?”
Seeley said, “You'll be the first to know.”
She gave him a resigned look and finished collecting her creams and lotions and keys from the desktop. Seeley had been married for eight years-and divorced for less than one-and he had been in relationships with women before and since, but the unfairness of the imbalance still galled him. As profound as his ignorance was of what they were thinking and of what drove them, women knew exactly where the buttons and levers were that could turn or twist him in any direction, giving him no choice but to resist. Not just Mrs. Rosziak; women.
He went into the office to get ready for court and to find out from Rudy what the spread was for the Bills game on Sunday.
TWO
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
