don't think she knows how to tell you.” She sipped at Seeley's champagne. “She told me about your wanderlust, how you left home when you were fifteen.”
In the fireplace, a log dropped and sent up a shower of sparks.
“She says you're like mercury, that you're impossible to grab hold of. First you go to New York, then you go back to Buffalo. She didn't say it, but I got the impression she thinks you waited until she left Buffalo before you moved back.”
“I moved to New York because I wanted more challenging cases. I went back to Buffalo because I wasn't getting the kind of cases I wanted.”
Renata emptied Seeley's glass. “Did Leonard tell you she's in Mexico with her church group? Somebody dropped out at the last minute and she took her place. I think she was afraid you wouldn't want to see her.”
This was the kind of conversation women liked, and Seeley lacked the words, the grammar, even the tone of voice it required. “I only came here to try a case.” He took the empty glass from her and returned it to the end table next to him. “Did you know Robert Pearsall?”
She followed his lead as closely as if they were dancing. “Do you mean, do I think he killed himself?”
Now that Renata had turned on the hassock to be closer to him, Seeley found it unsettling, the way she looked directly in his eyes as she talked.
“When I was an intern, I tried out a psychiatry rotation for three months before I decided to be a real doctor. There's something about suicidal patients that you don't see in the others, even the most depressed ones. There's an emptiness in the back of their eyes that just goes on and on; there's nothing there.”
“And Pearsall?”
“I don't know. I saw him at one or two parties up in the city and a couple down here. His wife's on the board of a private school we support. He always seemed agreeable, but you could see he had a deeper, serious side.” Renata hesitated. “No,” she decided, “there was always a light in his eyes. He didn't have that hopeless look.”
Leonard called out that dinner was ready, and Seeley followed Renata into another glassed-in room. Three chairs were at the end of a long table, and place mats, silver, and glasses were set in front of them along with a green salad and an open bottle of Bordeaux. The steak, sliced and heaped on a platter, was rare.
Renata said, “We were just talking about Bob Pearsall.”
Leonard filled no more than a quarter of Renata's glass, and Seeley waved him away from his.
“You only had a glass of champagne.”
“I have an early meeting tomorrow.” Leonard didn't need to know that the meeting was with Pearsall's widow, to search through the lawyer's belongings for a missing trial notebook, anymore than he needed to know that it was Renata, not he, who had emptied the glass. It was a reflex. He did the same when they were boys, protecting Leonard from anything that he thought might upset him.
“One of the mysteries of the human soul,” Leonard said. “You look at a guy like Pearsall, he seems fine to you, but you never know what's going on inside.”
Seeley said, “I was thinking about what you said, that the train was between stations when it hit him.”
Renata sipped at her wine. “Why should that be important?”
Leonard said, “You wouldn't believe my brother's sense of humor. When I went to see him in Buffalo, he asked me if I pushed him. Pearsall.”
“Mike!” Renata laughed.
It was the first time she had spoken his name, and the sudden cry felt as intimate as if she had slipped her hand into his.
Leonard speared a slice of steak from the platter. “Do you remember Billy Elrod, Mike?” He turned back to Renata. “Elrod was a little hoodlum when we were at St. Boniface, the kind of kid who picked wings off flies. Once, for a week, he went around the playground with what looked like one of those narrow jars olives come in, but filled with a clear liquid. Billy swore it was nitroglycerin, and that if anyone told the teachers, he would drop it and blow the place up. We all knew he was lying, but still with Billy you couldn't be sure. Finally, my brother here-how old were you, Mike, ten? eleven? — goes up to him and says, ‘Hey Billy, look up in the sky, there's a blimp’”-Leonard pantomimed, pointing to the ceiling-“and when Billy looks up, Mike pokes a finger into his stomach”-again, Leonard playacted the move-“so that he drops the bottle and it smashes on the ground. Of course it was just water. That's my brother's sense of humor.”
After that, the conversation drifted to Renata's childhood in Schenectady, the challenges women faced as surgeons, stories about her work as one of the Stanford football team's on-field physicians, and the constant temptation to go into research.
Leonard said to Seeley, “You didn't tell me how your meeting went with Alan Steinhardt. He's impressive, isn't he?”
“A legend.”
“Alan can be a pain in the ass, but he's a talented scientist. He's won all the prizes but the Nobel. It takes vision like his to design this kind of research, much less pull it off. Looking for an AIDS vaccine is like running a marathon, except no one gives you a map to show you the route or even how far it is to the finish line. If there is a finish line.”
Seeley said, “I need to be sure he got there all by himself, and that Lily Warren wasn't there, too.”
Renata said, “Lily Warren?”
Leonard said, “Twenty years ago, if you asked the best scientists in the business how long it would take to come up with a true AIDS vaccine, they would have told you ten years. If you asked them the same question today, do you know what they'd say?”
“Ten years?”
“AV/AS is as close to a real vaccine as anyone's come. It's not like a polio vaccine or measles. It's not a cure-all. Maybe in ten years we'll have a vaccine that is. But right now, this is the best chance we have to save some of these people. Maybe the only chance.”
Renata said, “Do I know Lily Warren?”
“She worked with Alan at UC, before he came to work for us.”
“And,” Seeley said, “she went to work for St. Gall.”
Leonard said, “St. Gall used her to try to get a look at Alan's notebooks. They were desperate to develop a vaccine strategy. From the papers he was publishing, they knew he was onto something, but they didn't know what.”
Seeley said, “How do you know that?”
“One of our security guards found her in Steinhardt's lab alone, after hours.” Leonard chewed as he spoke. “You've got a first-year lawyer on your team who made herself a hero on this. She was going through our security reports, trying to find evidence of industrial espionage, and when she sees Warren's name on one of the reports, she remembers that she was on St. Gall's witness list. That's why St. Gall agreed to stipulate priority. They'd look like common thieves if this came out at the trial.”
First the stipulation, then the story behind it. What else was his client hiding from him? “Barnum never told me this.”
Renata had finished her dinner and risen from her place. “I have an early day tomorrow. Like Mike.”
Leonard didn't hear her. “Ed must have forgotten. Our deal with St. Gall is, they don't challenge our priority, we don't go to the DA with criminal charges.”
Seeley felt Renata standing behind him. “Did Pearsall know about the deal?”
“Of course he did,” Leonard said. “He brokered it.”
“I'm glad you came,” Renata said. “Are we going to see you tomorrow night?”
Before he could answer, Leonard said, “Joel Warshaw's having a benefit at his house tomorrow night. He wants to meet you.”
Warshaw was Vaxtek's chairman, but that didn't mean Seeley had to go to parties at his house. “I have a trial to prepare for.”
“Joel doesn't come in to the office,” Leonard said. “He works out of his house. This is a command performance.”
All the more reason not to go, Seeley thought.
“Come by here first,” Renata said. “We'll drive over together. It's just a few blocks.”
“I'll see if I have the time.”
