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
