“Don't get your hopes up. We're a heartbreaker.”
There was no score yet, but Seeley knew what she meant. In the end, in college football, strong teams beat smart ones. He said, “I only root for underdogs.”
“Leonard called last night. He said you're doing a great job on the case.”
Seeley imagined his brother worrying that he was going to tell Renata about their confrontation over Steinhardt's second set of books.
One of the men who had been talking to Renata approached, but before he could speak, she told him to go to the locker room to see if her X-rays were ready.
“Second play of the game,” she said to Seeley, “one of our wide receivers gets hit and cracks his femur.”
From his playing days, Seeley remembered the yellow-chalked rectangle as a world apart. Bodies constantly brush past as offense, defense, and special teams come on and off; from moment to moment there is the concussive, sledgehammer force of the game that no spectator in the stands can hear or feel. The hoots and calls from the crowd were a disembodied wall of noise, and a smell like ozone crackled all about. The giant scoreboard clock moved erratically toward triple zero, but inside the rectangle it was timeless. The immediacy of the next play sucked every atom out of the dense air.
Renata put a hand on Seeley's arm and nodded downfield. On the sideline was the lumpish figure of Joel Warshaw, football jammed under his arm, hands cupped around his mouth, shouting advice to the team.
“He's in the top tier of Buck Club donors,” Renata said. “That gets him a field pass whenever he wants. I've never seen him miss a home game.”
Seeley watched the entrepreneur. At every down, he moved with the play, running along the sidelines, screaming at the players, stopping only to talk with other men, dressed like him in chinos and Stanford sweatshirts and caps. Several times he passed by the chalked-in rectangle but didn't appear to notice Seeley or Renata.
Renata's other assistant rushed up with the suitcase-sized surgeon's kit and in the next moment was following her onto the field.
Seeley thought about the trial. No matter how many times he told himself that his examination of Steinhardt had violated no legal or ethical rules, he came up short. He should have caught the discrepancy in dates earlier and refused to let Steinhardt testify. It was no consolation that the American justice system left it to his adversary through cross-examination to root out untruth, nor was it a comfort that his remaining witnesses had been as honest and seamless in their testimony as the first three, and that St. Gall's attacks had left few bruises on his case.
Renata's assistant returned from the locker room with a legal-sized black envelope under his arm.
“The doc's amazing,” he said to Seeley. “How do you know her?”
“We're related,” Seeley said.
When Renata came off the field, she took the envelope the assistant gave her to a bench to study the film. Seeley looked away, and in the next moment a mass of bodies tumbled toward him like the onrush of a wave. Less than a yard from him, a healthy farm boy's face, pink except for the black smudge of grease high on each cheek, looked up at him from under the pile. The quarterback had taken some elbows going down and there was a glimmer of pain in the intelligent eyes, but what took Seeley back to his own college play was the humor he also saw there: What am I doing here, with all these big guys on top of me?
Renata came to Seeley's side.
“Hey, Doc,” the boy said.
The players peeled themselves off the boy and he managed a smile.
“You okay, Ron?”
“Never better.” He lifted himself into a crouch, steadied himself for a moment, then rose and limped off to the huddle that was forming.
Seeley said, “How's your receiver?”
“His season's over.” She slid the X-ray back into the envelope. “When Leonard said you were doing a great job in the trial, I figured something was wrong.”
She knew Leonard almost as well as he did.
“Nothing important,” Seeley said.
Washington scored a touchdown and the extra point, then it was halftime, and Renata went off to the locker room with the team.
Warshaw came to the edge of the rectangle and gestured to Seeley. The air had turned cool, but sweat streamed down his unlined face, and his voice when he spoke was several decibels louder than necessary, as if he was still exhorting the players. “What do you think of my team?”
“Which team is that?” Seeley knew that Warshaw wouldn't be listening for an answer.
“How's my trial going?”
“Your top scientist was ready to commit perjury.” Even after the near-disaster of Steinhardt's testimony, Seeley was confident he could win the case. He had promised victory to clients before, but he'd be damned if he would do so for Joel Warshaw.
Warshaw was looking out at the field, where the Stanford band was gathering for its halftime performance. “Do you know how many wins we had last year?” He held up a plump index finger with a dimple where a knuckle would be. “One.” With the other hand, he rolled the football along the side of his thigh. “But do you know what we did to USC last month? USC's the favorite by forty-one points, and what do these rocket scientists do-beat them 24–23!”
“Steinhardt just made this a harder case than it was before.”
For the first time, Warshaw looked directly at Seeley. Perspiration had created a damp V at the neck of his cardinal sweatshirt. “That's why I hired you. Your brother and Ed Barnum told me you specialize in hard cases. I want you to do anything you have to- anything — to win this case.”
“Is that what you tell your team?”
Warshaw looked away, his gaze taking in the stadium. “They've got fifty thousand people watching. They have to play fair. You don't.”
Seeley remembered his exchange with Warshaw outside the auction tent. Here was a man who thought that slicing an infant in half was a solution, not a threat.
“You know,” Warshaw said, tossing the football from one hand to the other, “if you lose, it's going to wipe out your brother.”
Before Seeley could ask what he meant, Warshaw was on his way down the sideline, throwing the football to another man in chinos and Stanford sweatshirt.
In the third quarter, Stanford scored its first touchdown, but Washington was making fewer on-field mistakes and, if Seeley's instincts were right, was gathering physical momentum just as Stanford was losing it. The sun was going down and Renata pulled on a wind-breaker. She'd gone onto the field two more times with her crew, and when she wasn't on the field, she was busy with one player or another or with the coaches. Seeley noticed that, unlike the first half, her jaw was tight and her hands balled into fists.
Early in the final quarter, Washington made another touchdown, and then Renata was on the field again, this time attending to the downed quarterback. His helmet was off and he had propped himself up on his elbows. Renata's hand was on his leg, her assistants and the trainer looking on. For a moment she turned from the youth to look across the field to the sidelines, and her gaze, when it found Seeley, was so filled with longing that he had to turn away. When he looked again, Renata had the quarterback's hands in hers and, like playmates on a seesaw, the armored giant rose as Renata, slight but determined, pulled back.
When she returned to the sidelines, Renata said, “Why do I get stuck on these guys? Leonard says I should stick with the winners.”
That was the kind of thought that Leonard would call a philosophy. Seeley said, “Winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
In the last minute, Washington scored another touchdown and won the game.
Renata said, “I could use a glass of wine.”
Renata was in the shower at the other end of the house. In the dining room, Seeley opened the bottle of Bordeaux that she had set out earlier with two glasses. When he went into the kitchen to fill a glass with water from the tap, a salver on the countertop was piled with crab legs cracked open to reveal pink-and-white meat.
