Seeley asked himself what he was doing in his brother's house alone with his brother's wife. He dismissed the obvious reason-Lily was the only woman he wanted a relationship with right now-but could think of no others.
The sensual figures in Renata's painting gave out no more secrets about the artist than they did on Seeley's first visit. Logs and kindling waited in the fireplace, and striking a match against the rough brick-work, it occurred to Seeley that he was re-creating that last visit and, in doing so, invoking his brother's disquieting presence. He thought of how just the other day he could have clubbed Leonard in the corridor outside the courtroom.
Since he stopped drinking a year ago, Seeley had fallen into the habit of counting other people's drinks. No one, he concluded, drank as much as he did, and no one he'd met since coming to California drank the way Renata did. It occurred to him that this was why he had come home with her. Like probing an old but still-sensitive wound, he was revisiting the one great romance of his life, alcohol, to see if a spark of feeling remained. He had no desire to drink; he just missed the companionship of his old friend. Sometimes the notions that came into his head astonished Seeley. My mind, he thought, should have a warning label glued to it: for entertainment use only.
Renata came in, a glass of wine in her hand. She had put on a blouse, skirt, and heels, and either the wine or the shower had given her pale skin a gentle flush.
She glanced at the fire as she took the chair across from him. “There's a cracked crab in the kitchen if you're hungry.”
“I saw.”
She noticed the water in his glass. “No wine? We have beer, too. Gin, vodka.”
“I've already had more than my share.” He tilted the glass in a mock toast. “To Stanford's next win.”
“What was it like being a college football player? I bet the girls never left you alone.”
“Between part-time jobs and football and baseball practice, there wasn't much time for girls.” Seeley didn't like talking about that time in his life. “What about you?”
“My parents didn't approve of the crowd I hung out with in high school. I always seemed to wind up with the guys who were on suspension. So they sent me to a small Methodist school in Ohio. All the preachers sent their sons there.” She laughed. “My freshman year, Playboy rated it one of the top-ten party schools in the country.”
Renata talked more about her time in college, the flickering firelight softening the delicate planes of her face. After a while, when the silences grew longer, she drained her glass and crossed the room to refill it. When she returned, she took a place on the couch next to Seeley, crossing her legs beneath her. “When you came here for dinner the other night, did you have any idea how hard I was shaking?” She touched the back of his hand.
The touch saddened him; Seeley felt cheated, but of what, he couldn't say. A fantasy escaped from a corner of his memory that Renata's whispered message to him at her wedding was that she had chosen the wrong brother.
A log snapped in the fireplace and there was a hiss and the sharp fragrance of resin.
Seeley said, “I need to be going.”
“What are you afraid of?” Her voice trembled.
“This isn't right.”
“Because of Leonard?”
“Yes.” It was a lie, but there was nothing else he could say.
“So, now we know.” Her voice was bitter.
“What's that?”
“The question I asked you at dinner. You're someone who'd rather be admired than loved.”
“You're my brother's wife, Renata.”
“And I'm a flirt. You don't think I'd go through with it, do you?”
“I guess we'll never know.”
She lifted the wineglass from the table, put it to her lips, and emptied it. “You think I drink too much.”
“It's none of my business how much you drink.”
“You judge people.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Who gets to judge you?”
“Believe me, I'm hardest on myself.”
“Do you have any idea how important your approval is to Leonard?”
“Look, Renata, I have to go. I'm in the middle of trial.”
“From the day I met him, all Leonard could talk about was his big brother. “Mike did this' or ‘Mike did that.’ Mr. Perfect.”
No tears with this woman, Seeley observed, only fury burning in her too-clear eyes.
“Leonard could never live up to your standards. Now that I've seen what you're like, I don't think anyone can.”
Seeley rose to go.
“Do you want to know why he begged you to come out here?”
Seeley had the feeling that he hadn't even begun to penetrate the layers of Leonard's motives.
“So you could see how well he's done. What a success he's been.”
“Warshaw told me it's going to wipe you out if I lose the case.”
“He's right. Every dime we have is in Vaxtek. We sold everything, all our stocks and bonds. We took a second mortgage on the house.
Leonard said it was our one chance to make some real money, Silicon Valley money. He told Joel that Michael Seeley doesn't lose cases.”
“That doesn't sound like Leonard.”
“Then you don't know your brother.”
“The problem is, I do.”
“You are going to win, aren't you?”
Unlike Warshaw, she waited for reassurance from him that, yes, he would win the case.
“Good night, Renata.”
The railroad crossing where the 4:30 a.m. commuter train out of San Jose struck and killed Robert Pearsall was twenty minutes from Leonard's house, a drive that took Seeley through a neighborhood of small, neat homes, and then a succession of shabby strip malls, warehouses, and auto body shops. The run-down industrial area was as dark and deserted at 8:30 on a Saturday night as it doubtless was in the early morning that Pearsall died here. Other than parked pickups and panel trucks, the street was empty, and the only sound was the hum of distant freeway traffic.
Seeley left his car on the gravel-strewn hardpan next to the track, where the dense shrubs would hide it from the street, and walked to the railbed. It was, he knew, useless to think that by pacing the tracks he could somehow reconstruct Pearsall's thoughts in the last minutes of his life, or re-create the events and images of his death. But Seeley never defended a criminal case without first visiting the crime scene, and he would do no less for Pearsall.
Seeley did not accept that Pearsall took his own life, but neither did he believe that the lawyer's discovery of Steinhardt's fraudulent notebook entries was responsible for his death. As important as AV/AS was to Warshaw, no client kills his lawyer for uncovering a hole in his case. Seeley had only been taunting Leonard when he asked whether he pushed Pearsall in front of the train. Still, Leonard's gamble on Vaxtek stock surprised him. Leonard was someone who squirreled away nickels and dimes in a pickle jar. He didn't make financial wagers.
Without realizing it, Seeley had walked more than fifty yards along the track. When he looked out to the street through a gap in the rough screen of hedge, he noticed a dark sedan parked among the panel trucks and pickups that he was certain hadn't been there before. No one was visible in the sedan, and although the rattling sound nearby could have been a car engine cooling, it could also be dry leaves blowing across the street.
There was a rustling in the shrubbery across the tracks and, when Seeley turned, a hulking presence emerged from the foliage. Moonlight glinted off the silvery white bone of a modest rack of antlers, and the instant the buck saw him, it froze. The two of them remained absolutely still, studying each other. Ears twitching, depthless eyes alert, the buck heard the locomotive before Seeley did, and by the time the train was upon him, the only evidence of the buck's appearance was the receding white bun of a tail bounding between two dark warehouses.
