four figures standing at the office doorway, looking in. Seeley let go of Leonard and turned.
“There's nothing here,” he said, dismissing the onlookers. “We all have work to do. Let's get back to it.”
Leonard, breathing evenly again-was it part of his brother's insanity that he recovered so quickly? — said, “What are you working on?”
“Tomorrow's closing argument.”
“I'm glad I got back in time,” he said. “I wouldn't miss it for anything.”
TWENTY-TWO
The courtroom on Friday morning was bedlam. The bench, where Judge Farnsworth should have been disposing of motions, was empty. In the back row of the gallery, Phil Driscoll, the protester, was gesturing wildly at one of the investment bank lawyers; the lawyer, arms folded across his chest, nodded parentally. Seeley could just barely make out Gail Odum's slender figure inside the crowd of lawyers around her. Leonard, who said that he wouldn't miss Seeley's closing argument for anything, wasn't there.
She did it, Seeley thought, cheering silently. Lily did it. Hope leapt inside him.
Barnum wasn't at counsel's table, and if Seeley was right about what had happened, the general counsel would not be there for the remainder of the trial. Seeley looked across the well of the courtroom. Dusollier was missing, too. This evidently was not a day for clients to be out and about. Palmieri's arms rested expansively over the back of the chair on either side of him. His hair looked as if someone had ruffled it. His voice was excited. “Have you seen it?”
Seeley lifted the newspaper from the table. Odum's byline was on the front page, beneath the fold. The picture next to the article looked like it came from Lily's college yearbook-a serious girl in a buttoned-up blouse and an out-of-date hairdo with a bow-shaped barrette at each side of her forehead. She was unsmiling, except for a certain brightness in her eyes. Even without reading the article, Seeley's admiration for the smart, vulnerable- looking girl in the photograph made him gasp.
The first three paragraphs condensed what Lily had told Seeley: her work on AV/AS at St. Gall; her nighttime visit to Steinhardt's lab; Steinhardt's appropriation of her discovery as his own. In the remaining four paragraphs, Odum pieced together her own speculations about the odd progress of the trial proceedings and their connection to Lily's story. Vaxtek and St. Gall hadn't returned her phone calls, and she nowhere directly charged them with collusion. However, there was a quote from an anonymous lawyer that Thorpe's defense was the weakest he had ever seen in a major federal case, and readers could draw from that whatever inference they wished.
Seeley read the article a second time. When he looked up, he was aware that the courtroom had turned silent. From the bench, Judge Farnsworth was beckoning to him and Thorpe to come forward.
The judge's calm expression was impenetrable and her voice, when she asked the court reporter if she was ready, was contained. Studying Seeley and Thorpe over her half-frames, she said, “I am not going to ask if you or your clients were responsible in any way for the article in this morning's Chronicle. I'm told it was also on the television news. But I am going to ask the U. S. attorney to look into whether there is any connection between your clients and Dr. Warren's decision, on the eve of closing argument, to give her story to the press.”
Seeley glanced sideways at Thorpe who, for once, was not crowding him at sidebar. The old lawyer's face was clotted, a deep, unhealthy crimson. Whatever the outcome of this trial, Thorpe's career as one of the handful of lawyers of choice for large, difficult cases was over. St. Gall's public relations team could put whatever spin they wanted on Odum's musings, but no Fortune 500 corporation would ever retain a trial lawyer so tainted by the scent of corruption.
The judge's polished red nails tapped at the wood trim of the bench. “Unless either of you gentlemen has a well-grounded objection, I am going to interview the jurors in my chambers to determine whether any of them has been prejudiced by this morning's story.”
Seeley was already thinking about numbers. If three of the eight jurors saw or heard Odum's story, Farnsworth would lack the six she needed to complete the trial. “We have no objection, Judge.”
Thorpe said, “None, Your Honor.”
Farnsworth instructed her clerk-“Bring them in one at a time, starting with juror number one”-and the court reporter-“This will be on the record, so bring your machine.” To Seeley and Thorpe she said, “You gentlemen are welcome, but only you, none of your colleagues, and just to observe. I don't want anyone intimidating my jurors.”
The small parade followed Farnsworth down the narrow hallway and past the jury room, moving quickly at the judge's pace. The clerk waited for them to settle themselves in chambers before returning to the jury room to collect juror number one, the AT amp;T cable splicer from Napa.
“Please come in, Mr. Gutierrez.” The judge was all warm smiles. She patted the empty chair next to her. “No one here is going to bite you.” As she explained to him the importance to the fact-finding process of insulating the jury from information acquired outside the courtroom, Gutierrez neither spoke nor even nodded. But the acuteness in the way he listened, a slight sharpening of his features, left no doubt that he was taking it all in.
“Have you heard or seen anything about this lawsuit outside the courtroom?”
“No, Your Honor.” Seeley noticed that Gutierrez held his head up, jutting his chin a fraction of a degree, the way a career military man might or someone accustomed to wearing a construction hard hat.
“Do you read the newspaper in the morning, Mr. Gutierrez? Watch the television news?”
Gutierrez shook his head and, for the first time, his expression relaxed. “Your Honor, it takes me an hour- and-a-half to get here in the morning. I barely have time to brush my teeth.”
“Do you listen to the radio when you drive down here?”
“No, there's not much to listen to.”
“How do you keep yourself occupied, then?” If she wasn't genuinely interested in the answer, she was an accomplished actor.
“I listen to audiotapes.”
“What are you listening to these days?”
“The new biography of Albert Einstein. It's pretty good. It moves right along.”
“I'll have to buy the book.” She rose to take the cable splicer's hand. “I want you to know how much the court-how much I — appreciate the work you are doing on this jury, Mr. Gutierrez. I'm certain it can't be easy.”
When he went out the door, Farnsworth's glance raked the two lawyers, as if she needed to remind them that she preferred jurors to lawyers.
The second juror, one of the secretaries, came into the room, and before she could take the chair next to Farnsworth, blurted, “I know what you're going to ask me,” then broke into tears. Between sobs, she explained that her roommate had come into the kitchen and spilled the Chronicle story before she could gather her wits to stop her. “I told her when the trial started that we couldn't talk about the case.”
The woman's face was a blur of tears and dissolving makeup. She said, “Do you think the story in the paper was true?”
Farnsworth briefly tried to console her-the woman was bereft at the prospect of leaving the jury-but said, no, it would present too great a risk if an appeal were taken for her to remain on the jury. “I'm sorry, but I must dismiss you.” Farnsworth nodded to the clerk, who led the woman out.
Farnsworth's dwindling jury was, Seeley knew, all that stood between the truth of Odum's story and the lies that Vaxtek's and St. Gall's public relations firms would soon enough begin circulating. He said, “You know, Judge, by tomorrow this story's going to be all over the news. If this jury doesn't hold together, it won't be possible to retry the case.”
“I'm fully aware of that possibility, Counselor.” The words could have been splinters of ice.
With questions and persistent prodding from the judge, jurors three and four, the other secretary and the nurse, stuck to their stories that they didn't know a single fact that had not been presented in court. Juror five, the real estate broker who hadn't worn the same outfit twice over the course of the trial, started down the same path.
Farnsworth glanced at the yellow legal pad on her lap. “What about your husband, Mrs. Barton. Does he read
