TWENTY-FIVE
Lieutenant Herbert Phan had the San Francisco Chronicle open on his lap in Heilbrun, Hardy's thirty-seventh- floor reception area and looked up only when Seeley approached. “We've been trying to find you all morning.”
Seeley glanced at his watch. It wasn't even eight thirty. He wondered, Why is it that I can have a level conversation with someone as deeply corrupt as Emil Thorpe, yet if a police detective makes a mild crack, I want to throttle him?
Phan took his time folding the paper before following Seeley up the open staircase, past Tina's empty desk, to Pearsall's office. Seeley took the chair behind the desk and the detective the one across from it, resting a notepad on his crossed knee. He had on the same zippered boots as the last time.
“Why don't you tell us what you know about the murder of Robert Pearsall.” The small smile didn't disturb the hairline mustache.
“You've decided it's murder.”
“First degree, probably-that's up to the district attorney. But definitely homicide.”
“Lucy Pearsall identified Dusollier? The Swiss.”
“We spoke with your Swiss colleague yesterday evening at his hotel.”
“Adversary,” Seeley said, “not colleague.” If Lucy made the identification, Phan was playing with him and Seeley didn't know why.
“The night of Pearsall's murder, Mr. Dusollier was in Calistoga, at the mud baths.”
“That doesn't mean he didn't arrange it.”
Phan opened the notepad, but didn't look at it. “How do you think Mr. Dusollier fits into this?”
Phan was trolling. Seeley said, “I'd only be speculating.”
“I like lawyers' hypotheticals. I had a year of law school. USF, here in the city.”
“No offense,” Seeley said, “but this is for the DA.”
“You obviously think St. Gall Laboratories arranged this murder. Why else would you send us after Mr. Dusollier?”
Seeley swiveled his chair to the view outside so that he faced the window. A single sailboat was making its way toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
“In our experience,” Phan said, “corporations don't kill off innocent lawyers.”
Seeley watched the sailboat's progress. “Corporations don't, but their employees do, particularly if they think their lives are about to fall apart.”
“And how was Mr. Dusollier's life about to fall apart?”
“Start higher up. Say you're St. Gall's general counsel, in Switzerland. You're making and spending more money than you ever dreamed possible. Expensive clothes for the second wife, private school for the new kids, cars, a servant or two, the small villa on the Cote d'Azur. You're fifty-five, sixty years old, you don't have a franc in savings and, because you haven't really practiced law for the past twenty years, there's no one who will hire you. You helped your CEO set up a collusive lawsuit in a major case and you've sworn to him that the deal is airtight. Then your opponent's lawyer threatens to wreck the deal. If he does, you know you'll lose your job. So you order someone lower down the ladder, the ambitious young lawyer who's directly responsible for the case, to eliminate the problem. Maybe you point him toward the company's head of security, who might know someone who could help.”
The only fl aw in Seeley's theory was that Leonard said Pearsall had helped to set up the collusion. Either Leonard was lying or, once having set the collusive lawsuit in motion, Pearsall changed his mind.
Seeley said, “People are fearful. The thought of losing something they value can drive them to acts that, a day earlier, they couldn't even imagine.”
“You can't believe-”
“Leaders of countries have started wars for less.”
“And you think the person at the bottom was Dusollier?” The detective sounded unimpressed.
“An order from the boss to a bureaucrat.”
“Not a bureaucrat,” Phan said, “a lawyer.”
“Law schools teach ethics, not morals.”
When Seeley turned back from the window, Phan's features had slipped into indifference, even boredom.
Phan said, “After the story appeared in the Chronicle, we started thinking in the same direction. Except, the way we see it, anything that applies to St. Gall also applies to you.”
Seeley said, “If you went to law school, you know I can't talk to you about my client.”
Phan's fine features narrowed; the bored expression disappeared. “We don't mean your client. We mean you.”
Seeley had never liked the police, their arrogance and unearned authority. But it was a long time since he made the mistake of underestimating their cunning or their power. “This is a wet dream you had, right?”
“We've been watching you since the first time you called us, misrepresenting yourself as Mrs. Pearsall's lawyer. What would that look like to a criminal jury-a complete stranger inserting himself into a murder case, just like that, for no good reason? Then there was that incident in Chinatown. You are brutally attacked, but you make no report to the police. When the desk man at your hotel asks, you tell him it was nothing.”
“Your men saw me being beaten and they didn't stop it?” Phan shrugged. “They said you handled yourself very ably.” He gave Seeley another of his miniature smiles. “And-don't ask me why-juries are always impressed when the accused returns to the scene of the crime.”
At first, Seeley didn't understand. Then he remembered the dark sedan parked by the train tracks in San Mateo. Phan's people had been there, too.
Through the glass panel next to the office door, Palmieri looked in and, when Seeley shook his head, pointed in the direction of his own office. Seeley nodded.
“And you think I'm involved in the murder of Robert Pearsall?”
“This is one of the questions we are looking into.”
“I never even met Pearsall. I was in Buffalo when he was killed.”
“But, as you said of Mr. Dusollier, that doesn't mean you weren't in some way responsible.”
Dozens of sailboats were on the bay now, a swarm of moths zigzagging toward the Golden Gate.
“And my motive would be, what? To take over his case?”
Phan frowned. “We're fully aware that your law practice in Buffalo barely pays the rent.”
“So I kill lawyers to drum up business.”
“Possibly. Maybe your life was, as you say, about to fall apart. But the motive we're looking into is that your brother is an employee of Vaxtek. Evidently his entire wealth is tied up in the company. He took a big bet that you would win the case for him.”
“And we didn't win.”
Phan yawned. “Maybe that's because you're not a very good lawyer.” He handed the newspaper across the desk to Seeley.
The story, on the front page beneath the fold, reported that Arnaud Baptiste, a sometime resident of Quebec City, with a record of criminal assaults across Quebec Province, had been arrested by the San Mateo police for the murder of San Francisco lawyer Robert Pearsall. The photograph next to the article was of one of those faces that look out from mug books in station houses around the world: cheeks drawn and sunken by missing teeth, eyes partly closed as if squinting into the sunlight or a police photographer's flash, lank hair falling across a too-narrow forehead.
Seeley was aware of Phan watching him as he read the story. “The first rung of the ladder,” he said.
Phan said, “Do you recognize him?”
“No.” Seeley remembered the fax that he'd asked Tina to send to Phan. “Did you show him Dusollier's picture?”
“He says he may know him. But he's not going to talk until he thinks we're ready to make a deal.”
“Did Lucy recognize Dusollier as the man who was talking to her father?”
“Last night,” Phan said. “We had to wait until the doorman came on at six this morning, but he identified both
