Seeley took a room that night at the downtown Y and for the remaining years of high school he shuttled between the Y and couches in his teammates' homes. He went to a local college, Canisius, on an athletic scholarship and took a one-room apartment off Chippewa Street, downtown, supporting himself from tutoring and part-time jobs. He did much the same when he left Buffalo to go to Harvard for law school.
Thirty-two years later, adjusting the heater vent in the rental car, Seeley could still smell the fumes of his father's alcohol. He could see the four of them frozen there in that afflicted house: him holding his mother's arm aloft, as if he were a referee and she a victorious prizefighter, her mouth locked in a wordless O; his father, sprawled dumbstruck and bleeding on the linoleum floor; and Lenny hiding in the bedroom behind the closed door. It was at that moment, Seeley now remembered, that a burst of canned laughter exploded from the television.
FIVE
There is a quality to the early-morning light in San Francisco that exists in no other American city. The sun shines silver, burnishing the stone-and-brick buildings like a jeweler's cloth. Only in the medieval quarters of old European cities had Seeley seen such light. Stepping out from the lobby of the Huntington Hotel, he smelled the scent of freshly mown grass from the pocket park across California Street at the top of Nob Hill. A large bird crowed, and the breeze coming off the bay mixed the smells of roasting coffee and just-baked sourdough.
Seeley hadn't taken a break from work for years; he had no talents as a tourist and idleness made him irritable. Setting out for the half-mile walk to the Pearsall apartment on Vallejo Street on a morning like this was all the vacation he needed. The day bristled with challenge, starting with Alan Steinhardt. Seeley had no reason to believe that St. Gall's corporate ethics were above industrial espionage, but he was also certain that neither Leonard nor Ed Barnum had told him the full story of Lily Warren's visit to Steinhardt's lab or her attempted theft of Vaxtek secrets. If, as Leonard said, Vaxtek had caught her alone in Steinhardt's lab, it would have given the story to the DA and to the press-unless Vaxtek, too, had something to hide.
What mattered right now was that St. Gall had dropped Warren as a witness, which meant that Seeley was free to talk to her without going through the company's lawyers. Before leaving the hotel he left a message for Tina to track down her telephone number.
The apartment building on Vallejo was 1930s Art Deco, and the lobby, which rose two stories, was all dark wood and ceramic tile the color of sandstone. The plaster molding along the ceiling was a maze of geometric designs, Aztec in their complexity. Seeley could imagine that, however warm it was outside, the temperature in the lobby never rose above the coolness of a crypt.
At a small desk, the doorman was talking to a girl. Seeley asked for the Pearsall apartment and, before the man could respond, the girl stuck out her hand.
“You're Mr. Seeley. I'm Lucy Pearsall, Robert Pearsall's daughter.”
In her green plaid school uniform, the girl was of a piece with the morning: clear-eyed, bright, self-assured. Seeley studied her face for some sign of loss or sorrow, but other than the dark shadows beneath her eyes, found none. Her hand, when Seeley took it, was small, but the grip was a young athlete's.
“My mother's expecting you. She said you're taking over Dad's case.” It was a statement of fact. Nothing in her voice or her expression asked for sympathy. “He was the best.”
“That's what I heard.”
When she leaned to look around him, Seeley turned. A yellow school bus had pulled into the space in front of the building.
“It was good to meet you,” she said. She swung a bulky backpack over her shoulder and was out the door.
“Impressive kid,” Seeley said to the doorman.
“Mr. Pearsall's death was a knockout blow to the two of them.” The man was looking at the school bus, not at Seeley. “But neither of them would ever let you know that.”
“Could you call up to the apartment for me?”
The man talked as he dialed the apartment telephone. “Since it happened, Mrs. Pearsall won't let her wait for the bus outside. She has to stay in here with me.”
A voice came on the line, and after the man finished and put down the receiver he said, “You know, Mr. Pearsall wasn't the kind of man that can be replaced.”
Seeley thought to tell him that he hadn't come courting. Instead, he just thanked the man for his help.
“Apartment 7C,” the man said. “Second door on your right.”
When Judy Pearsall opened the door, Seeley saw at once the source of Lucy's forthright manner. The face was handsome and intelligent and her handshake was the same firm grip as her daughter's. She wore no makeup 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.