“Is it possible that someone made a threat on his life?”
“I don't know. The police asked me that. It's not the kind of thing Bob would talk about. Bob was old school. He thought his role was to protect his family, not worry us.”
And, if Seeley's speculation about despair was right, to put on an upbeat front even though he was in the most excruciating pain.
“And that's why you won't let your daughter wait for the school bus outside the building. To protect her.”
For the first time, there was a break in Judy's composure. She pressed her hands against the arms of the chair, as if to steady herself. “A mother's instinct,” she said. “Bob and I didn't marry until late. He was already in his forties when Lucy was born. She's our only child.” She rose. “This isn't helping with why you're here. I'm sure you have a great deal to do. Let me show you Bob's study. It's where I had them put the boxes from the office.”
There was a desk in Pearsall's study with a computer and what looked like a fax machine. Books filled the ceiling-high shelves and spilled over into piles on the floor. Seeley examined a precarious stack of hardcover and paperbound books next to a well-used leather recliner. Kant's Critique of Practical Reason was on top, works by Hume, Rawls, and Dworkin beneath it.
“Moral philosophy,” Judy said. “It was one of Bob's hobbies. Like his bird pictures.”
Seeley hadn't noticed the photographs of brilliantly colored birds lining the one wall where the bookshelves were only chest-high. The pictures were close-ups taken with a long lens and, Seeley imagined, a great deal of patience. They weren't snapshots, either. Each photograph was carefully composed and captured its subject in full light. Pearsall had an artist's eye.
On the floor, at the foot of the shelves, were six corrugated bankers boxes with HEILBRUN, HARDY AND CROCKETT printed in large block letters.
Judy said, “Those are the boxes the firm sent over.” She hadn't moved from the doorway. “Let me know if you need anything.”
Seeley cleared away a corner of a library table piled with still more philosophy books and set a box on it. On top, when he opened the box, was a silver-framed photograph of a younger Lucy in a bathing suit, seated on her mother's lap. Beneath this was a stack of framed certificates acknowledging Pearsall's good work for the Legal Aid Society, the Sierra Club, the San Francisco Bar Association, and a prisoners' rights project in Chicago. A certificate attesting to Pearsall's membership in the exclusive American College of Trial Lawyers reminded Seeley that he had misplaced his own certificate long ago.
He tried the next box, and the one next to it, but found nothing that looked like a trial notebook. In the fourth box, under a layer of bar association magazines, he found the stenographer's pads that Tina said she saw Pearsall sketch in at the end of the day. Seeley selected one. “U. S. v. Gunnison Oil, 6-17-95,” was printed neatly in ink on the cardboard cover, and when Seeley flipped the cover open, the notebook gave off the musty smell of old paper. He riffled quickly through the pages. The book was a sketch pad filled with pen-and-ink drawings. Some were of sailboats on the bay, as Seeley expected, but most were portraits.
Seeley turned back to the first page. On it was a quick but accurate sketch of a well-known university economist who often testified as an expert witness in antitrust cases. Then Seeley saw that in the same loose hand as the drawings-which is why he had at first missed it-Pearsall had written, “Theory of lost profits has hole in it. Check with WFB.” Paging through the rest of the notebook, Seeley found similar comments, no more than a line or two on any sheet, written with a flourish beneath, or sometimes above, the portraits.
From Pearsall's comments, and two or three recognizable faces, Seeley immediately understood what the steno pads were. U. S. v. Gunnison Oil was an antitrust case in the 1990s and here, in pictures of the key players-witnesses, lawyers, the trial judge-Seeley had found Pearsall's trial notebook. Pearsall knew what any experienced trial lawyer knows: not only are cases mostly about facts, but no facts are more important than the personalities of the participants. Instead of writing extensive notes to himself, Pearsall did what an artist would naturally do: he captured the theory of his case, and the holes in his adversary's, by sketching the cast of characters, with the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Seeley rapidly searched through the fifth box, but the notebooks went no further than the 1990s. Only at the bottom of the sixth box-Tina had organized the notebooks in reverse chronological order-did he find three stenographer's pads labeled “Vaxtek v. St. Gall.” The notebooks, like the one from the Gunnison case years earlier, had a few street scenes, but were mostly filled with pen-and-ink sketches of witnesses and lawyers. Some pages had only pictures, not words. On one of these, a cluster of three spare drawings of Chris Palmieri revealed not only the young lawyer's intensity but also Pearsall's affection for him. On most of the pages, a sentence or two connected the portrait to a concern Pearsall had about the case or a trial tactic he planned to employ. A head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman in judicial robes took up a whole page in the second Vaxtek notebook. Ellen Farnsworth. First patent trial. Build legal foundation slowly. Pearsall probably made the drawing during an early hearing. The information on the judge, and the caution, though mundane, would be useful.
Several drawings of St. Gall's lead lawyer, Emil Thorpe, were scattered through the second notebook. From the changing backgrounds, it appeared that Pearsall had sketched the portraits over a period of time, each portrait depicting Thorpe's dissolute features from a different angle. Studying the images, it struck Seeley that Pearsall had made them with the same patience and keen observation as he had given to his bird photographs. The trial lawyer made the sketches to gain a purchase on his adversary, to understand what was driving him.
The early pages of the last notebook were sketches of St. Gall witnesses made during their depositions, each with a name and a comment or two beneath the portrait. Following these was a single portrait of Alan Steinhardt. With features that verged on caricature, Pearsall had uncannily captured the man's self-absorption and pomposity. An eyebrow arched ever so slightly; the ears elongated and sharpened; the goateed chin pointed, as in life. For a glancing moment, the portrait could have been of the devil himself. The words beneath were, What else is A. S. hiding?
Seeley put the steno pads back in their boxes, keeping out the three that Pearsall had filled with sketches for the Vaxtek trial, and returned the boxes to their place beneath the shelves. He sank into the worn leather recliner and leafed through each of the Vaxtek notebooks a second time, looking… looking for what? Easing the recliner back, he stared for several minutes at the ceiling, letting his thoughts slide back and forth past each other. Then he pulled the chair upright and looked again at the bird portraits on the wall and the volumes of moral philosophy stacked on the floor and on the table. His right hand resting on the small stack of stenographer's pads, like a witness about to take an oath, Seeley decided that Pearsall had not taken his own life.
In the hallway he called out to Judy to let her know he was leaving.
She came into the front hall, drying her hands on a towel. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I think so,” Seeley said. “Your husband had a fine eye.” He showed her one of the notebooks. “Would it be all right if I borrowed these for a few days?”
“Of course,” she said. “Bob called them his doodles.” Then the firm voice wavered, as if something had caught in her throat. “I know it's not why you came, but did you find anything that shows the police are wrong?”