Leonard waited, and when Seeley didn't speak, said, “He threw himself in front of a train.”
“How do you know that?”
“How else does a fifty-eight-year-old man end up dead on the railroad tracks?”
“Do you know why?”
“Who knows? His health was perfect-I know his doctor. He was an outdoors nut. Camping. Bird-watching.”
“What do the police say?”
“What I said. Suicide. One of life's mysteries. Who knows what's beneath the surface?”
When Leonard read in the legal newspapers about Michael Seeley's courtroom triumphs, could he have imagined the dark corners that his older brother was navigating on his own precipitous slide? Trying big cases back to back, winning trials that he had no right to win, all the time retreating deeper into shadows that were visible only to him. It was no mystery to Seeley that despair could so engulf someone riding the crest of his career that he would decide to end his life.
“What time of day did it happen?”
“Early in the morning. Before dawn. Why would it matter?”
Seeley said, “I was wondering if anyone saw him do it.” He could almost hear the wheels turn as Leonard calculated whether the lawyer's death might be the hook that would bring his brother to San Francisco. “Where did it happen?”
“A half hour south of San Francisco. He lived in the city. There weren't any witnesses.”
“Why would he go that far from home? Was it close to a station?”
“Somewhere between stations, I think. Would it make any difference for you taking the case?”
“I was just wondering why someone would go so far out of his way to take his own life.”
“Like I said, who knows what he was thinking? Look at the photographs in the obituaries. Half the time, a guy kills himself and in the picture he's got a big smile on his face.”
“In Pearsall's photograph-was he smiling?”
“Like he was having the time of his life.”
Leonard leaned forward and with his index finger pushed the thick manila envelope on the desk toward Seeley. “What can I say to get you to come to San Francisco?”
Two questions fought in Seeley's mind, one asking why he would let himself slip into his brother's plans for him, the other, why he wouldn't. When Leonard first called, Seeley turned him down at once, making the decision even before his brother could describe the lawsuit. After that, from the messages Mrs. Rosziak passed on to him, Seeley knew that, although the case was big, it could be tried in less than a month. For that short a time he could easily arrange continuances for his few cases in Buffalo. Wasn't this why he left his large corporate firm in New York City-not just to pick his clients and have no partners to answer to, but to be free to take cases of moral consequence. How many of his current cases came close to the heft of this one? Vaxtek was hardly the helpless victim that Leonard painted, but the multinational St. Gall was a war machine, and if Leonard was telling the truth his company's survival depended on this patent.
Seeley said, “I'm not admitted to practice in California.” If Leonard was in fact following his career, he knew that his brother regularly tried cases outside New York State. A simple motion to the court, granted virtually as a matter of course, was all that it would take for him to appear.
“You've done it before-practiced in other states.”
Seeley said, “Why are you smiling?”
“Because you're-”
“I didn't say I'd take the case.”
Leonard lifted his hands, placating. “I was just going to say I'm glad you'll consider it. That's all I'm asking for. Willingness.” He pressed his palms against his lap and rose. “Let me take you to lunch. Give me a chance to find your weak spot.”
Leonard's confidence annoyed Seeley. “I have to be in court at two.”
“My flight's at three-thirty. Is the Hatch still open?”
“The places on the lake close down after Labor Day.”
“Let's go and look. It's worth a try.”
The Hatch was little more than a lunch counter on a built-up part of the Lake Erie shore, locally famous for its grilled bologna sandwich-a massive slab of meat tucked into a hard roll along with a pile of grilled onions and a slathering of bright yellow mustard. Seeley remembered childhood outings when Leonard would inhale the sandwich as greedily as if it were a communion wafer.
Seeley again thought about motives-Leonard's in pursuing him, his in resisting-as he lifted the camel-hair coat from the stand by the anteroom door and handed it to his brother. He took a maroon scarf from the other hook and threw it around his neck. At her desk, the surface filled with a collection of creams and lotions, Mrs. Rosziak beamed. The office's exterior walls were the original lath and plaster, but the partition that divided Seeley's office from the receptionist's anteroom was thin wallboard, and from the officious bustle of papers Seeley knew that she had eavesdropped on the conversation. As soon as the door closed behind him, she would be on the phone to the airlines, checking on flights to San Francisco.
The sky had been a muddy gray since the beginning of October, and Buffalo wouldn't see the sun again for months. Over the past week, an errant snowflake or two would materialize out of the crisp air and as quickly disappear. Any day could bring the first snowfall. But more than the snow and bitter cold, it was the prospect of this unrelenting, joyless sky that defined the season for Seeley.
The cold slowed Leonard's chatter as they walked, and he seemed almost contemplative. The three or four blocks that radiated south and west from the Ellicott Square Building resembled a bustling downtown, but once the brothers passed the city's police headquarters, a squarish afterthought of dirty yellow brick, the office buildings gave way to a grim patchwork of low anonymous structures, weed-choked lots behind chain-link fences, and here and there a darkened church. The bundled-up pedestrians disappeared, and closer to the thruway overpass the downtown traffic dwindled to the occasional car cruising Erie Street, hip-hop blasting from behind rolled-up windows. In the shadow of the overpass, the temperature suddenly dropped ten degrees. Thruway traffic drummed the vaulting concrete.
Leonard huddled into his topcoat. “One thing I'll take to the grave with me is the bleakness of this place. I can be at the beach in the middle of July, but if I think about Buffalo, I feel the cold in my bones.”
Seeley said, “Austerity has its virtues.”
“And that's why you left New York? Not enough austerity? This city is falling apart, Mike. It's no place to live.”
“You know as much about Buffalo as the tourists on their way to Niagara Falls.” Apart from a terrifying childhood, he and Leonard had little in common. As a boy, Seeley was the explorer, taking his bicycle to every corner of the city while, other than on the occasional family outing, Leonard rarely strayed outside their dark immigrant neighborhood on Buffalo's far east side. “What California architect can match Louis Sullivan? H. H. Richardson? Daniel Burnham? Your idea of a boulevard is a street lined with strip malls.”
Leonard said, “I'm surprised you came back. You're not the kind of person who comes back.”
Even when you left home, Seeley finished his brother's thought. When Leonard Seeley Sr., the drunkard who was their father, stormed through the house in his underwear, railing at the boys and their mother, waving a loaded revolver and firing live rounds into the ceiling, it was Seeley who hurried his brother behind the living-room sofa or under the bed and faced his father alone. By the time Seeley was fifteen, and almost as heavy-framed and strong as he was today at forty-seven, it was inevitable that the confrontations would one day turn more violent. He couldn't explain this to Leonard at the time-he barely understood it himself-and for his twelve-year-old brother, Seeley's leaving must have seemed nothing less than a callous abandonment.
Leonard said, “And this is the law practice you dreamed about? Nickel-and-dime cases. A receptionist in a housedress. No offense, Mike, but your office is a dump.”