When Thorpe declined to question further, Farnsworth said, “Then we'll take our lunch recess now.” She looked at the clock high up on the wall on the defense side of the courtroom. “We'll resume at one p. m. sharp.”
Pounding on Seeley's back, Barnum leaned into his ear. “I knew Thorpe wouldn't catch the problem with the dates.”
Seeley looked at him hard. “This is no time to celebrate.”
Barnum smirked as if to say, the two of you are suckers. Thorpe and you.
What Seeley was thinking was that the line in Pearsall's sketchbook hadn't asked what Steinhardt was hiding, but what else he was hiding.
SIXTEEN
The low brown dog strained toward Seeley's car, barking angrily, stopping only when the woman trying to give Seeley directions yanked sharply at its leash. The Stanford game had already started, but Seeley missed the first freeway exit for the university, and the next one took him onto a residential section of the campus. The large homes on deep, shaded lots belonged, he supposed, to a pampered faculty. While the woman quieted the dog, the attractive girl with her gave Seeley directions to the stadium. “After the dormitories,” she said, “just follow the noise.”
The girl's directions took Seeley past parking lots, playing fields, and low sandstone buildings under red tile roofs. Students in shorts and T-shirts tossed Frisbees or punched volleyballs. Tufted palm fronds were green against the cloudless sky.
Seeley grew up playing football in the northeast, and he couldn't dislodge from his visceral passion for the game the memory of freezing mud and raw numbed fingers. Still, when ahead of him a huge, throaty roar went up-a touchdown? a crucial pass completed? — his nerves quickened. He found a place at the edge of a dirt lot already crowded with cars, collected his field pass at a booth on the other side of the stadium, and had to restrain himself from running down the ramp to the game.
Men in chinos, white turtlenecks, and cardinal red windbreakers moved up and down the sidelines, black-shirted television crews maneuvering between them. Seeley showed his pass to a security guard and made his way to the yellow-bordered rectangle, twenty yards on each side of the fifty-yard line, reserved for the team. Looking surprisingly young and vulnerable in jerseys pumped up with protective gear, some players watched from the bench, others milled about, and a few huddled with coaches. Renata, trim in jeans and a white polo shirt, was talking with two men in Stanford windbreakers, but broke away when she saw him.
She touched a hand to Seeley's back by the way of greeting, and when he glanced at the scoreboard, said, “Don't get your hopes up. We're a heartbreaker.”
There was no score yet, but Seeley knew what she meant. In the end, in college football, strong teams beat smart ones. He said, “I only root for underdogs.”
“Leonard called last night. He said you're doing a great job on the case.”
Seeley imagined his brother worrying that he was going to tell Renata about their confrontation over Steinhardt's second set of books.
One of the men who had been talking to Renata approached, but before he could speak, she told him to go to the locker room to see if her X-rays were ready.
“Second play of the game,” she said to Seeley, “one of our wide receivers gets hit and cracks his femur.”
From his playing days, Seeley remembered the yellow-chalked rectangle as a world apart. Bodies constantly brush past as offense, defense, and special teams come on and off; from moment to moment there is the concussive, sledgehammer force of the game that no spectator in the stands can hear or feel. The hoots and calls from the crowd were a disembodied wall of noise, and a smell like ozone crackled all about. The giant scoreboard clock moved erratically toward triple zero, but inside the rectangle it was timeless. The immediacy of the next play sucked every atom out of the dense air.
Renata put a hand on Seeley's arm and nodded downfield. On the sideline was the lumpish figure of Joel Warshaw, football jammed under his arm, hands cupped around his mouth, shouting advice to the team.
“He's in the top tier of Buck Club donors,” Renata said. “That gets him a field pass whenever he wants. I've never seen him miss a home game.”
Seeley watched the entrepreneur. At every down, he moved with the play, running along the sidelines, screaming at the players, stopping only to talk with other men, dressed like him in chinos and Stanford sweatshirts and caps. Several times he passed by the chalked-in rectangle but didn't appear to notice Seeley or Renata.
Renata's other assistant rushed up with the suitcase-sized surgeon's kit and in the next moment was following her onto the field.
Seeley thought about the trial. No matter how many times he told himself that his examination of Steinhardt had violated no legal or ethical rules, he came up short. He should have caught the discrepancy in dates earlier and refused to let Steinhardt testify. It was no consolation that the American justice system left it to his adversary through cross-examination to root out untruth, nor was it a comfort that his remaining witnesses had been as honest and seamless in their testimony as the first three, and that St. Gall's attacks had left few bruises on his case.
Renata's assistant returned from the locker room with a legal-sized black envelope under his arm.
“The doc's amazing,” he said to Seeley. “How do you know her?”
“We're related,” Seeley said.
When Renata came off the field, she took the envelope the assistant gave her to a bench to study the film. Seeley looked away, and in the next moment a mass of bodies tumbled toward him like the onrush of a wave. Less than a yard from him, a healthy farm boy's face, pink except for the black smudge of grease high on each cheek, looked up at him from under the pile. The quarterback had taken some elbows going down and there was a glimmer of pain in the intelligent eyes, but what took Seeley back to his own college play was the humor he also saw there: What am I doing here, with all these big guys on top of me?
Renata came to Seeley's side.
“Hey, Doc,” the boy said.
The players peeled themselves off the boy and he managed a smile.
“You okay, Ron?”
“Never better.” He lifted himself into a crouch, steadied himself for a moment, then rose and limped off to the huddle that was forming.
Seeley said, “How's your receiver?”
“His season's over.” She slid the X-ray back into the envelope. “When Leonard said you were doing a great job in the trial, I figured something was wrong.”
She knew Leonard almost as well as he did.
“Nothing important,” Seeley said.
Washington scored a touchdown and the extra point, then it was halftime, and Renata went off to the locker room with the team.
Warshaw came to the edge of the rectangle and gestured to Seeley. The air had turned cool, but sweat streamed down his unlined face, and his voice when he spoke was several decibels louder than necessary, as if he was still exhorting the players. “What do you think of my team?”
“Which team is that?” Seeley knew that Warshaw wouldn't be listening for an answer.
“How's my trial going?”
“Your top scientist was ready to commit perjury.” Even after the near-disaster of Steinhardt's testimony, Seeley was confident he could win the case. He had promised victory to clients before, but he'd be damned if he would do so for Joel Warshaw.
Warshaw was looking out at the field, where the Stanford band was gathering for its halftime performance. “Do you know how many wins we had last year?” He held up a plump index finger with a dimple where a knuckle would be. “One.” With the other hand, he rolled the football along the side of his thigh. “But do you know what we did to USC last month? USC's the favorite by forty-one points, and what do these rocket scientists do-beat them 24–23!”
“Steinhardt just made this a harder case than it was before.”