Fat loose-leaf binders labeled Vaxtek, Inc. v. Laboratories St. Gall, S. A. filled the conference room's wall-to-wall shelves. The black binders held the deposition transcripts of witnesses who would be testifying at the trial; the red binders collected patents and scientific papers related to the development and efficacy of Vaxtek's discovery, AV/AS; and the blue binders contained legal research memos. The black and red binders outnumbered the blue binders fifty to one, confirming the trial lawyer's truth that in litigation facts count more than law.
The footwork for a case this size entails months of depositions, reviewing mountains of interrogatories, camping out in chilly warehouses to examine documents, researching the applicable law, and arguing motions in court. St. Gall had overstaffed the case the way giant companies usually do, with lawyers drawn from firms in Zurich, New York, and Chicago, as well as San Francisco. Pearsall, by contrast, had staffed the case leanly, with no more than two dozen lawyers, paralegals, document clerks, and typists. Although Seeley and Chris Palmieri, Pearsall's second chair, would be Vaxtek's only trial lawyers in the courtroom, the team from the office would feed them facts, research, and law as needed.
Running big cases had not been part of Seeley's dream when he set out for law school, but, like the conference room in the sky, responsibility for a case like this offered a reassuring familiarity. He was still uncertain about his motive for coming to San Francisco. It could have been to prove that Leonard, and Seeley's own deepest fears, were wrong, that his professional edge was as sharp as ever. Or perhaps it was no more complicated than escaping the onset of another gray Buffalo winter which, if it was like the last one, would hold a perfect mirror to his soul. In either case, coming to San Francisco was the only way he was going to find out.
Before leaving Buffalo, Seeley spent a week of eighteen-hour days working through the binders that Palmieri express-shipped to him, all the while arranging continuances for his cases in the state and county courts. By the end of the week, as he began to connect the jigsaw pieces of Vaxtek's case, Seeley had a good measure of Pearsall's qualities as a lawyer. He would not have assembled the case the same way, but neither could he find anything to fault in the shrewd care with which Pearsall had gathered his facts and witnesses.
Pearsall's secretary, assigned to Seeley for the duration of the trial, came into the conference room while he was rechecking the witness list to locate a misplaced deposition binder. Christina Hoff couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, young to have worked for a partner as senior as Pearsall, and in her neat skirt and oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was mostly elbows and knees. She had shown him around the firm's five floors of offices when he arrived earlier in the morning, and although she had touched up her makeup, it still failed to mask the bleariness in her eyes, from fatigue, Seeley thought, or grief.
“I just wanted to see if you needed anything.” She had a nice voice.
“Should I call you Christina or Tina?”
“Tina. How'd you know?”
She was almost six feet tall, just an inch or two shorter than Seeley, and he guessed that, as a gawky adolescent, the shortened name might have helped inch her toward invisibility. There was a vulnerability about her that, along with the earnestness, seemed out of place amidst the hard polished surfaces of the conference room.
Seeley said, “Have you seen the deposition binder for Lily Warren?” Warren was a St. Gall vaccine researcher, and she should have been deposed along with the others on St. Gall's witness list. But the binder was missing. The last transcripts Seeley reviewed in Buffalo had traveled on the plane with him as freight and were now back on the conference-room shelf with the others. He had called Mrs. Rosziak, but she said he hadn't left any Vaxtek papers in the office.
“We have a sign-out system for them.” Tina took a slender file from the credenza at the far end of the room and quickly paged through it. “No one's checked it out.”
That meant nothing. Litigators, meticulous about observing court procedures, regularly overlook office protocol, particularly as they get close to trial.
“How long did you work for Mr. Pearsall?”
“It would have been one and a half years next month.” Her fingers fluttered first at the file, then at a few stray hairs at her neck. She didn't seem to know what to do with her hands.
“Did he keep a trial notebook for his cases? You know, his thoughts about the case, the way he planned to try it.” Sooner or later someone would return the binder containing the transcript of Warren's deposition, but if there was anything important in it that needed attention at trial, Pearsall would have mentioned it in his notes.
Tina shook her head. “He never said anything about a trial notebook.”
A lawyer with Pearsall's experience would not prepare for a trial of this size without outlining his strategy, setting down the main points for his direct and cross-examinations, noting whether a deposition witness seemed overly forgetful or remembered events that had not occurred. By this point in his preparation, Pearsall also would have sketched out his theory of the case, the story interweaving fact and law that would, or so every lawyer hoped, give the jury no choice but to decide for his client.
“After Mr. Pearsall died, who moved his things out of the office?”
“I did. Any documents related to the case, I sent down to the workroom.” One floor down, the workroom had been part of Tina's office tour that morning. The size of three conference rooms, it was where the paralegals working on the case had their cubicles. The storehouse of last resort, the workroom was also where the team kept the correspondence files and documents that were not in the conference room.
Tina said, “I gave the papers for his other cases to Chris.”
Palmieri had evidently been Pearsall's lieutenant on other cases, not just Vaxtek. The young partner had been in the workroom talking with one of the paralegals when Tina and Seeley came through, and he seemed annoyed at the interruption when Tina stopped to introduce Seeley.
“What about his correspondence file?”
“I have it, but it's only letters.”
“Briefs?”
“Mr. Pearsall didn't write them. Usually one of the associates did, or sometimes Chris. Mr. Pearsall marked them up, crossed things out and wrote comments on them. Sometimes he rewrote them. But someone in the pool typed them.”
“Was anything else removed from his office?”
“I filled some boxes with personal things-you know, diplomas, family pictures.” She remembered something and gave Seeley a small, tentative smile. “There were the steno pads he used to draw in. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, I'd come in and he'd be looking out the window with a stenographer's pad open, drawing.”
Boats on the bay, Seeley imagined.
“I put them in the boxes along with the other stuff and had them delivered to Mrs. Pearsall.”
Papers and belongings dispersed, Seeley thought, how long would it take Pearsall's partners to forget him completely? He was thinking about his own former partners in New York, some of whom, he was sure, were still working hard to forget him.
“Could you leave me her telephone number and address? And tell Chris I'd like to see him.”
“She'll appreciate that,”Tina said.
“What's that?”
“Mrs. Pearsall. Your visiting her. Paying your respects.”
After Tina left, Seeley continued working down the list of witnesses, preparing for each a brief summary of his or her testimony, the first draft of his order of proof.
Other than the travel-poster view, the conference room was virtually identical to the dozens in which Seeley had spent a good part of his professional life, plotting strategy with his trial team, taking or defending depositions, negotiating settlements. Law firm interior designers all had the same shopping list: dark gleaming wood for the bookshelves and conference table, plump leather-and-steel chairs, chrome carafes and ice buckets to sit next to the telephone on the sleek credenza. On one off-white wall was a generic painting, neither offensive nor banal, that looked as if it had been ordered by the yard.