The traffic on Sacramento was light and none of the few pedestrians noticed as Seeley made his slow, unsteady way up the hill. He thought about the strangeness of the encounter. The boys had demanded nothing from him. Not a word they said, in English at least, indicated racism. He would have expected a street thug to be strong, a scrapper, yet the leader was a weakling and his companions were cowards; had he restrained the boy any more strenuously, Seeley was certain that he would have snapped his bones. The oddest part was how dispassionately, almost casually, the attack unfolded, even the leader's rant about the do not enter sign. It was as if the boys were amateurs reading a script for the first time. Their panic, when Seeley struck back, was as much from ignorance as fear.
When Seeley came into the Huntington lobby, the clerk at the reception desk greeted him gaily, then stopped short. “Are you all right, Mr. Seeley?” The worried look showed more than professional concern. “Would you like us to call a doctor?”
Seeley realized that he had no idea how torn-up he looked. “No, I'm fine. Thanks.”
The man's look lingered for another moment as if he were making a decision. Then he gestured for Seeley to wait as he retrieved an envelope from beneath the counter.
The cheap feel of the unmarked envelope as Seeley opened it reminded him of his attacker's thin T-shirt. Inside the envelope was a folded square of newsprint, no larger than a cocktail napkin, advertising an expensive brand of wristwatch. He turned the scrap over and at once recognized the typeface of the San Francisco Chronicle. The story had the terse rhythm of the police blotter and was about gangs of three to five Vietnamese youths attacking lone pedestrians, evidently without discrimination, usually at night in deserted areas, but occasionally even on crowded sidewalks during the day. Sometimes wallets, purses, and watches were taken, other times not; always the attacks were conducted with bamboo sticks the length of a fishing rod or longer.
“Who delivered this?”
“An Asian boy, a couple of hours ago.”
“Have you seen him before?”
The clerk shook his head. “I remembered because none of our usual messengers are Asian. It was the first time I've seen him.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
“He wasn't here for more than a second or two.” The man was still studying Seeley's injuries. “Are you sure there's no way we can be of assistance to you?”
Sure, Seeley thought, tell me who set me up to be attacked and then sent this clipping so that I'd know it was a warning, not a random act. He rubbed the flimsy newsprint between his fingers as if it were the wrapping of some absent magic lantern whose genie might yet appear.
Seeley went to his room and dialed Lily's number. There was no answer, so he left a message on her machine for her to call him when she returned.
TWENTY
Seeley was dressing slowly and painfully when the telephone rang. He felt as if last night's beating hadn't missed a square inch of his body.
“Mike?”
He started to speak, but his jaw stiffened.
“Are you okay? I got your message. Gail Odum said you were in some kind of trouble.”
A newspaper reporter sees you follow a judge into chambers alone and she concludes, correctly, that you have a problem. Seeley massaged his jaw, but to no effect.
“The trial's gone off the rails. I need your help.” The word left his lips with surprising ease.
“This is about Alan's notebooks?”
Of course Lily wouldn't know about the collusion between Vaxtek and St. Gall. It was a week since Seeley last saw her, when he hadn't even known of Steinhardt's double bookkeeping. “You knew he kept two sets of books, didn't you?”
“Gail didn't say anything about it coming out in court.”
Seeley stretched one shoulder, then the other. A boiling shower had done nothing to ease the soreness. “Lily, in this country you can't play around with the judicial system like that. People go to jail. Lawyers get disbarred.”
“But nothing happened, so no one's hurt.”
“People are going to be hurt because it didn't come out.” He thought of Pearsall. “People have already been hurt. That's why I called.”
“I'm sorry, I was in the lab all night. I-”
“Lily, I could use your help.” Again, that word. There's nothing like a beating to enlarge the vocabulary. “I need you to tell Gail Odum everything you know about Steinhardt's work on AV/AS.” He had decided that if he couldn't destroy Vaxtek's case from counsel's table, he would do it in the press.
“I already told you. This is none of my business.” Her voice tightened into a knot. “I can't get involved.”
“Well, now you have no choice.”
“I like you, Mike. I want to see you again. But the fact that we slept together doesn't give you any claim on me.”
Seeley realized that, from the moment he picked up the phone, he had been waiting for her to say something about their night together. But this was all he was going to get.
Lily said, “I already told you. I can't testify.”
“You don't have to testify. I just want you to tell Gail Odum how Steinhardt keeps his records.”
“We've been over this-” She caught herself, apparently remembering that they had not discussed this. “How could it help your case for me to tell the Chronicle that Steinhardt is a fraud?”
Seeley looked at his watch on the night table. “I have to get to court. Can you come into the city?”
The phone went dead, as if she'd hung up. Then she came back on. “Sure, if it's not at your office or anywhere we'd be seen together.”
“One o'clock?”
She gave him an address on Dolores Street in the Outer Mission. “It's a friend's apartment. She'll be at work.”
Barnum, when he saw the bruises on Seeley's face, asked if he'd fallen off a barstool. Palmieri gave him a concerned look. Thorpe was in a banker's pinstriped suit this morning, his starched white collar as sharp as a knife against his neck. The dead black eyes examined Seeley and his twisted eyebrows rose in a pantomime of sympathy. Didn't I warn you, they seemed to say. Dusollier was not in the courtroom this morning.
The reality struck Seeley that virtually everyone of consequence in the courtroom knew that Vaxtek, Inc. v. Laboratories St. Gall, S. A. was a collusive lawsuit. Thorpe knew, as presumably did his second chair, Fischler. Barnum knew. For all of his objections, Palmieri knew as well. And, as the mock trial progressed and the evidence of collusion accumulated in front of her, Judge Farnsworth-whose expression showed genuine worry when she saw Seeley's battered face-now had to believe in the truth of what he had told her in chambers. Yet the charade went on, a corrupted show trial of the sort practiced in Lily's country but not, Seeley had implied to Lily, in his own. The only people who didn't yet know of the collusion were the jurors, and Farnsworth would stop at nothing to protect them from that knowledge.
Thorpe's witnesses today were testifying that even if Vaxtek's patent on AV/AS was valid, St. Gall's product did not infringe the patent. Seeley decided that if he couldn't control the jury's decision on the validity of the patent, then he could at least tar St. Gall as an infringer. He savagely went after Thorpe's witnesses-an immunologist from Johns Hopkins and a biologist from Columbia-starting his cross-examination slowly, sharpening the rhythm of his questions, forcing the witness to speed the pace of his answers, all the time moving faster, yet giving Thorpe no ground to object, until the witness's answers spilled over themselves in contradiction. The performance delighted Barnum, and at the end of the morning session, when Seeley returned to counsel's table, the general counsel vigorously clapped his injured shoulder.
Before he could press the bell at the street door of the yellow-and-white Victorian, Lily buzzed Seeley through. She was waiting for him on the second-floor landing in a white, man-tailored shirt and slender black pants; high-heeled pumps showed off her long legs. She looked as cool and carefully made-up as if she were ready for a fashion shoot, but her eyes were weary from her late night at the lab and when she showed him into the apartment her voice was as strained as it had been on the phone that morning. She studied Seeley's bruised face, probing it gently with cool fingers. “Can I get you something?”