A Patent Lie

by Paul Goldstein

  Leonard's street in Atherton, when Seeley found it, was a well-shaded cul-de-sac. Magnolia, eucalyptus, and chestnut trees, even an improbable palm here and there, formed a canopy over the narrow lane, and there were no sidewalks. Seven-foot hedges hid lawns and houses from view. Seeley asked himself what these people were hiding and what they were hiding from. The evening had turned cool, and the dusty medicinal scent of eucalyptus filled the rental car.

  Leonard's house was at the end of the lane and, from the boundaries marked by hedgerows, was more modest than its neighbors. Leonard was waiting at the front door.

  “You didn't get lost, did you?” He already had a drink in his hand.

  Seeley said, “I had your directions.”

  Leonard put an arm around Seeley's shoulder and led him through the hallway into a tall room that, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and encompassing skylight, could have been a solarium or a green-house. Set into the one wall that wasn't glass was a massive stonework fireplace. In front of it, a slender figure crouched, adjusting logs. Seeley had the sense of a cat ready to spring.

  “Well, here he is,” Leonard said. “The prodigal brother.”

  Renata turned to face them and, after staring at Seeley for a moment, gave him a hasty, vexed smile. “I'm just setting a fire.” She struck a kitchen match against the stone, put it to the newspaper crumpled beneath the logs, and replaced the screen. The tinder flared behind her and, rising, she momentarily lost her balance. Seeley steadied her with the hand he had extended in greeting.

  Leonard gave Renata an unhappy glance. He said, “I'll get the champagne.”

  Seeley took a chair close to the fire and Renata sank into the has-sock beside it, drawing her knees up and positioning herself so she could watch both Seeley and the flames. Fair and fine-boned, with a mass of dark hair that fell to just below her shoulders, she was more glamorous than in the photos. Yet, even this close, Seeley had no memory of her as the bride on tiptoe with an urgent message.

  She gave Seeley an amused, quizzical look and he wondered if she, too, was thinking of the whispered words.

  “Time flies,” she said, not inviting a reply. She seemed to be comfortable just sitting there, watching him and the fire.

  A painting crowded with nude figures hung on the wall above the fireplace. The figures were clustered in groups of two and three and, although the faces were indistinct, the painter had artfully used the bodies to convey emotions of sadness, joy, repose. It was far from the bold abstract expressionism that Seeley liked, but there was a sensual quality in the painting that intrigued him.

  Renata said, “With all the glass, there aren't many places to hang paintings.”

  “Who's the artist?”

  “Do you like it?”

  The way she asked told Seeley that the painting was hers. “Very much.” The words surprised him.

  “I stopped a few years ago. Orthopedic surgery doesn't leave much time for painting.”

  Seeley had thought she was a nurse.

  She must have seen his confusion. “I was still a nurse when I met you.” She gave him a crooked smile. “That's what a girl did in those days if her father was a doctor and her mother was a housewife. I met Leonard at a med-school mixer at Stanford. There weren't enough women, so they brought in nurses. We discovered we were the only ones there from upstate New York. In California, that's enough of a reason for two people to get together.”

  “You're from Buffalo?”

  She shifted on the hassock to see him better and tugged at her skirt, where it had ridden above her knees. “Schenectady.”

  “Like Daisy Miller.”

  “You don't look like a Henry James fan.”

  “I'm not,” Seeley said. “I read it in a college lit class. What would a Henry James fan look like?”

  “I don't know. Thin, neurotic. Maybe pale and bloated. Anyway, not like you ”

  In the kitchen a cork popped.

  Even before he stopped drinking, wine was at the very bottom of Seeley's choices. He didn't mind the taste as much as he did the inefficiency, the whole bottles he had to consume just to come within striking distance of the oblivion that three or four quick tumblers of gin could deliver in far less time. It was more than a year since he'd had a drink; Buffalo's enveloping familiarity had cosseted him well. Sometimes he went whole weeks without thinking about alcohol. Other times he could think of nothing else. The smallest mishap could set off the craving. He successfully navigated a long and difficult disbarment proceeding that threatened to finish off what was left of his career without once having the urge to drink. But, a week later, a shoelace broke and all he could think of was alcohol. A sound, like ice being scooped into a glass, could set off the craving. Or a cork popping.

  From the doorway Leonard gestured at the painting with the open champagne bottle. “It's good, isn't it?” He set the glasses on the coffee table, filled them, and handed them around, touching his glass to Seeley's-“A toast to Mike on his first visit to our home”-and then to Renata's. Renata tipped hers in Seeley's direction.

  Leonard sipped at the champagne, his eyes on Renata.

  Renata drained her glass and said to Seeley, “Which is more important to you, to be loved or to be admired?”

  Leonard said, “What kind of question is that?”

  Seeley laughed. “Why would I have to choose?”

  “It's always a choice,” Renata said.

  Seeley said, “I never thought about it. What about you?”

  Renata touched the empty champagne flute to her lips. “You really should think about it. You'd be amazed how much the answer will tell you about yourself.”

  “Right now,” Leonard said, “I just want Mike thinking about one thing-our case. He told me there's no way we can lose.”

  “Then you're in good hands,” Renata said.

  “Drink up, Mike. Can I give you a tour of the house?”

  Seeley was aware that Renata was watching him. “Thanks, I'm fine here.”

  Leonard said, “How do you like it? The house.”

  Seeley looked around. “It's a lot of glass.”

  “You mean, too much for earthquake country.”

  Seeley hadn't meant anything.

  “The structure is cantilevered,” Leonard said. “It was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Do you want to hear a story? Wright designed a house a couple of miles from here on the Stanford campus, and when the owners discovered it was on top of the San Andreas fault they sent him a frantic letter. Do you know what Wright sent back? A telegram: ‘I built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo’! This house is the same. The earth would have to split to its core before you even heard a rattle.”

  Seeley knew nothing about earthquakes, and didn't know if this was the usual California bravado or just his brother's.

  Leonard lifted the bottle and Seeley thought he was going to fill Renata's glass, but instead, he started back to the kitchen.

  “Make the steaks rare,” Renata called out. “Not dead.” She turned back to Seeley and, so Leonard could hear, said, “My husband used to be a fine doctor, but he doesn't know the first thing about broiling meat.”

  She placed her empty glass on the coffee table next to Seeley's still-full one, asking his permission with a look before lifting his glass.

  “To Henry James,” she said.

  It occurred to Seeley that Renata's drinks had started much earlier. The scariest drunken times for him were when he was aware that, behind his rigid mask of sanity, he was entirely out of control, and he wondered now if that was how it was for Renata. Stone-faced drunk, he had once called a sitting justice of the New York Supreme Court a toad. A pompous toad. Other lawyers had called the judge worse, but not to his face, and not in his chambers. The incident had brought him to the brink of being disbarred.

  “Your mother says you've had an amazing career, that you win all your cases.”

  Seeley wondered how much Leonard told her about their life growing up.

  �
�I didn't know she was keeping track.”

  “She subscribes to a couple of legal newspapers just so she can see how you're doing.”

  Seeley remembered Leonard telling it differently in Buffalo.

  “Whenever there's something about you, she clips it out for Leonard. She's tremendously proud of you, but I don't think she knows how to tell you.” She sipped at Seeley's champagne. “She told me about your wanderlust, how you left home when you were fifteen.”

  In the fireplace, a log dropped and sent up a shower of sparks.

  “She says you're like mercury, that you're impossible to grab hold of. First you go to New York, then you go back to Buffalo. She didn't say it, but I got the impression she thinks you waited until she left Buffalo before you moved back.”

  “I moved to New York because I wanted more challenging cases. I went back to Buffalo because I wasn't getting the kind of cases I wanted.”

  Renata emptied Seeley's glass. “Did Leonard tell you she's in Mexico with her church group? Somebody dropped out at the last minute and she took her place. I think she was afraid you wouldn't want to see her.”

  This was the kind of conversation women liked, and Seeley lacked the words, the grammar, even the tone of voice it required. “I only came here to try a case.” He took the empty glass from her and returned it to the end table next to him. “Did you know Robert Pearsall?”

  She followed his lead as closely as if they were dancing. “Do you mean, do I think he killed himself?”

  Now that Renata had turned on the hassock to be closer to him, Seeley found it unsettling, the way she looked directly in his eyes as she talked.

  “When I was an intern, I tried out a psychiatry rotation for three months before I decided to be a real doctor. There's something about suicidal patients that you don't see in the others, even the most depressed ones. There's an emptiness in the back of their eyes that just goes on and on; there's nothing there.”

  “And Pearsall?”

  “I don't know. I saw him at one or two parties up in the city and a couple down here. His wife's on the board of a private school we support. He always seemed agreeable, but you could see he had a deeper, serious side.” Renata hesitated. “No,” she decided, “there was always a light in his eyes. He didn't have that hopeless look.”

  Leonard called out that dinner was ready, and Seeley followed Renata into another glassed-in room. Three chairs were at the end of a long table, and place mats, silver, and glasses were set in front of them along with a green salad and an open bottle of Bordeaux. The steak, sliced and heaped on a platter, was rare.

  Renata said, “We were just talking about Bob Pearsall.”

  Leonard filled no more than a quarter of Renata's glass, and Seeley waved him away from his.

  “You only had a glass of champagne.”

  “I have an early meeting tomorrow.” Leonard didn't need to know that the meeting was with Pearsall's widow, to search through the lawyer's belongings for a missing trial notebook, anymore than he needed to know that it was Renata, not he, who had emptied the glass. It was a reflex. He did the same when they were boys, protecting Leonard from anything that he thought might upset him.

  “One of the mysteries of the human soul,” Leonard said. “You look at a guy like Pearsall, he seems fine to you, but you never know what's going on inside.”

  Seeley said, “I was thinking about what you said, that the train was between stations when it hit him.”

  Renata sipped at her wine. “Why should that be important?”

  Leonard said, “You wouldn't believe my brother's sense of humor. When I went to see him in Buffalo, he asked me if I pushed him. Pearsall.”

  “Mike!” Renata laughed.

  It was the first time she had spoken his name, and the sudden cry felt as intimate as if she had slipped her hand into his.

  Leonard speared a slice of steak from the platter. “Do you remember Billy Elrod, Mike?” He turned back to Renata. “Elrod was a little hoodlum when we were at St. Boniface, the kind of kid who picked wings off flies. Once, for a week, he went around the playground with what looked like one of those narrow jars olives come in, but filled with a clear liquid. Billy swore it was nitroglycerin, and that if anyone told the teachers, he would drop it and blow the place up. We all knew he was lying, but still with Billy you couldn't be sure. Finally, my brother here-how old were you, Mike, ten? eleven? — goes up to him and says, ‘Hey Billy, look up in the sky, there's a blimp’”-Leonard pantomimed, pointing to the ceiling-“and when Billy looks up, Mike pokes a finger into his stomach”-again, Leonard playacted the move-“so that he drops the bottle and it smashes on the ground. Of course it was just water. That's my brother's sense of humor.”

  After that, the conversation drifted to Renata's childhood in Schenectady, the challenges women faced as surgeons, stories about her work as one of the Stanford football team's on-field physicians, and the constant temptation to go into research.

  Leonard said to Seeley, “You didn't tell me how your meeting went with Alan Steinhardt. He's impressive, isn't he?”

  “A legend.”

  “Alan can be a pain in the ass, but he's a talented scientist. He's won all the prizes but the Nobel. It takes vision like his to design this kind of research, much less pull it off. Looking for an AIDS vaccine is like running a marathon, except no one gives you a map to show you the route or even how far it is to the finish line. If there is a finish line.”

  Seeley said, “I need to be sure he got there all by himself, and that Lily Warren wasn't there, too.”

  Renata said, “Lily Warren?”

  Leonard said, “Twenty years ago, if you asked the best scientists in the business how long it would take to come up with a true AIDS vaccine, they would have told you ten years. If you asked them the same question today, do you know what they'd say?”

  “Ten years?”

  “AV/AS is as close to a real vaccine as anyone's come. It's not like a polio vaccine or measles. It's not a cure-all. Maybe in ten years we'll have a vaccine that is. But right now, this is the best chance we have to save some of these people. Maybe the only chance.”

  Renata said, “Do I know Lily Warren?”

  “She worked with Alan at UC, before he came to work for us.”

  “And,” Seeley said, “she went to work for St. Gall.”

  Leonard said, “St. Gall used her to try to get a look at Alan's notebooks. They were desperate to develop a vaccine strategy. From the papers he was publishing, they knew he was onto something, but they didn't know what.”

  Seeley said, “How do you know that?”

  “One of our security guards found her in Steinhardt's lab alone, after hours.” Leonard chewed as he spoke. “You've got a first-year lawyer on your team who made herself a hero on this. She was going through our security reports, trying to find evidence of industrial espionage, and when she sees Warren's name on one of the reports, she remembers that she was on St. Gall's witness list. That's why St. Gall agreed to stipulate priority. They'd look like common thieves if this came out at the trial.”

  First the stipulation, then the story behind it. What else was his client hiding from him? “Barnum never told me this.”

  Renata had finished her dinner and risen from her place. “I have an early day tomorrow. Like Mike.”

  Leonard didn't hear her. “Ed must have forgotten. Our deal with St. Gall is, they don't challenge our priority, we don't go to the DA with criminal charges.”

  Seeley felt Renata standing behind him. “Did Pearsall know about the deal?”

  “Of course he did,” Leonard said. “He brokered it.”

  “I'm glad you came,” Renata said. “Are we going to see you tomorrow night?”

  Before he could answer, Leonard said, “Joel Warshaw's having a benefit at his house tomorrow night. He wants to meet you.”

  Warshaw was Vaxtek's chairman, but that didn't mean Seeley had to go to parties at his house. “I have a trial to prepare for.” />
  “Joel doesn't come in to the office,” Leonard said. “He works out of his house. This is a command performance.”

  All the more reason not to go, Seeley thought.

  “Come by here first,” Renata said. “We'll drive over together. It's just a few blocks.”

  “I'll see if I have the time.”

  Leonard gave Renata a brusque wave as she left the room. Seeley, although she hadn't touched him, had for the briefest moment the sensation of her hands lifting from his shoulders.

  In the living room, Leonard added a log to the fire and took the easy chair across from Seeley. “This is how it used to be, isn't it? The Seeley boys, taking care of each other.”

  Seeley didn't know if it was the wine, or the end of what was probably a long day, or maybe just the person Leonard had become-altogether, they hadn't spent more than two or three days with each other in the thirty-two years since Seeley left home-but it occurred to him, as it had in Buffalo, that there was an unquenchable hole at the center of his brother's life, one that for some reason he thought he could fill with family.

  “I haven't done anything for you yet. The thought of Steinhardt on the witness stand bothers me.”

  “And that's the only problem?”

  “I don't like how broad your patent is.” Patents can be broad or narrow, and Steinhardt's patent claimed that the invention included not only AV/AS but anything remotely similar to it. The problem was that, like any other target, the broader a patent is, the easier it is for a competitor like St. Gall to shoot it down in court.

  “That wasn't Steinhardt's call. The decision came from the top. Joel.”