A Patent Lie

by Paul Goldstein

  The court reporter asked Thorpe to repeat the question, and this time Steinhardt answered at once. “Yes, that's correct.”

  Barnum leaned across the table and wrote at the bottom of the legal pad: “Where's this going?”

  Seeley knew where Thorpe was headed, but didn't understand why.

  Steinhardt looked at Seeley again, and this time Seeley nodded. AV/AS was not a true vaccine, but Steinhardt's concession on the point would not help Thorpe's case. He could argue that it weakened Vaxtek's claim of long-felt need for the therapy, but that would make no difference to the jury.

  “Does AV/AS in fact work that way, as a vaccine, like the polio vaccine or measles vaccine? Does it use the body's immune system to neutralize a virus?”

  Then Seeley saw Thorpe's strategy: he was trying to goad Steinhardt into overstating the scope of his discovery, to put on display for the jury the same arrogant scientist that Seeley was trying to hide. But Thorpe had miscalculated. Steinhardt had already been humiliated once today, by his own lawyer, and he was not going to let St. Gall's lawyer do the same. When he looked at Seeley for guidance, Seeley discreetly shook his head.

  “No, it does not,” Steinhardt said. “As effective as AV/AS is in neutralizing infection, it is not a true vaccine, like the polio vaccine, that inoculates against it.”

  “So, then, this vaccine ”-Thorpe was waving the folder now-“AV/ AS is not the Holy Grail that everyone's been looking for?”

  Steinhardt didn't wait this time, but answered at once. “I'm not a theologian, sir.” The attempt at humor wrenched Steinhardt's face; humor and its expressions were unfamiliar to him and Seeley felt a moment's sadness for the scientist.

  Thorpe sighed and leaned back on the table. “I was using the term colloquially, Doctor. Let me rephrase the question. Is AV/AS the AIDS vaccine that has been the object of scientific research since 1984?” If he couldn't portray Steinhardt as arrogant, Thorpe was going to show him as evasive. But why was he pressing so hard?

  Steinhardt said, “Science doesn't work that way. With a disease as deadly as AIDS, there is a multiplicity of research goals. AV/AS achieved one of them.”

  “But AV/AS does not trigger human immunity to the disease.”

  Seeley was on his feet. “Asked and answered.”

  Farnsworth looked from Seeley to Thorpe. The questioning puzzled her, too. “The witness may answer.”

  “No,” Steinhardt said. “Sadly, it does not.”

  Thorpe turned to the jury. “I have no more questions of the witness.”

  Seeley caught his breath. Thorpe was not going to ask Steinhardt about the inconsistency between his travel dates and the dated entries in his lab notebook. It was inconceivable to him that Thorpe and his team of lawyers had failed to ask the question that any competent solo practitioner would have asked: Was the inventor in his lab at the time he said he made his discovery? And then Seeley reminded himself that until this morning he, too, had failed to compare Steinhardt's lab dates with his travel schedule.

  “Redirect, Mr. Seeley?”

  Seeley reckoned quickly. Two or three questions could repair the small damage from Thorpe's questions about the efficacy of AV/AS as a vaccine. But they might also open the door for more questions from Thorpe and-Seeley believed his witness still had it in him-perjury by Steinhardt. However, Steinhardt's new humility reduced the risk of arrogance or perjury from another question.

  “Just one question, Judge. Dr. Steinhardt, we have in the course of this trial been referring to AV/AS. Could you tell the jury what those letters stand for?”

  “AV, of course refers to AIDS vaccine. That's standard reference.”

  “And AS?”

  Steinhardt actually managed a shrug, and looked down as he spoke. “Alan Steinhardt.”

  The approving nods in the jury box confirmed that Seeley had been right to ask the question.

  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.”

  For the first time, Warshaw looked directly at Seeley. Perspiration had created a damp V at the neck of his cardinal sweatshirt. “That's why I hired you. Your brother and Ed Barnum told me you specialize in hard cases. I want you to do anything you have to- anything — to win this case.”

  “Is that what you tell your team?”

  Warshaw looked away, his gaze taking in the stadium. “They've got fifty thousand people watching. They have to play fair. You don't.”

  Seeley remembered his exchange with Warshaw outside the auction tent. Here was a man who thought that slicing an infant in half was a solution, not a threat.

  “You know,” Warshaw said, tossing the football from one hand to the other, “if you lose, it's going to wipe out your brother.”

  Before Seeley could ask what he meant, Warshaw was on his way down the sideline, throwing the football to another man in chinos and Stanford sweatshirt.

  In the third quarter, Stanford scored its first touchdown, but Washington was making fewer on-field mistakes and, if Seeley's instincts were right, was gathering physical momentum just as Stanford was losing it. The sun was going down and Renata pulled on a wind-breaker. She'd gone onto the field two more times with her crew, and when she wasn't on the field, she was busy with one player or another or with the coaches. Seeley noticed that, unlike the first half, her jaw was tight and her hands balled into fists.

  Early in the final quarter, Washington made another touchdown, and then Renata was on the field again, this time attending to the downed quarterback. His helmet was off and he had propped himself up on his elbows. Renata's hand was on his leg, her assistants and the trainer looking on. For a moment she turned from the youth to look across the field to the sidelines, and her gaze, when it found Seeley, was so filled with longing that he had to turn away. When he looked again, Renata had the quarterback's hands in hers and, like playmates on a seesaw, the armored giant rose as Renata, slight but determined, pulled back.

  When she returned to the sidelines, Renata said, “Why do I get stuck on these guys? Leonard says I should stick with the winners.”

  That was the kind of thought that Leonard would call a philosophy. Seeley said, “Winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

  In the last minute, Washington scored another touchdown and won the game.

  Renata said, “I could use a glass of wine.”

  Renata was in the shower at the other end of the house. In the dining room, Seeley opened the bottle of Bordeaux that she had set out earlier with two glasses. When he went into the kitchen to fill a glass with water from the tap, a salver on the countertop was piled with crab legs cracked open to reveal pink-and-white meat.

  Seeley asked himself what he was doing in his brother's house alone with his brother's wife. He dismissed the obvious reason-Lily was the only woman he wanted a relationship with right now-but could think of no others.

  The sensual figures in Renata's painting gave out no more secrets about the artist than they did on Seeley's first visit. Logs and kindling waited in the fireplace, and striking a match against the rough brick-work, it occurred to Seeley that he was re-creating that last visit and, in doing so, invoking his brother's disquieting presence. He thought of how just the other day he could have clubbed Leonard in the corridor outside the courtroom.

  Since he stopped drinking a year ago, Seeley had fallen into the habit of counting other people's drinks. No one, he concluded, drank as much as he did, and no one he'd met since coming to California drank the way Renata did. It occurred to him that this was why he had come home with her. Like probing an old but still-sensitive wound, he was revisiting the one great romance of his life, alcohol, to see if a spark of feeling remained. He had no desire to drink; he just missed the companionship of his old friend. Sometimes the notions that came into his head astonished Seeley. My mind, he thought, should have a warning label glued to it: for entertainment use only.

  Renata came in, a glass of wine in her hand. She had put on a blouse, skirt, and heels, and either the wine or the shower had given her pale skin a gentle flush.

  She glanced at the fire as she took the chair across from him. “There's a cracked crab in the kitchen if you're hungry.”

  “I saw.”

 
She noticed the water in his glass. “No wine? We have beer, too. Gin, vodka.”

  “I've already had more than my share.” He tilted the glass in a mock toast. “To Stanford's next win.”

  “What was it like being a college football player? I bet the girls never left you alone.”

  “Between part-time jobs and football and baseball practice, there wasn't much time for girls.” Seeley didn't like talking about that time in his life. “What about you?”

  “My parents didn't approve of the crowd I hung out with in high school. I always seemed to wind up with the guys who were on suspension. So they sent me to a small Methodist school in Ohio. All the preachers sent their sons there.” She laughed. “My freshman year, Playboy rated it one of the top-ten party schools in the country.”

  Renata talked more about her time in college, the flickering firelight softening the delicate planes of her face. After a while, when the silences grew longer, she drained her glass and crossed the room to refill it. When she returned, she took a place on the couch next to Seeley, crossing her legs beneath her. “When you came here for dinner the other night, did you have any idea how hard I was shaking?” She touched the back of his hand.

  The touch saddened him; Seeley felt cheated, but of what, he couldn't say. A fantasy escaped from a corner of his memory that Renata's whispered message to him at her wedding was that she had chosen the wrong brother.

  A log snapped in the fireplace and there was a hiss and the sharp fragrance of resin.

  Seeley said, “I need to be going.”

  “What are you afraid of?” Her voice trembled.

  “This isn't right.”

  “Because of Leonard?”

  “Yes.” It was a lie, but there was nothing else he could say.

  “So, now we know.” Her voice was bitter.

  “What's that?”

  “The question I asked you at dinner. You're someone who'd rather be admired than loved.”

  “You're my brother's wife, Renata.”