To rescue me, Seeley remembered. Do the conditions of my life look so disastrous that I would need to be rescued? He put a laugh in his voice. “You should have been a trial lawyer.”

“And you're not going to find the answers hanging around here. You could use some sunshine. The one time Mr. Rosziak took me to San Francisco, everyone was smiling.”

Sure, Seeley thought, even when they throw themselves in front of commuter trains.

“Are you going to go?”

Seeley said, “You'll be the first to know.”

She gave him a resigned look and finished collecting her creams and lotions and keys from the desktop. Seeley had been married for eight years-and divorced for less than one-and he had been in relationships with women before and since, but the unfairness of the imbalance still galled him. As profound as his ignorance was of what they were thinking and of what drove them, women knew exactly where the buttons and levers were that could turn or twist him in any direction, giving him no choice but to resist. Not just Mrs. Rosziak; women.

He went into the office to get ready for court and to find out from Rudy what the spread was for the Bills game on Sunday.

TWO

Heilbrun, Hardy occupied five floors of an office tower on Battery Street, off the Embarcadero at the edge of the city's financial district. In the conference room adjoining the office that before his death had belonged to Robert Pearsall, Michael Seeley shifted comfortably in a leather-cushioned chair. Thirty-eight stories down, sailboats scudded across the sun-speckled bay and the Golden Gate Bridge was a cupid's bow across the water. To Seeley, the scene was as flat and trite as a picture-postcard.

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.