A Patent Lie (24 page)

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?”

“I have a taxi waiting. I can't stay long.”

She settled into a white-cushioned rattan chair and didn't stir as Seeley explained how Vaxtek and St. Gall had conspired to control the outcome of their lawsuit. She asked questions, each a step or two ahead of Seeley. “If they killed Robert Pearsall for what he found out, what makes you think they're not going to come after you?”

“Pearsall must have confronted them. I didn't. They don't know that I know.” After yesterday's lunch with Thorpe, and last night's assault, he no longer believed that, but Lily might. “Right now I'm thinking that Nicolas Cordier's patients in Lesotho are going to die because whether it's Vaxtek or St. Gall that gets the exclusive rights to Africa, they're going to price AV/AS out of their reach.”

She gave him a small, pensive smile. “So this is something else I get to learn about Michael Seeley. You're an idealist. I didn't expect that.”

A truck rumbled by outside and the windows of the grand old room rattled in their frames.

“I want you to tell Gail Odum about how Steinhardt backdates his notebook entries.”

She shook her head. “I didn't say that I liked your idealism. Remember, where I come from it only gets you in trouble. You're trying to wreck your own client's case.”

“And you're the only person who can help me.”

“Gail told me the judge won't let you talk to the press. Isn't asking me to talk to her the same thing?”

“I'll give you whatever information you need. The notebook dates, Steinhardt's travel dates.”

“I don't know anything about how Alan keeps his notebooks.”

The acting was not as polished as it had been at Barbara's Fish Trap.

“You're not going to be deported for telling the truth about Steinhardt.”

“What if Gail asks what I was doing in Alan's lab that night?” She twisted the braided silver bracelets on her wrist. “My agreement with St. Gall is that I can't talk about that.”

“You told me that you went to see Steinhardt about co-authoring a couple of articles.”

“Do you think anyone will believe that? Did you believe me?”

“Did Steinhardt ever list you as a co-author when you were both at UC?”

“Alan and I had a relationship. You know that. It was over, but in some ways he can be very loyal.”

The high heels. The eyebrows plucked into thin parentheses. In his mind, Seeley winced at the pain women subjected themselves to, and for what? To get the nod from a vain little prince like Alan Steinhardt.

Seeley said, “Did it occur to you that your boyfriend set you up? Letting his company's security guard find you. Making it look like industrial espionage, so that Vaxtek could blackmail St. Gall because one of its researchers was in their labs alone at night. That's why St. Gall was willing to stipulate that Steinhardt was the first to invent AV/AS. They thought Vaxtek was going to expose them for having a spy on their payroll.”

“And that's why, if I go to the press, St. Gall will get me fired and I'll lose my visa.”

Seeley glanced at his watch. “I have to get back to the trial.”

Lily got up and walked to the tall window looking out onto the street. When she came back to Seeley, she was trembling.

He held her gently by the arms. “Don't tell me you took something from Steinhardt's lab.”

She looked at him and dropped her head. The groan that escaped from her was an animal's cry, pained and despairing. She said, “I didn't take anything from Alan.”

“I didn't think you did.”

“Do you want to know what happened that night?” When she looked up tears had filled her eyes.

“Tell me.”

“I brought Alan a sample from my own lab.”

“You stole a sample from St. Gall?”

“That's how a lawyer would look at it. But it was my sample. It was my work. It was the approach I started working on at UC. The guy who ran my lab at St. Gall thought it was a dead end, so I played by the rules and followed their orders. That's how corporate science works. But early mornings—four or five o'clock—when no one was there, I continued doing my own work. I believed in it. I kept my own notebooks.”

Seeley remembered Lily's claim to have discovered AV/AS. Every

one had dismissed her as a crackpot. “When you got your results, why didn't you show them to St. Gall?”

“I did. But you can't go to the FDA with results in a petri dish. That's all I had. I was young, a woman, and Chinese, and this wasn't the team's product, so St. Gall wasn't rushing to run trials on it. I told you, this is how corporate science works.”

“So you gave it to Steinhardt.”

Telling the story seemed to calm her. “It was only when Vaxtek filed its lawsuit and the head of my lab at St. Gall looked at Vaxtek's patent that he realized it was the same as my work.” She stifled a laugh. “Of course it was the same. It was my discovery! So they picked up my work and threw a lot of money at trials and got to market first.” “Does St. Gall know it was your sample that Steinhardt used?”

Lily shook her head. “After Vaxtek gave them the security guard's report, about my being in Alan's lab, they wouldn't believe anything I told them. They thought the results were Alan's, not mine. They thought I stole Alan's work.”

Seeley had to get back to the trial. “Did Steinhardt promise you credit for your work?”

“He said we'd be co-inventors—him for his work at Vaxtek, and me for my work at UC before I went to St. Gall.”

“But when the patent issued,” Seeley said, “there was only one name on it. His. St. Gall stipulated priority and dropped you as a witness. And they had the vaccine in their lab all the time.”

Seeley saw at once how the trial had to end. If a story in the
Chronicle
that Steinhardt had lied about the dates of his discovery would give any juror who saw it second thoughts about the validity of Vaxtek's patent, then an article that Steinhardt had in fact stolen the discovery from another researcher would effectively destroy the company's case. But only Lily could make that happen.

Seeley said, “Why did you decide to work in this field?”

The emotion of moments earlier had dissolved and the tears disappeared. Quietly, she said, “To save lives,” and then after a moment, “the same reason you're trying to destroy your own client's case.”

“Do you have any idea how many lives you could save by giving your story to the
Chronicle
?”

“I'm not a hero like your Dr. Cordier. I'm just a scientist.”

“For God's sake, Lily, this is your invention that Steinhardt's putting his name on. How is that different from some party hack in China doing the same thing?”

“Even if I told Gail the story, why would anyone believe me?”

“Because it's true.” Even as he spoke, Seeley knew that she had appraised the situation more astutely than he had. Gail Odum might believe her, and Odum's editor might let her run a story with only one source. But Vaxtek and St. Gall would drown the story in a flood of press releases and news conferences. And quietly they would arrange for Lily's deportation.

Seeley said, “You have to do this for yourself.”

“I liked you a lot better when you were letting me seduce you.” She traced the bruises on his face with a finger, hurting him. “I worry about you. You remind me of the dissidents at home. My parents. Beaten, exiled, sent to prison.”

“This isn't China.”

“There are people who create trouble for themselves wherever they are. I think you're one of them.”

Seeley said, “You have to trust me.”

“I trust you, Mike, but I don't trust the real world to come through the way you want it to.”

“I need your help. Just talk to Gail Odum.” As he spoke, Seeley watched his reflection in her eyes, and found himself listening to his own words. What he saw and heard was that he was as much a dissembler and user of people, as much an avoider of reality, as was his brother. For the briefest moment, he felt weightless, as if the earth had been pulled out from under him.

Seeley said, “We can make this work.”

She pressed a finger to his lips. “Can you really promise that?”

Seeley saw the pain in her eyes. “No, I can't.”

“That's better. If you really care about me—and I think you do—you'll trust me with this.”

“You're right.”

“About caring for me?”

“About both.”