A Patent Lie by Paul Goldstein Page B

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