Mistress of Justice (11 page)

“I heard that Dudley’s son abandoned her or something.
Anyway, she’s in boarding school in town and he takes care of her.” He laughed. “Kids. I can’t imagine them.”

Taylor asked, “You don’t have any?”

He grew wistful for a few seconds. “No. I thought I would once.” The stoic lawyer’s facade returned immediately. “But my wife wasn’t so inclined. And, after all, it does take two, you know.”

“When I hit thirty-eight I’m going to find a genetically acceptable man, get pregnant and send him on his way.”

“You could always try marriage, of course.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about that.”

He looked at her eyes for a moment then started laughing.

She asked, “What?”

“I was thinking, we should start a group.”

“What?”

“The Visine Club,” he said.

“I can get by with seven hours’ sleep. Less than that, no way.”

Reece said, “Five’s pretty much standard for me.” He finished the bacon and held a forkful of eggs toward her. She smiled, fought down the nausea and shook her head. She noticed, behind the bar, a stack of wine bottles and felt her stomach twist. Reece ate some of his breakfast and asked, “Where you from?”

“Burbs of D.C. Chevy Chase in Maryland. Well, I was born on Long Island but my parents moved to Maryland when I was in middle school. My father got a job in the District.”

“Oh, I read that article in the
Post
about him last month. His argument before the Supreme Court.”

“Tell me about it,” she grumbled. “I’ve heard the blow-by-blow a half-dozen times. He overnighted me a copy of his argument. For my leisure-time reading, I guess.”

“So how’d you end up on Wall Street?” Reece asked.

“Very long story,” she said with a tone that told him that this was not the time or place to share it.

“School?

“Dartmouth … music and poly sci.”

“Music?”

“I play piano. Jazz mostly.”

This seemed to intrigue him. He asked, “Who do you listen to?”

“Billy Taylor’s my fave, I guess. But there’s something about the fifties and sixties. Cal Tjader, Desmond, Brubeck.”

Reece shook his head. “I’m mostly into horn. Dexter Gordon, Javon Jackson.”

“No kidding,” she said, surprised. Usually only jazzophiles knew these players. “I love Jabbo Smith.”

He nodded at this. “Sure, sure. I’m also a big Burrell fan.”

She nodded. “Guitar? I still like Wes Montgomery, I’ve got to admit. For a while I was into a Howard Roberts phase.”

Reece said, “Too avant-garde for me.”

“Oh, yeah, I hear you,” she said. “A melody … that’s what music’s got to have—a tune people can hum. A movie’s got to have a story, a piece of music’s got to have a tune. That’s my philosophy of life.”

“You perform?”

“Sometimes. Right now my big push is to get a record contract. I just dropped a bundle making a demo of some of my own tunes. I rented a studio, hired union backup. The works. Sent them to about a hundred companies.”

“Yeah?” He seemed excited. “Give me a copy if you think about it. You have any extra?”

She laughed. “Dozens. Even after I give them away as Christmas presents this year.”

“How’s the response been?”

“Next question?” she asked, sighing. “I’ve sent out ninety-six tapes—agents, record companies, producers. So far, I’ve gotten eighty-four rejections. But I did get one ‘maybe.’ From a big label. They’re going to present it to their A&R committee.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

“Thanks.”

“So,” he asked, “how’s the music jibe with the law school track?”

“Oh, I can handle them both,” she said without really thinking about her response. She wondered if the comment came off as pompous.

He glanced at his watch, and Taylor felt the gesture abruptly push aside the personal turn their conversation had taken. She asked, “There is one thing I wanted to ask you about. Linda Davidoff worked on the Hanover & Stiver case, right?”

“Linda? The paralegal? Yeah, for a few months when the case got started.”

“It struck me as a little curious that she quit working on the case pretty suddenly then she killed herself.”

He nodded. “That’s odd, yeah. I never thought about it. I didn’t know her very well. She was a good paralegal. But real quiet. It doesn’t seem likely she’d be involved,” Reece said, “but if you asked me it if was likely somebody’d steal a note from a law firm, I’d say no way.”

The waitress asked if they wanted anything else. They shook their heads. “You women, always dieting,” Reece said, nodding at her uneaten toast.

Taylor smiled. Thinking: We women, always trying not to throw up in front of our bosses.

“What’s up next?” he asked.

“Time to be a spy,” she said.

Taylor sat in her cubicle at the firm and dialed a number.

She let the telephone ring. When the system shifted the call over to voice mail she hung up, left her desk and wandered down the halls. Up a flight of stairs. She turned down a corridor that led past the lunchroom then past the forms room, where copies of prototype contracts and pleadings were filed. At the end of this corridor—in the law firm’s Siberia—was a single office. On the door was a nameplate:
R. Dudley
. Most of these plates in the firm were plastic; this
one, though it designated the smallest partner’s office in Hubbard, White, was made of polished brass.

Inside the office were crammed an Italian Renaissance desk, a tall bookcase, two shabby leather chairs, dozens of prints of nineteenth-century sailing ships and eighteenth-century foxhunting scenes. Through a small window you could see a brick wall and a tiny sliver of New York Harbor. On the desk rested a large brass ashtray, a picture of an unsmiling, pretty teenage girl, a dozen Metropolitan Opera
Playbills
, a date book and one law book—a Supreme Court
Reporter
.

Taylor Lockwood opened the
Reporter
and bent over it. Her eyes, though, camouflaged by her fallen hair, were not reading the twin columns of type but rather Ralph Dudley’s scuffed leather date book, opened to the present week.

She noticed the letters
W.S
. penned into the box for late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning, just before the time Dudley—if Sebastian was right—had used the associate’s key to get into the firm.

The initials
W.S
. were also, she observed, written in the 10
P.M
. slot for tomorrow. Who was this person? A contact at Hanover? The professional thief? Taylor then opened the calendar to the phone number/address section. There was no one listed with those initials. She should—

“Can I help you?” a man’s voice snapped.

Taylor forced herself not to jump. She kept her finger on the
Reporter
to mark her spot and looked up slowly.

A young man she didn’t recognize stood in the doorway. Blond, scrubbed, chubby. And peeved.

“Ralph had this
Reporter
checked out from the library,” she said, nodding at the book. “I needed to look up a case.” Taking the offensive, she asked bluntly, “Who’re you?”

“Me? I’m Todd Stanton. I work for Mr. Dudley.” He squinted. “Who are
you?”

“Taylor Lockwood. A paralegal.” She forced indignation into her voice.

“A paralegal.” His tone said, Oh, well, that doesn’t really count. “Does Mr. Dudley know you’re here?”

“No.”

“If you need anything, you can ask me for it. Mr. Dudley doesn’t like”—he sought the least disparaging term—“anyone in his office when he’s not here.”

“Ah,” Taylor said and then turned back to the book and slowly finished reading a long paragraph.

Stanton shifted then said with irritation, “Excuse me but—”

Taylor closed the book softly. “Hey,” she said, offering a concerned glance. “Don’t sweat it. You’re excused.” And walked past him back into the deserted corridor.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Dactyloscopy,” the man said. “Repeat after me: dactyloscopy.”

Taylor did.

More or less.

“Good,” the man said. “Now you know the first thing about fingerprinting. It’s called dactyloscopy. The second is that it is a royal pain in the butt.”

She sat in the office of John Silbert Hemming. His card explained that he was a vice president in the corporate security department at Manhattan Allied Security, Inc.

The man, in his mid-thirties, had been recommended by a friend from the music world who did word processing for Allied Security to support his addiction to the saxophone.

Taylor had spent most of the day at Hubbard, White, poring over records of the
New Amsterdam Bank v. Hanover & Stiver
case, trying to find a reference to anyone who might have shown unusual interest in the promissory note or who’d requested files on the deal when there didn’t seem to be a reason for them to do so.

But after nearly eight hours of mind-numbing legal babble Taylor found not a shred of evidence to suggest that Ralph Dudley or Thom Sebastian—or anyone else—was the thief.

She’d decided to give up on the subtle approach and try a more traditional tack, à la
Kojak
or
Rockford Files
.

Hence, the tall shamus she was now sitting across from.

When Hemming had come to meet her in the reception area she’d blinked and looked up. He was six feet ten. His height had led, he had explained on their way back to his office, to his becoming a backroom security man—the company technical and forensic expert.

“You’ve got to be unobstrusive in private detective work. A lot of what we do is surveillance, you know.”

She said, “Tailing.”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t you say ‘tailing’? You know, like you tail somebody?”

“Hmmm, no, we say say ‘surveillance.’ ”

“Oh.”

“If you stand out like me that’s not so good. When we recruit we have a space on our evaluation form—‘Is subject unobtrusive?’ We mean ‘boring.’ ”

His hair was tawny and unruly and Taylor’s impression of Hemming was that he was a huge little boy. He had eyes that seemed perpetually amused and that belied a face that was dramatically long (what else could it be, given that it sat atop a body like his?). Despite this quirky appearance there was something rather appealing about him.

Now, John Silbert Hemming was aiming a startlingly long finger at her and saying, “I hope you mean that, about wanting to know everything. Because there’s a lot, and here it comes. Let’s start with: What
are
fingerprints?”

“Uh—”

“I know. You paid the money, I’ve got the answers. But I like people to participate. I like interaction. Time’s up. No idea? I’d suggest you avoid
Jeopardy!
Now: Fingerprints are the impressions left by the papillary ridges of the fingers and thumb, primarily in perspiration. Also called friction
ridges. There are no sebaceous glands in the fingertips themselves but people sometimes leave fingerprints in human oils picked up elsewhere on the body. Yes, in answer to the first most-often-asked question, they are all different. Even more different than snowflakes, I can say safely, because for hundreds of years people have been collecting fingerprints from all over the world and comparing them, and nobody—none of
my
close friends, I’ll tell you—have been doing that with snowflakes. Go ahead, ask the next-most-popular question.”