Mistress of Justice (21 page)

But Ralph Dudley was excited about the Knickerbocker Businessmen’s Club. He was at home here and buoyant at showing off his nest to a stranger.

“Come along now,” the partner said. And he ushered her into the club’s dining room. He walked to what must’ve been his regular table and, amusing her beyond words, actually held the chair out for her and bowed after she’d sat.

“Have the steak, Miss Lockwood. They have chicken, too, but order the steak. Rare, like mine.” The old partner’s excitement was infectious, his eyes gleaming as if he were back in the arms of his alma mater.

They ordered. Dudley took instantly to his task as mentor and launched into a series of stories about his law
school. It seemed an endless tumble of hard work, harmless collegiate pranks, chorale singers, respectable young gentlemen in suits and ties and tearfully inspiring professors.

All forty years out of date, if it wasn’t complete fiction.

She nodded, smiled till she felt jowls and said “Uh-huh” or “No kidding” or “How ’bout that” every so often. She got good mileage out of “That’s very helpful, just what I was wondering.”

The waiter brought the steaks, charred and fatty, and although she wasn’t particularly hungry, she found hers tasted very good. Dudley made sure she was looked after. He was a natural host. They ate in silence for a few minutes as Taylor took in the young men at the tables around them—recent grads, she assumed. In white shirts and striped ties and suspenders, they were just beginning the journeys that, in four decades, would take them to the destinations at which Donald Burdick and Ralph Dudley and Bill Stanley had arrived.

She looked at her watch. “You said you had some plans tonight. I don’t want to interfere with them. I hope you’re not working late?”

He gave her a charming smile. “Just meeting some friends.”

The mysterious W.S.

Taylor took a sip of the heavy wine he’d ordered. “I’d rather work late than on weekends.”

“Weekends?” He shook his head. “Never.”

“Really?” she asked casually. “I was in on Saturday night. I thought I saw you. Actually I think it was early Sunday morning.”

He hesitated a moment but there was nothing evasive about his demeanor when he answered. “Not I. Maybe it was Donald Burdick. Yes, that was probably it. I’m told we look alike. No, I haven’t worked on a weekend since, let’s see, ’79 or ’80. That was a case involving the seizure of foreign assets. Iranian, I think. Yes, it was. Let me tell you about it. Fascinating case.”

Which it may very well have been. But Taylor wasn’t
paying any attention. She was trying to decide if he’d been lying or not.

Well, looking at his frayed cuffs and overwashed shirt, she observed a motive for stealing the note: money. Dudley was a charming old man but he wasn’t a player in Wall Street law and probably never had been. His savings dwindling, his partnership share decreasing as he made less and less money for the firm, he would have been an easy target when somebody from Hanover approached and asked him to let a man inside the firm—an industrial spy, they’d probably said.

Dudley finished his story and glanced at his watch.

It was nine-thirty and he was meeting W.S. in a half hour, she recalled.

He signed the bill and they wandered out of the club into the cold, damp ozone of a New York evening on the shag end of November.

Taylor hoped the cool air would wake her but it had no effect. The narcotics of red wine and heavy food numbed her mind. She groggily followed the partner down the front steps, half-wishing she partook in Thom Sebastian’s magic wake-up powder.

She thanked Dudley for his insights and for dinner and said that his school had slipped into the front-runner spot.

This seemed to genuinely please him.

He said, “You all right, Taylor?”

“Fine, just a little tired.”

“Tired?” Dudley said, as if he had never heard of the word. “I’ll walk you to the subway.” He started down the sidewalk in long, enthusiastic but gentlemanly strides.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Wait.”

Sean Lillick’s voice was sufficiently urgent that Wendall Clayton stopped, frozen in the back entrance of the Knickerbocker Club.

“What is it?” the partner asked.

“There, didn’t you see them? It was Ralph Dudley and Taylor Lockwood. They were going out the front.”

Clayton frowned. It was a constant source of irritation that a has-been like Dudley belonged to the same club that he did. He resumed his aristocratic stride. “So?”

“What are they doing here?” Lillick wondered uneasily.

“Fucking?” Clayton suggested. He glanced toward the stairway, which led to the club’s private bedrooms.

“No, they came out of the dining room, it looked like.”

“Maybe he bought her dinner and
now
he’s going to fuck her. I wonder if he can still get it up.”

“I don’t want them to see us,” Lillick said.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

Clayton shrugged. He looked at his watch. “Randy’s late. What’s going on?”

Lillick said, “I’ve got to leave about midnight, Wendall. If it’s okay.” His suit didn’t fit well and he looked like a college boy out to dinner with Dad.

“Midnight?”

“It’s important.”

“What’s up?” Clayton smiled. “Do you have a date?” He dragged the last word out teasingly.

“Just seeing some friends.”

“I don’t think it’s ‘okay.’ Not tonight.”

Lillick said nothing for a moment. Then: “It’s pretty important. I’ve really got to.”

Clayton examined the young man. Like most denizens of the East Village, he seemed damp and unclean. “One of your performances?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” the partner mocked.

“Yes,” Lillick corrected himself instantly though in a tone that approached rebellious.

“We’ve got so much to do.…”

“I mentioned it a week ago.”

“And what a busy week it’s been, don’t you agree?”

“It’ll just be a few hours. I’ll still be at the office at six if you want.”

Clayton had let him dangle enough. He said, “This once, I suppose, it’s all right.” He had plans of his own tonight and didn’t give a rat’s rosy ass what Lillick did after they were finished here.

“Thanks—”

Clayton waved him off and gave a reserved smile to Randy Simms, who now walked through the revolving door of the club.

Ignoring Lillick, as he always did, Simms said, “I saw Ralph Dudley outside. With a woman.”

Piqued again by the reference to the old partner, Clayton snapped, “Appreciate the weather report, Randy.”

Simms was six feet three, thin and solid. Ralph Lauren might have designed a line of Connecticut sportswear around him. A mother and her teenage daughter entered the lobby. They eyed the young lawyer with similar degrees of desire.

“How’d they get the lowdown on our witness?” Clayton was referring to the evisceration of Dr. Morse on the witness stand in the St. Agnes Hospital case.

“Reece used some private eye in San Diego.”

“Fuck, that was good,” Clayton said with admiration. He didn’t know Reece well but he’d make sure the associate was guaranteed a partnership slot next year or the year after.

“When’s our guest arriving?” Clayton asked him.

“Any minute now.”

“Give me the details.”

“His name’s Harry Rothstein. Senior partner in the general partnership that owns the firm’s building. He’s got full authority to go forward or pull the plug. He and Burdick are planning to sign the new lease on Monday. Rothstein doesn’t seem to have any mistresses but I found some accounts in the Caymans. Son’s got two drug convictions.”

“What kind?”

“Cocaine.”

“I mean what kind of
convictions?”

“Felony. One sale, one possession.”

“Is he a good friend of Burdick’s?”

Simms’s face eased into a faint smile.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clayton snapped again.

“How can he be a friend of Donald’s?” Simms asked. “Rothstein’s a Jew.”

A tall, bald man walked through the door and looked around.

“That’s him,” Simms said.

Clayton’s face broke into a huge smile as he strode forward. “Mr. Rothstein. I’m Wendall Clayton,” he called. “Come join us, my friend.”

At the corner of Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street Taylor and Ralph Dudley paused and shook hands.

He inclined his head toward her in a Victorian way she found quaint and said, “Which train’re you taking?”

“I’ll walk.”

“I’ll cab it, I suppose. Good luck to you. Let me know how you fare with Yale.” He turned and walked away.

Taylor had thought she’d have to do a private-eye number:
Hey, follow that cab; there’s a fiver in it for you
. But no: Dudley didn’t flag down a taxi at all. He was on foot, going to meet the mysterious W.S., whom he had visited the night the note was stolen.

When he was a half block away, Taylor followed. They moved west through the eerie illumination of a city at night—the glossy wetness of the streets and storefront windows lit for security. Still plenty of traffic, some theaters letting out now, people leaving restaurants en route to clubs and bars. Taylor felt infused with the luminous energy of New York; she found that she’d sped up to keep pace with it and had nearly overtaken Dudley. She slowed and let him regain a long lead.

Out of the brilliant, cold, fake daylight of Times Square. Only now did Taylor feel the first lump of fear as she crossed an invisible barrier, into pimp city. The public relations firms hired by New York developers called this area Clinton; almost everyone else knew it by its historical name—the more picturesque Hell’s Kitchen.

Taylor continued her pursuit even when Dudley hit Twelfth Avenue, near the river, and turned south, where the streetlights grew sparser and the neighborhoods were deserted, abandoned even by the hookers.

Then Dudley stopped so suddenly, catching Taylor in mid-thought, that she had to jump into a doorway to avoid being seen.

The concrete reeked of sour urine. Hugging the shadows,
she felt nauseous. When she looked again Dudley was gone. Taylor waited for five minutes, breathing shallow gasps of cold air, listening to the sticky rush of traffic on the West Side Highway. Then she walked toward the spot where Dudley had disappeared: the doorway of a small two-story building. There were no lights radiating from the windows; she saw they were painted over. An old sign, faded, read,
West Side Art and Photography Club
.

W.S. on his calendar. So, a place, not a person.

He’d come here on Saturday night and then—possibly—gone to the firm around the time the note had disappeared.

But was there a connection?

Or was this just his hobby? Taking pictures or attending lectures on Ansel Adams and Picasso?

She cocked her head and listened. She thought she heard something. Wait, wait. Taylor tried to block out the rush of the cars and trucks and believed she heard music, something syrupy, full of strings, like Mantovani. Standing in the doorway, her feet stinging from the unaccustomed exercise in very unsensible Joan and David heels, she leaned against the stone and watched a cluster of intrepid rats browse through a garbage pile across the street.

He goes in, she figured, he’s got to come out.

Forty minutes later he did.

The door swung wide. Taylor caught an image of pink and lavender. Soft music and softer light spilled out into the street. A radio cab—owned by the company that the firm used—pulled up. Dudley vanished immediately into the car, which sped away.

The question was, what would Mitchell do?

No, that wasn’t the question at all. She
knew
what he would do. The question really was, did she have the guts to do the same thing?

The grapevine says you’ve got balls
.

Yeah, well … Taylor walked to the front door and pressed the buzzer.

A handsome black man, large and trapezoidal, opened the door. “Yes?” he asked, poised and polite.

Taylor said, “Um, I’m here.…” Her voice clogged.

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m here because a customer—”

“A member?”

“Right, a member referred me.”