Mistress of Justice (23 page)

“Did you know her well?”

“Pretty well. I read some of her pieces and did some editing for her. She wrote reviews for us and I was hoping eventually to publish some of her poems.”

“Was she good?”

“She was young; her work was unformed. But if she’d kept at it I know she would’ve gone someplace.”

“What was her style like? Plath?” Taylor had read some of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and recalled that she too had committed suicide.

Stuart said, “Her poetry was more traditionally structured than Plath’s. But her personal life? Yep, just as turbulent. The wrong men, always heartbroken. Too stoic. She needed to scream and throw things more. But she kept it all inside.”

The food came and Danny Stuart dug eagerly into his huge mass of rabbit food. Taylor started working on the sandwich, which she decided should be named not the garden but the cardboard burger.

“How did it happen, the suicide?” she asked.

“She was up at her parents’ summer house in Connecticut. The back deck was above this big gorge. One night, she jumped. The fall didn’t kill her but she hit her head and got knocked out. She drowned in a stream.”

Taylor closed her eyes and shook her head. “Did she leave a note?”

He nodded. “Well, it wasn’t really a note. It was one of her poems. When you called and said you were curious about her I thought you’d like to see it. I made you a copy. It’s dated the day before she died. It talks about leaving life behind her, all the cares.… I was going to publish it in my magazine but, you know, I haven’t had the heart.”

He handed her the Xerox copy. Taylor read the title: “When I Leave.”

She looked at Danny and said, “I hope I can ask you something in confidence. Something that won’t go any further.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think Linda killed herself because of something that happened at work?”

“No.”

“You sound pretty certain.”

“I am. I know exactly why she killed herself.”

“I thought no one knew.”

“Well, I did. She was pregnant.”

“Pregnant?”

“I don’t think anybody knew except me. She got an EPT kit? It was just a couple of weeks before she died. I saw the kit in the bathroom and asked her about it. You know, we were like girlfriends. She confided in me.”

“But why would she kill herself?”

“I think the father dumped her.”

“Who was the father?”

“I don’t know. She was seeing somebody but never talked about him or brought him around the apartment. She was real secretive about him.”

“Breaking up … that upset her so much she killed herself?”

Stuart considered. She thought, studying his face: poet’s eyes, artist’s eyes. Unlike Sean Lillick, this was the real thing. He said, “There’s more to it. See, Linda had no business working at that law firm. She was too sensitive. The business world was way too much for her. She got thrown too easily. Then when her personal life came crashing down I think it pushed her over the edge.”

“But you don’t know if there was anything specific at the firm that upset her? Anything she might’ve felt guilty about?”

“Nope. She never mentioned a word about that. And she probably would have. As I said, she and I were like, well, sisters.”

So, the rabbit hole of Wall Street had proved too much for poor Linda Davidoff.

Without the heart to read the girl’s suicide poem, Taylor put it in her purse and continued to eat her bland lunch while she and Danny talked about life in the Village.

Her face broke into another major yawn. She laughed and Stuart joined her.

“Not getting enough sleep lately?” he wondered.

“The problem,” she explained, “is that I’ve been living an after-hours life when I’m not an after-hours person. I’m a during-hours person.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Alice was on another trip through the looking glass.

This time, in a limo.

Taylor and Thom Sebastian were speeding down the Long Island Expressway Friday after work. The driver’s eyes flicked to the radar detector needle as often as they glanced at the highway.

“I’m totally psyched you came,” Sebastian said with apparent sincerity. “I thought you were going to boogie in with the Big E.”

“E?”

“Excuse, you know. I—”

“Get that a lot?” she filled in.

“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Now let me tell you about Bosk.”

“What’s the story behind the name?”

“His real handle’s Brad Ottington Smith. B-O-S. Bosk. I’m Sea-bastian. Sea Bass. Get it? Okay. His father and mother have been separated practically since he was born. She has a house in Boston and his father has an apartment on the Upper East Side. They kept the summer place in the
Hamptons and have it on alternate weeks. They—that’s the parents they—can’t talk to each other without bloodshed so they have their lawyers schedule the visits to the house.”

“And we’re the mother’s week.”

“Right.”

“Sounds like it’s going to be a bucket of kicks and giggles. What is she, a wicked witch?” Taylor asked.

“All I’ll say is she’s more powerful than his father.”

“What does
he
do?”

“Dad? What he does is he’s rich. He’s a senior partner at Ludlum Morgan, the investment bank.”

“Bosk.” She laughed. “I feel like I want to give him a Milk-Bone when I call him that. What firm does he work at?”

As he’d done the other night, though, he grew reluctant to give much away about Bosk professionally.

“Little shop in Midtown.” Sebastian busied himself opening a Budweiser, handed it to her. Popped another.

“The mother?”

“Ada travels, entertains, does what any fifty-five-year-old sorority sister does: manages her portfolio. It’s about a hundred million.” Sebastian sipped the beer and let his hand stray—accidentally on purpose—to her knee. “Ho, boy, Taylor. This’s gonna be primo. Good food, good drink, good people.”

She lifted his pudgy fingers off her skirt. “And good behavior.”

Sebastian moaned, then sat back in silence, and they gazed out the dim windows as dusk enveloped the flat, sandy landscape.

The Ottington Smith family manse was a three-story Gothic Victorian house, white with dark blue trim, about a hundred miles east of New York on the South Shore of Long Island. Two towers rose to widow’s walks, which overlooked a huge yard and three connected outbuildings. The house itself was covered with skeletons of vines and wisteria. A spiked, wrought-iron fence surrounded a labyrinth of grounds. Much of the property had been reclaimed by
tangles of forsythia, which sported sparse tags of brown and yellow leaves.

“Addams Family,” Taylor said.

The circular driveway was full of cars. The limo paused and they got out. “God, more German cars than in Brazil,” Sebastian said.

“Porches. I love porches,” Taylor said. She sat on a wooden swing and rocked back and forth. “Wish it were thirty degrees warmer.”

He rang the bell. A woman in her mid-fifties came to the door. Her dry, blond hair swept sideways Jackie Kennedy–style and was sprayed firmly into place. She wore a lime-green silk dress woven with pink and black triangles that pointed feverishly in all directions. Taylor bird-spotted Chanel.

The woman’s face was long and glossy, the high bones holding the skin like a taut sail. Her jewelry was large. A blue topaz on her tanned, wrinkled finger was easily fifty carats.

“Thomas.” They pressed cheeks and Taylor was introduced to Ada Smith—introduced, then promptly examined: the dynamics of the eyes, the contour of skin. The mouth especially. The review was mixed and Taylor believed she understood why: Bosk’s little girlfriends—age twenty-three or twenty-four—could be forgiven their youth. Taylor had broken the three-oh barrier and yet had hardly a crow’s foot or defining jowl.

She hates me, Taylor thought.

Yet Ada’s smile and charm didn’t waver; she’d been brought up right. “Call me Ada, please. I don’t know where Bradford is. The others are in the den. Bradford’s the cocktail and cigar director. I’m in charge of dinner. That will be at eight.”

Then she was gone.

From the back hallway, a bellowing voice: “Sea Bass, Sea Bass!”

Sebastian ran toward him and grunted. “Bosk-meister! Yo!”

They slapped fists, reminding Taylor of bull rams smacking horns.

Their host was in chinos, Top-Siders and a green Harvard sweatshirt. His hands and face were red, his eyes watering from the cold. “We’ve been chopping wood for the fire.”

A girl giggled at the apparent lie.

“Well,” Bosk said, “carting it in. Same as chopping it. Just as much work.”

Bosk leaned forward, his arm on Sebastian’s shoulders. He whispered, “Jennie’s here and she brought Billy-boy, you can believe it.”

“No way! Is she totally fucked, or what?” Sebastian looked around uneasily. “And how ’bout Brittany?”

“Couldn’t make it.”

The lawyer’s eyes were immeasurably relieved and Taylor remembered something from the club about unreturned phone calls.

Then Bosk’s eyes danced to Taylor. “ ’Lo. You’re …?”

“Taylor Lockwood.”

“Right, you’re the one who won’t marry me.”

“True, but you’re in good company.” She nodded at Sebastian. “I won’t marry him either. You have a nice place here.”

“Thanks. I’ll show you around later. Come on inside. We’ve got a fire going.”

After she’d washed up she joined the crowd in the den. They were mostly in their twenties. Names went past—Rob and Mindy and Gay-Gay and Trevor and Windham and MacKenzie (the latter both female), clusters of contemporary syllables more distinct than the faces of the handsome men and pretty women they identified.

Taylor smiled and waved and forgot the names instantly. They were friendly but reserved and Taylor wondered what they were thinking of her—a woman with more wop and mick in her than Brit, with a mass of kinky black hair, not a pert ponytail, and wearing a long paisley skirt and a black blouse, not a J. Crew stitch upon her body.

Suspicion … That was the message from the women.
From the men there was something very different. Something between casual flirtation and a knee-jerk invitation to hump. Taylor supposed that soon there’d be a lot of female fingers twining possessively through the belt loops of their men.

Bosk made martinis for the crowd but Taylor stuck with beer.

“Are you a lawyer?” one blonde asked.

“A paralegal.”

“Oh,” the woman said, blinking. “That’s interesting.”

“We need you folks,” one handsome young man said as he tinkered nervously with his Rolex. “You save our butts every day.” It seemed he wasn’t being condescending; he was simply embarrassed for her and trying to salvage her pride.

“Where’re you from? Boston, right? I detect Bostonian.”

“Born on the North Shore.”

“Oh, Locust Valley?” a pretty blond woman asked. The residence of the crème de la crème. J. P. Morgan’s home.

“No, Glen Cove.” A pleasant but strip-malled city. “But we moved to Maryland when I was twelve.”

“Is your father or mother in the business?”

“Which business would that be?” Taylor asked innocently.

“Law, banking?” As if no other businesses existed.

“He manages a convenience store,” she replied.

Sebastian, who’d already commented about her father and his renowned law practice, glanced at her with a cryptic look.

“Well, retail,” one girl finally said, nodding with robust approval. “Good margins in retail lately.”

“Very good,” somebody else added.

And to her relief, Taylor Lockwood ceased to be a human being as far as they were concerned and their own conversation—the real and important conversation—resumed.