Mistress of Justice (33 page)

“Well, anything in the fiancé-boyfriend category. You know, those pesky fellows that tend to get there first?”

“Not exactly.”

John Silbert Hemming said, “How about dinner?”

“Can’t.”

“I was going to let
you
take
me
out so you could deduct it.”

She laughed and said, “I’ve got plans for the immediate future.”

“Plans are what contractors and shipbuilders use.”

“Some other time?” she asked. “I mean it.”

“Sure,” Hemming said. Then, as she started to stand, he held up a finger, which returned her to her seat. “One thing … there’s this friend I have. He wears a badge and works at a place called One Police Plaza and I was thinking maybe it’s time you gave him a call. Just to have a chat.”

Taylor replayed the drive through the foliage down to the reservoir last night and thought Hemming’s was an excellent idea.

But she answered, “No.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

They walked together through Battery Park.

Ralph Dudley’s eyes were on the Statue of Liberty, rising from the harbor like a sister of the figure of blind justice. Junie walked silently beside him. He wanted to hold her hand but of course he did not. Like tourists, they were on their way to see the monument up close.

Dudley wondered how many people Junie’s age knew the lines carved on the base of the statue, knew they were from a poem called “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus.

Hardly any.

But, he also wondered, how many Wall Street lawyers knew it?

Not many of them either.

“Is it, like, cold on the boat?”

“You’re saying ‘like’ again a lot. Remember, you were going to watch it.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sure we can sit downstairs where it’s warm. We’ll get some hot chocolate.”

“Or a beer,” she muttered.

“Ha,” Dudley said. “Come on over here for a minute.”

He nodded to a bench and they sat down, Dudley wondering, as he had for a thousand times that year, why he was so taken with this little creature.

“Yo, so wassup?” she said. Sometimes she talked black and there was nothing he could say to get her out of this mode. He’d learned that it was best to ignore her affectations. They went away sooner or later.

“I’ve got some papers here. For you to sign. We couldn’t do it in the firm.”

She put her Walkman headsets on. He took them off her and smoothed her hair. She wrinkled her face.

“You’ve got to sign them.”

“Like, okay.”

He dug them out of his briefcase and handed them to her.

“Okay,” she said, snapping her gum. “Gimme a pen.”

Dudley reached into his jacket pocket and found that he’d accidentally picked up his Cross mechanical pencil. “Damn, I forgot mine.”

“I, like, have one.” She reached into her purse and pulled it out. But as she did a piece of paper fell to the ground. Dudley had picked it up and started to hand it back when he looked at the check.

He saw Junie’s name.

He saw Taylor Lockwood’s name.

His hand froze in midair between them.

Dudley looked at her with rage in his face. “What is this?

“I—”

“What the hell have you done?”

“Poppie?” she asked, dropping her Walkman. It broke apart on the asphalt.

“How could you?” he whispered. “How could you?”

The going rate to get Alice into the rabbit hole of a Manhattan apartment was a sob story.

I feel so stupid, Ralph Dudley’s my uncle? And my aunt—that’s his wife—passed away two years ago today and he was feeling really lousy. I wanted to make him dinner, just to cheer him up
.

She held up the Food Emporium bag as evidence.

Here’s fifty for your trouble. Don’t say anything, okay? It’s a surprise
.

Taylor Lockwood had dressed in her business finest, to allay the doorman’s concerns. He looked her over, pocketed the money, slipped her a spare key and turned back to a tiny television.

She knew Dudley wouldn’t be here. She’d run into him in the halls and he’d told her that he was taking the afternoon off to show Junie the Statue of Liberty. The sullen girl had been in the lobby, waiting for him. Taylor shivered at the thought of the two of them together. For the girl’s part, she looked from Dudley’s face to Taylor’s and back again. And just seemed bored.

Taylor now walked inside and found that Dudley’s apartment was much smaller and more modest than she’d expected.

Although she knew about his financial problems, she’d assumed that an elderly Wall Street law firm partner like Dudley would be living at least in simple elegance, jaded though it might be. In fact, the four rooms in the prewar building didn’t not have much more square footage than her own apartment. The walls were covered with cheap paint, which blotched where it was thin and peeled where the painters had bothered to apply several coats. There was no way the windows would ever open again.

She gave a cursory once-over to the living room, which was filled with old furniture, some of whose tattered, cracked arms and legs were tied together neatly with twine. She saw chipped vases, lace that had been torn and carelessly
resewn, books, afghans, walking sticks, a collection of dented silver cigarette cases. Walls were covered with old framed pictures of relatives, including several of Dudley as a young man with a large, unfriendly-looking woman. He was handsome but very thin and he stared at the camera with solemn introspection.

In his bedroom, beside a neatly made bed, she found what looked like a wooden torso with one of Dudley’s suit jackets hanging on the shoulders. A clothes brush rested on a small rack on the torso’s chest and on the floor in front of it was a pair of carefully polished shoes with well-worn heels.

His fussiness made her job as burglar easy. Each of the pigeonholes in his oak rolltop desk contained a single, well-marked category of documents. Con Ed bills, phone bills, letters from his daughter (the least-filled compartment), business correspondence, warranty cards for household appliances, letters from his alumni organization, receipts. He separated opera programs from symphony programs from ballet programs.

Taylor finished the desk in ten minutes but could find nothing linking Dudley to the note or to Hanover & Stiver. Discouraged and feeling hot and filthy from the search, she walked into the kitchen, illuminated with pallid light from the courtyard that the room’s one small window looked out on.

Taylor leaned against the sink. In front of her was Dudley’s small kitchen table, on either side of which were two mahogany chairs. One side of the table was empty. On the other was a faded place mat on which sat an expensive, nicked porcelain plate, a setting of heavy silverware, a wineglass—all arranged for his solitary dinner that evening. A starched white napkin, rolled and held by a bright red napkin ring, rested in the center of the plate. The gaudy ring was the one item glaringly out of place. Taylor picked up the cheap plastic, the kind sold at the bargain stores in Times Square where tourists buy personalized souvenirs—cups, dishes, tiny license plates.

She turned it over; the name sloppily embossed in the plastic was
Poppie
.

A present from June, the object of his perverse desire.

Her hour was up. Book on outta here, Alice.…

Nothing, she thought angrily. I didn’t find a thing. Not a single hint as to where the note might be. She stuffed the grocery bag, which had been filled only with wadded-up newspapers, into the trash chute and left.

So, can we eliminate Dudley? she wondered.

No, but we can put him lower on the list than Thom Sebastian.

Well, don’t get too interested in her.…

She’d charm the young lawyer, interrogate him—the prick who’d been collecting information on her. She remembered his troubled expression yesterday. Maybe a confession
would
be forthcoming at dinner tonight. She still held out that hope.

Outside, she paused for a moment, rubbed her eyes.

Tomorrow, she thought in alarm, the trial was tomorrow.

Taylor stepped into the street to flag down a cab.

Thom Sebastian sat at the bar of the Blue Devil on the far edge of West Fifty-seventh, near the Hudson River.

An excellent place, he assessed, it had a mostly black audience, dressed super-sharp. He was working on a vodka gimlet, imagining his juggler and thinking, So far, so good.

But also thinking
goddamn
, I’m nervous.

He was considering what was about to happen tonight.

Was this a way-major mistake?

For a while he’d thought so. But now he wasn’t so sure. Had no idea.

But it
was
going to happen; the die had been cast, he thought, phrasing the situation in a cliché that he found unworthy of a lawyer of his caliber.

He found himself coolly considering partnership at Hubbard, White & Willis and he remembered—almost with amusement—that he’d always considered achieving partnership a matter of life and death.

Death …

After Wendall Clayton had called him into his office and told him in that soft voice of his that the firm had concluded it would be unable to extend the offer of partnership to him, Sebastian had sat motionless for three or four minutes, smiling at the partner, listening to the man describe the firm’s plans for Sebastian’s severance.

A smile, yes, but it was really a rictus gaze, what to Clayton—had the fucking prick even noticed—must have seemed like a grin of madness: teeth bared, eyes crinkling in a psychotic squint.

“We’d like to make you a partner, Thom—you’re respected here—but you understand that economies have to be effected.”

Meaning simply that Sebastian was not a clone of Wendall Clayton and was, therefore, expendable.

Effecting economies …
Oh, how that term—pure corporatespeak—had inflamed him like acid.

Listening to Clayton, he’d lowered his head and had seen something resting on the partner’s desk: an inlaid dish of Arabic design. Sebastian’s eyes had clung to the dish as if he could encapsulate the terrible reality in the cloisonné and escape, leaving his sorrow trapped behind him.