Mistress of Justice (49 page)

The gun drooped.

Reece stepped forward slowly and took the pistol from her. He put his arm around her shoulders. “It’s all right,” he whispered.

“I wanted to be strong,” she said. “I wanted to kill him.

But I can’t do it.”

Burdick said to them both, “I swear I had nothing to do—”

She pulled away from Reece’s arm and faced Burdick in her fury. “You may think you have the police and the mayor and everyone else in your pocket but it’s not going to stop me from making sure you spend the rest of your life in jail!”

Taylor grabbed a telephone off the table.

The partner shook his head. “Taylor, whatever you think, it’s not true.”

She had just started dialing when a hand reached over, lifted the receiver away from her and replaced it in the cradle.

“No, Taylor …,” Mitchell Reece said. He sighed and lifted the gun, the muzzle pointing at her like a single black pearl. “No,” he repeated softly.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

She gave a faint laugh of surprise.

Much the same sound that Mitchell Reece himself had uttered when she told him a few days ago that Clayton had been murdered. Then her smile faded and with bottomless horror in her voice she said, “What are you doing?”

His face was stone, his eyes expressionless, but the answer was clear.

“You, Mitchell?” she whispered.

Donald Burdick said, “One of you tell me what’s going on here.”

Reece ignored him. Still holding the gun on both of them, he walked to the door, looked outside, made sure the corridor was empty and returned. He said to her angrily, “Why the hell didn’t you stop when you should have, Taylor? Why? It was all planned out so carefully. You ruined it.”

Burdick, horrified, said, “Mitchell, it was you? You killed Wendall Clayton?”

Taylor’s eyes closed for a brief moment. She shook her head.

Reece told her, “Wendall Clayton killed the woman I loved.”

Taylor frowned then said, “Linda? Linda Davidoff!”

Reece nodded slowly.

“Oh, my God …”

After a moment Reece said, “It was all about a man and a woman. As simple as that.” His eyebrows rose. “A man who’d never had time for relationships, a woman who was beautiful and creative and brilliant. Two people who’d never been in love before. Not real love. It wasn’t a good combination. An ambitious, tough lawyer. Best in law school, best at the firm … The woman was a poet—shy, sensitive. Don’t ask me how they became close. Opposites attract, maybe. A secret romance in a Wall Street law firm. They worked together and started going out. They fell in love. She got pregnant and they were going to get married.”

A moment passed and Reece seemed to be hefting the words to select among them. Finally he continued, “Wendall was working on a case one weekend, and he needed a paralegal. Linda’d cut way back on her hours—that’s when she’d stopped working for me and Sean Lillick took over. But she still worked occasionally. She did a few assignments for Wendall Clayton and he got obsessed with her. One weekend in September he found out she was at her parents’ summer house in Connecticut, not far from his place. He went to see her, tried to seduce her. She called me, crying. But before I could get up there or she could get away there was a struggle and she fell into the ravine. She died. Clayton left her poem to make it look like a suicide.”

“This whole thing,” Taylor whispered, “it was fake. You lied about everything.… Your mother, in the hospital? You weren’t going to see her at all. You were going to Scarsdale—to take flowers to Linda’s grave.”

Reece nodded.

The nail of Taylor’s index finger touched the marble. “Oh, Mitchell, it’s so fucking clear now.” She looked at Burdick. “Don’t you see what he’s done?” She turned to face
Reece, who leaned against the dark, dried-blood-red conference table, looking gaunt and pale. “You got one of your criminal clients from the pro bono program—what? A hit man, a killer, a mercenary soldier? You got him to break into your own file cabinet, steal the Hanover note and hide it in Wendall’s office. Then you had him bug your own office so you’d look as innocent as possible. You recorded some conversations then planted the tapes with the note. You had me track him down.”

She thought for a moment. “Then, at Clayton’s party, I found the receipt from the security service: upstairs, where
you
sent me to search—after you planted it there.… Finally I found the note in Clayton’s office.” She laughed bitterly. “And after the Hanover trial your hit man killed him right away—because he couldn’t very well be accused of something he hadn’t done.”

The lawyer made no effort to deny any of this.

She continued, “And his suicide note … It was fake, wasn’t it? Who forged it? Another criminal client?”

The associate lifted his eyebrow, conceding the accuracy of her deduction.

She laughed bitterly, glancing at the partner.

Men of most renowned virtue …

Reece was gazing at her, impassive as a statue.

Eyes still on Reece, locked on his, Taylor said, “And Donald was a big help, wasn’t he?” She turned to the partner. “Nothing personal, Donald, but you laid a pretty damn good smoke screen.” Her hands were shaking now. The tears started. “And as for me, well, you were keeping pretty close tabs on your pawn. All you had to do was look across the pillow.”

A bit of emotion blossomed in his face at this—like the first cracks in spring ice. Reece took a Kleenex from his pocket and began rubbing the trigger guard and grip and frame of the gun. He nodded. “You won’t believe me if I tell you that what happened between us wasn’t part of the plan.”

“Bullshit! You tried to kill me!”

His eyes grew wide. “I didn’t want to hurt you! You should have stopped when you were supposed to!”

Burdick said, “But Mitchell, how could you risk it? You love the law. You’d
risk
everything for this, for revenge?”

He smiled with a look as bleak as a hunting field in December. “But there
was
no risk, Donald. Don’t you know me by now? I knew I’d get away with it. Every nuance was planned. Every action and reaction. Every move anticipated and guarded against. I planned this exactly the same way I plan my trials. There was no way it wouldn’t work.” He sighed and shook his head. “Except for you, of course, Taylor. You were the flaw.… Why didn’t you just let it go? I killed an evil man. I did the firm—hell, I did the
world
—a favor.”

“You used me!”

Donald Burdick sat heavily in a chair, his head dipping. “Oh, Mitchell, all you had to do was go to the police. Clayton would’ve been arrested for the girl’s death.”

The young lawyer gave a harsh laugh. “You think so? And what would’ve happened, Donald? Nothing. Any half-assed criminal lawyer could’ve gotten him off. There was no witness, no physical evidence. Besides, you of all people ought to know how many favors Clayton could’ve called in. The case wouldn’t’ve even gotten to the grand jury.”

His attention dipped for a moment to the gun. He flipped it open expertly and saw six cartridges in the cylinder. Then from his pocket he took the note that Taylor Lockwood had written to him, the note about going to confront a killer. He folded it into a tight square, stepped forward and stuffed it into her breast pocket.

She whispered, nodding at it, “I wrote my own suicide note, didn’t I? I kill Donald and then myself. Oh, my God …”

“It’s your fault,” he muttered. “You should’ve just moved on, Taylor. You should’ve let Clayton stay in hell and let the rest of us get on with our business.”

“My fault?” She leaned forward. “What the hell happened to you? Has it all caught up? Finally? Pushing, pushing,
pushing … years and years of it. Win the case, win the goddamn case—that’s all you see, all you care about! You don’t know what justice is anymore. You’ve turned it inside out.”

“Don’t lecture me,” he said wearily. “Don’t talk to me about things you can’t understand. I live with the law, I’ve made it a part of me.”

Burdick said, “There’s no way you can justify it, Mitchell. You killed a man.”

Reece rubbed his eyes. After a moment, he said, “You get asked a lot why you go to law school. Did you go because you wanted to help society, to make money, to further justice? That’s what people always want to know. Justice? There’s so little of it in the world, so little justice in our lives. Maybe on the whole it balances out; maybe God looks down from someplace and says, ‘Yeah, pretty good, I’ll let it go at that.’ But you know the law as well as I do, both of you. Innocent people serve time and guilty ones get off. Wendall Clayton killed Linda Davidoff and he was going to go free. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

Taylor said, “The suicide note—Clayton’s. ‘Men of most renowned virtue …’ How does it go?”

Reece said, “ ‘Have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.’ ”

“You meant it about you, then, not Clayton.”

Reece nodded solemnly. “It’s about me.”

“Mitchell,” Burdick whispered, “just put the gun down. We’ll go to the police. If you talk to them—”

But Reece walked slowly over to Taylor. He stood two feet away. She didn’t move.

“No!” Burdick shouted. “Don’t worry about the police. We can forget what happened. There’s no need for this to go beyond this room. There’s no need.…”

Reece glanced at the partner briefly but didn’t speak. His whole attention was on Taylor. He touched her hair, then her cheek. He nestled the muzzle of the gun against her breast.

“I wish …” He cocked the gun. “I wish …”

Taylor wiped the thick tears. “But it’s me, Mitchell.
Me
. Think about what you’re going to do.”

“Please, Mitchell,” Burdick said. “Money, do you want money? A fresh start somewhere?”

But it was Taylor who raised her hand to silence the partner. “No. He’s come too far. There’s nothing more to say.”

At last there were tears on Reece’s face. The gun wavered and rose. For a moment it seemed to be levitating; maybe he intended to touch the chill muzzle to his own temple and pull the trigger.

But his deeper will won and he lowered the black weapon to her once more.

Alice, in this dreadful world on the other side of the looking glass, remained completely still. There was no place to go. All she could do was close her eyes, which is what she now did.

Mitchell Reece, practical as ever, held his left hand to his face to protect himself from the blast—and her spattered blood—and then he pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER FORTY

In the hushed conference room the metallic click was as loud as the gunshot would have been.