Mistress of Justice (5 page)

“So, first of all,” she said, “what does it look like? The note.”

“Nothing fancy. One piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper.” He showed her a binder containing a copy of it.

She looked over the undistinguished document then asked, “Tell me what happened and when.”

“The bank messengered the note to me at five in the afternoon on Saturday—they were closed on Sunday and since the trial started at nine on Monday I needed it early to make copies for pleadings. Well, I locked it in my file cabinet as soon as it came in. I made the copies about ten or eleven that night, put it back in the cabinet, locked it. I left at three on Sunday morning. I got some sleep, came back around nine-thirty. I noticed some scratch marks on the lock and opened it up. The note was gone. I spent the rest of Sunday looking for it. I appeared in court yesterday, got the continuance for a week from today and then came back here to find somebody to help me.”

“Did you see anybody at the firm that night?”

“Not after five or six. Not a soul. But I was at my desk practically the whole time.”

“Well.” She sat back, reflecting. “You mentioned motive. Who has a motive to steal it? You said it was negotiable. Could somebody cash it in?”

“No, nobody in the world’d take paper like that. Too big
and too easily traced. I’m sure it was just to delay the case—to give Lloyd Hanover a chance to hide his assets.” “Who knew you had it?”

“The messenger didn’t know what was in the bag but it was an armed courier service so they’d know it was valuable. At the bank, as far as I know, the only one who knew I took delivery was the vice president who worked on the deal.” “Could he have been bribed by Hanover?” Reece said, “Anything’s possible, but he’s a career officer. Been with the bank for twenty years. I know him personally. He and his wife live in Locust Valley and they’ve got plenty of money on their own. Anyway, he’s the point man on the deal. If the bank doesn’t collect on this note, he’ll be fired.”

“Who here knew you were working on the case?”

Reece laughed. He slid a memo across to her.

“This is the standard conflicts of interest memo. To let everybody know who we’re suing. If any lawyers here have ever represented Hanover we have to drop the case or do a Chinese wall to make sure there was no appearance that we were compromising either client.… So, in answer to your question,
everybody
here knew what I was doing. And by checking copies of my correspondence in the file room they could figure out when I’d be receiving the note.”

Taylor prodded the conflicts memo with the fork of her fingers.

“What do you know about the executives at Hanover?”

“I’ve had murderers in the pro bono program who’re more upright than the CEO—Lloyd Hanover. He’s unadulterated scum. He thinks he’s some kind of smooth operator. You know the kind—late fifties, crew-cut, tanned. Has three mistresses. Wears so much gold jewelry he’d never get through a metal detector.”

“That’s not a crime,” Taylor said.

“No, but his three SEC violations and two RICO and one IRS convictions were.”

“Ah.”

Taylor glanced out the window: across the street was a wall of office windows, a hundred of them. And beyond that building were others with more office windows, and still more beyond that. Taylor Lockwood was, momentarily, overwhelmed by the challenges they faced. Needles and haystacks … She asked, “Are you sure we’re looking for something that still exists?”

“How do you mean?”

“If nobody’s going to cash the note why wouldn’t they just burn it?”

“Good question. I’ve thought about that. When I was an assistant U.S. prosecutor—and when I do my criminal defense work now—I always put myself in the mind of the perp. In this case, if the note disappears forever that implies a crime. If it’s just misplaced until Hanover’s hidden his assets and then it resurfaces, well, that suggests, just legal malpractice on Hubbard, White’s part; nobody looks any farther for a bad guy than us. That’s why I think the note’s still in the firm. Maybe in the file room, maybe stuck in a magazine in a partner’s office, maybe behind a copier—wherever the thief hid it.

Thief.… Lockwood felt her first uneasy twinge—not only at the impossibility of the task but that there was potential danger too.

In Wonderland the Queen of Hearts’ favorite slogan was “Off with their heads.”

She sat back. “I don’t know, Mitchell. It seems hopeless. There’re a million places the note could be.”

“We don’t have the facts yet. There’s a huge amount of information at the firm about where people have been at various times and what they’ve been doing. Billing department, payroll, things like that. I guess the first thing I’d do is check the door key entry logs and time sheets to find out who was in the firm on Saturday.”

She nodded at the lock. “But we think it was a pro, don’t we? Not a lawyer or employee?”

“Still, somebody had to let him in. Either that or they lent him their key card—or one they’d stolen.” Reece then took out his wallet and handed her a thousand dollars in hundreds.

She looked at the cash with a funny smile, embarrassed, curious.

“For expenses.”

“Expenses.” Did he mean bribes? She wasn’t going to ask. Taylor held the bills awkwardly for a moment then slipped them into her purse. She noticed a sheet of paper on Reece’s desk. It was legal-sized and pale green—the color of corridors in old hospitals and government buildings. She recognized it as the court calendar the managing attorney of Hubbard, White circulated throughout the firm daily. It contained a grid of thirty days beginning with today. Filling these squares were the times and locations of all court appearances scheduled for the firm’s litigators. She leaned forward. In the square indicating one week from today were the words:

He looked at his watch. “Let’s talk again tomorrow. But we should keep our distance when we’re at the firm. If anybody asks tell them you’re helping me with some year-end billing problems.”

“But who’d ask? Who’d even know?”

He laughed and seemed to consider this a naive comment. “How’s the Vista Hotel at nine-thirty?”

“Sure.”

“If I call you at home I can leave a message, can’t I?”

“I’ve got an answering machine.”

“No, I mean, there won’t be anybody else there to pick it up, right? I heard you lived alone.”

She hesitated momentarily and said only, “You can leave messages there.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“I have a breakfast meeting in half an hour then the partnership meeting for the rest of the morning,” Wendall Clayton said into the phone. “Get me the details as soon as possible.”

“I’ll do what I can, Wendall,” Sean Lillick, a young paralegal who worked for Clayton regularly, replied uneasily. “But it’s, like, pretty confidential.”

“ ‘Like’ confidential. It is confidential or not?”

A sigh from the other end of the phone line. “You know what I mean.”

The partner muttered, “You meant it
is
confidential. Well, find out who has the information and aristocratize them. I want the particulars. Which you might just have found out
before
you called. You’d know I’d want them.”

“Sure, Wendall,” Lillick said.

The partner dropped the phone into the cradle.

Wendall Clayton was a handsome man. Not big—under six feet—but solid from running (he didn’t jog; he
ran
) and tennis and skippering the forty-two-foot
Ginny May
around Newport every other weekend from April through
September. He had a thick bundle of professorial hair and he wore European suits, slitless in the back, forgoing the burdened sacks of dark pinstripe that cloaked most of the pear-shaped men of the firm. Killer looks, the women in the firm said. Another three inches and he could have been a model. Clayton worked hard at his image, the way nobility worked hard. A duke had to be handsome. A duke enjoyed dusting his suits with pig-bristle brushes and getting a radiant glow on his burgundy-colored Bally’s.

A duke took great pleasures in the small rituals of fastidiousness.

Aristocratize them.…

Sometimes Clayton would write the word in the margin of a memo one of his associates had written. Then watch the girl or boy, flustered, trying to pronounce it.
Ar-is-TOC-ra-tize …
he’d made up the term himself. It had to do with attitude mostly. Much of it was knowing the law, of course, and much was circumstance.

But mostly it was attitude.

Clayton practiced often and he was very good at it.

He hoped Sean Lillick would, in turn, be good at aristocratizing some underling in the steno department to get the information he wanted.

By searching through the correspondence files, time sheets and limousine and telephone logs the young paralegal had learned that Donald Burdick had recently attended several very secretive meetings and made a large number of phone calls during firm hours that had not been billed to any clients. This suggested to Clayton that Burdick was plotting something that could jeopardize the merger. That might not be the case, of course; his dealings could be related to some private business plans that Burdick or his Lucrezia Borgia of a wife, Vera, were involved in. But Clayton hadn’t gotten to his present station in life by assuming that unknown maneuverings of his rivals were benign.

Hence, his sending Lillick off on the new mission to find out the details.

The Tuesday morning light filtered into his office, the
corner office, located on the firm’s executive row, the seventeenth floor. The room measured twenty-seven by twenty—a size that by rights should have gone to a partner more senior than Clayton. When it fell vacant, however, the room was assigned to him. Even Donald Burdick never found out why.

Clayton glanced at the Tiffany nautical clock on his desk. Nearly time. He rocked back in his chair, his throne, a huge construction of oak and red leather he had bought in England for two thousand pounds.

Aristocratize
.

He ordered his secretary to have his car brought around. He rose, donned his suit jacket and left the office. The breakfast get-together he was about to attend was perhaps the most important of any meeting he’d been to in the past year. But Clayton didn’t go immediately to the waiting car. Rather, he decided he’d been a bit harsh on the young man and wandered down to Lillick’s cubicle in the paralegal department to personally thank the young man and tell him a generous bonus would be forthcoming.

“You ever been here, Wendall?” the man across the burnished copper table asked.

When Clayton spoke, however, it was to the captain of the Carleton Hotel on Fifty-ninth Street, off Fifth Avenue. “The nova, Frederick?”