Mistress of Justice (8 page)

Taylor didn’t glance up. “With who?” she asked casually but felt her heart gallop.

“Mitchell Reece.”

She laughed. “How’d you hear that?”

“Just the rumor around the paralegal pen. Some of the girls were jealous. They’re dying to work for him.”

Who the hell had noticed them? she wondered. She hadn’t seen a soul outside his office when she entered or left. “I just met with him for a few minutes is all.”

“Mitchell’s hot,” the girl said.

“Is he?” Taylor replied. “I didn’t take his temperature.” Nodding at the papers: “Can I keep them?”

“Sure, they’re copies.”

“Can I get any of this information myself?”

“Not if it’s in the computer. You need to be approved to go on-line and have a pass code and everything. But the raw time sheets—before they’re entered—anybody can look at. They’re in the file room, organized by the attorney assigned as lead on the case or deal. The other stuff … just tell one of the girls what you want and they’ll get it for you. Uhm, Taylor, can you, like, tell me what’s going on?”

She lowered her voice and looked gravely into the eyes of the young woman. “There was a mega mix-up on the New Amsterdam bill. I don’t know what happened but the client’s totally pissed. It was kind of embarrassing—with all the merger talks going on and everything. Mitchell wanted me to get to the bottom of it. On the Q.T.”

“I won’t say a word.”

Taylor put the rest of the papers into her attaché case.

“Ms. Satin Touch?” Dimitri called from behind the bar in a singsongy voice.

“Brother.” Taylor grimaced. “Gotta go pay the rent,” she said and climbed back under Dimitri’s homemade spotlights.

A trickle of fear ran through her as she began to play.

Who else had seen Mitchell and her together?

Taylor suddenly gave a brief laugh as she realized the title of the tune she found herself playing, selected by some subconscious hiccup.

The song was “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

“Hey,” the young man shouted over the music cascading from the club’s million-decibel sound system, “I’m sorry I’m late. Are you still speaking to me?”

The blond woman glanced at the chubby man. “What?” she called.

“I can’t believe I kept you waiting.”

She looked over his smooth baby-fatted skin, the newscaster’s perfect hair, the gray suit, wing tips, Cartier watch. He examined her right back: red angular dress, paisley black stockings, black hat and veil. Small tits, he noticed, but a lot of skin was exposed.

“What?” she shouted again. Though she’d heard his words; he knew she had.

“I got held up,” he explained, hands clasped together in prayer. “I can’t really go into it. It’s an unpleasant story.”

These were lines he used a lot in clubs like this. Cute lines, silly lines. As soon as the women realized that they’d never seen him before and that he was hitting on them in a major way, they usually rolled their eyes and said, “Fuck off.”

But sometimes, just sometimes, they didn’t. This one said nothing yet. She was taking her time. She watched him sending out Morse code with something in his hand, tapping it against the bar absently, while he smiled his flirts toward her.

Tap, tap, tap.

“I thought for sure you would’ve left. Would’ve served me right. Keeping a beautiful woman waiting,” said this young man with a slight swell of double chin and a belly testing his Tripler’s 42-inch alligator belt.

The process of scoring in a place like this was, of course, like negotiating. You had to play a role, act, be somebody else.

Tap, tap, tap.

The club was an old warehouse, sitting on a commercial street in downtown Manhattan, deserted except for the cluster of supplicants crowding around the ponytailed, baggy-jacketed doorman, who selected Those Who Might Enter with a grudging flick of a finger.

Thom Sebastian was never denied entrance.

Tap, tap, tap.

True, mostly the women roll their eyes and tell him to fuck off. But sometimes they did what she was doing now: looking down at the telegraph key—a large vial of coke—and saying, “Hi, I’m Veronica.”

He reacted to the gift of her name like a shark tasting blood in the water. He moved in fast, sitting next to her, shaking her hand for a lengthy moment.

“Thom,” he said.

The sound system’s speakers, as tall as the six-foot-six, blue-gowned transvestite dancing in front of them, sent fluttering bass waves into their faces and chests. The smell was a pungent mix of cigarette smoke and a gassy, ozonelike scent—from the fake fog.

Tap, tap, tap.

He offered his boyish grin while she rambled on about careers—she sold something in some store somewhere but wanted to get into something else. Sebastian nodded and murmured single-word encouragements and mentally tumbled forward, caught in the soft avalanche of anticipation. He saw the evening unfold before him: They’d hit the john, duck into a stall and do a fast line or two of coke. No nookie yet, nor would he expect any. After that they’d leave and go
over to Meg’s, where he was a regular. Then out for pasta. After that, when it was pushing 3
A.M
., he’d ask her with mock trepidation if she ever went north of Fourteenth Street.

A car-service Lincoln up to his apartment.

Your condom or mine …

And later, after a Val or ’lude to come down, they’d sleep. Up at eight-thirty the next morning, share the shower, take turns with the hair dryer, give her a kiss. She’d cab it home. He’d down some speed and head to Hubbard, White & Willis for another day of lawyering.

Tap, tap, tap …

“Hey,” Thom said, interrupting her as she was saying
something
, “how about—”

But there was a disturbance. Another incarnation of Veronica appeared: a young woman walking toward them. Different clothes but the same high cheeks, pale flesh, laces, silks, a flea market’s worth of costume jewelry. Floral perfume. They were interchangeable, these two women. Clones. They bussed cheeks. Behind Veronica II stood a pair of quiet, preoccupied young Japanese men dressed in black, hair greased and spiked high like porcupine quills. One wore a medal studded with rhinestones.

Sebastian suddenly detested them—not because of the impending kidnapping of his new love but for no reason he could figure out. He wanted to lean forward and ask the young man if he’d won the medal at Iwo Jima. Veronica nodded to her other half, lifted her eyebrows at Sebastian with regret and a smile that belied it and disappeared into the mist.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Quo vadis
, Veronica?” Sebastian whispered, pronouncing the v’s like w’s the way his Latin professor had instructed. He turned back to the bar and noticed that somebody had taken Veronica’s space. Someone who was the exact opposite of her: homey, pretty, dressed conservatively but stylishly in black. She was vaguely familiar; he
must’ve seen her here before. The woman ordered a rum and Coke, gave a laugh to herself.

She was hardly his type but Sebastian couldn’t help raise an eyebrow at the laugh. She noticed and said in response, “That woman over there? She’s decided I’m her soul mate. I don’t know what she wants but I don’t think it’s healthy.”

Instinctively he glanced where the woman was nodding and studied the gold lamé dress, the stiletto heels. He said, “Well, the good news is it’s not a woman.”

“What?”

“Truly. But the bad news is that I’m betting what he has in mind is still pretty perverse.”

“Maybe I better head for the hills,” she said.

“Naw, hang out here. I’ll protect you. You can cheer me up. My true love just left me.”

“The true love you just met four minutes ago?” the woman asked.
“That
true love?”

“Ah, you witnessed that, did you?”

She added, “Mine just stood me up. I won’t go so far as to say true love. He was a blind date.”

His mind raced. Yes, she
was
familiar.… She now squinted at him as if she recognized him too. Where did he know her from? Here? The Harvard Club? Piping Rock?

He wondered if he’d slept with her, and, if he had, whether he’d enjoyed it. Shit, had he called her the next day?

She was saying, “I couldn’t believe it. The bouncer wasn’t going to let me in. It took all my political pull.”

“Political?”

“A portrait of Alexander Hamilton.” She slung out the words and Sebastian thought he heard something akin to mockery in her voice, as if he wasn’t quick enough to catch the punch line.

“Gotcha,” Sebastian said, feeling defensive.

“This drink sucks. The Coke tastes moldy.”

Now he felt offended too, taking this as a criticism of the club, which was one of his homes away from home. He
sipped his own drink and felt uncharacteristically out of control. Veronica was easier to handle. He wondered how to get back in the driver’s seat.

“Look, I know I know you. You’re?”

“Taylor Lockwood.” They shook hands.

“Thom Sebastian.”

“Right,” she said, understanding dawning in his eyes.

With this, his mind made the connection. “Hubbard, White?”

“Corporate paralegal. Hey, you ever fraternize with us folks?”

“Only if we blow this joint. Let’s go—there’s nothing happening here.”

The tall gold-clad transvestite had begun a striptease in front of them, while ten feet away Tina Turner and Calvin Klein paused to watch.

“There isn’t?” Taylor asked.

Sebastian smiled, took her hand and led her through the crowd.

CHAPTER SIX

The drapery man was having a busy night.

He pushed a canvas cart ahead of him, filled with his props—draperies that needed to be cleaned but never would be. They were piled atop one another and the one on top was folded carefully; it hid his ice-pick weapon, resting near to hand.

This man had been in many different offices at all hours of the day and night. Insurance companies with rows of ghastly gray desks bathed in green fluorescence. CEOs’ offices that were like the finest comp suites in Vegas casinos. Hotels and art galleries. Even some government office buildings. But Hubbard, White & Willis was unique.

At first he’d been impressed with the elegant place. But now, pushing the cart through quiet corridors, he felt belittled. He sensed contempt for people like him, sensed it from the walls themselves. Here, he was nothing. His neck prickled as he walked past a dark portrait of some old man from the 1800s. He wanted to pull out his pick and slash the canvas.

The drapery man’s face was a map of vessels burst in s
fistfights on the streets and in the various prisons he’d been incarcerated in and his muscles were dense as a bull’s. He was a professional, of course, but part of him was hoping one of these scrawny prick lawyers, hunched over stacks of books in the offices he passed (no glances, no nods, no smiles—well, fuck you and your mother) … hoping one of them would walk up to him and demand to see a pass or permit so he could shank them through the lung.

But they all remained oblivious to him. An underling.

Not even worth noticing.

Glancing around to make sure no one was approaching, he stepped into the coffee room on the main floor and took a dusty container of Coffee-mate from the back of a storage shelf. In thirty seconds he’d slid out the tape recorder, removed the cassette, put in a new one and replaced the unit in the canister. He knew it was safe in this particular container because he’d observed that the prissy lawyers here insisted on real milk—half-and-half or 2 percent—and wouldn’t think of drinking, or serving their clients, anything artificial. The Coffee-mate tube had been here, untouched, for months.