Mistress of Justice Page 20

  "We want you to let it be known around the firms--ours and John Perelli's--that you want the merger to go through."

  "Why would we not want it to go through?"

  Simms said bluntly, "Donald and his cronies won't be there afterward."

  "Ah." Gliddick nodded. "I see."

  "You might feel some loyalty to him," Simms said.

  "Fuck, I do feel loyalty to him."

  "Of course you do. You've been friends for years. But putting that aside for a moment, let's talk about why you would want the firms to merge," Simms said.

  This is one slick boy--I like him, Gliddick thought, but immediately gave up the idea of trying to wrest him away from Hubbard, White to work for McMillan. Wendall Clayton was not somebody you stole employees from.

  Simms continued, "We've gone over your billings, Ed. Burdick's robbing you blind. Your legal costs are totally out of control. You're paying two hundred bucks an hour for first-year associates who know shit. You're paying for limo deliveries when messengers can take public transportation. You're paying premium bonuses for routine legal work. If you help the merger along we'll pare your expenses by an easy five million a year."

  "Five?"

  "Five. And if the merger goes through, Perelli can take over your labor law work. Right now you've got Mavern, Simpson handling it and, frankly, they're idiots. They didn't do shit to keep the unions out of your subs' Oregon and Washington State operations. Perelli's the toughest labor lawyer in New York. He'll fuck your unions in the ass."

  Gliddick shook his head. "Donald was on our board for I don't know how long. He's got friends all over the company. There're a lot of people won't take it kindly that we've sold him out."

  " 'Kindly'?" Simms said the word as if it were in a foreign language. "Well, loyalty's important. But it works both ways. I'd think you'd have to earn loyalty. And do you think a lawyer who misses a takeover plan against his client deserves it?"

  "A ... What're you talking about?"

  "There's a rumor.... Only a rumor but Wendall and I think it's valid."

  "We're always hearing that. Hell, we beat projections every quarter last year. Everybody'd love to acquire us."

  "But does everybody contact your institutional investors on the sly?"

  Gliddick's glass froze halfway to his mouth. "Who?"

  "GCI in Toronto."

  "Weinraub, that fucking Jew prick." A glance to Simms to see if the young man was Semitic but the results of the scan came back reassuringly Aryan. "I saw him just last week in London. He gave me the great stone face."

  Simms continued, "We're thinking four months till a tender offer. If you wait you'll pay a takeover firm a million or two to defend. Perelli can preempt it for a quarter of that. And he can handle it in a way that your stockholders and key employees won't get nervous and bail out. That's what he does best."

  "Donald doesn't know about it?"

  "Nope. We found out through Perelli.

  He finished his drink. Simms poured another.

  "Randy, I don't know. I can't argue with what you're saying, with the numbers. It's a moral decision. I don't like moral decisions. Maybe--"

  There was a knock on the door. A young woman. Blond, about five-two, wearing a short leather miniskirt and tight white blouse, walked into the suite.

  "Mr. Simms, I've got the file you asked for."

  "Thank you, Jean." He took a thick manila folder. "Jean, this is Mr. Gliddick."

  They shook hands. Gliddick's eyes skimmed the white silk over her breasts, the lacy bra clearly visible beneath.

  "Jean's an assistant with a firm we use down here occasionally."

  "Nice to meet you, Jean."

  Simms tapped the folder. "There's a lot of other material in there about how the merger'd be good for your company, Ed." He looked at his watch. "Say, I've got a conference call scheduled now. I'll make it from my room so I don't bother you. Look over that stuff, think about what I'm saying."

  "Sure," Gliddick said, eyes still scanning Jean's figure. She smiled broadly at the paunchy businessman.

  "Say, Jean," Simms said, "you know Miami, right?

  "Well, now, I've lived here all my life" came the lilting accent.

  "Then maybe you could help Mr. Gliddick figure out a place where he and I could go listen to some music. Jazz or Cuban or something."

  "I'd be happy to." The young woman sat on the bed and picked up an entertainment guide. Her skirt hiked up high. "If that's all right with him."

  "I'd appreciate your input," Gliddick said.

  Simms said, "We're off-duty now, Jean, how 'bout you fix yourself a drink. And another one for Mr. Gliddick too."

  "Thanks, Randy. I believe I will."

  "I'll be back in about an hour," Simms said.

  "That'd be fine," Gliddick replied, setting the file on the table and watching Jean scoot pertly off the bed and walk to the bar. Somehow her shoes had come off in the process.

  Moral decision ...

  As Simms was about to step through the door, Gliddick said, "One thing, Randy?"

  The tall lawyer turned.

  "Maybe you could call first--before coming back to the room?"

  "Not a problem, Ed."

  At 10 P.M., as Reece was accelerating south onto the highway that would take them from Clayton's Connecticut home back to the city, Taylor stretched out in the reclining seat of the rented Lincoln.

  She was listening to the moan of the transmission. The flabby suspension swayed her nearly to sleep. She'd told him about Clayton's blackmailing Dudley and then about the invoice she'd found.

  " 'Client-directed' security services?" Reece asked. Then he nodded. "A euphemism for industrial espionage. Good job, finding that. How much was it for?"

  "Two thousand a month."

  "That's pretty low for stealing a note. Maybe it's for spying on people for the merger."

  "Did you hear the talk at the party? My God, these are first-year associates and all they were talking about was the merger. Wendall's out on a limb. If he doesn't get it through he's lost a lot of credibility...."

  Reece laughed. "Ha, if he doesn't get the merger through he's lost his job...." He looked over and caught her in the midst of another huge yawn. "You okay?"

  "I used to sleep."

  "I tried it once," Reece said, shrugging. "It wears off."

  He reached over and began massaging her neck.

  "Oh, that's nice...." She closed her eyes. "You ever made love in a car?"

  "Never have."

  "I never have either. I've never even been to a drive-in movie."

  Reece said, "One time when I was in high school, I--Jesus!"

  A huge jolt. Taylor's eyes snapped open and she saw a white car directly in front of them. It'd veered into their lane. Reece swerved onto the shoulder but the Lincoln slipped off the flat surface and started down a steep embankment.

  "Mitchell!" Taylor screamed and threw her arms up as trees and plants raced at them at seventy miles an hour. The undercarriage scraping and groaning, metal and plastic supports popping apart. Then brush and reeds were flashing past the car's windows.

  Reece called, "That car, that car! He ran us off the road! He ran us--"

  He was braking, trying to grip the wheel as it spun furiously back and forth, the front tires buffeted by rocks and branches. The car slowed as it chewed through the underbrush, the buff-colored rushes and weeds whipping into the windshield.

  Taylor's head slammed against the window; she was stunned. She felt nausea and fear and a huge pain in her back.

  Then they were slowing as the slope flattened out. The car was still skewing but the wheels started to track, coming under control.... She heard Reece say reverently, "Son of a bitch," and saw him smile as the car started a slow skid on the slippery vegetation. Thirty miles an hour, twenty-five ...

  "Okay, okay ...," Reece muttered to himself. He steered carefully into the skids, braking lightly, regaining control, losing and then regaining it. "Okay, come on
," he whispered seductively to the huge Lincoln.

  The car slowed to ten miles an hour. Taylor took his arm and whispered, "Oh, Mitchell." They smiled at each other, giddy with relief.

  But as she looked at his face his smile vanished.

  "God!" He shoved his foot onto the brake with all his weight. Taylor looked forward and she saw the brush disappear as they broke out of the foliage and dropped over a ridge, onto a steep incline that led down to the huge reservoir, a half mile across, its surface broken with choppy waves. The locked wheels slid without resistance along the frost and dewy leaves.

  "Taylor!" he called. "We're going in, we're going in!" With a last huge rocking jolt, the scenery and the distant gray horizon disappeared. A wave of black oily water crashed into the windshield and started coming into the car from a dozen places at once.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  At eleven that night, in Miami, the phone in Donald Burdick's hotel room rang.

  The partner had been waiting for Ed Gliddick all evening and had fallen asleep, fully dressed, on the couch in his room.

  "Yes, hello?" he asked groggily.

  "Mr. Burdick?" a woman's voice asked.

  "That's right. Who's this?"

  "My name's Jean. I'm calling for Mr. Gliddick."

  Jean? Burdick wondered. Who was this? Ed Gliddick had had the same secretary, Helen, for twenty years and never traveled anywhere without her.

  "Yes, Jean, well, I've been waiting to see Ed all night. Is he all right?"

  "Mr. Gliddick asked me to call you and apologize. He won't be able to see you, I'm afraid."

  Burdick was angry and disappointed but he said, "Well, it's late anyway. We can meet for breakfast. I'll--"

  "Actually, sir, I'm afraid he won't be able to see you at all this trip. He's got meetings nonstop for the next two days and then he's got to get home to Battle Creek."

  Burdick closed his eyes and sighed. So, ambushed by Clayton yet again.

  "I see. By any chance was there another attorney from Hubbard, White & Willis in town tonight?"

  "I wouldn't know, sir."

  "Okay," Burdick said wearily, realizing it would be pointless to call Steve Nordstrom--the coward wouldn't even pick up the phone. "If you could deliver a message to Ed for me."

  "I'd be happy to."

  " 'And you too, Brutus?' Do you have that?"

  "Uhm, I do, sir. Will he know what it means?"

  "I'm sure he will." Burdick dropped the phone in the cradle then picked it up once more to call his wife.

  In front of them the huge reservoir extended in faintly lapping waves to the trees on the opposite shore. The moon reflected off the water, broken into a thousand crescents on the textured surface. It would've been quite romantic if they hadn't been wet and freezing.

  Taylor Lockwood and Reece sat in the front seat of the rental Lincoln, legs crossed to keep their feet out of the six inches of water that filled the bottom of the car's interior.

  After the skid to the bottom of the hill, with its dramatic conclusion--a braking splash like a Disneyland ride--the Lincoln had settled into about eighteen inches of water and stopped sinking.

  The reservoir was huge but here, apparently, very shallow.

  They'd laughed--edgy and a bit hysterical--but then the humor wore off quickly when they realized that while they could open the door, they'd have a thirty-or forty-foot trek through freezing water up to a deserted road, where they'd have to wait for help with no way to keep warm.

  Reece called the police on his cell phone and then they curled their legs up and huddled in their coats.

  The dispatcher had assured them that a squad car and rescue truck would be there in ten minutes. But that had been some time ago and, since Reece had been unable to tell them exactly where they'd run off the road, he guessed their rescue might not be imminent even now.

  "Who was it?" Taylor asked.

  "The thief, I assume. I didn't get a good look at him. Middle-aged guy, white, hat, collar turned up. I didn't even see what kind of car it was. Just a white streak."

  "An accident?"

  "No way," Reece answered. "He was steering for us."

  "Who was at the party--who'd know we were there?"

  Reece shrugged. "Thom Sebastian, Dudley. And most of Clayton's little goose-stepping clones, except Randy Simms." Then he fell silent for a moment, finally saying, "I'm thinking it's time to tell the police what happened. Tell them everything."

  "No." She shook her head.

  "I didn't think this was going to happen, Taylor. I never thought it could turn violent."

  She said, "It wouldn't make sense to kill us. That'd bring the police in for sure, and he doesn't want that any more than we do. He didn't know we'd go off the road. He was just scaring us."

  Reece considered.

  Taylor scooted closer to him. "We're almost there. I can feel it. The trial's day after tomorrow. Let's just hold out until then." She took his head in both her hands. "Just until then?"

  "I don't know."

  But he was weakening. She repeated, "Just until then," though when she said the words this time, they were not spoken as a question but as a command. He opened his mouth to protest, but she shook her head and touched his lips with her finger.

  He leaned close, following the motion of her finger to her own lips. They kissed hard and their arms wound around each other.

  A moment later this embrace was interrupted by several probing flashlights, their fierce halogen beams converging on the car. As Reece and Taylor leapt apart they could hear a laugh and an amused voice. "Whoa, lookit that car! Looks like it's floating. Hank, lookit! I mean, you ever seen anything like that?"

  To which another voice replied, "I surely haven't. Not in a month of Sundays."

  At lunch on Monday, the day before the New Amsterdam trial, Taylor Lockwood sat in Mc Sorley's Old Ale House in Manhattan and watched John Silbert Hemming down a mug of ale.

  He may not've been the traditional private eye who tossed back Scotch on the job but this boy loved his beer. The tall man finished his sixth mug of dark brew and called for three more. "They're small."

  True, they were, though Taylor was having trouble with her second. She'd drunk more wine than she'd intended at Clayton's and had not gotten much sleep, thanks to the dip in the reservoir--and Reece's presence in bed next to her.

  She told Hemming about the Supreme Court case that required the pub to allow women in; for many years it had been a men-only establishment.

  "Some achievement," Hemming muttered, looking at the carved-up bare wood tables, the wishbone collection growing a dark fur of dust and the crowds of young frat boys shouting and hooting. He glowered at a drunk, beer-spilling student stumbling toward them. The boy caught the huge man's gaze and changed direction quickly. With some true curiosity in his voice the detective asked Taylor, "Are we having a date?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Ah," he said and nodded. "How did the fingerprints work out?"

  "Not bad. I'll send you a postcard."

  "If you want I'll show you how to do plantars."

  "Vegetable prints?"

  "Very good but no--feet, Ms. Lockwood."

  "Taylor."

  "Feet."

  Taylor handed him the piece of paper with the information from the invoice she'd found in Wendall Clayton's desk. "John, have you ever heard of this company?"

  He read, "Triple A Security? They're not around New York. But we can assume it's a sleazy outfit."

  "Why's that?"

  "It's an old trick to get in the front of the phone book--to have your listing first. Name your company with a lot of A's. You want me to check it out?"

  "Can you?"

  "Sure." A waiter carrying fifteen mugs in one hand swooped past and dropped two more, unasked-for.

  "Would somebody from a security service--say, this disreputable Triple A outfit--commit a crime?"

  "Jaywalking?"

  "Worse."

  "Stealing app
les?"

  "That category. More valuable than fruit."

  He sat up and towered over her for an instant then hunched forward again. "At the big security firms, like our place, absolutely not. You commit a crime, you lose your license and your surety bond's invalidated. But these small outfits"--he tapped the paper--"there's a fine line between the good guys and the bad guys. I mean, somebody's got to plant the bugs that my company finds, right? And planting bugs is illegal."

  "Any funny stuff?"

  "That's not a term of art in my profession."

  "Say, hypothetically, trying to run somebody off the road."

  "Run somebody off ..."

  Taylor whispered, "... the road."

  Hemming hesitated a moment and said, "This sort of place--Triple A Security--yeah, you could possibly find somebody there who might be willing to do that. Worse too."

  Taylor finished the bitter dark ale. She opened her purse, pulled out a twenty and signaled the waiter.

  "Is there a Mr. Lockwood?" Hemming asked.

  "Yes, but you wouldn't really like my father."

  "Well, anything in the fiance-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.

  Give me your tired, your poor,