Mistress of Justice Read online

  "It may look impressive, but the bank owns most of it," Sean Lillick said.

  The young paralegal was sitting on the drafty floor, shirtless and shoeless, shoving a backpack under the bed as she walked in.

  Taylor Lockwood, catching her breath from the climb, was surveying what Lillick was referring to: a wall of keyboards, wires, boxes, a computer terminal, speakers, guitar, amps. Easily fifty thousand dollars' worth of musical equipment.

  Lillick--thin, dark-haired, about twenty-four--was smelling socks, discarding them. He wore black jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt. His boots sat in front of him. The only clue as to his day job at Hubbard, White & Willis were two dark suits and three white shirts, in various stages of recycling, hanging on nails pounded crookedly into the wall. He studied her for a moment. "You look impressed or confused. I can't tell."

  "Your place is a little more alternative than I expected." The apartment was a patchwork. Someone had nailed pieces of plywood, plastic or sheet metal over cracks and holes. Joints didn't meet, plaster was rotting, floorboards were cracked or missing. In the living room: one hanging bare bulb, one floor lamp, one daybed, one desk.

  And a ton of bank-owned musical instruments and gear.

  "Have a seat."

  She looked helplessly about her.

  "Oh. Well, try the daybed.... Hey Taylor, listen to this. I just thought it up. I'm going to use it in one of my pieces: You know what a preppy is?"

  "I give up."

  "A yuppie with papers."

  She smiled politely. He didn't seem concerned about the tepid response and wrote the line down in a notebook. "So what do you do?" she asked. "Stand-up comedy?"

  "Performance art. I like to rearrange perceptions."

  "Ah, musically speaking," she joked, "you're a re-arranger."

  He seemed to like her observation too and mentally stored it somewhere.

  Taylor walked over to a music keyboard.

  Lillick said, "You're thinking organ, I know. But--"

  "I'm thinking Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer with a digital sampler, MIDI and a Linn sequencer that should store about a hundred sequences in RAM. You mind?"

  He laughed and waved his hand. She sat on a broken stool and clicked on the Yamaha. She ran through "Ain't Misbehavin'."

  Lillick said, "This machine cannot deal with music like that. I think it's having a breakdown."

  "What do you play?" she asked him.

  "Postmodern, post-New Wave. What I do is integrate music and my show. I call myself a sound painter. Is that obnoxious?"

  Taylor thought it was but just smiled and read through some of his lead sheets. In addition to standard musical notation they included drawings of pans and hammers, lightbulbs, bells, a pistol.

  "When I started composing I was a serialist and then I moved to minimalism. Now I'm exploring nonmusical elements, like choreography and performance art. Some sound sculpture, too. I love what Philip Glass does only I'm less thematic. Laurie Anderson, that sort of thing. I believe there should be a lot of randomness in art. Don't you think?"

  She shook her head, recalling what she'd told Reece that morning: How she believed music should stay close to melodies that resonated within people's hearts. She said, "You're talking to Ms. Mainstream, Sean," and shut off the system. She asked, "Got a beer?"

  "Oh. Sure. Help yourself. I'll take one, too, while you're at it."

  She popped them and handed him one. He asked, "You perform?"

  "You wouldn't approve. Piano bars."

  "They serve a valuable function."

  Irritated by his too hip, and too righteous, attitude, Taylor asked, "Are you being condescending?"

  "No. I mean it. I like classics too." Lillick was up, hobbling on one boot to his rows of records and CDs and tapes. "Charlie Parker. I got every Bird record ever made. Here, listen." He put on an LP, which sounded scratchy and authentic. "Man, that was the life," Lillick said. "You get up late, practice a bit, hang out, play sax till three, watch the sunrise with your buddies."

  Taylor, lost in one of Bird's solos, mused, "Man died young."

  "Thirty-five," Lillick said.

  "World lost a lot of music."

  "Maybe it wouldn't have been so, you know, deep, so righteous if he'd lived longer."

  Taylor said, "Maybe just the opposite. Hooked on smack's gotta affect you."

  He nodded at his record collection, which did contain a lot of mainstream jazz. "See, I'm not a snob. We need people like that. If you don't have rules and traditions there's nothing to break."

  If it ain't broke, don't fix it, Taylor thought. But she wasn't here to debate the philosophy of music with him.

  Lillick retrieved a fat joint and lit it up. He passed it toward Taylor. She shook her head and, examining the musical armada of equipment, asked, "What're you doing at a law firm, you're so into artsy-fartsy?"

  "Steady salary, what else. The way I look at it, Hubbard, White & Willis is supporting the arts." He seemed uneasy, as if the conversation was going down paths he didn't want to tread.

  He suddenly pulled out a pad of music staff paper and a pencil. "Keep talking. I work best when I'm only using half my mind."

  She asked, "What I came to ask you about ... You took over for Linda Davidoff on the Hanover & Stiver case, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "What do you know about her?"

  Lillick looked at his cracked plaster walls for a moment and wrote a measure of music. She sensed he was performing for her--playing the distracted artist.

  "Linda Davidoff?" she repeated.

  After a moment he looked up. "Sorry ... Linda? Well, we went out a few times. I thought she was more interesting than most of the prep princesses you see around the firm. She wanted to be a writer. It didn't go very far between us."

  "Why'd she stop working on the Hanover case?"

  Silent for a moment, Lillick thought back. "I'm not sure. I think she was sick."

  "Sick? What was wrong with her?"

  "I don't know. I remember she didn't look good. She was--"

  "--pale," Taylor recalled.

  "Yeah, exactly. I saw her filling out insurance forms a couple of times. I asked her about it but she didn't tell me anything."

  "Do you know why she killed herself?" Taylor asked.

  "No, but I'll tell you I wasn't wildly amazed she did. She was too sensitive, you know? She took things too much to heart. I don't what she was doing working for a law firm." Lillick erased and rewrote a line. He hummed it. "Give me a B-flat diminished."

  Taylor turned on the DX-7 and hit the chord.

  "Thanks." He wrote some more musical notations.

  "Where'd she live?"

  "I don't know--in the Village somewhere, I think. What's up? Why're you so interested in Linda?"

  "Screwup with the New Amsterdam bill, going way back. They were majorly underbilled and I'm supposed to check out what happened. When you took over for her did she say anything about the case?"

  Lillick shook his head.

  Taylor asked, "You're still billing time on the case, aren't you?"

  "Some. But Mitchell's handling most of it himself." Lillick didn't seem to have any reaction to her questions.

  "Anybody she was close to?"

  "Her roommate, Danny Stuart. He's an editor or something. Lives in the West Village. Over on Greenwich Street, I think." He rummaged in a stack of papers. "I've got the number somewhere." He handed it to her. "Hey, back in a flash."

  He ducked into the john.

  Which gave Taylor the chance she'd been waiting for. She dropped to her knees and found the backpack that Lillick had been stashing when she'd entered. It had seemed to her that he'd hidden it just a little too quickly when she walked inside.

  A fast unzip revealed cash. A lot of it. Taylor had only ten seconds for a fast estimate but figured the total would probably be something on the order of thirty or forty thousand dollars. An amount equal to his yearly salary at the firm--which didn't, of course, pay in greenbacks. r />
  And, a regular of the Downtown performing circuit herself, Taylor knew that, to quote her father, there was no way in Satan's backyard that anyone would ever make any kind of serious money playing music in bars.

  Which meant that, no, Sean, the bank didn't own most of your equipment.

  She'd come here only for information but had found another suspect.

  Taylor shoved the bag back a few seconds before the young man returned. "Better roll," she said. "Thanks for the beer."

  "You like goat?"

  "What?"

  "I'm thinking of going over to this place on Fourteenth. The goat's the best in the city. It's a totally happening place."

  The thought of another night partying was more than she could handle. Besides, she had a mission back at the firm.

  "Not tonight."

  "Hey, this place is mondo cool. Bowie hangs out there. It's so packed you can hardly get in. And they play industrial out of one set of speakers and the Sex Pistols out of the other. I mean in the same room! Like, at a thousand decibels."

  "Kills me to say no, Sean. But I'll take a pass."

  Wendall Clayton liked the firm at night.

  He liked the silence, the jeweled dots of boat lights in New York Harbor, liked taking a mouthful of cigar smoke and holding it against his palate, free from the critical glances his secretary and some of the more reckless younger lawyers shot his way when he lit up a Macanudo in the firm.

  This after-hours atmosphere took him back to his days just after law school, when he'd spend many of his nights proofreading the hundreds of documents that make up typical business deals: loan agreements, guarantees, security agreements, cross-collateralization documents, certificates of government filings, corporate documents and board resolutions.

  Proofreading ... and carefully watching the partners he was working for.

  Oh, he'd learned the law, yes, because in order to be good a lawyer must have a flawless command of the law. But to be a great lawyer--that requires much more. It requires mastering the arts of demeanor, tactics, leadership, extortion, anger and even flirtation.

  Sabotage too.

  He now looked over statements by a witness in a case that Hubbard, White was currently defending on behalf of one of Donald Burdick's prize clients, St. Agnes Hospital in Manhattan. Sean Lillick and Randy Simms, Clayton's head of the SS, had dug up the identity of a doctor who had firsthand knowledge of the hospital malpractice St. Agnes was allegedly guilty of.

  Clayton had slipped the identity of this man to the plaintiff--in effect, scuttling the case against his firm's own client.

  This troubled him some, of course, but as he read through the witness's statements and realized that the St. Agnes doctors had indeed committed terrible malpractice, he concluded that his sabotage was in fact loyalty to a higher authority than the client or the firm: loyalty to abstract justice herself.

  He rolled these thoughts around in his complex mind for a few minutes and reached this conclusion: that he could live with St. Agnes Hospital's extremely expensive loss in the trial.

  He hid these documents away and then opened another sealed envelope. Sean Lillick had dropped it off just before he'd left for the night. He read the memo the paralegal had written him.

  Clayton's money was being well spent, he decided. Lillick had apparently aristocratized the right people. Or begged them or fucked them or whatever. In any case the information was as valuable as it was alarming.

  Burdick was taking an extreme measure. The firm's lease for its present office space in Wall Street would be up next year. This expiration had been a plus for Clayton's merger because it meant that the firm could move to Perelli's Midtown office, which was much cheaper, without a difficult and expensive buyout of an existing lease.

  The purpose of the secret talks Lillick had learned about between Burdick, Stanley and Harry Rothstein, the head of the partnership that owned the building, was to negotiate a new, extremely expensive long-term lease for the existing office space.

  By entering the lease, the firm would take on a huge financial commitment that would cost millions to buy its way out of. This would make Hubbard, White a much less attractive target for a merger. The full partnership didn't need to approve the lease, only the executive committee, which Burdick's side controlled.

  The lease agreement, Lillick had learned, wouldn't be signed until this weekend.

  Son of a bitch, he raged. Well, he'd have to stop the deal somehow.

  He put Lillick's memo away and began thinking about defensive measures. If Burdick learned what Clayton was up to, particularly with the St. Agnes case and the lease, he and his bitchy wife would strike back hard. Clayton began to worry about loose ends.

  He picked up the phone and called Lillick.

  The boy's cheerful voice drooped when he realized who the caller was.

  "That information was ... helpful."

  This was one of Clayton's highest forms of compliments. Helpful.

  "Like ... I mean, I'm glad."

  "I'm a little concerned though, Sean. You are being careful, aren't you?"

  The boy hesitated and Clayton wondered if there was anything more to his uneasiness than a phone call from his boss.

  "Of course."

  "I'm aware of people asking questions around the firm, Sean. Anybody been asking you questions?"

  "Uh, no."

  "You are making sure you cover tracks? Being a good Boy Scout or nature guide or something?"

  "Yeah, I'm not stupid, Wendall."

  "No, of course you're not. Just make sure everything's covered up carefully, no way to trace what you and I've been up to. You know legal defense fees can be so expensive. They can eat up all one's savings in a flash."

  The boy's silence told him that the threat had been received.

  Clayton looked up into the doorway, where a young woman stood at attention. "Better go, Sean. Be in early tomorrow. Snip any ends, okay?"

  "Sure."

  The partner hung up, his eyes on the woman. She was one of the night stenographers from the word processing department. Her name was Carmen and she was slim and had a complexion like a week-old tan. She wore tight blouses and dark skirts that would be too short for the day, but on the evening shift the dress code was more relaxed.

  "I got your call, Mr. Clayton. You need some dictation?"

  Clayton looked at her legs then her breasts. "Yes, I do."

  Carmen had a five-year-old son, fathered by a man who was currently in prison. She lived with her mother in the Bronx. She had a patch of stretch marks on her lower belly and a tattoo of a rose on her left buttock.

  "Why don't you close the door," he said. "We don't want the cleaning staff to disturb us."

  She waited until he'd taken his wallet from his suit jacket pocket and opened it up before she swung the door shut and locked it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was nearly 8 P.M. but for some reason the closing of a corporate merger that had begun at 2 that afternoon ran into difficulties and was not yet completed--some delay in Japanese regulatory approvals.

  The Hubbard, White & Willis lawyers and paralegals working on the case, clutching stacks of documents, scurried back and forth between the several conference rooms devoted to the closing like ants stealing bread crumbs from a picnic though with considerably more content faces than their insect counterparts--presumably because ants don't make a collective $4,000 per hour for carting around bits of soggy food. The clients, on the other hand--the payers of those legal fees--were nothing but frustrated.

  Back from her trip to Lillick's apartment, Taylor Lockwood had learned many intimate details about the closing because she'd been dodging the lawyers and clients for the past hour. Like the clients in the delayed deal, Taylor had her own frustrations.

  John Silbert Hemming had neglected to tell her that dactyloscopy powder didn't come off.

  She'd just finished fingerprinting Reece's burglarized file cabinet and painstakingly transferring the sticky tape
of the two dozen latents she'd found to cards. She thought back to what Hemming'd told her. Yes, he'd mentioned the different kinds of powders. He'd mentioned how to spread it around and how to brush, not blow, the excess away.

  But he hadn't told her the stuff was like dry ink.

  Once you--once one--dusted it onto the surface the damn stuff didn't wipe off. The smear just got bigger and bigger.

  She wasn't concerned about the file cabinet that had contained the note. She was concerned about Mitchell Reece's coffee mug, emblazoned with "World's Greatest Lawyer," which she'd dusted to get samples of his prints to eliminate those from the ones she lifted off his cabinet.

  Fingerprinting powder coated the mug like epoxy paint. She did her best to clean it then noticed she'd gotten some on her blouse. She pinched the midriff of the shirt and fluffed the poor garment to see if that would dislodge the powder. No effect. She tried to blow it away, and--as her tall private eye had warned--spit into the smear, which immediately ran the powder into the cloth. Permanently, she suspected.

  Taylor sighed and pulled on her suit jacket to cover the smudge.

  She hurried down to Ralph Dudley's office, where she lifted samples of his fingerprints, then on to Thom Sebastian's, where she did the same.

  Finally, back in the paralegal pens, she took samples of Sean Lillick's prints from several objects in his cubicle. Then back in her own cubicle she put the fingerprint cards in an envelope and hid it under a stack of papers in the bottom drawer of her desk.

  She found the phone number that Lillick had given her--Danny Stuart, Linda Davidoff's roommate--and called him. He wasn't in but she left a message asking if they could meet; there was something about Linda she wanted to ask him about.

  She hung up and then happened to look down at her desktop and, with a twist in her gut, noticed the managing attorney's daily memo. In the square for Tuesday of next week were these words:

  New Amsterdam Bank & Trust v. Hanover & Stiver.

  Jury trial. Ten a.m. No continuance.

  As she stared there was suddenly a huge explosion behind her.

  Taylor spun around, inhaling a scream.

  Her eyes met those of a young man in a white shirt. He was standing in the hall, staring back at her. He held a bottle of French champagne he'd just opened. "Hey, sorry," he said. Then smiled. "We just closed. We finally got Bank of Tokyo approval."