Mistress of Justice

  "Now," she said, "just speaking theoretically, could someone like me take fingerprints?"

  "If you practiced, sure. But could you testify that prints A and B were the same? No way. Could you even tell if they were the same or different? Not easy, mama, not at all. They squoosh out, they move, they splot. They look different when they're the same, they look identical except for some little significant difference you miss.... No, it isn't easy. Fingerprinting is an art."

  "How 'bout a machine, or something? A computer?"

  "The police use them, sure. The FBI. But not private citizens. Say, Ms. Lockwood?"

  "Taylor," she prompted.

  "Perhaps if you told me exactly what your problem is I could offer some specific solutions."

  "It's somewhat sensitive."

  "It always is. That's why companies like us exist."

  "Best to keep mum for the time being."

  "Understood. Just let me know if you'd like another lesson. Though I do recommend keeping in mind the experts." He grew serious and the charming banter vanished. "Should the matter become, let's say, more than sensitive--a lot of our people here have carry permits."

  " 'Carry'?"

  "They're licensed to carry weapons."

  "Oh," she said in a soft voice.

  "Just something to think about."

  "Thanks, John." Then she said, "I do have one question."

  The hand in which a basketball would look so at home rose and a finger pointed skyward. "Allow me to deduce. The inquiry is: Where you can get a Dick Tracy fingerprint kit?" Before she answered yes, he was writing an address on the back of his business card. "It's a police equipment supply house. You can buy anything but weapons and shields there."

  "Shields?"

  "Badges, you know. Those you can buy--one can buy--in Times Square arcades for about ten bucks. But you're not supposed to. Oh, not to be forward, but I did happen to write my home phone number on the back of the card. In case any questions occur to you after hours, say."

  She decided she liked this guy. "This's been fascinating, John. Thank you." She stood and he escorted her toward the elevator, pointing out a glass case containing a collection of blackjacks and saps.

  "Oh, and Miss Lockwood? Taylor?"

  "Yes?"

  "Before you leave I was just wondering: Would you like to hear the lecture I give to our new employees on the laws against breaking and entering and invading privacy?"

  Taylor said, "No, I don't believe I would."

  She'll be moody today.

  Ralph Dudley sat in his creaky office chair. The nape of his neck eased into the tall leather back and he stared at the thin slice of sky next to the brick wall outside his window. Gray sky, gray water. November.

  Yes, Junie would be in one of her moods.

  It was a talent, this intuition of his. Whereas Donald Burdick, to whom he constantly--obsessively--compared himself, was brilliant, Ralph Dudley was intuitive. He charmed clients, he told them jokes appropriate to their age, gender and background, he listened sympathetically to their tales of sorrow at infidelities and deaths and to their stories of joy at grandchildren's births. He told war stories of his courtroom victories with a dramatic pacing that only fiction--which they were, of course--permits. With his patented vestigial bow Dudley could charm the daylights out of the wives of clients and potential clients.

  He had sense and feeling while Burdick had reason and logic.

  And, sure enough, he was now right. Here came fifteen-year-old Junie, a sour look on her face, trooping sullenly into his office, ignoring the woman from the word processing pool who was handling a typing job for him.

  The girl stopped in the doorway, a hip-cocked stance, unsmiling.

  "Come on in, honey," Dudley said. "I'm almost finished."

  She wore a jumper, white blouse and white stockings. A large blue bow was in her hair. She gave him a formal kiss on the cheek and plopped into one of his visitor's chairs, swinging her legs over the side.

  "Sit like a lady, now."

  She waited a defiant thirty seconds then slipped on her Walkman headset and swiveled slowly in the chair, planting her feet on the lime-green carpet.

  Dudley laughed. He picked up the handle of his dictating machine. "Look, I've got one, too--a recorder."

  She looked perplexed and he realized she couldn't hear what he was saying (and would probably have thought his joke was idiotic if she'd been able to). But Dudley had learned not to be hurt by the girl's behavior and he unemotionally proceeded to dictate a memo that gave the gist of some rules of law he believed he remembered. At the end of the tape he included instructions to Todd Stanton, his associate at the firm, who would rewrite the memo and look up the law Dudley hoped existed to support his points.

  Ralph Dudley knew they sometimes laughed at him, the young associates here. He never raised his voice, he never criticized, he was solicitous toward them. He supposed the young men (Dudley had never quite come to terms with the idea of women lawyers) held him in all the more contempt for this obsequiousness. There were a few loyal boys, like Todd, but on the whole no one had much time for Old Man Dudley.

  "Grandpa," he'd heard that the associates called him. Partners, too, although somewhat more subtly, joined in the derision. Yet though this treatment soiled his days here--and obliterated whatever loyalty he had once felt for Hubbard, White & Willis--he was not overly troubled. His relation with the firm became just what his marriage to Emma had been: one of respectful acknowledgment. He was usually able to keep his bitterness contained.

  Junie's eyes were closed, her patent-leather shoes swaying in time to the music. My God, she was growing up. Fifteen. It gave him a pang of sorrow. At times he had flashes--poses she struck, the way the light might catch her face--of her as a woman in her twenties. He knew that she, abandoned in adolescence, carried the seeds of adulthood within her more fertilely than other children.

  And he often felt she was growing up far too fast for him.

  He handed the dictated tape to the typist, who left.

  "So," he said to the girl, "are we going to do some shopping?"

  "I guess."

  That question she heard perfectly, Dudley observed. "Well, let's go."

  She shrugged and hopped off the chair, tugging at her dress in irritation, which meant she wanted to be wearing jeans and a T-shirt--clothes that she loved and that he hated.

  They were at the elevator when a woman's voice asked, "Ralph, excuse me, you have a minute?"

  He recognized the young woman from around the firm but couldn't recall a name. It stung him slightly that she had the effrontery to call him by his first name but because he was a gentlemen he did nothing other than smile and nod. "Yes, you're ..."

  "Taylor Lockwood."

  "Sure, of course. This is my granddaughter, Junie. Junie, say hello to Miss Lockwood. She's a lawyer here."

  "Paralegal, actually." Taylor smiled and said to the girl pleasantly, "You look like Alice."

  "Huh?"

  "Alice in Wonderland. It's one of my favorite books."

  The girl shrugged and returned to the oblivion of her music.

  Dudley wondered what this woman wanted. Had he given her some work? An assignment?

  "I'd like to ask you something."

  "What's that?"

  "You went to Yale Law School, didn't you?"

  "That's right, I did."

  "I'm thinking of applying there."

  Dudley felt a bit of alarm. He hadn't quite graduated, despite what he'd told the firm, and so couldn't exactly send a letter of recommendation for her.

  But she added, "My application and letters and everything're in. I just want to know a little about the school. I'm trying to decide between there and Harvard and NYU."

  Relieved, Dudley said, "Oh, I went there before you were born. I don't think anything I'd have to tell you would be much help."

  "Well, somebody here said you helped them decide to go to law school, that you were very helpful. I wa
s sort of hoping you could spare a half hour or so."

  Dudley felt the pleasure he always did at even minor adulation like this. "Tonight?"

  She said, "I was thinking tomorrow night maybe. After work? I could take you out to dinner."

  A woman taking a man out to dinner? Dudley was nearly offended.

  The paralegal added, "Unless you have plans."

  He did, of course--plans he wouldn't miss. But that was at 10 P.M. He said, "I'm busy later in the evening. But how would seven be?" A charming smile. "I'll take you to my club."

  Junie of the selective hearing said, "Like, Poppie, you told me they didn't let women in there."

  Dudley said to her, "That's only as members, honey." To Taylor he said, "Come by tomorrow at six, we'll take a cab uptown...." Then, calculating the taxi fare, he added, "No, actually a subway would be better. That time of day, traffic is terrible."

  "Now he's going after the clients."

  Donald Burdick knotted the silk tie carefully with his long fingers. He liked the feel of good cloth, the way it yielded yet was tough. Tonight, though, the smooth texture gave him little pleasure.

  "First he rams through the accelerated vote and now I hear he's targeting the clients."

  "The clients," Vera Burdick repeated, nodding. "We should've thought of that." She sat at her dressing table in the bedroom of their Park Avenue co-op, rubbing prescription retin-A cream on her neck. She wore a red and black silk dress, which revealed pale freckled skin along the unzipped V in the back. She was leaning forward studiously, watching the cream disappear.

  A resolute woman, in her early sixties, she'd battled age by making tactical concessions. She gave up tanning fifteen years ago and carefully gained a little weight, refusing to join in the dieting obsession of many of her friends, who were now knobby scarecrows. She let her hair go white but she kept it shiny with Italian conditioner and wore it pulled back in the same style as her granddaughter. She'd allowed herself one face-lift and had flown to Los Angeles to have a particular Beverly Hills surgeon perform the operation.

  She was now as she'd always been: attractive, reserved, stubborn, quiet. And virtually as powerful as the two men who'd influenced her life--her father and Donald Burdick, her husband of thirty-two years. Arguably she was more powerful in some ways than each of these men because people were always on guard with the masters of Wall Street, like Donald Burdick, but tended to get careless around women and be too chatty, to give away secrets, to reveal weaknesses.

  Burdick sat on the bed. His wife offered her back and he carefully zipped up the dress and hooked the top eyelet. The partner continued, "Clayton's moving against them. It's pretty clever, I have to admit. While Bill Stanley and Lamar and I've been taking on as much debt as we can to poison the merger Wendall's been spending time with the clients, trying to convince them to pressure the partners at the firm to support the merger."

  Vera too felt admiration for what Wendall was doing. Although a firm's clients have no official vote in firm affairs they ultimately pay the bills and accordingly can exert astonishing influence over which way the partners vote. She'd often said that if clients unionized against law firms it would be time for her husband to find a new line of work.

  "How's he doing it?" she asked, curious to learn his technique.

  "Probably promising big discounts in legal fees if they support the merger. Those that still don't go along with him--my clients or Bill's, the ones who won't support the merger in any case--we're afraid he's going to sabotage."

  "Sabotage. Oh, my. What's the vote so far?"

  "It's closer than it should be."

  "You've got the long-term lease with Rothstein, right?" Vera asked. "That should slow him up some. When are you signing it?"

  "Friday or the weekend," he answered glumly.

  "Not till then?" She winced.

  "I know," he said. "The fastest they could get the papers together. But it's okay--Clayton doesn't know anything about it. Then I've been talking to Steve Nordstrom."

  "At McMillan Holdings," Vera recalled. "Your biggest client. Steve's the chief financial officer, right?"

  A nod. "I'm closer to him than I am to Ed Gliddick, the CEO. I'm going to get them to lobby some of the other partners against the merger."

  "And Steve'll agree?"

  "I'm sure he will. Gliddick's in charge. But he listens to Steve. Wendall doesn't know about that either. I've been excruciatingly discreet. I ..."

  Burdick realized that he sounded desperate and hated the tone of his voice. Then he glanced at his wife, who was gazing at him with a savvy smile on her face. "We can do it," she said. "Clayton's not in our league, dear."

  "Neither was that cobra on vacation last year. That doesn't mean he's not dangerous."

  "But look what happened to it."

  Hiking in Africa, Burdick had accidentally stepped on the snake in the brush. It had puffed out its hood and prepared to strike. Vera had taken its head off with a swipe of a sharp machete.

  Burdick found his teeth clenched. "Wendall just doesn't understand what Wall Street law practice is. He's crude, he bullies. He has affairs."

  "Irrelevant." She began on her makeup.

  "Oh, I think it is relevant. I'm talking about the survival of the firm. Wendall doesn't have vision. He doesn't understand what Hubbard, White is, what it should be."

  "And how do you define 'should be'?"

  Touche, Burdick thought. He grinned involuntarily. "All right, what I've made it. Bill and Lamar and I. Wendall wants to turn the firm into a mill. Into a big merger-and-acquisition house."

  "Every generation has its own specialties. That's very profitable work." She set down the blush. "I'm not justifying him, darling. I'm only saying we should stay focused. We can't make logical arguments against the nature of the legal work he wants the new firm to handle. We have to remember that the risk is that as part of the merger he's going to burn the firm to the ground and then sow the ashes with salt. That's why we have to stop him."

  She was, as usual, right. He reached for her hand but the phone rang and he walked to the nightstand to answer it.

  Burdick took the call and listened in dismay as Bill Stanley's gruff voice delivered the message. He hung up and looked at his wife, who stared at him, clearly alarmed by his drawn expression.

  "He's done it again."

  "Clayton?"

  Burdick sighed and nodded. He walked to the window and gazed outside into the trim, windswept courtyard. "There's a problem with the St. Agnes case."

  Donald Burdick's oldest and second-most-lucrative client was Manhattan's St. Agnes Hospital. It had recently been sued for malpractice and Fred LaDue, a litigation partner, was handling the trial, which was in its fourth day now. The case was routine and it was likely that the hospital was going to win. Stanley had just reported, however, that the plaintiff's attorneys--from a tough Midtown personal injury firm--had found a new witness, a doctor whose testimony could be devastating to St. Agnes. Even though he was a surprise witness, the judge was going to let him testify tomorrow.

  The judgment could be for tens of millions and a loss this big might mean that St. Agnes--which was self-insured--would fire Hubbard, White & Willis altogether. Even if the hospital didn't do so, though, the credibility of Burdick and his litigation department would be seriously eroded and the hospital might push to support the merger; John Perelli's firm was renowned for its brutal handling of personal injury defense work.

  "Damn," Burdick muttered. "Damn."

  Vera's eyes narrowed. "You don't think that Wendall slipped your client's files to the other side, do you?"

  "It did occur to me."

  Vera took a sip of scotch and set the Waterford glass down on the table. Burdick's eyes were distant, trying to process this news. His wife's, however, had coalesced into dark dots. "One thing I'd say, darling."

  The wind rattled the leaded-glass windows. Burdick glanced at the sound.

  She said, "With a man like Wendall, we have to
hit him hard the first time. We won't have a second chance."

  Burdick's eyes dropped to the Pakistani carpet on the bedroom floor. Then he picked up the phone and called the night operator at the law firm. "This is Donald Burdick," he said politely. "Please locate Mitchell Reece and have him call me at home. Tell him it's urgent."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Taylor Lockwood walked through the breezy evening streets of the East Village, the curbs banked with trash, and thought of a funeral she'd attended several months earlier.

  She'd sat in the front pew of the church in Scarsdale, north of the city, a wood-and-stone building built, someone behind her had whispered, by contributions from tycoons like J. P. Morgan and Vanderbilt. Although Taylor had been in black, that color did not seem to be requisite at funerals any longer; any somber shade was acceptable--purple, forest green, even dusk-brown tapestry. She sat on the hard pew and watched the family members, lost in their personal rituals of grief, tears running in halting streams, hands squeezing hands, fingers rubbing obsessively against fingers. The minister had spoken of Linda Davidoff with genuine sorrow and familiarity. He knew the parents better than the daughter, that was clear, but he was eulogizing well.

  Most attendees had seemed sad or bewildered but not everyone had cried; suicide makes for an ambivalent mourning.

  The minister had closed the service with one of Linda's poems, one published in her college literary magazine.

  As he'd read, images of Linda had returned and the tears that Taylor Lockwood had told herself not to cry appeared fast, stinging the corners of her eyes and running with maddening tickles down her cheeks, even though she hadn't known the paralegal very well.

  Then the organ had played a solemn cue and the mourners had filed outside for the drive to the interment.

  As she'd told Reece, nothing that she'd found suggested that Linda Davidoff had had any connection with Hanover & Stiver or the loan deal. But there was something suspicious to Taylor about the way the girl had worked such long hours on the case then stopped abruptly--and then committed suicide.

  She felt she needed to follow up on this question. Alice, after all, had wandered everywhere throughout Wonderland--a place, however, in which you sure wouldn't find the disgusting six-story tenement she now stood in front of. In the foul entry foyer the intercom had been stolen and the front door was open, swinging in the breeze like a batwing door in a ghost town saloon. She started up the filthy steps.