Mistress of Justice (7 page)

“Well, Donald,” Clayton pointed out, “you’ve had everything for two weeks already. And I’d imagine you, like all the rest of us, read it as soon as they messengered the binders to us from Perelli & Sullivan.”

He
had
read it, of course, and so had the team of lawyers he and Vera had hired.

A new partner at the end of the table made a comment. “I don’t think we can debate this too much. It’s not inappropriate to talk about the substance of the merger now, I think.” His dialect put him within five minutes of the Charles River.

“Yes, it is inappropriate,” Burdick said shortly, silencing him. Then to Clayton: “Go ahead with your vote. It makes no sense to me but if two thirds of the partners are in favor—”

Clayton gave a very minuscule frown. “A simple majority, Donald.”

Burdick shook his head. A trace of confusion now crossed
his
face. “Majority? No, Wendall, I don’t think so. The issue is the merger of the firm and that requires a vote of two thirds.”

Clayton said, “No, we’d be voting simply on establishing an agenda and timetable. Under the partnership rules, Donald, that requires only a simple majority.”

Burdick was patient. “Yes, but it’s an agenda and timetable that
pertain
to a merger.”

Each of the two partners pulled out a copy of the partnership documents, like dueling knights drawing swords.

“Section fourteen, paragraph four, subparagraph d.” Clayton said this as if reading from the tome though everyone knew he’d memorized it long ago.

Burdick continued reading for a few moments. “It’s ambiguous. But I won’t make an issue of it. We’ll be here all day at this rate. And I, for one, have some work to do for clients.”

The senior partner knew, of course, that Clayton was absolutely correct about the majority vote on this matter. However, it had been vitally important to make clear to everyone in the room exactly where Burdick stood on the merger—how adamantly against it he was.

“Go ahead,” Burdick said to Stanley.

As the rotund partner growled off names, Burdick sat calmly, pretending to edit a letter though he was keeping a perfect tally in his head of the fors and againsts.

Distraction on his face, agony in his heart, Burdick added them up. His mood slipped from cautious to alarmed to despairing. Clayton prevailed—and by almost a two-thirds majority, the magic percentage needed to win the entire war.

The list Stanley had shown Burdick earlier was not accurate. Clayton was
stronger
than they’d thought.

Clayton looked at Burdick, studying his opponent from behind the emotionless guise of the great. His gold pen danced on a pad. “If anyone needs any information from Perelli—to make a better-informed decision next week—just let me know.”

Burdick said, “Thank you, Wendall. I appreciate the time you’ve spent on the matter.” Looking around the room—at both his supporters and his Judases—with as neutral a face as he could muster, he added, “Now, any more issues we ought to discuss?”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Dimitri.” Taylor Lockwood’s voice was a whisper. “Don’t say ‘satin touch’ tonight. Please.”

“Hey, come on,” the man replied in a deep Greek-accented voice, “the guys in the audience, they like it.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s sexy,” he replied petulantly.

“No, it’s not, and all it does is get me moony looks from the lechers.”

“Hey, they like to fantasize. So do I. You got the lights?”

She sighed and said, “Yeah, I got the lights.”

From the amplifier his voice filled the bar: “Ladies and gentlemen, Miracles Pub is pleased to bring you the silky and oh-so-smooth satin touch of Taylor Lockwood on the keys. A warm round of applause please. And don’t forget to ask your waitress about the Miracles menu of exotic drinks.”

Oh-so-smooth
satin touch?

Taylor clicked the switch that turned the house lights down and ignited the two overhead spots trained on her. Dimitri had made the spotlights himself—pineapple cans painted black.

Smiling at them all, even the moony lechers, she began to play Gershwin on the battered Baldwin baby grand.

It wasn’t a bad gig. The temperamental owner of the club in the West Village—a lech himself—had figured that an attractive woman jazz pianist would help sell bad food, so he’d hired her for Tuesday nights, subject only to sporadic preemption by Dimitri’s son-in-law’s balalaika orchestra.

With her day job at the firm and this gig, Taylor had found a type of harmony in her life. Music was her pure sensual love; her paralegal job gave her the pleasures of intellect, organization, function. She sometimes felt like those men with two wives who know nothing of the other. Maybe someday she’d get nailed but so far the secret was safe.

A half hour later Taylor was doing the bridge to “Anything Goes” when the front door swung open with its familiar D to B-flat squeak. The woman who entered was in her mid-twenties, with a round, sweet, big-sister face framed by hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a sweater decorated with reindeer, black ski pants and, on her petite, out-turned feet, Top-Siders. She smiled nervously and waved broadly to Taylor then stopped suddenly, afraid of disrupting the show.

Taylor nodded back and finished the tune. Then she announced a break and sat down.

“Carrie, thanks for coming.”

The young girl’s eyes sparkled. “You are
so
good. I didn’t know you were a musician. Where did you study? Like, Juilliard?”

Taylor sipped her Seagram’s and soda. “Juilliard? Try Mrs. Cuikova’s. A famous music school. Freddy Bigelow went there. And Bunny Grundel.”

“I never heard of them.”

“Nobody has. We were all in the same grade school. We’d go to Frau Cuikova’s in Glen Cove every Tuesday and Thursday at four to be abused about arpeggios and finger position.”

Several men in the audience were restless, about to make their moves, so Taylor did the lech maneuver—positioning
her chair with her back to them—and turned her whole attention to Carrie.

Taylor had spent the day looking through documents on the
New Amsterdam Bank v. Hanover & Stiver
case, collecting the names of everyone who’d worked on it: partners, associates and all the paralegals, typists, messengers and other support staff. But the case had been in the works for months and the cast of characters at Hubbard, White who’d been involved totaled nearly thirty people. She needed to narrow down the suspects and to get the key entry logs and the time sheets, as Reece had suggested. But to do this, she’d found, you needed to be a registered user and to have a pass code. Carrie Mason, a friend of hers at the firm, was the paralegal who oversaw the billing and time recording system and so Taylor had asked the girl to meet her here after work.

Taylor now looked at the girl’s Coach attaché case. “You’ve got what I asked for?”

“I feel like a, you know, spy,” the girl joked, though uneasily. She opened the briefcase and pulled out stacks of computer papers.

“I wouldn’t have asked if it weren’t important. Are these the door key logs?”

“Yeah.”

Taylor sat forward and examined the papers. On top was a copy of the computer key entry ledger for the firm’s front and back doors. Like many Wall Street firms Hubbard, White had installed computer security locks that were activated with ID cards. To enter the firm you had to slide the card through a reader, which sent the information to the central computer. To leave, or to open the door for someone outside, you had only to hit a button inside the firm.

Taylor read through the information, noting who’d used their keys to get into the firm on Saturday and Sunday morning. There were fifteen people who’d entered on Saturday, two on Sunday.

“Where’re the time sheet reports?”

More documents appeared on the table. It was on these
time sheets that lawyers recorded in exasperating detail exactly how they spent each minute at the firm: which clients they worked for and what tasks they’d performed, when they took personal time during office hours, when they worked on business for the firm that was unrelated to clients.

Taylor looked through papers and, cross-checking the owner of the key code with the hours billed, learned that fourteen of the fifteen who’d checked in on Saturday morning had billed no more than six hours, which meant they would have left by four or five in the afternoon—a typical pattern for those working weekends: Get the work done early then play on Saturday night.

The one lawyer who’d remained was Mitchell Reece.

Flipping to the Sunday key entries, she saw that Reece had returned, as he’d told her, later that morning, at 9:23. But there was an entry
before
that, well before it, in fact. Someone had entered the firm at 1:30
A.M
. But the only lawyer for whom there were time sheet entries was Reece.

Why on earth would somebody come into the firm that late and not do any work?

Maybe to open the door for a thief who would steal a gazillion-dollar note.

She flipped through the key assignment file and found that the person who’d entered at 1:30 had been Thomas Sebastian.

“Sebastian.” Taylor tried to picture him but couldn’t form an image; so many of the young associates looked alike. “What do you know about him?”

Carrie rolled her eyes. “Gag me. He’s a total party animal. Goes out every night, dates a different girl every week, sometimes two—if you want to call it a date. We went out once and he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”

“Is he at the firm now, tonight?”

“When I left, maybe a half hour ago, he was still working. But he’ll probably be going out later. Around ten or eleven. I think he goes to clubs every night.”

“You know where he hangs out?”

“There’s a club called The Space.…”

Taylor said, “Sure, I’ve been there.” She then asked, “Did you bring copies of the time sheet summaries from the
New Amsterdam v. Hanover & Stiver
case?”

Carrie slid a thick wad of Xerox copies to Taylor, who thumbed through them. These would show how much time each person spent on the case. Those more familiar with the case, Taylor was figuring, would be more likely to have been the ones approached by Hanover to steal the note.

Of the list of thirty people who’d been involved, though, only a few had spent significant time on it: Burdick and Reece primarily.

“Man,” Taylor whispered, “look at the hours Mitchell worked. Fifteen hours in one day, sixteen hours, fourteen—on a Sunday. He even billed ten hours on Thanksgiving.”

“That’s why I love being a corporate paralegal,” Carrie said, sounding as if she devoutly meant it. “You do trial work, you can kiss personal time so long.”

“Look at this.” Taylor frowned, tapping the “Paralegals” column on the case roster. “Linda Davidoff.”

Carrie stared silently at her frothy drink. Then she said, “I didn’t go to her funeral. Were you there?”

“Yes, I was.”

Many people at the firm had attended. The suicide of the pretty, shy paralegal last fall had stunned everyone in the firm—though such deaths weren’t unheard of. The subject wasn’t talked about much in Wall Street law circles but paralegals who worked for big firms were under a lot of pressure—not only at their jobs but at home as well: Many of them were urged by their parents or peers to get into good law schools when they in fact had no particular interest in or aptitude for the law. There were many breakdowns and more than a few suicide attempts.

“I didn’t know her too good,” Carrie said. “She was kind of a mystery.” A faint laugh. “Like you in a way. I didn’t know you were a musician. Linda was a poet. You know that?”

“I think I remember something from the eulogy,” Taylor said absently, eyes scanning the time sheets. “Look, in
September Linda stopped working on the case and Sean Lillick took over for her as paralegal.”

“Sean? He’s a strange boy. I think he’s a musician too. Or a stand-up comic, I don’t know. He’s skinny and wears weird clothes. Has his hair all spiked up. I like him, though. I flirted with him some but he never asked me out. You ask me, Mitchell’s cuter.” Carrie played with the pearls around her neck and her voice flattened to a gossipy hush. “I heard you were with him all day.”