Mistress of Justice

smoothed her hair, looking into a brass mirror, a huge thing. The foyer was in dark red and filled with Georgian yellow and white dovetail trim. The pictures were old English hunting scenes.Plaster scrolls and cherubs and angels and columns were everywhere.
    An ageless, unsmiling woman in a plain navy shift answered the door, asked her to wait then disappeared down the hallway. Taylor glanced through the doorway. The rooms were larger versions of the foyer. She looked back into the mirror and stared at herself, at a person who was thinner than she’d expected. Thinner and … what else? More drawn, gaunter, grimmer? She tried smiling; it didn’t take.
    A shadow passed across her and Mrs. Wendall Clayton stood in the doorway: a middle-aged woman, wearing the stiff, straight-cut, big-patterned clothes that people who learned style in the sixties still sometimes favor. Her straight hair was swept back and sprayed perfectly into place. Her thin face was severe. The foundation makeup had been applied thickly but her skin wasn’t good and Taylor could see red patches beneath the pancake.
    They shook hands and made introductions.
    Taylor followed the woman into the living room. Why the hell am I doing this? she wondered suddenly. What possible point could it have?
    I’m here to give you my deepest sympathy
.
    I’m here to say I worked with your husband
.
    I’m here to say that even though he’s dead don’t feel too bad because he tried to seduce me
.
    Mrs. Clayton sat upright in an uncomfortable satin wingback, Taylor in a spongy armchair.
    I’m here because I helped kill your husband.…
    The widow asked, “Tea? Coffee?”
    “No, thank you,” Taylor said. And then realized that the woman’s dress was red and that this was hardly a household in mourning—the room was festooned with antique Christmas decorations and there was a faint but rich scent of pine in the air. Classical Christmas music played on the stereo. Taylor looked at the woman’s cocked eyebrow and her expression, which wasn’t one of bitterness or sorrow. It was closer to curiosity.
    “I worked with your husband, Mrs. Clayton.”
    “Yes.”
    “I just came to tell you how sorry I was.”
    And Taylor understood then, only at that moment, that uttering those words was all she could do. Watching this stolid, lone woman (Taylor couldn’t picture her as one half of the Claytons) light a cigarette, she understood that the spirits of Donald Burdick and Vera Burdick and Messrs. Hubbard, White and Willis themselves had accompanied her here and were laying cold fingers on her lips. She could not, even here, in Clayton’s home, do what she desperately wanted to do: explain.
    Explain that she’d been the one who’d uncovered the terrible secrets about her husband, that she was the cause—the proximate cause, the law would say—of his death. No, there’d be no confession. Taylor knew what bound her. In this joint venture Hubbard, White & Willis had secured her soul.
    “That’s very kind of you.” After a pause the woman asked: “Did I see you at the funeral? There were so many people.”
    “I wasn’t there, no.” Taylor eased back in the chair, uncomfortable, and crossed her arms. Wished she’d asked for coffee to keep her hands busy.
    Now she looked around the room, aware of its size. The ceilings were twenty feet high. It reminded her of National Trust mansions and palaces in England. Taylor said, “He was an excellent lawyer.…”
    Clayton’s widow said, “I suppose.” She was examining a tabletop. It seemed to be a dust inspection. “But then we didn’t talk much about his career.”
    Taylor was counting the squares in the carpet. Trying to figure out the designs. Finally: St. George and the dragon, she believed.
    Beware the Jabberwock …
    The widow paused. “The truth is, Ms. Lockwood, I’m a little bewildered. I don’t know you—though we may have met before. But you seem genuinely upset by my husband’s death and I can’t quite figure out why. You’re not like thelittle sycophants who’ve come by since he died—the associates at the firm. They thought they were covering it up but I could see through them—in their eyes you could tell that they were amused at his death. I know they’d chuckled about it over their beers when they were alone. Do you know why they were here?”
    Taylor was silent.
    “They came because they thought word would get back to the firm that they’d done their duty. They’d made an