Mistress of Justice

was under pressure at work, stress.”
    “Oh, he wrote that for my benefit. If he’d mentioned a girlfriend, well, it would have embarrassed me.” She laughed. “The idea of Wendall killing himself because of pressure? Why, he lived for pressure. He wasn’t happy unless he had ten projects going at once. I’ve never seen him happier than over the past few months working on the merger, doing deals for his clients … and then planning the other firm.”
    “What other firm?”
    She looked at Taylor cautiously then pushed out her cigarette. “I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. In case the merger didn’t go through, he was going to leave Hubbard, White & Willis, take his boys and a couple of dozen partners and open his own firm. It was his alternative plan. I think he almost preferred that to the merger. Because he’d be a named partner. He always wanted to have his name on the letterhead. Clayton, Jones & Smith, or whatever.”
    Another firm? Taylor wondered.
    The widow resumed her examination of Central Park flora. Then smiled. “That note … He could have said in thenote how unhappy he was with me as a wife. With our life together … But he didn’t. I was very touched.”
    Rising, Mrs. Clayton looked at her watch. “I’d like to talk to you longer.” She picked up her Dunhill cigarette case. “But I have bridge club in ten minutes.”

     
    Aristocratize
.
    Taylor Lockwood was sitting at Wendall Clayton’s desk.
    It was late afternoon and a yellow-gray illumination lit the room from the pale sun over New York Harbor. The office lights were out and the door closed.
    She looked at the jotting on a faded piece of foolscap.
    Aristocratize
.
    Was that a word? Taylor glanced at the brass, the carpets, the vases, the tile painting, the wall of deal binders, the stacks of papers like the one that had held the note and tape recordings of her conversations with Mitchell Reece. The huge chair creaked as she moved.
    Men of most renowned virtue …
    Spinning around once more to face the window, she decided that, whether it was real or not, “aristocratize” certainly described the essence of Wendall Clayton.
    There was no reason for her to be in the firm. Technically she was still on vacation, courtesy of Donald Burdick. She could leave at any moment, smile at Ms. Strickland and walk out of the front door with impunity. She was, in fact, due at Mitchell Reece’s loft right about now. (It turned out that he could cook after all and was planning to make them a tortellini salad for dinner; he was currently baking the bread himself!) She wanted to lie in his huge bathtub, a wonderful bathtub that had claw feet, to luxuriate in the water holding a thin-stemmed glass of wine and smell him cooking whatever went into a tortellini salad.
    Instead, Taylor slouched down in Clayton’s chair and spun slowly in a circle, 360 degrees, once, twice, three times.
    Alice spinning as she fell down the rabbit hole, Alice buffeted on the ocean of tears, Alice arguing with the Queen of Hearts.…
    Off with their heads, off with their heads!
    Taylor stopped spinning. She began what she’d come here for: a detailed examination of the contents of Wendall Clayton’s desk and filing cabinets.
    A half hour later, Taylor Lockwood walked slowly downstairs to the paralegal pen. She made certain that no one was in the cubicles surrounding hers then looked through her address book and found the number of her favorite private eye, John Silbert Hemming.

     
    He stopped suddenly, jolted, as he watched her slip out of Wendall Clayton’s office, looking around carefully as if she didn’t want to be seen.
    Sean Lillick ducked into a darkened conference room where Taylor Lockwood couldn’t see him. It had scared the hell out of him, as he was walking toward Clayton’s office, to see the sudden shadow appearing in the doorway. For a split second all his chic, retro-punk East Village cynical sensibilities had vanished and he’d thought: Fuck me, it’s a ghost …
    What the hell had she been doing in there? he now wondered.
    Lillick waited until she was gone and the corridor was empty. Then he too ducked into the dead partner’s office and locked the door behind him.

     
    It was excellent tortellini salad—filled with all sorts of good things only about half of which she recognized. The bread was lopsided but Reece had propped it up in a cute way. Whatever its shape, it tasted wonderful. He opened a cold