Mistress of Justice

always put myself in the mind of the perp. In this case, if the note disappears forever that implies a crime. If it’s just misplaced until Hanover’s hidden his assets and then it resurfaces, well, that suggests, just legal malpractice on Hubbard, White’s part; nobody looks any farther for a bad guy than us. That’s why I think the note’s still in the firm. Maybe in the file room, maybe stuck in a magazine in a partner’s office, maybe behind a copier—wherever the thief hid it.
    Thief.… Lockwood felt her first uneasy twinge—not only at the impossibility of the task but that there was potential danger too.
    In Wonderland the Queen of Hearts’ favorite slogan was “Off with their heads.”
    She sat back. “I don’t know, Mitchell. It seems hopeless. There’re a million places the note could be.”
    “We don’t have the facts yet. There’s a huge amount of information at the firm about where people have been at various times and what they’ve been doing. Billing department, payroll, things like that. I guess the first thing I’d do is check the door key entry logs and time sheets to find out who was in the firm on Saturday.”
    She nodded at the lock. “But we think it was a pro, don’t we? Not a lawyer or employee?”
    “Still, somebody had to let him in. Either that or they lent him their key card—or one they’d stolen.” Reece then took out his wallet and handed her a thousand dollars in hundreds.
    She looked at the cash with a funny smile, embarrassed, curious.
    “For expenses.”
    “Expenses.” Did he mean bribes? She wasn’t going to ask. Taylor held the bills awkwardly for a moment then slipped them into her purse. She noticed a sheet of paper on Reece’s desk. It was legal-sized and pale green—the color of corridors in old hospitals and government buildings. She recognized it as the court calendar the managing attorney of Hubbard, White circulated throughout the firm daily. It contained a grid of thirty days beginning with today. Filling these squares were the times and locations of all court appearances scheduled for the firm’s litigators. She leaned forward. In the square indicating one week from today were the words:
    New Amsterdam Bank & Trust v. Hanover & Stiver. Jury trial. Ten a.m. No continuance
.
     
    He looked at his watch. “Let’s talk again tomorrow. But we should keep our distance when we’re at the firm. If anybody asks tell them you’re helping me with some year-end billing problems.”
    “But who’d ask? Who’d even know?”
    He laughed and seemed to consider this a naive comment. “How’s the Vista Hotel at nine-thirty?”
    “Sure.”
    “If I call you at home I can leave a message, can’t I?”
    “I’ve got an answering machine.”
    “No, I mean, there won’t be anybody else there to pick it up, right? I heard you lived alone.”
    She hesitated momentarily and said only, “You can leave messages there.”

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    “I have a breakfast meeting in half an hour then the partnership meeting for the rest of the morning,” Wendall Clayton said into the phone. “Get me the details as soon as possible.”
    “I’ll do what I can, Wendall,” Sean Lillick, a young paralegal who worked for Clayton regularly, replied uneasily. “But it’s, like, pretty confidential.”
    “ ‘Like’ confidential. It is confidential or not?”
    A sigh from the other end of the phone line. “You know what I mean.”
    The partner muttered, “You meant it
is
confidential. Well, find out who has the information and aristocratize them. I want the particulars. Which you might just have found out
before
you called. You’d know I’d want them.”
    “Sure, Wendall,” Lillick said.
    The partner dropped the phone into the cradle.
    Wendall Clayton was a handsome man. Not big—under six feet—but solid from running (he didn’t jog; he
ran
) and tennis and skippering the forty-two-foot
Ginny May
around Newport every other weekend from April throughSeptember. He had a thick bundle of professorial hair and he wore European suits, slitless in the back, forgoing the burdened sacks of dark pinstripe that cloaked most of the pear-shaped men of the firm. Killer looks, the women in the firm said. Another three inches and he could have been a model. Clayton worked hard at his image, the way nobility worked hard. A duke had to be handsome. A duke enjoyed dusting his suits with pig-bristle brushes and getting a radiant glow on his burgundy-colored