Mistress of Justice

reaching for the call button, pushing it fiercely over and over.
    And then the room went black.

     
    At 7:30 P.M . the telephone in Donald Burdick’s co-op rang.
    He was in the living room. He heard Vera answer it then mentally followed her footsteps as they completed a circuit that ended in the arched entrance near him. Her calm face appeared.
    “Phone, Don,” Vera said. “It’s the doctor.”
    The
Wall Street Journal
crumpled in his hand. He rose and together they walked to the den.
    “Yes?” he asked.
    “Mr. Burdick?” a woman’s matter-of-fact voice asked. “This is Dr. Vivian Sarravich again. From Manhattan General Hospital? I’m calling about Ms. Lockwood.”
    “Yes?”
    “I’m afraid I have bad news, sir. Miss Taylor has gone into a coma. Our neurologist’s opinion is that she won’t be coming out of it in the near future … if at all. And if she does she’s certain to have permanent brain and neuromuscular damage.”
    Burdick shook his head to Vera. He held the phone out a ways so that she too could hear. “It’s that bad?”
    “This is the most severe case of botulism I’ve ever seen. The infection was much greater than usual. She’s had two respiratory failures. We had to put her on a ventilator. And a feeding tube, of course.”
    “Her family?”
    “We’ve told them. Her parents on on their way here.”
    “Yes, well, thank you, Doctor. You’ll keep me posted?”
    “Of course. I am sorry. We did everything we could.”
    “I’m sure you did.”
    Burdick hung up and said to his wife, “She probably won’t make it.”
    Vera gave a neutral nod and then glanced at the maid who’d silently appeared beside them. “They’re here, Mrs. Burdick.”
    “Show them into the den, ’Nita.”

     
    Donald Burdick poured port into Waterford glasses. His hands left fingerprints in a slight coating of dust on the bottle, which, he noticed, had been put up in 1963.
    The year that a Democratic President had been killed.
    The year he made his first million dollars.
    The year that happened to be a very good one for vintage port.
    He carried the glasses to the guests: Bill Stanley, Lamar Fredericks, Woody Crenshaw—all old fogies, his granddaughter might say, if kids still used that word, which of course they didn’t—and three other members of the executive committee. Three young partners to whom Burdick was making a point of being kind and deferential.
    Three partners who were in absolute terror at the moment—because they had been picked and polished by Wendall Clayton and then leveraged by him onto the executive committee.
    The men were in Burdick’s study. Outside, wet snow slapped on the leaded glass windows.
    “To Hubbard, White & Willis,” Burdick said. Glasses were raised but not rung together.
    The Reconstruction had began swiftly. Only one of Clayton’s lackeys had been fired outright—tall, young Randy Simms III, a fair-to-middlin’ lawyer but one hell of a scheming nazi sycophant, Vera Burdick had observed. It had been her delightful task to transmit, through her own social network, rumors of various types of illegal scams the young partner was guilty of. By the time she was through he’d been thoroughly blackballed and was a pariah in the world of New York law and Upper East Side society.
    As for the other pretty young men and women associates on Clayton’s side … they weren’t asked to leave, the theory being they’d work even harder to rid themselves of the contamination. These secessionists and collaborators were given the shaved-head treatment then kicked onto the summer outing and hiring committees.
    These three Nameless were the last order of business in the Purge.
    One of them said, “Your wife, Donald, is a charming lady.”
    Burdick smiled. They had of course met Vera before this evening though she had never served them dinner, never entertained them, never told them stories of her travels and anecdotes about her famous political friends; never, in short, grilled them like an expert interrogator.
    He set the assassination-year bottle in the middle of the tea table.
    He said, “Bill knows this but for the rest of you, I have some news. I’m meeting tomorrow with John Perelli. We have a problem, of course. Perelli’s position is that Wendall’sdiscussions with him suggest an implicit agreement to go forward with the merger—even though the whole firm’s never approved it.”
    One of the Nameless nodded. Impressed that the man returned his