Mistress of Justice

Bally’s.
    A duke took great pleasures in the small rituals of fastidiousness.
    Aristocratize them.…
    Sometimes Clayton would write the word in the margin of a memo one of his associates had written. Then watch the girl or boy, flustered, trying to pronounce it.
Ar-is-TOC-ra-tize …
he’d made up the term himself. It had to do with attitude mostly. Much of it was knowing the law, of course, and much was circumstance.
    But mostly it was attitude.
    Clayton practiced often and he was very good at it.
    He hoped Sean Lillick would, in turn, be good at aristocratizing some underling in the steno department to get the information he wanted.
    By searching through the correspondence files, time sheets and limousine and telephone logs the young paralegal had learned that Donald Burdick had recently attended several very secretive meetings and made a large number of phone calls during firm hours that had not been billed to any clients. This suggested to Clayton that Burdick was plotting something that could jeopardize the merger. That might not be the case, of course; his dealings could be related to some private business plans that Burdick or his Lucrezia Borgia of a wife, Vera, were involved in. But Clayton hadn’t gotten to his present station in life by assuming that unknown maneuverings of his rivals were benign.
    Hence, his sending Lillick off on the new mission to find out the details.
    The Tuesday morning light filtered into his office, thecorner office, located on the firm’s executive row, the seventeenth floor. The room measured twenty-seven by twenty—a size that by rights should have gone to a partner more senior than Clayton. When it fell vacant, however, the room was assigned to him. Even Donald Burdick never found out why.
    Clayton glanced at the Tiffany nautical clock on his desk. Nearly time. He rocked back in his chair, his throne, a huge construction of oak and red leather he had bought in England for two thousand pounds.
    Aristocratize
.
    He ordered his secretary to have his car brought around. He rose, donned his suit jacket and left the office. The breakfast get-together he was about to attend was perhaps the most important of any meeting he’d been to in the past year. But Clayton didn’t go immediately to the waiting car. Rather, he decided he’d been a bit harsh on the young man and wandered down to Lillick’s cubicle in the paralegal department to personally thank the young man and tell him a generous bonus would be forthcoming.

     
    “You ever been here, Wendall?” the man across the burnished copper table asked.
    When Clayton spoke, however, it was to the captain of the Carleton Hotel on Fifty-ninth Street, off Fifth Avenue. “The nova, Frederick?”
    “No, Mr. Clayton.” The captain shook his head. “Not today.”
    “Thanks. I’ll have my usual.”
    “Very good, Mr. Clayton.”
    “Well, that answers my question,” John Perelli said with an explosive laugh. “How’s the yogurt today, Freddie?”
    “It’s—”
    “That’s a joke,” Perelli barked. “Gimme a bowl. Dry wheat toast and a fruit cup.”
    “Yessir, Mr. Perelli.”
    Perelli was stocky and dark, with a long face. He wore a navy pinstripe suit.
    Clayton shot his cuffs, revealing eighteen-karat-Wedgwood cuff links, and said, “I feel, in answer to your question, right at home here.”
    Though this was not completely true. Recently Wendall Clayton had been coming to this dining room—where many of Perelli’s partners breakfasted and lunched—to make inroads into Midtown. Yet this was not his natural turf, which had always been Wall Street, upper Fifth Avenue, his weekend house in Redding, Connecticut, his ten-room cabin in Newport.
    Clayton had a stock portfolio worth around twenty-three million (depending on how the Gods of the Dow were feeling at any particular moment). Hanging on the oak paneling in his Upper East Side den were a Picasso, three Klees, a Mondrian, a Magritte. He drove a Jaguar and a Mercedes station wagon. Yet his wealth was of the hushed, Victorian sort: a third inherited, a third earned at the practice of law (and cautious investment of the proceeds), the rest from his wife.
    But here, in Midtown, he was surrounded by a different genre of money. It was loud money. Acquired from new wellsprings. This money was from media, from advertising, from public relations, from junk bonds, from leveraged buyouts, from alligator spreads and dividend-snatching. Commission money. Sales money. Real