Mistress of Justice

she wants but I don’t think it’s healthy.”
    Instinctively he glanced where the woman was nodding and studied the gold lamé dress, the stiletto heels. He said, “Well, the good news is it’s not a woman.”
    “What?”
    “Truly. But the bad news is that I’m betting what he has in mind is still pretty perverse.”
    “Maybe I better head for the hills,” she said.
    “Naw, hang out here. I’ll protect you. You can cheer me up. My true love just left me.”
    “The true love you just met four minutes ago?” the woman asked.
“That
true love?”
    “Ah, you witnessed that, did you?”
    She added, “Mine just stood me up. I won’t go so far as to say true love. He was a blind date.”
    His mind raced. Yes, she
was
familiar.… She now squinted at him as if she recognized him too. Where did he know her from? Here? The Harvard Club? Piping Rock?
    He wondered if he’d slept with her, and, if he had, whether he’d enjoyed it. Shit, had he called her the next day?
    She was saying, “I couldn’t believe it. The bouncer wasn’t going to let me in. It took all my political pull.”
    “Political?”
    “A portrait of Alexander Hamilton.” She slung out the words and Sebastian thought he heard something akin to mockery in her voice, as if he wasn’t quick enough to catch the punch line.
    “Gotcha,” Sebastian said, feeling defensive.
    “This drink sucks. The Coke tastes moldy.”
    Now he felt offended too, taking this as a criticism of the club, which was one of his homes away from home. Hesipped his own drink and felt uncharacteristically out of control. Veronica was easier to handle. He wondered how to get back in the driver’s seat.
    “Look, I know I know you. You’re?”
    “Taylor Lockwood.” They shook hands.
    “Thom Sebastian.”
    “Right,” she said, understanding dawning in his eyes.
    With this, his mind made the connection. “Hubbard, White?”
    “Corporate paralegal. Hey, you ever fraternize with us folks?”
    “Only if we blow this joint. Let’s go—there’s nothing happening here.”
    The tall gold-clad transvestite had begun a striptease in front of them, while ten feet away Tina Turner and Calvin Klein paused to watch.
    “There isn’t?” Taylor asked.
    Sebastian smiled, took her hand and led her through the crowd.

CHAPTER SIX
     
    The drapery man was having a busy night.
    He pushed a canvas cart ahead of him, filled with his props—draperies that needed to be cleaned but never would be. They were piled atop one another and the one on top was folded carefully; it hid his ice-pick weapon, resting near to hand.
    This man had been in many different offices at all hours of the day and night. Insurance companies with rows of ghastly gray desks bathed in green fluorescence. CEOs’ offices that were like the finest comp suites in Vegas casinos. Hotels and art galleries. Even some government office buildings. But Hubbard, White & Willis was unique.
    At first he’d been impressed with the elegant place. But now, pushing the cart through quiet corridors, he felt belittled. He sensed contempt for people like him, sensed it from the walls themselves. Here, he was nothing. His neck prickled as he walked past a dark portrait of some old man from the 1800s. He wanted to pull out his pick and slash the canvas.
    The drapery man’s face was a map of vessels burst in sfistfights on the streets and in the various prisons he’d been incarcerated in and his muscles were dense as a bull’s. He was a professional, of course, but part of him was hoping one of these scrawny prick lawyers, hunched over stacks of books in the offices he passed (no glances, no nods, no smiles—well, fuck you and your mother) … hoping one of them would walk up to him and demand to see a pass or permit so he could shank them through the lung.
    But they all remained oblivious to him. An underling.
    Not even worth noticing.
    Glancing around to make sure no one was approaching, he stepped into the coffee room on the main floor and took a dusty container of Coffee-mate from the back of a storage shelf. In thirty seconds he’d slid out the tape recorder, removed the cassette, put in a new one and replaced the unit in the canister. He knew it was safe in this particular container because he’d observed that the prissy lawyers here insisted on real milk—half-and-half or 2 percent—and wouldn’t think of drinking, or serving their clients, anything artificial. The Coffee-mate tube had been here, untouched,