Mistress of Justice

“I’m mostly into horn. Dexter Gordon, Javon Jackson.”
    “No kidding,” she said, surprised. Usually only jazzophiles knew these players. “I love Jabbo Smith.”
    He nodded at this. “Sure, sure. I’m also a big Burrell fan.”
    She nodded. “Guitar? I still like Wes Montgomery, I’ve got to admit. For a while I was into a Howard Roberts phase.”
    Reece said, “Too avant-garde for me.”
    “Oh, yeah, I hear you,” she said. “A melody … that’s what music’s got to have—a tune people can hum. A movie’s got to have a story, a piece of music’s got to have a tune. That’s my philosophy of life.”
    “You perform?”
    “Sometimes. Right now my big push is to get a record contract. I just dropped a bundle making a demo of some of my own tunes. I rented a studio, hired union backup. The works. Sent them to about a hundred companies.”
    “Yeah?” He seemed excited. “Give me a copy if you think about it. You have any extra?”
    She laughed. “Dozens. Even after I give them away as Christmas presents this year.”
    “How’s the response been?”
    “Next question?” she asked, sighing. “I’ve sent out ninety-six tapes—agents, record companies, producers. So far, I’ve gotten eighty-four rejections. But I did get one ‘maybe.’ From a big label. They’re going to present it to their A&R committee.”
    “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
    “Thanks.”
    “So,” he asked, “how’s the music jibe with the law school track?”
    “Oh, I can handle them both,” she said without really thinking about her response. She wondered if the comment came off as pompous.
    He glanced at his watch, and Taylor felt the gesture abruptly push aside the personal turn their conversation had taken. She asked, “There is one thing I wanted to ask you about. Linda Davidoff worked on the Hanover & Stiver case, right?”
    “Linda? The paralegal? Yeah, for a few months when the case got started.”
    “It struck me as a little curious that she quit working on the case pretty suddenly then she killed herself.”
    He nodded. “That’s odd, yeah. I never thought about it. I didn’t know her very well. She was a good paralegal. But real quiet. It doesn’t seem likely she’d be involved,” Reece said, “but if you asked me it if was likely somebody’d steal a note from a law firm, I’d say no way.”
    The waitress asked if they wanted anything else. They shook their heads. “You women, always dieting,” Reece said, nodding at her uneaten toast.
    Taylor smiled. Thinking: We women, always trying not to throw up in front of our bosses.
    “What’s up next?” he asked.
    “Time to be a spy,” she said.

     
    Taylor sat in her cubicle at the firm and dialed a number.
    She let the telephone ring. When the system shifted the call over to voice mail she hung up, left her desk and wandered down the halls. Up a flight of stairs. She turned down a corridor that led past the lunchroom then past the forms room, where copies of prototype contracts and pleadings were filed. At the end of this corridor—in the law firm’s Siberia—was a single office. On the door was a nameplate:
R. Dudley
. Most of these plates in the firm were plastic; thisone, though it designated the smallest partner’s office in Hubbard, White, was made of polished brass.
    Inside the office were crammed an Italian Renaissance desk, a tall bookcase, two shabby leather chairs, dozens of prints of nineteenth-century sailing ships and eighteenth-century foxhunting scenes. Through a small window you could see a brick wall and a tiny sliver of New York Harbor. On the desk rested a large brass ashtray, a picture of an unsmiling, pretty teenage girl, a dozen Metropolitan Opera
Playbills
, a date book and one law book—a Supreme Court
Reporter
.
    Taylor Lockwood opened the
Reporter
and bent over it. Her eyes, though, camouflaged by her fallen hair, were not reading the twin columns of type but rather Ralph Dudley’s scuffed leather date book, opened to the present week.
    She noticed the letters
W.S
. penned into the box for late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning, just before the time Dudley—if Sebastian was right—had used the associate’s key to get into the firm.
    The initials
W.S
. were also, she observed, written in the 10 P.M . slot for tomorrow. Who was this person? A contact at Hanover? The professional thief? Taylor then opened the calendar to the phone number/address section. There was no one listed with those