Mistress of Justice

gruff voice delivered the message. He hung up and looked at his wife, who stared at him, clearly alarmed by his drawn expression.
    “He’s done it again.”
    “Clayton?”
    Burdick sighed and nodded. He walked to the window and gazed outside into the trim, windswept courtyard. “There’s a problem with the St. Agnes case.”
    Donald Burdick’s oldest and second-most-lucrative client was Manhattan’s St. Agnes Hospital. It had recently been sued for malpractice and Fred LaDue, a litigation partner, was handling the trial, which was in its fourth day now.The case was routine and it was likely that the hospital was going to win. Stanley had just reported, however, that the plaintiff’s attorneys—from a tough Midtown personal injury firm—had found a new witness, a doctor whose testimony could be devastating to St. Agnes. Even though he was a surprise witness, the judge was going to let him testify tomorrow.
    The judgment could be for tens of millions and a loss this big might mean that St. Agnes—which was self-insured—would fire Hubbard, White & Willis altogether. Even if the hospital didn’t do so, though, the credibility of Burdick and his litigation department would be seriously eroded and the hospital might push to support the merger; John Perelli’s firm was renowned for its brutal handling of personal injury defense work.
    “Damn,” Burdick muttered. “Damn.”
    Vera’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t think that Wendall slipped your client’s files to the other side, do you?”
    “It did occur to me.”
    Vera took a sip of scotch and set the Waterford glass down on the table. Burdick’s eyes were distant, trying to process this news. His wife’s, however, had coalesced into dark dots. “One thing I’d say, darling.”
    The wind rattled the leaded-glass windows. Burdick glanced at the sound.
    She said, “With a man like Wendall, we have to hit him hard the first time. We won’t have a second chance.”
    Burdick’s eyes dropped to the Pakistani carpet on the bedroom floor. Then he picked up the phone and called the night operator at the law firm. “This is Donald Burdick,” he said politely. “Please locate Mitchell Reece and have him call me at home. Tell him it’s urgent.”

CHAPTER NINE
     
    Taylor Lockwood walked through the breezy evening streets of the East Village, the curbs banked with trash, and thought of a funeral she’d attended several months earlier.
    She’d sat in the front pew of the church in Scarsdale, north of the city, a wood-and-stone building built, someone behind her had whispered, by contributions from tycoons like J. P. Morgan and Vanderbilt. Although Taylor had been in black, that color did not seem to be requisite at funerals any longer; any somber shade was acceptable—purple, forest green, even dusk-brown tapestry. She sat on the hard pew and watched the family members, lost in their personal rituals of grief, tears running in halting streams, hands squeezing hands, fingers rubbing obsessively against fingers. The minister had spoken of Linda Davidoff with genuine sorrow and familiarity. He knew the parents better than the daughter, that was clear, but he was eulogizing well.
    Most attendees had seemed sad or bewildered but not everyone had cried; suicide makes for an ambivalent mourning.
    The minister had closed the service with one of Linda’s poems, one published in her college literary magazine.
    As he’d read, images of Linda had returned and the tears that Taylor Lockwood had told herself not to cry appeared fast, stinging the corners of her eyes and running with maddening tickles down her cheeks, even though she hadn’t known the paralegal very well.
    Then the organ had played a solemn cue and the mourners had filed outside for the drive to the interment.
    As she’d told Reece, nothing that she’d found suggested that Linda Davidoff had had any connection with Hanover & Stiver or the loan deal. But there was something suspicious to Taylor about the way the girl had worked such long hours on the case then stopped abruptly—and then committed suicide.
    She felt she needed to follow up on this question. Alice, after all, had wandered everywhere throughout Wonderland—a place, however, in which you sure wouldn’t find the disgusting six-story tenement she now stood in front of. In the foul entry foyer the intercom had been stolen and the front door was open, swinging in the breeze like a batwing door in a ghost town saloon. She started