Mistress of Justice

up the filthy steps.

     
    “It may look impressive, but the bank owns most of it,” Sean Lillick said.
    The young paralegal was sitting on the drafty floor, shirtless and shoeless, shoving a backpack under the bed as she walked in.
    Taylor Lockwood, catching her breath from the climb, was surveying what Lillick was referring to: a wall of keyboards, wires, boxes, a computer terminal, speakers, guitar, amps. Easily fifty thousand dollars’ worth of musical equipment.
    Lillick—thin, dark-haired, about twenty-four—was smelling socks, discarding them. He wore black jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt. His boots sat in front of him. The onlyclue as to his day job at Hubbard, White & Willis were two dark suits and three white shirts, in various stages of recycling, hanging on nails pounded crookedly into the wall. He studied her for a moment. “You look impressed or confused. I can’t tell.”
    “Your place is a little more alternative than I expected.” The apartment was a patchwork. Someone had nailed pieces of plywood, plastic or sheet metal over cracks and holes. Joints didn’t meet, plaster was rotting, floorboards were cracked or missing. In the living room: one hanging bare bulb, one floor lamp, one daybed, one desk.
    And a ton of bank-owned musical instruments and gear.
    “Have a seat.”
    She looked helplessly about her.
    “Oh. Well, try the daybed.… Hey Taylor, listen to this. I just thought it up. I’m going to use it in one of my pieces: You know what a preppy is?”
    “I give up.”
    “A yuppie with papers.”
    She smiled politely. He didn’t seem concerned about the tepid response and wrote the line down in a notebook. “So what do you do?” she asked. “Stand-up comedy?”
    “Performance art. I like to rearrange perceptions.”
    “Ah, musically speaking,” she joked, “you’re a
re
-arranger.”
    He seemed to like her observation too and mentally stored it somewhere.
    Taylor walked over to a music keyboard.
    Lillick said, “You’re thinking organ, I know. But—”
    “I’m thinking Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer with a digital sampler, MIDI and a Linn sequencer that should store about a hundred sequences in RAM. You mind?”
    He laughed and waved his hand. She sat on a broken stool and clicked on the Yamaha. She ran through “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
    Lillick said, “This machine cannot deal with music like that. I think it’s having a breakdown.”
    “What do you play?” she asked him.
    “Postmodern, post–New Wave. What I do is integrate music and my show. I call myself a sound painter. Is that obnoxious?”
    Taylor thought it was but just smiled and read through some of his lead sheets. In addition to standard musical notation they included drawings of pans and hammers, lightbulbs, bells, a pistol.
    “When I started composing I was a serialist and then I moved to minimalism. Now I’m exploring nonmusical elements, like choreography and performance art. Some sound sculpture, too. I love what Philip Glass does only I’m less thematic. Laurie Anderson, that sort of thing. I believe there should be a lot of randomness in art. Don’t you think?”
    She shook her head, recalling what she’d told Reece that morning: How she believed music should stay close to melodies that resonated within people’s hearts. She said, “You’re talking to Ms. Mainstream, Sean,” and shut off the system. She asked, “Got a beer?”
    “Oh. Sure. Help yourself. I’ll take one, too, while you’re at it.”
    She popped them and handed him one. He asked, “You perform?”
    “You wouldn’t approve. Piano bars.”
    “They serve a valuable function.”
    Irritated by his too hip, and too righteous, attitude, Taylor asked, “Are you being condescending?”
    “No. I mean it. I like classics too.” Lillick was up, hobbling on one boot to his rows of records and CDs and tapes. “Charlie Parker. I got every Bird record ever made. Here, listen.” He put on an LP, which sounded scratchy and authentic. “Man, that was the life,” Lillick said. “You get up late, practice a bit, hang out, play sax till three, watch the sunrise with your buddies.”
    Taylor, lost in one of Bird’s solos, mused, “Man died young.”
    “Thirty-five,” Lillick said.
    “World lost a lot of music.”
    “Maybe it wouldn’t have been so, you know, deep, so righteous if he’d lived longer.”
    Taylor said, “Maybe just the opposite. Hooked on smack’s gotta affect you.”
    He nodded at his record collection,