Mistress of Justice

that Lillick had given her—Danny Stuart, Linda Davidoff’s roommate—and called him. He wasn’t in but she left a message asking if they could meet; there was something about Linda she wanted to ask him about.
    She hung up and then happened to look down at her desktop and, with a twist in her gut, noticed the managing attorney’s daily memo. In the square for Tuesday of next week were these words:
    New Amsterdam Bank & Trust v. Hanover & Stiver.
Jury trial. Ten a.m. No continuance
.
     
    As she stared there was suddenly a huge explosion behind her.
    Taylor spun around, inhaling a scream.
    Her eyes met those of a young man in a white shirt. He was standing in the hall, staring back at her. He held a bottle of French champagne he’d just opened. “Hey, sorry,” he said. Then smiled. “We just closed. We finally got Bank of Tokyo approval.”
    “I’m happy for you,” she said and snagged her coat then started down the hallway as he turned his groggy attention to opening more bottles and setting them on a silver tray.

     
    The drapery man watched her pull her overcoat on and step into the lobby, the door swinging shut behind her.
    He patiently waited a half hour, just in case she’d forgotten anything, and when she didn’t return he walked slowly down the corridor to Taylor Lockwood’s cubicle, pushing the drapery cart in front of him, his hand near his ice-pick weapon.
    Upstairs the firm was bustling like mid-morning—some big fucking business deal going on, dozens of lawyers and assistants ignoring him—but down here the place was dark and empty. He paused in the Lockwood woman’s cubicle, checked the hallways again and dropped to his knees. In two minutes he’d fitted the transmitting microphone, like the one he planted in Mitchell Reece’s phone, into hers.
    The drapery man finished the job, tested the device, ran a sweep to make sure it wasn’t detectable and walked to the entranceway of the paralegal cubicles.
    Nearby was a conference room, in which he saw a half-dozen open bottles of champagne sitting on a silver tray. When he touched one with the back of his hand he found it was still cold. He glanced behind him, pulled on his gloves and lifted the first bottle to his mouth. He took a sip then ran his tongue around the lip of the bottle. He did the same with the others.
    Then feeling the faint buzz from the dry wine—and a huge sense of satisfaction—he returned to the hallway and started pushing his cart toward the back door.

     
    “Never take a job,” Sean Lillick said pensively, holding the door open, “where you have to hold things in your teeth.”
    Carrie Mason, standing in the door of his shabby East Village walk-up, blinked. “Never what?” she asked, entering.
    “That’s a line from a piece I’m working on right now. I’m, like, a performance artist. This one’s about careers. I call it ‘W2 Blues.’ Like your W2 form, the tax thing. It’s spoken over music.”
    “Never take a job that …” Pained, she said, “I don’t think I get it.”
    “There’s nothing to get,” he explained, a little irritated. “It’s more of a social comment, you know, than a joke. It’s about how we’re defined in terms of what we do for a living. You know, like the first thing lawyers say when you meet them is what they do for a living. The point is we should be human beings first and then have a career.”
    She nodded. “So when you just said you were a performance artist, that was, like, being ironic?”
    Now,
he
blinked. Then, even more irritated, he nodded. “Yeah, exactly. Ironic.”
    He examined her from the corner of his eye. The girl was hardly his type. Although on the whole Lillick preferred women to men (he’d had his share of both since he came to New York from Des Moines five years ago) the sort ofwomen he wanted to fuck were willowy, quiet, beautiful and passed cold judgment on anyone they bothered to glance at.
    Carrie Mason didn’t come close to meeting his specifications. For one thing, she was fat. Well, okay, not fat, but round—round in a way that needed pleated skirts and billowy blouses to make her look good. For another, she was polite and laughed a lot, which was evidence that she would rarely pass moody judgments on anyone at all.
    Lillick also suspected she blushed frequently and he couldn’t see himself getting involved with anybody who blushed.
    “You know,” she said after a moment, “tailors hold pins and things in their teeth.