Mistress of Justice

out of date, if it wasn’t complete fiction.
    She nodded, smiled till she felt jowls and said “Uh-huh” or “No kidding” or “How ’bout that” every so often. She got good mileage out of “That’s very helpful, just what I was wondering.”
    The waiter brought the steaks, charred and fatty, and although she wasn’t particularly hungry, she found hers tasted very good. Dudley made sure she was looked after. He was a natural host. They ate in silence for a few minutes as Taylor took in the young men at the tables around them—recent grads, she assumed. In white shirts and striped ties and suspenders, they were just beginning the journeys that, in four decades, would take them to the destinations at which Donald Burdick and Ralph Dudley and Bill Stanley had arrived.
    She looked at her watch. “You said you had some plans tonight. I don’t want to interfere with them. I hope you’re not working late?”
    He gave her a charming smile. “Just meeting some friends.”
    The mysterious W.S.
    Taylor took a sip of the heavy wine he’d ordered. “I’d rather work late than on weekends.”
    “Weekends?” He shook his head. “Never.”
    “Really?” she asked casually. “I was in on Saturday night. I thought I saw you. Actually I think it was early Sunday morning.”
    He hesitated a moment but there was nothing evasive about his demeanor when he answered. “Not I. Maybe it was Donald Burdick. Yes, that was probably it. I’m told we look alike. No, I haven’t worked on a weekend since, let’s see, ’79 or ’80. That was a case involving the seizure of foreign assets. Iranian, I think. Yes, it was. Let me tell you about it. Fascinating case.”
    Which it may very well have been. But Taylor wasn’tpaying any attention. She was trying to decide if he’d been lying or not.
    Well, looking at his frayed cuffs and overwashed shirt, she observed a motive for stealing the note: money. Dudley was a charming old man but he wasn’t a player in Wall Street law and probably never had been. His savings dwindling, his partnership share decreasing as he made less and less money for the firm, he would have been an easy target when somebody from Hanover approached and asked him to let a man inside the firm—an industrial spy, they’d probably said.
    Dudley finished his story and glanced at his watch.
    It was nine-thirty and he was meeting W.S. in a half hour, she recalled.
    He signed the bill and they wandered out of the club into the cold, damp ozone of a New York evening on the shag end of November.
    Taylor hoped the cool air would wake her but it had no effect. The narcotics of red wine and heavy food numbed her mind. She groggily followed the partner down the front steps, half-wishing she partook in Thom Sebastian’s magic wake-up powder.
    She thanked Dudley for his insights and for dinner and said that his school had slipped into the front-runner spot.
    This seemed to genuinely please him.
    He said, “You all right, Taylor?”
    “Fine, just a little tired.”
    “Tired?” Dudley said, as if he had never heard of the word. “I’ll walk you to the subway.” He started down the sidewalk in long, enthusiastic but gentlemanly strides.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
     
    “Wait.”
    Sean Lillick’s voice was sufficiently urgent that Wendall Clayton stopped, frozen in the back entrance of the Knickerbocker Club.
    “What is it?” the partner asked.
    “There, didn’t you see them? It was Ralph Dudley and Taylor Lockwood. They were going out the front.”
    Clayton frowned. It was a constant source of irritation that a has-been like Dudley belonged to the same club that he did. He resumed his aristocratic stride. “So?”
    “What are they doing here?” Lillick wondered uneasily.
    “Fucking?” Clayton suggested. He glanced toward the stairway, which led to the club’s private bedrooms.
    “No, they came out of the dining room, it looked like.”
    “Maybe he bought her dinner and
now
he’s going to fuck her. I wonder if he can still get it up.”
    “I don’t want them to see us,” Lillick said.
    “Why not?”
    “I just don’t.”
    Clayton shrugged. He looked at his watch. “Randy’s late. What’s going on?”
    Lillick said, “I’ve got to leave about midnight, Wendall. If it’s okay.” His suit didn’t fit well and he looked like a college boy out to dinner with Dad.
    “Midnight?”
    “It’s important.”
    “What’s up?” Clayton smiled. “Do you have a date?” He dragged the last word out