Mistress of Justice

name?”
    “His real handle’s Brad Ottington Smith. B-O-S. Bosk. I’m Sea-bastian. Sea Bass. Get it? Okay. His father and mother have been separated practically since he was born. She has a house in Boston and his father has an apartment on the Upper East Side. They kept the summer place in theHamptons and have it on alternate weeks. They—that’s the parents they—can’t talk to each other without bloodshed so they have their lawyers schedule the visits to the house.”
    “And we’re the mother’s week.”
    “Right.”
    “Sounds like it’s going to be a bucket of kicks and giggles. What is she, a wicked witch?” Taylor asked.
    “All I’ll say is she’s more powerful than his father.”
    “What does
he
do?”
    “Dad? What he does is he’s rich. He’s a senior partner at Ludlum Morgan, the investment bank.”
    “Bosk.” She laughed. “I feel like I want to give him a Milk-Bone when I call him that. What firm does he work at?”
    As he’d done the other night, though, he grew reluctant to give much away about Bosk professionally.
    “Little shop in Midtown.” Sebastian busied himself opening a Budweiser, handed it to her. Popped another.
    “The mother?”
    “Ada travels, entertains, does what any fifty-five-year-old sorority sister does: manages her portfolio. It’s about a hundred million.” Sebastian sipped the beer and let his hand stray—accidentally on purpose—to her knee. “Ho, boy, Taylor. This’s gonna be primo. Good food, good drink, good people.”
    She lifted his pudgy fingers off her skirt. “And good behavior.”
    Sebastian moaned, then sat back in silence, and they gazed out the dim windows as dusk enveloped the flat, sandy landscape.
    The Ottington Smith family manse was a three-story Gothic Victorian house, white with dark blue trim, about a hundred miles east of New York on the South Shore of Long Island. Two towers rose to widow’s walks, which overlooked a huge yard and three connected outbuildings. The house itself was covered with skeletons of vines and wisteria. A spiked, wrought-iron fence surrounded a labyrinth of grounds. Much of the property had been reclaimed bytangles of forsythia, which sported sparse tags of brown and yellow leaves.
    “Addams Family,” Taylor said.
    The circular driveway was full of cars. The limo paused and they got out. “God, more German cars than in Brazil,” Sebastian said.
    “Porches. I love porches,” Taylor said. She sat on a wooden swing and rocked back and forth. “Wish it were thirty degrees warmer.”
    He rang the bell. A woman in her mid-fifties came to the door. Her dry, blond hair swept sideways Jackie Kennedy–style and was sprayed firmly into place. She wore a lime-green silk dress woven with pink and black triangles that pointed feverishly in all directions. Taylor bird-spotted Chanel.
    The woman’s face was long and glossy, the high bones holding the skin like a taut sail. Her jewelry was large. A blue topaz on her tanned, wrinkled finger was easily fifty carats.
    “Thomas.” They pressed cheeks and Taylor was introduced to Ada Smith—introduced, then promptly examined: the dynamics of the eyes, the contour of skin. The mouth especially. The review was mixed and Taylor believed she understood why: Bosk’s little girlfriends—age twenty-three or twenty-four—could be forgiven their youth. Taylor had broken the three-oh barrier and yet had hardly a crow’s foot or defining jowl.
    She hates me, Taylor thought.
    Yet Ada’s smile and charm didn’t waver; she’d been brought up right. “Call me Ada, please. I don’t know where Bradford is. The others are in the den. Bradford’s the cocktail and cigar director. I’m in charge of dinner. That will be at eight.”
    Then she was gone.
    From the back hallway, a bellowing voice: “Sea Bass, Sea Bass!”
    Sebastian ran toward him and grunted. “Bosk-meister! Yo!”
    They slapped fists, reminding Taylor of bull rams smacking horns.
    Their host was in chinos, Top-Siders and a green Harvard sweatshirt. His hands and face were red, his eyes watering from the cold. “We’ve been chopping wood for the fire.”
    A girl giggled at the apparent lie.
    “Well,” Bosk said, “carting it in. Same as chopping it. Just as much work.”
    Bosk leaned forward, his arm on Sebastian’s shoulders. He whispered, “Jennie’s here and she brought Billy-boy, you can believe it.”
    “No way! Is she totally fucked, or what?” Sebastian looked around uneasily. “And how