Mistress of Justice

have finished quickly but it took Clayton considerably longer. Long enough, in fact, for Taylor to go through the partner’s desk carefully. The sound track conveniently helped her gauge how much time she had.
    She found only one thing that interested her: an invoicefor a security firm. The bill was for ongoing services, which had begun last month. The job description was “As directed by client.”
    She debated stealing it. What would her detective friend John Silbert Hemming do? He’d use a spy camera, she guessed. But ill-equipped Taylor Lockwood did the next best thing: She carefully copied all the information and put the invoice back.
    Downstairs she noticed the crowd had dwindled considerably, as you’d expect for a Sunday night party. Only the hard-core partyers remained. Thom Sebastian, for instance, who swooped in for another sloppy bear hug. She ducked away from it. He said good-bye and reiterated his dinner invitation for tomorrow. Taylor ambled through the house, aiming toward the buffet and listening to the snatches of muted, often drunken, conversation.
    He’s going to do it. For sure. Next month, we’re going to be Hubbard, White, Willis, Sullivan & Perelli
.
    You’re out to lunch, dude. No way’ll Burdick let it happen
.
    Do you realize the vote is Tuesday? Day after tomorrow
.
    You hear about the detective that was going through Burdick’s Swiss accounts?
    You hear Burdick had somebody check Clayton’s law review article to see if he plagiarized?
    That’s bullshit
.
    You want to talk bullshit, this merger is bullshit. Nobody’s getting any work done
.
    Where’s Donald?
    He doesn’t need to be here. He sent Himmler instead
.
    Who?
    His wife. See, Burdick would charm a man out of his balls; Vera’d just cut ’em off. You know the stories about her, don’t you? Lady Macbeth …
    Taylor noticed that Burdick’s wife was no longer here.
    She then surveyed the long table where there’d once sat mounds of caviar, roast beef, steak tartare and sesame chicken. All that now remained was broccoli.
    Taylor Lockwood hated broccoli.

     
    On the patio deck of the Fleetwood Hotel’s penthouse on the Miami Beach strip Ed Gliddick sent a golf ball near the putting cup embedded in the roof’s AstroTurf.
    “Hell,” he said of the miss and looked at the trim young man near him, who watched the shot without emotion. Standing ramrod-straight, he offered Gliddick no false compliments and said only, “I play tennis, not golf.”
    The man was Randall Simms III, Wendall Clayton’s protégé. It was he who’d pirated the Hubbard, White & Willis chartered jet to beat Donald Burdick down to Florida to meet with the executives of McMillan Holdings.
    While Burdick himself was cooling his heels with the second-in-command of the company, Steve Nordstrom, Simms had been meeting with Gliddick, the chairman of the board and CEO of McMillan.
    McMillan was a company that did nothing but own other companies, which either manufactured obscure industrial parts or provided necessary though obscure services to other businesses or in turn owned other companies or portions of them. The vagaries of this structure and function, however, were not to suggest that Gliddick didn’t know how to satisfy a market need when he saw one. McMillan was consistently in the top twenty of the most profitable companies in the world.
    At sixty-five, Gliddick was stooped and paunchy amidships. His ruddy skin was wrinkled from years of sun on golf courses and tennis courts around the world. Sparse gray hair, a hook of a nose.
    So he said to Simms, “Wendall didn’t come down to see me. He sent you instead.”
    Simms said nothing.
    Gliddick held up a hand. “Which means only one thing. You’re the muscle, right?”
    Unsmiling, Simms folded his arms and watched Gliddick miss another easy putt. “Wendall wanted a little distance between himself and what I’m going to say to you.”
    “This’s all about that fucking merger, isn’t it?”
    “I’d suggest we go inside,” Simms said. “Somebody could have an antenna trained on us. They really make those things, you know. They’re not just in the movies.”
    “I know.”
    Gliddick walked into the room, shut the window and drew the curtains. Simms mixed whiskey sours for them both. Gliddick wondered how this man, whom he’d never met, had known that this was his drink.
    The chairman sipped the sweet concoction. “You know Donald Burdick’s meeting with Steve Nordstrom right