Mistress of Justice

Hemming said. Then, as she started to stand, he held up a finger, which returned her to her seat. “One thing … there’s this friend I have. He wears a badge and works at a place called One Police Plaza and I was thinking maybe it’s time you gave him a call. Just to have a chat.”
    Taylor replayed the drive through the foliage down to the reservoir last night and thought Hemming’s was an excellent idea.
    But she answered, “No.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
     
    They walked together through Battery Park.
    Ralph Dudley’s eyes were on the Statue of Liberty, rising from the harbor like a sister of the figure of blind justice. Junie walked silently beside him. He wanted to hold her hand but of course he did not. Like tourists, they were on their way to see the monument up close.
    Dudley wondered how many people Junie’s age knew the lines carved on the base of the statue, knew they were from a poem called “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus.
    Give me your tired, your poor
,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free
,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.…
     
    Hardly any.
    But, he also wondered, how many Wall Street lawyers knew it?
    Not many of them either.
    “Is it, like, cold on the boat?”
    “You’re saying ‘like’ again a lot. Remember, you were going to watch it.”
    “Whatever.”
    “I’m sure we can sit downstairs where it’s warm. We’ll get some hot chocolate.”
    “Or a beer,” she muttered.
    “Ha,” Dudley said. “Come on over here for a minute.”
    He nodded to a bench and they sat down, Dudley wondering, as he had for a thousand times that year, why he was so taken with this little creature.
    “Yo, so wassup?” she said. Sometimes she talked black and there was nothing he could say to get her out of this mode. He’d learned that it was best to ignore her affectations. They went away sooner or later.
    “I’ve got some papers here. For you to sign. We couldn’t do it in the firm.”
    She put her Walkman headsets on. He took them off her and smoothed her hair. She wrinkled her face.
    “You’ve got to sign them.”
    “Like, okay.”
    He dug them out of his briefcase and handed them to her.
    “Okay,” she said, snapping her gum. “Gimme a pen.”
    Dudley reached into his jacket pocket and found that he’d accidentally picked up his Cross mechanical pencil. “Damn, I forgot mine.”
    “I, like, have one.” She reached into her purse and pulled it out. But as she did a piece of paper fell to the ground. Dudley had picked it up and started to hand it back when he looked at the check.
    He saw Junie’s name.
    He saw Taylor Lockwood’s name.
    His hand froze in midair between them.
    Dudley looked at her with rage in his face. “What is this?
    “I—”
    “What the hell have you done?”
    “Poppie?” she asked, dropping her Walkman. It broke apart on the asphalt.
    “How could you?” he whispered. “How could you?”

     
    The going rate to get Alice into the rabbit hole of a Manhattan apartment was a sob story.
    I feel so stupid, Ralph Dudley’s my uncle? And my aunt—that’s his wife—passed away two years ago today and he was feeling really lousy. I wanted to make him dinner, just to cheer him up
.
    She held up the Food Emporium bag as evidence.
    Here’s fifty for your trouble. Don’t say anything, okay? It’s a surprise
.
    Taylor Lockwood had dressed in her business finest, to allay the doorman’s concerns. He looked her over, pocketed the money, slipped her a spare key and turned back to a tiny television.
    She knew Dudley wouldn’t be here. She’d run into him in the halls and he’d told her that he was taking the afternoon off to show Junie the Statue of Liberty. The sullen girl had been in the lobby, waiting for him. Taylor shivered at the thought of the two of them together. For the girl’s part, she looked from Dudley’s face to Taylor’s and back again. And just seemed bored.
    Taylor now walked inside and found that Dudley’s apartment was much smaller and more modest than she’d expected.
    Although she knew about his financial problems, she’d assumed that an elderly Wall Street law firm partner like Dudley would be living at least in simple elegance, jaded though it might be. In fact, the four rooms in the prewar building didn’t not have much more square footage than her own apartment. The walls were covered with cheap paint, which blotched where it was thin and peeled where the painters had bothered to apply several coats.