Mistress of Justice

There was no way the windows would ever open again.
    She gave a cursory once-over to the living room, which was filled with old furniture, some of whose tattered, cracked arms and legs were tied together neatly with twine. She saw chipped vases, lace that had been torn and carelesslyresewn, books, afghans, walking sticks, a collection of dented silver cigarette cases. Walls were covered with old framed pictures of relatives, including several of Dudley as a young man with a large, unfriendly-looking woman. He was handsome but very thin and he stared at the camera with solemn introspection.
    In his bedroom, beside a neatly made bed, she found what looked like a wooden torso with one of Dudley’s suit jackets hanging on the shoulders. A clothes brush rested on a small rack on the torso’s chest and on the floor in front of it was a pair of carefully polished shoes with well-worn heels.
    His fussiness made her job as burglar easy. Each of the pigeonholes in his oak rolltop desk contained a single, well-marked category of documents. Con Ed bills, phone bills, letters from his daughter (the least-filled compartment), business correspondence, warranty cards for household appliances, letters from his alumni organization, receipts. He separated opera programs from symphony programs from ballet programs.
    Taylor finished the desk in ten minutes but could find nothing linking Dudley to the note or to Hanover & Stiver. Discouraged and feeling hot and filthy from the search, she walked into the kitchen, illuminated with pallid light from the courtyard that the room’s one small window looked out on.
    Taylor leaned against the sink. In front of her was Dudley’s small kitchen table, on either side of which were two mahogany chairs. One side of the table was empty. On the other was a faded place mat on which sat an expensive, nicked porcelain plate, a setting of heavy silverware, a wineglass—all arranged for his solitary dinner that evening. A starched white napkin, rolled and held by a bright red napkin ring, rested in the center of the plate. The gaudy ring was the one item glaringly out of place. Taylor picked up the cheap plastic, the kind sold at the bargain stores in Times Square where tourists buy personalized souvenirs—cups, dishes, tiny license plates.
    She turned it over; the name sloppily embossed in the plastic was
Poppie
.
    A present from June, the object of his perverse desire.
    Her hour was up. Book on outta here, Alice.…
    Nothing, she thought angrily. I didn’t find a thing. Not a single hint as to where the note might be. She stuffed the grocery bag, which had been filled only with wadded-up newspapers, into the trash chute and left.
    So, can we eliminate Dudley? she wondered.
    No, but we can put him lower on the list than Thom Sebastian.
    Well, don’t get too interested in her.…
    She’d charm the young lawyer, interrogate him—the prick who’d been collecting information on her. She remembered his troubled expression yesterday. Maybe a confession
would
be forthcoming at dinner tonight. She still held out that hope.
    Outside, she paused for a moment, rubbed her eyes.
    Tomorrow, she thought in alarm, the trial was tomorrow.
    Taylor stepped into the street to flag down a cab.

     
    Thom Sebastian sat at the bar of the Blue Devil on the far edge of West Fifty-seventh, near the Hudson River.
    An excellent place, he assessed, it had a mostly black audience, dressed super-sharp. He was working on a vodka gimlet, imagining his juggler and thinking, So far, so good.
    But also thinking
goddamn
, I’m nervous.
    He was considering what was about to happen tonight.
    Was this a way-major mistake?
    For a while he’d thought so. But now he wasn’t so sure. Had no idea.
    But it
was
going to happen; the die had been cast, he thought, phrasing the situation in a cliché that he found unworthy of a lawyer of his caliber.
    He found himself coolly considering partnership at Hubbard, White & Willis and he remembered—almost with amusement—that he’d always considered achieving partnership a matter of life and death.
    Death …
    After Wendall Clayton had called him into his office and told him in that soft voice of his that the firm had concluded it would be unable to extend the offer of partnership to him, Sebastian had sat motionless for three or four minutes, smiling at the partner, listening to the man describe the firm’s plans for Sebastian’s severance.
    A smile, yes, but it was really a rictus