Mistress of Justice

She took her leather jacket from the closet and walked out the front door, then strolled around the house until she spotted a four-foot-deep window well. She climbed down into it. A piece of glass was loose and she worked it free. She could not see the three men downstairs but their words, earned on the warm air, streamed up to her with the awkward-sounding hesitancies of conversations overheard but not witnessed.

"Got to be more careful," Sebastian said. "Jesus, I shit when I saw you here."

Callaghan said, "We've still got some details to work out. And you're impossible to get ahold of, Thom."

"Well, we can't just fucking waltz into each other's office and take a meeting now, can we? We've got to be careful about it, set it up ahead of time, keep everything secret."

Callaghan sighed. "I've been doing this sort of thing a lot longer than you have, Thom. We're going to get away with it. Stop worrying so much."

"I'm thinking about the phones," Bosk said. "You really think they're bugged?"

Sebastian said, "Of course they're fucking bugged Jesus, don't be so naive."

Bosk. "Well, I can't run downstairs to make a call from a pay phone every time I want to talk to you. Somebody sees me doing that a couple of times and what're they going to think?'

Sebastian. "Well, that's what you're going to have to do. You can pick up cell phone transmissions even easier than landlines."

Callaghan. "What we could do – I've done this before – what we could do is get an answering service. You call and leave messages. I'll call on a separate line and pick them up. We'll have a second answering service going the other way."

Clever, Taylor Lockwood thought, though being truly clever, Thom, would have meant wearing gloves when you check out the file cabinet you're about to break into so you don't leave fingerprints.

Suddenly she felt a curious thrill. What was it? The excitement of the pursuit, she supposed, getting closer to her quarry. What Reece felt in the courtroom yesterday. What her father undoubtedly felt – in court, on the golf course, with his beloved shotgun out in the fields.

When she was young her father would take her with him when he'd go hunting on Saturday mornings in the fall. She'd hated those times, wanted to be back home in bed, watching cartoons or playing on her upright piano, shopping with her mother. But Samuel Lockwood, eyes keen and hungry for a kill, had insisted she come along. He'd carried the tiny, still-warm corpses of the birds back to the car, where came the moment she dreaded. To make her understand that the dead birds couldn't hurt her, he had her touch each one with her index finger.

There, that wasn't so bad, was it? Didn't hurt. They can't bite when they're dead, Taylor, remember that.

De

"We're fucking thieves," Sebastian said. "Am I the only one taking this seriously?"

Bosk's laugh was flinty. "Well, whatta you want, Thom? You want to get walkie-talkies and scramblers? Disguises?"

"I'm just a little paranoid, okay? There was a weird fuckup."

"What?"

"Well, last Saturday night, when I was in the firm?"

"Right," Callaghan offered.

"I made sure nobody knew I was there – on Friday. I taped the back door latch down so I could get in without leaving any record. I was in. But what happens is this old asshole, a partner, cops my key and uses it to get in early Sunday morning. So now I'm in the system."

Gotcha, thought Taylor Lockwood. John Silbert Hemming, her tall private eye, would be proud of her.

"Shit," Bosk said. "Why'd he do it?"

"How the fuck do I know? Alzheimer's."

Callaghan said, "Not the end of the world. They don't know what you were doing there, right?"

"I don't think so."

"Well, relax. You've covered up everything real well, Thom. Oh, here Got a present."

"Ah, nectar of the gods," Sebastian said.

"Sure," Bosk said. A long pause.

Then a sniff. Another.

The magic powder boosted Sebastian's spirits considerably. When he spoke next he said with a laugh, "I like this – fucking the firm that fucked me and getting rich in the process."

"You want a Lamborghini?" Callaghan asked.

Bosk said seriously, "I don't like the ride. Rough, you know."

Sebastian. "I live in Manhattan. What'm I go

"Keep it out at your summer house, Thom, like we all do."

"I don't have a summer house. And I don't want one."

The wind was dicing her face and ears. She closed her eyes against the cold. Her legs and thighs, the last stronghold of heat, were going numb. She touched the glass that separated her from a room that was fifty degrees warmer, where she heard the sounds of two chubby, spoiled boys sniffing the residue of cocaine into their nostrils.

Bosk said, "So what's with this Taylor cunt? She put out?"

"Fuck you," Sebastian said unemotionally.

"No, does she fuck you? That's what I'm asking."

Callaghan sniffed his white powder then said, "You've got gonads for brains, Bosk. Is that all you think about? Sex?"

"Money, too. I think a lot about money but mostly I think about sex. Tell me about Taylor."

"I don't want to talk about her," Sebastian said menacingly.

"Does she have big tits? I couldn't tell. Hey, chill, will you, man? That's a fucking scary look. I was just curious."

There was a pause. And with an ominous tone in his voice Sebastian said, "Well, don't get too interested in her. You hear me?"

Taylor felt a ping of fear at that.

"I'm just -"

"You hear what I'm saying?"

"Hey, chill. I hear you, Sea Bass, I hear you."

Then the conversation turned to sports and, stinging with cold, Taylor left them to their banter. She walked inside and rejoined the crowd in front of the fireplace, observing how the conversation grew sedate when she entered the room. She nudged herself into the center of the group and sat on the hearth with her back to the fire until the pain from the cold became a fierce itch and then finally died away.

Around 10 P.M. the drapery man walked through Greenwich Village under huge trapezoids of bruise-purple clouds, lit from the perpetual glow of the city.

He was concentrating on the buildings and finally arrived at the address he sought.

At the service entrance, which smelled of sour garbage, he inserted his lock gun and flicked the trigger a dozen times until the teeth of the tumblers were aligned. The door opened easily. He climbed to the fourth floor and picked another set of locks -on the door of the particular apartment he sought.

Inside, he slipped his ice-pick weapon into his belt, handle up, ready to grab it if he had to, and began to search. He found a bag of needlepoint (one a Christmas scene that sure wouldn't be finished in time for the holiday), a box of Weight Watchers apple snacks, a garter belt in its original gift box, apparently never worn, canons of musty sheet music. An elaborate, expensive-looking reel-to-reel tape recorder. Dozens of tape cassettes with the same title The Heat of Midnight Songs by Taylor Lockwood.

Inside the woman's briefcase, in addition to sheet music, he found time sheets, key entry logs and other documents from Hubbard, White & Willis. He looked through them carefully and memorized exactly what they contained.

He found and read through the woman's address book, her calendar and her phone bills. He listened to her answering machine tapes. His client had hoped that she'd have a diary but very few people kept diaries anymore and Taylor Lockwood was no exception.

The drapery man continued his search, walking slowly through the apartment, taking his time. He knew his client would grill him at length about what he'd found here and he wanted to make sure he overlooked nothing.