Mistress of Justice

He blinked and held up a hand. "Look, I'm sorry. That was out of line. I'm used to dealing with clients who're either crooks or greedy bastards." A sour laugh. "And I'm not sure which are my pro bono criminal clients and which are the white-shoe folks we wine and dine at the Downtown Athletic Club."

She nodded, accepting his apology but glad certain ground rules were clear.

Reece looked her over for a moment, as if he suddenly saw her differently. A faint smile bloomed on his face. "I'm kind of like you."

"How do you mean?" she asked. "I get the sense that you never ask for help." She shrugged.

"I don't either. Never. But now I need help and it's hard for me to ask. I don't even know how to. So, let me try again." A boyish laugh. "Will you help me?" he asked in a voice filled with what seemed to be uncharacteristic emotion.

Taylor looked out the window. The pale sun went behind thick clouds and the sky became as dark as its reflection in the choppy harbor. "I love views, ' she said. "In my apartment, you can see the Empire State Building. Provided you lean out the bathroom window."

Silence. Reece brushed his hair aside then rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. The brass clock on his desk ticked softly.

Taylor mentally asked the opinion of Alice, the young girl in the English countryside who decided out of summer boredom to follow a talking white rabbit down its hole to a world very different from her own. Finally Taylor said to the lawyer, "All right. I frankly don't have a clue what to do but I'll help you."

Reece smiled and leaned forward suddenly then stopped fast. There's a code of chastity within law firms. Whatever liaisons occurred in hotel rooms or attorneys' beds at home, when you were within the labyrinth of the office, cheeks were not kissed and lip never met lip. Even embracing was suspect. Recce's concession to gratitude was taking Taylor 's hand in both of his. She smelled a mix of expensive aftershave and sweat in his wake as he sat back.

"So, first of all," she said, "what does it look like? The note."

"Nothing fancy. One piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper." He showed her a binder containing a copy of it.

She looked over the undistinguished document then asked, "Tell me what happened and when."

"The bank messengered the note to me at five in the afternoon on Saturday – they were closed on Sunday and since the trial started at nine on Monday I needed it early to make copies for pleadings. Well, I locked it in my file cabinet as soon as it came in. I made the copies about ten or eleven that night, put it back in the cabinet, locked it. I left at three on Sunday morning. I got some sleep, came back around nine-thirty. I noticed some scratch marks on the lock and opened it up. The note was gone. I spent the rest of Sunday looking for it. I appeared in court yesterday, got the continuance for a week from today and then came back here to find somebody to help me."

"Did you see anybody at the firm that night?"

"Not after five or six. Not a soul. But I was at my desk practically the whole time."

"Well." She sat back, reflecting. "You mentioned motive. Who has a motive to steal it? You said it was negotiable. Could somebody cash it in?"

"No, nobody in the world'd take paper like that. Too big and too easily traced. I'm sure it was just to delay the case – to give Lloyd Hanover a chance to hide his assets."

"Who knew you had it?"

"The messenger didn't know what was in the bag but it was an armed courier service so they'd know it was valuable. At the bank, as far as I know, the only one who knew I took delivery was the vice president who worked on the deal."

"Could he have been bribed by Hanover?"

Reece said, "Anything's possible, but he's a career officer. Been with the bank for twenty years. I know him personally. He and his wife live in Locust Valley and they've got plenty of money on their own. Anyway, he's the point man on the deal. If the bank doesn't collect on this note, he'll be fired."

"Who here knew you were working on the case?"

Reece laughed. He slid a memo across to her.

From: M. A. Reece

To: Attorneys of Hubbard, White & Willis

Re: Conflicts of Interest

I am representing our client New Amsterdam Bank & Trust in a lawsuit against Hanover & Stiver, Inc. Please advise if you have ever represented Hanover & Stiver or have any other conflicts of interest involving these companies of which the firm should be aware.

"This is the standard conflicts of interest memo. To let everybody know who we're suing. If any lawyers here have ever represented Hanover we have to drop the case or do a Chinese wall to make sure there was no appearance that we were compromising either client… So, in answer to your question, everybody here knew what I was doing. And by checking copies of my correspondence in the file room they could figure out when I'd be receiving the note."

Taylor prodded the conflicts memo with the fork of her fingers.

"What do you know about the executives at Hanover?"

"I've had murderers in the pro bono program who're more upright than the CEO – Lloyd Hanover. He's unadulterated scum. He thinks he's some kind of smooth operator. You know the kind – late fifties, crew-cut, ta

"That's not a crime," Taylor said.

"No, but his three SEC violations and two RICO and one IRS convictions were."

"Ah."

Taylor glanced out the window: across the street was a wall of office windows, a hundred of them. And beyond that building were others with more office windows, and still more beyond that. Taylor Lockwood was, momentarily, overwhelmed by the challenges they faced. Needles and haystacks… She asked, "Are you sure we're looking for something that still exists?"

"How do you mean?"

"If nobody's going to cash the note why wouldn't they just burn it?"

"Good question. I've thought about that. When I was an assistant U. S. prosecutor – and when I do my criminal defense work now – I always put myself in the mind of the perp. In this case, if the note disappears forever that implies a crime. If it's just misplaced until Hanover 's hidden his assets and then it resurfaces, well, that suggests, just legal malpractice on Hubbard, White's part; nobody looks any farther for a bad guy than us. That's why I think the note's still in the firm. Maybe in the file room, maybe stuck in a magazine in a partner's office, maybe behind a copier – wherever the thief hid it.

Thief… Lockwood felt her first uneasy twinge – not only at the impossibility of the task but that there was potential danger too.

In Wonderland the Queen of Hearts' favorite slogan was: "Off with their heads."

She sat back. "I don't know, Mitchell. It seems hopeless. There're a million places the note could be."

"We don't have the facts yet. There's a huge amount of information at the firm about where people have been at various times and what they've been doing. Billing department, payroll, things like that. I guess the first thing I'd do is check the door key entry logs and time sheets to find out who was in the firm on Saturday."

She nodded at the lock. "But we think it was a pro, don't we? Not a lawyer or employee?"

"Still, somebody had to let him in. Either that or they lent him their key card – or one they'd stolen." Reece then took out his wallet and handed her a thousand dollars in hundreds.

She looked at the cash with a fu

"For expenses."

"Expenses." Did he mean bribes? She wasn't going to ask. Taylor held the bills awkwardly for a moment then slipped them into her purse. She noticed a sheet of paper on Recce's desk. It was legal-sized and pale green – the color of corridors in old hospitals and government buildings. She recognized it as the court calendar the managing attorney of Hubbard, White circulated throughout the firm daily. It contained a grid of thirty days begi