Mistress of Justice (13 page)

“First he rams through the accelerated vote and now I hear he’s targeting the clients.”

“The clients,” Vera Burdick repeated, nodding. “We should’ve thought of that.” She sat at her dressing table in the bedroom of their Park Avenue co-op, rubbing prescription retin-A cream on her neck. She wore a red and black silk dress, which revealed pale freckled skin along the unzipped V in the back. She was leaning forward studiously, watching the cream disappear.

A resolute woman, in her early sixties, she’d battled age by making tactical concessions. She gave up tanning fifteen years ago and carefully gained a little weight, refusing to join in the dieting obsession of many of her friends, who were now knobby scarecrows. She let her hair go white but she kept it shiny with Italian conditioner and wore it pulled back in the same style as her granddaughter. She’d allowed herself one face-lift and had flown to Los Angeles to have a particular Beverly Hills surgeon perform the operation.

She was now as she’d always been: attractive, reserved, stubborn, quiet. And virtually as powerful as the two men who’d influenced her life—her father and Donald Burdick, her husband of thirty-two years. Arguably she was
more
powerful in some ways than each of these men because people were always on guard with the masters of Wall Street, like Donald Burdick, but tended to get careless around women and be too chatty, to give away secrets, to reveal weaknesses.

Burdick sat on the bed. His wife offered her back and he carefully zipped up the dress and hooked the top eyelet. The partner continued, “Clayton’s moving against them. It’s pretty clever, I have to admit. While Bill Stanley and Lamar and I’ve been taking on as much debt as we can to poison the merger Wendall’s been spending time with the clients, trying to convince
them
to pressure the partners at the firm to support the merger.”

Vera too felt admiration for what Wendall was doing. Although a firm’s clients have no official vote in firm affairs
they ultimately pay the bills and accordingly can exert astonishing influence over which way the partners vote. She’d often said that if clients unionized against law firms it would be time for her husband to find a new line of work.

“How’s he doing it?” she asked, curious to learn his technique.

“Probably promising big discounts in legal fees if they support the merger. Those that still don’t go along with him—my clients or Bill’s, the ones who won’t support the merger in any case—we’re afraid he’s going to sabotage.”

“Sabotage. Oh, my. What’s the vote so far?”

“It’s closer than it should be.”

“You’ve got the long-term lease with Rothstein, right?” Vera asked. “That should slow him up some. When are you signing it?”

“Friday or the weekend,” he answered glumly.

“Not till then?” She winced.

“I know,” he said. “The fastest they could get the papers together. But it’s okay—Clayton doesn’t know anything about it. Then I’ve been talking to Steve Nordstrom.”

“At McMillan Holdings,” Vera recalled. “Your biggest client. Steve’s the chief financial officer, right?”

A nod. “I’m closer to him than I am to Ed Gliddick, the CEO. I’m going to get them to lobby some of the other partners against the merger.”

“And Steve’ll agree?”

“I’m sure he will. Gliddick’s in charge. But he listens to Steve. Wendall doesn’t know about that either. I’ve been excruciatingly discreet. I …”

Burdick realized that he sounded desperate and hated the tone of his voice. Then he glanced at his wife, who was gazing at him with a savvy smile on her face. “We can do it,” she said. “Clayton’s not in our league, dear.”

“Neither was that cobra on vacation last year. That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.”

“But look what happened to it.”

Hiking in Africa, Burdick had accidentally stepped on the snake in the brush. It had puffed out its hood and prepared
to strike. Vera had taken its head off with a swipe of a sharp machete.

Burdick found his teeth clenched. “Wendall just doesn’t understand what Wall Street law practice is. He’s crude, he bullies. He has affairs.”

“Irrelevant.” She began on her makeup.

“Oh, I think it
is
relevant. I’m talking about the survival of the firm. Wendall doesn’t have
vision
. He doesn’t understand what Hubbard, White is, what it should be.”

“And how do you define ‘should be’?”

Touché, Burdick thought. He grinned involuntarily. “All right, what
I’ve
made it. Bill and Lamar and I. Wendall wants to turn the firm into a mill. Into a big merger-and-acquisition house.”

“Every generation has its own specialties. That’s very profitable work.” She set down the blush. “I’m not justifying him, darling. I’m only saying we should stay focused. We can’t make logical arguments against the nature of the legal work he wants the new firm to handle. We have to remember that the risk is that as part of the merger he’s going to burn the firm to the ground and then sow the ashes with salt.
That’s
why we have to stop him.”

She was, as usual, right. He reached for her hand but the phone rang and he walked to the nightstand to answer it.

Burdick took the call and listened in dismay as Bill Stanley’s gruff voice delivered the message. He hung up and looked at his wife, who stared at him, clearly alarmed by his drawn expression.

“He’s done it again.”

“Clayton?”

Burdick sighed and nodded. He walked to the window and gazed outside into the trim, windswept courtyard. “There’s a problem with the St. Agnes case.”

Donald Burdick’s oldest and second-most-lucrative client was Manhattan’s St. Agnes Hospital. It had recently been sued for malpractice and Fred LaDue, a litigation partner, was handling the trial, which was in its fourth day now.
The case was routine and it was likely that the hospital was going to win. Stanley had just reported, however, that the plaintiff’s attorneys—from a tough Midtown personal injury firm—had found a new witness, a doctor whose testimony could be devastating to St. Agnes. Even though he was a surprise witness, the judge was going to let him testify tomorrow.

The judgment could be for tens of millions and a loss this big might mean that St. Agnes—which was self-insured—would fire Hubbard, White & Willis altogether. Even if the hospital didn’t do so, though, the credibility of Burdick and his litigation department would be seriously eroded and the hospital might push to support the merger; John Perelli’s firm was renowned for its brutal handling of personal injury defense work.

“Damn,” Burdick muttered. “Damn.”

Vera’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t think that Wendall slipped your client’s files to the other side, do you?”

“It did occur to me.”

Vera took a sip of scotch and set the Waterford glass down on the table. Burdick’s eyes were distant, trying to process this news. His wife’s, however, had coalesced into dark dots. “One thing I’d say, darling.”

The wind rattled the leaded-glass windows. Burdick glanced at the sound.

She said, “With a man like Wendall, we have to hit him hard the first time. We won’t have a second chance.”

Burdick’s eyes dropped to the Pakistani carpet on the bedroom floor. Then he picked up the phone and called the night operator at the law firm. “This is Donald Burdick,” he said politely. “Please locate Mitchell Reece and have him call me at home. Tell him it’s urgent.”

CHAPTER NINE

Taylor Lockwood walked through the breezy evening streets of the East Village, the curbs banked with trash, and thought of a funeral she’d attended several months earlier.

She’d sat in the front pew of the church in Scarsdale, north of the city, a wood-and-stone building built, someone behind her had whispered, by contributions from tycoons like J. P. Morgan and Vanderbilt. Although Taylor had been in black, that color did not seem to be requisite at funerals any longer; any somber shade was acceptable—purple, forest green, even dusk-brown tapestry. She sat on the hard pew and watched the family members, lost in their personal rituals of grief, tears running in halting streams, hands squeezing hands, fingers rubbing obsessively against fingers. The minister had spoken of Linda Davidoff with genuine sorrow and familiarity. He knew the parents better than the daughter, that was clear, but he was eulogizing well.

Most attendees had seemed sad or bewildered but not everyone had cried; suicide makes for an ambivalent mourning.

The minister had closed the service with one of Linda’s poems, one published in her college literary magazine.

As he’d read, images of Linda had returned and the tears that Taylor Lockwood had told herself not to cry appeared fast, stinging the corners of her eyes and running with maddening tickles down her cheeks, even though she hadn’t known the paralegal very well.

Then the organ had played a solemn cue and the mourners had filed outside for the drive to the interment.

As she’d told Reece, nothing that she’d found suggested that Linda Davidoff had had any connection with Hanover & Stiver or the loan deal. But there was something suspicious to Taylor about the way the girl had worked such long hours on the case then stopped abruptly—and then committed suicide.

She felt she needed to follow up on this question. Alice, after all, had wandered everywhere throughout Wonderland—a place, however, in which you sure wouldn’t find the disgusting six-story tenement she now stood in front of. In the foul entry foyer the intercom had been stolen and the front door was open, swinging in the breeze like a batwing door in a ghost town saloon. She started up the filthy steps.

“It may look impressive, but the bank owns most of it,” Sean Lillick said.

The young paralegal was sitting on the drafty floor, shirtless and shoeless, shoving a backpack under the bed as she walked in.

Taylor Lockwood, catching her breath from the climb, was surveying what Lillick was referring to: a wall of keyboards, wires, boxes, a computer terminal, speakers, guitar, amps. Easily fifty thousand dollars’ worth of musical equipment.

Lillick—thin, dark-haired, about twenty-four—was smelling socks, discarding them. He wore black jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt. His boots sat in front of him. The only
clue as to his day job at Hubbard, White & Willis were two dark suits and three white shirts, in various stages of recycling, hanging on nails pounded crookedly into the wall. He studied her for a moment. “You look impressed or confused. I can’t tell.”

“Your place is a little more alternative than I expected.” The apartment was a patchwork. Someone had nailed pieces of plywood, plastic or sheet metal over cracks and holes. Joints didn’t meet, plaster was rotting, floorboards were cracked or missing. In the living room: one hanging bare bulb, one floor lamp, one daybed, one desk.

And a ton of bank-owned musical instruments and gear.

“Have a seat.”

She looked helplessly about her.

“Oh. Well, try the daybed.… Hey Taylor, listen to this. I just thought it up. I’m going to use it in one of my pieces: You know what a preppy is?”

“I give up.”

“A yuppie with papers.”

She smiled politely. He didn’t seem concerned about the tepid response and wrote the line down in a notebook. “So what do you do?” she asked. “Stand-up comedy?”