Mistress of Justice (42 page)

They shook hands and made introductions.

Taylor followed the woman into the living room. Why the hell am I doing this? she wondered suddenly. What possible point could it have?

I’m here to give you my deepest sympathy
.

I’m here to say I worked with your husband
.

I’m here to say that even though he’s dead don’t feel too bad because he tried to seduce me
.

Mrs. Clayton sat upright in an uncomfortable satin wingback, Taylor in a spongy armchair.

I’m here because I helped kill your husband.…

The widow asked, “Tea? Coffee?”

“No, thank you,” Taylor said. And then realized that the woman’s dress was red and that this was hardly a household in mourning—the room was festooned with antique Christmas decorations and there was a faint but rich scent of pine in the air. Classical Christmas music played on the stereo. Taylor looked at the woman’s cocked eyebrow and her expression, which wasn’t one of bitterness or sorrow. It was closer to curiosity.

“I worked with your husband, Mrs. Clayton.”

“Yes.”

“I just came to tell you how sorry I was.”

And Taylor understood then, only at that moment, that uttering those words was all she could do. Watching this stolid, lone woman (Taylor couldn’t picture her as one half of the Claytons) light a cigarette, she understood that the spirits of Donald Burdick and Vera Burdick and Messrs. Hubbard, White and Willis themselves had accompanied her here and were laying cold fingers on her lips. She could not, even here, in Clayton’s home, do what she desperately wanted to do: explain.

Explain that she’d been the one who’d uncovered the terrible secrets about her husband, that she was the cause—the proximate cause, the law would say—of his death. No, there’d be no confession. Taylor knew what bound her. In this joint venture Hubbard, White & Willis had secured her soul.

“That’s very kind of you.” After a pause the woman asked: “Did I see you at the funeral? There were so many people.”

“I wasn’t there, no.” Taylor eased back in the chair, uncomfortable, and crossed her arms. Wished she’d asked for coffee to keep her hands busy.

Now she looked around the room, aware of its size. The ceilings were twenty feet high. It reminded her of National Trust mansions and palaces in England. Taylor said, “He was an excellent lawyer.…”

Clayton’s widow said, “I suppose.” She was examining a tabletop. It seemed to be a dust inspection. “But then we didn’t talk much about his career.”

Taylor was counting the squares in the carpet. Trying to figure out the designs. Finally: St. George and the dragon, she believed.

Beware the Jabberwock …

The widow paused. “The truth is, Ms. Lockwood, I’m a little bewildered. I don’t know you—though we may have met before. But you seem genuinely upset by my husband’s death and I can’t quite figure out why. You’re not like the
little sycophants who’ve come by since he died—the associates at the firm. They thought they were covering it up but I could see through them—in their eyes you could tell that they were amused at his death. I know they’d chuckled about it over their beers when they were alone. Do you know why they were here?”

Taylor was silent.

“They came because they thought word would get back to the firm that they’d done their duty. They’d made an appearance that might earn them another point or two, get them a step closer to being partner.” She pressed out her cigarette. “Which is so ironic, of course, because they didn’t grasp the situation at all. They should’ve been avoiding this house as if it were a leper colony. If word gets back to Burdick that young Samuel and Frederick and Douglas were paying respects to me, well, then, my God, they’re in Dutch. At worst, they’d had the bad judgment to pick the wrong side; at best, they were displaying an oblivion about law firm politics.

“So you see, Ms. Lockwood, I am a little perplexed by your sympathy call.” A smile. “That sounds appropriately Victorian, doesn’t it? Sympathy call. Well, you aren’t here to toady. You aren’t here to gloat. Your dress and demeanor tell me you couldn’t care less about what the Donald Burdicks and Wendall Claytons of the world think of you. You’re clearly not one of the little malleable things he picked for his, dare I use the euphemism, girlfriends.… No, you’re genuinely upset. I can see that. Well, you may have respected my husband as a lawyer and an ambitious businessman. But I doubt very much if you respected him as a human being. And I know without a doubt that you didn’t like him.”

“You had a loss in your life and I’m sorry,” Taylor said evenly. “I didn’t mean anything more or less than that.” She fell silent, watching this shrewd woman light another cigarette with bony, red hands. It seemed as if the smoke that floated out of her nose and mouth had over the years taken with it her weight and softness.

Mrs. Clayton finally laughed. “Well, I appreciate that, Ms. Lockwood. Forgive my cynicism. I hope I haven’t offended you. But don’t feel sorry for me. Heavens, no. You’re young. You don’t have any experience with marriages of convenience.”

Well, let’s not go that far, Taylor thought, replaying many images: her parents’ twin beds, her mother with her glass of wine sitting alone in front of the television, her father calling at midnight saying he was staying at his club. Night after night after night …

Clayton’s widow said, “I guess you’d say our relationship wasn’t even a marriage. It was a merger. His assets and mine. A certain camaraderie. Love? Was there any love between Williams Computing and RFC Industries when they consolidated? To name just one of the deals that took so much of Wendall’s time …” She looked out over the park, spindly with branches, the residue of snow faintly surviving in shadows. “And that’s the irony, you see.”

“What?”

“Love—there was never any between us. And yet I’m the one he was most content with. Cold, scheming Wendall, the power broker. The master of control. But once outside of our life, he was at sea. Vulnerable. That’s why he killed himself, of course. For love.”

“What do you mean?” Taylor heard herself ask, her heart pounding fast.

“He killed himself for love,” the widow repeated. “That’s the one thing Wendall didn’t understand and couldn’t control. Love. Oh, how he wanted it. And as with so many beautiful, powerful people it was denied him. He was an alcoholic of love. He’d go off on his benders. With his chippies. His little sluts. And there were plenty of them—women would flock to him. A few of the men, too, I should tell you. How they all would want him!

“He’d spirit them away on carriage rides, buy them roses, have a breakfast tray put together at Le Perigord and sent to their apartments. Wendall goes a-courting. They were all disasters, of course. The girls never quite lived up
to what he wanted. The older ones … they turned out to be every bit as superficial and material and cold”—she laughed again, dropping a worm of ash in the ashtray—“as cold as I was. Or he’d pick a young puppy, some ingenue, who’d cling to him desperately, rearrange her life around him. Then he’d feel the arms around his neck, dragging him down. Someone
relying
on him. My Lord, we couldn’t have that, could we? Then he’d dump them. And back he’d come to me. To nurse his wounds.”

Taylor jumped in to steer the conversation back on course. “What do you mean about his suicide? Killing himself for love?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. He must’ve fallen madly in love with somebody and he was sure she was the one. When she told him no it must’ve devastated him.”

“But the note he left said he was under pressure at work, stress.”

“Oh, he wrote that for my benefit. If he’d mentioned a girlfriend, well, it would have embarrassed me.” She laughed. “The idea of Wendall killing himself because of pressure? Why, he lived for pressure. He wasn’t happy unless he had ten projects going at once. I’ve never seen him happier than over the past few months working on the merger, doing deals for his clients … and then planning the other firm.”

“What other firm?”

She looked at Taylor cautiously then pushed out her cigarette. “I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. In case the merger didn’t go through, he was going to leave Hubbard, White & Willis, take his boys and a couple of dozen partners and open his own firm. It was his alternative plan. I think he almost preferred that to the merger. Because he’d be a named partner. He always wanted to have his name on the letterhead. Clayton, Jones & Smith, or whatever.”

Another firm? Taylor wondered.

The widow resumed her examination of Central Park flora. Then smiled. “That note … He could have said in the
note how unhappy he was with me as a wife. With our life together … But he didn’t. I was very touched.”

Rising, Mrs. Clayton looked at her watch. “I’d like to talk to you longer.” She picked up her Dunhill cigarette case. “But I have bridge club in ten minutes.”

Aristocratize
.

Taylor Lockwood was sitting at Wendall Clayton’s desk.

It was late afternoon and a yellow-gray illumination lit the room from the pale sun over New York Harbor. The office lights were out and the door closed.

She looked at the jotting on a faded piece of foolscap.

Aristocratize
.

Was that a word? Taylor glanced at the brass, the carpets, the vases, the tile painting, the wall of deal binders, the stacks of papers like the one that had held the note and tape recordings of her conversations with Mitchell Reece. The huge chair creaked as she moved.

Men of most renowned virtue …

Spinning around once more to face the window, she decided that, whether it was real or not, “aristocratize” certainly described the essence of Wendall Clayton.

There was no reason for her to be in the firm. Technically she was still on vacation, courtesy of Donald Burdick. She could leave at any moment, smile at Ms. Strickland and walk out of the front door with impunity. She was, in fact, due at Mitchell Reece’s loft right about now. (It turned out that he could cook after all and was planning to make them a tortellini salad for dinner; he was currently baking the bread himself!) She wanted to lie in his huge bathtub, a wonderful bathtub that had claw feet, to luxuriate in the water holding a thin-stemmed glass of wine and smell him cooking whatever went into a tortellini salad.

Instead, Taylor slouched down in Clayton’s chair and spun slowly in a circle, 360 degrees, once, twice, three times.

Alice spinning as she fell down the rabbit hole, Alice buffeted on the ocean of tears, Alice arguing with the Queen of Hearts.…

Off with their heads, off with their heads!

Taylor stopped spinning. She began what she’d come here for: a detailed examination of the contents of Wendall Clayton’s desk and filing cabinets.

A half hour later, Taylor Lockwood walked slowly downstairs to the paralegal pen. She made certain that no one was in the cubicles surrounding hers then looked through her address book and found the number of her favorite private eye, John Silbert Hemming.

He stopped suddenly, jolted, as he watched her slip out of Wendall Clayton’s office, looking around carefully as if she didn’t want to be seen.

Sean Lillick ducked into a darkened conference room where Taylor Lockwood couldn’t see him. It had scared the hell out of him, as he was walking toward Clayton’s office, to see the sudden shadow appearing in the doorway. For a split second all his chic, retro-punk East Village cynical sensibilities had vanished and he’d thought: Fuck me, it’s a ghost …

What the hell had she been doing in there? he now wondered.

Lillick waited until she was gone and the corridor was empty. Then he too ducked into the dead partner’s office and locked the door behind him.