Jeffery Deaver - Mistress of Justice

"Steady salary, what else. The way I look at it, Hubbard, White & Willis is supporting the arts." He seemed uneasy, as if the conversation was going down paths he didn't want to tread.

He suddenly pulled out a pad of music staff paper and a pencil. "Keep talking I work best when I'm only using half my mind."

She asked, "What I came to ask you about. You took over for Linda Davidoff on the Hanover & Stiver case, right?"

"Yeah."

"What do you know about her?"

Lillick looked at his cracked plaster walls for a moment and wrote a measure of music. She sensed he was performing for her – playing the distracted artist.

"Linda Davidoff?" she repeated.

After a moment he looked up. "Sorry. Linda? Well, we went out a few times. I thought she was more interesting than most of the prep princesses you see around the firm. She wanted to be a writer. It didn't go very far between us."

"Why'd she stop working on the Hanover case?"

Silent for a moment, Lillick thought back. "I'm not sure. I think she was sick."

"Sick? What was wrong with her?"

"I don't know. I remember she didn't look good."

"She was – pale," Taylor recalled.

"Yeah, exactly. I saw her filling out insurance forms a couple of times. I asked her about it but she didn't tell me anything."

"Do you know why she killed herself?" Taylor asked.

'No, but I'll tell you. I wasn't wildly amazed she did. She was too sensitive, you know? She took things too much to heart. I don't know what she was doing working for a law firm." Lillick erased and rewrote a line. He hummed it. "Give me a B-flat diminished."

Taylor turned on the DX-7 and hit the chord.

"Thanks." He wrote some more musical notations.

"Where'd she live?"

"I don't know – in the Village somewhere, I think. What's up? Why 're you so interested in Linda?"

"Screwup with the New Amsterdam bill, going way back. They were majorly underbilled and I'm supposed to check out what happened. When you took over for her did she say anything about the case?"

Lillick shook his head.

Taylor asked, "You're still billing time on the case, aren't you?"

"Some. But Mitchell's handling most of it himself." Lillick didn't seem to have any reaction to her questions.

"Anybody she was close to?"

"Her roommate, Danny Stuart. He's an editor or something. Lives in the West Village. Over on Greenwich Street, I think." He rummaged in a stack of papers. "I've got the number somewhere." He handed it to her. "Hey, back in a flash."

He ducked into the John.

Which gave Taylor the chance she'd been waiting for. She dropped to her knees and found the backpack that Lillick had been stashing when she'd entered. It had seemed to her that he'd hidden it just a little too quickly when she walked inside.

A fast unzip revealed cash. A lot of it. Taylor had only ten seconds for a fast estimate but figured the total would probably be something on the order of thirty or forty thousand dollars. An amount equal to his yearly salary at the firm – which didn't, of course, pay in greenbacks.

And, a regular of the Downtown performing circuit herself, Taylor knew that, to quote her father, there was no way in Satan's backyard that anyone would ever make any kind of serious money playing music in bars.

Which meant that, no, Sean, the bank didn't own most of your equipment.

She'd come here only for information but had found another suspect.

Taylor shoved the bag back a few seconds before the young man returned. "Better roll," she said. "Thanks for the beer."

"You like goat?"

"What?"

"I'm thinking of going over to this place on Fourteenth. The goat's the best in the city. It's a totally happening place."

The thought of another night partying was more than she could handle. Besides, she had a mission back at the firm.

"Not tonight."

"Hey, this place is mondo cool. Bowie hangs out there. It's so packed you can hardly get in. And they play industrial out of one set of speakers and the Sex Pistols out of the other. I mean in the same room. Like, at a thousand decibels."

"Kills me to say no, Sean. But I'll take a pass."

Wendall Clayton liked the firm at night. He liked the silence, the jeweled dots of boat lights in New York Harbor, liked taking a mouthful of cigar smoke and holding it against his palate, free from the critical glances his secretary and some of the more reckless younger lawyers shot his way when he lit up a Macanudo in the firm.

This after-hours atmosphere took him back to his days just after law school, when he'd spend many of his nights proofreading the hundreds of documents that make up typical business deals loan agreements, guarantees, security agreements, cross-collateralization documents, certificates of government filings, corporate documents and board resolutions.

Proofreading and carefully watching the partners he was working for.

Oh, he'd learned the law, yes, because in order to be good a lawyer must have a flawless command of the law. But to be a great lawyer – that requires much more. It requires mastering the arts of demeanor, tactics, leadership, extortion, anger and even flirtation.

Sabotage too.

He now looked over statements by a witness in a case that Hubbard, White was currently defending on behalf of one of Donald Burdicks prize clients, St Agnes Hospital in Manhattan. Sean Lillick and Randy Simms, Clayton's head of the SS, had dug up the identity of a doctor who had firsthand knowledge of the hospital malpractice St Agnes was allegedly guilty of.

Clayton had slipped the identity of this man to the plaintiff – in effect, scuttling the case against his firm's own client.

This troubled him some, of course, but as he read through the witness's statements and realized that the St Agnes doctors had indeed committed terrible malpractice, he concluded that his sabotage was in fact loyalty to a higher authority than the client or the firm loyalty to abstract justice herself.

He rolled these thoughts around in his complex mind for a few minutes and reached this conclusion that he could live with St Agnes Hospital's extremely expensive loss in the trial.

He hid these documents away and then opened another sealed envelope. Sean Lillick had dropped it off just before he'd left for the night. He read the memo the paralegal had written him.

Clayton's money was being well spent, he decided Lillick had apparently aristocratized the right people. Or begged them or fucked them or whatever. In any case the information was as valuable as it was alarming.

Burdick was taking an extreme measure. The firm's lease for its present office space in Wall Street would be up next year. This expiration had been a plus for Clayton's merger because it meant that the firm could move to Perelli's Midtown office, which was much cheaper, without a difficult and expensive buyout of an existing lease.

The purpose of the secret talks Lillick had learned about between Burdick, Stanley and Harry Rothstem, the head of the partnership that owned the building, was to negotiate a new, extremely expensive long-term lease for the existing office space.

By entering the lease, the firm would take on a huge financial commitment that would cost millions to buy its way out of. This would make Hubbard, White a much less attractive target for a merger. The full partnership didn't need to approve the lease, only the executive committee, which Burdicks side controlled.

The lease agreement, Lillick had learned, wouldn't be signed until this weekend.

Son of a bitch, he raged. Well, he'd have to stop the deal somehow.

He put Lillick's memo away and began thinking about defensive measures. If Burdick learned what Clayton was up to, particularly with the St Agnes case and the lease, he and his bitchy wife would strike back hard. Clayton began to worry about loose ends.