Jeffery Deaver - Mistress of Justice

Taylor whispered, "You're his granddaughter?"

"Like, helloooo. Whatta you think? Of course not. That's only what he tells people."

The girl was heavily made up, with dark streaks of brown and blue eye shadow that made her face sleek and serpentine. She retrieved the garter and began untangling it. "What it is, he's one of my oldest customers." Then she laughed. "I mean one of the dudes I've been seeing for the longest time. But, you know, he's one of the oldest, too. Probably, like, the oldest."

Taylor looked at a plush armchair. "Can I sit down?"

"It's your hour. Have a drink, you want."

Taylor poured sparkling wine into a crystal champagne glass. "You want any?"

"Me?" Junie looked horrified. "I can't drink I'm underage, you know."

Taylor blinked.

The girl laughed. "That's, like, a fucking joke. Of course I drink. Only they don't let us when we're working."

Taylor said, "You mind?" as she eased her shoes off. A swell of pain went through her feet then slowly vanished.

"Mind? Usually people take off a lot more than their shoes."

"So tell me about you and Ralph."

"I guess I oughta ask why."

"He could be in trouble. I need to find out whether he is or not."

The girl shrugged, meaning. That's not a good enough answer.

"I'll pay you."

This was a better response.

"I guess I oughta see the duckets."

"The what?"

The girl held her palm out.

Taylor opened her purse. She hadn't brought much of Reeces bribe money. She wadded together about two hundred dollars, keeping twenty for herself for cab fare home.

"I get that as a tip for a blow job," Junie said. "If the son of a bitch's cheap."

Taylor handed her more money. "That's all I have."

Junie shrugged and put the money in a dresser drawer. She pulled out a T-shirt and worked it over her head. "So, Poppie – that's what I call him – he likes girls my age. He came to the house last year and we had a date. It was like totally bizotic but we kind of hit it off, you know?" She whispered, "We started meeting outside the club. They get really pissed, they find out. But we did it anyway. He brought me some totally def clothes. Nice shit, you know. From the good stores. Anyway, we did some weird things, like, he took me to this art museum, which was a real bore. But then we went to the zoo. Like, I've never been there before. It was way wild. We just kept hanging out more and more. He's lonely. His wife died and his daughter is a total bowhead."

"Junie is that really your name?"

"June. I like June."

"June, last Saturday night, was Ralph here?"

"Yeah."

"When?"

"Around ten or eleven, I guess. We had our regular appointment, you know. I'm his on Saturday night. Sorta a tradition."

"Then what?"

She fell silent. Shrugged.

"Another two hundred."

The girl said, "I thought you don't have any more money."

"I can give you a check."

"A check?" Junie laughed.

"I promise it won't bounce."

"That was, what, five hundred, you said?"

Taylor hesitated. "You have a good memory." She wrote the check out and handed it to her. Mitchell, you're going to see a very weird expense account for this project.

Junie slipped the check into her purse. "Okay, but he didn't want me to tell anybody. He went to your company."

"The law firm?"

"Yeah."

"What was he doing?"

"That's the thing. He wouldn't say. I'm, like, what're you going there for this time of night? I mean, it's midnight or whatever. He said he had to – something about a lot of money. But he wouldn't tell me what. And he told me never tell anybody."

At least anybody who didn't pay her seven hundred dollars.

Taylor asked, "Has he ever mentioned a company called Hanover & Stiver?"

"Naw, but he don't talk – I mean, he doesn't talk about his business too much. He's always correcting what I say. It's so mundo-boring."

Taylor stood slowly, slipped her swollen feet back into her shoes. She walked painfully to the door. She paused.

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen. And I've got a driver's license."

"I've had fake ones too, honey."

"Okay, I'm sixteen. But I tell Ralph I'm fifteen. He likes it that I'm younger."

"Do you go to school or anything?"

A laugh. "Where're you from? I made sixty-eight thousand dollars last year and have a hundred Gs in a, you know, retirement fund. Why the fuck would I want to go to school?"

Why indeed?

Taylor let herself out into the hallway, through which echoed a cacophony of voices and sounds very different from those she was used to at Hubbard, White & Willis.

At lunchtime the next day, her feet only marginally recovered from their abuse the day before, Taylor Lockwood was sitting across from a diminutive young man in a West Village diner. Danny Stuart, Linda Davidoff's former roommate.

The menu of the place, which had been Stuart's choice, was heavy on foods that had swayed in the wind when alive, and light on main courses that had walked around on two or four legs, the latter being by far Taylor's favorite.

"So," she asked, "you know Sean Lillick too?"

"Not at all really. I met him through Linda and went to some of his shows. But he's a little avant-garde for me."

"You're an editor?"

"That's mostly a hobby. Some of us put together an alternative literary magazine. I'm a computer programmer by profession."

Taylor yawned and stretched. A joint popped. The walls of the place were badly painted, swirls of dark paint didn't cover the lighter enamel underneath. The decorations were a la Mother Jones and Woodstock. But the space, she knew, had been a Beat club in the fifties. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg had hung out here – the ancient floor felt spongy under the chairs and the wooden columns were carved with the initials of hundreds of former patrons. What these walls have heard, she thought.

Danny ordered sprouts and nuts and yogurt, Taylor, a garden burger. "Bacon?"

"No bacon," the waitress replied through her pierced lips.

"Ketchup," Taylor tried.

"We don't have ketchup."

"Mustard?"

"Sesame-soy paste or eggless mayo."

"Cheese?"

"Not your kind of cheese," the waitress responded.

"Plain'll be just fine."

The woman vanished.

Stuart said, "I think I remember you from Linda's funeral."

Taylor nodded. "I didn't know many people there, except the ones from the firm."

"You a lawyer?" he asked.

"Paralegal. How did you meet her?"

"Just a fluke. You know, your typical New York story. You come to New York from a small town, look for a place to live, you need a roommate 'cause the rents are so high. The guy I was rooming with got AIDS and moved back home. I needed to split the rent and Linda'd been staying at some residence hall for women. She hated it. We roomed together for, I guess, about nine or ten months. Until she died."

"Did you know her well?"

"Pretty well. I read some of her pieces and did some editing for her. She wrote reviews for us and I was hoping eventually to publish some of her poems."

"Was she good?"

"She was young, her work was unformed. But if she'd kept at it I know she would've gone someplace."

"What was her style like? Plath?" Taylor had read some of Sylvia Plath's poetry and recalled that she too had committed suicide.

Stuart said, "Her poetry was more traditionally structured than Plath's. But her personal life? Yep, just as turbulent. The wrong men, always heartbroken. Too stoic. She needed to scream and throw things more. But she kept it all inside."

The food came and Danny Stuart dug eagerly into his huge mass of rabbit food. Taylor started working on the sandwich, which she decided should be named not the garden but the cardboard burger.