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kept
people at a distance, and I got in my clients’ faces. Paper suited
my style. “I promise I won’t disgrace you by throwing myself at
Hollander.”
    “Thank you,” he breathed, and I shook my
head. Jack’s concern for Hollander’s opinion was so out of
character I had no frame of reference for it.
    At a word to my assistant, my things were
taken down to my car while I ate the last of my breakfast.
    “And, oh, keep your mitts off the rest of
the pack, too.”
    “Why?” I asked around my lox.
    “Just— No playtime or side arrangements
amongst my Mormon clientele, okay? It kind of creeps me out.”
    “Their morality is their problem,” I said.
“And as to that—except for Hollander, who nobody can figure out
anyway—none of that pack is a shining example of morality. I mean,
look at Hilliard.”
    “That’s a rumor.”
    “But he’s never denied it.”
    I felt a deep affinity for Knox Hilliard, a
man who’d cracked and gone rogue the minute the justice system
failed to deliver justice. Fortunately or unfortunately (I’d never
known which) I hadn’t had Hilliard’s courage and had settled for
dispatching my enemies in less permanent ways.
    Even then, while my daughter could overlook
a charismatic law professor’s alleged misdeeds (so much she
was willing to follow him to his no-name midwestern college to get
a law degree), she could not forgive me mine.
    The ones she knew of, anyway.
    Vengeance was far uglier up close and
personal, and did not sit as attractively on my shoulders as it did
on Dr. Hilliard’s, whom she worshipped on a semi-regular basis
whenever he lectured on white-collar crimes at NYU’s criminal
justice program.
    “And Taight.”
    Jack shrugged. “He’ll tell you he’s still a
cultural Mormon.”
    “Doesn’t keep him from fucking half the
world’s women.”
    “He’s settled down.”
    “Doubt it. A tomcat like that doesn’t just
stay home with the kittens when one particular pussy catches his
fancy.” Jack cleared his throat and I rolled my eyes. “Okay, okay,”
I said, conceding once I remembered Jack’s history, sexual and
otherwise. “I get the point. Unless you’re fucking around on
your wife.”
    “Would you fuck around on my
wife?”
    “It would depend on her libido and how good
she is in bed.”
    “She’s a raving lunatic. Eat your heart
out.”
    That made me laugh. If Eilis Logan had done
for King Midas what Lydia Blackwood had done for Jack, I’d have to
kill my assumptions about his chronic promiscuity.
    I looked at my watch and stood to clean
up.
    “Cassie, please, let me do that,” Susan said
as she zipped through my office door, past Jack.
    “Susan...”
    “It’s my job,” she said and glared at me,
her fist propped on her hip. Really, she was too young to be that
bossy, but I acquiesced.
    I swept out of my office, Jack’s last-minute
admonitions following me down the hall to the elevator bank. Once
down on Wall Street, I slipped into my waiting car. My driver
closed the door, walked around the car, slid behind the wheel, and
said, “Good morning, Ms. St. James.”
    “Good morning, Sheldon. Any news?”
    He gave me a few details on my neighbors, my
colleagues, my children—tidbits he’d picked up here and there at
Zabar’s or the dry cleaner’s or wherever he went while waiting for
a call from me or my children. Every day he had at least one small
thing that I could use. Somehow.
    “Thank you,” I murmured when he ran out of on dits .
    “And,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken,
glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “My wife finally got a job.
Really good one, where she can do what she likes and go up the
ladder. Benefits, too. The works. Ms. St. James,” he said
earnestly, “I really want to than—”
    “Excellent,” I said, and checked my phone
for messages.
    We said nothing else to each other on the
drive to Bethlehem, home of Hollander Steelworks, mostly because I
needed to call the one person guaranteed not to want