Mistress of Justice Read Online Free PDF Page B

breakfast meeting in half an hour then the partnership meeting for the rest of the morning,” Wendall Clayton said into the phone. “Get me the details as soon as possible.”
    “I’ll do what I can, Wendall,” Sean Lillick, a young paralegal who worked for Clayton regularly, replied uneasily. “But it’s, like, pretty confidential.”
    “ ‘Like’ confidential. It is confidential or not?”
    A sigh from the other end of the phone line. “You know what I mean.”
    The partner muttered, “You meant it
is
confidential. Well, find out who has the information and aristocratize them. I want the particulars. Which you might just have found out
before
you called. You’d know I’d want them.”
    “Sure, Wendall,” Lillick said.
    The partner dropped the phone into the cradle.
    Wendall Clayton was a handsome man. Not big—under six feet—but solid from running (he didn’t jog; he
ran
) and tennis and skippering the forty-two-foot
Ginny May
around Newport every other weekend from April throughSeptember. He had a thick bundle of professorial hair and he wore European suits, slitless in the back, forgoing the burdened sacks of dark pinstripe that cloaked most of the pear-shaped men of the firm. Killer looks, the women in the firm said. Another three inches and he could have been a model. Clayton worked hard at his image, the way nobility worked hard. A duke had to be handsome. A duke enjoyed dusting his suits with pig-bristle brushes and getting a radiant glow on his burgundy-colored Bally’s.
    A duke took great pleasures in the small rituals of fastidiousness.
    Aristocratize them.…
    Sometimes Clayton would write the word in the margin of a memo one of his associates had written. Then watch the girl or boy, flustered, trying to pronounce it.
Ar-is-TOC-ra-tize …
he’d made up the term himself. It had to do with attitude mostly. Much of it was knowing the law, of course, and much was circumstance.
    But mostly it was attitude.
    Clayton practiced often and he was very good at it.
    He hoped Sean Lillick would, in turn, be good at aristocratizing some underling in the steno department to get the information he wanted.
    By searching through the correspondence files, time sheets and limousine and telephone logs the young paralegal had learned that Donald Burdick had recently attended several very secretive meetings and made a large number of phone calls during firm hours that had not been billed to any clients. This suggested to Clayton that Burdick was plotting something that could jeopardize the merger. That might not be the case, of course; his dealings could be related to some private business plans that Burdick or his Lucrezia Borgia of a wife, Vera, were involved in. But Clayton hadn’t gotten to his present station in life by assuming that unknown maneuverings of his rivals were benign.
    Hence, his sending Lillick off on the new mission to find out the details.
    The Tuesday morning light filtered into his office, thecorner office, located on the firm’s executive row, the seventeenth floor. The room measured twenty-seven by twenty—a size that by rights should have gone to a partner more senior than Clayton. When it fell vacant, however, the room was assigned to him. Even Donald Burdick never found out why.
    Clayton glanced at the Tiffany nautical clock on his desk. Nearly time. He rocked back in his chair, his throne, a huge construction of oak and red leather he had bought in England for two thousand pounds.
    Aristocratize
.
    He ordered his secretary to have his car brought around. He rose, donned his suit jacket and left the office. The breakfast get-together he was about to attend was perhaps the most important of any meeting he’d been to in the past year. But Clayton didn’t go immediately to the waiting car. Rather, he decided he’d been a bit harsh on the young man and wandered down to Lillick’s cubicle in the paralegal department to personally thank the young man and tell him a generous bonus