Mean Streak (25 page)

“You know how it is with a man as busy as Matt,” she went on. “I never knew when to expect him. It could be as early as eight or as late as one
A.M.
He even”—she gave a throaty little laugh—“kept me waiting on his birthday. I'd made reservations at Le Cirque, and he made me sit for a full hour, with everyone giving me pitying looks because it was so obvious I was being stood up. But then he came in, sat down, and explained he'd been with a witness and couldn't get away. So I was used to his coming in at strange hours.”

“Did he say anything about meeting someone downtown?” I persisted.

“He
said
,” she replied, putting a wry spin on the verb, “that you and he were working on the case.”

Working on the case in my bed. The one that didn't have a thousand-dollar quilt on it.

Nothing Taylor had said could be used in evidence, but I left the Upper East Side wondering whether Matt's inability to perform could have arisen from the fact that he'd just killed a man.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

“She doesn't actually
sleep
under that quilt, does she?”

Of all the questions I could have asked my former lover and present client, this one took the cake for sheer irrelevance, but I wanted to know. I truly wanted to know.

“What difference does that—” he began, then broke off as he realized I wasn't going to quit until I got an answer. “Sometimes,” he admitted.

I nodded, satisfied. Taylor was a woman who could pay a fortune for something beautiful and insist on using it, not just having it. Interesting.

I changed the subject with an abruptness that would have earned me points on cross-examination. “Whoever killed Eddie,” I said, “had to get past you, standing in front of the church. Assuming that the killer is someone connected with this case, then why didn't you recognize the person walking past you toward the courthouse steps?”

“Because the killer went around the back way,” Matt replied. “The killer sneaked up the courthouse steps from the other side, the one behind the church, where neither Krieger nor I would have seen him.”

“Good answer,” I said. “That's what I was thinking, too. And that thought leads to Nick Lazarus. We don't go back to court on your case for another day, but I think I'm going to pay a visit to the U.S. attorney's office anyway.”

I was in enemy territory. Inside the belly of the beast. Wandering through the United States attorney's floor of the corrugated-concrete building that also housed the Federal Correctional Center, a state-of-the-art facility for federal prisoners awaiting trial.

I was looking for Davia Singer. If Stan Krieger had been lured to the plaza to serve as cover for the true killer of Eddie Fitz, then he wasn't that killer. But who was? My money was on Davia Singer or her boss, and I wasn't particularly interested in which one had pulled the trigger. What I wanted was a lever with which to pry a little truth out of one of them, and I didn't much care which of them opened up first.

I'd never been a prosecutor. I simply wasn't born on that side of the courtroom. My instincts, my strategic abilities, were all defensive. But one trick I'd learned from twenty years of doing combat with Brooklyn district attorneys: Find a weak link and put pressure on it till it cracks.

There had been little in Davia Singer's courtroom demeanor to indicate that she had potential as a weak link, but I decided she was a better bet than her canny boss.

I went through more layers of bureaucracy; I'd already announced myself at the reception desk downstairs and been given a color-coded plastic badge to wear. Now I was ushered into a taupe-carpeted sanctum where I was told to wait for Ms. Singer.

Her mascaraed eyes widened a fraction when she saw me. “Come in,” she said in a curt tone and turned without watching to see if I followed. I trailed her down a carpeted corridor and followed her into a cubicle the size of a freight elevator. It was on the inside of the building and had no window. A framed poster of the Joffrey Ballet company dominated one eggshell-white wall; a black-and-white blowup of Peter Martins suspended in midair hung on the opposite wall.

Davia walked with her toes pointed out, duck-fashion. Dancer-fashion.

So she was a frustrated ballerina. How was that piece of information going to help me?

I wasn't sure, but I filed it away in a corner of my brain just in case. You never knew.

I considered opening with a world-weary rhetorical question about why women lawyers continued to sleep with witnesses, but realized it would open me to a charge of hypocrisy, since my own relationship with Matt Riordan was not unclouded by sex.

Besides, that wasn't the issue. I was certain that if Davia Singer had had anything whatsoever to do with the death of Eddie Fitz, it had been professional and not personal motives that had driven her.

“See, the thing is,” I began, jumping in as if we'd been having this conversation for twenty minutes, “guys like Eddie have a way of conning other people into holding the bag for them. Which is why Stan Krieger is on record as having registered TJ as an informant.”

There wasn't even a flicker in the dark eyes that watched me with the unblinking intensity of a cat. I was fairly certain I was telling her things she didn't already know, but she wasn't about to give me the satisfaction of reacting to my words. A formidable opponent, this little sister of the courtroom.

“And guys like your boss do the same thing,” I added, keeping my tone chatty. Pretending we were shooting the breeze about bosses we had known; pretending this was not an interrogation. “They keep layers of deniability between themselves and their questionable acts. Which is why I'm willing to bet that the only fingerprints on this whole mess will turn out to be yours and not Nick Lazarus'.”

Davia Singer knew perfectly well we were not chatting. “Whatever you want with me,” she said in a hard voice, “you're not going to get it. So you might as well leave the way you came.”

“If you wanted me out of here,” I reminded her, “I'd be gone. This is your territory. All you'd have to do is call a guard, revoke my little badge here, and I'd be on the street. You invited me into your office because you want to know what I know.”

“So tell me what you know and then get out of here,” she retorted. The hard voice was wavering just a tad; she sounded more like a sullen child than a killer prosecutor.

“You know better than that,” I chided, going for a big sister tone of voice. I settled back into my taupe chair, in an attitude of complete ease. The more on edge she became, the calmer I intended to appear. It was a variation on my courtroom strategy. “You're the prosecutor, after all. You know you can't get information without giving something in return.”

She thought it over. I could see the wheels turning under the sleek black hair. “Eddie's dead,” she said. “I didn't kill him. I think you know that already, so I don't know what you expect from me.”

“Well, for one thing,” I said, “you could tell me who told you to wait by the sculpture after you left the office that night. Was it Eddie promising you a night of passion, or was it someone else promising something else?”

“God, your generation makes such a big thing about having sex,” Singer complained. “So Eddie and I had a thing going. What's the big deal? Lazarus would have been pissed off if he'd known, so I kept it quiet around the office, but—”

“You kept your affair a big secret from your boss by meeting your lover in front of the building where you work?” I let my voice rise in disbelief. “That's a really clever approach, I must say.”

“Lazarus always walks the other way,” she explained. “He always goes to Centre Street, then turns and walks up to the subway at Canal.”

“Why Canal Street?” I asked. “Why not go right into the subway station in front of the courthouse?”

“That entrance isn't open at night,” Singer said. “Besides, he takes the Number Two train, and he says it's easier to walk to Canal than change trains at that hour,” she finished.

“Sounds like you know a lot about his habits,” I remarked.

“I told you,” she said with a touch of asperity, “I didn't want him freaking out about Eddie and me. I wanted to be sure he wouldn't see me waiting by the sculpture every night.”

“You could have found a less conspicuous meeting place,” I commented. “I can think of at least five in the plaza area alone, not to mention the fact that you could have met in Chinatown or at a bar on Broadway. Why did you and Eddie insist on taking chances by meeting at that sculpture?” I had the idea that she was half-hoping someone would see her and Eddie together; that she relished the notion of throwing the affair in the teeth of the man she worked for.

“I hope you used a condom,” I said with wry wisdom. I was playing older sister for all it was worth—which wasn't much, to judge from the disdainful expression on the younger woman's face.

“Oh, don't give me shit about sleeping with a witness,” Singer retorted, the cool sophisticate turning smart-mouthed kid. “I can keep my professional life and my personal life separate. It was just sex, nothing more. Besides,” she hit back, a sly smile playing around her dark-red lips, “I don't believe you and your client are exactly unknown to one another in the biblical sense.”

I said nothing. I didn't have to; the color rising in my face said it all. I could have explained that it was different for Riordan and me; we'd had a history before we ever became lawyer and client. But the truth was that I'd been a fool to let him into my bed in the middle of a trial, and no amount of rationalizing was going to change that. The only difference between me and Davia Singer was that I knew sleeping with a witness had been a mistake; she was willing to defend it on the grounds that it was “just sex.”

“There's no such thing as just sex,” I retorted, “and before you decide that's a Victorian viewpoint you don't relate to, consider what Judge de Freitas is going to say about you and Eddie Fitz. Consider what it will do to your reputation in the office, to your chances of becoming
the
U.S. attorney.”

“You can't tell me there haven't been male U.S. attorneys who've screwed around,” she shot back. “Why should this be different?”

“You can't really believe the double standard is dead, can you?” I asked. “You can't really think you can get away with the same things the good old boys can?” I fell back in my chair with an expression of astonishment on my face. “You really are young.”

“Please don't give me that tired old feminist line,” she said in a voice as cold as the air conditioning in her windowless office. “I've heard all the stories about how it was when your generation went to law school. It was different for me; women were almost half the class. I took it for granted that I could become editor in chief of the law review if I had the grades. Just like I take it for granted now that I can become
the
U.S. attorney in a few years if I work hard and make the right contacts.”

In a scant few years, according to the herbal wisdom school of female aging, I'd be ready to become a crone. Sitting in the same room as this heartless child, I felt as old as coal and twice as hard. I was already a crone in the eyes of this tough little girl who really believed there were no more barriers in her way, nothing to keep her from rising to the top. She truly didn't see the glass ceiling right above her head.

“I guess you don't know what Warren Zebart said about you out in the hall after he testified,” I remarked. “If you did, you couldn't possibly believe you can become
the
U.S. attorney without a fair amount of bloodletting.”

“You mean because he calls me a cunt?” Her answering smile was amused. My own teenaged face had registered the very same expression when I tried to shock my Aunt Patsy with the F-word. “That's no different from men calling each other pricks and putzes, no big deal. No giant sexist conspiracy, that's for sure.”

“Is it? Is it really the same?” I shook my head. “I don't think so, myself, but it's your opinion that counts here. I just think you're in for a rude shock in a few years, when you try to step into your boss's shoes only to find out the powers that be are a lot more comfortable with wingtips than with pumps. But that's not my problem, is it? And since I'm sure you've made no attempt to join with other women in your office or your profession, you'll be all alone when you make the big discovery that women really aren't equal yet. But that's in the future. It's what's going to happen to you now that bothers me.”

“What is that, Ms. Jameson? What do you think is going to happen to me?”

“I've already accused Nick Lazarus of putting Eddie Fitz on the stand knowing full well that he was going to perjure himself,” I said, “and you and I both know that Lazarus is going to stand in front of the judge and deny everything. He is then going to say that he entrusted the entire process of witness preparation to his very able trial assistant, namely you. You are going to stand in front of the judge holding a very large bag. All the intra-office memoranda have your name or initials on them; all the notes on the file folders are in your handwriting. Nick Lazarus has deniability—and you don't.”

“Even assuming you're right,” she said with that overlay of smugness that made me want to slap the blusher right off her expertly made-up face, “isn't that one of the hallmarks of a good assistant? Isn't loyalty to the boss something that gets rewarded down the line?”

“The reward you want,” I said bluntly, “you have to be a member of the bar to get. Let Lazarus use you for a scapegoat, and your continued ability to practice law will be in serious doubt.”

“It will never come to that,” Singer replied. She tossed her dark hair from side to side. “Nick Lazarus wouldn't let it. And the judge won't want to push things that far. This is the Southern District; we act like gentlemen here.” The implication was clear that I, a barbarian from the wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge, couldn't possibly understand the genteel code of the jewel in the crown of federal courthouse.