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The Heart of Justice
By Ruth Coughlin St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1995 Ruth Coughlin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7592-0
CHAPTER 1
"She's lovely, isn't she?"
Paul Murray pulled his gaze away from the dark-haired woman who stood across the room, surrounded by a small knot of admirers. He chuckled with ill-concealed embarrassment. "Was I being that obvious?" he asked.
"Hope Scott," said Drew Abrams, a fellow committee member. "As if you needed me to tell you her name. I stared, too, the first time I saw her."
Paul glanced back at Hope Scott. The pictures he'd seen of her in newspapers and magazines hadn't done her justice. She was simply dressed in a black silk skirt, short enough to reveal a stunning pair of legs; a matching black silk jacket; a simple cream-colored blouse that managed simultaneously to show off her shoulders and be discreet.
Taller than he'd imagined, she carried herself with the erect posture and grace of a dancer. Her head was tilted back slightly, exposing a long, thin neck that Modigliani would have loved to paint. Her lips were set in a half-smile. Paul wondered what was being said to provoke that smile. To his surprise, he found himself wishing he were the person provoking it.
"We're damned lucky she accepted Mrs. Osburgh's invitation to join our committee. With her connections and money, the Preservation Society will raise twice the amount we did last year," Drew Abrams said.
He nodded in the direction of the food that their hostess, Hallie Neuwirth, had provided for the pre-meeting cocktail hour. "I suggest we sample some of that caviar, then you'll want to pay your respects to our chairperson. I've already done my duty with Mrs. Osburgh."
Paul followed Abrams to the buffet table. Most of the planning committee's meetings were long on talk, short on food or drink. But Hallie Neuwirth, whose arbitrageur husband was newly rich, hadn't yet mastered the old money's rigid social code. Her walls were covered with expensive art, her apartment filled with museum-quality furniture, and her table weighted down with an endless supply of Petrossian's Russian beluga caviar at $57.50 an ounce. The crowd that ran New York might sniff at such ostentatious displays of affluence, but they were happy to feast at her expense.
Hallie Neuwirth was grateful to be a part of that crowd. The Municipal Preservation Society, dedicated to the protection and restoration of landmark buildings, was one of the city's most prestigious organizations. The fourteen people who had gathered on this rainy October evening to plan the next fund-raiser were an eclectic mix of the old guard and the nouveau riche. Paul didn't fit into either category. Nevertheless, as a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, he brought a certain cachet to the committee's letterhead.
The benefits were mutual. Paul needed the committee as much as it needed him. Despite his impressive-sounding title, he could only strain his neck looking up the judicial ladder at the far more exalted state Appellate Court, the Court of Appeals, and Federal Court. But it took a great deal of influence to get elected to the bench. His progress depended on the continued support of the men and women who made things happen in the city.
Paul had clerked for a year right out of law school, then spent sixteen years at Goodstein & Carney, first as an associate, then as a partner. He had no regrets about giving up a lucrative corporate practice. As a judge, he could make a difference about how the law should be interpreted. The route to the bench had led him into local clubhouse politics, charitable organizations, appointments to influential committees. He had cultivated the right friends, people like Connie Osburgh, the sixty-year-old doyenne of the Municipal Preservation Society, who were willing to dip into their pockets to help him get elected.
Mrs. Osburgh seemed to have taken a special liking to him. She smiled and patted the sofa, inviting him to sit down next to her. In her tidy pageboy, beige cashmere sweater, tweed skirt, and comfortable oxfords, she looked more like a boarding school housemother than a society grande dame. In taste and dress, Mrs. Osburgh was ultra-conservative. Standards had to be maintained. But she prided herself on being open-minded about people like Paul Murray. He was such a gentleman, so bright and well mannered one would never guess his background.
"You're looking well, Paul," she said.
"Thank you, Mrs. Osburgh. As are you. Did you have a pleasant summer?" Paul asked.
Mrs. Osburgh beamed. "Marvelous. You've never been up to our place in the Adirondacks, have you? You must come some weekend next summer. We have such fun there, and I'm sure my husband would adore meeting you."
He had heard about the Osburghs' Adirondack retreat, which she had inherited from her mother. The log cabin lodge and five outbuildings were set on hundreds of acres of virgin forest, in an area so remote that all the supplies had to be brought in by canoe. Electricity was provided by a primitive generator that regularly broke down, but the Osburghs didn't seem to mind the inconvenience.
"And speaking of meeting people," she went on. "Have you been introduced yet to Hope Scott? She's a darling girl. Her mother and I were such very great friends, poor thing."
Paul couldn't tell whether Mrs. Osburgh was clucking over Hope or her mother. "Oh, Hope! Do come over here and meet one of my favorite judges."
Hope Scott extricated herself from the conversation and came to join them. Face to face, Paul saw that her features were less than perfect: her large green eyes a tad too far apart, her mouth overly generous, her forehead perhaps too prominent. None of that mattered. In ancient times, he thought, a man would have gone to war for such a woman.
He stood up to greet her. She was almost his height, five nine, and she stared directly into his eyes as she extended her hand. "I'm glad to meet you, Judge Murray."
She spoke so softly he almost had to strain to hear her.
"I feel as if I already know you. I followed the Banning trial last year, and then of course I read the piece about you in The New Yorker."
Ordinarily, he would have been flattered by her interest. But she could hardly have missed hearing about the case, a tragic story of child abuse and murder that had dominated the media for weeks.
"My fifteen minutes of fame," he said. "Overall, I think I prefer my privacy."
She smiled, not the half-smile he'd noticed earlier, but a grin that seemed to bubble up from some inner spring of amusement. "Fame does have its price," she said. "Believe me, I ought to know."
A passing waiter stopped to offer them wine. She took a glass for herself and handed one to him. "To privacy." She clicked her glass against his. "A rare and precious commodity."
He smiled then, too, remembering that she'd had to put up with a lifetime of photographers snapping her picture, of newspapers and magazines reporting her every move.
"Touché," he said. "And please, call me Paul."
"Paul." She repeated his name slowly, as if she were trying to decide whether it suited him. "All right, I will. Does that mean we're going to be friends?"
Her tone was casual, lilting. She was flirting with him, but he told himself it meant nothing. A woman like Hope Scott could have any man she wanted. She flirted out of habit, not interest.
"Well, I certainly hope so," he said awkwardly.
His wife had been dead almost two and a half years, but he'd only recently begun seeing other women, most of whom he met through friends who made no secret of their wish to see him remarried. "You'll love her, she reminds me so much of Helen," they invariably assured him.
None of them seemed to understand. He didn't want someone who reminded him of Helen. The resemblance — real or imagined — would only serve to remind him of what he'd lost.
No one could replace his wife of almost twenty-five years, but he wasn't about to become a monk. And though he never would have believed it, the cliché was true: Time did heal wounds. Perhaps not all of them, but enough that he was enjoying life again. He dreamed of Helen less frequently, and some mornings he caught himself humming as he dressed for work.
But he was a rank amateur at playing the dating game. The rules had changed since he'd met Helen at a college mixer during the fall of his freshman year. In this new age of sexual equality, women often offered to pick up the tab. They didn't wait for him to phone, but pursued him openly, calling with invitations to the theater or the opera or brunch.
One woman, an interior decorator whom he'd taken to dinner, had later sent him a note with her card: "I don't think we'd make good lovers," she had written in her neat parochial school penmanship. "But please keep me in mind the next time you redo your apartment."
Her blunt approach had felt like a punch in the stomach. When had women learned to be so direct? Thinking it over, he realized her method had a lot of merit. Both of them led busy, complicated lives. Why waste time mouthing niceties they didn't mean? Still, he didn't understand how she could have been so certain about not being lovers. He hadn't even kissed her goodnight.
"I'd adore some caviar," said Hope. "Nobody ever eats anything anymore. The women all want to be stick-thin like Connie Osburgh, and the men are too busy talking deals to stop long enough to put food into their mouths. Do you like to eat?"
Paul laughed as she took a plate, then spooned caviar and sour cream onto the delicate blini pancakes. "I love to eat." To prove his point, he helped himself to a plate. "I make a point of doing it at least three times a day."
"Hello, Blair." She waved at another committee member before returning her attention to him. "Chinatown has some wonderful Vietnamese restaurants, just a few minutes away from the courthouse." She took another bite of blini, then carefully wiped a trace of sour cream off her lips with a cloth napkin. When she smiled, he noticed for the first time the tiny dark beauty mark just to the left of her bottom lip.
Her eyes danced with amusement as the silence between them stretched to the point of awkwardness. Finally, he realized that she was not going to be the one to break it. She was waiting for him to respond ... to invite her to lunch? Could that possibly be what she had in mind?
Somehow, it was hard to imagine Hope Scott negotiating the wall-to-wall crowds that packed Chinatown's sidewalks at lunchtime. He'd been to a couple of the Vietnamese restaurants there. The food was excellent, but the ambience was noisy and rushed, hardly the quiet elegance she must be used to at Le Cirque or Lutèce or wherever she normally dined.
"Hope?" Hallie Neuwirth swooped down on them, tapping Hope's arm with her perfectly manicured nails. "Mrs. Osburgh's about to start the meeting, but she wants to ask you something first. Will you excuse us, Paul?"
"Of course." He nodded, wondering as Hallie steered her away how a woman like Hope Scott kept herself amused. A woman like Hope Scott ... He should probably stop thinking of her as some sort of generic brand, when actually he had very little sense of what she was about. Except that she apparently liked caviar and Vietnamese food and seemed to have a keen sense of humor, he really didn't know her at all.
He wished he could change that. He didn't know if he dared.
* * *
"Trust me on this one, gentlemen. I can smell a good business deal, and this particular merger has the full-bodied aroma of a vintage Burgundy."
George Osburgh III sat back in his leather armchair and smiled at Winthrop Harding, Jr., and Harry Matheson, his fellow trustees for the Sanford Scott Trust. A waiter silently cleared the remnants of their lunch from the table. In a moment, coffee would be poured from the eighteenth-century silver server that Osburgh's great-great-grandmother had received as a wedding gift from the governor of New York. Chocolate chip cookies and fresh fruit would be offered for dessert. Then, if all went according to Osburgh's plan, the three men would agree to invest some portion of the late Sanford Scott's considerable fortune in Jordan Crandell's discretionary fund, to be used for his next big move on the corporate battlegrounds.
Four times a year, the trustees met here in the private dining room of Osburgh & Bartlett, the Wall Street investment banking firm founded by Osburgh's grandfather in 1902, to make decisions regarding the Scott Trust. The quietly elegant room, with its gleaming mahogany surfaces and Bavarian cut-glass chandelier, seemed an appropriate setting for their discussions. The man who had entrusted them with the administration of his estate had been raised by a father who celebrated the potential of commerce and a mother who appreciated beauty and elegance.
More importantly, the connection between the Scotts and the Osburghs went back two generations. Scott's grandfather had done business with George Osburgh's grandfather, whose stern-faced portrait glared at them from its place of honor above the mantel. George Osburgh and Sanford Scott had known each other since boyhood, when their families had summered together on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. Later, they had been roommates at Groton, and their friendship had continued during their years at Harvard.
In theory, the three trustees' votes each carried equal weight, but Osburgh was the only one of them who had called Sanford Scott by his childhood nickname, Sandy. He was the first person Hope Scott had phoned when her father had keeled over and died of a heart attack on the fourth hole of the Castle Pines Golf Course. When Osburgh said, "I think Sandy would have liked this idea," his colleagues tended to see it his way.
Yet the controversial proposal he had brought to the table on this rainy autumn day was meeting with deep opposition. An astute businessman, Osburgh had felt their resistance from the moment Harry and Winthrop walked into the room. The Bobbsey twins, as he had contemptuously dubbed them. Harry was the managing partner of the venerable New York law firm, Langley & Dunlap. Winthrop had parlayed his family's commercial real estate holdings into an empire that included a liquor distillery, a 20 percent interest in a major European hotel chain, and a part ownership in one of America's largest canned food companies.
But as far as Osburgh was concerned, they were idiots, Sandy's idea of a bad joke, the kind he'd played on Osburgh since they were boys. The two men even looked alike, both conservatively dressed in Brooks Brothers pin-striped suits, their cheeks flushed and their eyes bright from too much wine at lunch.
Osburgh always made sure they had plenty to drink. He himself rarely drank, never smoked, ate a strictly low-fat diet, and exercised religiously. His maternal grandfather had been a Methodist minister who preached temperance and lived to celebrate his ninety-seventh birthday. Osburgh was determined to surpass him, and at sixty-four looked a good ten years younger. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he was proud of the fact that he weighed only five pounds more than he had when he'd earned his varsity letter as a linebacker at Harvard.
"George, I can't see how you could possibly justify this move," said Harry.
His sideways glance at Winthrop confirmed what Osburgh had suspected, that they'd already discussed the proposal between themselves and rejected it.
"Starwares is ripe for the plucking. Somebody was bound to come after them, and Crandell believes that his company is a logical fit for Starwares' long-range goals. If Crandell succeeds — and he hasn't failed yet, I don't need to tell you, gentlemen — he stands to make himself and us a lot of money."
"Us?" Winthrop peered at Osburgh above the rim of his coffee cup.
"Us ... the Scott Trust ...," Osburgh said impatiently. He gestured at Crandell's proposal, a copy of which they'd each received earlier in the week. "Have you gone over the figures?" Harry Matheson pulled a cigar out of his inside jacket pocket and tapped it against the table. Osburgh knew Matheson resented the "no smoking" rule that was strictly enforced on the premises of Osburgh & Bartlett. He could have made an exception for Harry Matheson but pointedly chose not to.
"The figures look damn good, George," he said. "But this isn't the sort of thing in which we would normally involve ourselves. And Crandell's one hell of a tough customer. Do you really think you could trust him?"
"Langley & Dunlap would happily represent Crandell if he came knocking at your door. You'd take his money. Are you opposed to giving him some of ours as an investment that would be handsomely repaid? Honestly, Harry, if you had your way, we would bury the Scott Trust money in New Jersey."
"It's not ours," Winthrop reminded Osburgh, helping himself to another cookie. "It's Hope Scott's. We merely administer the trust on her behalf. The question we have to ask ourselves is, how would Sanford Scott feel about backing Crandell in what could be a very risky venture?"
"Dammit, Winthrop!" Osburgh slammed his fist on the table. "Sandy Scott was no saint! He was a hard-nosed businessman who made money by taking risks and backing winners."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Heart of Justice by Ruth Coughlin. Copyright © 1995 Ruth Coughlin. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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