Justice Is a Woman

Also by Helen Haberman How About Tomorrow Morning?

Justice Is a Woman

Helen Haberman Prentice-Hall, Inc. New York

Copyright, 1947, by

PRENTICE-HALL, INC.

70 Fifth Avenue, New York All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Printed in the United States of America

To Gorham Munson

The characters in this novel are fictional and imaginary. Resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is coincidental.

[Pg 1]

PART I

[Pg 2]

[Pg 3]

Chapter 1

The two men who stepped out of the elevator ahead of Larry dropped their voices and talked in a whisper as if they were in the safe-deposit vault of a bank. Larry recognized the reaction because he had often experienced it himself on the tower floor of 40 Wall Street where Arthur H. Bemrose had his offices. The cold ribbon of gray marble floor and walls did it—the neat gold arrow painted on the outside hallway and the carefully designed block lettering which pointed to the law firm of HAYNES and BEMROSE. The two men walked on past the door of Arthur’s office, and Larry, standing in front of the clouded glass, his hand on the doorknob, took on their respectful mood. It usually made him feel as if he had an extra thousand dollars in his pocket just to walk into these offices. During his time at law school Judge Haynes had been God, Jesus Christ himself, to almost every student. Larry had grown up in the fall-on-your-face-and-worship-Haynes tradition. Now Judge Haynes was dead, and Arthur H. Bemrose, from Larry’s own class at law school, was carrying

[Pg 4]on the practice. Larry could still feel the Judge somewhere around as he entered the reception room. He could picture him in dark robes which overwhelmed his spare frame and could recall his low, precise voice, even though it was more than six years since the Old Man had died.

Without looking to see if there were any clients of the firm waiting, Larry gave his name to the boy at the reception room window. Mr. Bemrose would be tied up a while, the boy explained, inviting him to sit down. Larry pinched a wilting carnation in the buttonhole of his overcoat, and shook the melted snow off his hat. He stopped for a moment at the antique table in the center of the room. The Judge had found the table in Italy one summer. Twenty years of accumulated dust clung to its elaborate carving, and Arthur Bemrose, probably out of respect to the Judge’s memory, had left it just as it was when the Old Man died, unpolished, impassive, and dead-centered in the room.

Larry picked up a law journal to read while he was waiting for Arthur, and deposited his overcoat on a chair that wobbled, probably another museum piece that had belonged to Judge Haynes. The chair steadied itself, and Larry sat down with care on the next one, resigned to a long wait. He had no sooner opened this week’s issue of the advance sheets, which reported court decisions before the bound volumes came out, than the Judge’s old clerk, Tim Hoxter, called to him from where he must have been sitting all the time across the room.

As he rushed over to shake hands with Hoxter, a Haynes fixture in the old days, a faithful adjunct in an alpaca coat who had trailed the Old Man with legal papers for twenty-five years, Larry couldn’t take his eyes off the girl sitting [Pg 5]next to Hoxter, wondering if she could be his daughter, and how, if she were, Tim had managed to keep her quiet all these years. She was the last person Larry expected to find among the relics of Judge Haynes in the tradition-ridden reception room of HAYNES and BEMROSE, an improbable client to be waiting for Arthur H. Bemrose, who specialized in corporate work, and incongruously young to be connected with old Tim.

“Will he be tied up much longer?” Tim complained. “She can’t wait. She’s on her lunch hour.” He nodded to the girl and introduced them. “Miss McVail. Her grandmother was an old friend of mine from out in Iowa,” he explained. “Lucy, this is Mr. Frank.”

Larry watched to see if the girl’s handsome gray eyes would go on, but they looked up at him coldly unlit, as if he might be to blame because she had to wait for Arthur H. Bemrose. Larry noted gratefully that Miss McVail did not fidget while she waited. Her spine conformed placidly to the rungs of her chair, and she remained calm except for the eyes, which stubbornly refused to show any emotion, and with their lack of expression somehow managed to reproach him. It was as if she said, “I’m beautiful when I’m turned on, but if this lawyer I’m waiting to see is your friend, I’m not going to make any effort for you.”

“How long have you been waiting, Tim?” Larry asked.

The old man leaned forward confidentially. “She’s having trouble with a no-good brother about some money the grandmother left her. I figure that Arthur——”

The old man was getting deaf. He must be close to eighty.

“Busy at your office, are you?” Tim strained toward him.

[Pg 6]

Larry brought his mouth close to Hoxter’s ear. “Not enough to give the income tax people any serious trouble, but doing all right. I can’t kick.”

“They tell me that Arthur has hung on to most of the old practice.” Tim straightened proudly. “It sure would have tickled the Judge. I’ve been telling Lucy the store he set by Arthur.”

“He’s done a lot better than hang on,” Larry shouted, looking around to make sure no one else had walked in. “If you can believe the newspapers, he’s picked up a few clients of his own.”

The old man smiled. Apparently he did read the newspapers. “I hear he’s in pretty thick down there,” he admitted. “I hear that Tom Newton’s always sending for him——”

“He has to go down to Washington about three times a week.” Larry held up three fingers by way of clarification and moved his lips slowly so that Tim had time to read them.

“Manages to handle both, does he?”

Good for the old man. His mind wasn’t hard of hearing. He was sharp enough to realize that it took some doing for Arthur H. Bemrose to be in solid down in Washington and to pal around with Tom Newton, the Attorney-General, while with the left hand he managed to swing a Wall Street practice.

“Weren’t you two fellows in the same class at law school?”

Larry nodded and sat down next to Tim, thinking about the night many years ago that Arthur Bemrose had first [Pg 7]received a message from Judge Haynes to come and see him.

It was toward the end of their last year in law school, and the rest of them had been playing poker in Cy O’Malley’s room. Bemrose showed up late that evening and made it in about two strides from the door to the card table, his pants flopping around his ankles like excited pigeons.

“Just talked to Judge Haynes in Albany,” Arthur had reported briskly. “He phoned to find out if I’ll be his law secretary next year.”

The game broke up temporarily. Cy rushed over and pumped Arthur’s hand, and Tremont Friendly, dropping his usual punctilious manner, jumped up to pummel Arthur’s back. There was an envious buzz around him.

“Nice going, boy.”

“Gee, fellow, that’s great.”

“Imagine the luck of some guys!”

Larry remembered standing in a kind of daze by himself until Arthur broke away from the others and came over to him. “What’s the matter, Larry? Don’t you think it’s a good offer?”

Even in those days Arthur used to talk things over with him, not always taking his advice, of course, but using him to discover how his ideas sounded out loud. He was still doing it today, in spite of the difference in their incomes.

Back there in Cy’s room almost twenty years ago, Larry had said, “It’s a great offer, kid. You’d better grab it.”

[Pg 8]

That wasn’t the moment to tell Arthur that he’d often had the notion they might hang out a joint shingle someday, BEMROSE and FRANK. Arthur would supply the brilliant big ideas, and he would look after the details. Already in those days, at twenty-three, Larry had sensed his own limitations. He was cut out to be an office lawyer. He didn’t have what it took for big trial work. With Bemrose the front man, going to court, they’d make out all right. He sensed that Arthur functioned better when he was around, felt easier when Larry was on hand and he could talk things out with him.

“I don’t think Judge Haynes will pay me much,” Arthur pointed out practically. “He didn’t mention money over the phone. I have to go up there next Thursday. He said he would discuss the details when he saw me.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the money,” Larry advised. “It will mean a lot to your future. How many fellows have a chance——”

That’s what he said out loud to Arthur Bemrose, but all the time he was thinking about how much better it would be for him, Larry Frank, if they had offices on either side of the same glass partition and could go to lunch together, or talk over a cross-examination when Arthur came back in the late afternoon from court. Back to the offices of BEMROSE and FRANK.

Arthur stood at the poker table strained and flushed, and Larry urged him to sit down and take a hand. He finally did let them deal him into the game, but his attention wandered from the cards. “Are you sure I can swing it, Larry?” he asked while he was waiting for Tremont to call [Pg 9]the hand. “You know his reputation. He’s supposed to be hell on secretaries.”

Bemrose laid down a pair of nines, and Tremont reached for the pot. While someone dealt, Arthur said quietly so that the others couldn’t hear, “Suppose I take it, Larry, and the Judge finds out I’m not good enough.”

“You’ll be good enough, kid,” Larry assured him, discarding then and there the pipe dream about BEMROSE and FRANK. If he didn’t find another congenial fellow with whom he could share an office, he’d start in practice for himself. It would be slower without Bemrose maybe, but he’d make out, and after all, no one was depending on him for a living. His older brother took care of the folks, and Larry had no one to think about supporting but himself.

Larry lost interest in the poker game that evening and quit early. For the rest of the week, whenever he thought of Bemrose going up to Albany to see Judge Haynes, he felt that maybe he ought to try and talk Arthur out of taking the job. But he never did. It would have been putting his own interests ahead of Bemrose’s, and that wasn’t the way Larry Frank liked to operate.

Aloud to Tim Hoxter in the law offices of HAYNES and BEMROSE, Larry said, “At school the fellows always figured that someone like Justice Brandeis would make him an offer if the Old Man didn’t. They were always looking for Law Review men, and Bemrose was the editor of Law Review in our time.”

[Pg 10]

Tim Hoxter nodded. “The Judge and his wife took him right in and started treating him like a son. That must be why he stayed with the Old Man after he left the bench. The Old Man was afraid he wouldn’t stay, you know.” Tim paused. “He figured that Arthur might be restless and want to start in practice for himself. It would have killed the Judge to see him go. He was all wrapped up in that young fellow. I never could figure it out. He and Mrs. Haynes kept everybody else at arm’s length. They weren’t the kind to ever want a son.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Larry said.

“How’s that?” Tim sat up straighter.

“Don’t you remember? Mrs. Haynes liked cats,” Larry shouted.

Tim shook his head. “Cats or no cats, she was the cold type. I think it was the Judge. The Judge made her take him in to live with them. The Judge was always telling everybody that Bemrose was good—” The hand on Tim’s knee was a relief map of heavy blue veins. “What makes him good, Larry? Ever figure it out?”

“I guess you’ve never watched him handle a jury. He has it all over Dunninger. When Bemrose finishes with a witness, there isn’t a thought in the fellow’s head that hasn’t been undressed, waiting for Bemrose to pluck it in the nude.” Larry looked to see if Miss McVail responded, but she was assiduously tending a cuticle. Not a pale eyelash flickered in the blonde fringe around her extraordinary gray eyes.

“My niece’s boy went to court the other day and heard him.” Tim Hoxter’s voice cracked. “He’s a fine boy. Studying law at N.Y.U. He puts Arthur in a class with John W. [Pg 11]Davis. Maybe that’s going too far. But he must be good. For the young ones.”

Larry smiled, recalling an old saw from law school. Under forty-five a lawyer is a bright young man. At sixty he shows promise, and by seventy he’s a respected member of the bar.

Tim leaned back in his chair fretfully and nodded at Miss McVail who industriously continued to ply the cuticle of one finger with the thumbnail of the other hand. “Better ask at the window again, Larry. Tell that young fellow she’s on her lunch hour.”

“Maybe we should leave and phone him tomorrow.” Miss McVail studied an old-fashioned gold watch suspended by a ribbon from her coat lapel. Her voice was a toneless gray as she looked past Larry. “Oh, there’s someone——”

Larry recognized Arthur’s secretary, motioning to Tim and the girl to come inside. As Miss McVail disappeared through a door in the direction of Arthur’s office, Larry took note of the snugly made hips, shapely and small like her neatly indented waist, and wondered how much of the set-up Arthur H. Bemrose would inventory, or whether, with him, it was always strictly business. It probably was, or he wouldn’t be rattling around alone in that three-story house the Judge had left him. In six years he should have located something female and decorative to brighten up the mausoleum. Let’s see. Arthur was going on forty-three now. He might begin to think about settling down. Whatever his bond with the Old Man which put the law first and women second while Haynes was alive, it should have ended with the Judge’s funeral. But from hearing Bemrose talk about women Larry always had the idea that Arthur thought he [Pg 12]was doing them a favor to spend time with them, and that, given his choice, he’d rather devote the same number of

hours to practicing law. He apparently never picked a woman who had a chance of being able to compete in interest with his practice. His taste ran to flashy, dark divorcées who patronized the local bridge clubs. They lasted with him three months, six months, sometimes almost a year. Until they brought up the subject of marriage, was Larry’s guess. He had a hunch that Arthur H. Bemrose concentrated on the purely social type because he wanted to prove something to himself. He probably insisted on being convinced that a woman was good for bed or a wasted evening and not much else. As long as he specialized in women who had similar views about men, he could hang on to the theory. Larry thought that when the Judge died, Arthur might look around for someone who at least was a good listener, someone to fill the hours he used to spend talking to the Judge. She wouldn’t have to be a great brain for that. All she’d have to do was listen. Larry thought of the McVail girl in there with him. She didn’t look as if she’d talk a man to death. Not if the way she acted in the reception room

was a sample. Well, what the hell was it to him what Bemrose did about his sex life? Larry thought of himself and Bessie. There was no use trying to sell marriage to Arthur H. Bemrose because he and Bessie were more than reasonably contented, or because Bemrose had inherited a big, empty house. There were plenty of fouled up marriages, and living alone in an empty house wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to him.

The boy at the reception window called out to say that Mr. Bemrose would only be tied up a few more minutes. [Pg 13]Larry leafed through the advance sheets, but none of his own cases were reported, and he seldom enjoyed reading law for the sake of reading law. It was his father, not Larry, who had decided he ought to be a lawyer. His father had acted in the tradition of many men who had emigrated to this country and thought the eldest son should be a business man and provide for the family while the other sons concentrated on surrounding the family name with the prestige of the professions. In legal circles the name, Frank, still wasn’t surrounded by an aura, but Larry’s father never lived to find that out, and it suited Larry fine to earn a modest living at the law. Without straining. His friend, Arthur H. Bemrose, strained enough for two of them, and produced results when he strained.

Restlessly Larry got up to have a look at the famous Haynes letters in the lighted breakfront cabinet, occupying an entire wall of the reception room, where Arthur had them embalmed. These were the more noteworthy originals of the Haynes-Didier letters, published in three volumes a year ago for fifteen dollars a boxed set. Larry bought them at the time but couldn’t wade through the first volume. The old duffers, Judge Haynes and his French colleague, Didier, had liked to toss Greek and Latin quotations across the ocean, probably with posterity in mind, and Larry hadn’t gone in for a Latin declension since high school.

The cabinet reminded Larry of a mental Kremlin where the Old Man’s brains were on public view. He squinted at one of the yellowed sheets dated April 10, 1881 and tried to decipher the fading characters of the text, recalling, as he read, that once before he had been puzzled by this particular letter. His entire generation at the bar had grown up in [Pg 14]the belief that Haynes was a great labor judge, a man who recognized the right of labor to organize when his contemporaries had used the word, labor, from the bench in about the tone reserved today for the word, fascist.

But in spite of his reputation as a great labor judge, Haynes had written in confidence to his friend, Didier: “Your friend, the common man, is a fumbling pleasure-loving dolt. He delights in the sloth of his overstuffed ignorance.”

If he really felt that way and still turned himself inside out to give labor a break in his court, you had to hand it to the Old Man, Larry reflected. Back in those days it couldn’t have been profitable, politically, to hold pro-labor views. He must have done it for something rooted inside, some prodigal instinct for fairness that had flourished in spite of the snobbish New England background. The interesting fact was that a man who had privately tagged millions of his fellow citizens as “fumbling pleasure-loving dolts” lived out his years publicly as champion of the dolt, as a leading friend and patron of doltism. Known to the world as “labor’s friend,” the chances were that Judge Haynes had never gotten around to shaking the hand of a man in overalls, Larry reflected.

The thought amused him. He couldn’t help but contrast the Old Man’s views with those of Arthur H. Bemrose, truck driver’s son, born enough of a common man to want to forget it. For keeps. No bending over backwards by Bemrose to understand the common man. He knew all he wanted to know at first hand. Consequently, Arthur H. Bemrose specialized in the uncommon man, the no-dolt, especially when he practiced law. Counsellor to the uncommon [Pg 15]man. That was the firm’s reputation today. Bemrose doesn’t take every case. He handpicks his clients. How often Larry had heard other lawyers discuss this enviable prerogative of a successful lawyer.