Morning Noon & Night by Sidney Sheldon Page B

none of them. A crime was a crime and had to be punished. And in the back of his mind, always, was his father.
    Tyler Stanford’s fellow judges knew very little about his personal life. They knew that he had had a bitter marriage and was now divorced, and that he lived alone in a small three-bedroom Georgian house on Kimbark Avenue in Hyde Park. The area was surrounded by beautiful old homes, because the great fire of 1871 that razed Chicago had whimsically spared the Hyde Park district. He made no friends in the neighborhood, and his neighbors knew nothing about him. He had a housekeeper who came in three times a week, but Tyler did the shopping himself. He was a methodical man with a fixed routine. On Saturdays, he went to Harper Court, a small shopping mall near his home, or to Mr. G’s Fine Foods or Medici’s on Fifty-seventh Street.
    From time to time, at official gatherings, Tyler would meet the wives of his fellow jurists. They sensed that he was lonely, and they offered to introduce him to women friends or invite him to dinner. He always declined.
    “I’m busy that evening.”
    His evenings seemed to be full, but they had no idea what he was doing with them.
    “Tyler isn’t interested in anything but the law,” one of the judges explained to his wife. “And he’s just not interested in meeting any women yet. I heard he had a terrible marriage.”
    He was right.
    After his divorce, Tyler had sworn to himself that he would never become emotionally involved again. And then he had met Lee, and everything had suddenly changed. Lee was beautiful, sensitive, and caring—the one Tyler wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Tyler loved Lee, but why should Lee love him? A successful model, Lee had dozens of admirers, most of them wealthy. And Lee liked expensive things.
    Tyler had felt that his cause was hopeless. There was no way to compete with others for Lee’s affection. But overnight, with the death of his father, everything could change. He could become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
    He could give Lee the world.
    Tyler walked into the chambers of the chief judge. “Keith, I’m afraid I have to go to Boston for a few days. Family affairs. I wonder if you would have someone take over my caseload for me.”
    “Of course. I’ll arrange it,” the chief judge said.
    “Thank you.”
    That afternoon, Judge Tyler Stanford was on his way to Boston. On the plane, he thought again about his father’s words on that terrible day: “ I know your dirty little secret .”

Chapter Nine
    I t was raining in Paris, a warm July rain that sent pedestrians racing along the street for shelter or looking for nonexistent taxis. Inside the auditorium of a large gray building on a corner of the Rue Faubourg St.-Honoré, there was panic. A dozen half-naked models were running around in a kind of mass hysteria, while ushers finished setting up chairs and carpenters pounded away at last-minute bits of carpentry. Everyone was screaming and gesticulating wildly, and the noise level was painful.
    In the eye of the hurricane, trying to bring order out of chaos, was the maîtresse herself, Kendall Stanford Renaud. Four hours before the fashion show was scheduled to begin, everything was falling apart.
    Catastrophe: John Fairchild of W was unexpectedly going to be in Paris, and there was no seat for him.
    Tragedy: The speaker system was not working.
    Disaster: Lili, one of the top models, was ill.
    Emergency: Two of the makeup artists were fightingbackstage and were far behind schedule.
    Calamity: All the seams on the cigarette skirts were tearing.
    In other words , Kendall thought wryly, everything is normal .
    Kendall Stanford Renaud could have been mistaken for one of the models herself, and at one time she had been a model. She exuded carefully plotted elegance from her gold chignon to her Chanel pumps. Everything about her—the curve of her arm, the shade of her nail polish, the timbre of her laugh—bespoke well-mannered