The Burden of Proof kc-2 Read online

  The barroom wags were right about her. Not that she was incorrect in her estimate of Stern's intentions; hardly. But there was something naive in the way she presumed to inhibit him. Whether Ms. Klonsky knew it or not, she was engaged in a contest, a process, not the search for the Holy Grail. When she brought witnesses quailing into the grand jury room, where their lawyers could not accompany them, where the thought of every indiscretion, every lapse, accosted them like bogeymen, so that these persons were slavish in their eagerness to please the prosecutors, this, per Klonsky, was not influence. It was the government at work.

  But if the target's lawyer spoke to the witnesses himself, reviewed their records, and tried to keep their recollections balanced, that bordered on subornation. The problem was simple: she was still new to her job. Poor Sonia Klonsky.

  Past forty and still so much to learn. He found himself quite disappointed. "You're angry," she said.

  "Not so."

  "I wasn't suggesting that you would do anything unethical."

  "Nor did I take it that way."

  Stern spent a further moment unloading his cases, withdrawing bundles of documents with their blackened edges of copier murk. Ms. Klonsky was still disconcerted by the change of mood.

  "I thought we were having"-she waved a hand-and exchange."

  "We disagree," said Stern. "Consider it a matter of obligation, of our respective roles." He stood. "Where might I expect you to go next?" She looked at him a moment.

  "I don't feel satisfied, Sandy."

  How in the world had Stan Sennett hired this woman? Did she want to have sensitivity sessions in the grand jury? What a remarkable person.

  In spite of his reluctance to admit it, she had some quality of magnetism. Her smile, especially in its sly aspect, was endearing; a deep, serious intelligence glinted in her eyes. But he felt braced by the recognition of a moment before. With Sonia Klonsky, one had the sense that, for all her woman-on-the-go composedness, a fragment of her soul remained on the verge of hysteria. There was something seething, molten, uncontrolled, unknown. That had a touching quality as well-a woman past forty, still on the voyages of a teenager.

  "Ms. Klonsky," he said, "we really do not need to engage in hand-wringing. I assure you, we shall remain on cordial terms." He offered his hand. Instead, she sank down in the chair behind her desk, her face still dark and troubled, and rattled open a drawer.

  "There's one other thing. Since you represent Mr. Hartnell, we can't agree to serve you when we subpoena other witnesses from MD. The potential for conflict is too great."

  Something new was coming, Stern realized. Klonsky was saying, in effect, that she would soon be setting sails for Dixon's employees, attempting to get them to testify against the boss. If the government had its way, each would have a different lawyer. This was the prosecutors' usual stance. Divide and conquer. Under the guise of concern about professional ethics, they tried to ensure that anyone who might have something to blab to them would not be under the influence of the target's lawyer. Stern agreed wholeheartedly about the ethical precepts, but believed that the right to determine conflicts in the first instance was his, not the U.S. Attorney's. He protested now, but Ms. Klonsky reverted to her firm look, forbidding. further discussion.

  "Anyway," she said, "Stan thought there was one subpoena that should be served on you. As a courtesy." Klon-sky opened a manila folder and removed a single sheet of paper, offering it to Stern. "We gave him a long date-almost a month-so you'll have plenty of time to help him arrange for separate counsel." Dumbly, Stern nodded. When he looked back, Klonsky was filling out a return of service on the back of her file copy, recording on whom and when the subpoena had been served.

  He had been having such a buoyant spell, Stern thought with sudden fodomness, gibing with this able young woman, assaying her character.

  Now this. His arms, as he looked at the subpoena, were leaden with alarm. Some primitive curse rose up in him against Dixon and his inevitably tortured courses. From the way this was being handled, the acknowledged special treatment, Stern suspected at once what was afoot.

  "Are there other persons from the order desk whom you expect to call?" he asked offhandedly, hoping the import of the question would slip past her, and Klonsky simply shook her head as she wrote. Stern, at once, felt his condition grow worse. The order tickets Margy had promised to request from the Kindle office had not yet reached him, but he knew now what they would show. Dixon had not called just anyone on the order desk to trade ahead, as Margy had speculated; that, apparently, Would have entailed too much risk, the chance that someone shrewd and less obedient might speak up, object. Instead, Dixon had conveyed the orders to a single compliant sap, the only soul on the order desk with whom the government needed to speak. And, of course, his daughter had married him. Stern folded the subpoena into three even parts. "John Granum" had been typed on the dotted lines reserved for name and address. His son-in-law now had a date certain for.grand jury testimony. Klonsky's guile, her fear of undue influence on the critical witnesses, was growing more understandable. "Is he a target?" asked Stern.

  "Maybe he has something to tell us."

  "Immunity is a possibility?"

  "I think so." Klonsky once more glanced downward; she was saying too much. "I understand your interest, Sandy. But this would be more appropriate with whoever represents him.

  As I say, this is a courtesy to you. Start didn't want another incident like the one at your home."

  "Most considerate," said Stern. "My thanks to both of you."

  He did not wish to sound particularly curt, but he was experiencing a fading lack of control.

  Ms. Klonsky looked at him sadly. He could see who he was to her-a home-wrecked widower with one more enormous family problem. He had her sympathy, which was not at all what he had come here expecting to obtain.

  Outside the U.S. Attorney's Office, the elevator arrived, opened, and then refused to move. Stern, still spinning with anger, threw down his empty cases and pounded on all the buttons. Up. Down. Door open. Door close: The new federal building had been completed ten years ago, with every contract sprinkled- down on cronies from the fingertips of Mayor Bolcarro like a confectionery topping.

  The structure had been intended as a courthouse, but the judges, after a brief period of occupancy, issued various orders and injunctions and moved themselves back into the ancient Federal Square building across the street. Nothing here worked. The elevators. The heat. The windows popped out in high winds or low temperatures and showered glass off the pedestrians below. It had taken six years to complete con-stmction, and the litigation was still ongoing a decade later. The architect, the engineers, the general contractor, and virtually every tradesman who had touched the place were co-plaintiffs, co-defendants, or crossparties in four or five separate suits. Now and then, Stern would see the herd of lawyers arrive for the various status calls. They would stand before the judge, twenty and thirty abreast, and bicker. In the meantime, the building grew so brisk during the occasional periods of Arctic cold that gripped this city that one federal judge, during the short period when court had been held here, mounted the bench in mittens and instructed the lawyers that they were not required to remove their hats.

  At last, the steel box began to move. After the delay, it stopped at every floor. Stern, who had an appointment to meet Lieutenant Radczyk for lunch, simmered at the edge of outburst. Dixon. John. Gevalt.

  What an ugly mess his brother-in-law had made!

  Headed down, with lunch at hand, the tiny space was jammed.

  The elevators, naturally, had been stintingly designed, too small for the bu'fiding's population. In his state of high agitation, crashed against the rear partitions, Stern took an instant to react when a woman in front of him, a tall brunette in her thirties, stepped back and made contact.

  Indeed, that put matters somewhat delicately, for she had not merely brushed against him or inadvertently driven her spike heel into his toes. Rather, this young woman
had laid the cleave of her rear end firmly against his hand. And would the Sandy Stern of a month ago have politely pulled away? No question. Today he remained still; he was certain that she took him for the wall. But at the next stop the elevator stuttered on its cable, minutely rocking. And did she ease back even farther? So it seemed. And did Stern, as the floors went by, find himself, almost involuntarily, inching his hand by the most subtle degree? He did. He did, so that by floor 4, his fingers, two or three, were delicately pressed against the parting of her buttocks and the filmy folds of her green dress and the elastic ridges of her undergarments below. By the natural movement of the car, this arrangement provided the most discreet stroking each time the elevator jolted to a halt.

  From behind, Stern tried to study this young woman. Was she one of his casual courthouse acquaintances, another lawyer having fun in an offbeat fashion? He did not recogn'tze her: Her eyes were green; one cheek was blemished. A professional person, he assumed, in an expensive green silk dress, carrying her briefcase. With each stop, she seemed to lean back a little more. Her jaw was set in a largely abstracted manner, but save for paralysis, there was no way she might not have noticed what was occurring. At the ground level, she let all her weight come back into him, so that for the briefest instant his hand fit snugly inside and-possible?-was vaguely squeezed before she stepped forward to exit.

  Across the metal threshold, she looked about for hearings, and when her view crossed his, her expression was far too indefinite to be called a smile.

  Hiking away, she reached back and gave a quick jerk at her skirt to free it from the rear cleavage where the material was gathered.

  Dizzy and aroused, impressed, even inspired by this boldness, Stern followed her from the elevator. So this was the life of men and women in the modern day! It was Cincinnatus who was called back to battle from the plowfield, -rearmored, remounted, and placed in charge of war and strategy. That was Stern-except that Cincinnatus had been a hero and an officer in his youth and Stern was never more than a buck private. He'd had more diverse sexual experience in the last four days than in his entire prior lifetime. And there was no hiding his pleasure from himself. His sweet interlude with Margy had revived him like a dose of water on a thirsting plant-he felt the strength of his own vitality from root to leaf. No wonder people so easily made fools of themselves. If he'd never known, he did now-this was fun. How did one pursue these leads? Coffee. A hotel room? What happened next? Amazed by himself, still toting his cases, he actually followed the young woman for a block before he recalled Radczyk. She never once looked back; apparently, she took her gratification from teasing. And yet, even when he'd stopped, he had no sure knowledge of his own capacities. He did not know what excesses were within him; he might sprout wings and fly, he might dance naked in the intersection. He felt like some soaring bubble, a thin surface containing the exciting weightlessness of freedom.

  By the Kindle River, near the docks on the Kewah-nee side, an underground world had grown up. Stern always marched down the iron stairwell from the boulevards above with a sense of significant descent, somehow related to entering darkness in the daytime. These piers where the bargemen would unload their cargoes of fruit, rice, and coal brought up from the South retained an economic importance for Kindle County well into this century. In the 1920s, the local movers and shakers, full of the improbable hope that the tri-cities, like an urban Cinderella, could be made to resemble Paris, decided to pretend the docks were not here.

  On concrete pilings driven down into the sandy banks of the Kindle, the downtown section of Ke-wahnee was extended; great roads were built and modest skyscrapers rose.

  Beneath, the gritty dockmen and barge hands continued to.work in a netherworld barely reached by daylight, while the suit-and-tie crowd rushed about above, dealing, suing, buying and selling the labor and commodities being delivered to the city in the dark below.

  These days, Lower River, as this area was known, was eerie with the garish yellow glow of sulfur lamps. Abutting the streets, the docks of the trucking concerns which had located here originally to carry off what the barges brought and which eventually had supplanted them were littered with crates and spoiling produce. The air sang with the racing pitch of fires on the roads above and the windy commotion of that traffic. For many years, this was the locale where bodies were dumped and drug deals done.

  The flow of hot merchandise across the tracking piers, by rumor, was still steady. In his early years in practice, Stern was always going about down here to visit one crime scene or another. A thousand people passing by and nobody knew nothin'. The situation was usually far more frustrating to the police than to Stern.

  Rather than.joust in the noontime traffic, he had walked across the bridge, carrying his two large empty cases. He met Radczyk at a place called Wally's. It was hardly scenic. As with each establishment in Lower River, one entered from the rear. The windows at the back of the restaurant faced the river, which was otherwise inaccessible, looking out to the pilings and the iron underpinnings of the roads. Toward the top of the horizon, a line of daylight broke through and, depending on the angle of the sun, sometimes lit the slaty surface of the water brightly enough to show the floating silt and the industrial debris.

  Radczyk was at a table smoking a cigarette and, for unknown reasons, studying his shirt when Stern approached.

  "Ah, Sandy!" The copper's roddy country-boy 'face was radiant. This warmth, whose source Stern still could not recollect, continued to make him uneasy. Radczyk had phoned this morning, Saying he had some results. He suggested Wally's, a policemen's hangout, which suited Stern, who was always just as happy not to walk into the station house.

  Here Stern was more impressed by the size of the man than he had been in his home; Radczyk barely fit into his chair, a hulking figure being slowly diminished by age. He wore a tweed sport coat and the bright red golfing shirt he had been examining when Stern arrived. He explained now that it was an Easter gift from his children. "You get the grandkids over and they tear the place apart, makes you glad you can send them home."

  Stern smiled obligingly. It occurred to him that he, too, would soon be entitled to these fond complaints. The prospect today seemed considerably less consoling. The thought of John briefly scuffed at Stern's heart.

  "So," said Stern. "You had success?" He sought to bring Radczyk to the subject. He was the kind who would chat about anything else.

  The old cop reached to the inside pocket of his sport coat and came up with a single grayish page, a copy of something. He put on his reading glasses and considered the paper as if he had never seen it before. Then he removed his eyeglasses and pointed the temple at Stern.

  "You give any thought to talkin with her doctors? That's what I'd do in your shoes."

  Immediately, Stern felt the same vexation that had overcome him on his way from the U.S. Attorney's Office. Why had he bothered with this policeman? He was old, and probably never terrifically competent. Trust Radczyk to suggest a starting point where Stern had already been. He was not fully able to conceal his irritation.

  "Lieutenant, I am afraid I have already attempted that COurse. ' ' "Mind if I ask what come of it?" asked Radczyk. "What came of it," said Stern, "was that Clara's personal doctor tells me he did not order this test, and I have been unable to determine which physician did."

  "Huh." Radczyk looked back down to the sheet he held. "No name here," he said. "Suppose I coulda asked when I was out there." The notion that the name of the treating physician might have been relevant occurred to Radczyk remotely, a far-off idea, like the notion of life on the planets. Stern was finding it increasingly difficult to stifle himself.

  "You were at Westlab?"

  "Oh, sure, sure. Done just like I told you. Went out-there, got the administrator, you know, showed her my star. Nice gal. Liz something or other. Very professional, you know.

  Looked to be a little 'Mexican or Italian gal. I said I was doin routine follow-up, what records did they have? She showe
d me the whole file right there in her office. Give me a copy of the results." Radczyk hoisted the paper in his hand, and Stern, without invitation, reached across the table and quietly took it.

  The hangdog waitress came by with her green pad, saying only "Yours?" to each man. Stern ordered as he studied the copy. It was a half sheet on the letterhead of Westlab. The rest of it contained computer-printed figures. Numbers.

  Codes. A meaningless scramble. In his frustration, Stern nearly groaned.

  "Did they tell you, Lieutenant, what this test was for?"

  "Sure," he said." 'Viral culture." "He took the paper back and with a dirty fingernail showed Stern a tiny box which had been x'd. "A virus?" Radczyk nodd.S. Attorney's Office. Why had he bothered with this policeman? He was old, and probably never terrifically competent. Trust Radczyk to suggest a starting point where Stern had already been. He was not fully able to conceal his irritation.

  "Lieutenant, I am afraid I have already attempted that COurse. ' ' "Mind if I ask what come of it?" asked Radczyk. "What came of it," said Stern, "was that Clara's personal doctor tells me he did not order this test, and I have been unable to determine which physician did."

  "Huh." Radczyk looked back down to the sheet he held. "No name here," he said. "Suppose I coulda asked when I was out there." The notion that the name of the treating physician might have been relevant occurred to Radczyk remotely, a far-off idea, like the notion of life on the planets. Stern was finding it increasingly difficult to stifle himself.

  "You were at Westlab?"

  "Oh, sure, sure. Done just like I told you. Went out-there, got the administrator, you know, showed her my star. Nice gal. Liz something or other. Very professional, you know.

  Looked to be a little 'Mexican or Italian gal. I said I was doin routine follow-up, what records did they have? She showed me the whole file right there in her office. Give me a copy of the results." Radczyk hoisted the paper in his hand, and Stern, without invitation, reached across the table and quietly took it.