The Burden of Proof kc-2 Read online

  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 nodded.

  Stern took this in: Clara had seen the doctor for a virus.

  So here was the outcome of nearly two months' pursuit. His wife had the sniffles. A persistent cough. No wonder she had bothered only Peter.

  He smiled faintly. For all the pain, it had the quality of a burlesque.

  "And they had no more to report?"

  Radczyk seemed to have settled himself elsex,here. He considered Stern with his pleasant, rosy look and huddled closer.

  "Still don't remember me, do you?"

  Stern, who would ordinarily go to considerable lengths to avoid adrmtting something so unflattering, simply shrugged.

  He had better sense than to try to fool an old policeman.

  "Didn't think so." The cop edged forward. "Marv Ja-coby."

  It hit Stern like lightning. "The brother," said Stern. The orphan, he thought. "That was some time ago."

  Childishly pleased to be recalled, Radczyk sat there smiling. "Hadn't taken the tags off my sergeant's stripes yet."

  So this was the orphan. Stern instantly recalled the entire tale.

  Radczyk had been raised by his grandfather, who ran a paper stand, one of those metal shanties on a street comer; in the winter, they took heat from a fire in an oil dram.

  One day two young neighborhood hoods, looking for nickels and dimes, tried to stick up the grandfather, and ended up shooting him dead. The beat cop was Harold Jacoby-Jews did not become lieutenants in those days-and he took the grandson home and raised him with his own. Harold had two natural sons, as Stern remembered, and all three became policemen. Ray was the eldest. Eddie eventually quit the force and went to California, where he'd done well in the security business. It was the youngest son, Marvin, who became Stern's client.

  Lord, what a thug he was, Stern thought when he remembered Marvin.

  Gum-cbewing,' wisecracking, with little black eyes and, as they said on the street, an attitude. Marvin was a wrong cop from the day he got his star. And a daily heartache to Ray here, who took over Marvin's guidance when the father passed away.

  Almost a dozen years ago, certain police officers, disgruntled by the usual departmental rivalties, had begun to assemble evidence of wrongdoing in the city's North Branch district. This effort required no intrepidhess. The North Branch was wide open: cops on the pad; bail bondsmen steering cases; judges on the take. Marvin was not the worst offender, but one of the least popular, and at the time he first met Stern he had a subpoena to appear before a state grand jury that was looking into allegations that Marvin had taken monthly payments from certain narcotics dealers to warn them of ensuing police raids.

  "I still owe you for all of that;" said Radczyk.

  Stern shook his head. It had not been much. He had simply touched the pressure points. Like someone who knew jujitsu.

  Stern had paid discreet visits to certain politicians whose alliances he'd estimated would be disturbed by sudden havoc in the North End. The county prosecutor, Raymond Horgan, who had friends like everybody else, had seen fit to quash the investigation. For these efforts, Radczyk had been unreasonably grateful; he had attended each of Marvin's visits, fretting like a mother; he was as garrulous then as now. Marvin simply sat there in his uniform, cracking his gum, while Ray went on reinterpreting every remark and arguing in behalf of Marvin's exculpation. He seemed determined not to believe the worst, the kind of devoted big brother every man should have. None of it had done any good for Marvin, who was discovered a few years later in the trunk of a car being towed from a parking lot in the North End. As Stern heard it,'

  Marvin was stark naked, with blowtorch holes burned black through his privates.

  Stern said that out loud, that he might not have been much help to Marvin in the end.

  "Gave him a chance," said Radczyk. "He was three times seven. Can only give a leila a chance." Stern and he both pondered that observation. "I shoulda known he'd never make a cop. Hell," said Radczyk, "I don't even know what kind of cop I made." Radczyk, caught in his own tender reflections, smiled crookedly. There was something unavoidably touching about this confession-the very plainness of it. Radczyk was pushing retirement but remained in doubt about these fundamental judgments. His woe Stern did not feel; he had no question about his fitness for his calling, no regrets about what he would have done with greater diligence or harder work. It was the costs of that kind of dedication he was now attempting to assess. The thought brought him back to where they had started. Glancing about to find his cases, Stern stood.

  "I thank you for all your good work on this matter, Lieutenant. I am in your debt."

  Still apparently anchored in the past, Radczyk considered Stern with a tentative, sad amp;ned look and for the first time had no comment.

  "Did my wife have a virus, by the way?" Stern asked. He wondered how remote the glimmer was that he had been chasing.

  In answer, Radczyk showed the paper. His thick finger lay in the findings section of the form. Stern squinted across the table: "HSV-2 Positive." When Stern looked to him inquiringly, Radczyk shrugged.

  Whatever that meant. Medical gibberish.

  "Maybe I oughta go back there and get that doc's name for you," said Radczyk.

  This time Stern caught it, a, savvy flash that passed through Radczyk's worn cheerful face, sharp and sudden as the reflection off a blade-something you see, then don't.

  He had seen this clever gleam in Radczyk before, Stern realized, and let it go by. It amazed him, after all these years, that he could still be taken in by the police.

  Stern set down his cases and resumed his seat. He spOke precisely, as he would in court,

  "You must excuse me, Lieutenant, but I believe you did not answer my question."

  Radczyk's happy mug took on an oafish expression. Caught, he looked both ways and weighed something, probably an impulse to try another feint: What question? He did not do that.

  "Yea, verily," said Radczyk at last- "I did not."

  "What was this test for?"

  "Oh," said Radczyk. He pushed the few clumped strands of hair over his red scalp. "That's what the doctor should be telling you, Sandy. I'd rather not."

  "I see. Are you refusing?"

  The pOliceman looked around, big and unhappy.

  "No, I ain't refusin' you, Sandy. You ask, I'll tell ya the truth."

  "Well, then?"

  Radczyk's old face was soft and drained.

  "Herpes," Radczyk said.

  "Herpes?"

  "I asked the lady. That's what she told me. Herpes."

  Radczyk passed his hand over his mouth, wiping it in a fashion, and said, "Genital herpes."

  Stern found himself pondering the dirty river, the flecks of wood pulp, disintegrating cardboard, whitish foam that floated by. He had felt just this way recently, he thought with idle precision. When was it?

  Then he remembered opening the door to the garage. Peering down, he noticed that one of his hands was gripping the dirty gray table by the edge.

  "The test was positive?" he asked. Of course, he knew what the paper had said.

  "Sandy, you're askin a guy who don't know a thing. I'm repeating what the lady told me. Who knows? Who knows what we're talkin about? I'm goin right back there. I'm gonna get this doc's name, I'll have it for you in no time fast."

  "Please do not bother, Lieutenant."

  "No bother."

  "You have done enough." Of course, it came out the wrong way. stern stood there, reeling, suffering, unable just now
to do anything to make amends.

  My God, Clara, he thought.

  Stern insisted on paying the check. He grabbed the old policeman's rough hand and shook it solemnly, and Rad-czyk, in some kind of conciliatory gesture, took the copied page and placed it in the pocket of Stern's suit. Then Mr. Alejandro Stern, with his empty cases, turned to go, wondering where so early in the day he could find a place to be alone.

  PART

  TWO

  Clara Mittler was already too old when she met him. It was 1956.

  Their acquaintance was first struck in the auspicious climate of her father s law office, where Stern had let one room in Henry Mittler's suite. In those years Stern revered Henry; by the end, he saw his father-in-law as a man with too little justice in him to be admired. But in 1956, with his large and sometimes volcanic personality, and, more pertinently, his influence and wealth, Henry Mittler loomed before Stern, fresh from Easton Law School, like some diorama giant, a majestic emblem of the attainments possible in a life at the bar. He was.a sizable fellow, with a formidable belly and whitish hair pushed straight back from a widow's peak, distinct as an arrow, and his manner was, by turns, shrewd and scholarly and ruthless. In many ways, Henry was the most refined of gentlemen; he collected stamps, and for many years thereafter Stern would watch with amazement as Henry, with his jeweler's glass and tweezers, studied, stored, and filed. In other moods, he was a person of utter commonness. Whatever his temper, he projected the imposing aura of an orchestral maestro, This impressive congregation of qualities-and, as Stern learned later, a fortunate marriage to a woman of significant standing-had made him a business counselor whose insight and discretion were prized throughout the city' s small but wealthy German Jewish community. Two of the larger independent banks downtown were his clients; so were the Hartzog and Bergstein families, only then conquering the first terrains in their future kingdoms in air travel and hostelry. Henry had come of age in an era when those he served stood for sweatshops and union busting and heartless home foreclosures-the entire pristine empire of wealth, accepted as being in the Order of Things. It was a different world now;

  Capital no longer equaled Power in America in the same brute fashion.

  But Henry, no less than anyone else, was the image of his times, when it was expected that a business lawyer of his eminence be a gentleman to his clients and a son of a bitch to everyone else.

  Seven young attorneys worked for Henry in paneled suites in the old LeSueur building, with its Art Deco features of heavy turned brass.

  Graduating from law school, Stern had responded to an ad in one of the lawyers' gazettes and rented a single room. It was a promising arrangement. Henry did not go to court himself. There would be occasional matters of small consequence that he might refer to Stern.

  Collections, liens, attachments. Small divorces, perhaps.

  Minor personal-injury matters, or traffic tickets. It made little difference. If the flow was steady enough, Stern could satisfy his rent of $35 a month.

  For this sum, Stern acquired use of Mittler's law library-which had seemed an impressive concession, although the gilt-trimmed treatises on commercial matters contributed nothing to the criminal practice that Stern wished to establish-and Mittler' s secretary took his phone messages. In those first months, he could not afford a telephone of his own. Stern' s calls were received on Mittler' s general number and returned, a dime apiece, from a wooden phone booth in the lobby thirty-two floors below.

  This arrangement, comfortable to Stern, was soon unacceptable to Henry.

  He had no complaints with Stern's handling of the matters he referred.

  But he did not care for the clientele that Stern brought back from police court, where once or twice a week he would stand in the corridors in the hopes of drumming up some kind of a practice. After two or three barren attempts, he had attracted the attention of a police sergeant named Blonder, and for a fee of $5 for each success, Blonder had begun carrying on in lyrical fashion about Stern's many triumphs and passing out his card to the detainees being ferried in the police paddy wagon.

  These clients-gypsies, shoplifters, drinkers who had become embroiled in barroom disputes-would come to the oak. wainscoted offices of Henry Mittler to wait for Mr. Stern, beside Henry's client, Buckner Levy, in pince-nez and fedora, the president of the Cleveland Street Commercial Bank. There were no incidents, but the sight of these toughs, who sat in their undervests smoking cigarettes and, on one or two occasions, mistaking the ashtrays for spittoons, drove Henry wild. By the time Stern happened to meet Clara, his clients had been relegated to a bench in the hallway, while Henry contemplated a more complete eviction for Stern himself. In fact, in his initial rage, Henry had directed Stern to initiate the search for new quarters, although afterwards no more was said of that.

  As for Clara, she was employed in her father' s office two or three days a week. Stern's first sight of her was from the hallway as he was passing. She was a slender young woman of erect carriage who sat before Henry Mittler with a green stenographic pad in hand. Stern paused; something was not in place. She had a finished look, expensively dressed in a silk blouse and a brown skirt of fine wool; she wore pearls. Then he noticed that she was seated not on a chair but on the footstool of Mittler's easy chair.

  "Yes, Stern." Henry had caught sight of him in the doorway.

  Stern, who had not meant to stop, said he would come back later, but Mittler was in an expansive mood and more or less ordered him into the office. "My daughter," he said, with his hand raised, while he looked across his desk for something else.

  Her hair, a muted reddish shade like finished cherrywood, was cut anfashionably short; her complexion, flawed by one or two livid marks near one cheekbone, was generally pallid; and Stern on first impression could not tell if she was pretty or plain. Her expression certainly seemed deadened. She nodded to Stern with no more interest than she would have to a stick of furniture.

  It was his pipe Henry had been searching for. suppose you've made other arrangements by now," he said as he shot fire into the.meerschaum bowl.

  "Not just yet," said Stern-.

  Years later, Stern could still remember the shocking speed with which he had calculated the advantages of winning this young woman's attention.

  It was Henry, however, not Stern, who had gotten them started.

  "Stern is from Argentina," said her father.

  She brightened. "From?" she asked.

  In 1956 most Americans regarded foreigners of all kinds with apprehension; about Argentina they wished to learn no more than the tango. Stern was grateful for her interest.

  "B.A., principally. We lived in different parts. My father was able to turn the practice of medicine into an itinerant trade."

  "Your father was a doctor?" asked Henry. "You've always made out like you were some impoverished son of a bitch.

  Pardon, Clara."

  "Regrettably true," said Stern.

  "This is the one who goes down to the lobby to use the telephone," said Henry.

  "Ah," said Clara.

  The heat of shame rushed up on poor Stern. Clara seized his arm.

  "Daddy, you' re embarrassing Mr. Stern."

  Henry made a face. It-was no matter to him.

  From these first instants some elements seemed incomprehensible. She was too sophisticated-too rich-a young woman to be a stenographer, but she appeared two or three times a week, typing and answering the phone.

  When Stern happened by, she would smile idly, a self-contained human being, hard to decipher beyond a heavyhearted stoical exterior.

  "You are a student?" he asked her one day, impulsively, when he was in the hallway near the small interior office that she shared with two other women.

  "Me? No. I finished college three years ago. Four. Why would you ask?"

  "I imagined-" said Stern. He was lost, as usual, for the proper word.

  "That I was younger," she said.

  "Oh, no." This truly had not entered his mind,
but the young woman seemed to shrink from him. She had embarrassed herself by exposing this. vulnerability. '"I wondered simply how you were otherwise engaged, when you were not here."

  "You think I have something better to do than my father' s typing?"

  "Miss," said Stern, but he saw then that she was attempting to be coquettish and was, simply, awkward at it. "I am certain you are capable of many things."

  She did not answer. He turned away, morose, Truly, he was doomed with this family. A few days later, however, as he was passing in the hall, she called.

  "Mr. Stern?" He looked in, not certain that it was her voice he'd heard. Her eyes were down as she pecked at the typewriter, a substantial mass of black cast iron.

  Eventually, she spoke, though it seemed to require considerable deliberation. "Tell me, Mr. Stern, what did you suppose I studied?"

  Oh, dear. Now what? He seized on something likely to be inoffensive.

  "My estimate, I suppose, is that you were a musician." Her immediate look of pleasure was incandescent. "My father told you."

  "No," said Stern, enormously relieved.

  "You enjoy music?"

  "Very much." This was not really a lie. Who did not like music? She had studied the piano for many years, she said.

  She mentioned composers whom Stern knew merely by name.

  Vaguely, they agreed to enjoy music together on some future occasion.

  Yet, as Stern came away from the conversation, he was struck again by how peculiar this young woman seemed.

  College educated and half-idle, full of such taut sensitivity. How old was she? Twenty-four or twenty-five, Stern calculated, a year or two older than he. Old for a girl not to be married,. even in the States.

  The next week, Henry called him to his office. On his way, Stern feared that his eviction was about to be consummated, but he could tell at once, from the way Henry groused and pawed about,' that he had something else on his mind. If Henry were revoking a license at will, he would do it without hesitation.

  "We can't use these," Mittler said. "Pauline and I."