Scott Turow: The Burden of Proof

Stern only shrugged.

While Radczyk was on the phone, Stern returned to Helen.

She had not moved. She was st'ill in her robe, still pale and stricken, barefoot, with her thin calves looking white without hosiery. The brandy glass was beside her. Stern took it up again and told her what he planned.

"It will be much easier this way for Silvia," said Stern.

Dixon and he were to have lunch with her today. Stern would drive out to the house and together they were going to tell her-that Dixon was going to plead guilty to two counts of mail fraud next week, and soon after would be confined in a federal penitentiary, probably the one in Minnesota, for a year, ten months; actually, with good time. It had not been a task he had been looking forward to, and in a peculiar way the notion that he had already shouldered some ominous duty toward his sister made the thought of what was now at hand easier by some bare measure.

"Silvia," said Helen. With that realization she started crying again.

"I was trying to get even with you, I sup"You were entitled."

She wiped her nose on her sleeve before Stern could get out his hanky.

"I was," said Helen, as only she could, in her frank, emphatic way. "I was so hurt, Sandy. I feel. Felt. Shit."

She lowered her head and laughed and cried at once. "He would have dropped me, anyway. -He hadn't come by for days and he told me tonight that he'd decided we had to break it off. I couldn't believe it. Jilted by the replacement, too." Helen smiled a bit, but then the thought of something, the moment probably, carne back to her and she wrapped her arms about herself and closed her eyes. "He was trying to comfort me," she said.

She took a second.

"I should have known better. I tried to get even with Miles, too, 'after I found out about him. Did you know that?

That I hd an affair before I left him?"

"No. Should IT' "I always felt everyone knew. Didn't you? I was certain you did, that night."

Stern looked at her blankly. "What night?"

"When Nate dropped by," said Helen. "At your house? I'd brought dinner?"

He absorbed this, too.

"I do not approve," Stern said suddenly. "I understand. But I do not approve of any of this."

This utterance amazed him. Not so much the judgment as its sudden force. He realized that he st.ood revealed, a man of harsh opinions, which he ordinarily kept to himself. It seemed that he spoke mostly out of confusion, but the significance was not lost on Helen. She looked at him bravely, knowing, apparently, with her strong intuitions of him, that it was necessary that something be denounced. "Of course not," she said. Radczyk returned then.

"Okey-doke," he said. "All set. No report, no nothim This here never happened." He nodded politely to Helen. "I'll give you a hand," he said to Stern.

Dixon's clothes were strewn about the room. Stern gathered the items, but Radczyk took them from his hands. "Here, here, let me," he said.

"Homicide dick is half an undertaker."

When Dixon was dressed again, they carried him out. Radczyk took the ankles and Stern grasped Dixon's hands, clammy to the touch and strangely firm. The feel was like nothing human; cool, almost chilled.

Dead weight, they said. It was a considerable task. Helen walked away, at the sight of the body. They rested Dixon on a sofa in the small den off the kitchen and then Stern backed his' car into the garage.

Together, they laid Dixon out in the back seat and covered him with the same washed-out sheet. "I'll meet you down there," Radczyk said. "I gotta make a call, then I'll be there."

Stern insisted it was not necessary, but Radczyk would not hear of it.

"You gonna go walkin round Center City with a stiff, better have a badge along. Could get pretty peculiar, otherwise."

Radczyk drove off, and Stern returned to Helen, who had sat again on the bench, her place of contemplation for the night. She had dressed in the interval, a black top and stretch pants, and had washed her face clean of any makeup.

She looked plain, drawn but composed. He had been pondering his outburst, haunted now by embarrassment. Something-that high-and-mighty tone-was so wildly hypocritical. He began to apologize.

"Please, Sandy," she said.

He sighed at length.

"You must understand," he said. And so he told her, more directly than he ever could have imagined, about Clara: she and Dixon had had a brief affair some years ago. As he spoke, it occurred to him that there was nothing in the world he could not say to Helen Dudak.

"Oh, Sandy." She covered her open mouth with one hand.

"So you see," he said.

"Yes, of course." She closed her eyes. Then she took his hand. "He must have envied you terribly."

"Envied me?"

"Don't you see?"

The thought was breathtaking.

They sat together on the bench in silence. He would have to move along, he thought, meet Radczyk. She con-. tinued to hold his hand, and now Stern was reluctant to depart,

"How's your friend?" she asked presently.

He did not understand.

"Your new friend," Helen said.

"Oh, that." He smiled to himself. "Well past. Temporary insanity," he said. "I seem to have grown up again."

They were both quiet. EventualLy, Helen slumped and held her face in her hands in her familiar, youthful manner. "Do you believe,'; she asked, "that we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes all our lives?"

"There is that tendency," he said. But, of course, if he believed that the soul would forever be a slave to its private fetishes, why had he come to the U.S.? Why did he cry out for justice for those who were most often unredeemable? What, indeed, had he spent these months trying to transcend? "But I also believe in second chances."

"So do I," said Helen, and reached over again to take his hand.

After he married Helen the following spring, Stern told her on a number of occasions that it had all been foregone from the moment they had sat together on that bench. But this was not really true. For months after, he remained uncertain about many things, particularly himseft, the limits of his strength and the exact form of his wishes.

But as he rose to leave that night, he took her once more in his arms-Helen, who had been in bed with Dixon a few hours ago, and Stern, who had his body in the back seat of his carm and felt, as he embraced her in these impossible circumstances, if only for an instant, the clear bright light of desire. It was what he had felt when he greeted her tonight, but the events that had unfolded since had added a new urgency.

What was it? He could never explain, but as he had absorbed her peculiar confession, he had been full of strong emotion. In her disorder, her confusion, her hasty admission that she, like the rest of us, was still, for all her effort, partly invisible to herself, he adored her. So he held her another moment and told her a bit more of the story. About the latest turn of events with D'Lxon.

And the fact that his children were involved. He did not say how.

Helen, he knew, would want to share every secret, to tell each of hers and to hear from him everything he told no one else. And in time, he realized, he would probably do that. It was that moment, those discoveries, he would be talking about the following spring.

Then Mr. Alejandro Stern, heavy with thought and feeling, drove through the night, eerily aware of the presence behind him. At every light, he ffited down the rearview mirror so that he could look at the form in the back seat.

"My God, Dixon," he said out loud at one point. Envied him.

Envied, Helen said. For what? He was a fat man with a foreign accent.

The respect he claimed, esteem, was nothing, minor, transitory. What, really, were his achievements? A disordered family life? Poor Dixon.

His cravings were unending. Great men, thought Stern, had great appetites. Had someone said that? He was not certain, nor was he sure what name he would put to Dixon. Great something, was the thought tonight.