Scott Turow - The Burden of Proof

He thought suddenly: What happened there at the end? If anger and despair had emboldened her wildly, would he have stopped her? 'Oh, what do you care?" He still had no idea what Fiona had meant, but recollected, her remark set up a shiver, as if it were a tantalizing message of libertine permission. What did he care?

"Absurd," he said aloud, and tried to sleep, galled to think that he was taken up with half-drunk fantasies of Fiona. Fiona! She was one of those creatures he had never found appealing. But now, as he crept in and out of a dusky night-town on the borders of sleep, she appeared in his mind alarmingly confused with the young woman for whom Nate had spumed her. Clara had been twenty pounds overweight since Peter's birth, and Stern did not recall wishing even for a second that that were not so. But now he dwelled on the slim body of that much younger woman, transposed in dreaming moments to Fiona. Near five he slept solidly and then bolted awake. He had had the crudest and most direct of dreams that he had supplanted Nate; his penis stood erect, burning with sexual and urinary urgency. What nimble ges-lure, he wondered with sudden languor, would have been utilized to speed his response? He imagined, somehow, the fingering of a flute.

Before six, he drove down to the office. The sky was beginning to be colored, gray and rose, a certain prairie feel to it. The night of sleeplessness left him feeling shattered; he concentrated poorly, while the sensations of his smoky dreams persisted, leaking over him. Behind his desk, he remained stimulated, so that even his fingertips, the hairs atop his knuckles, were quick with sensation. And he heard, remote but insistent, that insinuating voice:

Oh, what do you care?

THREE years ago, Stern had been retained to represent the chief deputy in the Kindle County Prosecutor's Office, who was charged with murdering a female colleague. It had been the tri-cities trial of the decade, revealing tawdry passions and political intrigues, and Stern's role had briefly fiveted attention on him across the nation. In the aftermath, his practice, never insubstantial, had grown significantly. While formerly he'd had one associate, Stern now employed three younger lawyers, all of whom insisted lately that at least one more attorney was needed. One of the lawyers working for Stern, Alec Vestos, dealt exclusively with civil matters and was 'largely on his own; Stern, even three decades along, felt little confidence with the endless rigmarole of civil procedure-depositions, interrogatories, and requests to admit.

The other two lawyers-Raphael Moya and Sondra Duhaney-were both former state defenders and had come to Stern about the same time, two years ago. They followed criminal files in the state court, while Stern usually took principal responsibility for the federal criminal work.

Alec, Raphael, and Sondra were capable of handling most matters without guidance, and since Clara's death, they had been piloting the ship.

Stern's hours here were significantly reduced. After his broken nights, he would find himself in the mornings stricken by morose visions from his dreams, often too forbidding to fully recollect.

He would lie in bed, feeling as if he were coated by film, seeing himself in a distant, abstracted way as some figure on air, like one of the dybbuks dancing through the background of a Chagall, or an astronaut barely tethered to his capsule, someone who was nowhere, in no field of gravity, able at any instant to drift off forever into the limitless universe. When he managed to rouse himself, he felt enervated as soon as he passed through the office door.

The dispositions of a lifetime.made it impossible for him to treat legal problems with indifference; the law would ever amaze him, the way some children were always fascinated by a certain toy. Even now, his abilities struck him as unimpaired; yet his commitments were lagging.

Clients with their problems, their urgencies-it all seemed beyond his present reserves. There was a limited number of matters to which Stern was inalterably committed. The rest were shifted to the younger lawyers. Each day here he would receive reports from his associates, meet with those clients he was required to see, examine pleadings, make the necessary phone calls or court appearances, and spend the remainder of the day in aimless desultory reflection. He would say he was thinking of Clara, but that was not completely so. He meditated on virtually anything: TV advertisements, graffiti on an alley wall; the children and their miseries; groceries he needed; bills; planting he still had time to do; the four or five occasions he had promised to return with Clara to Japan and had failed to make the trip, or even preparations. Last week he had read brochures on a new word-processing system for an entire day.

He had closed the cover on his case, preparing for his night of wandering at home, when Alec appeared with a telecopy that had.just arrived in the mailroom. It was near seven,. and the office was still, only the Iawyers present, surveying what remained now that the phones had stopped ringing. The message Stern had received-a cover sheet and a letter-identified Dixon as its sender, transmitting from his magnificent stone home in Greenwood County,. where his study was replete with gadgets: fax, computers, tickers, modems. A modem executive, Dixon was never out of touch. The phone rang then, Stern's private number. 'You get that?" Dixon asked.

"I am studying it now." As promised, Dixon's case was one of the few matters to which Stern had given continuing attention. He had tracked down the three clients of Dixon's mentioned in the govemment's subpoena whom he had not reached before. Their lawyers continned that each had been contacted by the FBI, but only one was willing to provide Stern with copies of the records the grand jury had subpoenaed. Then, earlier this week, AI Greco, from Dixon's office here in DuSable, had called with the names of two large local customers who had received subpoenas for the same kinds of documents. The govemment's specific con-ceres were no more apparent.

The letter.Dixon had faxed, however, offered some insight.

It was from his personal banker at First Kindle, who announced that yet another grand jury subpoena had been served on the bank more than a month ago. According to the letter, agents had visited the bank and briefly reviewed the statements for Dixon's checking accounts. Then, pursuant to the subpoena's command, they had required copies of all items Dixon had deposited and the checks he had written over the last year. This was an exhaustive task, requh-ing clerks to search through reels of microfilm, but the bank was scheduled to finally produce these items next week. The FBI, as usual, had requested confidentiality, yet the banker, after consultation with his lawyers, had determined to advise Dixon should he wish to venture any objection. The letter portrayed this gesture as an act of heroic defiance in behalf of a valued customer, but it was, in truth, routine.

"What does it mean?" asked Dixon.

Many things, Stern knew. Certainly that Dixon was the target of th9 government's inquiry; and that somehow they had figured out where Dixon banked. At this point, a few months ago, Stern would have lit a cigar as a way to gather a moment to think. His fingers still wandered toward the handsome crystal ashtray on his desk, as if the nerves had some instinct of their own. It was twenty-nine days, by his calculation, since he'd had his last cigar, the day he flew off to Chicago. This was a lugubrious South American notion, he knew, the idea of a penance, moth-eaten Catholic baggage he was still lugging around from his adolescence, and he a Jew at that. It was typical of the entirely unpredictable ways that Argentina would episodically haunt him.

"It me's office here in DuSable, had called with the names of two large local customers who had received subpoenas for the same kinds of documents. The govemment's specific con-ceres were no more apparent.