Scott Turow - The Burden of Proof

Helen's honesty was wonderful and endearing, but he also realized how uncertain it made him. She could set him on edge a dozen times a night with her straightforward observations, particularly of him. Was he brave enough to face Helen and her facts? She wanted to know everything about him and then make it better. At one point, turning away from the bar and looking across the enormous tent that had been pitched for this affair, he observed her in animated conversation with Silvia and found himself alarmed. This was a mismatch, Stern thought suddenly. His sister was a woman guarded by layers of the most protective refinements, much as the petals lay about the center of a rose. His first impulse was that she was somehow in danger.

He whisked Silvia away to dance.

"So?" asked Stern. His sister had known Helen only remotely over the years, having encountered her principally at family affairs.

"A charming person," Silvia answered, somewhat formally. He would have expected a similar response from Clara, who, no doubt, would have thought a contessa or professor a more fitting companion for Stern. At that point,.Helen came whirling by in Dixon's arms, looking happier than she had all evening. Helen, like most women, enjoyed Dixon's company.

'Is he the one who is in so much trouble?" she asked Stern as they were driving home on the highway cut between the dark hills.

"He is," said Stern simply. With her unfailing sense for what was important to him, Helen listened carefully to everything he told her about his practice, but he could not recall exactly what he'd said which led her to piece this together.

"Well, you'd never know it," Helen said. "He's quite entertaining."

"When he wishes to be," said Stern.

In the dark, she placed her head on his shoulder. Clara, raised in the fading era of rigid female posture, would never have been capable of this gesture, and he drove the hour back to the city with Helen drowsing, a.warm, comforting weight upon him.

Two nights later, they had a different kind of evening.

Helen's daughter,' Maxine, came to town with Rob Golbus, her husband of only a few months. Maxine had been Kate's childhood friend, and Helen proposed an evening out with all three couples-Kate and John, Maxine and Rob, Stern and her. With the perfect resourcefulness one expected from Helen, she figured out entertainment pleasing to everyone and bought tickets to a Trappers game, Stern was always delighted to spend a night in the handsome old park with its brick outfield walls and cantilevered upper decks, where skied fly balls occasionally came to rest as homers.

But there was soon an irritating undertone. Too much seemed to be assumed. Maxine spoke repeatedly of Helen and him visiting St. Louis, so that he began to feel both put upon and cornered, while Kate seemed coltish and jumpy all evening. When Helen casually-too casually-mentioned a remark Stern had made to her one morning this week at breakfast, Kate burst into the unnerved tittering one would have expected from an early adolescent. When John offered to go downstairs for refreshments, Stern eagerly rose to lend a hand.

With their order placed at the counter beneath the stands, they stood in silence. His son-in-law, laconic as ever, put on his glasses to watch the televised version of the game on the screen above the old fry grill. ,

"How is the matter proceeding?" asked Stern eventually, desperate for some topic of conversation. He thought, perhaps, to ask if Kate was bearing up; it had occurred to him that the stress of John's problems might have contributed to her worn look and high-strung mood.

"The matter?" John looked at him.

"The grand jury business." Stern had lowered his voice slightly.

"Oh." John poked his glasses back up on his nose and reverted to the TV.

"Okay."

"Klonsky, the Assistant United States Attorney, tells me you have found a lawyer."

"I guess." John hitched a shoulder. It was time for sports; the rest of this was bad news, workaday stuff.

"You are in excellent hands. Raymond is very experienced."

John removed his glasses.

"Oh, I didn't end up with him. I've got a guy named Mel."

"MelT' asked Stern. "Mel Tooley?" It was an article of professional decorum never to speak ill of another lawyer to his client, but Stern could not restrain the note of contempt. Mel TooIcy had not been on the list Stern had given John. The only list of Stern's where TooIcy might appear would be one naming the despised of the earth.

TooIcy, who had been the chief of the Special Investigations Division in the United States Attorney's Office unfl he entered private prac-ftce approximately a year ago, was one of those lawyers who seemed to be attracted to the profession because it legitimized certain forms of deceit. Stern's disagreements with TooIcy over the years were celebrated; legendary. No wonder Klon-sky had said she was surprised by the referral. How had John wandered into the clutches of a creature like that?

His son-in-law had already gathered up the box containing the tissued dogs and the beers and was mounting the concrete steps back to the boxes. Fraught with paternal anxieties and lawyerly rules, Stern followed, lecturing himself. It was, in a word, none of his business how John had chosen his counsel-even Mel TooIcy.

Halfway up the stairs he ran into Kate, literally, jostled against her as she was on her way down. They both exclaimed. Stern laughed, but she seemed startled to see him and jumped back. Here in the stairwell, better lit than the stands, he again noticed her appearance. She was nicely turned out in a sort of maternity sailor suit with a large red bow, but she looked drawn and, most shockingly, seemed to lack her childish blush. It was more than pregnancy, Stern suspected. John's situation was taking its toll. He instantly had the thought that this was the face of Kate's true adulthood. Whatever he had long expected was now in its onset. He touched her hand.

"Katy, are you all right?"

Fine, she answered, just on her way to the ladies' room.

She touched her stomach and added that it was for the third time.

"But is everything else-?"

"You mean John?" When he nodded, she seemed to wince fieetingly and touched her stomach again. She began to speak, then stopped herself. "I shouldn't say anything."

Kate had been briefed, he saw, fully informed. She had the facts, the procedures. In all likelihood, she knew a good deal more than he did.

"I quite agree. I merely wanted to reassure you."

"Daddy-"

"I have seen these situations often, Kate. Trust me. It will turn out all right."

"I only Wish, Daddy."

"You must be patient. It will all probably go on longer than any of Us like. But you should not worry."

"Daddy, please.. You're starting to sound like Mommy. She never wanted me to worry. 'Don't worry, Katy, don't worry."

"She had lifted her hands in imitation, quick, bird-Ye shapes.

"Sometimes I wonder: Did she think if I worried I was going to break or something?"

He considered this lament, so unlike her, not sure how to respond.

"Daddy, it's not that easy. Believe me." With that, she sighed, a despairing sound, and took another step down. "I have to go to the bathroom," she announced, and moved off in that direction. Stern watched her depart. What was that last bit about? But he thought he could read the portents in her mood clearly. She was worried not merely for her husband-but by him. Kate, not unlike her father, had learned more from John, and about him, than she had cared to know. John lumbered on, he slept nights, but his wife now had her eyes open. To himself, Stern briefly groaned and muttered one of his mother's Yiddish phrases. As he emerged into the open night air, the crowd was roaring over a fabulous catch by the right fielder Tenack. Ascending, Stern had seen the ball go by Yike a shooting star.