Scott Turow - The Burden of Proof

"Will you name her for Mommy?" Marta inquired of Kate. She seemed more absorbed than her sister with this baby.

Silvia, passing through the solarium, frowned at Marta's directness, but both young women were accustomed to it.

Marta had always had her way with Kate.

"I suppose," said Kate. "Either a boy or a girl. Unless you would mind, Daddy."

Stern looked up from his cards-but he had not' missed a word.

"It would please me if you chose to do this." He smiled gently at Kate.

In his fie, he felt a sudden closeness in the room. Dear God, the turmoil. Things seemed to come at him from all directions. He felt like those paintings he would sometimes see in museums and churches of St.

Sebastian shot full of arrows and holes, bleeding like a leaking hose.

To his enormous chagrin and surprise, he found he had started, silently, to cry again. The tears ran down both sides of his nose. Around him, his children watched, but made no comment. The days, he supposed, would go like this. He removed his handkerchief from his back pocket and found the medical laboratory bill he had examined early this morning. He had entirely forgotten it.

"I shall return in a moment." He headed off to find a Kleenex. Better jam his pockets. From the kitchen, he looked back to the sun room, where his Children, grown up but wounded by their grief, awaited him.

Oh, how these children had mattered to Clara! he thought suddenly. What a worshipful passion. She had been raised with servants, by well-intentioned but limited nannies and governesses. She would have none of that with her own.

Again an image: Coming home, One of those occasional evenings when he was here before they were all in bed, to find her on her knees in the kitchen. Peter sat at the table reading; Marta was crying; Kate was having her dress hemmed. The little girl, her shins blotched, stood motionless as her mother fingered the garment. On the stove, a pot was boiling over. Lord, the clamor and the ferment. Clara looked up to greet him and puckered out a lip to blow a stray lock that had fallen down into her eyes. She smiled, smiled. It was miserable, hard work, as it had always been, a numbing routine of humdrum tasks, but Clara found music in the banging and tumult of family life.

Stern, in his simple-minded way, thought little of this.

Only now could he see that she made herself a devoted audience to their sounds in their needs-as a distraction from that dismal bleat that must have always whistled away within her.

"Sender?" Silvia was standing beside him, concerned. His sister wore her hair in her usual upswept hairdo, a person of simple, graceful beauty her entire life, still smoothfaced and radiant at the age of fifty-one. She had always called him by his Yiddish name, as their mother had.

He smiled faintly to reassure her, then cast his eyes down.

The medical invoice, he noticed, was still in his hand and he passed it with little thought to Silvia, addressing her in a circumspect tone. He asked if Clara had ever spoken of this.

Once more, the doorbell rang. Down the long hall, Stern saw Marta admit two young men in sport coats. They waited inside the foyer, as Marta called out for Dixon. One of the two looked familiar. Henchmen or flunkies, Stern estimated.

Dixon had retainers around him like a Mafia don. His business never ceased and his need to learn what was occurring was constant. The one Stern thought he'd seen before was carrying an envelope and a blue vinyl briefcase. Papers to sign, perhaps? Dixon was going to do a deal on the casket.

Silvia, in the interval, had examined the bill and handed it back. Alone they communicated as they always had, few words.

"Dr. Cawley, Nate, next door would know, no?" she asked.

Of course. Trust Silvia. Nate Cawley, their next-door neighbor, a gynecologist, was Clara's principal physician.

He certainly should have the answer. Stern thought of phoning right now, then recollected that Fiona, Nate's wife, who had been among the visitors last evening, had mentioned, in her usual notable lament, that he was gone for a week on a medical conference. He reminded Silvia.

"Yes, yes." His sister, light-eyed and still striking, studied him earnestly. Apparently, she now shared some of the same thoughts Stern had had earlier.

Through the breakfast-room window, Stern saw the funeral parlor's limousine, dove-gray, swing smoothly into the circular drive before the house, parking behind the dark sedan of Dixon's visitors. Silvia headed off to summon the family. Girding himself, Stern stood.

But down the hall the commotion of angry voices suddenly rose. An alarming scene was taking place near the front door. Dixon was shouting. "What is this?" he yelled at the two men who had arrived only moments before. "What is this!" Above his head, he waved a sheet or two of paper.

Halfway there, Stern realized what had taken place. Now this! He could not manage the sudden ignition of anger; it had waited for days so near at hand, and now his heart felt as if it would fly out of his breast, like some NASA rocket trailing flame.

"You crummy so-andsos!" yelled Dixon. "You couldn't wait?"

Stern rushed to place himself between Dixon and the two men. He had realized where he'd seen the man he recognized-in the federal courthouse, not Dixon's offices. His name was Kyle Horn, and he was a special agent of the FBI.

Dixon was still carrying on. Stern by now had seized the paper from his hand and bulled Dixon a few steps farther back into the foyer. Then he briefly examined the grand jury subpoena. All as usual: a printed form embossed with the court seal. It was directed to Dixon Hartnell, Chairman MD Holdings, and commanded his appearance before a United States grand jury here, four days from now, at 2 P.M.

Investigation 89-86. Attached was a long list of documents Dixon was to have in hand. The initials of Sonia Klonsky, the Assistant United States Attorney, appeared at the bottom of the page.

"I refuse to allow this to take place," said Stern. Half a foot shorter than the agents, he maintained, in rage, the erect bearing of a martinet. "If you call my office next week, I shall accept service there. But not at this time." I require you to leave. Immediately. You may tell Assistant United States Attorney Klonsky that I deplore these tactics and shall not abide them." Stern opened the front door.

Horn was past forty. He looked like all the other FBI agents, with a cheap sport coat and a carefully trimmed haircut, but there was a weathered, leathery look to the skin about his eyes: too much sun, or alcohol: He had a bad reputation, the wrong type of agent, a petty tyrant full of resentments.

"No, sir," he said, He gestured toward the subpoena, which Stern had returned to its envelope and was now extending toward him. "That sucker is served."

"If you file a return of service with the court, I shall move to have you both held in contempt." It occurred to Stern vaguely that this threat was ludicrous, but he gave no ground. "Have you no idea of the nature of this occasion?"

Horn made no move. For a moment, none of the four men moved. Marta had crept to the edge of the living room and watched in grim amazement."

"We are preparing to depart for a funeral," Stern said at last. He pointed out the front windows to the mortuary limousine and the driver in his dead-black suit. "Of Mr. Hartnell's sister-in-law," said Stern.

"My wife."

The second agent, a younger man with blond hair, straightened up.

"I didn't know that," he said, then turned to Horn. "Did you know that?"

Horn stared at Stern.

"I know I can't seem to get a call back from Dixon Harmell.

That's what I know," Horn said. "I know I come by the front door and he's gone out the back."

"I'm.sorry," the younger agent said. He touched his chest.