The Burden of Proof

by Scott Turow

  “This here thing,” Remo said, “is Friday time. You know what I mean?”

  Stern did not. He shook his head.

  “What’s your religion?” asked Remo. “Catholic, right?”

  Stern shook his head once more. With his Latin accent, he had long found that Remo’s mistake was often made. After all these years, he was certain that it would shock poor Remo to learn the truth. But Remo made no further inquiry. He was caught up with what he was saying.

  “See, in the Roman Catholic religion, for all the time I was growin up, the priests say, No meat on Friday, don’t eat meat on Friday. You know? Fish, that’s okay. Jell-O mold, that’s okay. But no meat. See, but guys done it. Lotsa guys. Sometimes you’d slip up or somethin, you know. You’d be eatin a steak, then you’d think like, Jesus, what day is this? Sometimes it’d be on purpose. I remember, when I was at St. Viator’s, there’s a group a us, we’d go for burgers just on Fridays. We’d sit in a booth in the window and wave to the Sisters when they went walkin by. I’m not kiddin.” Remo laughed to himself, and wobbled his large dark face. “Oh, we was bad.

  “Then all the sudden the priests change their minds. See? It’s okay now. Have whatever you like, no problem. But what happened to all the guys who’s down burnin in hell for eatin meat on Fridays, huh? You think they let them out? I asked the Father, you know, cause I’m wonderin. I asked, Those guys get out or what? Oh no, he says. God’s rules is God’s rules. You don’t fuck with them. You know. I mean, he don’t say you don’t fuck with them, but you get what I’m sayin.

  “So that’s this here thing—it’s Friday time. It’s bullshit. I didn’t do nothin. Honest to God, I cross my heart, it wasn’t my job. You know, I heard about this thing, so I shown up and all, I figured could be I’d get a piece.

  “But maybe these guys and I, maybe we done some things before. See? So that’s how it works out. It’s Friday time, on account of what we done before. So what can you do?”

  Remo shifted his large shoulders and raised his hands. He did not control God’s universe; he merely understood a few of its rules. In his mild brown eyes the look of conviction was deep. Stern, inclined to quarrel, stifled himself. Behind Remo he saw Sonia Klonsky, burdened with numerous case files, drifting by. He called after her and quickly shook hands with his client, leaving behind the one man in the courthouse who had no doubts about justice.

  “I must have a word with you about Margy Allison,” he said, coming abreast of her. Klonsky had apparently spent a typical morning for a trial Assistant: shifting between courtrooms, leaving messages with the clerks and other young prosecutors so that her cases, up for status or motions, could be passed while she ran between court calls. Stern attempted to complain about the government’s conduct in not serving him with Margy’s subpoena, but she showed no remorse.

  “You knew what our position was.” Klonsky strolled ahead, intent on her next court appearance. “Who’s going to be her lawyer?”

  “Is she a subject?”

  “Not at present.”

  “Then I intend to represent her.”

  Klonsky was prepared for this, too. “Stan thinks there’s a risk of conflict.”

  “Can you explain that?”

  “No.”

  “Then you may thank the United States Attorney for his ethical vigilance on my behalf and inform him that I shall be Ms. Allison’s lawyer.” His smile was personable; he meant to be firm, not snippy. “May I ask, as Margy’s counsel, a few questions?”

  “If you insist.”

  “What do you wish from her?”

  “Some documents.” Klonsky smiled but did not slow her pace. “Some questions. I have to go to Pivin.” She pointed to the courtroom of Judge Albert Pivin, seventy-eight years old and still presiding over an active calendar. Stern followed her inside, but the clerk saw her and called her case immediately and Stern went outside to wait across the hall from the courtroom doors. Emerging a few minutes later, she greeted him with a somewhat rankled look. Apparently, she had thought she was free of him.

  “Sandy, look. Personally, I don’t care what I tell you. But you know how Stan gets. He’s running a tight ship.”

  Stern followed her to the cloakroom, where she retrieved a light raincoat, then proceeded down the central alabaster staircase of the courthouse. Her business here was apparently concluded.

  “What exactly is it Stan Sennett has told you about me?”

  “Oh, don’t be like that. He has a great deal of respect for you. Everybody there does. You know that. Frankly, he looked very concerned the first time I told him you were involved in this case. I’m not supposed to admit that, am I?”

  “Oh, Mr. Sennett has no fear of me,” said Stern. “Old prosecutors merely love to praise their opponents. It adds immeasurably to the thrill of victory.” This gallantry, of course, was intended for the U.S. Attorney’s consumption. Like all men lacking self-confidence, Sennett was easily flattered and the South American in Stern was always alert to appease those in power.

  Klonsky was laughing out loud.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’re just taking you as seriously as we should.” She pushed out the doors of the courthouse. Spring was in its finale, the winds still sweet and the air light, just before it took on the burdens of summer.

  “What you are doing,” said Stern, “is limiting the information I receive, in order to protect your informant.”

  From her look, he could tell she felt he was trying to bait her. She did not answer.

  “Please,” said Stern. He took her by the arm momentarily. “I must ask you one or two more questions about Margy. Allow me to buy you coffee. I did not eat breakfast.” He pointed to a little restaurant on the corner called Duke’s, and to his surprise she came along without complaint. He meant what he said—he was hungry—and he found Ms. Klonsky, in spite of himself, pleasant and challenging company. Primarily, of course, he hoped that in a more amiable atmosphere she might be less resolute about guarding America’s secrets. Ms. Klonsky, as she had just demonstrated with her remark about Sennett, was not really equipped to be discreet. She understood the role, but her large, expansive character was still not comfortably confined by lawyerly proprieties. Like many young attorneys, she was imitating the mentor—Sennett, in this case—rather than making allowances for herself.

  Duke’s was little more than a lunch counter, a greasy spoon with an open grill under a spattered aluminum hood, and a number of old Formica tables. Klonsky set her files down when they were seated and lifted her face to the frying smells.

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “That is an overstatement. Reliable will suffice. You have never been?”

  She shook her head.

  “The proprietor,” said Stern, “is the little dark fellow you see in the kitchen. A Rumanian. He is best known for his sausage, which he makes himself and which he aptly refers to on the menu as ‘Ruination.’ Will you eat?” Stern already had the menu in hand.

  “I shouldn’t,” she said. “I’ve put on twelve pounds already.” But she picked up the laminated card nonetheless. “Your son-in-law got a lawyer, you know. I was a little surprised by your referral.”

  “Oh, well,” said Stern, and smiled fleetly. He, on the other hand, was well practiced in appearing agreeable yet remaining silent; how John chose his lawyer was not the prosecutor’s business. He had been troubled not to have heard something from his son-in-law, but Klonsky’s remark made it clear that he had followed Stern’s advice and retained Raymond Horgan. There were many people in the legal community puzzled by Stern’s affinity with Horgan. They’d had celebrated battles while Raymond was the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney, culminating in some uncomfortable moments three years ago when Stern had cross-examined Horgan, who appeared as a prosecution witness at the murder trial of Rusty Sabich, Raymond’s former Chief Deputy. But the law, much like politics, made its own strange bedfellows. Horgan’s large firm liked to send cases they could not handle due to conflicts to Ste
rn, who could not compete for the other legal work of the big corporate clients, and he naturally reciprocated.

  “What’s really good?” she asked.

  “The sausage, if you have the stomach for it. I am not certain it is suited to your present condition.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I’ve just started eating meat again. For the protein.”

  “A vegetarian?”

  “Oh, I’ve been very careful for years about what I eat. I was once very sick.” She looked directly at Stern, the hinge of some tentativeness clear in her eye. “Cancer,” she said.

  The waitress came then, saving Stern from a response. Ms. Klonsky had a disconcerting directness, a willingness to proceed past the recognized borders with little thought, a trait which made Stern uneasy. She asked for a single scrambled egg, while he ordered an omelette and two servings of the sausage. He promised her a bite.

  “What was I saying?” she asked. Stern did not answer, but she remembered herself and said simply, “Oh, yes.”

  “You appear a picture of health now.”

  “I think I am. I mean, I wouldn’t be in this condition—” She lifted a hand. “But so much of it is outlook. You really never forget about it. You tell yourself you’re well. You search for signs that you’re not, and when you don’t find them, you rejoice and tell yourself that you can go back to believing that you’re infinite, the way you did before.”

  “How old were you?”

  She raised her eyes to remember. “Thirty-five, thirty-six just about.”

  Stern shook his head. That was young, he said, for that sort of thing.

  “Well, you know how it is. You get to the hospital feeling why me, how me, and then there are plenty of people in the same condition, and worse.” She had asked for tea and interrupted herself to fish the bag in and out of the cup when the waitress brought it. “It didn’t seem so unusual there. But I was a very young thirty-six. My life was in chaos. I was in law school, but it was the fourth postgraduate education I’d started. I had no idea what I was doing. My relationship with Charlie was going through its one millionth crisis—” She raised her hands for emphasis, one wrist today bedecked with a row of bright plastic bracelets. “It just seemed so unbelievable to me that I was being shown the door, when I didn’t even feel I’d arrived.”

  The expression made Stern laugh. “What were your other postgraduate programs?”

  “Let’s see.” She raised her hands to count and again lifted her eyes to the grimy acoustical tiles of Duke’s ceiling. “From college, I went out to California for graduate school in philosophy, but I wasn’t ready for that, so I enrolled in the Peace Corps—remember that?—and was in the Philippines for two years. When I came back, I started graduate school in English, which is where I met Charlie. I left that because I couldn’t imagine actually writing a dissertation. But, of course, I’d finished all the class work before I figured that out. Then I taught for about a year and a half, then I went back to the U. as a graduate student in education. Then I gave up on the educational bureaucracy as hopeless. Naturally, I owed a fortune in student loans at that point. So I began thinking about getting a decent-paying job. Which led to law. There were some things in between, but they didn’t last long enough to mention.”

  “I see,” said Stern. “It does sound as if you had a hard time getting started.”

  “Not starting,” she said. “That was no problem at all. Finishing was hard. I always believed that I was not an achievement-oriented person, but when I got sick, I was really unhappy that I didn’t have a single thing I could look back to that I’d completed. It was as if I’d passed through and never even left tracks. It was pathetic. I was getting radiation. I was lying there with my hair falling out, recovering from surgery, and I had Charlie bringing me volumes of Hart Crane. I actually started writing my dissertation right there. And, naturally, one morning I vomited all over it. That, needless to say, was a low point.” She sat back, gripped by her own story. She picked up a dull steel fork off the table and stared at it. “I’m talking too much,” she said.

  “You are charming, Sonia,” he answered, and immediately felt he had been drawn into her habit of saying more than one should. He rushed on to something more neutral. “So you became a health-food person in the wake of your illness? My daughter, who is a lawyer in New York, comes home with a knapsack full of bags and bottles of such things. I’ve learned to ask no questions.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s me. Ms. Natural here. We drive around all day on Saturday and shop. Charlie has written poems about it. It really is better for you. But the doctor has been dropping some pretty broad hints about more protein.”

  “Your husband is a poet?”

  “A living, breathing, write-every-day poet. He actually puts it in our tax return: ‘Poet.’ He has another job, naturally. You have to. Charlie likes to say we have the same employer.” She smiled. “He’s a postal clerk. He was an instructor in the English Department at the U. for years, but he couldn’t hack the politics. And he makes more money this way and gets more time to write. It’s an absolutely impossible, impractical life, to which he’s completely devoted.” She smiled once more, somewhat fitfully this time. Perhaps she felt she was being disloyal. She looked again at the silverware and took a second to praise her husband’s verse.

  The eggs came then.

  “God,” said Klonsky, “what is that black lump?”

  “Ruination,” he said. “What else?” Stern cut a piece and lifted it toward her, but she made a horrible face and raised both hands.

  “It makes me queasy just to see it. It looks like something excreted.”

  Stern dropped his fork to the plate.

  “Young woman,” he said darkly, “this is my breakfast.”

  She began to laugh then, a fine trilling note full of joy and congratulation. He laughed himself and she got caught up in her own amusement and went on until she had to use her napkin to wipe her eyes. She managed to say, “Bon appetit,” and began to laugh again.

  He started to eat in spite of her.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Don’t let it get cold.”

  “It happens to be good. And I am quite hungry.”

  “You must be.” She broke down one more time. She tried, with a few false starts, to control herself.

  “Are you sure you will not try some?” He lifted his fork in a perfect deadpan, and set her off once more. This time he laughed himself for quite some time.

  She told him he was a good sport.

  “I am accustomed,” Stern told her. “My daughter in New York lectures me about meat. She has ruined a number of meals.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Stern told her.

  “Marta. That’s beautiful. I’m thinking about names all the time now. It seems so important. The first thing. And I don’t want my child to feel that I’ve done what my mother did to me.”

  “You do not care for Sonia?”

  “I hated it as a child. My mother was this very heavy lefty? A big-deal labor type, until her union threw out the Commies. I was named for a Russian revolutionary killed in the revolt of 1905 and I resented being somebody else’s symbol. I wanted to be called Sonny. Which threw my mother into a rage. She thought I was being anti-feminist. Then I got to be forty years old and a lawyer, and all of a sudden I wanted a name that would sound professional. So I’m Sonia in the office. And my old friends still call me Sonny.” She laughed at herself. “That’s a little like what you do. You say Alejandro in court, but you introduce yourself as Sandy.”

  Stern smiled in an allusive way, reflecting his own inscrutability, but he was flattered to think he had been so closely observed. It was natural really, he told himself, for her to keep watch on a likely adversary.

  “My mother was an obliging sort. She called us by different names, depending on the locale. I had a Yiddish name. A Spanish name. And, of course, she desperately wanted me to fit in here. Even at the age of thirteen, I could recognize that it
was not an optimal period for Alejandros in the U.S. I suppose you may take my using Sandy as a sign of weakness on my part.” This was very much as he thought of it—that he had yielded. His mother was a powerful person in her home. He seldom spoke of her but she was still with him every day, with her dark shrewd eyes, her teeming social ambitions, and her desperate pained hope that his father would somehow become the man she had envisioned instead of the poor wounded thing he was. Stern tended to remember her as she appeared on the nights she and his father went to the opera. The rich gown made a somewhat opulent display of her large proportions; her reddish hair was held in place by a diamond-studded comb, and her entire figure appeared gripped by her fierce determination to be seen, and remembered. He had always known that every fiber of strength in him derived from her.

  “So how did you settle on Marta?” Klonsky asked. “Was it a better world for Alejandros by then?”

  “She is named for my mother,” said Stern. He laughed at that and shared a look with her, the complexities of these facts seemingly lost on neither of them. Then he lifted his fork. “Last bite,” said Stern.

  She covered her mouth amid a muffled retching sound and Stern played along.

  “I’ll have you know, young woman, this is the best breakfast I’ve had for days.” For effect, he rang the tines of the fork against the dish, but the remark, intended in jest, somehow carried a forlorn suggestion of his personal plight. Ms. Klonsky gave him a sideways look, sweet and sad and lingering, and Stern suddenly was deeply embarrassed. He had disciplined himself to avoid this approach to anyone: Pity me. Feel for me. He looked down once more at his plate.

  “You were going to tell me what you wished with Margy,” he said. He heard her sigh. But when he looked up, she had folded her hands and gathered herself.

  She corrected him: “You were going to ask some questions.”