The Burden of Proof kc-2

by Scott Turow

  "Dad, not now."

  "I am not here to criticize you. On the contrary, I believe-"

  Peter leaned down to his father and spoke with a determined clarity.

  "Dad, there's somebody here. I have a guest."

  With that, on cue, a distinct cough was emitted from the bedroom. There was no mistaking the sound, either.

  It was a man.

  "I see," said Stern: He stood up at once. As resolved as he was to resist this, a response of dizziness, sickness gripped him. This lifestyle, choice-whatever it was called-remained beyond him. Not the acts, but the very philosophy. Stern, in truth, did not care much for men.

  They were rough, sometimes vicious, and generally unreliable. Women were far better, except, of course, they frightened him. "Well, we must speak soon," said Stern. He attempted to look at his son, but failed by a fair margin and instead let his eyes fall to the toe of his shoe.

  There he saw a briefcase, the visitor's no doubt, resting against the block of laminate that passed for the coffee table. The case was zippered, blue vinyl, with a large brass tag hanging from it. Stern had seen the case before. With that realization, he felt an outbreak of something else-panic, riot, emotion out of control: the man was someone he knew. "Look, we'll have dinner," said Peter. "This evening?"

  "Not tonight. But I'll call." Peter rested a hand.on his elbow.

  It was, of course, weak and sick. There were secrets he could live without.knowing, were there not? Life's compulsions were hopeless.

  Obliquely, Stern glanced back at the briefcase. The tag was an enlargement of the man's business card-Stern had seen these items beforesbut it was not visible from here. He let Peter lead him two steps to the door.

  "Sometime this week," said Stern. "Soon after, I may be in jail."

  "Jail?"

  "An interesfmg story."

  Peter at once waved a hand. He did not want to know-or to have his visitor hear it. With that, that clue, there was a sudden pulse of alarm. Stern let his eyes shift to the case again. With the gif of farsightedness, the tag might be legible.

  And it was. Not the name, actually. He recognized the crest. When he did, Stern pulled his ann free from Peter's grasp and bent to be sure he had made no mistake. "Oh, shit," said Peter behind him.

  Stern stood up and covertly pulled on the hem to straighten his jacket? a courtroom gesture that he used before confronting a difficult witness.

  "Agent Horn," said Stern loudly. "Show yourself."

  "Oh, shit," Peter said again, more despairingly:

  Stern did not bother to look back at his son. He was watching the bedroom door.

  "How do you say it, Agent? 'Don't make me come in there to get you'?"

  Kyle Horn, in his sport coat and white shoes, stepped into the living room. He was chewing gum, trying to smile.

  "Hey, Sandy," he said.

  When Stern finally glanced about, Peter had taken a seat on his sofa and was looking out the window toward the far distance, where he no doubt he wished to be. Horn, shameless, had continued smiling. Stern was erect as a soldier.

  "Please tell the distinguished United States Attorney for me that it will be a most interesting set of motions." Horn at once shook his heM.

  "We didn't do anything wrong. Nobody's rights got violated.

  You can just cool it." "I shall not 'cool it." Any person of decent sensibility will be deeply offended. To use counsel's son-the target's nephew-as an informant?"

  "It was all done right," said Horn. He approached Stern briefly and snatched his case from near Stern's shoes.

  "You'll see."

  "I shall never see," said Stern.

  Horn was near the door. He pointed to Peter, a fomi o/ goodbye.

  "Stay in touch," he told Peter.

  "What can I say, Kyle? 'Shit happens'?"

  "Hey," said Horn as he opened the door. He actually winked.

  "Life," he told Peter, "is full of surprises."

  "I'M not sorry," Peter said to his father. "It was the g right thing to do. So don't give me d it was. Not the name, actually.

  He recognized the crest. When he did, Stern pulled his ann free from Peter's grasp and bent to be sure he had made no mistake. "Oh, shit," said Peter behind him.

  Stern stood up and covertly pulled on the hem to straighten his jacket? a courtroom gesture that he used before confronting a difficult witness.

  "Agent Horn," said Stern loudly. "Show yourself."

  "Oh, shit," Peter said again, more despairingly:

  Stern did not bother to look back at his son. He was watching the bedroom door.

  "How do you say it, Agent? 'Don't make me come in there to get you'?"

  Kyle Horn, in his sport coat and white shoes, stepped into the living room. He was chewing gum, trying to smile.

  "Hey, Sandy," he said.

  When Stern finally glanced about, Peter had taken a seat on his sofa and was looking out the window toward the far distance, where he no doubt he wished to be. Horn, shameless, had continued smiling. Stern was erect as a soldier.

  "Please tell the distinguished United States Attorney for me that it will be a most interesting set of motions." Horn at once shook his heM.

  "We didn't do anything wrong. Nobody's rights got violated.

  You can just cool it." "I shall not 'cool it." Any person of decent sensibility will be deeply offended. To use counsel's son-the target's nephew-as an informant?"

  "It was all done right," said Horn. He approached Stern briefly and snatched his case from near Stern's shoes.

  "You'll see."

  "I shall never see," said Stern.

  Horn was near the door. He pointed to Peter, a fomi o/ goodbye.

  "Stay in touch," he told Peter.

  "What can I say, Kyle? 'Shit happens'?"

  "Hey," said Horn as he opened the door. He actually winked.

  "Life," he told Peter, "is full of surprises."

  "I'M not sorry," Peter said to his father. "It was the g right thing to do. So don't give me your disdainful look."

  Peter held his father's eye a second, then moved away. From his refrigerator, he removed a bottle of soda, pulled off the cap, and sat alone at the small butcher-block table, where he drank down the contents. When he belched he covered his mouth, then appeared to concentrate on the wall.

  Stern eventually followed him into the kitchen, a narrow white-washed space built with typical late-century efficiency, the toaster and microwave slotted beneath the cabinets. Stern swung his dark suit jacket over the back of the wire-mesh chair opposite Peter's and sat.

  His son glanced at him once or twice.

  "Peter, I believe I am representing an innocent man."

  Peter removed something from his tongue and stared, at his fingers.

  "He hasn't told you,anything, has he?"

  Stern reflected. "Very little."

  "That figures. I couldn't imagine you were hold'rag back for tactical reasons." He was still not looking at his father. "I was pretty sure you didn't know."

  "I know enough, Peter, to believe you have been spread-irlg lies."

  Peter turned to him then.

  "Don't make judgments," he said. "You don't understand how it happened."

  Neither spoke. The compressor clicked on in the refrigerator and a bus wheezed by down in the street. Peter flexed his jaw about ruminatively.

  "About five or six weeks before More died," said Peter, "Kate come to see me. One morning, before school. She's forty-five minutes in traffic and as soon as she gets here she does a beeline for the.john and I hear her retching. So the great diagnostician says-'You know, maybe you're pregnant." And she answers, 'I am. That's why I came. I need the name of a decent place to get an abortion."

  "I'm like, what? And so she tells me this long, involved story. About John. How he thinks he'll never be anything that matters. How inferior he feels in this family. You know, everything we've all thought to ourselves a million times. And how, because of that, and because of her, too, he'
s done something really stupid at work. Really, really stupid.

  "He had his heart set on becoming a floor trader. I guess his idea was that if he could show some ability, he was going to ask you and More to put up the money so he could rent a seat. But Uncle.Dixon wouldn't really 16t him near the pits. John kept asking. But Dixon thought the same thing about him as everybody else: dumb as a post. And he's not.

  He really is not."

  "Apparently not," said Stern. Peter, absorbing his father's dry tone, actually smiled.

  Kate, Peter said, believed no one would take John seriously until he could demonstrate that he had made money trading.

  So she suggested they open an account at MD. He was right there on the central desk. He could put in his own orders.

  It would be almost as ff he were in the pits. Kate signed the forms.

  They both knew that employees of member firms weren't supposed to trade, but it was a minor infraction, Peter said. Everyone did it.

  "And they call it Wunderkind because that's what he is, you know, in their heads, that's who they figure he'll be."

  Peter dwelled on the thought. "I guess he'd promised her he could scrape together $5,000 to get started, but neither one of them is making much money, and so, eventually, he got another idea."

  The idea was trading ahead. He'd put in small orders here when he knew that big orders were going to be executed in Chicago or New York. And he'd learned enough when he'd working in MD's operational areas to know how to use the house error and Wunderkind accounts to/hide the profits.

  "He promised himself that he was only going to do it once or twice, just to get himself starteA. Famous last words from the' penal colony, right."?" Peter asked.

  "Those," said Stern, "and 'Just one more time."

  "Right."

  Peter actually laughed for a second. Then he sobered himself and went on. "Obviously, the front-running worked.

  But when he traded, the morgy was gon like that." Peter snapped his fingers. "He decided he didn't have enough capital to handle the ups and downs in the market. What he needed was real money. So he traded ahead again, say thirty times, and picked up $300,000 in a month."

  "And why did he simply not buy his sat on the Exchange at this point?" asked Stern.

  "Why didn't he do a lot of things?" Peter smiled, in a way.

  "I think basically he was afraid to. He couldn't explain to anybody where the money came from. And, frankly, he still didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground as a trader.

  He'd have lost the seat in a week. He wanted to try to stay even for a couple of months."

  "And how much, may I ask, did YOur sister know about this?"

  "Kate?" Peter leveled a hand. "Obviously, she knew about the Wunderkind account. But she didn't know where the initial money came from. Not yet."

  "Not yet," said Stern, mostly to himself.

  Peter removed two more bottles of soda from the refrigerator, and plunked one, uncapped, in front of his father.

  It was French mineral water, a brand Stern had never heard of, savored with a rose-petal aroma. Stern asked for a glass. "I take it John lost the $$00,0007"

  "Right. He did a little better, but eventually it was gone."

  "And so he stole again."

  "If that's what you call it."

  "That is what I call it," said Stern. "That is what a prosecutor would call it.And that' is what a judge would call it when he or she committed John to the penitenfary."

  Peter, in front of the white cabinets, turocd about. "Look, Dad, I spent summers down there. I'm not making excuses for him, but it's like nothing really exists. It's all numbers on a scoreboard. That's all.

  You trade ahead of customers, in ten or twenty lots, you don't hurt a soul. Not really.

  It's against the rules because if everybody did it the customers would get maimed. But one guy? No harm. It was found money. And it's money that a lot of people down there have found. You think Dixon never traded ahead of a customer?"

  "No one has ever cited Dixon as a moral exemplar."

  "That's for sure," said Peter with a flash of the same hard light he had shown when he said he wasn't sorry. Stern told his son to go on.

  It was at this point, Peter said, that Kate found out.

  There was a confession, said Peter, lots of tears.

  "She makes him promise that he won't do it again. He's ripped off another 275 K by now, and he reassures her. No way. No chance. He'll never have to do it again. And promptly goes right into the dumper in the market. So he's down to his last twenty, thirty thousand, and he makes The Big Mistake. He hears all these ramors about left-handed sugar. You know about that?"

  "Enough," said Stern.

  "John thinks he's got inside dope-he bets the ranch that the world sugar market is going to collapse. And he gets creamed. Destroyed. The market goes up so fast he can't even get out. When the smoke clears, not only has he lost every penny in the Wunderkind account he now owes MD $250,000 to pay for the losses in the value of the positions over and above his equity."

  "Enter Dixon?" asked Stern.

  "Almost," said Peter. "First, John panics. You can say anything you want to about what he did, but it was low risk. Different Exchanges?

  And the best bean counter in America couldn't follow the paper trail between the error account and the Wunderkind account without someone to help him. But now, with a quarter-million-dOllar deficit, he's in deep.

  Obviously, they have no money. And he can't like come to the family for a loan. So he takes what seems to be the only alternative. He starts trashing all the records that show who owns the account-you know, the idea is that way they can't find him. He zaps the computer system, he cleans out the files here. He fries up the microfiche.

  Unfortunately, the duplicate fiche is in Chicago. John had actually called a clerk there with some bullshit and had him ready to send the dupes, but the clerk asked what'shername first. Who's in charge there?"

  "Margy Allison."

  "That's it." Margy, Peter said, called Dixon, who by then had heard from MD's accounting department about the Wunderkind account and its sizable deficit balance. Dixon told Margy to send him the records John had requested. When he summoned John to his office two days later, Dixon had the pages he'd printed' out off the fiche and the account statements spread across his desk.

  "He had John sit down in one of those Corbusier chairs he's got, the deep square ones with the stainless-steel frames?

  Then he gets hold of John by the tie, puts his knee in his chest, and beats the living crap out of him. Quite a scene, apparently. Dixon's big,' but he's not John's size. But John lies there like a lump, bleed'me and crying, just sort of begging."

  Peter grabbed a bit at his rumpled hair. Dixon by then had written his own check for the deficit in the Wunderkind account. He preferred that to admitting to his best customers, the ones who had placed the large orders John had traded ahead of, that no one noticed while an employee-worse yet, a relation-had stolen them blind. And he couldn't simply write off the debit without drawing a great deal of attention from his in-house accountants. It was all one pocket or the other, anywi, and to cover himself with the customers, Dixon preferred to keep this quiet.

  "But, of course," said Peter, "Uncle Dixon was tear-ass.

  John's fouled his nest, put the whole business in jeopardy, and Uncle Dixon announces that John's going to pay for it, Dixon-style. Big speech. 'You are now my fucking slave."

  "Peter thrust his elbows out in imitation of Dixon and rumbled on; he was an able mimic.

  "'You've seen your last raise or bonus in this century, and you'll do anything I decide you'll do, whenever I want. you'll be a floor runner or a window washer or the guy who cleans the latrines, if that's what I say. Aod if you ever think about leaving, or so much as crap crooked, I'll ruin you. I'll take the hit with the customers, and I'll call the CFTC, the FBI, George Bush, anybody I can think of, and I'll tell them this has been laying heavy on my soul, and I'll beg them
to fry your ass." And to back it up, Dixon makes a big show of taking all the account records and throwing them in his personal safe and telling John that they're always going to be there."

  "John believed Dixon would carry through?"

  "You bet your life."

  Stern thought about Margy's story and the legend of Dixon's wrath murmured among his employees. Dixon, no doubt, was convincing when he bragged about his own cruelty.

  "In fact, Uncle Dixon says, on second thought, he will turn John in.

  He's going to turn him in tomorrow. Tomorrow comes and he says it'll be the day after that. Then he's back on the fence. And so this is John's life. He works on the order desk. Then, when everybody's gone, Dixon finds something humiliating for him to do, like sort the, trash.

  And then every other day Dixon says he's thought it'over, the best course for him is just to drop the dime on John.

  One day he calls John to his office, while he phones the CFtC Enforcement Division and has this long chat about error accounts. He gets hold of a photo of John and draws bars across it. He even gives John the draft of a letter that Dixon says he's sent to the U.S.

  Attorney. Every day, it's something else. My beloved uncle is practicing extreme mental cruelty. Hard to believe of him, of course." Stern, tempted to comment, said nothing at all.

  "So that's where this thing is when Kate comes to see me.

  John is in Uncle Dixon's prison, which by now, he figures, is ten times worse than the real thing. At this point, Kate and he have decided the only thing John can do is bite the bullet: John will call the FBI and confess and go to prison, and Kate will terminate her pregnancy. This is their life plan. And riobody's kidding. All right?"

  Peter finished his soda and burped again. He nodded to his father.

  "Did you think perhaps," said Stern after a moment, "that I might be helpful in an arena in which I have worked for most of my life?"

  "First of all, Dixon was your client, which means he was an object of religious worship. And second, what the hell would you do?"

  "Obviously, I would speak with Dixon."

  "And how would you prevent him from going to the law?

  That's what he said he'd 'do. That would leave John without even the benny of having turned himself. in."