The Burden of Proof (78 page)

WHEN Helen called, Stern was dreaming: Dixon had accosted him on a street comer. He was smoking one of Stern's cigars and in his usual joking manner was pointing out that he had gone bald. He circled his hand over his crown and with considerable satisfaction turned about so that Stern could see the large spot where the straight black hair had actually fallen away. As Helen spoke, the dream and its difficult feelings still swam within him and for just the barest instant he was convinced his dreaming had gone on.

"What?" He was lost. Was she crying?

"I need you." She seemed short of breath. When he had answered--as in the office, 'Stern here'--she had said repeatedly she was sorry to be calling. Sorry. Sorry. "I need you here. Please."

"Yes, yes. I shall be there momentarily."

In the bathroom, he felt unbalanced by the light. He splashed water on his face and gave up the thought of shaving. The line of a sheet was impressed on his cheek.

Had she even mentioned the problem? One of her children, he imagined.

The boy in college. He crept down to the garage.

When he started the Cadillac, the digital clock flashed on.

It was almost three; early Friday morning. He had been asleep since a little after nine, having gotten only an hour or two on Wednesday night.

Marta had kept him awake, demanding that he share in advance every thought and nuance that would go into the closing argument in U. S.v.

Cavarelli. Stern had delivered this argument at ten yesterday morning, then waited with poor Remo most of the day for the jury, which returned near five o'clock. Not guilty. With the verdict, Judge Winchell had fixed Remo with a sour look, but her sole comment had been to Moses Appleton: 'Better luck next time." Marta, who had assisted her father throughout, even cross-examined one of the surveillance agents, was eager to celebrate. Gracious to the core, Moses had insisted on buying both of them a drink.. After a single soda water, Stern had left Marta and Appleton for the sleep of the old and weary. Why were triumph and exultation always so fleeting? He drove through the night streets now, toward Helen's, waking gradually and increasingly alarmed.

Facing him, in Helen's drive, a van had been backed to the paneled door of the garage. In his own headlights Stern could read the lettering, reversed to be legible in rearview mirrors: gEl(IEIMA.qAq Not again, he thought, God, not again. He ran up the walk, his change and keys jumping in his pockets; he did not have to ring the bell.

Helen, by the door, swept it open and was in his arms at once, weeping and thanking him for coming.

He had caught her face for just a second, but it was a sight. She had been fully made up when she started crying.

A mess of liner was clumped along her cheeks, and the tears had washed away the cosmetics in streaks below her eyes. A tuft of her hair stood on end. In his arms, in spite of the heavy robe, he could tell that she was otherwise unclad, and all of this--the sight of her, the feeling now, her voice and breath, her urgent clinging--unloosed in him a tremendous wallop of sensation. His poor heart. It was like a barnacle drifting through the sea and ready to attach itself to any prominence.

And still how welcome all this was, her ardor, her presence, her declared need. Lord, what a dear person Helen Dudak was to him. For this instant he felt amazing gratitude.

"What? Please?" He held her hands.

She tossed her head about.

"I'm so sorry I had to call you. You were the only person I could think of. Sandy, please..." She did not finish; a retching sound escaped her.

She pressed her folded hand to her mouth and once more leaned against him.

"Lady, hey. Sir?" A latino in the ambulance service's brown uniform was on the landing of the staircase, beckoning down to both of them. "His no good." The man slowly shook his head.

Helen wailed, a brief wavering sound.

Stern was already on the way up, following the attendant, who had retraced his way along the staircase and was headed down the hall. In Helen's bedroom there was a terrible st'ink. The bed was unmade. And a man was in it, a crippled, still figure, unclothed, his face beneath the plastic form of an oxygen mask. In extremity, he had apparently lost control of his bowels. There was a second attendant here, a young white man, and both of them were busy with the equipment which they had at the bedside, two large green cast-iron tanks and a cart with wires and various apparatuses. On one corner of the king-sized bed, entirely unexplained, stood a small wooden end table. The latino, the one Stern had seen on the stairs, gestured to Stern in the doorway. He was removing the last lead from the man's chest.

"EKG?" He whistled and drew a smooth line in space.

"No good. They'll pronounce him at Riverside. Okay I use the phone? I got to call the cops." Before he moved on, the attendant leaned over and removed the air mask from the man in the bed and stopped to close his eyes, a quick stroke with his forefinger and his thumb. Even from the doorway, Stern could tell.

"Oh, dear God," he said out loud. Helen had arrived beside him. Stern was holding on to the doorjamb. "Who is it?" he asked her, moved by some impulse of propriety or hope.

Helen had not looked at him directly since he had arrived.

She gripped Stern's hand with both of hers and bowed her head a bit, so that her forehead rested against his shoulder. "Helen, please tell me that is not Dixon."

As before, she merely shook her head, the washed-Out tousles of fox-colored hair. She had no words for the moment. And in any event, what Stern wanted was something she could never say.

With the attendants' consent, it was Stern who summoned the police. He called Division 4 Homicide and insisted they rouse the lieutenant at home. When he called back, Stern put him on the line with the attendants. At the lieutenant's instruction, they were relieved, told tO go on their way and to leave the body to the police. Stern saw the two out as they bumped their tanks and cart over the threshold. Helen was seated right there, on a low, upholstered bench posi-rioned by the doorway to collect mail or packages or wraps. She remained downcast, looking into a snifter of brandy.

Stern sat beside her and she passed him the glass.

"I'm sorry I had to call," she said again.

"Please, do not--" A hand drummed in the air. The words did not need to be spoken. "In the act?"

She nodded with emphasis.

Dead with his boots on. Dixon Hartnell in his many lost vain moments would be abundantly pleased. Stern attempted without success to smile.

"And how long has this been going on?"

"Going on?"

"This," said Stern decidedly.

Helen glanced up.

"Sandy, please don't take that tone with me. He called. Did I do something wrong?"

Stern worked against the weight of various judgments, too shocked, it seemed, to follow his customary instinct for reticence.

"He is married, Helen."

"I'm not."

"No," Stern agreed.

"Do you think this was aimed at you somehow?"

Did he? God knows what he felt. He looked back up the stairs, where Dixon's body now lay beneath an old blue sheet, like some shrouded' piece of statuary.

"He called me. The week you left me high and dry, as a matter of fact. And I enjoyed his company. That's all."

"Very well," said Stern.

"He was very romantic," said Helen. Her face was harsh with unconcealed ire. "He'd call, he'd come by at any hour. He was charming."

"Yes, I see," said Stern. No need now to ask where Dixon was roaming to at night. His next utterance would be 'Enough."

They sat in silence. Stern could hear the clocks tick, the appliances.

The headlights of another car swcp.t into the drive.

"The policeman," Stern said.

Helen tightened the belt on her robe, preparing to tell the story.

Radczyk, alone, in his rumpled sport coat and an old fedore, approached the doorway. Stern shooed Helen into the living room, then let him in.

"Always sad occasions, Lieutenant."

"My business," said Radczyk, and laughed in his inoffensive, hickish way, amused by himself. His blotchy face was red from sleep. He raked the straying hair over his head and clutched his hat.

Stern introduced Helen, who in a few brief strokes said what she had to.

They were making love, she said. Radczyk stood in the living room with his tiny pad, making notes.

"So, let's see," he said. "This guy and this gal--" He nodded in a courteous way to Helen, who was standing right there. "This guy--"

"My c/lent," said Stern.

"Your client," said Radczyk. He hitched his chin finally and invited Stern to walk farther down the hall.

"I take it this fella wasn't the gentleman of the house."

"Ms. Dudak is unmarried. He was my brother-in-law," said Stern. "My sister's husband."

"Okay," said Radczyk. He nodded a number of times. He got it now.

"This will be terrible for her."

"Sure, sure. So wha'dya got in mind?" He knew there was something, because Stern had told him on the phone he would ask a favor. He wished to spare his sister, Stern said now.

Radczyk listened. It was nothing to him, one way or the other.

"Let me look around, be sure it's kosher," Radezyk said. He was matter-of-fact. It was his job.

Upstairs, he examined the body, touched the chest, rolled Dixon a bit from side to side. Radczyk held his nose.

"P. U.," he said. "Stroke or heart attack, you figure?"

"Heart," said Stern. That was the paramedics' diagnosis.

Radczyk thought so, too. "Looks okay. No marks or anything.

I ain't got a problem, if you're sure that's what you want fo do."

Stern said it was.

"I gotta make a call or two," said Radczyk. "Get somebody to hit the wrong key on 'the computer." He winked. At the doorway to the bedroom, Radczyk grabbed Stern's ann, lowered his voice. "What about the table?"

He hitched a shoulder toward the corner of the bed where the small end table had remained.

Stern only shrugged.

While Radczyk was on the phone, Stern returned to Helen.

She had not moved. She was st'ill in her robe, still pale and stricken, barefoot, with her thin calves looking white without hosiery. The brandy glass was beside her. Stern took it up again and told her what he planned.

"It will be much easier this way for Silvia," said Stern.

Dixon and he were to have lunch with her today. Stern would drive out to the house and together they were going to tell her--that Dixon was going to plead guilty to two counts of mail fraud next week, and soon after would be confined in a federal penitentiary, probably the one in Minnesota, for a year, ten months; actually, with good time. It had not been a task he had been looking forward to, and in a peculiar way the notion that he had already shouldered some ominous duty toward his sister made the thought of what was now at hand easier by some bare measure.

"Silvia," said Helen. With that realization she started crying again.

"I was trying to get even with you, I sup"You were entitled."

She wiped her nose on her sleeve before Stern could get out his hanky.

"I was," said Helen, as only she could, in her frank, emphatic way. "I was so hurt, Sandy. I feel. Felt. Shit."

She lowered her head and laughed and cried at once. "He would have dropped me, anyway. -He hadn't come by for days and he told me tonight that he'd decided we had to break it off. I couldn't believe it. Jilted by the replacement, too." Helen smiled a bit, but then the thought of something, the moment probably, carne back to her and she wrapped her arms about herself and closed her eyes. "He was trying to comfort me," she said.

She took a second.

"I should have known better. I tried to get even with Miles, too, 'after I found out about him. Did you know that?

That I hd an affair before I left him?"

"No. Should IT'

"I always felt everyone knew. Didn't you? I was certain you did, that night."

Stern looked at her blankly. "What night?"

"When Nate dropped by," said Helen. "At your house? I'd brought dinner?"

He absorbed this, too.

"I do not approve," Stern said suddenly. "I understand. But I do not approve of any of this."

This utterance amazed him. Not so much the judgment as its sudden force. He realized that he st.ood revealed, a man of harsh opinions, which he ordinarily kept to himself. It seemed that he spoke mostly out of confusion, but the significance was not lost on Helen. She looked at him bravely, knowing, apparently, with her strong intuitions of him, that it was necessary that something be denounced. "Of course not," she said. Radczyk returned then.

"Okey-doke," he said. "All set. No report, no nothim This here never happened." He nodded politely to Helen. "I'll give you a hand," he said to Stern.

Dixon's clothes were strewn about the room. Stern gathered the items, but Radczyk took them from his hands. "Here, here, let me," he said.