The Burden of Proof (20 page)

"Right. Couple days later, when the smoke clears, both trades are sittin over in the house error account. Compliance'll never be lookin at Kindle, and even if they do, they won't find anybody buyin ahead of the market. All they see is some dumb ole mistake. But when we close out the two positions, the buy and the sell, we got a hell of a nice little profit in the error account."

Stern wagged his head in amazement. How nice a profit, he wanted to know.

Margy shrugged. "[ haven't finished lookin yet. Four trades here made close to a hundred thousand, though. I'd say you probably got six times that. Not bad, you' know, for a few phone calls while you're scratchin your fanny."

Six hundred thousand, thought Stern. Ms. Klonsky was not pursuing a petty offense.

"Only thing," said Margy, "is this little scheam still doesn't seem much like our friendly peckerhead."

That had been Stern's thought as well, that the rewards were not Worth the risks for a man of Dixon's wealth. But Margy laughed at the idea when Stern said that.

"Oh, he'd screw you in the ground for a buck and a quarter, let alone half a million. Naw, it isn't that. Just doesn't seem like Dixon. Our customers? That's his religion. I can't figure him makin them suckers.

He's loyal." Lawl. She grabbed Stern's hands. "But I know he done it," she said.

"Because he must be informed before any large order is traded?" This fact, which Dixon had admitted in Stern's office, had already come to mind.

"That's one thing. But lotsa folks in house know what we're doin. Only, ifI stole five, six hundred thousand bucks, am I gonna hide it in your pocket? It's the house error account. And o1' Dixon Hartnell is shore enough the house.

He owns MD Clearing Corp, MD Holding Corp, Maison Dixon.

The whole shootin' match is his. This is probably some dumb old game he was playin, seein' if he could get a laugh or two up his sleeve."

Stern contemplated the notion of Dixon committing crimes for his own amusement. It was not impossible. With Dixon, of course, nothing was.

"And what became of the money?" Stern was thinking about the subpoenas the government was serving at Dixon's bank.

Margy turned onto her back and wobbled her head a bit to indicate that she did not know. Her breasts went loose and splayed against her chest; beneath her chin, where the blush-on ended, a pale rim of flesh was visible, oddly pallid, as if the years of cosmetic treatments had drained her complexion of color. These flaws meant little to Stern; he remained in heat.

"I can't tell without a lot more lokin. But you want my guess about what he did with the money?"

"Please."

"Nothim"

"Nothing?"

"Nothin. Just leaves it there. That's What I'd do. Error account always runs at a deficit. That's because when you .goof on an order and the customer makes money on it, he won't tell you it's an error. He just accepts the trade.

You only hear about the losers. And that's okay. Cost of doin business. But you can lose forty thousand a month, and if you start makin some profits, all of a sudden you're only losin two thousand a month. See? Nobody knows the difference. Except oe peckerhead. Cause, at the end of the year, that six hundred thousand's gonna end up on the bottom line. Sort of like he give himself a bonus."

"Very clever," said Stern of the entire scheme. "And quite adept of you, Margy, to figure all this out." He kissed the back of each of her hands.

"Oh, I am a clever harlot," she said, smiling up at him.

Stern wondered whose phrase that was, who had called her that before; it seemed to be something she was repeating.

He, naturally, might guess. "But I'm not the smartest one."

"No?" asked Stern, sitting beside her now on the bed, where she waited sunny-side up to face him. "Who is that?"

"Ole you-know-who. They won't never catch him. All he had todo was call the order desk to put on these positions that ended up in the error account. He only does that twenty times a day. Nobody's gonna remember him doin it. And there isn't one piece of paper in this mess with so much as his initials on it. He's gonna point to forty other people Shoulda done it instead of him. Phone clerks. Customers' reps. Coulda been me." Margy smiled then. "They may think it's him. They may know it's him. But they ain't gonna prove it's him." Margy had watched television, heard these lines; perhaps she was imitating Stern. She had certainly convinced herself. Dixon was confident too, Stern thought, recalling Dixon's predictions of vindication on the phone.

His client was fortified by his prior successes with the IRS and his knowledge that the government had run off to rangack his checking accounts when the mqney had never really left the company. Stern, however, was hardly as sanguine. The Assistant U. S. Attorneys were often adroit financial investigators. They might blunder about at first, but if Margy was right in her suspicions about how Dixon had handled his ill-gotten gains, the prosecutors would find them eventually, in his hands, and draw the same conclusions as she had about who was responsible. Dixon remained at substantial risk.

"I should speak to the MD employees in Kindle who received these orders on the desk to be certain their memories are as vague as you suppose," said Stern. It would be wise to remind whoever might have dealt directly with Dixon of how long ago these events occurred, and the confounding volume of orders received. each day; Stern would have to do that promptly, before the FBI unearthed contrary recollections.

Margy promised to recall the order tickets from storage and have them sent to Stern; he could identify the order takers and contact them directly. She would send a memo to Kindle, asking all employees on the desk to cooperate with their lawyer.

"Course, this still isn't what I'd call comical," said Margy. "The Exchange'll bang the bullpucky out of the company. They'll give us a whole bunch of fines and censures and make a big stink. Then they'll hand it over to the CFTC and let them make some stink, too. But ole youknow-who, he'll be okay. He'll be fussin and stinkin along with the rest of them, makin out like how'd this awful thing happen right under my nose. And then he'll turn around and fire someone to cover his hillbilly fanny."

Margy inclined her head slightly so that she was more or less eye to eye with the excited area of Stern's shorts.

Looking back, she gave him a little knowing grin, which he thought was at his expense, but it was not.. She was still thinking about whom Dixon would fire. "Prob'ly me," she said with a sad little buttoned-up smile. "Probably me," she repeated, and laughed then, laughed and raised her arms to Stern again and pulled him down to her for comfort. parting at the hotel-room door, he promised to call her.

"That'd be nice," Margy answered simply. Clearly, she did not believe him; men said that all the time. As soon as the cab had deposited him at O'Hare, he thumbed through the yellow pages and sent an enormous bouquet, without a card, to her office. Seated in the cramped booth, behind the perforated stainless-steel partitions, he was visited by images of the night and morning and he almost shivered with the staggering thrill of it all. Had that truly been he, Ale-jandro Stern, gentleman lawyer, child of a Catholic country, humping his brains out a few hours ago? Yes, indeed. His spirit was on alert, his flag unfurled. He had Margy's smoky taste on his lips, the touch of her silks in his palm. When was he returning? He laughed out loud at himself, so that a woman in a booth across the way actually looked straight at him. Slightly shamed, he found suddenly the splinter of something more abiding buried closer to his heart. Gratitude. Oh yes, he was grateful to Margy, to the entire race of women, who, unbelievably, had seen fit to take him in once more. With his hand still on the telephone, he pondered the sheer blessing of another human being's embrace.

At the gate, the attendant announced that the plane for his short flight back to the tri-cities was delayed. "Equipment problems." As usual!

Stern, even in his buoyant mood, could not pull free of his hatred for this airport, with its endless corridors and sickly light, its teeming, hurtling bodies and worried faces. He located the airline's executive lounge, all black leather and granite, and telephoned his office.

". Claudia, please call Ms. Klonsky and schedule an appointment for Friday. Tell her I wish to deliver the documents she has subpoenaed from MD." Stern had not spoken with the prosecutor in a month now.

Raphael had called to beg an additional week on the return date, and reported that Klonsky sounded on the verge of rage. Stern did not like to beard the Assistants--it was not his style, and more to the point, enmity among lawyers complicated a case.

He would have to make amends somehow with Klonsky. The lawyer's life, he thought, always toadying. Judges.

Prosecutors. Certain clients.

"You want your messages?"

Stern was seated on a sofa; the telephone console was cleverly inserted in the granite top of a cocktail table.

Claudia reported a call from Remo Cavarelli, an old hustler under indictment, who wanted the status date for his next appearance before Judge Winchell. There was also a message from a Ms. Helen Dudak, who wanted to speak to Stern: a personal matter. And Cal Hopkinson had phoned.

Developments, he thought with a sudden surge of something undefined, interest or apprehension, when he heard Cal's name. He had Claudia put him through, but Cal's secretary said he was on another call. Stern held a bit, then decided to call back and punched in the number Helen had left. She had told him she worked at home, with a headset plugged into the phone--connected earpieces and a tiny suspended mike, smaller than a thimble. He imagined her like that.

"I'm picking up on the end of our conversation the other .night," said Helen.

"Yes, of come," he answered, not truly certain what she meant.

"I wanted to invite you to dinner here. Two weeks from Saturday. The two of us."

"Ah," said Stern, and felt his heart palpably squirm. Now what? Helen meant well, he thought. And she was charmning.

But could he manage these complications? Yes, said some voice suddenly.

Yes, indeed.

Yet, having accepted, he dwelled on Margy and quarreled with himself as he put down the phone. Eating, after all, was not a formof sexual intercourse. But then again, he slyly thought, he was becoming quite a fellow. In the crowded airport lounge, with the stalled travelers murmuring around him, he once more laughed aloud.

This time he got through to Cal.

"Sandy!" Cal cried. "Where are you?" Cal told him the story of his most recent unscheduled layover at O'Hare. Stern eventually asked about the bank.

"That's why I was calling," said Cal. '-'Just to let you know the story." River National, Cal said, was being perfectly neurotic about this transaction in Clara's investment account. Any time a will was involved, the bank worried over everything: the probate court, the Attorney General's Office. They insisted on retrieving every single piece of paper before they would meet. Cal was pressing for a conference in the next week. He spoke with the selfcongratulatory air that Stern himself often assumed with clients, describing his communications with the bankers and file clerks as if it were mortal combat.

"Really, Cal," said Stern. He did not want to be one more complaining client, and ended the conversation rather than speak his mind. Cal was too fussy to be forceful--he, too, would want to see each paper--and besides, he was probably in no position with the bankers, who in all likelihood sent him business--wealthy customers who needed trusts drawn, wills updated. But it was unfair, Stern decided in a moment, to blame Cal for the complications Clara had made.

Stern had lived decades never wholly knowing what was occurring behind Clara's composed and gracious facade. And still the wondering went on.

All that old simmering frustration was boiling up in him again.

He redialed his secretary's number.

"Claudia, did Dr. Cawley return my call?" Following his evening at Kate and John's, Stern had chased Nate about, leaving word at the office, the hospital, at home, asking Nate to call the lab. It was not clear that Nate had even gotten the messages, and Stern remained unsure that he would follow through, in any event. Nate, after all, had other worries.

"Should I try someone at his office?" asked Claudia. Stern drummed his fingers on the tabletop and did not answer. Out the window, the view was obstructed by a 747 which was being washed by workers mounted on a series of movable scaffolds--Stern was reminded of zookeepers and a giraffe.

He certainly could venture to Westlab himself--wherevei: it might be. As Clara's executor, he had a legal right to inquire. But if the administrators at Westlab were sticklers about privacy, as Nate suspected, Stern would need credentials, which would mean involving Cal.

Better patience, Stern thought. Nate would get to it eventually.

But there was a soreness here, more persistent than his curiosity about Clara, which seemed to rise and fall with the tide of his grief. It took Stern an instant to fix upon it: Peter. The suspicion born at Kate and John's that he had been outdone by his son had not proved easy to put aside. Oh, he knew it was unfair, unlikely, unbecoming to believe that Peter in his great anguish had had the presence of mind, or the cunning, to manipulate his father about the autopsy. But Peter, to Stern's memory, had been so insistent--he could still recall his voice resounding down the corridors at its wailing pitch as he upbraided that poor bewildered cop, the frantic glint in Peter's eyes. Questions lingered. With Peter, Stern supposed, questions always would."