Rose-colored Glasses

by Downing, John

  Wonderful. “Can you imagine that? I hope you reported him to the police.”

  “I’da caught him in the act I would have.”

  “If you didn’t catch him in the act, how do you know he’s the one who took your radio?” Langley asked.

  The man said, “‘Cause he was a sumbitch.”

  A “freak” and a “sumbitch.” Langley wondered what other comments he would get if he asked around. He decided he might as well find out while he was here.

  He caught four of Burden’s fellow boarders at home. Two of them didn’t know who he was talking about until he described Burden, at which point they couldn’t say enough bad things about him. But when asked why they felt the way they did, neither could supply a specific reason, just a sense that the guy wasn’t right. The third boarder was a woman. At the mention of Burden’s name, she gave a little shudder: Every time she passed him on the stairs, she said, he would undress her with his eyes. The fourth boarder, also a woman, had her own complaint against Burden. Why, he would never hold the door for her, even when he saw that she was laden with packages from the store. “I wasn’t surprised when I read in the paper that he had killed someone,” she told Langley.

  He went to return the key to the landlady.

  “Who painted the room like that?” he asked her.

  “He did. I’ll have to have the whole friggin’ place redone before I can rent it again.”

  “Did he have many visitors?”

  “I never saw him with no one.”

  Neither had his neighbors. “What happened to his stuff?”

  “You passed it when you came in.”

  Langley didn’t get it. He was about to ask her again, when he remembered the pile of junk by the gate. He glanced around; except for a few papers that had blown away, it was still there. He turned back to give the landlady a piece of his mind, but she had retreated inside.

  Stopping a passing kid, Langley offered him two dollars, one now and one later, if he would watch Burden’s belongings while Langley went to get his car, which he had parked around the block, on Pacific Street. After loading the stuff into the car, he drove back to his office, stopping on the way at a grocery store to pick up some cardboard cartons.

  Inside his office he piled the stuff on his desk. He started to sort through it.

  When he had finished, he had four boxes. Three and a half, actually: a box of clothes, two of books and one, about half full, of various papers and odds and ends. Except for a stack of girly magazines, which he set to one side, that was it. Of course there was no telling how much of Burden’s stuff had been pilfered while it sat in the yard, but Langley guessed not much. Three and a half boxes: the sum total of a man’s existence.

  ***

  Wickersham had called to say he would drop by the office later that afternoon to bring Langley up to date on the progress of his investigation. It was nearly five when he finally showed up.

  “What’s the good news?” Langley asked him by way of greeting.

  “Lots of news,” Wickersham said, “none of it good.” He tossed a piece of paper on Langley’s desk. “That’s a list of the places Laurel Rose worked since she came to the city.”

  Langley glanced at the list. It contained, by his estimate, about seventy-five names. He didn’t see where it would be of much help.

  “What else have you got, Harry?”

  Resting a haunch on Langley’s desk, Wickersham picked up one of the girly magazines. It was called Wink.

  “Burden’s,” Langley said.

  “Do you want me to start with Luray or Laurel Rose?” Wickersham said, riffling through the pages of the magazine.

  “Tell me about Laurel.”

  “How do you like them apples?” Wickersham held the magazine so that Langley could see what he was referring to: a girl stupendously endowed, and flaunting it.

  Langley said, “I’m surprised she can stand up.”

  Wickersham shook his head. “You have no sense of romance, O.”

  “I have a sense of proportion,” Langley said. “In the words of Captain Katzenjammer, ‘Enough is too much.’ Laurel,” he prompted.

  “Never too much,” Wickersham said, setting the magazine down. “Okay. Sweet Laurel. Real name Amber McCoy.”

  “When did she change it?”

  “She was Amber McCoy when she left Ligonier, Indiana, headed for New York; Laurel Rose when she arrived here, which was two and a half years ago. She was eighteen years old. All she had to her name was fifty dollars given to her by her mother, a high school diploma and some secretarial skills.

  “In the two-plus years she’s been here, she’s had at least half a dozen roommates. I’ve located four of them. I’m looking for the other two. Since she left Burden, she’s been living alone. The four I spoke to all told me the same story: Laurel was determined to Make It Big.”

  “As what?”

  “They didn’t know. They weren’t sure that Laurel knew, herself. When she arrived here, she registered at an agency that places people in temporary positions, filling in for people who are out sick or on vacation. That’s why that list”‌—‌he pointed to the paper on Langley’s desk‌—‌“was so easy to compile. Also, why it’s so long. She was still working out of the same agency at the time of her death.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a ticket to the big time,” Langley said.

  “She passed up at least a couple of opportunities for a permanent position. According to all four of her ex-roommates, Laurel was very popular with men. She attracted them the way a fresh dog turd attracts flies.”

  Langley wrinkled his nose. “Not a very apt analogy, Harry.”

  “Maybe better than you think. She met her men through her work: executives, lawyers, bankers. Most of them were married and all of them were well-heeled. Laurel played them for a week or two and then they parted.”

  “She was a prostitute?”

  “Not exactly. Not full-time, anyway. Maybe not at all. I have no evidence that she accepted money from any of her men. For sure, she wasn’t living high on the hog.”

  “So,” Langley asked, “what was she after?”

  “Maybe she just liked to fuck powerful men.”

  “How does Burden fit into the picture?”

  “He doesn’t. None of Laurel’s ex-roommates could believe she’d have anything to do with him, much less marry him. ‘A parky? Laurel married to a parky? I-don’t-believe-it!’”

  “How do you explain it?”

  “I can’t. It’s like there’s a chapter missing in her life. The Laurel Rose described to me by the people who knew her wouldn’t have touched your boy with a barge pole. And yet we know she married him. And lived with him for three months in a crummy apartment over a candy store. Why? Did he hypnotize her? Blackmail her? He must have had some kind of hold over her.”

  “Love?” Langley said.

  “Shmove,” Wickersham said, dismissing that idea. “She was pregnant, by the way.”

  Langley loved how he’d slipped in the “by the way.” “How long?”

  “Four months.”

  Langley did the arithmetic. “It could have been Burden’s.”

  “He’d have had to get in just under the wire.”

  “Did he actually throw her bareass out on the sidewalk?”

  “He did.”

  “Did anybody see him hit her, threaten her with a knife, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “That’s something, anyway. Any leads on the guy he caught making love to her?” Langley asked.

  “One does not ‘make love’ to another man’s wife,” Wickersham corrected him. “He dicks her.”

  He said this rather passionately and with a sense of authority, speaking, Langley assumed, from experience (Wickersham, he knew, was divorced), but whether in the role of the dick-er or the dick-ee, he didn’t know and wasn’t about to ask.

  “The guy Burden caught ‘dicking�
� Laurel‌—‌”

  “Apparently, he was a steady visitor. The neighbors reported seeing him around often.”

  “A boyfriend? Could he be Luray?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Luray has not been staying at his mother’s house because he likes her chicken soup. He’s been staying there to discourage people from sniffing around his home neighborhood‌—‌”

  “And finding out what?”

  “That he’s queer as a three-dollar bill.”

  “Is that why he left Columbia?”

  “No. He left Columbia‌—‌got tossed‌—‌because he was involved in some kind of cheating scandal. He comes from money, not a lot, but enough to cover his tracks. He transferred to N.Y.U., where he earned a degree in economics.”

  “He cheats,” Langley said, thinking out loud. “Maybe he lies, too.”

  “Everybody cheats,” Wickersham said. “Everybody lies.”

  “How did he come to be a parky?”

  “Don’t sneer, O. If you want to get paid for doing nothing, you couldn’t find a better job. For sitting on his ass four or five hours a day, not only is Luray paid a decent salary but he is setting himself up for a fat City pension. I’d put in for the job myself, except you need a college degree.”

  “Does Luray like only boys? Or does he go for girls, too?”

  “Only boys, apparently. I’ve talked to several of his neighbors, and none of them has ever seen him with a woman.”

  “So much for the idea that he was having an affair with Laurel Rose.”

  “That was never a very strong possibility, O.”

  “Getting back to Laurel’s ‘boyfriend.’ Does he predate Burden?”

  “Possibly. Two of Laurel’s old roommates describe a man similar to the one described by Burden. They both remember Laurel calling him ‘Ricky.’”

  “Do you think you could find him?”

  “Is that wise? Wouldn’t he just serve to give Burden a motive for killing Laurel?”

  “A motive the jury can understand. Right now I have him killing her for no reason at all.”

  “I’ll get on it.” Wickersham pushed himself to his feet. “By the way,” he said, “what are you going to do with the magazines?”

  “I told you: they’re Burden’s.”

  “He’s not going to need them where he’s going.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Langley said. But Wickersham was right, he thought. Under the most optimistic of scenarios, Burden was not going to be needing the magazines anytime soon.

  “Take them,” he said.

  ***

  Langley took the boxes containing Burden’s books and personal effects home with him. The clothes he threw out; cheap and threadbare as they were, they didn’t figure to be of any use even to the Salvation Army. That night, reinforced by a couple of Scotches, he began going through Burden’s effects, hoping he might at last get a feel for what Burden was like in his most personal and private self.

  Books paint a picture of the person they belong to. At least Langley would have said so before sorting through the books Burden owned. Plato’s Republic and Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly. St. Augustine’s City of God and the Marquis DeSade’s The Bedroom Philosopher. A few comic books (mostly Dick Tracy) and half a dozen college catalogues. Either these books belong to two different men, Langley thought, or Burden is schizophrenic.

  He turned to the box of personal papers. A couple of the girly magazines had somehow gotten placed in the box. He put them to one side. When he looked back inside the box, he was struck by how little it contained. And to call the papers “personal” was to use the term very loosely.

  If he were to gather together his own personal effects, he thought, what would he include? Souvenirs of the places he had gone and of the happy hours he had spent there, letters from relatives and friends, photographs of the same, Christmas and birthday cards, old report cards, diplomas, school awards and a lot more. Burden had none of this. Langley found his discharge papers from the army, his social security card, bankbook (Langley couldn’t resist looking: Burden had $88.17 in his account at the Williamsburgh Bank‌—‌as he had figured, he was not going to get paid anytime soon). And that was it. No love letters. No letters of any kind. No birthday cards, Christmas cards; not a single souvenir (maybe he had no happy moments to call up).

  Did Burden love no one? Had no one loved him?

  Langley had worked his way almost to the bottom of the box. One item remained. It was sandwiched between two protective pieces of cardboard. When he separated the pieces, he found himself looking at a 5X7 color portrait of a beautiful woman. She had olive skin and lustrous black hair.

  The bell rang. Langley went to answer it.

  It was Fay.

  She looked him up and down, frowning at the jeans and T-shirt he was wearing, and said, “You’ve forgotten.”

  And so he had. Now it started to come back to him. Fay had told him that she had a late night at school, rehearsal for the Christmas show or something. Afterwards, she was going to stop by his place and they were going to… He couldn’t remember.

  “May I come in?”

  “I’m sorry. Please.” He showed her into the living room. “What would you like to drink?”

  “What is that?” she asked, pointing to the empty glass that had held his Scotch.

  “Ginger ale.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, taking off her coat. “If it’s no trouble.”

  “Would you like me to spice it with something?”

  “Just the ginger ale.”

  When he returned with the drink, she asked, “Have you been feeling lonely, Owen?”

  He didn’t know what she meant. She held up one of the girly magazines.

  “Oh, that’s not mine,” he said.

  “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  He could feel his cheeks burn. He was embarrassed that he was embarrassed, and that made him blush all the more.

  “The magazine belongs to Burden,” he said. “All of this is his.” He indicated the boxes.

  Fay picked out two books at random. “The Poems of Robert Burns,” she said. “And The Kama Sutra. He must be a very unusual person.”

  “‘Unusual’ is not the word.”

  “What is the word?” Fay asked.

  “The word is…” Langley hesitated. He wasn’t sure he wanted to discuss this with her. He wasn’t sure he could even if he wanted to. What was the right word? Maybe he should quote Burden’s landlady, as good a description as any.

  “He’s the worst person I’ve ever met, Fay. He’s completely without any kind of charity. I have yet to find even one person to say anything nice about him. I may not be able to find a single character witness to speak up for him at the trial.”

  “He must have some redeeming qualities,” she said.

  He was in no mood for facile sentimentalism. “And Hitler liked to paint,” he said.

  “Is he that bad?”

  “I tell you, Fay, it’s almost like he’s a different species from the rest of us.”

  “What made him the way he is?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.” He pointed to the boxes.

  “Who’s this?” Fay asked, picking up the photograph he had been looking at when the bell rang.

  “That’s Laurel Rose, the woman Burden killed: his wife.”

  “He kept her picture.”

  “It’s the only photograph of any kind that he has.”

  “Maybe that’s his redeeming quality: he loved Laurel Rose.”

  Horseshit, Langley thought but didn’t say it. Fay shuddered. He thought for a second she had read his mind.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just thinking. How love can change, can mutate into something that’s exactly its opposite.”

  “I don’t know who it was who said, ‘The opposite of love is in
difference.’ Love and hate are almost the same thing: two faces of the same coin, if you will. You sacrifice everything for a person, center your life around her, bare your soul to her, and then you discover she’s made a fool out of you. In that instant, love becomes hate. A hate strong enough to drive you to kill.”

  Except that Burden had killed Laurel four months after learning that she had made a fool of him.

  Fay set the photograph down.

  “What had we planned on doing tonight?” he asked her.

  “We were going to see the tree.”

  The tree at Rockefeller Center. “Right.”

  “You don’t sound all that keen on the idea, Owen.”

  “We saw the tree last year,” he said.

  “That was a different tree, Owen.” She said it playfully.

  “You see one tree, you’ve seen them all,” he said.

  “All right,” she said, “we’ll skip the tree.”

  He was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry, Fay. It’s just that I’m not feeling very Christmas-y.”

  “I know that, Owen. That’s why I thought it might do you good to see the tree.” She hesitated. “I know you can’t talk about the specifics of a case, Owen. But would it help to talk about how you’re feeling?”

  “I’m feeling depressed,” he said, “and talking about it would only depress you, too.”

  “Go ahead and depress me,” she said brightly.

  Okay, she had asked for it. “When I was first offered this case,” he said, “I wondered why. Why, with all his money, when he could have had any lawyer he wanted, did DeBrough pick me? I now know why. Because no lawyer with any reputation to speak of would have taken the case. No lawyer with any sense would have taken it. Why not? Because there’s only one way this case can end. And that,” he told Fay, “is with Burden’s execution.”

  He saw the pain in her face and was sorry he had spoken. Sorry for himself, too. Until that moment, he hadn’t really faced the fact: Unless he did something to prevent it, Burden was going to die in the electric chair.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Laurel used people. She wiped her ass with them. There was no malice in what she did, no more than you have it in for the toilet tissue when you‌—‌” Burden made a gesture with his hand. “Then again,” he said, “put yourself in the position of the toilet tissue.”