Rose-colored Glasses

by Downing, John

  “No. And I’m not likely to.”

  “If you look deep enough, you will; and you shouldn’t have to look that deep.”

  “Because Laurel Rose and Luray were lovers?”

  “Yes. And as such they are bound to have left a trail.”

  “Luray is homosexual,” Langley said, and was gratified that for once Burden seemed stumped for a rejoinder.

  But not for long. “Maybe he’s a switch-hitter.”

  “Apparently not. From everything my investigator has been able to unearth, Luray likes only boys. And so,” Langley said, “it’s unlikely it was he who got Laurel pregnant.”

  The old one-two. He waited for Burden’s reaction. And waited.

  “You did know she was pregnant?” Langley said finally.

  “Is this a trick question?” Burden asked.

  Answer the goddamn question, Langley thought. “Did you know she was pregnant? Yes or no?”

  “No,” Burden said. “Was she pregnant?”

  Sweet Jesus. “She was.”

  “How long?”

  “Four months,” Langley said, and waited while Burden did the calculations.

  “It could have been anyone,” Burden said then.

  “It could have been yours.”

  “It could have been the guy I caught fucking her.”

  “How did you happen to catch the two of them together, by the way?”

  “That day I felt sick on the job and came home early. Otherwise…” Burden shook his head. “Otherwise,” he said then, “we might still be together‌—‌and she might still be fucking the guy behind my back.”

  “Is it possible Laurel came to the park to confront you with the news of her pregnancy?”

  “You’re assuming it was my kid she was carrying.”

  “For the sake of argument, let’s assume that for the moment.”

  “What scenario do you have in mind?” Burden said. “Do you suppose Laurel was going to sue me for child support? Or maybe she just wanted to make sure the child had my name?”

  Point taken. “There are similarities between the attack on Laurel Rose when you met her and the attack that cost her her life.”

  “There are no similarities beyond the most superficial. In the first instance, the ‘attack’ was staged and I was supposed to stumble upon it. In the second, it was real and I wasn’t supposed to be on the scene at all.”

  “Do you think the two attacks are related?”

  “Obviously, they’re related. If I hadn’t met Laurel in the first instance‌—‌”

  “Beyond that,” Langley said.

  Burden nodded. “I believe the second attack is directly connected to the first. How, I don’t know. I don’t know what Laurel wanted from me. Whatever it was, she didn’t get it. Instead, she wound up dead. Obviously, she didn’t plan to wind up dead. Somehow her plan backfired. Maybe she wiped her ass with the wrong person. I figured it was Luray. If not, it was somebody else. Did you bring the books I asked you to bring?”

  The change of subject was so abrupt it took Langley a moment to adjust. “Two of them,” he said then. Removing them from his briefcase, he handed them over. “The third one was missing.”

  “Look again. All three were together.”

  “Your landlady had thrown your stuff out in the yard.”

  Burden set the books down on the table and stared at them. “She had no right to do that,” he said at last.

  “You can’t expect her to hold on to your things forever.”

  “I was paid up until the end of December.”

  Langley didn’t know what to say, not quite able to imagine how he would feel if somebody tossed the sum of his life’s belongings in the garbage.

  “Why didn’t you continue your education?” he asked, making a sudden change of subject of his own. The question hadn’t come altogether out of the blue. It had been nibbling at his mind for some time. Seeing the two books on the table in front of Burden had reminded him of it. They were The Heart of the Matter and Brighton Rock, both by Graham Greene. Not the sort of books the typical parky reads. Langley’s first impression of Burden as some kind of Neanderthal halfwit had long since evaporated. He had come to think of Burden as his equal (if not his superior) in intelligence. And while his own education vastly outstripped Burden’s, the gap that otherwise would have separated them had largely been bridged by the efforts Burden had made to educate himself.

  “I don’t have all that much respect for educated people,” Burden said.

  “Why not?”

  “It seems to me they cause most of the trouble in the world. They’re the ones who make the bombs, declare the wars. And then they’re not all that smart. They may have a certain amount of specialized knowledge. A guy might spend forty years studying the social life of the bumblebee and become an expert on the subject, but so what? When it comes down to the really important things, he doesn’t know any more than I do.”

  “I noticed some college catalogues among your things,” Langley said, to see if Burden would offer an explanation. He didn’t.

  “You were thinking of going to college?”

  Burden shrugged.

  “For Laurel’s sake?”

  Again it appeared Burden wasn’t going to answer. But then, after an extended pause, he said, “I wanted to be able to give her something better than that shit-hole we were living in.”

  Langley remembered Fay’s words: “Maybe that’s his redeeming quality: he loved Laurel Rose.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Guilt and innocence were beside the point. Justice? You might as well look for buried treasure in your backyard as look for justice in the courtroom. You might find justice in the courtroom just as you might find buried treasure in your backyard, but it would be pure happenstance.

  The thing to remember is this: You and your client form a team. Think of a baseball team. The manager and the players may hate each other’s guts, but on the field at least, they bury their differences for the collective good of everyone (or they’ll surely lose). So it is with you and your client. You don’t have to like the man you’re defending. You’re not required to approve of what he’s done. But once you accept his case, you and he are on the same side. From that point on, you must do everything you can, within the boundaries of legal ethics, to help his case. If you do that (and nothing less than that), you’ve done your job.

  These were among the first lessons Langley had been taught in law school. Intellectually he grasped their truth. The trouble was, he didn’t feel it. Never had; and, he suspected, never would.

  For his own peace of mind, he had to have a reason for defending a client. Given that none of the people he represented was innocent, he looked for some other justification for defending them (money was not enough: he could earn money doing something else). What got him through most of his cases was that at some point he managed to “identify” with the client. Not that he came to excuse what the person had done, but by putting himself in that person’s shoes he was able to understand why he had done it: There but for the grace of God… If he could reach the point where he thought that, he could justify to himself his efforts. And do right by his client. If he were to go into the courtroom loathing the person he was defending (assuming he would ever agree to represent a person he truly could not abide), he was sure the jury would pick up on his feelings, and that could only work against his client.

  In a sense, then, he was like an actor taking on a role. Some roles were easy. He had defended a client once who had under-reported his income to the IRS. As honest as Langley was in other aspects of his life, he had a moral blind spot when it came to paying taxes. He had never cheated, but only because he feared getting caught. If he had had a hope in hell of getting away with it, he would have had no qualms about doing exactly the same thing his client had done.

  Some roles were more difficult. That of street mugger, for example. Leaving aside the question of right or wrong,
a street mugging was about the dumbest crime it was possible to commit, the risk/reward ratio being so badly skewed against the mugger. Whenever he had to defend a person accused of such a crime, Langley tried to imagine himself as being too stupid to make his way in the world legally. To survive, he had to take money from other people; and since he had no brains, he wasn’t able to finesse the money from his victim, he had to take it by force. While he could never do such a thing himself, he was able to make himself see why some people felt they had to. Nor did he concern himself particularly with the consequences of getting such a person off. Because the mugger was stupid, it was only a matter of time before he got caught again; and the next time (or the time after that) he wouldn’t beat the rap. Or so Langley told himself.

  Some roles were impossible. He could not by any stretch of the imagination picture himself as a rapist. He supposed there were factors that contributed to the making of a rapist. Some rapists, perhaps most, were so sick they couldn’t control themselves. No matter. He had decided that he would never defend a man accused of rape.

  So far he had had only one client whose crime he could not conceive of committing under any circumstances: Gregor Mylong. Killing your own child for money was an act Langley found difficult even to contemplate. In a million years he couldn’t have fitted himself in Mylong’s shoes. And so to make the task of defending Mylong palatable, he had persuaded himself, against reason, that Mylong was innocent. His first innocent man! When he was forced finally to face cold reality, when, to use Burden’s analogy, he took off his glasses (or, at least, peeked over the top of them), it had hit hard, not least because he was made to confront his own gullibility.

  Now he had to find some way to identify with Burden. He had been putting off the attempt. He told himself the reason was that he couldn’t conceive of ever being able to see the world through Burden’s eyes. The real reason, he suspected, was something else entirely: he was afraid that if he did succeed in getting inside Burden’s skin, it would be unbearable if all this ended with Burden’s execution.

  But now it could be put off no longer.

  It was Fay, with her talk of Burden’s redeeming quality, who had given him an idea of where to start his search. He didn’t know about the “redeeming” angle, but Langley felt sure that at the heart of everything Burden had done was his love‌—‌if that was the right word‌—‌for Laurel Rose.

  He could understand how Burden felt about Laurel Rose: he felt the same way about Fay. His own life, he thought, could be divided into two parts: before he’d met Fay, and after. Before meeting Fay, he had more or less trudged through life. Not that his life had been hard (it had), but, worse, it had been joyless. College had been study and work, work and study. Then came the war. Graduate school had been college all over again, only more so. The past seven years had been an almost daily struggle to establish himself in his profession. Beyond that, his existence had had no purpose. Without planning it, without even being aware of it, he had settled into the life of a loner (not all that different from Burden’s, he thought).

  This had come about in three stages. In the first, because of the demands of his career, because of the lack of any great success in that career and the consequent chronic shortage of money, he had had, of necessity, to curtail his social life. After years of being alone most of the time, he had gotten used to living that way: stage two. And then, approaching the threshold of stage three, he had actually started to prefer it. That was when Fay came into his life.

  It had been so long since anyone had given a hoot about him, he had forgotten what it felt like. And to have somebody to care for in return made the experience richer than he could have imagined.

  In high school he had had a teacher who proposed the following question: You are sick in the hospital. Your girlfriend visits you, brings you candy, tells you what a marvelous person you are. Or, if you prefer, you can have your girlfriend replaced by an android, made of some kind of synthetic flesh, which looks and sounds just like your girlfriend and remembers as she does. It will perform the same functions your girlfriend does. Which would you choose?

  It was a trick question. Instinctively, most men would pick the android. Your girlfriend might be in a cranky mood one day; the next she might not come to see you at all. In time she might disappear for good. The android can be relied upon to be there every day, and always in an accommodating mood. Paradoxically, it’s the possibility that your girlfriend could walk out on you at any time that makes her the preferable choice, the only choice a man with any self-respect would make. It’s not the box of candy she gives you that counts; it’s that she chooses to give it to you. The candy is a symbol of her love. And as she chooses to give it to you today and maybe, if you’re lucky, tomorrow, the day after that she might withhold it and the day after that she might be giving it to somebody else. How would you feel then? One night after Fay and he had been dating several months, Langley stopped by her apartment, unannounced. Receiving no answer to his knock, he turned to go. As he was leaving the building, he ran into her in the lobby. She was with another man.

  He remembered how he felt when he saw Fay with the other man. A nausea swept over him, almost as if he had been punched hard in the stomach. Emotionally he was torn several ways at once. Anger. Jealousy. Fear. What does she see in that creep? What if she preferred the creep to him? A week later, after procrastinating for months, fearing that if he put it off any longer he would lose her (if he hadn’t lost her already), he proposed to her.

  He discovered later that the “creep” was a teacher from Fay’s school who had driven her home from a parent/teacher conference. But what if he hadn’t been? What if he had been Fay’s new love? Suppose, Langley thought, he were to come home one day two months after their wedding and find Fay the way Burden had found Laurel Rose? He would be angry enough to kill, although he couldn’t imagine himself actually doing so. But he could imagine Burden doing it.

  For the first time in his miserable life, Burden had found somebody who loved him. Langley couldn’t recall where he had read it, but someone had once defined love thus: He loves her because she loves him, and vice versa. In reality life was often more complicated than that (A loves B and B loves C, to cite just one permutation); but that did not negate the basic truth of the A-loves-B-because-B-loves-A formula. How can you not love someone who loves you? Particularly if that person loves you not for your money or your fame or your other “attachments,” but for your personal qualities, the ones you’re most proud of, qualities the rest of the world rarely, if ever, notices? Here’s Burden, with no money or fame to speak of, no “attachments” of any kind. How gratifying it must have been to discover that Laurel “loved” him. It’s his first time in love. Like everyone in love for the first time, he falls hard. And then one day, in the worst way possible, he finds out it’s all a fraud. Who wouldn’t flip out under those circumstances? In Burden’s shoes, Langley thought, he, too, might have been driven to kill Laurel Rose. Only‌—‌and it was a thought he kept coming back to‌—‌he would have done it four months earlier. Why hadn’t Burden done it four months earlier?

  He was still mulling the question (and getting no closer to an answer) when Wickersham stuck his head in the door.

  “Let’s take a drive, O,” he said, tossing Langley his hat. “Someone I want you to meet.”

  “Who?”

  “A former roomie of Laurel’s. According to her, last February while they were rooming together, sweet Laurel was dating your old friend Terry.”

  Langley’s heart sank. The son of a bitch had told him he’d met Laurel in March. It was a small lie, but it was a lie, the first he had caught Burden in. The first of how many? And just when he was beginning to‌—‌

  “Put a smile on your face, O,” Wickersham said. “I’m not talking about your boy. Laurel Rose was dating his brother.”

  ***

  On the way Langley filled Wickersham in on what Burden had told him.

  “If
he’s telling the truth,” Wickersham said, “it should be easy to confirm. Laurel Rose didn’t find Burden by herself. She would have had to hire someone like me. If he exists, I’ll find him.”

  “If he exists…”

  “It’s an unbelievable story, O.”

  “Which is why I’m sort of inclined to believe it.”

  “It’s unbelievable, so it must be true?”

  Put that way… Maybe he was letting his relief at learning that it wasn’t Burden who had lied but DeBrough carry him away. “Have you found out anything else?”

  “Laurel was living at the Bossert when Burden says he met her.”

  “On that point‌—‌again‌—‌he’s telling the truth.”

  “It wouldn’t be smart to lie about something so easily checked. Laurel’s roommate prior to her moving to the Bossert was one Evelyn Foster. I re-interviewed her today. According to Foster, she and Laurel had not had a falling out. One day Laurel just up and left.”

  “Sounds like she wanted the field clear when she picked up Burden.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is that who were going to see? Foster?”

  “No. We’re going to talk to the woman who was Laurel’s roommate just before Foster. Her name is Greta Mueller.”

  ***

  “Laurel was a hick. She tried to act grown-up and sophisticated, but the only person she fooled was herself. She was always talking about how she was going to make it big here, and yet every week she wrote her mother back in Iowa, or wherever, to ask her advice.”

  Greta Mueller was the original Scandinavian milkmaid. Buxom. Creamy white skin. Straw-colored hair.

  “How did you come to live with her?” Langley asked.

  “She advertised for a roommate in the News.”

  “And how long were you together?”