Rose-colored Glasses

by Downing, John

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know paranoia was catching,” Wickersham said. “Listen, O, from what I’ve heard, the guy was‌—‌is‌—‌physically hurt, I don’t know how bad; he may die on the streets before the cops ever find him. He saw a chance to escape, maybe the last one he’ll ever have, and he took it. It’s in no way your fault. By the way, for what, if anything, it’s worth, I’ve located our friend Ricky.”

  Langley scarcely heard him. “Let me know if you hear anything else, Harry.”

  He had ignored Wickersham’s advice to sit down. Now, hanging up the phone, he crossed to the nearest chair and slumped into it.

  “What is it, Owen?” Fay said, coming to his side.

  He told her the news.

  “What do you think Burden’ll do?” she asked.

  “If he’s smart, he’ll jump a freighter to South America.” Do that, he thought. But first let the nurse go. “Well, anyway,” he said, “I guess it makes our discussion academic.”

  “What do you mean, Owen?”

  “However this turns out, Burden is not going to be needing a lawyer when it’s over.” He explained, “Either he gives the police the slip or they bring him in wrapped in a sheet.” He knew the latter was by far the more likely eventuality.

  “Come and have some coffee, Owen.”

  He followed Fay into the dining room. While he was on the phone, she had set the table. Now she poured two coffees and handed one to him.

  “Do you mind if I stay here tonight, Owen?” She nodded toward the window. “I’m afraid the trains might not be running.”

  He wondered if that was the real reason. In the area of Brooklyn where she lived, the trains ran on elevated tracks, so perhaps her concern about not being able to get home was genuine. And if it wasn’t? The idea that she was staying so that she could be with him and comfort him was in itself a comfort.

  He gave her his bed and made up the couch for himself. Although they were to be married in a few months, he knew she would not stand for any other arrangement and so he didn’t even make the suggestion.

  ***

  He was roused out of a fitful doze by the sound of the phone ringing. He looked at his watch. One o’clock. Whoever it was calling, he knew it didn’t figure to be good news. He hesitated before picking up the receiver.

  “Have you heard any news about my brother, Owen?” DeBrough asked.

  It hadn’t taken him long to get caught up on developments, Langley thought. Who had informed him? The D.A.? The police?

  “No more than you seem to have heard,” Langley said.

  “You’ll probably hear before I do, Owen. I’d be grateful if you’d keep me informed. I’m staying at Sea Vista for a few days, until I put things in order here.”

  The funeral of DeBrough’s mother, Langley remembered, was just this morning. Make that yesterday morning.

  “I’ve dismissed the staff for the holidays,” DeBrough said. “I felt the need to be by myself for a while. Do you have the number here, Owen?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police have orders to shoot him on sight,” DeBrough said.

  It seemed to Langley that DeBrough was taunting him.

  He said, “Is it true you set your mother’s cat on fire?”

  With a click, the line went dead.

  ***

  He was still awake when, sometime later, the doorbell rang. On his way to the door, he glanced out the window. It was still snowing.

  He opened the door to two men dressed in top coats and fedoras. Even before they flashed their badges, he knew what they were. They gave their names as Bannerman and Forbush. He showed them into the living room. Attracted by the commotion, Fay had come out of the bedroom.

  “Everything’s all right,” Langley assured her. “Go back to bed.”

  The eyes of the cop named Bannerman trailed after Fay. When she had gone, he turned to Langley.

  “Do you have any idea where Burden might be?” he asked.

  So they hadn’t found him yet.

  “Try Prospect Park,” Langley suggested.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s where he worked. He has no friends that I know of. No relatives. I thought he might go where he knows the lay of the land.”

  “He did,” Bannerman said.

  That was all he said. Just that tantalizing tidbit. Leaving it up to Langley to ask, if he wanted to know more. Stubbornly he refused to do so.

  “When he broke out of the hospital,” Forbush explained, “he abducted a nurse and commandeered her car. We’ve found her car in the park.”

  Like his partner, he’d left out the most crucial piece of information. This time Langley couldn’t resist.

  “And the nurse?”

  For what seemed like forever, neither cop responded.

  “No sign of her,” Bannerman said finally.

  “Have you searched the park?”

  “We have. We found no sign of Burden or the nurse.”

  “It’s a big park.”

  “There’s a fresh coating of snow,” Forbush said. “There were no tracks leading from the car to the woods.”

  “We think he hijacked a second car,” Bannerman said.

  “So now he’s got two hostages?” Langley said.

  “Or there are two dead bodies lying in a ditch somewhere,” Bannerman said.

  “Burden has no reason to harm either of these people,” Langley told him.

  “Not like Charles Luray, for example?”

  What did Bannerman mean by that? Despite his curiosity, Langley refused to bite. Once again it was Forbush who broke the silence.

  “Charles Luray was murdered tonight,” he said.

  Langley said nothing. But this time there was no calculation in his silence. He was, quite simply, speechless.

  “Seeing as how Burden has now killed twice, his wife and Luray,” Bannerman said, “what has he got to lose by adding the nurse and the second driver?”

  “We’d like to prevent that if we can,” Forbush said. “So if you have any idea at all where Burden might be, Mr. Langley‌—‌”

  The phone rang. Langley went to answer it.

  “Got some bad news, O,” Wickersham said. He sounded very tired.

  “The police are here now, Harry.”

  Wickersham sighed. “I guess there’s nothing more to be said, then. Let me know if I can be of any help.”

  Hanging up the receiver, Langley turned to Bannerman. “Why didn’t you have a man guarding Luray?”

  “We did,” Forbush said.

  “And Burden got past the guard?” Langley said. How the hell had he managed to do that? But at the moment his curiosity about the answer to that question ranked a very distant second to his irritation at the way the two detectives had been treating him. Particularly Bannerman.

  “Not a good day for New York’s Finest, I think,” he said, addressing Bannerman. “First, Burden escapes from his hospital bed, from under the nose of the cop guarding him. And now he kills a witness under the nose of the cop guarding him.”

  “It’ll be a worse day for Burden when we catch up with him,” Bannerman said.

  After the two detectives had left, Fay emerged again from the bedroom. Over two cups of hot milk, Langley filled her in on what he had been told.

  “Why would Burden want to kill Luray?” Fay asked him.

  To Langley, the answer was obvious: to silence an eyewitness. What he wanted to know was how Burden had managed to slip by the cop guarding Luray.

  “What does it gain him to kill Luray?” Fay persisted.

  “It removes the only eyewitness to his crime,” Langley told her, perhaps a bit shortly. Well, it was almost three a.m. and his patience was exhausted.

  “Does this mean he’ll beat the rap for killing Laurel?” Fay asked. She started clearing the cups off the table.

  “Not likely,” Langley said. “Even without Luray, ther
e’s more than enough evidence to fry Burden ten times over for Laurel’s murder.”

  “So,” Fay said, posing the question for the third time, “what does it gain him to kill Luray?”

  At last he saw her point. It gained Burden nothing to kill Luray. If anything, it cost him. It wasted valuable time he could have used to try to effect his escape from the city. It put him in danger of capture by the police who were surely guarding Luray. To kill Luray was an act of stupidity. Whatever else he was, Langley thought, Burden was not stupid. So, why had he done it? It made no sense unless‌—‌

  Langley jumped to his feet.

  “Get dressed,” he called to Fay, who had carried the cups into the kitchen. “We’re getting out of here right now.”

  She appeared in the doorway. “Why, Owen?”

  “I think Burden may have flipped out altogether. If that’s the case, he may come here next.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Owen.”

  “Exactly. It doesn’t make any sense for Burden to kill Luray. It didn’t make any sense for him to kill his wife the way he did. Maybe, when all is said and done, the explanation behind all that has happened is: Burden is crazy.”

  “You’ve talked with him at length, Owen,” Fay said quietly. “Is he crazy or isn’t he?”

  If she had posed the question as a challenge, it would have set him off. So too, if she had made a joke of it. But she had put it to him matter-of-factly, allowing him to answer in the same fashion. “No, he isn’t.”

  “Then,” Fay said, “let’s go back to bed.”

  He yielded to her common-sense suggestion. But he didn’t try to sleep again. He knew he wouldn’t be able to. It wasn’t the possibility that Burden would sneak up on them in the dark that kept him wide-eyed awake. It was Fay’s question. Why would Burden kill Charles Luray? Although he spent the rest of the night thinking about that question, he couldn’t come up with an answer that made any sense.

  CHAPTER 13

  The new day arrived gray and bleak. Sometime during the night the snow had stopped, leaving a covering of about eight inches.

  The morning papers‌—‌Langley had trudged the mile-long round trip to Grand Army Plaza to get them‌—‌were full of the news of Burden’s escape. Pictures of him and Laurel Rose covered the front pages of the News and the Mirror, as both tabloids graphically rehashed the details of Laurel’s murder. Neither paper, Langley noted, and nor the Tribune and the Times, had yet made the connection between Burden and DeBrough (at least not for publication). They had, however, all made the connection between Burden and Langley, the Mirror going so far as to suggest that there was something fishy about Burden’s transfer to the hospital just hours before his escape.

  Langley looked for but could not find a mention of Luray in any of the papers. Apparently, his murder had been reported too late to make the early editions.

  The phone rang. Again. It had been ringing all morning. Reporters. Fay had taken it upon herself to screen the calls for him. Now, covering the receiver with her hand, she turned to him.

  “He says he’s a private eye, says it’s important he talk to you.”

  He took the receiver from her.

  “Harry?”

  “My name’s Magruder,” the voice on the line said. “Earl Magruder.”

  Langley waited for him to say which paper he was with.

  “I’m a private investigator, Mr. Langley.”

  So he was for real. “What can I do for you, Mr. Magruder?”

  “I read in the paper that you’re Terence Burden’s attorney. Several months back I was hired to find Burden, by a woman who, according to what I read in the paper, later married him.”

  Wickersham, Langley remembered, had predicted this development. He said that if Laurel Rose had hired a P.I. to find Burden, the guy would turn up. Of course Wickersham hadn’t believed Burden’s “unbelievable” story. Langley, himself, had never more than half-believed it. So the story was true after all.

  “Are you there, Mr. Langley?”

  “Just getting my thoughts together. How many months back did this happen, Mr. Magruder?”

  “I’ve just been checking my records. I was hired by Miss Rose, only she presented herself to me as Amber McCoy, in February. It took me only a couple of days to locate Burden. I made my report to Miss Rose on February 29. I’d have been in touch with you sooner, but I was out of town when the murder happened. It was only this morning that I saw Burden’s name and picture in the paper and made the connection. You understand I’ll have to go to the police with this information?”

  Langley heard the doorbell ring. Like the phone, it had been busy all morning. Some of the more aggressive reporters apparently thought that if they approached him in person they might be able to force an interview with him.

  “How many times did Laurel Rose hire you to find Burden?” Langley asked Magruder.

  “How many times? One time.”

  “She didn’t lose track of him and then hire you to find him again?”

  “Just the one time.”

  “Did you ask her why she wanted Burden located?”

  “I didn’t ask and the lady didn’t say.”

  Langley thanked Magruder and hung up.

  Treachery, thy name is woman. He couldn’t remember who had said that. Shakespeare, probably. Whoever, he must have had Laurel Rose, or someone just like her, in mind.

  Paradoxically, none of this was good news for Burden. On the contrary. He had sensed he was being set up. In fact, he was being set up (for what Langley even now couldn’t venture a guess). What it all added up to, though, was a motive for killing Laurel Rose: to pay her back for the way she had used him.

  “Are you all right, Owen?”

  He became aware that Fay was staring at him from the doorway. They had been dancing around each other all morning. He had said some things the night before that he very much regretted in the full light of day. For one, his suggestion that Fay might no longer want to marry him if he were not to remain a lawyer. He suspected that Fay would call back one or two of her own remarks, if she could. He didn’t think any permanent damage had been done to their mutual trust, yet. But that could happen in a hurry if they began holding things back from each other. He wondered now whether he should share with her the information he had just learned from Magruder. So great was his own ambivalence about the news, however, that he decided to hold off.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “There’s a Mr. Wickersham at the door,” she told him.

  ***

  “Ready to pay our friend Ricky a visit?” Wickersham said, entering the room. Langley thought he looked beat.

  He introduced Wickersham to Fay. They had not previously met. There was a reason for that, which was that he tried religiously to keep his professional and private lives separate. He did not bring Fay to the office. And he did not bring people he worked with home. So, what was Wickersham doing here?

  “What is it, Harry?”

  “I asked if you’re ready to go see Ricky.”

  “You’ve found him?”

  “I told you last night that I had.”

  Reminded of the fact, Langley could vaguely remember being told. Anyway, so what?

  He said, “It doesn’t much matter anymore, Harry.”

  Wickersham frowned. “Twenty-four hours ago you thought it was important, O.”

  “That was then. After what happened last night…” He waved a hand.

  “What happened last night?” Wickersham asked.

  Now Langley was confused. It was as if Wickersham and he were having separate conversations, each with a correspondent the other couldn’t see. And about two completely different subjects.

  “Luray was murdered last night.”

  “Oh, that.”

  Yes, that, Langley thought.

  “I can see the police didn’t give you the full particulars about Charlie’s demise,” Wickersham s
aid, perching on the edge of the couch. “Did they tell you that his body was discovered around two o’clock this morning in an alley four blocks from his home? He moved back to his own apartment a week ago, by the way; he lives‌—‌lived‌—‌in the West Village. If they didn’t tell you about the alley, then I don’t guess they told you how he got to be in the alley in the first place. It seems that sometime after one, which is when the cop watching Luray’s apartment saw his light go out, Charlie sneaked out the back window onto the fire escape. From there he climbed to the roof, crossed the roofs of some twenty houses‌—‌all of this in the middle of a snowstorm, mind you‌—‌climbed down the fire escape at the end of the block, and walked the four blocks to the alley where he met his sad end.”

  Long before Wickersham had finished, Langley had gotten the point. “So Burden didn’t kill him.”

  “Not unless he’s the most persuasive man who ever lived. I figure Luray was drawn out of his apartment by a phone call.”

  “A phone call? Did you say one o’clock?”

  “Or a little later.”

  “DeBrough called me at one o’clock, from the family home on the Island.”

  “He said he was calling from there.”

  Unwilling to admit that DeBrough had used him, Langley searched for another explanation. “He could have had somebody else kill Luray.”

  Wickersham shook his head. “I don’t think so, O. The idea was to silence Luray, to leave no loose ends that could trip DeBrough up. If he used somebody else, he would merely be trading one loose end for another.”

  It seemed there was no escaping the truth. “The son of a bitch was setting me up for his alibi.”

  “Again, I don’t think so, O. If he called you from the Island, the telephone company will have a record of it. And they’ll have a record of it if he didn’t call. To satisfy our own curiosity, we’ll check. And if, as I figure, there is no record of such a call, well, then it’s your word against DeBrough’s that there ever was a call. What I think he was doing, O, was making sure Burden was still at large. Wouldn’t do to kill Luray after Burden had been captured or killed. It just might start the police wondering.”