Rose-colored Glasses

by Downing, John

  Every thousand feet or so, there was a bridge carrying one of the local streets over the railroad cut. If even one of the overpasses had a ladder or steps leading to it, Ricky would be able to climb to street level and be long gone before Langley could see which way he went.

  It seemed to Langley that he had gained a bit. Yes. He had narrowed the gap to about three-quarters of a block. And now he started to wonder how he would go about subduing Ricky when he overtook him finally.

  The trench, he realized suddenly, had begun to widen. It took him a second to decide exactly why this was so, and then he saw: there was a spur heading off from the main track. By itself, the spur was of no importance; the problem was, the spur rose. Following its line of ascent, Langley saw that it climbed all the way to street level. Up ahead, there was another overpass and high above that an el trestle. What would that be? The West End line? No, that was miles away. It had to be the Culver line. And so that was McDonald Avenue ahead. Once Ricky reached McDonald Avenue… Langley didn’t even want to think about it; there were a million ways for Ricky to lose himself in the side streets.

  Langley let out another notch. His lungs were screaming. So must Ricky’s be. Ricky, however, was already halfway up the ramp leading to the street. Another hundred yards and he would reach McDonald Avenue. He glanced back over his shoulder to check on Langley. And then, as though invigorated by the prospect of giving his pursuer the slip, he put on a new burst of speed.

  And then suddenly he stopped.

  Beyond Ricky, Langley could see another figure. At the distance he could not make it out, but he knew it was Wickersham. Ricky had reached the same conclusion. Veering to his left, he leaped off the ramp, landing on the remains of an old loading platform. He lost his footing when he hit the platform and again when he jumped down to the track bed, which allowed Langley to close to within a hundred feet of him. Scrambling to his feet, Ricky pushed on. But he had spent himself. He staggered and wobbled until he was under the McDonald Avenue overpass. And then he began to scream.

  Catching up with him finally, Langley pushed him back into the deepest recesses of the underpass. Ricky continued to scream for help. And now Wickersham hovered into view.

  Opening his jacket, he gave Ricky a look at the gun he had holstered there and said, “Shut up.”

  Which Ricky did, as quickly and as completely as if he had been turned off by a switch.

  “We’re going to go back to your place,” Wickersham said. “If you don’t do anything stupid, you won’t get hurt.”

  ***

  “It’s not here,” Ricky said as Wickersham closed the door behind them.

  Langley took encouragement from his words. Maybe it wasn’t here, he thought, but whatever “it” was, it existed.

  And then again, maybe it was here: he could hardly expect Ricky to come out and say, “I hid it under the cushion there; help yourself.” Telling Wickersham to watch Ricky, he started his search.

  One way or the other, it didn’t figure to take long. He began with the closet. Except for a battered suitcase, the closet was empty. So was the suitcase.

  He turned to the room. It was sparsely furnished: a bed, a table and two chairs, and a dresser. He crossed to the dresser. Perversely, he started with the bottom drawer. It was empty. So was the next drawer. The third drawer held some socks and underwear.

  The top drawer contained some cigarettes, matches, loose coins, and a small Fanny Farmer candy box. Langley opened the box. Photographs. But not the sort of photographs he and Wickersham had been speculating about an hour earlier: no one was in flagrante in these pictures. The photographs were of some kind of document. As he lifted the box out for a closer look, he heard Ricky say, “The negatives are in a safe deposit box at the bank. My lawyer has the key to the box.”

  So, this was “it”: a box of photographs.

  It was too dark where he was standing to read the small lettering. He carried the pictures over by the window, where there was more light. It was still difficult to read, but he could make out that the photographs were of a will. Ardel DeBrough’s last will and testament. Dated February 9, 1956. Was this what was behind it all?

  Skimming over the legalese, Langley boiled the will down to its essentials; namely, who gets what. Except for a few minor bequests to various relatives and faithful servants, Mrs. DeBrough had left all that she had owned to her son. And what else would one expect? Langley didn’t get it.

  “Explain it,” he told Ricky, and saw the light come on behind Ricky’s eyes.

  “You’re not from De‌—‌” He stopped himself before speaking the name.

  “No,” Langley said, “I’m not from DeBrough. Worse than that. I’m from Burden. I’m his lawyer. Now explain this.”

  The tension visibly went out of Ricky. “Figure it out for yourself.”

  And so he would, Langley thought. Two people, so far, had died because of the will. Ricky had been hiding in fear for his life because of it. And because of it Burden faced the electric chair (if the police didn’t kill him first). If Laurel Rose and Ricky could figure out the significance of the will, he, Langley, ought to be able to do so too.

  Wickersham walked over to stand beside him, all the while keeping one eye on Ricky.

  With Wickersham reading over his shoulder, Langley read the will again. The first photograph contained the boilerplate of a typical will: the date, assertion of soundness of mind and body, arrangements to settle bills outstanding at the time of Mrs. DeBrough’s death, and various other codicils, none of which had any great significance that Langley could see.

  The second photograph showed the smaller bequests: so much to the butler, so much to Cousin Louis, and so on. The third photograph was more of the same. Again Langley could see nothing out of the ordinary.

  The fourth photograph contained the heart of the will, in which Mrs. DeBrough left the residue of her estate to her son. The makeup of the residue was listed in excruciating detail: the house on Long Island, a vacation home on Block Island, two more houses, the company that bore Mrs. DeBrough’s name, various pieces of art, stock certificates, bank accounts, and so on and so on; it took a fifth photograph and a sixth and a seventh to list them all.

  The eighth photograph contained some more legalese and the ninth wrapped things up in pretty much the usual fashion. Langley still didn’t get it. He looked at Wickersham. It was clear from Wickersham’s expression that he didn’t get it either.

  “Look at the fourth photograph,” Ricky said. There was a taunting quality to his voice. He was mocking them.

  The fourth photograph. That was the one in which Mrs. DeBrough had expressed her desire to have the bulk of her estate go to her son. Was there some irregularity here? Some legal catch involving the ownership of DeBrough Enterprises, some arcane rule regarding the transfer of stocks and bonds? No. It had to be something simple, something Laurel Rose and Ricky could understand.

  Had something been left out of the will? Langley was not privy to all that Mrs. DeBrough had owned. Neither would Laurel or Ricky have been. Even if something had been left out, there was more than enough included to tide the average person over for several lifetimes. Even someone as extravagant as M. Terence DeBrough‌—‌ Of course! Suddenly Langley had it. He looked at Wickersham and saw that he had just figured it out too.

  “And you were worried about not getting paid,” Wickersham said.

  “‘…to my son, Meredith Terence DeBrough-Burden…’” Langley read from the will. My God!

  He was no expert on financial matters, but it looked to him as if Burden was now a very rich man. He was Meredith Terence DeBrough-Burden, and he had been Meredith Terence DeBrough-Burden before anyone else had. He was Ardel DeBrough’s son, legally as much so as her natural son was. If the will didn’t net Burden the entire fortune, Langley guessed it would net him at least half.

  He turned to Ricky. “Now you’re going to tell me the rest of the story.”

  “
I’ve told you all I’m going to tell you,” Ricky said. His fear had long since faded. He faced Langley with a newly-found boldness.

  Walking over to where Ricky stood, Langley punched him in the face as hard as he could. As a child he’d had the usual skirmishes with other playmates, but they were so inconsequential he could scarcely remember them. He had never gotten into a fight as an adult, nor, as far as he could recall, even as a teenager. And yet here he had, without even consciously intending it, hit another man hard enough to send him reeling. With blood gushing from his nose, Ricky went sprawling onto the bed.

  He had to decide right now, Langley realized, how far he was willing to go with this. In an instant he had made up his mind.

  Turning to Wickersham, he said, “Maybe you’d better wait outside. Either I find out what I want to know or this guy’s going to be dead.”

  As he said these words, he meant them literally: he was not going to leave this room until he knew the truth. Even as he waited on Ricky, Burden was being hunted by the police; perhaps at this very minute he was being cut down, all because of some evil scheme cooked up by Laurel Rose and this bastard lying on the bed. So, God help him, Langley thought, but he meant every word he had said.

  “I want to watch,” Wickersham said.

  The remark was flippant, but the tone of voice was serious. Langley wasn’t sure how to read him. Did Wickersham think he was bluffing? Or, realizing that he was in earnest, was Wickersham staying so that he could, if necessary, prevent him from going too far?

  Ricky believed him. Turning back to him, Langley saw that the bravado had gone completely from Ricky’s face, replaced by fear. Nothing concentrates the mind like one’s own pending execution, so the saying goes. The next best concentrator of the mind, he thought, was the sight of one’s own blood flowing. With both hands cupped over his broken nose, Ricky peered up at him.

  “I already know most of the story, Ricky,” Langley said. “You’re going to fill in the parts I’m missing. In February Laurel Rose worked for two weeks at PrestonPierce. During those two weeks she met DeBrough and started dating him. Also during those two weeks she stole the will. But for the will to have any meaning for her, she had to know about Burden. How did she know about him?”

  “She didn’t.”

  Langley drew his hand back, his fingers curling into a fist. Ricky put both hands up before his face, bloody palms outward, to fend off the expected blow.

  From behind them he said, “Give me a chance. I’ll tell you what you want to know, but give me a chance.” Langley lowered his fist, and Ricky went on, “Like you said, Laurel met DeBrough and they started seeing each other. Laurel wrote letters to her mother twice a week. In one of the letters she mentioned that she was dating DeBrough. Her mother wrote back to ask if she was dating ‘the right DeBrough.’ In the letter she went on to tell the whole story of DeBrough and his brother. I thought the old lady was cuckoo, but Laurel suggested we check into it. We did. We found out that what her mother said was true: two brothers with the same name, both of them legally Ardel DeBrough’s son. One day in the middle of all this, Laurel was asked to witness the signing of Ardel DeBrough’s will.”

  Langley glanced at the will. One of the two witnesses was Amber McCoy. Laurel, he thought, you were a piece of work.

  “After,” Ricky went on, “she was told to file the will with the rest of the family’s papers. Instead, she filed it in her purse. From what we could tell in reading the will, Burden was the true heir to the DeBrough fortune.”

  “And so you set about finding Burden. You hired a private detective. Go on,” Langley prompted.

  “We staged a mugging, giving Burden a chance to ‘rescue’ Laurel. As his reward he got to marry her.”

  “They didn’t exactly live happily ever after, though. What was your plan? To kill Burden?”

  “Hell no! Laurel was married to him. When he inherited, she inherited. We inherited.”

  “It didn’t bother you that Laurel was living with Burden?”

  “She always came back to me,” Ricky said. “Anyway, I think I was banging her more than he was. The poor sap never even guessed.”

  “Until the afternoon he caught you and Laurel together.”

  “That called for a change in plans. After that, we decided to shake down DeBrough.”

  “Explain that. Why didn’t he simply go to his mother and ask her to fix the will?”

  “The day after she signed the will Mrs. DeBrough suffered a stroke. Laurel heard the news in the office of PrestonPierce. There was even a veiled reference to it in the papers. The stroke left Mrs. DeBrough partially paralyzed and senile. The paper she signed in the office of PrestonPierce was going to be her last last will and testament.”

  Langley remembered DeBrough’s remark about his mother dying ten months earlier when her mind went. “Did DeBrough agree to pay you?”

  “Of course. He gave Laurel two payments of $5,000 each, one in September, the other in October.”

  “Where did she meet him?”

  “Once on the boardwalk at Coney Island. She was told to enter the boardwalk at Steeplechase Park just after sunrise and start walking west. He was waiting for her by the Half Moon Hotel.”

  A walk of about half a mile, Langley calculated. At that hour of the morning the boardwalk would be deserted. DeBrough was making sure there would be no one around to witness the exchange between Laurel and himself.

  “The second time she met him on a subway station late at night.”

  Again insuring there were no witnesses. Also, conditioning Laurel to expect their meetings to take place in remote locations. So she would have had no reason to suspect a thing as she set out to meet DeBrough in Prospect Park.

  “We decided to hit him up for $10,000 the third time. She was on her way to meet DeBrough when she was killed.”

  This was more than Langley had dared hope for. “Go on,” he said.

  “We were together at Laurel’s apartment before she left to meet DeBrough in the park. I walked downstairs with her and put her in a cab. As the cab drove off, this big guy walked up to me and grabbed me. Twisting my arm behind my back, he pushed me into a car. DeBrough was waiting inside the car. The big guy got behind the wheel‌—‌I was ready to shit my pants; I thought I was going to be killed‌—‌but he drove us to Gage and Tollner’s, the restaurant on Fulton Street. DeBrough and I went inside, while the big guy waited in the car. DeBrough was obviously well known in the place. We sat at a table and DeBrough ordered drinks. For the next hour or so we sat there and talked.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “It was all pretty vague. More or less that he’d prefer to do business with me personally. He said he’d be willing to pay me ‘a handsome sum’‌—‌those were the words he used, like a character in a movie‌—‌for the original of the will and the negatives of any photographs I had taken.”

  “Did you think his offer was serious?”

  “No. For the will to be worth anything, Burden would have to be gotten rid of. And then so would Laurel and me, because we knew of the existence of the will and we knew and could testify to the fact that DeBrough was aware of the will at the time of Burden’s death. DeBrough was just playing games.”

  “And building an alibi for himself.”

  “That’s right. At around 4:30 he received a phone call that appeared to annoy him. I started to get worried. I knew he was up to something, but I didn’t know what. And then he started to look concerned. He asked the maitre d’ if there had been another call for him. A while later he asked again. Just after five o’clock he gave up and got set to leave. I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to leave the restaurant with him and his goon. If they were going to kill me, they were going to have to do it right there. But DeBrough made no effort to force me to go with him. With a display of jolliness‌—‌for the benefit of people watching, I guess‌—‌he said goodbye to me at the table. I waited a couple of minute
s and then I went back to Laurel’s place. I found that it had been torn apart. I knew by who. And for what. I was scared. I went on to my place and found that somebody had broken in there, too. I spent the night with a friend. When I read about Laurel in the papers, I decided to make myself scarce.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “Hell, I had the goods on DeBrough, now more than ever.”

  So the son of a bitch was still going to try to cash in. “Have you made any effort to get in touch with him?”

  “Yes. I sent him a copy of the photographs to remind him that I still had the will. I told him the originals were in the hands of a lawyer, to be given to the police with a full written statement of all that I knew and had witnessed if anything happened to me. I was telling him, in other words: If I go, you go. That was the only contact I’ve had with him until this morning, when I tried to reach him by phone. With his mother dead, it’ll soon be will-reading time.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I couldn’t reach him. I was told he was at the family estate. I tried to reach him there, but I couldn’t get through. The storm apparently knocked out the phone lines.”

  “How much were you going to ask?”

  “Half.”

  “Half! You greedy fuck. How did you think you were going to keep the will secret? There’s bound to be a copy of it at PrestonPierce. And lawyers there who will remember what it said.”

  “Sure. The money was for my silence. What if I were to go to the police? Okay, I’d be in some trouble too. But DeBrough‌—‌I can testify that he knew Laurel had stolen the will, that he had paid her for her silence, that he had arranged to meet her the afternoon she died. He had plenty of reasons for wanting to pay me.”

  Langley didn’t bother to disabuse Ricky of his notions, but in fact his knowledge was worthless. Unless DeBrough had been dumb enough to pay Laurel by check, there’d be no way to connect him to the money she’d received. As for the rest of Ricky’s knowledge, it was hearsay: None of it could be used against DeBrough in a court of law.