Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  My head is ringing but I’ll live. I take a deep breath and catch the odor of city garbage on my clothes.

  Oldest damn trick in the book. Jesus, how easy could I make it? I let this lady walk me into an alley, middle-aged and sauced off my rocker. The guy could have been wearing clown shoes and I wouldn’t have heard him. A child of ten could have taken me.

  At least I have an I was mugged in the city story.

  The good news is, I’m only two miles from home. I don’t ordinarily consider it unsafe to walk these streets, and I’m figuring the odds of being jumped twice in one night makes me more or less immune from attack. Not that I have any choice. No cash.

  So I walk, hoping that it will sober me up and clear my head, but it’s more like gravity is trying to pull me down with each step I take. A concussion, or a hangover, or both. The cool air helps fight the nausea, but I’m swimming against the current. I try to celebrate with each street sign I pass, that much closer to home, when what I’m really doing is trying to ignore the pain and my gullibility and my bruised ego, and the fact that I was dreaming about my ex-girlfriend when I came to.

  I own a brick house on a corner, a single-family place I bought six months ago. Way too big for just me—a home for a family, Shelly had noted ominously—but I liked the look of it, and I suppose it didn’t hurt that the place had been owned by a U.S. senator at the turn of the century—twentieth, not twenty-first.

  Before moving here, I had lived in a high-rise condominium, downtown by the lake, a place that was close to work and very low maintenance but that never really felt like a home. I didn’t like having a doorman who could register my comings and goings, not that there was anything particularly interesting about my life. It just didn’t feel private.

  So now I have privacy and then some. Forty-five hundred square feet all to myself. I’m now locked out of my house, but, in a rare moment of invention, I hid a spare key when I first moved in. I was terrified of losing my keys, though I didn’t anticipate losing them this way.

  I head to the alley by my garage where I taped the spare key underneath the rain gutter. I open the gate and walk into my backyard, which is small by suburban standards but pretty ample for the city. The border is covered in shrubbery that manages to grow all by itself, thankfully, because I don’t have a clue about that stuff. On the back of the garage is a basketball net, with a small paved area serving as a minicourt. Then there’s a small kids’ play area—swing set, jungle gym—which I think was what spooked Shelly. I might as well have proposed marriage on the spot.

  Not the right time, had been her way of putting it.

  A few steps lead down to the basement door. Only then do I realize that I never checked my spare key against this lock. Never checked to see that it worked. I’ve never, in fact, opened this door since I moved in last January. I’m hoping pretty damn hard that it’s the right key, because if it isn‘t, it really doesn’t do me much good, now does it? There are ways to pick a lock, but I have no experience. The only robbery I’ve ever committed is when I send my clients their bills.

  I turn the key and say a silent prayer. Nope. No, Mrs. Riley, your son is as scatterbrained as always. He can try the hell out of a case, but don’t give him any menial chores. “God,” I say, “dammit.”

  I decide that this door is going to be sorry it kept me out. I go with a rock from the garden. There is probably a safer and more efficient way to do this, but my head is screaming for a pillow, so I wind up like the mediocre baseball player I used to be and slam it against the small pane of glass closest to the lock.

  “Dammit,” I yell. “Shit.” I hold up the side of beef that is my right hand, shards of glass cutting between the knuckles, blood cascading down to the sleeve.

  Nice night.

  I reach through and turn the dead bolt. I try to focus on the relief at being home, rather than yet another chore I have now created for myself, a new pane of glass for the door. They sell you on how well the old places are built. That’s fine if you want to survive a hurricane, but get ready to fix toilets and reignite the water heater and find the circuit breaker in the middle of the night. I didn’t go to law school to be a carpenter. I went so I could afford one.

  The basement is huge. Soon to be a recreation area—billiard table, dartboard, wet bar, and, of course, a big-screen plasma television—if I ever get to it, which should be sometime before there’s peace in the Middle East. There are over a dozen boxes I haven’t gotten to. The only thing I have set up in the basement is what I affectionately call the Wall of Burgos. It looks like a trophy case in a high school, except instead of banners and medals there are weapons and scratched notes and barbaric photographs and courtroom sketches.

  The city magazine that did a story two months back on my purchase of this house spent more time on the Burgos stuff than on the rest of the house put together. The story was supposed to be a fluff piece about someone buying the old Senator Roche home, but instead it was about the guy who prosecuted Terry Burgos.

  After Burgos was executed, those of us who put him away divvied up the items. There were all kinds of photographs and memorabilia in the evidence room, and we ransacked it like looters after the Rodney King verdict. Over a dozen members of the team have at least one item from evidence. I think some of them are on eBay now.

  I was the luckiest, probably because I was considered unofficially the head of the Burgos team. I have the original note Burgos wrote, with the lyrics of that stupid song that he used as a blueprint for his murders. There are two photographs of him being led in, and out, of the courtroom during the trial. An article, featuring a photo of me, from Time magazine. A photograph of the bathtub where Burgos drowned Maureen Hollis. A transcript of the interrogation where Burgos incriminated himself to Detective Joel Lightner. And, front and center in the montage, two of the weapons in Terry Burgos’s arsenal: First, the knife that Burgos used to remove the heart of Ellie Danzinger and to slice Angie Mornakowski’s throat—an ordinary kitchen knife with a five-inch blade. Second, the machete that Burgos never got around to using. My personal favorite. A heavy-duty, twenty-six-inch, high-carbon spring steel machete.

  I blow out a long sigh. That was a real time. Chasing bad guys, putting together links in a chain to prove the case, grabbing beers with the coppers after. Now I’m wealthy beyond my wildest hopes, I have a governor itching to make me a federal judge, and here I’m pining for the past. You spend so much time looking to move up, you forget how much you enjoyed the climb.

  I rip a piece of cardboard from one of the unpacked boxes, find some packing tape, and do my best job patching up the hole in the basement door. It doesn’t fix the problem but it provides some temporary relief. Now I need the same thing for the pain in my head and my hand. I decide on a particular medicine, one that is served in a conical glass, I don’t care if it’s past three in the morning, and head upstairs.

  17

  LEO SITS in the coffee shop, back to the wall—never show them your back—eyes on the store window and the door. He pretends to read the paper but looks over it down the street. His eyes feel heavy. His movements are slow. It was a late night—more accurately, an early morning—with Riley and the one in the alley.

  He watches each person who enters the café. None of them pay him attention. But that’s exactly what they’d want him to think. They’d want his guard down.

  They underestimate him. He knows they could be anywhere, they could be anyone.

  He touches his stomach gently, begging the acid to stay away, knowing that the more he obsesses, the more likely, and ferocious, its arrival.

  A young, thin, blond-haired woman in a tank top, with sunglasses perched on her head, pushing a baby in a carriage and holding a bottle of green tea, takes a lounge chair three feet away from him. She pretends to tend to the baby but her head turns and she looks in his direction, casually, oh so casually, like it’s not on purpose.

  Talk to the lady. Test her.

  He tries. He doesn’t do so
well with words. Doesn’t say them right. I like your baby, is what he wants to say.

  The woman turns and smiles at him “Thank you.” Looks at him like she feels sorry for him. “This one kept me up all night.”

  He tries to smile. Long night.

  At night, I think about dark things.

  Try again: How old is she? He does okay with that.

  The woman answers—“She’s ten months”—and Leo breaks eye contact, but he can see her reaction, she picks up her child and holds her close.

  Leo winces at the stabbing in his stomach. The woman gets up quickly and walks toward the counter. He looks out the window just in time to see Paul Riley’s car in the alley, his car backing out into the alley, behind his house.

  The woman is looking in his direction, he pretends not to notice, but he’s smarter than her. He can watch her without letting her know he’s watching her.

  I know you’re staring at me, you little bitch. I could rip your eyes out without breaking a sweat.

  Leo puts on his baseball cap and leaves the café. He looks back. The woman is staring at him through the window, caressing the baby’s head. Bad baby. Fake baby.

  Leo jogs to his car. He drives miles away and then turns back toward Riley’s street, entering from a different direction. He keeps north of Riley’s house for a long while, parked by a curb, watching the rearview and driver‘s-side mirrors. Nothing. No vehicle traffic. Nothing. Nobody.

  He drives to the next block over and parks. This street is like Riley‘s, expensive houses, high gates and small, elaborate landscapes, fancy lawns, perfect houses, perfect people, shiny and happy. He removes his gym bag from the trunk and walks to the corner, turning in the direction of Riley’s street, stops midblock and turns down the alley.

  He finds Riley’s detached garage and the gate into his backyard. He uses Riley’s house keys from last night. First one doesn’t work, second one fails, third time, he’s in.

  There’s a sliding glass door on his patio, but it’s not opened by a key. No. Down a stairwell is a door under lock and key that leads to the basement. He stands at the foot of the stairwell, five feet below ground. One of the panes to the basement door window has been shattered and replaced with a piece of cardboard.

  Leo slips another key into the door, the first one doesn’t take, second one does, he heads inside with his bag. Good. Good.

  Twenty minutes later, he emerges from the house and locks the door behind him, walks back up the stairs and looks up into a vibrant sun. He admits it, yes, it feels good, feels good, but it’s a weapon they use, the weather, turning everyone into smiling, shiny, happy people. Happy, smiling, shiny, ignorant robots.

  I can live in your world. I can live in yours and mine at the same time. That’s the difference between me and you. That’s the difference between me and Terry.

  He calmly marches back to the gate. Once back in the alley, he picks up his pace, eyes darting about because this would be a time, when it’s nice and shiny and warm, not a care in the world, right, not a care in the world and I’ll be whistling to myself and then you’ll come, then you’ll come when I don’t expect it—

  But then he’s on the sidewalk, back to the car, safe, start the car. Calm now, heartbeat normalizes, breathing exercises, blast the air-conditioning, breathe in, breathe out, cold against his wet shirt, try to smile. He passes by the coffee shop, his hat pulled low, and looks through the window, to where he was sitting not a half hour ago.

  The woman with the baby is gone.

  He looks in the rearview mirror at the cars behind him. He quickly pulls over, forcing the other vehicles to pass him by, the drivers to show themselves, but none of the drivers are thin, blond-haired women with a baby in the back, but then, they wouldn’t be that obvious. He waits, one-two, one-two-three, a break in the traffic, and he pulls the car into a quick U-turn. Turns left at the first street, then another left, then another, driving in a square, eyes on the rearview mirror at all times. Looks okay. But, to be sure, he repeats the process twice more. He’s gotten this far. No reason to let up now.

  Tonight, he will know for sure.

  18

  JEREMY LARRABEE crosses his leg after completing a brief summation of the facts of his case to Judge Landis. His client, Josefina Enriques, was an administrative assistant in one of the suburban plants of Bentley Bearings. She’s a fifty-two-year-old Latino woman who filed a workers’ comp claim for carpal tunnel syndrome a year earlier. Three months later, she was fired by my client, Bentley Bearings. The lawsuit Jeremy Larrabee filed on her behalf included claims for discrimination based on race, gender, age, and workers’ comp retaliation. He’s given notice to the court that he will seek to certify a class of all employees who fall within these categories.

  Judge Landis turns his tired eyes to me. “Mr. Riley?”

  I’m annoyed for two reasons. First, my head is still killing me from being jumped last night. Second, I shouldn’t have to be here. I supervise all litigation involving Harland Bentley’s companies, but I don’t oversee the day-to-day work on these cases. That job belongs to the partners who work under me at my firm. But whenever trial judges call a settlement conference, as Judge Landis has today, they want the “trial attorneys” present, meaning the lead lawyers on each side. So here I am.

  Make it three reasons I’m annoyed, because the wound to my pride is almost as bad as the one to my skull. I still can’t believe I got snookered by that lady last night. She batted her eyes at me and my defenses evaporated.

  “Oh, I’d be very interested in how Mr. Riley spins this,” says Jeremy Larrabee. Jeremy and I have history, not a particularly amicable one, but I always get a kick out of him. Always wearing his emotions on his sleeve, still with the sixties-era ponytail, the acne scarred skin and deep-set eyes, the bright wardrobe. Today, it’s a lemon yellow shirt, wild purple tie, and chocolate sport coat.

  “She was fired because she took two-hour lunches,” I say. “And because she only showered about once a week. We’re not offering a dime.”

  Larrabee’s jaw clenches. A vein shows itself above his bushy eyebrows. He’s past sixty now, and, from what I hear, has all but abandoned criminal defense. In fact, I don’t think it was long after he lost the Burgos case that he gave up the practice. Now he’s a plaintiff’s lawyer, working on some civil rights stuff that suits him, and, these days, spending much of his time suing Bentley Bearings, one of the subsidiaries for Harland Bentley’s holding company, BentleyCo. He has no fewer than eleven suits filed against us currently. So far, we haven’t offered anything on any of the cases. He is building up fees and expenses on these cases and looking for seed money—a settlement of at least one of these claims to pay for the prosecution of the other ones.

  “I think it might be helpful if I spoke to each of you separately,” says the judge. “Starting with Mr. Riley.”

  A common tactic in a pretrial conference—the judge talks to each side separately, trying to scare each party into thinking their case is garbage and they better settle but quick. Judges always try to settle cases to clear their dockets. The last thing Judge Landis wants to hear is a motion for class certification on a bullshit case like this.

  Jeremy stands tentatively and looks at me. “Mr. Riley,” he says, and walks out.

  I put my head in my hands as the door closes, and it’s me and the judge.

  “I noticed a nasty bruise on the back of your head,” the judge says. “Your hand has seen better days, too.”

  “You shoulda seen the other guy.”

  “How is the governor’s daughter these days?”

  He means Shelly. I look up at him and don’t say anything, but my expression betrays me.

  “Ah, too bad.” He settles back in his leather chair. “I liked her. She had a real—spirit.”

  “That she did.”

  “Her loss. Hmm. I see you have Senator Almundo in the Public Trust indictments. Are the screws pretty tight?”

  “Any tighter,” I say, “he�
��d explode.”

  “Well, if anyone can pull a rabbit out of a hat ...” The judge nods at the door. “Interesting that Larrabee’s suing Harland Bentley’s company. I mean, with the history.” He shakes his head, like he doesn’t know what to make of it. “Some kind of grudge or something? ”

  I shrug. “His client killed Harland’s daughter. What would he have against Harland?”

  Judge Landis drums his fingers conclusively on his desk. He doesn’t know, either. How could anyone understand the erratic mind of Jeremy Larrabee? “Now, Paul, about this case—”

  “Not a dime, Danny,” I say. “Larrabee’s a cockroach. We throw him a crumb and he multiplies.”

  The judge drops his hands on his massive desk. His chambers are an homage to the hunter. The floor is covered with bearskin and the walls are adorned with various beheaded animals. I’m no hunter, but I’ve played a few rounds of golf with the Honorable Daniel Landis. The only thing I’ve seen him hunt for is a Titleist that he sliced into the woods.

  He massages his prominent forehead and then wags a finger at me. “You’re going to give him nuisance money,” he says.

  “We’ll give his client a year’s worth of soap,” I say.

  The judge’s shoulders tremble as he laughs.

  “And we’ll strap a feedbag to her face.”

  “Stop.” The judge’s face is red as a beet, a smile planted on his face. He catches his breath. “Ten thousand,” he says. “Your billionaire client spends that on dinner. And the woman gets reinstated.”

  “Ten thousand what?” I say. “Ten thousand nose plugs for the people who have to work around her?”

  Danny likes that one even better. His laughter turns to a cough and he waves me out. His face a bright red, he holds up ten fingers as I close the door to the judge’s chambers.

  Jeremy Larrabee is sitting in the empty courtroom, talking on his cell phone. He seems surprised to see me. “Already?” he asks, punching out the cell phone. He needs some work on his poker face. He was hoping for something, anything, from me, and the fact that I spent about sixty seconds in there gives him the answer. I pick up my jacket and briefcase.