David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

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.

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.