Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by George V. Higgins

  “It varies,” Richards said, turning left on Cambridge Street. “The meaning of life varies. That’s why so many are confused. They seek a single meaning, when in fact there are millions. Millions and millions of meanings. Enough for every single one of us to choose at least one for himself, and be perfectly contented, sitting in the shade of his personal tree. It’s being pernickety, people being jealous of other people’s meanings, and deciding that their own’s not as good. That’s what causes war and other tribulations — athlete’s foot, pyorrhea, dandruff: stuff like that.”

  “You’re sure about that,” Gleason said. “Millions and millions of meanings, enough for every man jack that ever wore shoe leather?”

  “I’m fairly sure,” Richards said. “I could be off a little bit, maybe two, three hundred thousand. Either way. But there’s at least a good dozen that I know about, I have personally seen.”

  “What’s yours?” Gleason said. “I promise I won’t covet it.”

  “And you won’t steal it, either,” Richards said. He took the Storrow Drive ramp at Charles Street Circle and headed west along the river, blue in the clear morning.

  “Absolutely not,” Gleason said. “I’m too exhausted to steal anything. These conjugal battles whip me all to shit.”

  “Assist me in your guidance,” Richards said. “The most useful knowledge is that which we acquire by ourselves — good examination of conscience, all that kind of stuff. What was the fight about?”

  “The usual thing,” Gleason said, “ ‘the usual thing’ being some perfectly harmless-sounding remark that one of us makes and the other one takes as a mortal fucking insult and war’s declared at once. I got out of the shower and I’m getting dressed, and she asked me what time I’d be home. And I said I didn’t know, because I hadda go down to Providence today with John Richards to see the AG there. And I didn’t know how long that was going to take — which I don’t — but however long it takes. And add another hour to get back here. Plus another hour for dinner, if it runs for a long time. Plus about an hour for me to get my car here and back home.”

  “And she got mad,” Richards said.

  “Yeah, she did,” Gleason said. “But Barbara’s got this little trick she uses. She’s very smart. She knows she gets mad at me for things that I can’t help. And when she does that, I just ignore her. Like I would’ve done this morning, if she’d lighted into me for not knowing how long the Rhode Island AG’s gonna want to talk about their little robbery. Or for not moving Providence closer to Hanover, so I could get home earlier. Or for not moving Hanover closer to Boston. You follow? What she does, when she gets mad like that about something that there’s not a damned thing in the world that I can do to change it for her, she lies in ambush for me. Waits for me to make some innocent remark she can deliberately misinterpret, and then bushwhacks me. Supposedly over that, but really about what she doesn’t dare to say’s the real reason. So I won’t be prepared.

  “Now,” Gleason said, “keep in mind that I knew, when she asked me what time I’d be home, I knew she was asking because she was looking to have me pick up Terry Junior at gymnastics up at Rockland. And he gets through at six. Which is precisely when Joanne’s swimming class starts at the Norwell Health Club. What she had in mind was for me to collect Terry on my way home, and she would take Joanne, and her life would be easier. And maybe I’ll be able to do it for her tonight, things work and we get back.

  “So,” he said, “knowing she’s disappointed, and also sympathizing, I say while knotting my green tie: ‘I’m really sorry about this, you know, but I have to go. I wish I didn’t have to, and that John could go alone, and I don’t think I’m going to add much to the festivities, but Reese wants me at the briefing with the Rhode Island AG and that means I have to go.’ ”

  “Reese didn’t,” Richards said, “Reese doesn’t know anything about your going down. This was entirely Boyd’s idea. He’s the one who called. Reese is in Hawaii, chasing maidens of dusky hue. Andy is the one who thought this might be a good idea.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gleason said, “I know. But I’m just telling you what I said to her, all right? And she said, she’s got this murderous soft voice she uses when she’s winding up to throw a beanball right straight at my head. And she said: ‘Then why go?’ And I said, sarcastic naturally, I said: ‘Well, darling, because I work for Mister Reese. That’s why he pays me money. And when Mister Reese says: “Gleason, go to Providence,” I have to go to Providence.’ And she said: ‘You don’t have to. You told me, it was almost a year ago when you left the DA’s office for this big wonderful new offer that’d make you a big star, you told me then that you and John, you’d have the birds in custody within a couple months. And you’d try them, and convict them, and then the clients would be beating down the doors to get you to represent them when you resigned right after that to open your own office. Well, as near as I can see, you haven’t made it happen yet, and I don’t think you’re gonna. All that you’ve accomplished is another year of low-pay work, but this one with no trials. If most people didn’t know you when you were in court every day, those who did will have forgotten, time this’s over with.’

  “Well,” Gleason said, “what do I say? The truth? ‘You might be right, dear, that I made a big mistake? But if I did, I’m stuck with it? I can’t go back and change it now?’ No, that is not what I said. What I said instead was: ‘Look, we are partners. This is the way you wanted it, when I got out of school. You couldn’t wait to quit your job and start having the kids. You didn’t want to stay with Jordan’s. You were adamant. I told you then, I tell you now, we could’ve used that cash. You’d worked for three or four more years, and we’d saved your pay, the things that we can’t afford to buy now we’d already have. I know you’re jealous of Susan Hemmings, and Sheila, and all those other ladies whose husbands’re pulling down the heavy bread in private practice. I envy them myself. But you’ve got to keep in mind that Don Hemmings was editor of law review, and I wasn’t, and Ted Feeney’s father’s a founding partner in that firm, and mine wasn’t, and if being the wife of a guy like that is what you had in mind, well, you should’ve married one.’

  “And then I said some other things,” Gleason said. “I dunno. I’m worried, John. I can see us just getting further’n further apart, like two kids with a play telephone made of two tin cans and a string, seeing how far apart they can get before they can’t hear each other any more, and never realizing that the only reason you can make a play telephone out of two cans and a siring is because smart kids never use a piece of string that’s long enough to let them get out of earshot.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Richards said. “Back when I was a sergeant, down the Norwell barracks, I had this trooper under me, real nice kid named Colby. And his work started going to hell. No attention to detail, listless on the job, making dumb mistakes. And I called him in and sat him down, and I said to him: ‘Well, Tim, what the hell is going on?’ And he told me a story lot like the one you’re telling me. And I was sorry I asked. Wife didn’t, she liked the idea, him being a trooper, when the two of them got married. But then she had the experience of him living at the barracks the days he was on duty, and the kids’re driving her nuts, and she began to think, you know, this grand design they had — of him being a State policeman for enough years so he could grab off a chief’s job in some small town — maybe wasn’t going to work.”

  “What ended up happening to him?” Gleason said.

  “They got divorced,” Richards said. “And I’m sorry you asked me that, too, but that is what they did.”

  “Did it help?” Gleason said.

  Richards turned off Storrow Drive at the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike in Allston. “Gee,” he said, “you’ve got a positive genius for the toughies this morning, haven’t you, my lad. Yes, it seemed to, as a matter of fact. Helped him, at least, quite a lot. Got the shit beaten out of him on the alimony, the support, naturally in those days — judge just hoovered hi
m. But he was a lot more relaxed on the job, and took a lot more pleasure in life. Yeah, I’d say it helped. Had a nice, uneventful ten or twelve years in the uniform, picked off a chiefs job that opened up in Amesbury, I think it was, collected a new wife along the way. Yeah, things turned out for him.” Richards paused.

  “Lemrae say, Terry,” he said, “it’s easy, me to talk. I put in the day on the job, which I like, and I go home at night. That I also like. Angela’s all day at the library, which she likes to do, so she’s busy and she’s occupied and she isn’t, when I get home at night she hasn’t been by herself all day long in the house just waiting for me to get home so I can tell her all about what happened in the great world that she missed. Some new book came in that day, she thinks that I might like, she brings it home for me to read before she logs it in. And she’s of course reading all the time, because that’s her job, and I tell her what’s happened on my job that day, she tells me about hers, and we get along. One of us cooks and the other one sits there in the kitchen and the whole thing works out good.

  “Now,” he said, “there’s a lot of choices in there that don’t, aren’t obvious. Angela and I got married late, I didn’t meet anybody until her that I was interested in marrying. Fucking, yes, marrying, no. And Angela, after her first husband she was not that keen on putting up with another one. Only reason we got to know each other was that I was in the place she worked so much, this was when she was an assistant and she hadda work nights, we got to know each other. And that took us a long time. And she didn’t want to have children. She was forty-one years old when we got together. And that was all right with me. I was used to living alone. I was thirty-nine. Come home at night, it’s quiet, have something to eat and read while you listen to some music and perhaps sip a little light table wine? Very pleasant life I had. Idea having a bunch of kids running around and screaming through my evenings? Did not appeal to me.

  “See, what we did,” Richards said, “what Angela and I did was merge two lives that were working all right separately. And which happened, on which the gears luckily meshed. The only real adjustment we made was giving up our separate places, her apartment and mine, and getting a house. Which we set up the way we wanted it set up, and it was nicer’n what we’d left. We’d already developed our own lives, and we just kept on living them, but with some improvements.

  “You can’t,” Richards said, “you can’t live your whole life through another person. It doesn’t work, that’s all — it simply doesn’t work. Nobody’s up to that, living the life that he’s got plus living the life that his wife hasn’t got, and I don’t care how sincere anybody is that claims they’re going to do that, it cannot be done. And that is exactly what all you starry-eyed guys do, that get married young. And that’s why there’s so much trouble.”

  “And that’s the meaning of life,” Gleason said.

  “No,” Richards said, “that’s the flotsam of life. The clutter. The stuff that keeps getting in your way and you have to kick a path through it. The meaning of life for you today is that the AG in Rhode Island’s got a vicious little problem that he didn’t have a week ago, but we’ve had for five years. Which is how to catch some guys ’n gals that’re doing bad things in unconventional ways. Since it’s almost certainly the same set of bad people that belted the Brinks truck in Warwick on the fourth that started belting trucks on us in Danvers back in Nineteen-seventy, the Rhode Island Staties figure maybe we know more about them here than they know about them there.”

  “So give it to them,” Gleason said. “Makes them happy? Very fine. Doubt it’ll help them catch the bastards, since it hasn’t helped us much, but if they feel better, great. This world’s a gloomy place. One must help one’s fellow man.”

  “Already gave it to them, Terry,” Richards said. “That is not the point. Point is the AG down there needs something, put inna papers. And you know our Mister Reese. Does not miss a bet. They read the Providence papers in Attleboro and the Massachusetts towns in the Blackstone Valley. Nice if they see Mister Reese’s cooperating with Rhode Island authorities to collar the perpetrators. Mister Boyd, who can read Mister Reese’s mind from a distance of thousands of miles, therefore dispatches me and you to Rhode Island for a conference with the AG and his cops down there. This will enable the people from the TV stations and the papers to write stories about how the two AGs are cooperating, because the fact that they can take pictures of us there proves it. Everyone will be pleased.”

  “Hah,” Gleason said. “Barbara will not be pleased. She will not be pleased tonight, when I get home too late, and if those guys from out of state catch a break and grab the robbers, she will really be pissed off.”

  “They won’t,” Richards said.

  “No,” Gleason said, “they probably won’t. If we can’t catch them, with what we’ve got, they probably can’t catch them, working from our stuff.”

  “They haven’t got all the stuff,” Richards said.

  “You said you gave it to them,” Gleason said.

  “I said I gave them what we know,” Richards said. “I didn’t say I gave them what we think.”

  “What do we think?” Gleason said. “You wanna let me in on it, so I’m not caught with my thumb up my ass when you mention it today?”

  “I’m not mentioning anything today,” Richards said. “What I am doing today is getting information, not giving it. The giving part is over — getting’s what we’re doing. And if what I think we’re going to get’s what we turn out to get, then I will have enough for me to think that we can catch these folks.”

  “And what is that?” Gleason said.

  “I thought of this the other night,” Richards said. “I was copying the files for them, and naturally I’m reading them over again, and I kept coming back to the same thing: the fucking precision of these punks. Every time they do it, it comes off like clockwork. Almost like an inside job. They know when those armored cars’re coming, and they know when they’re going to be fullest when they go away. But every time they do it, it’s in a different place. And when we check out the bank employees, there’s never anybody missing, might’ve been in league with them. There’s not the slightest reason to suspect anyone in the banks or the courier companies or anywhere else of being in cahoots with them.

  “And then I thought,” Richards said, “then I thought: ‘Aha. You have been an asshole.’ The reason there’s never been anybody in the banks or in the trucks that looked like they had a hand in this stuff is because nobody in the banks or the trucks had a hand in it. And how could they? These’re deposits from the banks that the punks’re stealing, not shipments to the banks. The people in the banks don’t know how much they’ll have on hand to ship out when the next truck comes. The people on the trucks don’t know what they’re going to pick up. So, who the hell does know? Well, someone in the shopping plazas, someone in there every day. Someone who can not only keep a little log of when the truck comes, for a couple months or so, but also knows, from personal observation, when the stores in the malls’re doing a land-office business. So that when the truck does come, next time, it’s going out chock-a-block full. Someone, in other words, who’s not only watching the bank, but also watching the mall. They’re putting a spotter in the mall, and taking careful notes, and then when they see a big haul coming up, they know when to strike.”

  “So where does that get us?” Gleason said.

  “We’ll know today,” Richards said. “My guess is that we’ll find out there’s some kind of a fast-food joint somewhere near the bank, where the people working mornings, when it’s generally slow, had a very good place to watch the trucks come to the bank.”

  “Hamburgers?” Gleason said. “These things’re morning jobs?”

  “The burger joints serve breakfast now,” Richards said. “You weren’t so uxorious, staying home to fight with your wife every day, you would know that. Doughnut shops serve breakfast. Pancake houses? They serve breakfast. Every fucking fast-food restaurant in the whole fucking
world now sells fucking breakfast. Some day when I retire and have a lot of time, I am going to figure out who the hell is eating all those goddamned awful-looking slimy eggs and that greasy bacon, and the wet pancakes and fatty sausages with soggy rolls for breakfast. Obviously someone is doing it. Lots of someones. Otherwise normal-looking people’re getting themselves out of warm beds every morning sooner’n they have to, every day, so they can get in their cars and drive several miles to pay money to eat food nowhere near as good as they could have at home, and do it every day. Thousands of them. Hordes of the bastards. Every fucking day. Because those restaurants’re in business for money, and they’re all selling breakfasts. We’ve got a whole underclass of people ruining their digestions every morning with stuff I wouldn’t feed to my pet pig, and a whole class of other people making money off them.

  “Most of those other people,” Richards said, “are making the minimum wage. I’m talking about the slaveys here, the high-school dropouts and the elderly ladies and the rest of society’s rejects that can’t get any other work and have their mornings free. I figure this way: the lumpers working the griddles’re too busy to watch banks. But the people on the counter jobs, after the morning rush ends and they’re mopping up the tables and emptying the trash, those counter people have the time to watch the fucking bank and see when the truck arrives.