Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by George V. Higgins

  “You gonna do it, when you get out, Terry?” Richards said. “On the other side?”

  Gleason drank Coke “Uh huh.” he said. “Bet your ass. Have to, Day, the way things are today, from the day your client walks in the office, you’re laying backfires to ignite behind his ass, the day comes that he sues you. You think Consolo’s bad? At least he’s not going to file a complaint against me with the Board of Bar Overseers, and then sue me for two million on a malpractice complaint.”

  “You gonna let Bigelow have it?” Richards said. “His stipulation there?”

  “Oh, sure,” Gleason said. “I’m even going to add a little something — that none of the employments listed were the kind that would have required James to work on Sunday. May the fourth. Nineteen-seventy-seven. Then I’ll argue. ‘No alibiin’ this stuff Ladies and Gentlemen.

  “But I’ve got to let Bigelow have it.” Gleason said. “He’s got about a dozen witnesses there, every one of which he’s got a perfect right to call. He could keep us here another three weeks — well, maybe only one — dragging all these Connecticut Valley tobacco farmers, and major appliance installers, and Pioneer Valley construction foremen, and all those other guys. Parading them up one after another to say James’s worked for them and he’s a good employee, too. I gather the defense is going to be that James never showed any indication to the outside world that he came into a share of a rather large sum of money, and a good-sized stash of cocaine, on the morning of May fourth Which is all all right with us. Grand jury didn’t say that James went out and bought a yacht. He isn’t charged with using drugs, though I would bet be did. I thought when I first read it: ‘Geez, I wonder if these people, if they’ve got attendance records. ’Cause I sure would like to know if he was absent on four specific days between October fourth of Nineteen-seventy and September fourth of Seventy-five. When those armored cars went down. And if he wasn’t on the job, well, we know where he was — he was on the jobs.”

  Gleason stretched. “Shit, I’m tired,” he said. “I wish this was over with. And now I got this afternoon, all their ranting and raving instead of mine — which’s nowhere near’s much fun — and I know what Bart’s gonna say, when four P.M. rolls around.”

  “What?” Richards said.

  “He’s gonna say: ‘Tomorrow,’ ” Gleason said. “ ‘We’ll sit on Saturday.’ Because the jury’s been locked up, and they are getting antsy, and he’ll want to console them, and so that’s what he will do.”

  “But you’re getting antsy yourself,” Richards said.

  “I am,” Gleason said, “but I am not, antsy, if you take a look at Barbara. Barbara is antsy like George S. Patton got antsy about Panzer divisions surrounding Bastogne. I miss about three more dinners, I’m not there at sun-up about two more mornings, she is going to have the bread knife aimed at my throat the next time I come home.”

  “She’d better learn to live with it,” Richards said. “This is how you do your job.”

  “She has learned to live with it,” Gleason said. “It’s my life that’s in danger.”

  18

  Morrissey intercepted Gleason on his way back to the courtroom on the afternoon of September 15th. He took him into the internal corridor leading to the judge’s chambers and began a murmured conversation. McNeil, at the security table, glanced at them from time to time. She heard Gleason say: “Okay” Morrissey continued down the corridor and knocked on the door of the chambers. Gleason came toward her “Tibbetts gonna plead?” she said excitedly. Gleason looked mildly startled. “No, no,” he said, “nothing like that.” He went into the courtroom.

  At 1:03 P.M. the bailiff noted the return of Carolyn Veale and rapped on the courtroom door of chambers. The judge emerged immediately and swept onto the bench. The jury box was empty. The defendants sat behind the rail. The judge sat down and clasped his hands. Morrissey was standing. “You have some glad tidings for us, Mister Morrissey?”

  “I believe so, your Honor, Morrissey said. “Inspired by my brother, Mr. Bigelow’s example I sought out Mister Gleason at the luncheon recess and proposed a stipulation of agreed facts in the case against Mister Tibbetts. Mister Gleason, with the civility and fairness, he’s invariably showed me in all our many confrontations, accepted my proposal. Time did not permit me to reduce the agreement to writing, but if the Court will permit. I can recite it for the record. It what I say varies in any way from Mister Gleason’s understanding of our undertaking. I will bow to his correcting amendments.”

  “Unctuous bastard, isn’t he?” Richards whispered to Gleason “Shh,” Gleason said “It’s part of his act. He’d wear a wig if he could.”

  “As Mister Gleason has indicated to the Court,” Morrissey said, “discovery motions in cases that he’s prosecuted and I’ve defended have been mere formalities Our custom over many years has been to swap as much of our files as the attorney-client privilege permits. Following that practice in the case at bar, each of us has a copy of the other’s results of medical evaluation of my client, Mister Tibbetts. Mister Gleason knows what my doctor’s going to say on the stand, and I know what Mister Gleason’s doctor will say on the stand. Each doctor is Board-certified. Each has staff privileges at prestigious teaching hospitals. Each lectures on psychiatry at leading medical schools. And, as usual, they are diametrically opposed in their diagnosis of the state of my client.

  “I, for one,” Morrissey said, “have never been able to perceive how a jury benefits from such battles of the experts, each firmly nullifying the other’s opinion. I suspect the jurors ignore both, and proceed on their gut reactions, but since I can’t be sure, I always offer what I have. Mister Gleason and I both know that neither of us is going to shake the other’s expert on cross. Therefore, in hopes of expediting this matter — and also saving a few dollars in expert-witness fees — we have agreed to offer each of the reports in evidence, and to ask the Court to tell the jury they may take it as proven that if both doctors had been called, they would have testified according to the tenor of their reports. Which, if the Court so allows, will almost certainly enable the defendant Tibbetts to complete his case this afternoon.”

  “Or maybe around midnight,” Richards whispered, “if Big Mo talks much longer about all the time he’s saving.” Gleason hid his grin behind his hand and looked down at the table.

  “Mister Gleason,” the judge said, beaming, “any variance between your understanding and what Mister Morrissey has said?”

  Gleason cleared his throat, and his face of expression. He stood up. “No, your Honor,” he said. “Mister Morrissey with his inveterate succinctness, brevity and wit, has accurately described our concord.” He sat down. Morrissey grinned.

  The judge coughed. “Yes,” he said. “Well, nevertheless, the Court appreciates the effects of this cooperation among counsel, and so states on the record. Any other good news for me?” There was no response. “Bring the jury down, Harry,” he said. “Let’s get cracking here.”

  Morrissey told the jury that the case was “very simple. We by no means concede any point that the Commonwealth has tried to make — indeed, that the Commonwealth must make — in order to support its allegations against Sam Tibbetts. We don’t, in part — though only in part — because we can’t. Our position is that Sam Tibbetts on the date in question was literally out of his mind, and we are going to prove that, on the evidence.

  “Therefore,” Morrissey said, “whether Mister Tibbetts’s fingerprints were on a gun; whether Mister Tibbetts was found sleeping in a cabin; regardless of whether Mister Tibbetts ever in fact was in The Friary Bar and Grille: all of that stuff is irrelevant. The fact of the matter, as our evidence will show, is that Samuel Tibbetts on May fourth of last year was incapable of forming the intent that our statutes — and our Constitution — demand for the commission of a punishable criminal act. He was then, still, under the hegemony of dangerous drugs — as he had been, for nearly a decade. He was then, still, suffering delusions. Of grandeur. Of omnipotence. Of omniscie
nce. He was, in other words, my dear Ladies and Gentlemen, not in his right mind.” He paused. “And he will so testify.

  “His testimony,” Morrissey said, “will be preceded, the foundation laid for it, by that of his parents.”

  “Oh boy,” Gleason whispered to Richards, “I was afraid of this.”

  “They will tell you what he was, before he went to the West Coast,” Morrissey said. “They will tell you that he was a brilliant student, a conscientious young man, active in his church, a talented musician — in short, in every respect, everything a mother and a father could have wished an only son, an only child, to be. They will tell you about the sad changes they observed in his character. His inexplicable estrangement. How he became, in their words, ‘a different person.’ You have seen them every day, sitting in the audience. You could not know who they were, of course, but perhaps you yourselves have remarked the anguish evident in their faces. They will tell you, each of them, they will recount for you the torment — and the agony — of living through this horrifying deterioration, of their beloved son.

  “Sam will testify as well,” Morrissey said. “He doesn’t have to; no defendant does. He has a constitutional right to remain right where he is. Make the government prove its case against him — if it can. But he’s waiving that right. He’s saying to you: ‘No, I’m going up there. I’m going to tell these people exactly what happened. If they’re going to judge me, then let them hear the whole story. Let them know all the facts. As degrading as they are.’

  “Now,” Morrissey said, hooking his right thumb in his belt, “you are going to receive, as the result of an agreement between me and Mister Gleason here, copies of two reports by physicians. The report that we’re submitting — Doctor Herbert Hamisch’s, and he’s an eminent psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School and the Brigham Hospital — supports the facts I’ve just outlined. The other report — by Doctor Norris Alpert — contradicts it. We believe that what you hear from the Tibbetts family, on the stand, will lead you to agree with Doctor Hamisch’s report, and that you will find Sam Tibbetts not guilty of these charges, by reason of insanity.”

  “I think he mousetrapped you,” Richards whispered.

  “No,” Gleason said. “ ‘Sandbagged,’ maybe, but not ‘mousetrapped.’ He was gonna do it anyway, and I could not stop him. This way it’s over quicker.”

  Gleason was deliberate and gentle when he took Walter Tibbetts on cross-examination. “I’m going to refer to some of the testimony you’ve just delivered, Mister Tibbetts,” he said, “in response to Mister Morrissey’s questions. And I’m relying of course on the notes I took while you were giving it. It’s possible my notes are incorrect in some respects. So I hope, if I did misunderstand — or mis-hear — something, that you’ll feel perfectly free to correct me. Tell me exactly what you said.”

  “I understand,” Tibbetts said. He licked his lips.

  “I know this is, this must be, an ordeal for you, sir,” Gleason said. “I’ll be as brief as I can.”

  “I appreciate that,” Tibbetts said.

  “You testified, sir, I believe,” Gleason said, “that your son became estranged from you. I’m not sure I got the date. Could you tell me approximately when you first noticed that estrangement?”

  “It was around,” Tibbetts said, frowning, “I believe it was around the middle of the summer.”

  “And the year, sir, if you recall?” Gleason said.

  “Nineteen-sixty-eight,” Tibbetts said, clearing his throat. “The year he graduated from Stanford. Nineteen-sixty-eight.”

  “And you testified, sir, did you not,” Gleason said, “that what prompted you to notice this, what excited your concern, was his failure to come home and visit you and his mother?”

  “Well,” Tibbetts said slowly, crossing his legs, “no. Not exactly. That was … Sam’d been away summers before and we were not concerned. He enjoyed working around the water, and since he was always, since he’d always been a very responsible kid, mature for his years, good judgment, we’d always felt comfortable, since he was about fourteen, allowing him to do that. He had jobs on the Cape, mowing lawns, doing gardening work, staying with friends of ours. And then, when he was sixteen, working at the marina in Edgartown. On Martha’s Vineyard. We were accustomed to the fact that he was uncommonly industrious, and independent — self-sufficient — for a person of tender years.”

  “And you were proud of him,” Gleason said.

  “Oh, very proud,” Tibbetts said. “It seemed like, it always seemed as though Sam was God’s child, you know? I remember when he was a freshman at Stanford, he called us up, all excited, and said: ‘Can you believe it, Dad? The Ipswich Ensemble? That I’m spending second quarter, that I’m going to Egypt, and to Israel and Lebanon? Can you believe it?’ And I said, I’m afraid I was a bit complacent, I said: ‘Of course I can believe it. You’re an extraordinary person. You have gifts. The only limitation on your future is your own imagination.’ And I meant it, every word.”

  “I see,” Gleason said, “Well then, if you can, sir, what was it that prompted your concern about your son in Sixty-eight?”

  “Well,” Tibbetts said, “we’d gone out there before, while he was at Stanford. Business trips, conventions in San Francisco, all that sort of thing. And naturally we always made time to see him. Take him to dinner at Jack’s in San Francisco, him and whatever young lady he happened to be seeing at the time. And those were always very pleasant occasions, you know? Very nice occasions. And I suppose his mother and I were guilty of a little planning ahead, a little anticipation, when we’d meet a particular young lady. Looking forward to the day when he’d get married, settle down, start a family of his own. And the girls, the girls he introduced us to were always very sweet, very nice young women — we would have welcomed any of them as our daughter-in-law. So, when it came time for his graduation, I called him up — I suppose this would’ve been late April, early May — and I knew of course that Stanford being a big school, there might be trouble getting hotel reservations around graduation time. So I called him up to make sure of the date, because I wanted to reserve a room for us either at Ricky’s Hyatt, near the campus, or, failing that, at the Fairmont in San Francisco, and he said: ‘Oh, Dad, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to it.’ And naturally I was surprised, and asked him: ‘Why?’ And he said: ‘Well, look. I know it’s important, that you and Mom’ve looked forward a long time to this. But I’ve got this opportunity — some friends of mine’re going down to Central America for part of the summer. Something like a Peace Corps thing. Which I would like to do, the regular Peace Corps, but with Berkeley in the fall, I can’t. So I thought, you know, I could go down there for the summer.’

  “And we saw nothing wrong with that,” Tibbetts said. “We were, as I’ve said, we were accustomed to Sam being away in the summer. Naturally we were a little disappointed not to see him graduate, but this did seem like a good opportunity. So he went off to Bolivia with our blessings.”

  “Then what prompted your concern that summer?” Gleason said.

  “His letters,” Tibbetts said. “As in everything else, Sam was a very good correspondent. If we weren’t seeing much of him, we always knew what he was doing, what was going through his mind. What he read — everything. And around the middle, I suppose it was July, but around the middle of the summer, his letters started to … well, they were disturbing.”

  “In what respect?” Gleason said. “Any one thing stand out in your mind?”

  “More like two, I’d say,” Tibbetts said. “Two things stood out. The first one, initially the first thing didn’t concern me a great deal. Sam’s major field was mathematics, but his interests were catholic — eclectic. His range of interests was very broad. So when he started writing about reading Castaneda, and various other — I suppose you would call them ‘seers,’ ‘gurus,’ ‘mystics,’ whatever — I wasn’t immediately concerned. But then there began to creep in, really, what sounded to me very much like M
arxist rhetoric.” He hesitated. “I think,” he said, “I think if it’d been either of those, what, enthusiasms, either one of them, I would not have been concerned. But the combination, the combination of visionary stuff and radical politics: that troubled me. And then I got — we got — a letter in early August which had clearly been written under the influence of something. It made no sense at all. Now he wasn’t talking about reading about visions — now he was reporting visions that he’d seen. Himself.”

  “Did you try to get in touch with him?” Gleason said. “Find out what was going on?”

  “We did,” Tibbetts said. “It was impossible. By phone, at least. He was off in the mountains somewhere, and we couldn’t reach him. We debated, we considered flying down there, both his mother and I did, but then we decided there was no point in that because we didn’t, neither of us speaks Spanish and we didn’t know where to find him. So, we put that aside and made plans to go out to Berkeley to see him in the fall.”

  “And did you do that?” Gleason said.

  “No,” Tibbetts said.

  “The reason?” Gleason said.

  “He,” Tibbetts said, coughing, “he told us on the telephone he wouldn’t see us if we came.”

  “Did he give a reason?” Gleason said.

  “Just that he didn’t want us to come,” Tibbetts said, shaking his head and coughing. He removed his glasses and rubbed his hand over his forehead. He coughed again. He replaced his glasses. “I’m sorry,” he said. “He didn’t want us to come.”

  “That must’ve been very painful for you, sir,” Gleason said.

  “It was,” Tibbetts said. “Very painful.”

  “And when was the next time you saw him?” Gleason said.

  “When,” Tibbetts said, “when he was arrested.”

  “That would’ve been this past May?” Gleason said.

  “Yes,” Tibbetts said.

  “Did you have any other contact with him,” Gleason said, “between that telephone call in the fall of Sixty-eight, and when you saw him again, in custody?”