Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by George V. Higgins

  “She’s a music teacher, Peter,” Consolo said. “Music teachers like that stuff. Their tastes’re refined, you know? Very high-class stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “At home I got Kerry, playin’ Madonna, over and over again. I come to work on this detail, I get the classical shit. I dunno which I hate worse. How come I never get a detail, somebody listens the ballgame or something?” He changed his voice to falsetto and sang the same line twice, alleging that Consolo was an angel. “And then the other one there, about how this is a material world, and she’s a material girl. Which is, the both of them, I think, are about gettin’ laid. Unless I don’t speak English anymore.” He paused. “Or they don’t, which is possible.”

  “Always like to see the young people enjoying themselves,” Consolo said. “You think when she gets older, the convent isn’t going to take her?”

  “No,” Peter said. “I think when she gets older some young stud is going to take her. Which will be all right with me, long’s it’s off my hands along with off her pants. It’s just I think fourteen, you know, might be a little young to start having that in mind. Just the teeniest bit young. That’s what bothers me.”

  “She’s not getting dressed,” Consolo said suddenly. He put the coffee container on the shelf and lifted himself into a crouch, going around behind Peter and using his left hand to grope for the receiver delivering the music.

  “The hell’re you doing?” Peter said.

  “I’m turning up the goddamned sound,” Consolo said. “That broad is not getting dressed. What she’s doing, one of two things is going on here. She is either, she either got out again before you got here this morning, or else she’s waiting for a phone call.” He turned up the volume so that the music was almost painfully loud in the acoustically deadened truck.

  “She couldn’t’ve got out,” Peter said with some agitation. “Fitzy was here all night, just like he’s supposed to. He told me this morning, Davis brought her in last night, and then she had a date with some guy that she calls ‘Marty,’ and Davis watched him leave about, she threw him out early, I guess, around ten-fifteen, and then Fitzy come on and she didn’t go out after that. She couldn’t’ve got out.”

  “She got out once before,” Consolo said. “Keep that in mind, Peter. Old Fitzy there, nice guy and all, but he’s got a tendency to nap, grab a few Zs now and then, when nobody’s lookin’ on.”

  “That was when,” Peter said, “that was when he was having them allergy treatments and the stuff was makin’ him sleepy. That was when that was.”

  “That was last fuckin’ week, was when it was,” Consolo said. The music played on. He adjusted the volume upward again.

  “You know, boss,” Peter said, “you crank that thing up about one more red cunt hair, they’re not gonna need to see me comin’ inna coffee shop, know what we’re doing here. They’re gonna be able hear what she’s listening to better’n she can herself, while they’re eatin’ honey-dips.”

  “Ahh,” Consolo said disgustedly. He turned the volume down slightly and crabbed his way back to the metal box. “Most likely no point in it anyway, since she probably got out while Fitzroy was dreaming, dozin’ away on the floor — got his head down on the shelf, something along that line. Only thing we’re going to get here now’s when she comes back. And we’re gonna look damned silly, too, when she comes strolling in.”

  “Look, willya?” Peter said. He manipulated keyboard controls under the screen in the center of the display. The camera focus zoomed back from close-up to wide angle so that the four parking spaces nearest the rear entrance of the apartment building were visible. As the focus changed, a man wearing a light-colored suit and carrying an attaché case emerged from the door and walked toward the camera. He turned to his left and walked behind a Ford Mustang convertible and then a silver Volkswagen GTI. “See?” Peter said. “There’s her fuckin’ car, all right? That’s her fuckin’ car. And that car, that fuckin’ car was not there, the morning she got out.”

  “She got a ride from someone, then,” Consolo said. He peered at the screen. “Who’s the fuckin’ guy?” he said.

  “She didn’t get a fuckin’ ride from any fuckin’ body,” Peter said. “She’s inna damned apartment where we put her in last night and she had meatloaf with a guy. He was crazy about it. That, they had more talk about that meatloaf’n they did the fact we’re prolly all gonna get blown up, nuclear holocaust. You’re givin’ this broad too much credit, is what you are doin’. I’m telling you, I’m tellin’ you, this broad is not that smart. She’s a fuckin’ music teacher, not a goddamned Russian spy. She don’t know where Tibbetts is. She hasn’t seen the guy. She hasn’t talked him, onna phone. He hasn’t called her up. She don’t know where to find him and she don’t know where he is. And we are wasting our damned time here, in this fuckin’ heat. Might as well go down the beach and take off all our clothes, and just go inna water, all the headway we make here.”

  “A guy I know says that she knows,” Consolo said equably. “Him I believe, not you. Who’s that guy there?”

  “Who’s the guy where?” Peter said.

  “The guy with the attaché case,” Consolo said. “I assume Davis’s got brains enough, he’s already running the guy that had the meatloaf through the fuckin’ magic box, I don’t have to tell him that.”

  “Well,” Peter said, “he is. But frankly from the conversation the two of them had, I wouldn’t get my bowels in an uproar, waiting see what comes out. The guy, the guy sounds like a teacher. He’s a teacher too.”

  “What’s he teach?” Consolo said.

  “What difference does it make?” Peter said. “He’s a fuckin’ high school teacher. Who cares what it is?”

  “Sam Tibbetts was a teacher, too,” Consolo said. “That’s something that Sam Tibbetts did, when he was just lying low. He had himself a nice, quiet job, teaching math in Brattleboro, all right? That is what he did. And now he’s lying low again — maybe he’s gone back to it. That’s why it makes a difference, you’re looking for some guy. Guys that do the same things he did, they might help you out. Might not mean to help you out, but that’s another thing. And a guy that did something before, when guys were after him, he’s liable do the same thing again, something gets him jumpy.”

  Peter sighed. “Right, Sarge,” he said. “Chemistry or something, I guess. Didn’t talk too much about that, but I think that’s what he is from what I see on Davis’s logs. Spent all the time they weren’t talkin’ about the meatloaf, bitchin’, near as I could tell, gripin’ how they hate their boss, what a prick he is.” He paused. “Which I could relate to, you know what I mean.”

  “Uh huh,” Consolo said. “I hope you really like being a corporal, Pete Kelly. You’re gonna be one, I would say, for a good long time.”

  “Oh, big fuckin’ deal,” Kelly said. “I already been one longer’n JFK was president. You think that bothers me, that shit that you hand out?”

  “You got me,” Consolo said. “Mostly I don’t give a shit, it bothers you or not. Try to stick to business here. Never mind your beefs. You want another line of work, go find one for yourself. Inna meantime, do your job. Tell me what I want to know. Who’s the guy? The one the briefcase there? We got a make on him? Or is he just another bozo that we’re planning to ignore, the same way we let her slip out when she saw Mister Gleason there?”

  “He’s,” Kelly said, “he’s a guy named Mister Thomas that works inna Consumer Protection Division, the AG’s office. He lives by himself in number One-K, and he’s probably a fairy, although we’re not sure of that. You know how those bachelors are — most of them are perverts. Okay, Sergeant? That do it for you all right? Make you calm and satisfied?”

  “For the moment,” Consolo said. The violin music ended. A radio announcer’s voice replaced it, reciting the name of the selection and reporting that it was a performance by a Russian musician who had made several other Bach recordings not yet available in the United States. The announcer exhorted his liste
ners to write to the recording company and request importation of the other discs. The telephone rang in the apartment.

  “Uh huh,” Consolo said. “I was right. And she’ll get it on the second ring, the latest.”

  They heard the phone being picked up midway through the second ring. From the speaker that had delivered the music they heard a woman say: “Hello.” Simultaneously from a second speaker that had been silent until then they heard her greeting and a male voice that said: “Chris?”

  “Ah hah,” Consolo said, leaning forward. “Come on, Christina baby.”

  “Yes,” she said hesitantly.

  “Chris,” the male voice said with some urgency, “listen: I can’t talk here. Is there some way I can get in touch with you, see you so we can? I’ve really got to see you.”

  She sighed. “I can’t go through this again, Dan,” she said. “I’ve told you and I’ve told you, and I know it’s important to you. But it’s also important, it’s also important to me, you know? It’s very important to me. And I don’t, I just don’t feel the same way you do, you know? And I can’t pretend I do. And I’ve got to hang up now, and I’m sorry, but I just do.”

  “Shit,” Consolo said as the woman broke the connection. He leaned back against the partition. The only sound from the speakers was the opening movement of the thirty-fourth symphony by Mozart.

  “That helps us a lot,” Kelly said. “That’s a real big fuckin’ break we got there, that thing we just got. Spending the taxpayers’ money, dig up something big like that, really makes it worthwhile. Makes you feel good inside.”

  “Oh,” Consolo said, “I wouldn’t go that far. It’s useful for us, know these things, dig up all we can. More we know about this broad, better our chances are.” He paused. “Besides,” he said, “that’s not the guy. That was not the call she wanted.”

  “What,” Kelly said, “what’s so goddamned useful? That this guy Dan Matteo’s got the hots for her? So what? Everybody’s got the hots for this broad, near as I can tell. So this guy that runs a record store, so he’s one of them. What good does that do us? Can you tell me that? Taping people that take lessons, taping what she listens to, onna radio. Taping.… No shower, right? That’s how you knew she was waiting for a call. She didn’t take a shower.”

  “Ah, Peter my boy,” Consolo said, patting him on the right shoulder, “there are moments when you make the whole thing worth the effort. All the time and trouble I take, teaching you your job, I tell you, when you shine like that, you really make me proud. Now, tell me what you’re hearing now.”

  Kelly listened silently to the music. “More goddamned classical shit,” he said.

  “And that’s all, isn’t it?” Consolo said.

  “That’s all I hear,” Kelly said.

  “Which means?” Consolo said.

  “Which means,” Kelly said, “she’s still not in the shower. She’s still waiting for a call.”

  “You’re a pistol, Pete,” Consolo said. “You make me so proud.”

  “Yeah, Sarge,” Kelly said, “but suppose she doesn’t get it? What if you’re right, and that’s what she’s waiting for, but the call never comes through, all right? Or it doesn’t come through to her here? Then what do we do?”

  “Peter, Peter,” Consolo said, “we’re already doing, we’re doing other things.”

  JULY 16, 1985

  28

  When Barbara Mary (Donovan) Gleason was contented and composed, she was an attractive woman. She was forty-three years old. She had ash-blonde hair, carefully styled in a Newbury Street salon to soften her somewhat sharp features. She had grey eyes and she had had her teeth capped. She played eighteen holes of twelve-handicap golf in good weather, Monday through Friday mornings, late April through mid-November, at the Milton-Hoosic Club course in Canton. In the winter she kept fit and trim by playing indoor tennis — doubles — with three other women three mornings a week at the Blue Hills Tennis Center.

  She considered gravity one of her two major enemies. It had relentlessly continued the bodily decline accelerated by the effects of four pregnancies — three carried to term; one surgically terminated in the first trimester when amniocentesis disclosed the substantial probability that the fetus, intentionally conceived when she was thirty-six, was afflicted with Down’s Syndrome. She watched what she ate. In the summer she wore cool casual cotton skirts and shorts in pinks and greens and yellows, from The Talbots’, and in the winter she wore brownish tweeds, muted plaids and clingy jersey from Orvis. She used foul-weather gear from L.L. Bean all year.

  Her oldest son, Terrence Junior, was a senior at Boston College High School in Dorchester. Her daughter, Joanne, was a freshman at Milton Academy. Her younger son, Philip, was in the seventh grade at Briar Hill, a private school in Sharon for hyperactive and presumably disturbed children. Her father, Philip, was deceased. Her mother, Mary Barbara (Lynch) Donovan, lived year ’round in Connemara Town Estates, outside Orlando, Florida, in the retirement home she and her husband had purchased on the ninth fairway of the Emerald Club Golf Course. Barbara’s brother, Timothy, was an office manager for Raytheon in Burlington. Her sister, Joanne, was the widow of Cmdr. Donald Welch, USN, who was killed in an attempted landing on the carrier Saratoga during exercises in the Mediterranean; she lived in Seattle. Barbara attended Mass alone on alternate Sundays at St. Casimir’s Church in Stoughton; it was not her parish — which Terry described as “Our Lady of Perpetual Remonstrance” — in Canton, and she generally declined to account for her preference for it.

  She volunteered the reason to Lawrence Badger, implying by it the identity of her second enemy: another woman. At 10:35 on the morning of July 16, 1985, she sat in front of his desk at Investigations, Inc., on the westerly side of the thirty-eighth floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston, overlooking Fenway Park empty in the morning sunlight, and with great exasperation in her voice told him she attended St. Casimir’s “because I don’t think anybody knows me there. Where I know everybody knows me in my actual parish, and I can’t hold my head up there. Not since Nineteen-seventy-nine, when I became the last person, I believe, to find out what’d been going on.”

  Lawrence Badger was sixty-two years old. He was small and slight. There were brown liver spots visible on his tanned face and under the long wisps of grey hair he arranged each morning on his scalp. He wore a dark blue shirt with a white, gold-pinned collar and french cuffs, and a bright pink silk tie. He steepled his fingers. He cleared his throat. “Mrs. Gleason,” he said, “I do hate to seem abrupt. But if you could tell me, please, the reason for today? Why you are here today? I take it you believe your husband’s having an affair.”

  She nodded. She moistened her lips. “I do,” she said. “Yes, I do. That’s why I came here.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, as I believe I explained to you on the phone, Mrs. Gleason, our policy here is that only in very rare instances do we accept direct retentions by clients in such matters. We seldom, as a matter of fact, accept them at all. Even when they are proffered to us by practicing attorneys. Most of our work is in the area of industrial security — trade secrets, formulas, processes; items of that nature. We do very little work in domestic relations matters. They’re not our cup of tea.”

  She nodded. “You did tell me that, Mister Badger,” she said. “And, as I believe I explained to you, this is one of those rare matters. My husband is a prominent attorney. He’s currently involved in a notorious case, involving notorious people. If,” she said, moistening her lips again, “if … I don’t hate my husband, Mister Badger. Even if he is cheating on me. I don’t want to damage him, or damage his career.” Her eyes filled. “If I go to an attorney, if I go to any other attorney, and tell him or her about my suspicions, it will be all over Boston by nightfall. My husband’s told me about this town. Gossip is its stock in trade. Character assassination — all the rest of it. I don’t want that to happen.”

  “Mrs. Gleason,” Badger said, “really, now. No lawyer that you consulted w
ould dare to breach your confidence. It would be unheard of. It simply wouldn’t happen.”

  “The lawyer,” she said grimly, “the lawyer might not talk. But you can bet your bottom dollar that his secretary would. What Terry Gleason does is news. Especially if it’s scandalous.” She shook her head. “You can talk to me,” she said, “you can talk to me ’till you’re blue in the face. You will not change my mind. I’m not going to a lawyer until I’m sure I have to. And I won’t be sure unless and until I get someone like you to find out if I am right. And tell me so.”

  She smiled. “You must understand my position,” she said. “Seven years ago this Christmas, Terry and I finally escaped from a dinky little three-bedroom colonial in Hanover. Into a twelve-room antique farmhouse behind a stone wall on four acres of land with a pond out in back. In Canton. I have a cleaning lady three times a week. In the summer I move to our cottage in Chilmark, as soon as the kids finish school. Well, I did until this year. And last winter, last winter we sent the kids to stay with my mother in Florida, and Terry and I took our vacation in Hawaii. We worked hard, Terry and I did, and we sacrificed and did without. And finally, finally it all paid off. I’ve earned what I’ve got, Mister Badger, every damned bit of it.

  “But,” she said, “the kids’re growing up now. They’re bored, just spending the summer with Mummy on the island now. Terry Junior’s in tennis camp. Joanne’s a lifeguard at the pool. Philly, I suppose, could go, but he’s in a special summer program for kids who have his problem, over at Curry College. And besides, who’d be home with Terry Junior and Joanne when they come back at night? So, I can’t do that.”

  She took a deep breath. “I need to know,” she said, “I need to know if I’m going to be completely alone. When they’re all grown up. And, if I am, I have to start planning for it. Now. Before it happens. I haven’t worked since Nineteen-sixty-seven. The people who were in my field then’re all on the management level now. If I went back, went back into buying, I’d have a whole new lingo to learn. And whole new groups of people to get to know. And that’s assuming I could even get a job. Which is quite an assumption.”