Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by George V. Higgins

  “Now,” Lawrence said, “given all that, plus the fact that Mrs. Gleason included in her tale of woe the fact that she suspects her home to be under surveillance by a party or parties unknown.…”

  “Why would she be under surveillance?” Alton said. “Is she fooling around some, too?”

  “Assures me she is not,” Lawrence said. “Her inference is that her husband is trying to fabricate a case of adultery against her, in order to block her in the event that she makes one against him.”

  “Mexican stand-off,” Alton said.

  “Something along that line,” Lawrence said. “She says at least every other day, in the morning before her husband normally leaves for work, and around six-thirty, seven in the evening, when he’d ordinarily get home, an unfamiliar car cruises slowly by their house. Which is in a secluded residential area where unfamiliar cars are uncommon. What she said to me is that the people who drive down their street are people who either live on their street, or are visiting people who do. It’s not a street that anyone would use as a back way to Route Twenty-four, or One-twenty-eight, or anything like that.”

  “And she thinks it’s a private dick,” Alton said.

  “I presume so,” Lawrence said. “Given what I see in the case that she apparently does not, I’m inclined to think it may be someone rather more sinister than that. Someone who thinks that Terry Gleason sooner or later will lead him to Sam Tibbetts and his cache, if he tracks him long enough. I saw no reason to alarm her, though, so I kept that to myself. If some remnant of that Bolivian Connection, or whatever they called themselves, is prowling around her property, better leave that quiet. At least for the time being.”

  “She get a good look at the car?” Alton said.

  “Yes,” Lawrence said. “Not only that, but the first three digits of the license plate. It’s a maroon Mercedes Benz, the two-seater, and the first three digits on the plate are two-nine-two.”

  Alton laughed. “It’s the Cowboy,” he said. He slapped the table with his left palm. He stood up and jammed his hands in his pockets. He was grinning. “It’s Cowboy Fred Consolo,” he said. “Freddie is a cop. Terry hasn’t got a tail on his wife — the cops’ve got one on Terry.”

  “So,” Lawrence said, “what do we do now?”

  “Talk to John Richards, I think,” Alton said. “Go and see the man and find out what’s going on.”

  JULY 18, 1985

  30

  Alton Badger met John Richards late in the morning in the parking lot off Route 6A in Sandwich. They walked north along the beach toward the eastern end of the Cape Cod Canal.

  “You know,” Richards said, “I was a cop for a lot of years. Over half my life. Thirty-five diligent years. And I loved what I did. It was fun. It was fun in the beginning, fresh from the war. Being a cop’s much better’n being a soldier; you’re a soldier and the other guy’s supposed to shoot at you, whereas when you’re cop, he may shoot you, but he’d goddamned right well better not because some other cop will get him for it if he does. So you’ve got an advantage as a cop that you didn’t have in the First Marines. No guarantee, but an advantage, and that was sort of a relief. Made things pleasanter.

  “And the amazing part of it is,” Richards said, “the completely astonishing part of it was that the day I decided to retire it was still fun. I didn’t decide to hang it up because I’d gotten bored, or because I was forced to, reached a certain age, or, thank God, because I was sick. I just woke up one morning and said to myself: ‘This is the day. You’ve done it long enough, and now it’s time to do something else.’ And I got dressed and I went downstairs and I said to Angela: ‘This is the day.’ And she said: ‘You’re sure.’ And I said I was, and that was it.

  “Now that was four years ago,” he said. “Four years ago this September. We’ve got a quiet life down here. Take care of my investments in the morning, bother my broker, read the papers, keep myself occupied. Drive around in my Continental. You know that’s the first new car I’ve ever actually owned? I told Angela that morning: ‘And here’s another thing,’ I said, ‘ever since Nineteen-forty-six I’ve wanted a Lincoln Continental, and tomorrow I’m going down to Fred Gillis’s and buy me one of them.’ And she said: ‘Good. You’ve earned it and you should. But why tomorrow? Let’s go down after dinner tonight.’

  “I usually have lunch at the club with the lads. Maybe play some cards in the winter afternoons. This time of year, if there’s a breeze, take the boat out for a few hours. Angela’s at the library four days a week in the forenoons, and at night we either stop for a bite at Tancredi’s or I’ll destroy a perfectly good piece of meat on the barbecue. Glass of wine, watch a little television, maybe read a book. It’s a nice life.

  “Gives you something I guess I never had before,” he said. “Time to think. They’ll tell you retirement’s dull, that it’s boring, and I think that’s probably true, if you are dull and boring. But if you’re like I was, and am, saw a lot of things as you went along that you would’ve liked to linger over a lot longer’n you had time to spare, think about what they meant, then when you stop working for somebody else and doing what they tell you’s got to be done, you can go back over them and figure them out. It’s a real luxury.

  “Now this business that you’re telling me about,” Richards said. “This is the kind of thing that I’ve thought about in general terms, several times. Not The Friary gang, I mean, not in particular. But the whole general idea of what I was doing all those years, when I was enforcing the law. Or trying to, at least. Just what exactly was it? All those statutes and rules, and all that glossy shit, that we were out there running around like mad, trying to catch people and bash them on the head? What did it all mean? Assuming it meant something. Why were we trying to do this?

  “And the reason was, I decided,” he said, “we were trying to keep it down to a dull roar. What we thought we were doing, while we were working so hard at it we didn’t have time to think about it — what we thought we were doing was maintaining the peaceable kingdom. Repelling the boarders, putting down mutinies, dispersing unruly crowds. But what it amounted to was keeping our eyes peeled for the guys whose behavior displeased us, assuming it must make everybody else mad because it pissed us off. And then hunting through the books for some law somewhere that said they couldn’t do that. Then arresting them and putting them in jail. Peace officers: that’s what cops were when Bobby Peel invented us, and that’s what we are today.

  “Now,” he said, “when I was a peace officer, things like The Friary had a tendency to annoy me. Personally. It’s not right, somebody should be able to come busting into a man’s place of business on a Sunday when he’s trying to relax with a few whoors and his pal. Sure, they were hookers, and Nichols and Abbate, they were pushers and bookies and pimps and bad boys. Father Flanagan was wrong — there is such a thing as a bad boy. Hundreds of ’em, in fact. But that doesn’t give anybody the right to rob them, and shoot them, when they’re indoors with all their clothes off, getting nice blow jobs and having a fine time. Anybody’s going to interfere with them, while they’re doing that, we should be the ones. And since we never had enough probable cause to go in and do that, nobody else should’ve, either. Usurping our power like that. Infringing on our jurisdiction. It really made me mad.

  “Well,” he said, “at the time that was good, that The Friary and all the other crimes we investigated made me mad like that, because I did a better job’n I would’ve if I didn’t take them personally. But now when I look back on it, you know, I can see that some of the things about the law that used to exasperate me, make my life inconvenient, were actually good ideas. Sound reasoning, from wiser men than I am. Those armored car heists that we know Tibbetts and his whole gang pulled, in the days when he had a whole gang and not just a few strays and crazies — by the time we made the collar, Limitations’d run. On the first two of them at least. Not on the second two, or the conspiracy that’d probably’ve let us charge them with the first two, but you get my mea
ning. And that was society’s way of saying: ‘Okay, robbing people’s a bad thing to do, but it’s not as serious a bad thing as killing them. So, you cops there, you got six years to grab the guys that rob people, and if you don’t catch them by then, we’re gonna forget about it. But, you bad guys there, you’d better not kill anybody while you’re robbing them, or just for the fun of it, because we’re not gonna tolerate that brand of foolishness and if we ever catch you, you’re gonna pay for it.’

  “It’s a matter of proportion,” Richards said. “It’s maybe a good thing if you don’t have a sense of it, or a highly developed one, at least, while you’re still a cop, because you’re not paid to be a philosopher; you’re paid to catch bad guys. That’s what the courts and the lawyers are for; they’re supposed to deal with all that balancing shit. But where you’ve got a guy like Fred, who has no sense of it all, then it becomes awful important to have somebody over him that’s riding herd on him all the time, making sure he doesn’t get the bit between his teeth and just go galloping off in all directions all at once, using his badge and his authority any way that suits him, so long as he likes the results.

  “My guess,” Richards said, “my guess is that since it’s summertime and things’re slow, and Dave Osgood’s sent his life out to be rebuilt and gotten it back in better shape’n it was in the first place, nobody in the Norfolk DA’s office’s paying much attention to what Cowboy Fred is doing. Dave, well, he went through a lot, and I thought, I thought when he got married the second time, married June McNeil there, I thought that’d fix him up. That he’d get his grip back on things. And he did. But on different things — his wife and family — not his office. So now instead of being gone most of August, so you can’t find him because he’s at the track, now he’s out of sight the whole damned summer. Down at his place on the Cape in July. Up at the track in August. Making up for what he missed, the first time around. So Fred, well, he lacks supervision, and when Freddie lacks supervision, things have a way of getting sideways.

  “Fred was enraged,” Richards said, “when Tibbetts got acquitted on that crackpot insanity defense, as everybody from the AG on down was, and now it’s seven years later and all the rest of us’ve calmed down, and Fred is still enraged.” He sighed. “That boy doesn’t have enough on his mind. He needs to keep himself occupied, and he doesn’t. What he does is all he ever thinks about. Not what it means, or whether it’s right, but how he’s going to do it and how soon he’ll get it done.

  “You called me,” Richards said, “and I thought about it, and I said to myself: ‘I think I will make some calls here and there, see what’s going on.’ After all, God wanted us to be ignorant, He wouldn’t’ve given us the phone. So I did that and I found out some things.” He began to check them off on the fingers of his left hand.

  “The only file that’s still open is the Handley murder case. Now you got to keep in mind that the way we finally bagged those bastards for The Friary, without getting anybody else killed, was by using blind informer evidence to get out indictments. And then getting damned lucky on the arrest and bagging enough circumstantial so we didn’t have to surface the informer.

  “Didn’t have that option with the Handley killing,” Richards said. “My old friend Howard fucked up the ballistics on that one bad enough so even though I knew it was one of those two twenty-twos that was used to shoot the girl, we couldn’t prove it. To do it, we would’ve had to’ve had either an informer who’d stand up — which Mackenzie would not’ve — or a rat who was present when the foul deed was done. Which we did not have, and that’s why the file’s still open.

  “That, I think,” Richards said, “is what Fred has got. Or thinks he’s got, at least. Fred thinks he’s got a big fat rat, who will sink some long white teeth into Tibbetts, front a jury.”

  “The girl,” Badger said. “You think that it’s Christina and that’s why she’s back with Gleason? To protect her from Fred?”

  “No,” Richards said. “We did a full-field on her when she showed up at the trial. She was nowhere near those birds when the Handley kid went down. Hadn’t been away from them long, but she was back in school. Didn’t see the murder, and no one confessed to her.”

  “Then why’s she seeing Gleason? And why’s Gleason seeing her?” Badger said. “Dangerous for him. No beach day for her.”

  Richards shrugged. “Mutual benefit,” he said. “She’s scared of something. He needs something. You’ve seen her. You know what temptation is. Terry’s a good lawyer, but he’s not perfect either. When she came in to us, after the trial, she was a frightened lady. Terry believed her, that the reason she was scared was Sam’d think she was the one that turned them in — that when he got out of Bridgewater, he’d have her killed. Myself, I agreed that she was scared, but I always wondered if maybe it was really us she feared.”

  “Really,” Badger said.

  “Absolutely,” Richards said. “Abso-bloomin’-lutely. She was a beautiful kid, and she was obviously really upset. Brother convicted of murder? Ex-boyfriend in the booby hatch, or he would’ve been sunk too? Who wouldn’t be upset? But I always kind of wondered if maybe what was bothering her mostly was that she’d been involved in some the shit that those guys pulled. The armored cars, I mean. And, maybe, the Handley killing. She knew we still had two Jane Does and a John Doe on the rest of that indictment — we could try it any time, and if one the dykes’d decided to get even, nail somebody else, she could’ve been the one. That she was coming in and flinging herself into our arms so she could keep an eye on us, see which way the wind was blowing, give herself a little edge, time to get out if it seemed to be shifting in her direction.

  “Those two dykes, you know,” he said, “those two dykes did not like Christina a whole lot. She wouldn’t fingerfuck them, I guess — they were not pals with her. If one of them’d had the brains, which neither of them did, to look at their situation realistically, and decide to see what she could get for spilling her guts to us, she probably could’ve put Christina in a mess of shit of her own. I think that’s what Christina was afraid of. Not of Sam recruiting someone on the outside to kill her. Not of her brother getting life in the slammer. No, of us making a case against her that’d put her behind bars for a while. She was bawling her eyes out to us, and making eyes at Terry, because she needed information and that was a way to get it. That is what I thought.

  “Terry didn’t agree with me,” he said. He laughed. “Stiff prick’ll believe anything.”

  “So, then,” Badger said, “now we’re seven years later, eight from The Friary, fifteen from the first armored car, and all of it’s history long gone. Why is Fred tailing Gleason?”

  “Fred thinks she’s got the missing piece,” Richards said. “The missing piece, his puzzle. I don’t know what he thinks she knows, but he thinks he needs it. She evidently thinks so too. That’s why she went to Terry. If Fred had any doubts before, that took care of them. Now he’ll never let her go. Won’t let Terry, either.

  “Fred likes symmetry,” Richards said. “He likes things to be perfect. Especially when they’re not.” He laughed. “It’s funny,” he said, “the different ways people react to things that they can’t do anything about. Like time going by, and that stuff. The sensible ones, like me, of course, we pass our own private Limitations, and we say to ourselves after whatever number of years it is’ve gone past, we say: ‘Right. The hell with it. If I’d’ve had the chance to do something about it back in Seventy-seven, or whatever year, I would’ve taken it. But now? Too late. Forget it.’ And that’s healthy, I think. Restful, at least. Man has to get his rest.

  “Fred,” he said, “Fred came out of the MDC like some sort of moonshot, like they tied a rocket to his ass and launched him. And we, the State Police were going to give him back the kind of hard-ass pride he’d had when he was Eighty-second Airborne. Kicking ass and taking names, but no prisoners. The first major assignment he was on with me, when we arrested Tibbetts and the rest of them. Floated down the Deerf
ield River in a houseboat with June McNeil stretched out in a bikini on the roof — Lord but she had the best tits I’ve ever seen on a cop — he thought he was back in Nam. Jumps in the water, over his head, carrying a twelve-bore, plus a belt, and a three-five-seven mag, with five speedloaders, in this goddamned plastic bag — knowing he couldn’t swim. The bastard walked ashore. Surfaced like the Creature from the Blue Lagoon. Did it ever cross his mind, might be some sharpshooter up on the sundeck with a sniper rifle crosshaired on his bubbles? Doubt it. I think he was disappointed. That we didn’t fire a shot.”

  Richards stopped and faced Badger. “What else can I tell you?” he said. “Every generation produces its own variety of freaks. I was, I suppose I was one the freaks of mine — Hitler and Tojo mutated us. We got the idea young, we’re supposed to maintain order. And that is what we did, all the rest of our damned lives. Then came the one that developed Tibbetts and Cowboy Fred. One of them looks at Ho Chi Minh and sees the same Tojo I saw, and he goes overboard. The other one looks at LBJ and sees Hitler, and his porch light goes out. So they’re that kind of freak. Fred’s nowhere near as dangerous as Tibbetts was — maybe still is — and at least Fred’s on our side. But he’s whoopy, Alton, whoopy. Fred is still a freak.

  “But freaks have a short useful life. Unless, at least, they adapt. All around us now, the whole damned world has changed. Tibbetts, Walker, the girl, Terry Gleason, your uncle and I — does Larry still cavort with the spooks, the way he used to do? Of course not; he’s too old. Everybody involved in The Friary trial’s gotten older. We’re all different now. We know it’s not the same. The things we all saw that introduced us to each other at whatever ages we were when they happened: those thing’re over with, and gone.