Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by George V. Higgins

  “Tell Barbara Gleason that,” he said. “Tell her you’ve talked to some people and the guy that’s following Terry’s a cop with an obsession. Guy that didn’t change. Nothing more than that. Tell her that you talked to me, and I said to forget it. Those days are over with. Fred’s an avatar, and he’s out there all alone.”

  JULY 23, 1985

  31

  At 5:20 A.M., Christina Walker awoke in apartment 2N at Waterford Village on Route 4. She got out of bed without making any noise. In the half-light that entered the room at the edges of the blackout drapes, she removed her short white nightgown and dropped it on the bed. From the top of the black steamer trunk at the foot of the bed she picked up a white bra, already fastened, stepped into it and pulled it up over her breasts. Bending again, she picked up white panties and put them on. She put on a tan cotton sleeveless sweater and faded blue jeans that she buttoned but did not zip. She padded barefoot across the thick yellow shag rug of the bedroom onto the thick green shag rug of the living room. At the door to the hall she picked up a large straw bag and put it over her shoulder. She opened the door silently, partway, and slowly removed the strip of duct tape she had put on the bolt of the snap lock the night before, allowing it to emerge gradually from the mechanism. She took a deep breath, opened the door further, dropped into a crouch in the hall, and closed the door as quickly as she could without making noise, wincing as the snap lock clicked home.

  Holding the straw bag on her left shoulder with her right hand, she ran bent from the waist on tiptoe until she reached the back stairwell. Inside it, hidden from the lens of the television camera in the corridor she sat down on the top step and took another deep breath. She rummaged in the straw bag and found her Adidas sneakers. She pulled them on, tied them, stood up, zipped her jeans, and went down to the parking lot.

  At 5:55 the clock radio in the dim bedroom of apartment 2N clicked on, midway through a performance of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto. The music sounded at moderate volume in the speaker in the white van at the MediMart in the shopping plaza some seventeen hundred feet north of Waterford Village. Initially it made Michael Fitzroy stir fitfully under his trenchcoat on the floor of the van. He fought off the interruption of his sleep for about seven minutes, working his dry mouth on the morning residue of the previous night’s cigarettes and coffee.

  At 6:03, Christina Walker parked her silver Volkswagen GTI outside the easterly wing of the Commodore Motel west of the Union Street rotary under Route 3 in Braintree. She fished in her straw bag again and came up with a tabbed key numbered 4. She got out of her car, locked it, and went to the door numbered 4. She opened it and entered the dark room. She closed the door and allowed her eyes to adjust from the sunrise to the gloom. She heard the shower running in the bathroom. She saw light between the bathroom door and its threshold. She went to the nearest of the two easy chairs set against the westerly wall and put her bag down on it. She dug into the bag again and groped until she found her toothbrush and a small tube of Crest toothpaste. She started toward the bathroom.

  At 6:06 Fitzroy surrendered to consciousness and sat up on the floor of the van. He rubbed his eyes. He worked his tongue against the deposits in his mouth. He shook his head, his shaggy blond hair falling into his eyes. He said: “Arr.” Gripping the equipment counter with his left hand, he cast off the trenchcoat with his right and pulled himself upright. He intentionally shivered his entire body. “Ahh, shit,” he said, “got to get rolling here.” He started toward the front of the van.

  Christina Walker knocked before she entered the bathroom of the motel room. The shower was loud on the Fiberglas walls of the enclosure and she got no answer. She went into the room filled with lighted steam and tapped on the glass door of the shower on her right. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” she said. The indistinct figure lurched against the enclosure.

  The door opened quickly partway. Terry Gleason’s red face under white shampoo lather and black hair peered out. “Jesus, you startled me,” he said. “Everything all right?”

  She held up the toothbrush and toothpaste. “Everything except I’ve got to brush my teeth,” she said. “And also take a leak. Just go right on with what you’re doing. I won’t bother you.”

  At 6:10 Fitzroy unlocked and opened the door of the van without interrupting his gargling of Scope mouthwash. Bending from the waist he spat it onto the parking lot. Then he clambered down to the pavement, closed the van, and walked around to the back of the drugstore. He crossed the loading area and made his way into the scrub pine grove that bordered the brook in the back. He stood hidden from the road and urinated into the brook, farting once as he did so.

  At 6:12, Gleason emerged from the shower. Walker was standing in front of the basin, scrubbing her face with a washcloth. Gleason took a towel from the rack beside the shower and began drying himself. “Almost finished,” she said. “You can have this in a minute.”

  “Take your time,” he said. “You’re early as it is.”

  At 6:14, back in the van, Fitzroy filled his mug from his Thermos of coffee, capped the depleted jug and replaced it on top of the steel box at the front of the van. He turned to the back of the van and sat down on the chair at the counter. He drank deeply from the mug as he focused on the TV screens. When he inspected the picture from the parking lot camera he said: “Oh my God,” and put the mug down. He leaned forward and manipulated the zoom control to produce a close-up picture of Walker’s parking space. It remained vacant. The speaker receiving noise from the apartment stopped delivering music and an announcer came on. Fitzroy put his head in his hands. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy, holy, shit. Christ on crutches. Holy shit. Holy goddamned shit.”

  At 6:17, Gleason with his towel wrapped around his waist finished shaving, wiping the last of the lather from his neck with a hand towel. Walker sat on the commode next to him with her pants down, urinating. “Not,” he said, “not that I don’t admire your dedication and your zeal, all right? Because I do. But are you really that convinced? That they’ve got your place so bugged there’s one in the toilet, too?”

  “Look,” she said, finishing and reaching for tissue, “I don’t know, all right? So, better to assume there is, and don’t use anything in there either.”

  “Because they very seldom do that anymore,” Gleason said, applying English Leather aftershave lotion. “If they’re after the Mafia, maybe, but on your standard surveillance they don’t bother. Because all you ever get is flatulence and rushing waters, and it’s not worth the trouble.”

  She stood up, pulling up her panties and jeans and fastening the zipper. “I don’t care,” she said. “I know they’re watching me. I just don’t know how much. I’m going to make it just as damned difficult as I can for them. Maybe they’ll still lock onto me. Maybe they’ve got some sort of bug on my car so they can find out where I go with an airplane or something. Maybe they have. But I can’t help that. What I can help, I will.”

  She opened the bathroom door and went into the dark bedroom. She turned on the lamp on the table between the chairs and used the switch at the door to turn on the two conical fixtures over the head of the queen-sized bed. The right side had been slept in; the left was virtually undisturbed. “Huh,” she said, “bet the maids in this joint don’t find many beds like that one in the morning.”

  Gleason in the towel was pawing through a blue nylon duffel bag on the luggage rack next to the open closet. On the rod in the closet there was a grey lightweight suit; a zippered suitbag was next to it. He found a tee shirt and jockey shorts in the duffel. He dropped the towel and pulled on the shorts and undershirt. “I could’ve slept on the floor last night,” he said. “Surprised I didn’t, in fact. Time I got here I was too tired even to dream. All I wanted in the world was to get horizontal and remain that way for seven consecutive hours. No interruptions. No one next to me having nightmares, flailing around and grabbing me at two-thirty or so, whacking me with her elbows, kicking at me with her feet. I’ve been on trial for th
irty-eight days since Memorial Day. My client’s a desperate man, in every sense of the word. For the amount of money that he’s paid, he thinks he’s entitled to his lawyer’s full attention, and he expects that full attention to include complete alertness and enough presence of mind to protect his interests.

  “Well,” Gleason said, “I think he’s right.” He took a white button-down shirt out of the bag and put it on. “And even if I didn’t, I would act as though I did. Because, like I say, he’s a desperate man. In no mood for arguments. Which means I have to find some way to get enough rest to function, and that means I have to get myself out of that house.”

  “But why this dump?” Christina said, sitting down on the chair nearest the door. “Last time you had to do this, you were in the Parker House. Why come all the way out here, and then fight the traffic back in the morning?”

  “Because,” he said, opening the suitbag and taking out the trousers of a dark blue poplin suit, “while I charged Phil Iannuci a generous fee, I charged it last September, and since the first of May I haven’t taken on any new cases. I don’t mean I’m broke, but when you’re two months into what looks like a three-month trial, more or less, you tend to look closely at the difference between a hundred bucks a night and twenty-four-fifty. Now, if Barbara’d do what I suggested, which was either we rent out the house in Chilmark if she wasn’t going to go there, or else have her take the kids and go there and leave me alone here, there wouldn’t be any need to think about it. Either we’d have the money coming in for the rental, which would be about fourteen hundred a week — plus the tax write-off next year because we rented it for profit — or she’d be down there, thrashing around, and I could sleep in my own bed in my own house in Canton.” He snorted. “Christ,” he said, “we spill more in a year now than I used to make.”

  “Do you think she’s crazy?” Christina said.

  He picked up black tasseled loafers from the floor of the closet and took dark blue socks from the duffel. He walked over to the foot of the bed and sat down to put them on. “Mildly,” he said. “And intermittently. Not clinically, so she doesn’t know what she’s doing. But in the ordinary sense of the word? Yeah, she is crazy. She’s never gotten over when you and I had our adventure, and she never will, either. She thinks I licensed her with that to do anything she wants to me ever afterwards. Whenever she feels like it, she punishes me again. And she’s never going to stop.”

  He stood up and returned to the duffel. He took out a blue and red striped tie and went into the bathroom. “You should’ve divorced her back then,” Christina said. “Whether we stayed together or not, you should’ve done it then.”

  “I know it,” he said in the bathroom. “But it’s now that I know it. Not then. And if I had known it then, I was in no position to do it. Because I was just building a practice and I didn’t have the dough. And now that I’ve got the dough, well, I still can’t do it.”

  “Guilt feelings?” Christina said.

  “For hurting Barbara?” he said, coming out of the bathroom. He went to the suitbag and took out the coat. He put it on, shooting his cuffs. He walked to the table next to the right of the bed and collected his black wallet and stainless-steel Tudor diver’s watch. “No,” he said, snapping the watch bracelet around his left wrist. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault that by the time that I met you, the marriage’d turned into a puppet show, with Barbara pulling the strings. Or if it was anybody’s fault, it wasn’t mine — it was hers.

  “No,” he said, “but am I afraid I would have guilt feelings, if I divorced her now? Yes, and with good reason.” He sat down on the bed again and leaned forward with his forearms on his thighs. “I haven’t finished with the kids. And I know I haven’t. If I dropped out on them now, became an occasional visitor in their lives, I’d be taking risks that I know I shouldn’t take.

  “They seem to be in pretty good shape,” he said. “Terry’s grades’re good, and he’s not a bad ballplayer. He’ll get into Tufts, I think, which is where he wants to go next year. Joanne went through a little punk phase last winter when her hair was green and spiked up and she was wearing about nine pounds of earrings, but at least she didn’t shave one side of her head the way some of her friends did, and I think she’s back on this planet now. Philip’s got his problem, but otherwise he’s a fine, nice kid. With some fairly expensive help, he should be able to overcome it. It’s a mild case that he’s got.

  “Maybe I flatter myself,” he said, “but I think I had something to do with all that. I didn’t leave them, when I really wanted to, all alone with a woman whose system of value consists solely and entirely of social standing points and calculations. I know Terry’s aware, responsible adults’re interested in something more than the tennis ladder at the club and what’s on sale at Bloomingdale’s, who went to Hawaii last winter when you had to settle for a weekend in New York.

  “When Joanne started hanging around with a group of kids who were headed directly for trouble,” he said, “her father was home every night to work on her delusions, check her out for drugs, flog her about her homework, and generally make sure she had to work so hard to keep me satisfied she wouldn’t have enough energy left to meet the demands of her peer group. She’s going to be all right.”

  He stood up. “Philip,” he said, “well, we’ll see what the future holds. That’s why I’m hanging around. This’s his important time. Talk to me five years from now and I’ll give you a report. He seems to be doing all right. Let’s go get coffee. There’s a quick-’n’-dirty up the road.”

  She hesitated. “Is it safe, you think?” she said.

  He grinned. “Look,” he said, “the evasive tactics you’ve been taking, there’s no way they can find you. And if Barbie-doll’s got someone out looking for me, he missed me when I came here last night, because it was almost ten and I had the road to myself. No one was tailing me.”

  She stood up. “I hate living like this,” she said.

  He grasped her upper right arm gently. “So do I,” he said. “But the reason that we’re doing it is: the way we lived before.”

  32

  “The first three years,” Christina Walker said over the remains of scrambled eggs and her third cup of coffee, “I didn’t go to see him. There wasn’t any need to. I knew how he’d react. I didn’t like what my brother’d turned into, but I knew what it was, and what he’d do if I did something.”

  Gleason sat across from her in the center of one of the three booths beside the northerly window of the Red Ball Diner on Mason Street in Braintree. Down the hill below them on Route 3, northbound traffic to Boston increased steadily. Outside the entrance to the diner, men in business suits selected newspapers from among the four vending machines, came in and took places at the counter; they folded the papers twice and read segments of several stories before refolding to new pages, avoiding encroachments into each other’s spaces.

  Two men and a woman in white NYNEX telephone company hardhats sat in the booth behind Gleason; they talked about catching bluefish off Minot’s Light in Scituate. “It’s all a buncha bullshit,” one of the men said. “I grew up around this area. Used to fish Hull Gut. Get some stripers, get some mackerel, maybe foul-hook your stray flounder, let your eel gig get too deep. Then all a sudden: bluefish. Jumpin’ inna boats. Got them out there fightin’ for the first chance, take your hook. Now you read it inna the papers: ‘Bluefish dyin’ out. Must be the pollution. Prolly Pilgrim Nuclear plant.’ ‘Bullshit’: that’s what I say. Nothin’ but bullshit. Fish come in and fish go out. It’s the fish decide.” He stood up with his companions and dropped coins on the table. “Either the fish or God.” They walked toward the register.

  At the table behind Christina, a grizzled man in his fifties in a white New England Patriots tee shirt listened stoically as a man in his late twenties talked in a low voice about his wife’s insistence on working, and his deep disapproval of it. “I tell her,” he said, “I try to tell the bitch: ‘Look, I married you because I wanted a w
ife. And I needed a wife. If I’d’ve wanted a goddamned sales clerk in Filene’s, I would’ve gone down the goddamned plaza and gotten one of them. I didn’t want a goddamned roommate that’s so tired every night she goes to sleep before the goddamned news is over. I wanted a wife.’ And she doesn’t listen to me, doesn’t hear one word I say.”

  The older man wore a blue and white nylon mesh cap with a panel above the visor lettered: “Obviously you’ve mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.” He cleared his throat. He said: “Well, I don’t know. Your mother, she always said she wished she had a job. After you kids grew up. She didn’t have nothing to do. I still think that’s what did it, why she sits there all day shitfaced, staring at the wall. She didn’t have nothing to do, after you kids grew up. Maybe, maybe you should just shut up and let her do it.”

  “I knew what Jimmy thought of me, by then,” Christina said. “God knows, he hadn’t made any secret of it. It was bad even before you guys caught him and Sam, and I didn’t happen to be there. Like the least I could’ve done was get myself captured too. I was afraid of him before that. Afterwards, I was really scared.”

  “We didn’t have a warrant for you,” Gleason said. “We never had any case against you in The Friary.”

  “But if I’d been there,” she said, “if I’d’ve been in the camp in Deerfield, you, cops would’ve picked me up.”

  “Oh sure,” he said. “No question. But then we would’ve had to let you go. We didn’t have any evidence you were in The Friary.”

  “What Mom says doesn’t matter,” the younger man behind Christina said as the older man got up and produced a wad of dollar bills from his left pants pocket. “What matters’s what she did. And she raised the three of us. Which is what I want Patricia to do. When the kids’re grown up, that’s different. Then she can get a job.”