“But I was brave,” Andrea said. “I went to Beau and I told him. I said: ‘Beau, this doesn’t mean, you know, that I’m not still committed to the struggle and everything. But from now on, you know, it’s just Glenn.’ And he didn’t like it a whole lot, Beau didn’t, but he was also a nice guy, then, and he said all right, that if I wanted it that way he was a friend of mine and he would understand and mention it to Sam.”
“This would have been Sam Tibbetts,” Dennis said.
“Right,” Andrea said. “Sam was the chief. El Jefe. We were all equal, and there was no cell hierarchy. But that always meant, from the very beginning, or at least since I came in, which was in the second year the Contingent’d existed, that always meant that Sam was the leader and the boss. You didn’t have to do what Sam said, but if you didn’t you were out.”
“And Sam approved,” the woman said. “Approved of you going with Glenn.”
“Not actually,” Andrea said. “He just didn’t make a big stink about it. Probably thought, probably Sam thought even then that Glenn had no balls, and if I wanted to go with Glenn, I wasn’t worth getting worked up about either. And Sam, too, I was putting a lot of money into that group, by comparison with the other people. ‘From each according to his means,’ right? Well, I didn’t have much means of my own, but my father was doing a fair amount of plastic surgery up the road in San Francisco and he just couldn’t deny me. So, I don’t know whether Sam decided I didn’t matter, so he’d let it go, or my money did matter so he’d have to let it go. But either way, he did. And the next semester I transferred east to BU. To be with Glenn. Not to get out of the Contingent. I was still in that. But now I was in the east coast branch, so I could be close to Glenn. And that was when we started living together. September of Nineteen-sixty-nine.
“So, you think about it,” Andrea said, “and I don’t think it’s too difficult to understand. We’d been living together with each other for over five years when he started hitting me. When Glenn first beat me up, I thought I knew the guy. I’d supported him in what he did, law school and everything. If he wanted to stay in the fight by fighting in the courts, I was all for that. He didn’t have any reason to want to kick me around. He told me it was bad drugs that made him do it the first time? I believed the guy.
“About five or six months later,” she said, “the bastard did it again. And this time he hadn’t been anywhere else, hadn’t taken anything I hadn’t taken too — just some grass and beer on a Sunday afternoon, and there was nothing wrong with me. But all of a sudden he erupts and I’m getting it again. And I began to get scared, which of course I should’ve been after the first time, the first time he whacked me. And after he was finished and he went to sleep, I got up and cleaned myself up, and very quietly I packed some stuff and went to a hotel. And the next day he called me at work, and he’s all remorse again. Wants me to come home. And I said to him, you know: ‘What is going on here? Why do you do this to me? I’m not coming home again until I find out these things, and if I don’t like what I find out, then I’m not coming home.’
“But I did,” she said. “Naturally I did. I missed him. And I kept doing it, too, when it happened after that.” She paused. “It was,” she said, “it was all mixed up together. It was like all the excitement we had at San José, the way I felt when I first met Glenn and we were all going to change the world, well, it had to stay the same. Or as much the same as it could. Romantic, you know? Dedication. The way we felt about the world and the way we felt about each other, it meant that if I didn’t see Glenn anymore, I was giving up all those other things too. And I didn’t want to do it. Even when he hurt me. So I kept going back.”
“And you stayed with him, then, for eight more years,” Dennis said. “After he started abusing you.”
“Yes,” Andrea said, “I did.”
“Do you have any idea how many times it happened?” Dennis said.
Andrea shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably, oh, ten. Maybe a dozen. The year when the cops caught Sam and Beau, and The Friary trial and everything, after that spring he didn’t hit me. I guess he had too much on his mind. And, he was away. But I know he was worried. What was going to happen to Sam and Beau and the women. How come Sam and Beau had, you know, how come they hired the lawyers they did, the establishment lawyers, and paid them, when they could’ve had Glenn and his partners for nothing. Solidarity and all that crap. Too depressed to hit then. Didn’t have the strength. But all the other years, every so often, every six months or so, but it varied, he’d go off the handle and start beating me up.”
“Did you ever fight back?” Dennis said. “Effectively, I mean?”
“Oh yeah,” Andrea said. “Two or three times. I remember once — see I’d generally try to hide in the bathroom if I saw it coming on. Make enough noise so the neighbors’d call the police. But the police, the police in Boston aren’t always on your block of your street when your roommate decides he’d like to change the way your face looks. So I was lucky once because Glenn passed out before they came. And the next day, after he went to work, I got a little purse-can of Mace from one of the girls at work, and the next time he came after me, I had it under the dirty clothes in the hamper in the bathroom, where I knew he’d never find it ’cause I always did the wash. And I locked the door and he’s pounding on it and I got that can of Mace out, and when he broke the lock I Maced him. That time he had to go to the emergency room. And of course I had to make up the story that it’d gone off in his face while he had the hamper open, because of the heat from the radiator next to it. So no one would know the truth. And another time — the last time, in fact, before he died — he came after me when I was cooking dinner in the kitchen. And I threw a roasting pan of hot pork gravy at him. At his crotch. He usually came at me, usually when he came after me he had his dick out. Part of his rape fantasy. So that stopped him, that time.”
“He died in Nineteen-eighty-two, you said?” Dennis said.
“Uh huh,” Andrea said. “October twentieth, Nineteen-eighty-two.”
“What was it?” Dennis said.
Andrea snickered. “You mean: ‘Was it anything I did?’ No, it wasn’t, although that’s another thing that sort of came as a relief. Because the longer it went on, the more likely it was that I might kill him some day, by accident. In self-defense. So his dying saved me that.” She inhaled deeply. “It was a stroke,” she said. “A clot hit his brain and that was it for him. He was sitting at his desk in the office, and I was at the station, perfectly normal Wednesday of me busting my hump for Buster, which is why we call him that, trying to get the Friday night magazine ready two days after it should’ve been done on Monday. And he keeled over. They took him to Boston City but he never regained consciousness. Died an hour later. Thirty-six years old.”
“It must have been difficult for you, all the same,” Dennis said. “Keeping it secret, the way you’d been. I mean: with all the family and friends at the funeral.”
“Oh,” Andrea said, “not all that difficult. It was sort of like.… What we’re talking about here’s my youth, you know? And that, when he died, it was the end of that. It was over with, and gone. And it hadn’t really been that nice, you know? When you thought about it. So in most ways, I was glad.”
“Did you see any of the others?” Dennis said. “At the funeral, I mean? Sam Tibbetts’s old gang? I know he, Walker and Kathy Fentress and Jill Franklin, was it? They were still in jail, of course, but none of the others came?”
“The Contingent?” Andrea said. “There wasn’t anything left of it, by then. Just Sam and them. That I knew about, at least. It was over, too. After they did The Friary thing and after they were caught, I read about them in the papers and Glenn talked about them just incessantly, and I used to think: ‘Yes, and if I’d’ve been still with you then, and they had kept you in, you and I would’ve ended up in the same ditch with Emmy, probably the same day.’ But we didn’t see them at all. I haven’t seen them in years. About a hu
ndred years, seems like. At least a hundred years.”
26
At 5:45 P.M., Terry Gleason told Det. Sgt. Fred Consolo he had failed to return the first two calls from Christina Walker. He gestured at the top of his desk, covered with piles of yellow paper, trial transcripts in blue covers, manila folders spilling documents and fat brown bellows files tied with faded maroon ribbons. His red-and-blue-striped tie was down from the unbuttoned collar of his shirt; his bottom eyelids were also down, sagging under his bloodshot eyes.
“I figured,” he said, “I figured: ‘If I haven’t got enough on my plate as it is, it’s certainly enough to suit me.’ You realize how long it’s been since I’ve had six — not eight but six — consecutive hours sleep? It’s been since Memorial Day. I keep telling myself: ‘This’s the big time, Gleason, my man. This is what you wanted. The heavy-lifting, big-dough cases, ninety days of trial.’ And I guess it probably is. And I am enjoying it. But it’s the same thing, you know, the tomcat said about the affair he had with the lady skunk. ‘I really liked as much of it as I could goddam stand.’ ” He sighed. “So,” he said, “I got the messages. I knew she called. But I didn’t call her back.”
Consolo had dressed impeccably in muted brown plaid sport coat, white button-down shirt, neat patterned tie in brown and gold, lightweight grey flannel slacks with welted seams and deeply polished brown loafers. His greying hair was trimmed and brushed back at the temples. He sketched deliberately on his notepad, making diagonal lines and connecting them into tiny trapezoids. “You didn’t have the time,” he said.
Gleason shook his head. “Yes and no,” he said. “If maybe you’d’ve come up here some evening, late afternoon, nothing special on your mind, if you’d’ve just come up here and said to me: ‘Terry, my friend, let us go and have a beer,’ I would’ve been out of here like a shot. Because there wouldn’t’ve been anything complicated about that, you know? I would’ve grabbed the break. But Christina was a different story. That was complications.”
Consolo’s left eyebrow went up. He made pentagrams. “But if you didn’t know what she was calling about,” he said, on a rising inflection. “Since you didn’t know why she was calling at the time?”
“Didn’t matter,” Gleason said. “I didn’t have to know exactly what she wanted. All I had to know was that she was the one who wanted it. And that was complications.”
“I don’t think I’m tracking,” Consolo said.
“Freddie, Freddie,” Gleason said, “you gonna sit there and make me take you back to school? You know how I met Christina. You were around her brother’s case. You were gaping her yourself. Everybody was. Don’t start giving me that shit, you’re not tracking me. You know exactly what I mean, why I shied away. Don’t jerk me around.”
Consolo chuckled. He drew octagons. “But that,” he said, “that was, what, seven years ago? You gonna sit there and tell me, that still sits on your mind? You two haven’t been an item for six or seven years.”
Gleason snorted. “Not on the street, we haven’t, maybe,” he said. “There I agree with you. But in my happy home, we have, I can tell you that. Barbara is a jealous woman, and with the memory she’s got, she should have a fucking trunk and be out hauling logs in Burma, getting jabbed in the arse by some mahout with a hooked pole, you know? In one large house that can get awful small some times, in scenic, serene Canton, Freddie, we’re an item still.”
Consolo snickered. He drew small squares. “But in any event,” he said, “at some point, you did call her back. You called Christina back.”
“I did call her back,” Gleason said. “Against my better judgment, but yes, I did call her back.”
“And you had some conversation,” Consolo said.
“No, we didn’t,” Gleason said. “All I did was, when she answered, I told her who it was, returning her call, and then we just sat there for fifteen minutes or so, breathing heavy in the phones, and then she said: ‘You give good phone,’ and we both hung up.”
“You’re still a fresh bastard, Terry,” Consolo said. He made sharp, dark slashes on the pad. “You’re maybe getting old, and you say you’re getting tired, but you’re still a damned fresh bastard. Got to give you that.”
“Well, you should’ve known better’n to start in on that line,” Gleason said. “The answer to your question is: ‘Yes, I conversed with her, and she conversed with me.’ Now you satisfied?”
“Don’t get all bent out of shape, Terry,” Consolo said. “I’m just a working stiff here, you know, making a goddamned living, just doing my job. What’d you talk about?”
“That’s what I meant before,” Gleason said. “You know I can’t tell you that. I was a lawyer the day you met me, and I’m a lawyer today. Conversation was privileged. I can’t tell you what we said until she orders me to do so.”
“Which she’s not likely to do,” Consolo said.
“I would guess not, no,” Gleason said. “That’s how I would bet.”
“At some time,” Consolo said, “as a result of this conversation or for some other reason, did you have occasion to see her face to face?”
“Yes, I did,” Gleason said.
“And was that by prearrangement?” Consolo said.
“Oh, goodness, no,” Gleason said. “I often get up at five in the morning, while I’m on trial in Boston, and drive twenty-eight miles down to Waterford and pull into the old high school parking lot, see if somebody turns up in the dawn’s early light to have a little chat around five-thirty-five.”
“And you had some more conversation with her there,” Consolo said.
“Affirmative,” Gleason said.
“Keeping in mind,” Consolo said, squinting at his pad. He drew lines connecting the squares with the pentagons. “Keeping in mind that the whereabouts of fugitives is not a confidential communication if the person knowing of them could be charged with harboring — having that in mind, and having also in mind the fact that the relationship of Christina Walker and Samuel Tibbetts was at no time one such as is recognized as entitling either party to withhold knowingly from law enforcement.…”
“You’re really getting your money’s worth at Suffolk Law, Freddie,” Gleason said. “You guys that go there nights really hammer those books, don’t you?”
“… information that might lead to the whereabouts of the other party,” Consolo said, “can you.…”
“She didn’t tell me where Tibbetts was,” Gleason said. “Assuming of course that when you use the word ‘fugitive,’ he is who you’ve got in mind.”
“He’s the one,” Consolo said. “He’s the very one. You’re a good guesser, too, Terry. Very intuitive.”
“ ‘One of my many talents,’ he said modestly,” Gleason said. “What I can’t intuit, though, is why you think he’s a fugitive. Fugitive from what? He did his bit. The jury said he was batty and the judge locked him up. Seven years later, docs said he was normal. And the same judge let him out. That’s the way the law works, Fred. You were there that day. You heard what he said. Judge didn’t like doing what he did any better’n you liked watching him do it, but that’s what the law says. Guy’s found NG by reason of insanity, he goes to Bridgewater. He gets better? He gets out. What’ve you got steaming around in that fevered brain of yours? You want to try him again for The Friary? See if you like it better, way it comes out the second time? Law doesn’t allow that. Take the course in double jeopardy next time they offer it. Very instructive.”
“When I’m looking for a guy,” Consolo said without expression, “that guy is a fugitive. What he’s a fugitive from is something I decide. Not you. Not the DA. Not the governor. I’m the one that decides. When I find him, then all you guys can get involved, and tell me if we can arrest him, and try to stop me from convicting him. But not until I find him.”
“So he hasn’t been charged with anything new,” Gleason said.
“He hasn’t yet,” Consolo said. “Like I say: When I find him, then I’ll go to the DA and say: ‘This is wha
t I’ve got, and here is where he is.’ And see if the DA wants to take what I’ve got into the grand jury, and indict him, and get me a warrant so I can go and get him.”
“And you think he will,” Gleason said.
“I know he will,” Consolo said. “I told that little killer, the day that he got out, I waited for him in the hall, and when he came out, I said, to him and his slimy lawyer, I said.…”
Gleason held up his hand. “I know what you said, Fred,” he said. “John Morrissey told me.”
“I said: ‘Don’t get the idea that you’re free now, just because you’ve gotten out. You’re never gonna be free, long as I am on this earth. I’ll track you the rest of my life if I have to, or yours if that comes first. But I’m never gonna forget, and you just remember that.’ ”
Gleason nodded. “And John Morrissey quite properly called Peter Mahoney and said if you threaten his client again like that, or harass him in any way, he’s gonna sue the ass off the Commonwealth in a federal civil rights case that’ll set your hair on end.”
“He won’t have much luck,” Consolo said. “I get an indictment, which I am going to get, he can holler and yell all he wants — harassment that is not.”
“Yeah,” Gleason said. “Well, good luck to you and the Red Sox, then. I still don’t know where he is.”
“Did you ask her?” Consolo said. “Did you ask Christina Walker where the gentleman might be? Where he went when he got out?”
Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) Page 22