Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by George V. Higgins

  She inhaled again. “So you see, Mister Badger,” she said, “I have to be very careful here, about how I approach this thing. I don’t want Terry’s business to be hurt, even if he is running around on me. It’s bad enough if I have to divorce him, and face the rest of my life alone. Which is most likely what would happen to me, if I reached that point. That would be bad enough. But if I somehow, stupidly, if I do something that ruins his practice, I could find myself in a position where I’d have to go back to work. And I don’t want to do that. Because I think I’ll fail. If I’ve failed at one thing,” she said, “if I’ve failed at my marriage, well, that’s bad enough. I don’t want to get into a position where I fail again. At my life.”

  Badger studied her. “You’re very persuasive, Mrs. Gleason,” he said. “You may not’ve worked for a good many years, but your mind has not been idle.”

  “No,” she said, “it hasn’t. Now, will you listen to me, hear what I have to say?”

  “No promises,” he said.

  “I understand that,” she said. “Except for secrecy, of course.”

  “It won’t leave these offices,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Ten years ago, my husband was an assistant district attorney in Boston. He’d been one for eight years by then, and he was good at it. He handled major cases — murders, robberies and that stuff. And he did well in court.” She hesitated. “At the time he left that job,” she said, “I thought we were both agreed that it was, that he should leave. Because it didn’t pay all that well, and both of us’d always wanted nice things. So I thought he wanted to do it. Wanted to leave. Now? Now I’m not so sure. When he was a prosecutor, we didn’t have much money but he was always happy. He liked what he did. Now he makes a lot more, and I know he’s good at it, but maybe we emphasized the material side too much.” She coughed. “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t want to create any false impressions. Terry is a good man, and a fine lawyer.”

  Badger cleared his throat. “I’m familiar with your husband’s work,” he said. “Both sides: prosecution and defense. I’ve worked on cases that he was presenting for the Commonwealth, and for other lawyers on cases where he was on the defense team. He’s a very resourceful lawyer. Very quick, very bright, very alert. Very hardworking, too. And, I must say, trustworthy. He keeps his word. If, as most suppose, John Morrissey is the dean of the Boston criminal defense bar, then he ought to know, and John Morrissey says Terry Gleason is the most capable trial attorney he’s ever run up against. Anywhere.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Oh,” she said, “are we now getting to the real reason, you don’t want this case?”

  He looked puzzled. “I don’t think I’ve said that, in the first place. All I’ve said is that we seldom do accept such cases. Which is not the same thing at all. In the second place, I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is precisely what I’ve said. That I know who Terry Gleason is. I’ve worked with him, ’though not for him. I know he’s capable. I respect him for that.”

  “Well,” she said, “all right. Because he is those things. Very capable.

  “Terry’s last case, as a prosecutor,” she said, “was The Friary shoot-out. The two men who ran it, and three women. Prostitutes. Found shot to death. Plus two other women as well. In a freezer.”

  “We worked on that case,” Badger said. He frowned. “Very troublesome case, that. For us, I mean. We had to walk a thin line. I’m still not sure we didn’t slip.” He cleared his throat. “We worked for Attorney Bigelow. One of the defense counsel.”

  “John Bigelow,” she said.

  “That’s the one,” Badger said.

  “Terry hates his guts,” she said with satisfaction. “He says John Bigelow’s the biggest snake that’s ever been on earth. At least since the Garden of Eden.”

  Badger put his head back and laughed. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “You should hear what Bigelow has to say about your husband.”

  “What is it?” she said fiercely. “Just what does he have to say?”

  Badger held up his right hand and laughed, shaking his head. “Easy, easy,” he said, “I’m not going to tell you that. John Bigelow and your husband’re both perfectly nice men. Men of integrity. John’s a bit stuffy, perhaps, but basically a very nice man. Your husband’s a bit of a renegade, but basically a very nice man. John and your husband: they just don’t like each other. They have a personality conflict that makes them — when they rub up against each other, they tend to give off sparks.”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe, but after what Terry’s told me about him, well.…”

  “Discount it by thirty percent,” Badger said. “It’s just a personal antagonism. Just a normal human weakness. Go on with what you were saying.”

  “One of the defendants in The Friary case,” she said, “was a man named James Walker.”

  “ ‘Beau James,’ they called him,” Badger said. “Very unusual man, praise God. He was John Bigelow’s client.”

  “So, you’re familiar with him, then,” she said. Her eyes were very narrow.

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Badger said. “I don’t think anyone was ever quite ‘familiar’ with Beau James. Mister Walker … Let’s just say that Mister Walker was a man who guarded his privacy. Even from his lawyer, and his lawyer’s investigators. Very complicated chap. Very complicated. It was hard to know how to defend him. He was so secretive with us.

  “John Bigelow and I were quite frustrated,” Badger said. “But we pursued the matter according to his wishes. He, after all, was paying us to chase down all those leads that didn’t pan out. All the people who couldn’t be found. Paying us a lot. We took his money. We thought he was a nut, but the checks were good.”

  “I gathered he came from a very wealthy family,” she said.

  “Urn,” Badger said, “ ‘well-to-do,’ I’d say. His father’s a research cardiologist at New York Memorial. Very highly respected. Mother was a concert pianist before her marriage. And her father was a cellist for the London Philharmonic. Before he emigrated to this country to teach at Yale. Terribly, naturally, terribly upset about this thing. This squalid murder case? Absolutely horrifying. Father had a heart attack shortly after the boy was arrested. I don’t think there’s any question but that it was brought on by the ordeal.”

  “He’s a Negro, too, isn’t he?” she said.

  “I suppose,” he said. “I suppose he’d be characterized as a black. His mother, James’s mother, his mother was a West Indian. His putative grandfather was Spanish. James is quite dark.”

  “Actually,” Barbara Gleason said, “it’s his sister that’s more my concern.”

  Badger pursed his lips. “Ah,” he said, “yes. Christina. To one degree or another, she was everyone’s concern. Everyone connected with The Friary trial, at least. Remarkable woman. Very remarkable woman. How to put it? ‘Wise beyond her years,’ I’d guess. Wise beyond her years.”

  “Mister Badger,” she said, “my husband had an affair with that woman. She was almost the cause of the end of our marriage.” She looked down into her lap and gnawed her lower lip. “I had,” she said, “I had a really awful time, deciding what to do. For several months after I found out what was going on, I was just beside myself. And then,” she said, gasping once, “then I made up my mind. And took him back. And I forgave him. I said: ‘All right, Terry. I guess I’m over it. I suppose every family, every couple has to go through something. Some men gamble; some men drink. Donald knew very well what a tramp my sister was, how she was taking on every man in Seattle while he was at sea, and he came to terms with it, somehow. And I guess, I guess I can do the same with you. I think I can live with it, what you’ve done to me, and maybe some day I’ll even manage, manage to forget it. But if this ever happens again.…’ I told him I didn’t think — I knew, in fact — that I couldn’t go through it again. And we even had — and this was his idea — we tried to have another child.” She stopped. “But we couldn’t. I was too old, I guess. I miscar
ried.”

  Badger tilted back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He smiled sympathetically. “Mrs. Gleason,” he said, “I’ve been married to the same woman for the past twenty-one years. Before that, I was married to the same woman for nineteen years. To my childhood sweetheart, mind you. And until I met my second wife, the thought of leaving my first wife never entered my mind. But the minute I set eyes on Martha, I knew without any doubt whatsoever I was going to divorce Sarah and marry Martha. I knew it, don’t you see? Whatever it took for me to get her, that I was going to do.

  “That was in Nineteen-sixty-four,” he said. “I was forty-one years old, and that was exactly what I did. It cost me plenty, I assure you, but I did it, and I paid it without a whimper.

  “Fourteen years later,” he said, “fourteen years after I married Martha, I went to work on The Friary. And naturally, in the course of my work for John Bigelow, I was introduced to Christina Walker.

  “I was fifty-five years old,” he said. “I don’t by any means suggest I’d been a model husband to Martha before that — we’re all prisoners of our own characters, and mine has at least the average number of defects. But there’s a distinction that adults need to draw, I think, between the sort of transient infatuation that leads to little flings, and often can be explained by a disparity between the sexual appetites of spouses, and the overpowering urge to possess another person. Exclusively and permanently. Until I met Christina Walker, I had never felt the slightest temptation in that respect to leave Martha.

  “Well,” he said, “my age saved me from making a complete fool of myself. Time goes by, thank God, and we get too tired to repeat our mistakes. Morality often gets the credit for the effects of fatigue. Christina was, I think, about twenty-five then, give or take a year. If I’d been thirty-five, even forty-five, I think I would have gone completely rattraps over that young woman. No matter who I was married to, or what anyone else thought of my behavior. She was an extraordinary woman.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Barbara Gleason said. “So I’ve often heard.”

  “Mrs. Gleason,” he said mildly, “listen to me, please? I’m telling you this because I think — indeed, I know — that what your husband did back then was understandable. If you asked me to tell you then, why this young woman — this child, really — distracted as she was by the fix her brother was in, as baffled as the rest of us by his reasoning, and what he said — if you had asked me then to account for her enormous attractiveness, I could not have done so. I can’t, adequately, to this day. But I can, what I can do is tell you that it was there. That it existed. It was powerful.”

  “I’ve heard that, too,” she said.

  “It’s not,” he said, “it’s not that she’s beautiful. In any conventional sense of the word.”

  “No,” Barbara said. “There I agree with you. I saw her. When I found out what was going on between her and my husband, found out who she was, my friend Rachel knew her. Knew who she was. Rachel’s very active in her synagogue, always setting up recitals and so forth, and she knew who she was. She had heard her play. And Rachel knew what she was doing. That she was getting education credits at Bridgewater State, to get a teaching job. And Rachel, we went over there one day, and Rachel pointed her out to me. And I was astonished. I guess I expected some Miss America or something, someone with a big chest and blonde hair and stiletto heels, wobbling along in pants so tight her pulse showed, and here I saw this young Negro woman with kind of her hair in a bun, and wearing a baggy old sweatshirt and blue jeans and moccasins, and no makeup or anything, and I thought: ‘What on earth? What on earth is going on here? I am losing my husband to this streelish, black, child? How can this be happening?’ ”

  “I’m sure you did,” Badger said.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t understand it,” she said. “I couldn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. I’m, I take care of my appearance, Mister Badger.”

  “I can see that,” he said.

  “Even my friends,” she said, “even my friends’re always telling me: ‘Oh, lighten up a little, Barbara. Don’t be so meticulous. You’re too fastidious. “Barbara has her hair done before she goes out to the mailbox.” Stop fretting all the time.’ But I was brought up, my mother always taught me to take care of myself. She told me, long before I met Terry, long before I was married, she told me one of the worst things a woman can do is let herself go, afterwards. And the night before I was married, she told me: ‘Now, you may not believe this, and I’ve never told you this before, but your father’s no different from any other man, and neither is Terry, either. I like him, and I think you’ve made a wise choice for a husband. But husbands’re always men. And men’re all alike. Men do not keep promises, no matter what they say. They’re always holding something back. Always hiding something. And when they say they’ll always love you, and take care of you, what they really mean is that they’ll do it unless somebody else comes along that they decide they’d like better.’

  “And of course I told her, little wimp that I was,” she said, changing to a singsong voice: “ ‘But Mother, we love each other. I love Terry very much, and I know that he loves me.’

  “And she said,” Barbara said, “she laughed at me. ‘You let him in,’ she said. ‘I don’t blame you for that. Only a crazy man would marry a woman without getting into her first. Only a crazy woman’d hold out on someone that really interested her. And if the parts fit right, of course it must be love.

  “ ‘But that doesn’t change the facts,’ she said. ‘Terry loves you now because he finally got you into bed. And he always will, too, if you remember they’re all dogs. Every single one of them. Including your father. All men’re dogs. And the only way you can be sure of keeping your dog at home is by giving him lots and lots of whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. He barks? Give him a treat. Any flavor. Because if you don’t, kiddo, there’s some dame out there who will, and the minute she offers it, he’ll be off like a shot.’

  “I was embarrassed,” she said. “My mother, talking like this? I said: ‘Mother, I am shocked.’ But I did it,” Barbara said. “I did what she said.” Her eyes teared up. “I’m not going to go into detail, Mister Badger, but I can tell you that Terry never wanted anything in the bedroom that he couldn’t get from me. Anything. If I thought it was something, you know, that I even thought was degrading — if that was what he wanted, well then, that’s what I would do. I didn’t let it matter. I went along with it. There was just — there was simply no reason why he had to go looking somewhere else.”

  She shook her head. “That’s why,” she said, “when I saw her, I just couldn’t understand. How was this insignificant little person doing this to me? It could not be happening. It simply could not be.” She took a deep breath. She snuffled. She dug into her purse and produced a handkerchief. She blew her nose hard. She shook her head again. “It wasn’t fair,” she said. “It simply wasn’t fair. I still don’t understand it. She couldn’t possibly’ve been giving him something with her body that he couldn’t get from mine. If she’d’ve been some bimbo, some eighteen-year-old stewardess, I might’ve understood. He wanted something young and firm — I wasn’t anymore. But this was just a child I saw. I couldn’t understand.”

  Badger cleared his throat. “It’s her eyes,” he said.

  She stared at him. “Her eyes,” she said in a flat voice.

  He cleared his throat again. “At first, I mean,” he said. “At first it’s her eyes. They change color. They seemed to change colors, at least. I don’t know what any of us, any of the, well, older people involved in The Friary — I don’t know what we expected to encounter when we came into contact with the people in that case. I know I expected, I guess I just assumed we’d be dealing with the detritus of an aberrant generation. A bunch of superannuated kids left over from a strange decade, obsolete debris. And most of them were — men and women in their thirties, still in adolescence. Cases of arrested development. But some of them, Christi
na, at least, had emerged from it. Evolved. And the reason, the reason that I, and someone like your husband, that we noticed those that had evolved, was usually something physical. And in Christina’s case, it was her eyes. I don’t really know what color they are. Blue. Green. Violet. Grey. I really don’t know. They’re hypnotic, though. Mesmerizing. You can sit there and have a conversation with her about some dreadfully dirty business that’s got her terribly upset, and you as disturbed as she, and you find yourself thinking, at least if you’re a man, you find yourself thinking, after a while: ‘My God, how does she do that? How many colors are there, that she can do with her eyes?’ It’s very unsettling. Most unsettling.”

  Barbara gazed at him uncomprehendingly.

  He coughed. “Well,” he said gruffly, “no need belaboring the point.” He rearranged his letter opener and pencils on the desk blotter. “All I meant to say was that there was a certain fascination, for all of us, in dealing with the people involved in The Friary case. And none of us was prepared for Christina. So, if your husband later had an affair with her, well, I don’t mean to make light of it, but you shouldn’t feel too bad. He just happened to be the one that succumbed. Or: ‘succeeded.’ That perhaps would be the word.

  “The fact,” he said, “the fact that you’re married to someone, Mrs. Gleason, as I’m sure you are aware, that fact is not a guarantee that that person is therefore immune to human weakness. To temptation. Nor is it necessarily a safe-conduct pass for you, when that temptation strikes. If, well, if you put it behind you, as you appear to have done in that instance, then that’s the sensible thing to do. A mature decision.”

  He stopped. He frowned. “Now,” he said, “now if you suspect he’s being tempted again, if someone else, and new, has entered the scene, well, I suppose, that’s a different matter. That you must weigh carefully. And, if you can’t see your way clear to riding out this new storm, going through it all again, well, then that’s a decision you’ll have to make yourself. But really, Mrs. Gleason, I don’t think your situation really requires the sort of service we provide.