Outlaws (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by George V. Higgins

  “What I did do,” she said, “the only thing I did do, I knew about that hotline number. The reward line. And I called that.”

  “It was you,” Gleason said. “John Richards thought it was Handley.”

  “That’s what Sam,” she said, “I think that’s what made Sam kill her. That, not that he knew anybody’d called the police, but he had this really good intuition. About when something was going on. And I think, I think he sensed, something might be going down. And that’s why he killed Emmy. Because of what I did. When I was trying to help her.”

  “And that’s what Jimmy’s offering now,” Gleason said. “Emmy’s murderer.”

  “That’s what he wants,” she said. “That’s what he wants to offer. See, he hasn’t done it yet. All he’s done, there’s this other guy in there that he knows pretty well, and this other guy knows the cop. Consolo? And Jimmy, what Jimmy did was have the other guy ask Consolo if Jimmy can get a deal, a commutation, if he tells them about Sam. And this cop, this cop is evidently thinking, well, maybe he can get Sam without making the deal with Jimmy. So he keeps having this other guy, the contact, he keeps having him go up to Jimmy and sort of tease him, you know? That Jimmy’s got to make the case before the cop gives him any agreement. And that’s what’s going on.”

  “And that worries you,” Gleason said.

  “Well,” she said, “yeah, it does. I mean, Sam beat the charge before, right? What if he, what if he beats it again, and then comes after me? I mean, I’d like to see Jimmy get out. He’s not right in the head, I think. I don’t mean he’s dangerous, now — I don’t think he is. But Jimmy, it’s sort of like he’s regressed, in prison. I don’t know if he can cope. And I think Sam should be, that he should be punished. But suppose this cop can’t find him? Suppose he comes after me, when he finds out they’re looking for him? What do I do then? Is Jimmy trading me along with Sam, to get out? He doesn’t mean to do that — that’s not what I mean. But suppose he makes this deal of his, and the cop fucks up? Sam gets away? What do I do then?”

  “Does Jimmy know where Sam is?” Gleason said.

  She gazed at him. “No,” she said.

  “Do you?” Gleason said.

  She toyed with her table knife. “I might,” she said. “If I don’t, I could find out.”

  33

  “Okay,” Gleason said in the diner where nine men lingered separately at the counter over coffee, “three wishes.”

  She laughed. “ ‘Three wishes time,’ ” she said. “God, how I miss that. Isn’t that funny? There we were in that impossible, awful, mess, and there was no way in the world it wasn’t going to end in a complete, fucking, disaster, no matter which way it turned out — and you say that and it almost seems like it was actually fun. ‘If you could have three wishes.’ I think that’s what kept me sane.”

  “Well,” he said, “yes, but you’re being kind. In the first place, you know, I was sort of teetering along the edge of the cliff myself. And in the second place, either you’re being kind or maybe you never noticed, but you never, I never granted any of those wishes.”

  “One you did,” she said.

  He looked puzzled. “Which one was that?” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, “you never noticed. I never mentioned more’n two wishes. The other one was to go to bed with you, and I already had that. I did sort of have another one, that I also didn’t mention and that I never got. But I sort of knew, I knew that one was a little more’n I could reasonably expect.”

  “What was that?” he said.

  She frowned. “Oh,” she said, “I was young then. And when you’re young, you can know something isn’t going to happen, and still sit there like a ninny, and hope and hope it will. I wanted you to leave her. To divorce Barbara and live with me. And I knew, I knew you wouldn’t. So it was sort of voodoo I was doing. I wouldn’t ask for it, because I wouldn’t get it, but if I didn’t ask for it, then maybe I would. Screwy, huh?”

  “We were all screwy then,” he said. “The time was out of joint. The players, the players didn’t belong in the games that were going on. Guys like Sam, he should’ve been writing learned papers and getting a tenured chair at Caltech. Your brother should’ve been a high school teacher and varsity coach — football, maybe, or wrestling. Jill Franklin was a talented woman, crazed but talented. Her background, she should’ve been moving up the ladder of administration in some progressive public school system. Kathie, just as crazy as Jill was, she should’ve been organizing grass-roots political support for some up-and-coming young pol who’d be a senator today and being prominently mentioned as a presidential candidate.

  “Instead,” he said, “we were all embroiled in weird stuff. There I was, nose-to-the-grindstone young prosecutor, working homicides because I’d really learned my trade, and instead of hanging hit-men and real psychopaths, I was going after a bunch of people whose backgrounds weren’t that different from my own. And whose natural inclinations, if no one’d disturbed them, would’ve been to do things very similar. But instead they’d gotten twisted. None of the rules applied. They’d all been abrogated.

  “It was the oddest trial I’d ever had,” he said. “Up till then and up till now, the very oddest trial. If it hadn’t’ve been for the reason that brought us together, I could’ve been talking to Sam over coffee, or maybe having a couple of beers and discussing the news of the world. I was prosecuting, the people I was trying to convict of cold-blooded murder were much more like me’n the people I was saying that they killed. The children of privilege, on trial by the children of privilege, for killing people whose children were going to be of privilege, if their daddies’ drug trade didn’t get interrupted. That’s unusual. It’s pretty near unique.” He paused. “And for sure, The Friary was the first trial I ever had where I ended up in bed with a defendant’s sister.”

  “Had any since?” she said.

  “Ahh,” he said. “No. I have had some trials since then where I encountered ladies whom I would not otherwise’ve met, but very few, and none of them related to defendants. By blood or marriage.”

  “How many?” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “I consider that to be privileged information.”

  “How many?” she said.

  “Two,” he said.

  “That surprises me,” she said.

  “What?” he said. “That there were actually two women who were interested? Or that there were only two. Say: ‘That there were only two.’ I’ve got a long day ahead of me, and I need bucking up.”

  “That there were only two,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  “I’d think, knowing you,” she said, “I’d expect them to hunt you in packs.”

  He grinned at her. “Meaning no offense, ma’am,” he said, “most ladies of intelligence and breeding seem to find me less than thrilling. You were an exception. Since you were: three wishes.”

  She sighed. “I hate going there,” she said. “The three years, the first three years that he was in there and I didn’t go near the place, it bothered me. And then when I finally went, I found out staying away from it’s nowhere near as depressing as going to it. No matter how guilty you feel.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s like going to a mass wake, but all the guests of honor’re alive. They just might as well be dead.”

  “I wrote to him,” she said. “I wrote letters to him that he didn’t answer, and boy, was that difficult. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to write to someone that you never hear back from anyway. But when the person who’s not answering’s in prison, what the hell do you say? Do you just ignore the fact that he’s locked up? Write him happy little notes about how great your new job is, and how he’d love your new car? Rub it in, in other words? Or do you start right off with that, be ‘adult’ about it? And if you do, what’s your tone? Sympathetic or disciplinary? ‘Dear Jimmy, I’m really sorry you’re doing life and it’s hard to believe you won’t be getting out for
at least fifteen more years.’ Or: ‘Dear Jimmy, You dumb shit. I heard an old record the other day I’m taping to send you. It’s called “I fought the law, and the law won.” ’ So they were awful hard to write.”

  “But you did it,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Jimmy was arrested and convicted, but I was the one who felt guilty. I was afraid to go see him. I was afraid if I went there he’d either refuse to see me, and I’d be mortified in front of a group of strangers. Or else that he would see me, and he’d just humiliate me in front of all of them. So I settled for writing letters, and when I’d talk to my mother on the phone, you know, pick up what I could from her about what was going on. Without asking too many questions, of course — I never let on to her that he didn’t write to me. She assumed he did — he wrote to her, and Dad wrote to him, after he recovered, and he answered them. He didn’t tell them anything, as far as I could tell, but he did write, and that seemed to satisfy them. So there wasn’t any point getting her all upset that he wouldn’t answer me.

  “Besides,” she said, “I was always afraid, you know, that if she found out, she’d want to know why. So she could patch it up. Florence is completely feckless, but she doesn’t realize that. She likes to manage things, run her children’s lives. And everybody else’s too. Especially if they don’t want her meddling and her pointless damned advice — then, especially. She’s one of those people that think once you see a problem, and discuss it, and decide how to approach it, the problem disappears. No need to do anything more, see? Just discuss it, and discuss it, and then discuss some more. Well, a big part of the reason Jimmy wouldn’t write to me was my affair with you, which I didn’t want to discuss with her, and therefore did not want her to know about.”

  “Why?” he said. “I thought, I thought she encouraged you, you know, to do as you wanted to do.”

  “Oh,” Christina said, “she did. I don’t mean that. Florence told me when I was first with Sam, who as far as she knew was my first, she.…”

  “He wasn’t?” Gleason said.

  “No,” she said. “I was with a boy when I was fourteen. He was, I know everybody says the first time was awful, the pain and all that clumsy stuff, grabbing on and getting hurt, but mine wasn’t — he was wonderful. He was only sixteen himself, and we weren’t even dating or anything, but I was absolutely, I couldn’t wait to try sex. I had to find out what it was like, and I knew Tommy, sort of — the school I was in was all girls, but Tommy’s father was one of my father, mother’s friends. Carl Oates? The correspondent? And so I’d met Tommy, and he was nice, so I asked him if he would help me. And he was just the sweetest boy. He told me he wanted to, but that he never had either, and you know what he did? He did research. He read a book or something, so he’d know what to do, and I wouldn’t get pregnant, and then one afternoon I went to his parents’ apartment and it was just wonderful.

  “That was three years before Florence got around to telling me her father’d been just as strict with her as Dad was trying to be with me, and that she’d listened to him and now she wished she hadn’t and I shouldn’t listen to mine. ‘Just be discreet,’ she said. ‘Don’t let him find out. Deceive him, to be kind, and do what you really want to do.’ So she was sort of stuck with it when I started going with Sam. She, I don’t think at first she really thought that much of Sam, even though Jimmy just worshipped him and talked about him all the time, whenever he was home. ‘He seems awfully intense,’ she’d say to me. Which of course he was. That’s a good part of what attracted me to him — that he was so driven all the time. And how could you be too intense about preventing war? And I said that to her. So she decided she liked him, and she wanted a lot to like him, because she agreed with him.

  “But you?” Christina said. “A married prosecutor, living with his wife and kids? Who put her son in jail? No, I think you would’ve been a little too much for her. If I’d ever told her about Tommy, that I went to bed with Tommy because I wanted sex so bad, that she would’ve approved of. But if I told her I went to bed with you because I wanted you, that would’ve really shocked her. Florence’s always liked to think of herself as very progressive. Very much in tune with the times and all that. But what she actually is is sort of a prisoner of the times, whatever they happen to be. Actually, very conventional, but always careful to make sure she has the fashionable conventions. Whatever they happen to be. Florence thinks the city was named after her. She and Dad, up there on Sutton Place, if they went to a cocktail party in the Sixties that didn’t have at least two Black Panthers and a few gay activists, she’d get all depressed — think they might as well’ve stayed home. And Dad was busy being eminent, so he just humored her. So when Jimmy brought Sam home, my father was a little less than thrilled, but he was in a trap because my mother was enchanted. Sam might not’ve looked like much, but what he said was chic.”

  She paused. “A few years later,” she said, “after Jimmy was convicted and she found exactly how Sam’d changed her son, well, she wasn’t very pleased with herself. Blamed herself, in fact, for Dad’s heart attack, because she opposed him when he kept saying Jimmy was doing bad things, hanging out with Sam. ‘I didn’t help your father,’ she says. ‘He was right, and I didn’t help him.’ That’s how she feels today. Although what she could’ve done, I don’t know — she was powerless.”

  “Remorse,” Gleason said. “That’s the way it always is. Saw it when I was prosecuting, see it more now I’m defending. When they get convicted, the folks who get convicted do their best, persuade the judges that they really feel remorse. Because that’s what the judges’re supposed to be looking for, when they consider sentences. And some of them’re telling the truth, although it’s hard to swallow when this guy’s been insisting for several weeks of the trial that he didn’t do it, and then he gets convicted and stands up in front of you and says in substance and effect: ‘Well, okay, I did it. I didn’t think they could prove it, but they did, and so I did it. But now I’m really sorry I did it, because if I don’t say I am, you’re going to bury me.’

  “But there are people who are sincere, about remorse: the defendants’ families. They may sit in your office and tell you the guy was trouble from the minute he came out of the womb, recite all the things they did, that didn’t work, to get him straightened out, and they know it’s not their fault. But all you have to do is look at them and you know it’s not the truth. That they’re blaming themselves for everything that’s happened, and they’ll go to their graves doing it.”

  “It’s very hard for her,” Christina said. “I didn’t want to make it worse, to let her think she was also responsible for Jimmy and me being estranged. One more thing to feel guilty about. So I didn’t, I tried not to let on he wasn’t answering my letters, and we’d talk, and she’d tell me as soon as Dad was fully recovered, well, she was sure they’d go up to see Jimmy. And I’d say the time Dad needed to heal would also help to let him come to grips with what’d happened. And I’d pick up a few bits of news that Jimmy’d written to her, and then I’d write to him.

  “Well,” she said, “after about two years, he started answering my letters. I couldn’t tell from the first one he wrote how many of my letters he’d read, or whether he’d just ripped them up when they came. He seemed pretty distant, what he wrote, and he didn’t really give me much information. But I could see, or I thought I could see, a definite change in his attitude from what it’d been when he went in. Just the fact he was responding — that alone was encouraging. So I answered him, and he wrote back, everything very noncommital and light, and we went on like that for about another year, me always holding myself back, thinking: ‘Don’t push him. Take it easy. After all, he’s got nothing but time. Progress is slow? Okay. Don’t try to hurry things and end up ruining them.’ And then my mother called me up one Sunday night and said Dad’d been examined, and he was all recovered, and they were driving up to see Jimmy the following weekend. And she was all fluttery and anxious about it. And I was not to tell J
immy when I saw him, they were coming up. So if Dad had a relapse or something, and they couldn’t come, Jimmy wouldn’t be disappointed.

  “Now, you’ve got to understand Florence,” Christina said. “My mother’s known since she was a little girl what to wear to an opening night of the Philharmonic, and how to act when invited to dine at Lancaster House, or to the Queen’s garden party. And my father’s all brusque and efficient when it comes to white-tie receptions for Nobel laureates. Ceremonial occasions are familiar to them. But this one was something new, this reunion with their son. Neither one of them was what you’d call ‘familiar,’ with the protocol for visiting close relatives doing time for murder. No experience in that line. So she said to me: ‘Tell me what to do. Tell me what you do when you get there.’ And I was on the spot. I had to improvise, because of course I hadn’t been there, and I said: ‘Look, Florence. I’m not sure the rules’re the same for parents as they are for siblings. So when I’m up there this week, I’ll ask, and call you back.’ And she said that would be ‘very helpful,’ and she thanked me very much.

  “So that iced it,” Christina said. “Now I had to go. And I called up and found out the visiting hours, and I picked, I decided I would go on Thursday because Thursdays and Wednesdays you had to be out of there by five, and the other days you could stay as late as nine, and I wanted, I thought the first time I went it might be just as well if they, if I couldn’t stay too long.

  “I drove out there,” she said. “It was one of those brilliant days in late September when the leaves’re just starting to change but the air’s still warm, and that year I had one of those rare pupils that you think when you start out teaching music, that you think all your pupils will be. In about a week you discover you’ll be lucky if you ever get even one. Toby Leach. The nicest, smartest, hardest working, most intelligent kid who ever played piano.” She chuckled. “When he graduated last June he packed his bags and headed off for Annapolis. ‘Sorry, Miss Walker,’ he said. ‘My father says the sons of naval officers have to understand when there isn’t enough money to do things they’d like to do.’