Half an hour later, two HPD officers sat in a line-repair truck in Haver Power Company outfits a block away from Tyler Norris’s home. If Tyler drove out of his house, John Emory (looking like an investment banker in a BMW) would pick him up at the single gated entrance to Balmoral Heights and follow him wherever he went. Nancy headed back to Lucy Griggs’s apartment to look for anything that would tie Norris personally to his dead student—best of all any letters or photos. Other detectives were talking again with Lucy’s mother, friends, and classmates for clues to the relationship between the dead girl and her math professor.
On my way to the Cadmean Building, I kept reconfiguring the variables that dozens of us had already worked on hard and long. Over and over Tyler Norris made sense of them. Tyler Norris was Guess Who. He’d killed his wife Linsley Norris and gotten away with it. Now there’d been four more murders, maybe even five. Kristin Stiller. Lucy Griggs. Maria Guevarra and, I feared, her sister Lupe. Margy Turbot. Presumably he’d killed Kristin and Lucy because they’d threatened him with blackmail. Presumably he’d killed the Guevarra sisters because, after he’d used them to pass messages to us, they could identify him. And he’d killed Margy for no cause but to take revenge on her and us—because we’d sat in judgment on him and believed him guilty. I had no doubt that he’d murdered those women. I’d seen it in his eyes. But a chilling look was far from proof. Without proof, we couldn’t stop him. If we didn’t stop him, he would kill someone else. And how could we stop him when we’d already been warned by the mayor and the city council, by the district attorney and by the attorney general of the state, not ever to go near him again?
As I parked the old Jaguar, I saw Isaac Rosethorn in his rumpled black suit and Miss Bee Turner in her crisp bright blue suit heading together into Pogo’s, a favorite restaurant of local lawyers because of its proximity to the county jail. Everyone knew that Isaac and Bee had been “dating” for a good three or four decades but that she refused to socialize with him during any trial in which she was clerk and he was defense attorney. One local lawyer quipped that he never had to wait for the news to know when the jury had given its verdict in a big case; he could tell by whether Isaac was eating lunch alone or with Miss Turner.
Following the two inside, I ordered a bloody mary at the bar. The next morning’s bloody mary for the headache from the night before; the old bad habits were quickly coming back. It was just after eleven, so the place was quiet. Shortly after the courtrooms emptied at noon, it would be impossible even to reach the bar. In the long mirror, I could see Isaac gallantly holding out a chair for Miss Turner at “his” table. Drawn directly on the walls of Pogo’s were cartoon drawings of Hillston’s civic and legal luminaries. There was one of Cuddy. There was one of Judge Margy Turbot that already had a funeral wreath of white carnations on a stand beneath it. Isaac always sat at a table beside a large color caricature of himself wiping tears from his eyes with a huge white handkerchief as he addressed a jury. Waiting for my drink, I walked back to their table where we talked quietly for a moment about Margy’s murder. They speculated about whether she would have been tempted by Cuddy’s “plan” to get her nominated as state’s attorney general.
Isaac didn’t think so. “One of my Slim’s problems has always been his abysmal inability to understand women.” This remark evoked a suppressed ironic cough from Bee Turner who’d been misunderstood by Rosethorn for forty years. “The Supreme Court,” he explained. “That was Margy’s dream. The Supreme Court.” Isaac sighed. “Ah dear dear dear. She was really a very good young judge. Neither a bleeding nor a hard heart. A wise heart.”
I said, “The killer cut out her heart and left it on a kitchen scale.”
So they had heard. We sat in silence for a while.
“Judge Turbot was very knowledgeable about the law.” Miss Turner patted the blue silk peony on her lapel. “And she trusted the law.”
I looked hard at Isaac. “Maybe if she’d been a little more skeptical about trusting her last jury, she wouldn’t be dead now.” The old man’s head came up sharply to meet my glare and read it.
Sometime later, I watched in the mirror as Isaac said good-bye to Miss Turner, then shuffled over to the bar. Unlike most people in my life (and therefore a relief), he didn’t appear to care (or notice) that I was an unshaven wreck, both smoking and drinking; in fact, he took one of my Luckies and lit it. For a while he stared at me from behind the smoke, like a woeful Saint Bernard in a snowstorm, until finally I said, “Is there something the matter?”
“You tell me, my boy.” Blue smoke swirled from the fleshy lips up into the tangled white eyebrows. “Tell me why you just suggested that you think Tyler Norris murdered Margy Turbot.”
I finished my drink, held it up for another. “I think he not only killed her—and his wife, of course—he killed his mistress Lucy Griggs and three other women. I think Tyler Norris is Guess Who.”
Isaac studied me carefully. “On what basis have you arrived at this very alarming conclusion? What evidence is there for this?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you what evidence. Look what you did with our evidence last time. It never got into the trial.”
He sighed. “I did nothing with your evidence; I did much with Homer Louge’s contamination of your evidence.” Hostile stares greeted our return to the table that a quartet of waiting public defenders had been eyeing. The old attorney sat down. “Tyler’s trial is over. And he can’t be retried for what happened to his wife.”
“I’m talking about the five other women he killed.”
Issac’s mournful eyes widened skeptically. “What five?”
“The one he was sleeping with, the one who was blackmailing him, the two who were planting false clues for him, and his judge.”
He frowned. “His mistress Lucy Griggs. Is that theory or fact?”
“She took three classes from Tyler at Haver. She got As in all three.”
Isaac looked at me thoughtfully. “That makes her his student Lucy Griggs. It’s theory then.”
“Her ex-boyfriend John Walker paid a woman named Kristin Stiller to find out who the man was that Lucy had left him for. Kristin found out. The man killed her. She’s G.I. Jane. The man’s Tyler.”
We stared at each other. Pogo’s was crowded and noisy, with groups of impatient lawyers glaring at other lawyers who were lingering over their checks too long. Then, without a comment, Isaac pushed himself up from the table, leaning on his cane. “I have an appointment,” he said.
I was surprised. “You’re not even going to tell me I’m crazy?”
He looked sadly at the wall where a funny caricature of Margy Turbot dressed as a little girl, playing with a doll of Justice, was half hidden by the bouquets of fresh flowers. “Tell Slim to come see his old friend. I’m always home.” He pointed at a caricature of the district attorney Mitchell Bazemore on the wall. “Mitch has a pure heart.” He shrugged. “But without understanding. Linsley’s sister, Dr. Roth, for example. Mitch had her as a witness and didn’t seem to know what he had there….”
I looked at him sharply. “What are you telling me?”
“I’m not telling you anything. I’m only suggesting Dr. Roth might have something to tell you.”
• • •
By the time I made it back to Cuddy’s office, a furious Carl Yarborough was in there with Mitch Bazemore, yelling about HPD’s renewed harassment of Tyler Norris. “For God’s sakes, Cuddy,” Carl spluttered. “You knew how thin this ice was with the council. We just had this conversation! And right after it, what happens? Not only do we get a night in hell—a murdered woman in a garbage truck and a popular judge butchered in her own kitchen—because you can’t catch this maniac—”
“Carl, you want to watch what you say—” Cuddy spoke quietly but dangerously.
“You got the press crawling right back up your you-know-whats, and all your people can think of to do is run over and hassle an innocent man you just got your asses reamed for dragging through a murder trial! I told you, go by the book. I told you, leave Norris alone.”
Cuddy sat behind his desk. The wooden Costa Rican chess set was back in place except for the two queens, sealed with other evidence in the property room. He quietly jumped a knight across the board. “You through?”
Mitch Bazemore, rhythmically squeezing his biceps, stood next to the mayor, nodding like a choral refrain. “You knew you had to go by the book.”
Cuddy glanced up, saw me, said, “What isn’t by the book here, Mitch?”
“Listen, Mangum, Ken Moize is your buddy not mine. He’s acting A.G. and he’s the one just chewed my ear off that the Norris book is closed, finished, finito, over with, the end.”
“I think I get your drift.”
“Don’t you get sarcastic with me.”
Cuddy motioned me over. “Justin, did you just visit Tyler Norris at his home?” I nodded yes. “Did you just accuse him—for some reason I’m not privy to—of murdering Judge Turbot?”
“No, I did not. I asked him some questions.” I explained about the DMV list directing us to the neighbor’s black Ford Explorer.
Cuddy nodded toward Carl. “Well, I’m afraid the mayor here just had a phone call from Tyler Norris’s lawyer—”
“You mean Isaac Rosethorn?” I asked.
“No, he doesn’t mean Rosethorn. He means Amory Waller.” Carl named the most successful civil litigation lawyer in the state, the man who’d taken on tobacco companies and won. “Mr. Waller told me that the commander of the Hillston homicide division—”
“You,” explained the D.A., jabbing his forefinger at me.
“Thanks, Mitch,” I told him.
Mitch read from notes. “—Tried to force his way into Norris’s private residence this morning in order to continue making the same type of libelous accusations that led to Norris’s false arrest for homicide last March.”
“I asked Norris where he’d been last night between ten and midnight. That’s all. I think it’s interesting he interpreted it the way he did.”
Cuddy tilted his head, studied me curiously. “Why’d you go over there and ask him anything?”
I took a breath. “He killed Margy.”
“What?” In his surprise, Mitch Bazemore shouted the word.
“I think he killed Kristin Stiller too. And Lucy Griggs and both the Guevarra sisters. I think it very probable that Lupe Guevarra is dead. God knows if we’ll ever find her. I think Tyler Norris is Guess Who.”
The three men stared at me. Carl took the unlit cigar out of his mouth, put it back, took it out again. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know if you’re crazy or drunk or both, and I realize you’ve been under a lot of personal stress, Justin. But that kind of wild accusation never leaves this room. I’m not having this city bankrupted by litigation from the Norris family. A jury found him innocent. Drop it. The district attorney here—”
Mitch actually stepped forward as if summoned.
“—instructs you to drop it. The acting attorney general instructs him to instruct you. Is that clear enough? Drop it.”
I said, “What if he did it?”
Carl furiously lit his cigar until smoke puffed around him like a steam engine leaving the station. “Sure, a Haver math professor ran around killing women for fun while he was in the middle of a trial for killing his wife which he didn’t even do!”
Mitch forgot himself and muttered, “Well, he did do it.”
“Don’t you start.” Carl pointed the cigar at him. “The jury found him not guilty. He went through a nightmare and it’s over. He’s innocent in the eyes of the law.” The mayor turned the cigar on Cuddy and shook it at him. “This is what comes of that bullshit of yours! All that ‘I’ll resign if we haven’t caught him by the Fourth of July!’ Obviously your staff is determined to bring you a suspect if they have to handcuff the goddamn Pope. Jesus H. Christ!” The mayor strode heavily out of the room, slamming the door so that the circular dartboard on the back fell off. There was a campaign poster of Sheriff Homer Louge taped to the board with darts stuck all over his grinning face.
Mitch stepped over the circular board. “Mangum, I’m instructing you to put Savile here on unpaid leave as of right now, pronto, this minute.” He kicked at the black wood board with Louge’s picture. “And this is puerile.”
Cuddy hung the board back on the door after Mitch left. “What did he say? Homer Louge is puerile?”
I sat down. “Yeah and then something about me and Tonto.”
His face gray with exhaustion, Cuddy went behind his desk. “No, I believe the last bit was about me tossing you out of here pronto. Got an argument why I shouldn’t?” He pulled off his hushpuppy loafers, crossed his long white-socked feet on the corner of the desk, leaned back, and opened his arms. “How many days have you been drinking now?”
“I’m not drunk.”
“You’re not sober. You’re back to smoking. You’re back to drinking. You’re back to the guy I first met a long time ago and didn’t much like. Fucking up and fucking off and fucking on the job. Oh, one difference. Now you’re married to a very nice woman who deserves better.”
Stung, I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and waved them at him. “I least I’m just smoking tobacco.” I gestured across at the window where a billboard atop a huge complex of brick buildings said HAVER TOBACCO COMPANY. “So if I were you, I wouldn’t be talking about—” I stopped myself.
Cuddy lowered his long bony legs from the table, leaned forward and said with a quiet deadly seriousness. “If I were you, Justin, I wouldn’t compare my feelings for Lee Brookside, my long unhappy hope of marrying Lee Brookside, with your,” he came around the desk toward me, “with your diving back into the bottle so you could punish Alice by screwing a rock star you met two weeks ago.” He walked rapidly around the perimeter of his office, and out the door.
After a while, he came back. I made myself look at him. I was surprised, not by the accusations—they were true—but by his sense of my motive. “Punish Alice?”
He’d thought about what he was going to say. “Way down deep, you’ve been blaming Alice for Copper’s death. That’s what I think. I don’t mean consciously. But you shut that baby out of your life—you won’t even have any pictures of him anywhere around. And you shut Alice out. And it’s not her fault.”
• • •
After a time, he found me sitting on the stone steps of the Cadmean Building. City workers and policemen looked at me curiously as they sidestepped around me. I must have looked like a derelict—dirty clothes, tangled hair, unshaven, sitting on the steps, smoking. Cuddy sat down on the step below mine. He said, “I apologize. It’s none of my business.”
I nodded, ground the cigarette under my shoe.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
He let the silence fade, then he said, “You think Tyler Norris is Guess Who. Convince me.”
For the next half hour I talked through my theory. When I finished, Cuddy started asking questions. For most but not all I had good answers. He listened to them. Then I said, “It’s got to be your call. You’ve had direct orders not to investigate Norris. I’ve got Roid tailing him in a BMW rental.”
“What’s Norris up to?”
“Just driving around town for hours. He hasn’t gotten out of his car. You want me to pull Roid off him?”
He thought about it then he shook his head. “You didn’t ask me that question so I didn’t tell you so you left Roid on the case.”
I nodded. “I didn’t hear anything you just said.”
We went back inside and walked downstairs to Room 105. Bunty Crabtree and Rhonda Weavis were the only ones there just then. Cuddy told them, “Justin’s got an idea. I want to know what you two think about it.”
We sat down together. This is the theory I told them:
Tyler Norris was having an affair with Lucy Griggs, a student who’d signed up three times for courses with him at Haver University. When his wife found out about the affair, he killed her—now we had the motive—and disguised the murder as a botched burglary. Meanwhile, Kristin Stiller was tailing Lucy on John Walker’s behalf. Kristin found out about Lucy’s affair with Tyler (maybe even suspected the killing) and she tried to blackmail him. By that time, Cuddy and I were already investigating Norris for the murder of his wife. He couldn’t afford to have his affair exposed; it would provide the prosecution with the ammunition it needed. So he met with Kristin on Christmas Eve, just before she was to leave for Maryland with Bo (Belle) Derek. At their meeting, they made some kind of arrangement—no doubt he began paying her off. She decided to stay in Hillston to collect.
But by mid-January their deal had fallen apart. To remove the threat, Tyler murdered her by choking her to death. And then, remembering a homicide that had taken place in Neville a few months earlier—a prostitute with her throat cut, wearing only a Guess T-shirt—he cleverly disguised Kristin to look like the second victim of a publicity-hungry serial killer. “Addressing” Kristin’s body to the head of homicide and the chief of police was something such a killer might do. Tyler was even luckier than he’d hoped. Carol Cathy Cane announced that a Guess Who Killer was loose in the Piedmont. The press not only bought the double murders, they promoted them. They started screaming that a serial killer was on the loose.
Tyler’s scene-setting also was a way of taunting the police who had forced him to stand trial for his life. But he couldn’t resist all those extra touches, what Nancy had called the redundancies, touches created out of his own particular sick and sickening psyche. The idea of virgin martyrs meant something specific to him. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that his mother and his wife were both Catholic. At any rate, when he’d read about the murder of Cathy Oakes, how all her bones were broken, he must have thought of the Catholic St. Catherine broken on the wheel. He knew his own victim’s name was Kristin, Christine. So he cut out her tongue and decapitated her. He added the halo of matches, the stone around her neck with the ring of the bride of Christ, and he covered her with leaves, on the edge of the subdivision where he lived, Balmoral Heights. If she wasn’t found, fine. If she was found, everything was in place to mislead us.
As it happened, not only did months go by before Kristin’s body was found, but we couldn’t identify her when we did find it. Cuddy was probably right: the bridge where the Shocco River fed into Pine Hills Lake was little more than a mile from the Balmoral Heights subdivision. By now the young Swedish woman’s duffel bag (with all the belongings she’d planned to take on her car trip to Maryland with Bo Derek) probably lay rotted in the deep weedy mud of the lake bottom. They’d probably been joined last night by the bloody clothes Tyler had worn out of Margy Turbot’s house.
In March, we had arrested Norris for the murder of his wife. In June, the state put him on trial. He was actually shocked that we’d had the guts to do it. The press was behind him, public opinion was behind him, the university and powerful family and friends were behind him, and only Lucy Griggs threatened him, a last loose end to tie up. And yet he had to stand trial for his life. It enraged him. The Hillston police, Cuddy and I in particular, must have come to represent to Tyler the one enemy between him and freedom. His hatred and contempt (and fear) grew as he faced first an indictment, then a judge who suspected his guilt.
At some point Tyler decided he would take his revenge by making fools of all of us while, at the same time, solving the growing problem of Lucy Griggs by murdering her. Perhaps Lucy had discovered (or deduced) that he’d killed Kristin Stiller and/or his wife. Perhaps she had threatened to reveal their affair midway through his murder trial. (Hadn’t she told Mavis, “I hold his life in the palm of my hand”?) Maybe she had wanted him to marry her or maybe all she wanted was help with her musical career. Whatever she wanted, it was more than he was willing to give.
What a coup—to commit a third murder while on trial for a first! And then to pass the Lucy Griggs homicide off as another Guess Who killing. More delicious still, to pass it off as the intended murder of Mavis Mahar.
And again, it all worked beautifully. Tyler was free to carry out the murder of Lucy because Judge Turbot had granted him a million-dollar bail (paid for by his father whom he apparently hated). Having spotted Lucy at the Tucson Lounge, he was free to follow her and Mavis Mahar to The Fifth Season. He shot her there while she indulged in the trespass of showering in her idol’s suite after Mavis wandered off drunk and passed out.
Bunty and Rhonda looked at me, at each other, back at me. Rhonda asked me how did the Guevarras fit in.
I told them Tyler had hired the migrant workers to take things and leave things in the Cadmean Building as he bid them. Migrant workers were scabbing during the strike for most of the city government offices there. No one ever pays much attention to cleaning ladies. Among his six languages, Tyler spoke fluent Spanish. He had cajoled or threatened and paid the Guevarra sisters to slip the envelope with the Mavis head shot under Cuddy’s door, to slip the package with Lucy’s eyes and the .38 shell into the HPD mail pouch. Maybe he had used them to steal and then to replace the Italian pistol in the lobby display. Tyler himself would evoke no surprise if seen in the Cadmean Building. He was, after all, there every day for his trial.
Rhonda and Bunty heard me out. Afterwards they looked at each other some more as if they could talk without speaking. I had no idea what they were saying. Finally Bunty said to leave her alone to think. That was fine with me. I had to go to Haver Hospital. I said I’d be back in an hour or so. Meanwhile, Isaac Rosethorn wanted to see Cuddy as soon as possible.
“You told him this theory of yours about Tyler Norris?” Cuddy asked. I nodded. “And he said he wants to see me?” I nodded.
“Old windbag,” snorted Rhonda. “He defend anybody wasn’t guilty?”
“He defended me all my life,” Cuddy told her.
Rhonda patted me on the arm. “Well, if JayJay here hasn’t gone psycho on us, maybe your friend Isaac shouldn’t have done such a good job defending Tyler Norris. Maybe if he hadn’t, your friend Margy Turbot’s life wouldn’t have been so short.”
Bunty was studying the huge folders of notes I’d brought her—all the records I’d kept on the Linsley Norris homicide, including all interviews, depositions, and a transcript of the trial. She looked up. “Are you saying Tyler was having this affair at the same time he got his wife pregnant?”
“It can happen.”
“Let’s find out if it did,” she said and started to read.
Rhonda stretched her strong wide hand over the map of Hillston to touch both Tartan Drive and the wooded area where Kristin Stiller’s body had been found. Then she pulled herself up onto the table. “Bunty, psychology’s not going to do it for us, baby, no time. We gotta get a direct physical connection between him and a victim fast. What about the pubic hair on Kristin? Don’t we have blood of his booked on the Linsley Norris homicide?”
I said, “Yeah, but no DNA breakdown. His blood was all over because of his own injury, so there was no argument. We can send it off, but that kind of lab work takes weeks and Chang wasn’t sure about the integrity anyhow.”
Rhonda looked at me. “You know what we need?”
I nodded. “What we need’s that Ford Explorer of his neighbor’s with Margy’s boxwood under its wheel hood.”
“JayJay, you’re reading my mind.”
Cuddy said, “I’ve got direct orders for HPD not to go near that car.”
I had an idea. I said, “You won’t have to.”
On my way out, I stopped at the desk where Sergeant Brenda Moore was re-glueing a long pink nail to her baby finger. She said, “I hear you’re smoking again, Justin. Bad bad bad.”
“Yeah, well, I hear you were parked in front of Dairy Queen again last night.” Brenda was overweight and blamed it on the seductions of Dairy Queen banana splits.
She came around the booking desk, her hands comically posed on her wide hips, and leaning over did a short shimmy, shaking her large-breasted figure. “I guess you rather hear a skinny little white girl singing the blues, is that it? I saw you at Smoke’s last night falling all over Mavis Mahar. Here, take these.” She handed me an opened pack of cigarettes. “Ralph asked me to hide them from him. ‘Least he’s trying to quit. Oh and, listen, that big redhead works for the governor—”
“Bubba Percy?”
“He left this for Cuddy.” It was a postcard with a huge hog that read, “Greetings Pig King. Only two more shopping days ’til the Fourth of July!”
“Don’t give that to Cuddy.”
“Like I would.” She flipped it into the trash. “Plus he said give you this.” She handed me my cellular phone. “Call him at eight o’clock tonight. Tell him it’s a big emergency and he’s got to get somewhere right away.”
“Why?”
She rolled her eyes. “Man, I don’t know. I don’t why he felt like he could ask me if I’d had silicone implants either.”
I said, “You look like a natural woman to me.”
She laughed. “Take it on faith, baby.”
I asked Brenda what had happened to the young Pope she’d booked a few nights ago for joyriding. “I think he’s Graham Pope’s son. He plays with a group called the Mood Disorders.”
She rolled her eyes. “Griffin Torii with two Is?” I nodded. “You call what he was doing joyriding? Joyriding is when me and my man shoot down to Charlotte for the NASCAR races in our own Buick LeSabre that we’re making our own payments on. You call what Griffin does ‘stealin.’” She went back to her desk where she checked a sheaf of papers. “We already booked his ass again. Failure to appear on grand theft auto.”
“He’s in the holding cell now?”
“Honey, that cell is Griffin Pope’s pied a terre. He picks up cars like some folks pick up loose grapes at the Food Lion. You could put your car in a vault in the basement of Fort Knox and he’d steal it. He’d steal the Pope-mobile with the Pope still waving from the back seat and say because of the name he thought it belonged to his family. Now I got to call his poor Mama to come back down here and bail him out again.”
I told her I would call Paula Pope about her son’s bail. I wanted to talk with the young man anyhow.
Brenda applied glue to another long square nail tip and stuck it to her finger. “Well I hope you take that harmonica away from him. You white people should stick to the accordion.”
I slid the cigarettes into my pocket. “Brenda, is it fair not to let us white people play music just because we don’t happen to be as good at it as you are?”
She cheerfully gave me the finger with a freshly applied nail. “Well, sweetheart, no fairer than how y’all wouldn’t let us read, vote, marry, move, or fart just because we happened to be slaves.”
• • •
Since I’d seen him last, Griffin Pope had dyed his red hair a greenish-yellow that cast an unfortunate jaundiced hue on his pimpled face. His harmonica playing was as misguided as Brenda had claimed; it might even be called tragic—evoking as it did both pity and fear. Griffin was glad to see me, particularly when I told him I’d arranged for his release until his next court date. As for the small favor I needed him to do for me as soon as he left here, “No problem.” His mother and father had always both spoken well to him of Captain Mangum and myself. He added with contempt, “And that’s about all my Conehead parents got in common, except I’m shit-for-brains. Now they’re mad ’cause I didn’t ask them to my wedding at the beach. My dad tells Brittany she’s dumber than road kill. Then he’s mad ’cause she don’t want them there on the happiest day of her life.”
Apparently this marriage ceremony, in the surf at Wrightsville Beach (he carried a photograph from it in his wallet—the groom shirtless in white baggy shorts, the bride in a white halter and a wrap-around skirt, both carrying big sunflowers, the minister straddling a surf board), was the reason he had failed to attend his recent hearing on a charge of auto theft. “Give me a break,” he said indignantly. “How many times does a man get married?”
“Well, Griffin, I hope not as often as he steals a car.”
“Hey, exactly.” He nodded eagerly, vindicated. “So what’s this favor?”
I asked him if he knew where Balmoral Heights was. He told me he did indeed. Sometimes he and Brittany drove around in the new subdivision looking at the houses. They wanted to move there. “We’ve had it with East Hillston, it’s nothing but trailer trash.”
A half-hour later the young Pope pointed out to me his favorite Dutch Colonial with its two-car garage option as I drove him twice past the empty Ferraro house on Dumfries Court. Since standard model houses on sixty-foot lots began at three-hundred forty-nine thousand dollars in Balmoral Heights, I suggested to Griffin that he needed to think about a different career path. Music and larceny weren’t going to do it for him. He admitted that Brittany couldn’t agree with me more. Far from the bimbo his meathead dad thought her, Brittany was in accounting at The Fifth Season and had already talked to the manager about maybe Griffin’s starting a limo service there to take guests to the airport and golf courses and such. I said I thought that was an excellent idea, particularly since Griffin was so obviously fond of driving.
When Griffin hopped out of my car at the corner of Dumfries Court, I wished him luck. He said, “I don’t need luck, I got talent. Brittany thinks I got talent. And I do.” Another Pope male had found the right woman. He headed blithely to the Ferraro house to steal their car.