Grant fished a tape cassette out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Lucas. “There’s not really anything hard on it; it just sort of shows you what he thinks about.”
“That could help,” Lucas said. “I’ll listen to it tonight. . I hope you didn’t come all the way up to bring the tape.”
“No, there’s not much to do down by St. John’s, so I hang out up here. I’m too old to chase college girls.”
“Especially Lutheran college girls,” Lucas said.
“Especially intellectual Lutheran college girls,” Grant said. He drifted over toward the Porsche, which was crouched in the garage. “Of course, if I had a car like this. . this is the wide one, right? Wide enough for Lutheran girls?”
“I’m a happily married man,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. . And if you happened to be unhappily married, I can tell you that Karen Beloit liked your looks. She was sort of bubbling about you.”
Lucas laughed and said, “Hmm. . Listen, you want a beer? What do you think about the Big Three? Is that just bullshit, or did they really do something with Pope?”
Lucas got a couple of beers and a step stool for Grant to sit on, and while Lucas hauled some work lights and tools out to the truck, Grant unwound a tangled coil of orange extension cord, plugged it into a garage outlet, and trailed it out to the truck. Lucas crawled back underneath and went to work on the wiring harness, while Grant sat on the stool, handed him tools, and they talked about Pope, the Big Three, and Mike West.
“I was pretty skeptical about Charlie, when I heard about it. But then, I heard about the reaction from Lighter and Taylor, and I thought-okay, I’ll buy that, somewhat. But Charlie might tend to drift. They could wind him up and send him out, but after a while, he’d sorta. . run down. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s somebody else involved. A battery kind of guy. Somebody to provide the energy.”
“Mike West?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t know-I didn’t have much contact with him.”
“But two guys makes sense to you.”
“More than Charlie by himself. You need something or somebody to provide the intensity. If you had that, I don’t doubt Charlie would go along. These murder scenes you laid out for us. . I can see Charlie enjoying all that.”
“Hand me that small Phillips.” Grant handed him the screwdriver, and Lucas asked, “But if Pope is doing all of this, with or without the West guy, and if one or both of them were programmed by the Big Three. . why did they wait so long before they started killing? You think they’d come right out, when the programming was the strongest. .”
“I don’t know. To get organized? To locate targets?”
“Mmm.”
“We don’t even know if they were programmed. That might all be bullshit,” Grant said.
Lucas tightened the last screw and pushed out from under the car. “That’s not bullshit. They did something. You had to be there to see it-those motherfuckers are involved,” Lucas said.
They put the tools away, and Grant handed Lucas his empty beer bottle. “Give me your bottom line,” Lucas said.
Grant shrugged: “Something’s wrong. Something stinks. For one thing, you should have caught Charlie by now. He’s the kind of guy who would flee on a Greyhound bus.”
“You worry me.”
“I’m not a cop, so I don’t know how you work, or how, mmm, efficacious your methods are. But if I were you, I’d at least consider the possibility that Charlie Pope is working with somebody. That there’s a second man out there.”
“A second man.”
“Or woman.” Grant touched his chin with steepled fingers, as though he’d surprised himself with the thought. “A woman. A woman adds a sexual element to the equation.”
“You think. .”
Grant said, “Listen, Lucas: the right woman could do anything with Charlie Pope that she wanted. Anything.”
Late that night, Lucas sat in a pool of light in his study, eyes closed, listening to the tape Grant had brought with him. Grant had a sly interviewing technique. He would profess ignorance of some point, or some event, or make an assertion that was clearly faulty, and then he’d let Charlie Pope straighten him out.
Charlie Pope said:
“. . They tease you all the time. They drive you out of your mind. I used to try to take care of myself, I’d get all cleaned up and shaved and put on new shoes, but nobody would ever go out with me. A man’s gotta have some sex, and what was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to go hire a hooker somewhere? That’s how you get AIDS, all the hookers in the Cities got AIDS or some other disease.
“. . It’s like advertising, they wear these skirts and these tight pants and these see-through blouses and show off their legs and their asses and their tits, and then what? They don’t think a guy is gonna want what they’re advertising?
“. . I whacked her around a little bit but I didn’t plan to kill her or nothing, that’s just what the cops said. I mean, I did fuck her, but I was just trying to hold her down on her chest and the cops said it was around her neck. I didn’t want her to scream. .
“. . I tried to talk to her, and she didn’t want to talk to me. I mean, look at me. I’m not a good-looking guy. When I was a kid I’d look in the mirror and try to make myself good-looking. I’d think, well, you’re not bad-looking, there are lots of guys not as lucky as you were, but I always knew that I’m not a good-looking guy. I mean, not like Tom Cruise or anybody. I got okay teeth, though, and that’s important. .
“I thought maybe a truck would be a big idea, and maybe it would be. I got an eighty-six Ford F-one-fifty. It’d been wrecked but it’d been fixed, a cherry red color, best truck I ever had. I was working at an assembly plant building computer cases and making good money, six bucks an hour, nine bucks on overtime, pretty good job but it was all piecework, some weeks I’d work six days and some weeks I’d work two days. .
“. . Women, you know, they’re the big shots in the courts now, judges and lawyers and everything, they don’t know about blue balls, because they don’t have them. So how can they know about it? They don’t know that you’re forced to get some sex. Have you ever tried coke? I tried some once and the thing I thought was, it’s like getting the blue balls. It makes your head different. I’d get me some sex and then my head would be all right, but if I’d go awhile without it, and get the blue balls, my head would get all weird and I’d have to get some.
“. . Okay, I paid a couple of times, but it was just a couple girls in Rochester that you sorta knew were okay. What’s the difference between that and maybe taking some chick out to TGI Fridays and maybe blowing twenty dollars, just to try to get some, and then you don’t get it. Maybe if you know a couple of girls it’s better just to give them the money. .
“I wouldn’t ever go with a colored girl, their pimp’d catch you and he’d cut your nuts off. I seen some good-looking colored girls, though. If I thought, you know, they could go for me, and if they didn’t have a boyfriend around. .
“. . I don’t remember strangling her. I don’t think I did. I think the cops just made it up. I just whacked her a few times. I wouldn’t do it again, you know, unless it was self-defense or something. Okay, so it probably wouldn’t be self-defense, but some of these chicks, they can really fight. .”
Lucas listened for almost two hours, running the tape back and forth, made a few notes. Charlie Pope was afraid of big cities, he thought, and blacks and Latinos and Hmong. If he were hiding someplace, it would be in a small city or a town.
He would be looking for sex. The shrinks had been emphatic about it, and Lucas was convinced: sex seemed to soak through Charlie Pope’s view of the world. A note should be sent to all the law-enforcement agencies to warn the local hookers against him, and to circulate his photograph where hookers would see it. In most smaller cities, that would be one or two bars.