In a nanosecond, these words appeared on his screen:
Ronald Lloyd-Jones
159 Tamarack Way
Old Point Harbor, IL 61725
“Our Ronnie lives in a pretty nice part of town,” Tom said.
“This doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said. “Millionaires don’t usually mess around in Pigtown . . .”
Old Point Harbor was a long-established eastern suburb of Millhaven with Tudor mansions, Gothic piles, and huge contemporary houses tucked into wooded landscapes on meandering roads illuminated by imitation gas lamps.
“Wait,” I said. “What did you say?”
“I think what I said was, ‘Our Ronnie lives in a pretty nice part of town.’ Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”
“You called him Ronnie,” I said. “It’s Ronnie! The guy in the park.”
“What guy in the park?”`
I told him about the astronomy professor and the boy and the police sketch.
“Amazing,” Tom said. “Your friend Sergeant Pohlhaus should have taken that house a little more seriously.” He looked back at the screen.
“When did Ronald Lloyd-Jones buy our little house, I wonder?” Tom pushed a few keys, and the answer appeared in a window on the screen: 1982.
“He’s owned that place for twenty-one years,” Tom said. “In fact, he bought it even before Kalendar was killed. This could . . . hmmm.”
“Why would a guy from Old Point Harbor buy a house on Michigan Street?” I asked.
Some of what Tom did then must have been illegal. Actually, there’s no way it could not have been, but I have to say it was amazingly effective. Half an hour later, we knew more about Mr. Lloyd-Jones than his parents did.
Ronald Lloyd-Jones was born in Edgerton, Illinois, in 1950. He graduated from Edgerton East High School in 1968. And from the University of Illinois, which he attended on a football scholarship, in 1972. He married pretty Edwina Cass, heiress and orphan, in 1975, and Edwina died in a boating accident in 1978. Lloyd-Jones had inherited approximately twenty million dollars, which matured into something like twice that amount, thanks to the ’90s market and other investments. His portfolio was spread across three brokerage houses. An accountant in Chicago handled his bills. He had never remarried and had no children. His garage housed a Jaguar Vanden Plas, a Chevrolet pickup truck, and a Mercedes sedan. A state-of-the-art security system guarded his home and the ten acres surrounding it. Lloyd-Jones had $65,374.08 in his checking account at First Illinois, and his Visa, MasterCard, and American Express accounts were fully paid up. He bought a lot of things on-line, ’80s rock music and James Patterson novels in particular. At six foot three and 235 pounds, he was a large man; he had an eighteen-inch neck and a forty-inch waistband, and he wore size thirteen shoes. Lloyd-Jones drank single-malt Scotch. He visited porn sites and downloaded photographs, which he attempted to delete the next day. His teeth were perfect. He had a gun room with antique pistols and rifles in glass cases, a music room with astonishingly expensive sound equipment, and a screening room with a big flat-screen plasma TV. The screening room speakers had cost him $250,000. He belonged to no club or social organization. No church numbered him in its congregation. He had never voted. This multimillionaire owned the house in Old Point Harbor, a two-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue and East Seventy-eighth Street, a great little farmhouse in Perigord . . . and the house on Michigan Street, the first property he had ever purchased.
The only photograph Tom could find of this man was his high school graduation photo. “Before it gets dark, I think we should take a little spin out to Old Point Harbor, don’t you?” Tom asked.
“He has a great sound system and a mountain of CDs. This guy really
“First we get a look at Ronnie, then we call the police. I don’t want to tell the Millhaven Police Department, especially not Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus, what I just did here. You remember the police sketch pretty well, I hope?”
“Pretty well,” I said.
“Sounds like probable cause to me,” Tom said.
Ten minutes later, I was driving Tom Pasmore up Eastern Shore Drive in my rented Town Car. Twenty minutes after that we had passed from the farthest outposts of Millhaven into Old Point Harbor. The landscape had opened out into gentle hills sprinkled with a lot of oak trees and tamarack pines. Hidden far back from the road, big houses flickered like mirages among the tree trunks.
[After reading a section of an early journal of mine, Maggie Lah said, “You write your journal like it was fiction.” I said, “What makes you think it isn’t?”]
There were very few street signs. It was one of those communities that do not wish to induce comfort in visitors or deliverypeople. In its mild, slightly wayward northern course, Loblolly Road intersected two apparently anonymous streets before crossing a slightly wider road called Carriage Avenue. Either one of them could have been Tamarack Way.
“Keep going,” Tom said. He had a map of Old Point Harbor in his head, as he had maps of a hundred different cities and towns, large and small. “Two streets ahead, you take a left, and Tamarack Way is the first corner you come to.”
“Do I turn right or left?”
“How the hell should I know?” Tom said. “I don’t memorize addresses.”
At the unmarked intersection with what Tom said was Tamarack Way, I turned left and began paying attention to the numbers on the mailboxes. Someone had made a fortune selling rich midwesterners on the idea of oversized mailboxes painted with New England themes: lighthouses, lobster boats, saltbox houses, beach dunes. We passed 85, 87, 88, 90.
“As the waiters at the Fireside Lounge are fond of saying, good choice,” Tom said.
“You’re nice and relaxed.”
“I love this part,” Tom said. “I get to see if I was right.”
We drifted up Tamarack Way, watching the numbers on the mailboxes get higher.
“Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “what do you intend to do when we get to 159?”
“I intend to sit in the car. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and find him outside, uprooting dandelions.”
He was dressed in one of his typical Tom Pasmore outfits, a light-gray windowpane plaid suit with a dark-blue vest, a forest-green patterned tie, the most beautiful crocodile shoes I’d ever seen in my life, and big round sunglasses. He looked like a Danish count masquerading as an architect.
“What do you envision me doing while you sit in the car?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”
The number 159 appeared on a standard-fare Old Harbor Point mailbox, an aluminum shell large enough to hold a fleet of toy trucks and embellished with a painting of a steepled old church and a few rows of tilting headstones. Nice touch. A wide black driveway wound in from the road on a long loop toward an immense gray two-story house. Through the trees, we could just make out the glint of a huge circular window set high above the baronial front door. The lawn gleamed an unnatural-looking green.
“Well, he’s not doing any yardwork,” Tom said. “Turn in and drive up to the house.”
I stepped on the brake. “He’s probably watching everything we do. Remember that security system. He’s got cameras all along this drive.”
“But you don’t know that. You’re a tourist in a rented car, and you got lost looking for your cousin’s house on Loblolly Road.”
“You want me to ring his bell?” I was incredulous.
