Lucas called him, and Grant answered on the third ring: 'Listen, I don't know if you're interested, but I pulled out all my session tapes on Pope,' he said. 'There're five or six hours of material. Most of it was just talk. How was he feeling, what was he doing. But there's an hour or so when he's talking about getting out, what he'll do, about the women he attacked. I edited down to the good stuff, an hour or so.'
'I need that,' Lucas said. 'Can you messenger it up?'
'I'm coming up there tonight. If you want to tell somebody that I'm coming, I could drop it at the BCA office… it's just a regular cassette tape.'
'Where're you going in the Cities?'
'Downtown Minneapolis.'
'Why don't you drop it at my house? That'll save you a half hour, and it's easy to find.'
LUCAS WENT HOME, ate a steak-and-onions low-carb, low-fat, low-protein microwave meal that had apparently been made purely from coal tars and goobers, perhaps seasoned with industrial phlegm; watched the television news; thought his suit looked pretty good but that his face looked too harsh-maybe from the diet? He looked at himself in the mirror, wondered if he should use a moisturizer-Weather's solution for anything that didn't involve bleeding or broken bones-but was embarrassed by the thought and eventually went out to the garage.
When Grant showed up, a few minutes before eight o'clock, Lucas was lying in the driveway, his head under the ass end of his Lexus, trying to rewire the trailer harness. The harness hung in an exposed position and had gotten trashed while he was dragging a boat around Wisconsin. More fine auto design.
'You under there? Lucas?'
'Yeah.' Lucas turned his head, saw a pair of cordovan loafers, and pushed himself out; 'Just a minute. I almost got it.' He didn't, though. After fooling with the inadequate male-female connection for a moment, he decided he'd have to readjust the wiring distance between a support bracket and the connection. That would take more light than he had. He pushed himself out again and got to his feet.
'How's it going?' Lucas hadn't paid special attention to Grant at St. John's, but now he looked him over. He was about Lucas's height, but maybe fifteen pounds lighter, with edges. He didn't look like he worked out, but there was a feral toughness about him.
Grant fished a tape cassette out of his jacket pocket and handed it 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…'
