She confronted her brother with screaming antics about his habit of burning their garbage at Hamburg beach. Bill's mouth fell open as Deputy Chief O'Gready walked over and laid the charge.

Bill had to wait a while for Mother Teresa to post bail. It gave him lots of time to think. It wasn''t easy. His thoughts did not turn to the paint on the Fargo, or the unexplained deaths at the restaurants. He was fixated on Lil.

As in the past weeks, he re-ran scenarios in his mind in which he murdered Meeshaw; begged Lil to come back; walked away from both of them; or bought Lil a Pontiac convertible, in powder blue with white top and interior.

Bill had even got so far down the road with this last Hail Mary possibility that he went to a Pontiac dealer in the gritty cross-roads village of Virgil across the river on the Canadian side to talk turkey. Although he and Meesh had never sold a single pair of their snake skin boots in Virgil, Bill had bought a series of half-ton pick-up trucks at the dealer, using Meeshaw''s band card to save a small fortune in federal excise tax which he then spent on costume jewellery and peach brandy for Lil.

Bill had not yet come to the understanding that if your girlfriend and your best friend are getting it on, and enjoying each other, then from a detached place from which your ego has been told to go sit in a corner, that''s maybe a good thing for the common good of all.

Bill had also not reckoned on the changing role of the Pontiac convertible in the larger scheme of things, or the advent of two historic social transformations that came along with it.

In 1964 the hot rodders in the Production department at Pontiac introduced the GTO. This was a new kind of macho car with an over-powered engine crammed into a smallish frame. Its name was copped from the model designation of a racing car fielded by none other than the demi-god of motorheads, Enzo Ferrari. It ushered in the Muscle Car Era.

When the boys from Marketing saw it they couldn''t believe it. The flow of pavement pounding testosterone was too much for their artistic sensibilities. One weekend during a charity golf tournament at home base in Flint some of the more playful among them dreamed up the "Girls Take Over" advertising campaign for the GTO. It was originally intended as a prank to upset and embarrass the grease monkeys in Production. The television commercials showed girls in frilly dresses driving happy as larks as if to Tupper Ware parties. When Bill saw the ad he imagined Lil in the driver''s seat. What none of them had counted on was the presence of larger forces at work.

Since the War Bill had made a point of keeping his head down when faced with events of historic proportions. As a result he was ill-prepared, sitting in his cell and reading Louis Lamour pocket books and day dreaming about his sweetheart behind the wheel of a powder-blue GTO rag-top, to deal with the weird irony of the Girls Take Over ad campaign and the emergence of the feminist movement. In the outside world, while the boys were going in one direction, tires smoking, with their Muscle Cars, the girls were going in another with their Germaine Greers.

In short, a new kind of thinking had arrived on the bookshelves. It wasn''t until some years later, still single and wanting to improve his chances on a first date, that Bill put down his Louis Lamour long enough to sample books that, in his words, "told stories from the chicks'' point of view."