Norbert Glick

Norbert Glick is 46 and the manager and driver of Joey Mulvaney's tour. Born in Newark, the son of a tailor, he worked as a theater ticket seller and learned the manager's trade carrying singers' suitcases in roadside clubs. For twenty years he has been tied to the Mulvaney family and describes himself as a luxury nanny: he drives, pays the band, counts the box-office receipts and signs whatever the boss tells him to.

He lives in a small two-bedroom house in Burbank, with a sagging sofa, a record player, a wall of photographs of clubs and a fridge with little more than eggs and beer. On tour, he sleeps in the room the hotel reserves for support staff and never fully unpacks his suitcase. He writes everything in a little notebook, even the mileage of the band's station wagon, which Joey's father pays by the mile.

He is short and potbellied, with a round, sweaty face, thin black hair slicked back with brilliantine and a thin mustache. He wears a rumpled gray suit, his tie loosened, and carries an unlit cigar between his fingers, which he rarely lights and always chews. He is talkative, anxious, and when flustered starts a sentence with one person's name and ends it on something else.

About the night of the kidnapping, his account is full of details: he returned to the dressing room at 9:10 and found Joey's friend with the phone in his hand, shouting at the operator, and strips of tape on the floor. He picked up one of them and ran to the front desk. He says he treats Joey like a son and his father like a boss who can fire him at any time, and that he has managed the kid's career since his sixteenth birthday.

Norbert knows the man who controls the schedule, the money and the tour's station wagon is the first person anyone credits with a secret. When the detective accuses him of handing over the boy, he swears he changed the kid's diapers in the wings and asks that the sentence go in the report. It could be the honest despair of a manager who watched his adopted son be taken. It could be someone chewing his cigar so his mouth won't tell more. The detective will have to decide which.