common, which was the only evidence of New
England in Smithfield, was deserted. There weren't even any kids sitting on the wall across from the meetinghouse, smoking weed.
The Lopata home was a big style-free house in a pretentious development called Royal Acres, where there was one house to an acre, and, I suspected, no one knew anyone else. I parked on the empty street and walked up the curving brick walk to the front door. There was too little landscaping and too much house, and the recently wintered lawn stretched emptily to the next house, and the next, and the next . . . big ugly house on the prairie.
I rang the bell.
The woman who answered was wearing cropped pants and a tight top with longish sleeves pushed up on her forearms. She had a very big engagement ring, a smoker's thin face, and the blondest hair I had ever seen.
'Mrs. Lopata?' I said.
'Yeah,' she said. 'You the guy that called?'
'Spenser,' I said.
I gave her my card.
'I'm an investigator for Cone, Oakes, and Baldwin.'
'You're on their side,' she said.
'Probably too early,' I said, 'for us and them. Mostly I'm just trying to establish what happened.'
'We already got that established,' she said. 'The fat pervert killed my daughter.'
I nodded.
'May I come in?' I said.
She shrugged.
'May as well,' she said. 'Better to our face than snooping around behind our back.'
I smiled. These were, after all, bereaved parents.
'I may do some of that, too,' I said.
She nodded absently and led me into the living room, and sat me in a brand-new flowered armchair. The room was as intimate as an operating room but not as welcoming.
She went to the living room door and yelled up the front stairs.
'Tommy, there's some kind of cop here.'
'Okay.'
I waited. She waited. And down the stairs he came. Pink Lacoste shirt, tan Dockers, dark brown Sperry Top- Siders.
'Spenser,' he said. 'Right?'
I stood.
'Right,' I said.
'Memory's still hitting on all eight,' he said. 'Tommy Lopata.'
We shook hands and sat down.
'I'm in insurance,' he said. 'My business to remember names.'
'Own business?' I said. 'Or you work for somebody.'
'Independent broker,' he said. 'Lopata Insurance, in Malden Square.'
He took a business card from a cut-glass holder on a coffee table in front of the couch and handed it to me.
'Take care of any insurance needs you got,' he said. 'Casualty, health, life, annuities, anything you need.'
I took the card and tucked it into my shirt pocket.
'Thanks,' I said.
'Buffy,' he said. 'How about making us some coffee?'
'Not if you're gonna drink it in here,' Mrs. Lopata said. 'I'm not having coffee stains on my good furniture.'
'Jesus Christ, Buf,' Lopata said.
'You know my rules,' she said.
'I'm already over-coffeed,' I said. 'Thanks anyway.'
She paid no attention to me while she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply before she let the smoke ease out, as if she regretted letting it go.
'We are going to take that fat pervert for every goddamned penny he has in the world,' she said.
I nodded.
'Did Dawn have any previous relationship with Mr. Nelson?' I said. 'Before the night she died.'
