'Are you kidding?' Mrs. Lopata said. 'You think I'd permit my daughter to go out with a sick tub of lard like him?'
'None that we knew of,' Mr. Lopata said.
'But she went with him willingly enough that night,' I said.
'Well,' Mr. Lopata said. 'You know, young girls, and a big movie star . . .'
'Besides which,' Mrs. Lopata said, 'she was some kind of sexual neurotic, anyway. I mean, the men she chased . . .'
'She have a boyfriend?' I said.
Mrs. Lopata sucked in a big lungful of smoke.
'Lots of them,' Mr. Lopata said.
Mrs. Lopata made a derisive sound as she exhaled.
'That's for sure,' she said.
Grief took some funny disguises. I'd talked with too many people struggling with grief to generalize about how they were supposed to do it. But the Lopatas were dealing with it more oddly than many. He was of the upbeat memory. She was a swell kid. His wife was angry. She was a slut. Maybe they were both right. The two weren't, after all, mutually exclusive.
But I was quite certain I wasn't going to penetrate either disguise today, and maybe never if I only spoke to them together.
There was a photograph on a shiny walnut credenza in front of the picture window. A young man and a young woman in their teens.
'That Dawn?' I said.
'Yes,' Lopata said.
'Who's the boy?'
'Her brother,' Mr. Lopata said. 'Matthew.'
'Where is he?' I said.
'Harvard,' they said simultaneously, as if they were announcing that he was King of England.
Sometimes the temptation to amuse myself is irresistible. I nodded approvingly.
'Good school,' I said.
6
THE STUDIO HAD RENTED a house in Wellesley for Jeremy Franklin Nelson and staff after the death of Dawn Lopata. The house had a swimming pool and tennis courts, and when I arrived with Rita Fiore, Nelson was sitting in the atrium, looking at the courts and the pool, and having a late breakfast. A Filipino man in a white jacket was serving, and a large Native American with long hair was sitting in a wicker chair in the corner of the atrium, reading the
Jumbo was still in his bathrobe, his sparse hair somewhat disorganized. Rita introduced us.
'Call me Jumbo,' Nelson said. 'Mean-looking fella in the chair over there is Zebulon Sixkill. Everybody calls him Z. He's a full-blooded Cree warrior.'
Z looked up from his newspaper and stared at me. I nodded at him. He remained impassive.
'Bodyguard,' Nelson said. 'Nobody fucks with old Jumbo when Z's around.'
Z sipped from his coffee cup.
As he was talking, I was inventorying Jumbo's breakfast. He had started with a pitcher of orange juice, and now he was working on a porterhouse steak, four eggs, home fries, and hot biscuits with honey. There was a champagne flute from which Jumbo sipped between bites, and a bottle of Krug champagne was handy in an ice bucket.
'You the man going to make this cockamamie fucking legal shit go away?' Jumbo said to me.
He poured honey on a biscuit, ate the biscuit in one bite, and wiped his fingertips on his bathrobe.
'Maybe,' I said.
'Whaddya mean maybe,' Jumbo said. 'Hot pants says you can jump over skyscrapers.'
I looked at Rita.
'I'm going to see if I can find out what the truth is,' I said.
Jumbo did a pretty good Jack Nicholson.
'You can't handle the truth,' he said.
'I don't get to very often,' I said.
'You know that line,' Jumbo said.
'I do,' I said.
