“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 Los Angeles Times. There was a carafe and a coffee cup on the side table next to him.
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. Hot pants?
“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.
“You know who said it?”
“I do.”
“Recognize the impression?” Jumbo said.
“You bet,” I said.
“Pretty good, huh?”
“Marvelous,” I said. “You want to tell me about Miss Lopata?”
“I already told the fox here; she didn’t tell you.”
“She did,” I said. “But I’d like you to go over it again.”
“She is a fox, isn’t she?” Jumbo said. “Hey, lemme tell you, I have wet dreams about her and I’m not even sleeping.”
The Filipino houseman stepped forward and poured some more champagne into Jumbo’s glass, and put the bottle back in the ice bucket.
Rita stood.
“I’m your attorney, and I’ll give you the best defense I can contrive. But I’m here today as a courtesy, to introduce our investigator. I don’t need to be here.”
“So?” Jumbo said.
“So I’m going to wait in the car,” she said, and turned and started for the door.
“This mean you don’t want to fuck me?” Jumbo said.
Rita stopped and turned.
“You bet your fat ass it does,” she said, and left the atrium.
Jumbo looked after her.
“Hot,” he said. “Ever get a little of that?”
He cut off a chunk of steak and ate it.
“Tell me about your evening with Dawn Lopata,” I said.
“First you gotta tell me about Rita,” Jumbo said. “Was she as hot as she looks? She noisy? She move around a lot?”
He looked at me, popped his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, and drank some champagne.
“Jumbo,” I said. “There are two things standing between you and the slam. One is your defense attorney. The other is me. You’ve already managed to offend her. And you are right on the verge of offending me.”
With his mouth full of steak and eggs, Jumbo said, “Wha’s your fucking problem?”
“There isn’t a jury in the world wouldn’t send you up for life if they spent five minutes with you.”
“Hey, man,” Jumbo said. “I don’t need to listen to shit like that from some two-bit fucking peekaboo.”
“Yes, you do,” I said.
“You’re fucking fired, then,” Jumbo said. “How d’ya like them apples?”
“I don’t work for you,” I said. “I work for Cone, Oakes. Unless I quit.”
“You better quit, because I’m gonna talk to some people,” Jumbo said. “And you can take this to the bank, buddy, you’ll be out on your ass.”
“So what happened to Dawn Lopata,” I said.
Jumbo swallowed another biscuit and drank some champagne.
“Z,” he said. “Get him outta here.”
The Indian stood, his face still expressionless. He jerked his thumb toward the door.
“Out,” he said.
He radiated menace. I looked back at Jumbo.
“I may stay on this case just to annoy you,” I said.
“Fuck you and the mule you rode in on, pal,” Jumbo said.
“Plus, I’ll get a chance to listen to the witty things you say.”
The Indian took a step toward me. He moved oddly, as if the floor was slippery. I hated to beat a hasty retreat. But I couldn’t think of anything to be gained by duking it out with Zebulon Sixkill.
So I beat a hasty retreat.
Zebulon Sixkill I
They lived in a shack with a kerosene stove, an outhouse, and no running water. As far back as he could remember, they had been a family of four: himself, his mother and father, and a bottle. They paid more attention to the bottle than they did to Zebulon. In good times, when his father worked, it would be a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. In bad times, and that was mostly, it would be some sort of clear hooch with no label at all. By the time he was six, he was pretty much on his own. He was a big boy and got what he wanted by bullying the other kids in school. Somewhere in the early years, Zebulon couldn’t quite remember when, his father had run off, and by the time he was eight, he already had a reputation for making trouble. By the time he was ten, his mother had died “from drinking too much,” as he understood it, and he went to live with his maternal grandfather, whose name was Bob Little Bear, whom Zebulon called Bob. Bob was a widower. He spoke very little. But he didn’t drink much. And when Zebulon got in trouble, Bob came down and got him and brought him home and explained to him why he shouldn’t do it again. For Zebulon, Bob became a fixed beacon. He was always the same. He did what he said he’d do. He had rules, and he knew what they were and explained them to Zebulon. He taught the boy to shoot a rifle, and build a fire and cook, and generally see to himself. He explained sex to him. Zebulon found it odd to think that Bob had ever done that. Bob said he, too, found it odd, but that in fact sometimes he still did that.