5
THE LOPATA FAMILY lived in Smithfield, twelve miles
north of Boston. Susan had once lived there a long time ago, when
she was a guidance counselor at the junior high school, before
Harvard and all that followed, so I knew my way around better than
I sometimes did in the suburbs. Or wanted to.
As I drove through
town, I was reminded once again of why Susan left. If you Googled
"bedroom community," there'd be a link to Smithfield. It was a
Saturday morning in spring, and nothing was happening. There were
no kids in the school yard throwing the ball around. There was no
one shopping, maybe because there was no place to shop. No dogs
were racing about, no Frisbees were being thrown, no bicycles were
being pedaled. The town 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."
"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.