“Z? Not bad. Like he took it when I beat him. He was startled and then puzzled, except with Henry he wasn’t drunk.”
“What time of day?” Susan said.
“Early afternoon,” I said.
“Many people are not drunk in the early afternoon,” Susan said.
“But some are,” I said. “And this particular early afternoon, he wasn’t.”
Susan nodded.
“And he gave you no excuses?”
“No. He’d been beaten, and he knew it.”
“He wants you still to train him?”
“He does,” I said.
“And you will,” Susan said.
“Yes. Try to get him in shape, too.”
“Has he told you anything new about that girl’s death?” Susan said.
“I haven’t asked,” I said.
“Why not?” Susan said.
I shrugged.
Susan looked at me while she nibbled another quarter-inch bite off the edge of the cold cut.
“Because you don’t want him to think you’re training him just to get information,” Susan said.
“That’s probably correct,” I said.
“Are you?” Susan said.
“Training him so he’ll tell me stuff?”
“Yes.”
“I’m training him for several reasons,” I said.
“Is information one of them?” Susan said.
“It is,” I said.
Susan smiled and patted my thigh.
“You wouldn’t be you if it weren’t,” she said.
“We wouldn’t want that,” I said.
“No, we wouldn’t,” Susan said. “But you also want to help him.”
“You think?” I said.
“Does anyone know you like I do?”
“I hope not,” I said.
“He wants to be a tough guy,” Susan said. “He’s come to the right place.”
“I can’t teach him how to be a tough guy,” I said. “I can teach him how to fight. But he’ll have to be tough on his own.”
“I know,” Susan said.
“You’re as tough as I am,” I said.
“I know that, too,” Susan said.
“But you wouldn’t win many fistfights,” I said.
“Depends who I was fighting,” Susan said.
“Yes,” I said. “I guess it would.”
“And you would win a lot of fistfights,” she said.
“Depends who I was fighting,” I said.
Susan smiled and nibbled on a fragment of her sandwich. Mine had long ago disappeared. I was drinking coffee from a large paper cup.
“Winning fistfights means being good at fistfighting,” Susan said. “Being tough means looking straight at something ugly, and saying, ‘That’s ugly; I’ll have to find a way to deal with it.’ And doing so.”
“By that definition, most people in their lives have a chance to be tough,” I said.
“And aren’t,” Susan said.
“And we are,” I said.
“It’s sort of how we make our living,” Susan said. “Each in our own way.”
“Shouldn’t that be ‘each in his own way’?” I said.
“Not when we’re talking about me,” Susan said.
“If you say so, Ms. Harvard Ph.D.,” I said.
Susan smiled again. I would be quite happy to sit around and watch her smile, for nearly ever.
“Couple of tough guys,” I said.
Susan’s smile widened.
“Are we a pair?” she said.
17
I went to the lobby of the Inn on the Wharf and sat down in a designer armchair, and waited. If I sat there long enough, someone from security would come over and ask me if I was a guest at the hotel. It took a bit more than an hour of sitting before a slightly stocky blonde woman in a dark blue pantsuit came over. She wore a small earpiece, like they do.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said. “Are you a guest of the hotel?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I want to talk to someone in security, but I don’t know who is or isn’t, you know?”
“So you came here and sat and assumed after a while someone from security would present themselves,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“Why didn’t you ask at the desk?” she said.
“Been told by a lawyer,” I said, “that I’m not supposed to talk with you.”
“Really? What lawyer?”
“Never got his name,” I said. “Hotel Counsel.”
She shrugged.
“Why do you want to talk with someone from security?” she said.
“I’m a detective,” I said. “Working on the Dawn Lopata case.”
“Who you work for,” she said.
The polished public self was beginning to wear away, revealing the presence of an actual person.
“I’m private,” I said. “Right now I’m working for Cone, Oakes, and Baldwin.”
“The law firm?”
“Yes. They’re defending Jumbo Nelson.”
“Pig,” she said.
“Agreed,” I said. “But is he a guilty pig? I’d like to talk to the first people into the room after he called down.”
“I was one,” she said.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Zoë,” she said. “Zoë Foy.”
“Sit down, Zoë,” I said. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Against the rules to sit with a guest,” she said. “The big Indian let me in. It’s a suite. Jumbo is there, in the living room, sipping some champagne.”
“Dressed?” I said.
“Wearing some kind of velour sweat suit, ’bout size one hundred.”
“Shoes?”
“The stupid-looking flip-flop slippers the hotel provides,” she said. “Me and Arnie — Elmont, the other security person — go right past them into the master bedroom and she’s on the bed, fully clothed, lying on her back, with her hands at her sides.”
“Bed made?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Rumpled, but the spread was still on.”
“Was she alive?” I said.
She shook her head.
“When I was on the job in Quincy,” she said. “I had some EMT training. Me and Arnie could see right away she was cooked. But I tried resuscitating her, until the ambulance arrived.”
“No luck?”
“Nope.”
“They took her to Boston City?” I said.
She smiled faintly.
“Boston Medical Center,” she said.
“I’m old school,” I said. “Anything else you saw that matters?”
“Fatso looked a little worried,” she said. “The Indian didn’t look anything. Nobody looked, you know, like, sad that this kid had died.”
“You think they knew she was dead?”
“She didn’t look alive,” Zoë said.
“Anything else?” I said.
She shook her head. I took my card from a shirt pocket and gave it to her.
“If you or Arnie have any recollections of interest,” I said, “give me a call.”
“The pig did it, you know,” Zoë said.
“You sure?” I said.
“Creepy bastard,” Zoë said.
“Be nice if we could hang it on him,” I said. “But maybe he didn’t.”
She shrugged.
“Idle question?” I said.
“Sure.”
“How come you were willing to talk with me after I told you Hotel Counsel said no?”
Zoë smiled.
“Fuck him,” she said.
18
The ER doctor who had worked on Dawn Lopata when they brought her in was a young guy named Cristalli. I talked with him in an examining room near the triage desk.
“She was dead when she got here,” he said. “We tried, why wouldn’t we? But she was unresponsive.”
“Which is medical speak for dead,” I said.
“Just like discomfort,” he said, “is medical speak for pain.”
“You have a thought about what killed her?” I said.
“I’m not the ME,” he said. “But we see a lot of death from trauma coming through here, and I’d say she was strangled.”