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His eyes were tired, but otherwise he did not look like a guy who’d done three days behind bars. Cliff and I nearly hugged the life out of him.

Dan had called the apartment to tell us he was out of jail—and to say that he was sightseeing with his grandfather, who’d never been to Chicago before.

Sightseeing?

Right, he said. Just released from police custody on a trumped-up charge of double homicide, he was showing his granddad the Wrigley Building and the Magnificent Mile. Wilt was right: Dan Zuni was cooler than any of us.

He asked if we could meet him and the old man downtown; they were going to take the airport shuttle bus outside the Hilton to catch the early-evening flight to Tucson.

“Aren’t you coming back to the commune to get any of your stuff?” Cliff had asked.

“No way, man,” Dan had said. “The vibes in that place would bury me now. But you could do me a favor and bring me my tripod.”

We didn’t just bring the tripod. I packed up his Creedence record, his Polaroid, and the brown T-shirt he loved.

Dan introduced Cliff and me to his grandfather, an ancient-looking version of Dan himself: implacable, with onyx eyes and features carved from granite. It wasn’t at all hard to visualize his ancestors picking their way across the mesas, fishing in the streams, worshipping the sun. I didn’t know the etiquette; you didn’t bow to Indian elders, as you would to the Japanese, but just shaking hands with this living incarnation of history didn’t feel like enough of a show of respect. I guess Cliff had managed to overcome his awe of Grandfather Zuni, because after he greeted Dan, he turned to the old man and began to hug him, too.

We must have been about as motley a group as they’d ever seen at the hotel bar.

“I wasn’t in the Cook County lockup,” Dan explained. “Some guys with heavy shoes had me. I guess they were FBI.”

“Feds? They’re the ones who grilled you about the murders?” I asked. “Not a homicide cop named Norris?”

“No. Well, maybe him, too. I don’t remember all their names.”

“But why? What did they want with you?”

“Mostly they were leaning on me about Wilt: What did I know about him, and did he ever talk to me about revolution. Did he have guns in the apartment. Shit like that.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not, man. I swear. A lot of the time they just left me alone. And they kept giving me steak and french fries for dinner. I don’t even like steak. I mean, once in a while it’s okay, but I’d rather have spaghetti—or that eggplant that Mia used to make. That was my favorite.”

Planet Zuni. Taylor’s description of Dan’s world.

“It sounds like the federal clowns just wanted to stick you somewhere, take you out of commission for a few days. And when they were good and ready, they let you go.”

“That was the trip,” he said. “They gave me back my Leica, but they kept the film.”

Grandfather Zuni was knocking back a second Jack Daniel’s, telling a rapt Cliff about his early life on the reservation. I slid off the bar stool and took Dan by the arm, led him back to the gents’ bathroom.

I locked the door behind us, handed him the joint I knew he was hankering for, passed the book of matches to him. “Okay, Dan. Talk quickly, before somebody comes in. You and Mia.”

He looked down briefly, then back up at me. “There was a baby. It was sad.”

“I can imagine. But I don’t mean that. I mean before. You and Mia were together before she knew Wilton?”

“Yes. We lived in the building across the street.”

“Not Crash and Bev’s building?”

“Yes. For almost two years.”

“And Wilt knew?”

“Sure. He was okay with it. Besides, he had a right to know.”

“And were you okay with it?”

He smiled. “I loved Mia. And I loved Wilt. And together they were—” His voice gave out there.

That was an awful moment. All this time, I’d felt sorry for Dan because of what the cops had put him through. Now I realized that because of that ordeal, he’d had no time to feel the weight of the loss of his friends. He had been given no time to grieve.

He cleared his throat. “So you found them, right? You saw them—dead.”

I nodded, heard the choking noise he made.