Identical (15 page)

“This serves no purpose,” Teri said to her nephew, largely ignoring Evon. She had a hand on her gnarly cane, which looked to be an old shepherd’s crook, undoubtedly Greek, and half her face was covered in large turquoise-framed sunglasses. Macular degeneration had left the old lady legally blind. “I’ve never liked vengeful people, Herakles. Never. Paul had nothing to do with that murder. And you know it.”

Evon had met a few folks approaching ninety who retained considerable physical grace, and Teri might have been one of them if she had ever been persuaded to give up alcohol and cigarettes. Sometimes Hal let her smoke in the office, but she hadn’t lit up yet, a sure sign that he wanted to get her on her way. Teri’s appearance was, to be honest, about as trashy as a half-blind octogenarian could get away with, with giant rose balls of rouge inflaming her cheeks, dyed shoulder-length blonde hair resembling a pile of hay, and crimson fingernails grown out like talons. Beneath the rouge and powder-and a full daily baptism in perfume-she seemed to have shrunk inside her own skin, which hung in folds from her forearms. She wore lipstick the color of a fire hydrant, and gold jewelry by the pound, huge pieces clanking on her neck and around her wrists. She was seriously bent and one hip was terrible. But she remained willful and cagey, and except for occasional difficulty remembering names, her intellect was largely undimmed. The reverence she was automatically due as a person of advanced age made her a tough customer, and she knew it.

Hal continued to resist.

“The hell I do. Have you been watching TV?”

“Georgia Cleon is a jealous twat,” said Teri. “She’s bitter. Nobody told her to marry Jimmy. I’m sorry it turned out bad for her, but that wasn’t Paul’s fault. She’s just mad because”-she was briefly stumped for a word-“because Paul dumped her. Or dumped on her. However they say he broke her heart. Isn’t that what they say now?” She finally turned to Evon, but only for brief clarification.

“Dumped her,” said Evon quietly. That was the term Heather used in her messages on Evon’s cell. She talked until the allotted time ran out, bouncing between extremes, raging and then begging for another chance. ‘I can’t believe you dumped me. I deserved so much better from you,’ last night’s barrage had started. Evon had no explanation for why she listened to every word until the message was cut off. Because you love her. Because you are hoping in every syllable to hear some semblance of the beautiful girl you fell in love with-beautiful and graceful, and sane.

“Evon talked to Georgia, Aunt Teri. Evon, tell my aunt. Did you think Georgia was just making this up?”

Evon told Teri that Georgia actually appeared reluctant to share her information, but Teri wasn’t hearing it.

“Sorry, girlie, but I’ve known that woman her entire life. I’m sure Georgia has convinced herself about some of this. But Paul telling her Cass was innocent? She just wants everybody to know how close she was to Paul.”

“She was,” Hal protested. He had removed his suit coat and his tie and sat, with an arm on the sofa back, close to his aunt, his large belly looking a little like he’d strapped on a flour sack.

“Georgia was old news the day Paul saw Sofia at that picnic. Everybody knew it but Georgia. Dora Michalis told me that Paul started showing up at the hospital to have coffee with Sofia the very next week.”

Evon was impressed with the old lady’s recall of events twenty-five years ago, although Dita’s murder had probably kept many details from that period fresh. Even Hal seemed to realize he’d been trumped.

“These families were together always and were then torn apart,” Teri said, “and I grant you that had started before Dita’s murder. But that is nothing to revel in. Lidia has been my best friend for eighty years. Your father would have hated this, Hal.” She said something in Greek and Hal, although clearly displeased, translated for Evon.

“‘He who respects his parents never dies.’”

“Don’t make faces,” said Teri. “From the day Cass was arrested Zeus said the same thing-”

Hal interrupted, his lips indeed pouched in distaste. “‘A tragedy for both families.’ I know.”

“Your mother, I grant you, she wanted Cass strung up at first, but after your father passed she took his point of view. When Paul first ran for office, I heard her hush you a hundred times when you carried on the way you’ve been doing now. You just never liked those twins.”

“That’s not so. I babysat for them, Aunt Teri.”

“And complained afterwards. Lord only knows what it was that bothered you.”

Hal took in the point for a second, but refused to give ground.

“I respected my parents when they were alive, Aunt Teri. And I treasure their memory.” He pointed to the shelves holding their pictures. “But I’m not letting them run my life from the grave.”

The old lady was still shaking her head so that her layered gold necklaces rattled.

“I’m telling you, it’s disrespectful to use your father’s money to punish Paul. Zeus wouldn’t have stood for that.”

Hal recoiled. Teri had hit the sorest point, and Hal, being Hal, endured an instant when his eyes appeared to water. As far as Evon could tell, the biggest issue in Hal’s life was his father, even though Zeus had been dead since 1987, killed accidentally on a trip to Greece. But as someone put it to Evon when she was considering coming to ZP, ‘Hal is trying to walk in his father’s shoes in feet half his size.’ Zeus had been a force, smart and magnetic and handsome, who would probably have been governor of this state had grief not driven him out of the race. Hal was none of those things and he knew how often others made the unfavorable comparison. As a result, his life, in considerable measure, was dedicated to a losing competition with his father’s ghost. Hal never spoke ill of Zeus. In fact, he quite often described his father as ‘a god,’ for whom he genuinely seemed to hold limitless affection and respect. But he was determined to prove that his own success was not due to what he had inherited. The principal evidence was relentless expansion of his father’s shopping center empire. In the early 1990s he had taken ZP public as a REIT, and since then he’d made a number of strategic acquisitions like the YourHouse deal, which was close to being publicly announced. Hal himself was now worth more than a billion dollars. But his nails were still bitten down to ragged stumps, and so he tended to speak with his hands in fists, to avoid displaying the manifest evidence of everything that nibbled at him from inside.

With Teri’s last remark, it was apparent he was losing his sense of humor with her.

“Knock it off, Aunt Teri. It’s not Dad’s money, it’s mine. I’ve made twice what he did.”

Even Teri knew she’d gone too far. She threw a wrist and her bangles at him but said nothing more. Instead she thumped her cane on the floor and tried to pull herself to her feet. Hal, ever loyal, clambered up to grab her by the elbow. Her hand groped in the air until she caught him by the cheek and kissed him, leaving a vivid imprint.

“You’re a good boy, Hal. My number one nephew.” An old joke, of course. She had no other nephew. She reached after Evon. “Here. You walk me out. He’s too important.” Evon substituted her arm for Hal’s, despite his mild protests.

They were no more than thirty feet from Hal’s door when the old lady stopped. She averted her face, trying to find the little fragment of sight she retained so she could see Evon.

“You have to make him stop this. This will come to grief for everyone.”

“Ms. Kronon, I’m an employee. No one tells your nephew what to do.”

“So you say, but he likes you. He values your judgment.”

“Well, so far, there’s been more to his suspicions than I would have guessed. I have no basis to tell him to stop at this point.”

Authoritative as always, Teri said, “Paul had nothing to do with killing Dita. Aphrodite wasn’t just Hal’s sister. She was my niece and I loved her. Don’t you think I’d be the first to want Paul punished, if he had any hand in her murder?”

Evon walked Teri to the ZP reception area, where German, who served as both her caregiver and her butler, was waiting. When the elevator arrived, he stepped inside and held the door for Teri, but she didn’t move, angling her head again to see Evon.

“You’re the lesbian, aren’t you?”

Evon still didn’t like being known that way. It said both too much and too little. But Teri was an old lady. Evon managed a polite nod. Teri stared a second and took a step closer, so that Evon noticed how thick the powder was in the channels engraved in Teri’s face.

“Wish I’d been born in your time,” she said quietly, then felt with the crook to make her way into the elevator.

Du Bois Lands had been hired in the PA’s office about three years after Paul, and ended up as the junior prosecutor in the courtroom where Paul held the first trial chair. D.B. was a good lawyer-exact in his thinking, a better writer than most of the deputy prosecutors, and a passionate and charming courtroom advocate. Paul and he enjoyed working together, and spent time outside the office. Sofia was particularly fond of Du Bois’s wife, Margo, a pediatrician, and even after Paul left the PA’s office, the couples saw each other once or twice a year.

Then in 1993, D.B.’s uncle, Sherman Crowthers, had been indicted for extracting bribes as a judge in the Common Pleas section of the Superior Court, where personal-injury lawsuits were heard. Judge Crowthers was an American tragedy. An all-Mid Ten tight end at the U, who had grown up picking walnuts on a plantation in Georgia, he became one of the Tri-Cities’ premier criminal defense lawyers and a leading figure in the civil rights movement. His first triumph was successfully representing Dr. King, who was arrested here after leading open housing marches in 1965.

No one ever really understood why Sherm had fallen under the venal spell of the chief judge in Common Pleas, Brendan Tuohey. Sherm lived high-the black nouveau riche thing, not much different from the Greek nouveau riche thing Paul saw growing up-but he’d made his fortune before going on the bench. One friend said Sherm’s explanation was twisted but simple: ‘Mama didn’t raise no fool.’ He refused to be a black man who got less while many of the white judges around him turned their seats on the bench into ATMs.

As a plaintiff’s lawyer who made his living in those courtrooms, Paul had heard the same tales as everyone else. Appearing before certain judges said to be part of Tuohey’s ring, Paul worried that the defense lawyers might slip something into the judge’s drawer, but he figured he would be OK if he got to a jury. And he was-more than OK. He got good cases, usually through his Easton Law School classmates in big firms who wouldn’t soil themselves with contingency matters, worked the files carefully and rang the bell hard, several times.

In 1991, Paul won his first big verdict, eighteen million dollars in a trial before Sherm Crowthers. Paul represented a concert violinist who lost an arm on the light-rail when the doors closed on his Stradivarius and dragged the musician several hundred yards down the track. Days after the jury had come back, Paul was in the courthouse and bumped into Sherm, who more or less steered Paul, with an arm like a tree branch, into the private corridor outside his chambers. Post-trial motions were still pending, in which the defense was trying to overturn the verdict, but Paul assumed that the judge wanted no more than to offer congratulations on a job well done, until he pushed Paul into the small clerk’s alcove in his chambers and closed the door. Sherm was huge, six foot six and well over three hundred pounds by now, with a storm of overgrown gray eyebrows and intense yellowed eyes.

‘Motherfucker,’ he said to Paul, ‘you don’t seem to understand what’s goin on here.’

Paul, who didn’t think he scared easily any more, was too terrified by what was happening to answer. The judge then told Paul that he had to try the food at Crowthers’s sister’s restaurant in the North End.

Quietly asking around afterward, Paul learned that Judith Crowthers reputedly bagged for her brother, tending the cash register at her thriving soul food restaurant in her abundant purple eye shadow and dangling earrings, and accepting without comment the envelopes certain lawyers handed over as they paid their lunch checks. Paul had no thought of dealing with something like this without talking it over with Cass. They met two days later in one of the tiny whitewashed attorneys’ rooms at the Hillcrest Correctional Facility. By now, Paul understood the grim operating mode of the whole corrupt system in Common Pleas. His fee on the case was close to four million dollars-the ten or twenty thousand he was expected to hand over was next to nothing. If he refused, he had no doubt Crowthers would set aside the verdict, reversing key evidentiary rulings, and order another trial, which Paul almost surely would lose. If he reported Sherm to the authorities, it would be Paul’s word against the judge’s, who would claim he had done no more than recommend his sister’s restaurant. Worse, Paul would be a marked man whom Chief Tuohey and his cabal would do their best to drive out of the courthouse.

‘Fuck him anyway,’ Cass concluded. After years in Hillcrest, they both knew the perils of kowtowing to bullies. It never ended. You stood up. But didn’t snitch.

Paul filed a motion the next day, asking Judge Crowthers to disqualify himself from presiding further on the case, because of ‘inappropriate ex parte contact,’ which went otherwise unexplained. There were half a dozen people who’d seen the judge with his arm around Paul, drawing him toward his chambers. If it came to a showdown, Paul would get some backing. Rather than go through that, Crowthers withdrew from the case, but for the next two years, whenever Paul’s firm filed a new lawsuit in the Common Pleas section, it ended up before one of Tuohey’s judges who, without exception, granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss the complaint. Eventually, they referred out any new matters in Kindle County and began trying to develop their practice in the outlying counties.