Identical (18 page)

She tried to stiffen herself, but it didn’t work. She dropped her face into her hands.

“I’ve got girlfriend problems,” Evon said.

“I kind of took that from what you said when you were at my house. Anything requiring an old man’s advice?” You couldn’t resist Tim. There was a calm understanding that seemed part of his expression. Her father was this kind of man. Not as brainy. But centered. And thoughtful. And loving at the core. She needed to talk to somebody. Most of her friends knew Heather, too, and were caught in the middle. She’d largely been keeping all of it to herself.

Evon told him the story in short strokes.

“The worst part,” she said, “is me. What was I thinking? What was I doing with somebody like Heather? A model. A former
fashion
model. I just wanted to believe that somebody that beautiful could care for me. It kind of made me beautiful by association, I guess.”

“There’s nothing wrong with beautiful,” Tim said. “Not in and of itself.” Maria had been one of the most beautiful girls he’d met, with wide-set features and a perfect mouth. He’d loved her almost at once, because she seemed to take no notice of how pretty she was. “It’s kind of like money. It’s what it does to the people who have it or want it that’s the bad part.”

“How stupid can I be? I’m fifty years old.”

“People see what they want to see. You care to skip psychology class, then just remember that. Every time somebody falls in love, they create their own mythology to go with it. Don’t they? About her. And you. It makes it all bigger than life. Has to be, doesn’t it? To be so special. So this gal, used to be she was a goddess and so were you, and now she’s mortal.”

“Mortal? She’s crazy. Seriously disturbed. People warned me, too. And I didn’t listen.”

“Think you’re the first?” Tim had been standing in front of her desk, still in his overcoat, with his stocking cap in his hand. Little tufts of hair stood straight up on his head from removing his hat. He pushed the outerwear aside and fished around in the pocket of the brown Harris tweed jacket he always had on and came out with a piece of paper. “Copied this down a few months ago from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.” He read it out.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

He handed over the torn scrap of paper, where he’d printed the quotation out in block letters. You had to love Tim. Eighty-one and studying Shakespeare and understanding it, too.

“You just happened to be carrying that around in your pocket?” Evon asked.

“Naw,” he answered, “I copied out a couple of passages from the plays I read that I’ve been looking at whenever I get to thinking a lot about Maria. Somewhere in fifty years, Cupid loses his blindfold. That’s the part I wonder about. I wonder how badly I disappointed her.”

“I can’t believe you weren’t good to her, Tim.”

“Tried to be. I just never was the kind to talk about my feelings. So she was never completely sure I had my whole heart in it. Looking back I think I did. But then again, you wonder if it’s just stuff you’re making up so you feel better.”

It was easier in some ways to cherish the dead. He knew, with more than a little remorse, that the Maria he mourned was not quite the woman he’d lived with for more than fifty years. He lacked her sharp tongue, for one thing, and thus he couldn’t really summon the angry words that escaped her every once in a great while, words that made his deflated hopeless heart flounder in his chest. But he remembered something that was not as clear in life-who she was to him, the casting that could be made by the needs she filled, the zones of need and pleasure. In memory, he did not deal with her full complexity. But he felt what their love meant to him.

“Still, it was worth every second,” he told Evon. “At least for me. I can only say what I used to tell my daughters when some boy would break their hearts. Can’t be that something makes you feel so good without it making you feel bad, too, now and then. It’s how life is.”

She took that in for a second and came around her desk. She thought she was going to pat his shoulder or touch his hand, but he opened his arms to her and held her against him. She realized she’d been desperate for that hug.

“I think we have work to do,” she finally said.

“More and more,” he said. He removed his coat, plopped himself down on her sofa, and handed over a thick file. It turned out there was a problem already. He explained why Dickerman was in a heat to get Cass Gianis’s fingerprints, but Greenwood County maintained they no longer had his ten-card. Like Cass’s blood specimen, the card had been obtained from the Kindle County Police Academy, to which Greenwood returned it after Cass’s guilty plea. Those prints in turn had been trashed when the county automated its fingerprint system a decade ago.

“Didn’t Greenwood print him again when he was arrested after the indictment?” Evon asked. She was back behind her desk, an inch of plate glass marked with a translucent green rim. Ramparts of paper rose there, with photos of Merrel’s kids in nice leather frames in a row on the far corner. Pictures of her other nieces and nephews occupied a shelf in her bookcase, and her awards from the Bureau and a color courtroom sketch of Evon on the stand during one of the Petros trials hung on the walls.

“You’d have thought,” Tim told her. “The best anybody can figure is they didn’t print him when he came in to surrender on the indictment, because they already had the other ten-card from Kindle County. They’d promised Cass’s lawyer, Sandy Stern, it would be a quickie deal, no more than an afternoon and Cass would be out on his own recognizance. They promised to keep looking, but I doubt anybody out there is gonna stay late to do it.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve been over by Tooley this morning. He gave me a subpoena for Cass to give fingerprints and whatnot. But I’m gonna have to chase around and find him. Ray Horgan already told Mel he won’t accept service on the subpoena. Said Paul just about busted a gut when he heard. Wants his brother left alone, after all Cass has been through. Sandy Stern won’t cooperate either. I get the point, but we gotta do what we gotta do.”

“Cass is living with Paul, right?”

“That’s what the newspapers said. Supposedly he wants to work on opening a charter school for ex-cons. But he’s kept a low profile. I talked to Stew Dubinsky and he says he hasn’t heard of any reporter seeing hide nor hair of Cass since he came home.”

“Maybe he went on vacation,” Evon said. “That’s what I’d do after twenty-five years inside.”

“I hope not. Dickerman’s ornery already.”

Greenwood County had also produced the color photographs the techs had taken in Dita’s bedroom the night of her death. Evon got up from her desk to examine them beside Tim. She had never really developed a taste for crime-scene photos. It wasn’t the blood and guts that bothered her. Playing field hockey at a world level, she’d seen more than her share of scalp wounds and teeth flying like popcorn kernels as the result of a misdirected stick. But the pictures always seemed undignified and voyeuristic. Here was someone, like Dita, who’d come to a tragic end, and you were looking at her as an exhibit, a collection of visible trauma, with no sense of the life that had animated her.

Tim on the other hand seemed to confront the photos with sad determination. There was nothing about it he liked either, she suspected, except its importance to the job. As she watched him and the intensity that still gripped him, she recalled a story Collins Mullaney had told her.

‘Timmy taught me a lot,’ Collins had said. ‘I remember, we pulled some floater out of the river near Industrial Pier. Gang thing, and Jesus, what they’d done to this boy. It took a lot to make me sick, but this did. “What’re we doing here, Timmy?” I asked. He didn’t take one second to answer. “Helping the rest of them be good. Proving to them that this here won’t be tolerated. So they know there’s reason to mind their p’s and q’s, and do unto others. Because you and I are out here rounding up the ones who don’t. That’s what we’re doin.” That was quite a speech. It never left my mind,’ Mullaney had told her.

The shots of Dita’s face and neck were revealing. Blood had coagulated in a thick clump at her crown and rusted the mass of black hair for several inches below. The scalp wound at the back of her head, portrayed in a close-up, was a smile about an inch across, the laceration bloated by the walnut-size hematoma beneath it. It looked like Cass-or Paul-had had one hand over her mouth, gripping damn tight, as he rattled her head back and forth against the headboard. On the right side of her jaw, just at the point where it met her skull-“mandibular condyle” was the term, she believed-there was a faint oblong bruise. And Cass or Paul had given her a solid whack across the left side of her face. Rich with blood, Dita’s rosy cheeks had bruised easily and the strafing of an open hand was clear, with three streaks left by the fingers. The lowest of them disappeared into a whorl of color and in a close-up, you could see a tiny break in the skin from which a trickle of blood had browned.

“That’s how you knew about the ring, right?” said Evon, pointing at the bruise on Dita’s cheek.

“Those clowns out there in Greenwood, they looked at me like I was the Wizard of Oz when I told them that. They’d been figuring she’d been punched. Shouldn’t be so catty about it. They were smart guys and all, just took a fat paycheck and a quiet life. But clueless totally.”

“Tooley and the other lawyers have been telling me we have to prove that Paul owned that ring, by the way. They’d rather not just go by Georgia, especially since we promised her we weren’t going to question her again.”

Tim nodded, but he was preoccupied by something else. He shuffled through the photos.

“You know,” he said, “seeing these, I recall I got into a little something with the police pathologist out there in Greenwood. She was the same as the county sheriff’s police, not accustomed to homicides, and a little prickly about it. Wasn’t real happy to be getting pointers from an investigator. Looking at all of this, I wanted to say that slap on Dita’s cheek came several minutes before she got the wounds on the back of her head. Look here. See the difference in the color of the bruises. Bruising doesn’t continue long after death.” He flipped between the mark along the jaw, contrasting it with the reddish-purple circle on her cheek. “Look at this, too.” He pointed to the photo taken of Dita’s left hand. She had long, elegant fingers, admirable even after the purplish pooling of blood at the sides, which occurred postmortem. But that wasn’t what had Tim’s attention. There was a rusty smear on the left knuckle.

“Tech put a hemastick on that. It was her blood. And there were traces on the left side of her face. So my thought was that Dita wiped off her cheek, when that little cut started in bleeding. But that’s the only blood on her hands. She never reached back to touch her scalp wound. Must have passed out before she knew she was bleeding.”

“So what was the issue with the pathologist?”

“Seemed to me like Dita was with Cass or whoever for a while. He smacked her on the cheek, they talked, she wipes that little faint trickle of blood from the cheek, and then he wallops her against the headboard, maybe ten minutes later. Dr. Goren, she agreed that the slap came first. But she wasn’t with me about the color of the bruises-said that could have been related to the closeness of the vessels to the skin. And that tiny little cut would have been stanched when the assailant grabbed her.”

“The blood on the knuckle?”

“Goren said maybe Dita did reach back to her scalp before losing consciousness, just grazed the area. I say that would have been her right hand. Truth, of course, is it could have happened either way. So we never had a meeting of the minds about the timing. Pathologist thought she gets slapped and is just stunned by that when he grabs her again and pounds her head back.”

“Why stunned?”

“Well, there’s no sign of a struggle. Didn’t even turn her head as he’s bouncing it off the furniture-blows are more or less in one place. And look at her right hand. You’d have thought she might have fought back and he would have grabbed it. No bruising at the wrist. Same with the left hand. And there weren’t any foreign skin cells under her fingernails. DNA these days might show something different. But we all figured he caught hold of her pretty fast. Strong guy, though. Try grabbing my head to push it back.” Evon did. “Not so easy. There’s some natural resistance,” Tim said, “even if she didn’t have time to lift a hand.”

“And what was the significance of the timing? What did it mean to you if there was a lapse between the blows?”

“Well, hell, if she’s slapped and sits there with the assailant for ten minutes, instead of screaming for help, it’s got to be somebody she knew.”

“Maybe an intruder held a knife or a gun on her.”

“And then beat her to death, instead of using the weapon?”

“A gun makes noise.”

“So does breaking a window. More likely someone she knew.”

“That all fits Cass, right?”

“Or Paul. Sure. Like I said, Zeus was so hysterical, putting on so much pressure for results, it was hard for anybody to think straight.”

His remark reminded Evon of something.

“You said last month that Zeus thought Dita had been killed by his enemies.”

“The Greek mob.”

“Right, but I didn’t understand that.”

Tim laughed and sank back into the sofa cushions. This was going to be another one of his stories.

“Around Athens, there’s a bunch called the Vasilikoses. Started out running a pretty big protection racket in the twenties. Smart guys. Their motto is ‘Not a lot from a little, but a little from a lot.’ Twenty-five drachmas a week. Who can depend on the police anyway? Nikos, Zeus’s dad, he’s here but kind of a wannabe who’s got some connection to a lot of these big-time Athens gunslingers. During WW Two, Zeus gets sent as a translator to join the Allied forces in Greece when they arrived in October 1944, once the Germans took a powder. Apparently, Nikos has his son check in with his pals. Zeus was there until May 1946, and he comes home with his pretty young wife, Hermione, whose maiden name is Vasilikos, and baby Hal, who’s a year then, and a duffel bag full of cash and booty that the Greek mob wanted out of the country, before the civil war starts and the commies win and take it all away from them.”