Identical (2 page)

Over the years, when Paul revisits this day that will change his family’s life forever, Dita’s thrashing unhappiness with herself will grow plain to him across the distance of time. But in the moment, he can feel only the peril to his twin that Dita poses, and his painful inability to save Cass from it. Paul walks off, while the thought comes to him with the force and clarity of a trumpet blast: He despises that woman.

Evon Miller, fifty, senior vice-president for security at ZP Real Estate Investment Trust, ran with the uncommon speed of a former athlete through the basement of the State Building Annex, not knowing where she was going or why she was here. Short and strongly built, Evon unexpectedly made out the number of the conference room she was seeking, and jerked to a halt. Within a plastic holder beside the door, a misprinted placard read PARDN AND PAROLE BOARD HEARING. Inside the conference room, she found her boss, Hal Kronon, CEO of ZP, whose urgent e-mail had summoned her. He was speaking with his personal lawyer, Mel Tooley, and another man in a suit she didn’t know.

Evon had spent twenty years as an FBI special agent before taking this job, and she had learned that the power of the state, frequently spoken about as if it were a dread disease, was often most notable for the utter lack of majesty with which it was exercised. The Pardon and Parole Commission’s monthly deliberations about the liberty of several dozen humans were going to be conducted in this low-ceilinged windowless room from metal folding chairs placed at two card tables. Behind the seats, the great seal of the state, thirty inches across and all plastic, hung slightly askew on the streaked wall. A lectern with a microphone was centered between the commissioners and two more card tables reserved for the participants, the state and whoever would speak for the prisoner. The hearing, which the card at the door said would commence at 2:00, had apparently been delayed.

Evon’s boss, dark and burly, with his shirt gathered over the waist of his bespoke suit and his necktie askew, finally saw her and drew her toward a corner of the room. On the way, she asked why he was here. His message had offered no explanation.

“I’m trying to keep Cass Gianis in prison,” he said. Evon knew next to nothing about the murder of Hal’s sister, Dita, in September 1982. The case was long past being news by the time she’d moved to Kindle County fifteen years ago, and Hal preferred not to discuss it. Her knowledge was limited to what had been in the papers recently, that Cass Gianis, the identical twin of Paul Gianis, a state senator now running for mayor, had pled guilty to killing Dita, his girlfriend at the time. “That’s not what I need first.”

“What is?”

“It’s YourHouse,” he whispered. Hal had been in negotiations for months to buy YourHouse, one of the nation’s largest builders of planned communities, for several hundred million dollars. With the downtick in prices for single-family homes, he believed he could bargain hard and diversify ZP, as he’d been advised to do for years. “We missed something in our due diligence. In Indianapolis. Sounds like there may be a brownfield on part of the site. We need environmental investigators. ASAP.”

Evon was not even sure there was such a thing. Worse, knowing Hal, she was wary of chasing phantoms.

“Where did this come from?” she asked, meaning the information.

Hal kept his voice low, his lips barely moving.

“Tim shadowed Dykstra and the rest of the YourHouse crew, after they flew in yesterday.”

“Jesus, Hal.” ZP had kept Tim Brodie, an elderly former homicide detective, on an annual retainer for decades to do occasional work as a private investigator for Hal. Evon had little use for private investigators, most of whom were wannabes and used-to-bes who didn’t know where the lines were and could get the company in trouble. Having Brodie spy on his business adversaries was typical of Hal’s impulsive and risky stunts.

“Get somebody on this,” he directed Evon, “but don’t go far. I may need your help here.”

As a boss, Hal Kronon, who had run ZP on his own since the death of his father, Zeus, twenty years ago, seemed to exist in a state of constant agitation. He could be by turns imperial, outraged or pleading, and always loud and opinionated. In every mood Hal required instant gratification from his employees. Evon was often baffled, therefore, by how fond she had become of him in the three years she’d been at ZP. For one thing, he had been astoundingly generous, making her far richer than a girl from Kaskia, Colorado, ever would have imagined possible. But mostly she liked Hal because he was so abject when he needed her help and so thoroughly appreciative afterward. Hal was one of those men who required plenty of women to take care of him, especially now that his mother, Hermione, was gone. There was Hal’s wife, Mina, funny and bossy, and pudgy like her husband, and ancient Aunt Teri, his father’s sister, who scared everyone a little bit. At work, Evon had become one of Hal’s principal confidants, frequently nodding for hours, and gently attempting to save him from himself.

She went out to the hall to call her assistant VP who covered the Ohio Valley and told him to get up to Indianapolis and find somebody who could look for environmental contamination. Back inside, Mel Tooley, Hal’s lawyer, told her that the hearing had been delayed again, because Cass’s lawyer was still en route. Her boss had gone out to return a few calls. Mel was checking his handheld from a seat in one of the three rows of card chairs that had been set out for spectators, and Evon put herself down beside him. As a Bureau agent, Evon had known Mel mostly by reputation, which was as another scumbag defense lawyer, smart but basically deceitful. Through Hal, she’d seen Mel’s better side, but she still took him with a grain of salt. He looked ridiculous, for one thing, wearing suits too tight for his wide form and a shaggy toupee, which he must have adopted when Tom Jones was the rage. The mess of black curls fell all over his head, resembling the stuff he might sweep off the floor when he took his poodle to the groomer.

She asked Mel for a better picture of what was supposed to happen this afternoon. Mel wrenched his eyes in passing anguish.

“It’s just Hal being Hal,” he said. He explained that family members of homicide victims had a statutory right to demand a hearing before a convicted killer was released. There was no basis, however, to hold Cass Gianis any longer. He had done all but six months of good time on the twenty-five-year sentence imposed when he pled guilty, and the only way to keep him inside would be for a serious disciplinary infraction. Instead, Gianis had been a model prisoner.

“Here,” said Mel, “take a look at his file. See if I missed something.” Mel handed over a heavy redwell folder and left to return a call of his own, while Evon sat there, turning the pages. An essential element of Cass’s original plea deal had apparently been incarceration in a minimum-security institution, treatment rarely accorded a murderer, and for which she assumed there had been hard bargaining. As a result, he had been in the Hillcrest Correctional Facility about seventy-five miles from the Tri-Cities for more than two decades, even turning down transfers to newer prisons where he could have had his own room. The forms he’d filled out stated that Hillcrest, despite its barracks, was a better location for his family, especially his twin brother, who visited most Sundays. Tooley had subpoenaed every piece of paper Hillcrest had on Cass, starting with his intake photo and the fingerprints he’d given when he entered prison in July 1983, and concluding with the most recent status report of his counselor. As Mel had said, the overall impression from the heavy file was of someone who had managed the rare trick of being a popular figure with the administration, the correctional officers and fellow prisoners, to whom Cass taught classes on law and GED equivalency every day. Most recently, Gianis had finished distance classes to qualify for a teaching credential. In a milieu in which disciplinary beefs were routine-fistfights over the TV channel, fruit secreted from the mess that could be fermented with a little bread into rotgut liquor, joints that relatives had smuggled in-Cass’s record showed only a few “tickets,” write-ups for offenses no graver than reading after lights-out.

At the doorway, there was a ruffle of activity. Paul Gianis, looking as good as he did on TV, was on his way in, followed by two scrubbed young underlings, a black woman and a white man, campaign staffers, Evon surmised. Mayoral race or not, Paul was apparently going to resume the role he’d played from the start, as one of his brother’s lawyers. He hung his gray wool overcoat over a metal chair and threw down a beaten briefcase on the table designated for the prisoner’s representatives.

There had been a time, fifteen years ago, when Evon would have said she knew Paul Gianis fairly well, although she realized that he might not even remember her now. At that time, she had been transferred here to work on Project Petros, an FBI undercover investigation of corruption in the state courtrooms where personal-injury cases were heard. Paul was that rare Kindle County lawyer who’d first had the guts to refuse a shakedown attempt by a prominent judge, and then exhibited the even greater courage required to say yes when Evon asked him to testify about the incident after the judge was indicted. Afterward, widespread admiration for Paul, especially in the press, had propelled him into a political career that had led him to become majority leader in the state senate. Now running for mayor, he was far ahead in the early polls due to his name recognition and the generous backing of the plaintiff’s bar and several unions.

Evon nodded when Paul finally cast an absent glance her way. He seemed to register nothing at first, then looked back and beamed.

“My God, it’s Evon.” He crossed the room immediately to offer his hand and chatted as he stood over her, jingling the keys and change in his pocket, answering her questions about his family. Paul’s wife, Sofia Michalis, was famous in her own right, a reconstructive surgeon who’d made national news twice for leading teams of doctors to Iraq to treat the victims of IEDs. Their two sons, he said, were both at Easton College.

“And what about you?” he asked. “I heard you went to work for Hal. How’s that been?” The corners of his mouth peaked. Paul clearly was familiar with Hal’s reputation for irascibility.

“He’s not a bad guy. Bark is a lot worse.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’ve known Hal all my life.”

Evon straightened up. She’d never heard that.

“The families were always like this.” Paul crossed his long fingers. “His Aunt Teri was my mom’s best friend and her
koumbara
, the maid of honor at my parents’ wedding. In our church, that meant she was also my oldest sister’s godmother, the
nouna
, which is a big deal if you’re Greek. Teri was at every family celebration-Easter and Christmas and saints’ days-and Hal was her favorite, so she brought him along. My Big Fat Greek Family.” He smiled at his bland little joke. “Eventually my dad and Hal’s got into this insane tussle about the lease on my father’s grocery, but before that, Hal even babysat for Cass and me.” He showed the same great white grin, engaging because it made him seem briefly unguarded. “Needless to mention, he hates my guts now.”

Even leaving aside Dita’s murder-a lot to leave aside-Hal hated all liberal politicians, who, as he would tell you, almost always wanted to pay for inept government services by raising property taxes, which would drive out of the city business and employment and, most important, the tenants who rented in ZP’s three major shopping centers in Kindle County. Evon tended to see his point. She’d voted Republican her entire life, until 2004, when she felt like they’d closed the door on her with the national effort to equate gay marriage with leprosy.

“How’s your campaign?” she asked.

“Everybody says it’s going great,” he said, again offering that expansive smile. He was a nice-looking man, fit, a tad better than six feet, with a mountain of black hair that gleamed like a crow, save the scattered strands gone to silver. His long face had been weighted by time in that way that somehow looked good only on men, who ended up appearing wiser, nobler and ergo more fit for power. On women, it was just age. “Can I count on your vote?”

She probably would have said yes, even if it hadn’t been banter, but Paul was interrupted by the arrival of Cass’s main lawyer, Sandy Stern, who, according to the prison file, had represented Cass when he pled guilty. Round and bald, with an enigmatically elegant manner, Stern demonstrated there was an advantage to looking middle-aged when you were younger. He seemed barely changed by the fifteen years that had passed since he’d first cross-examined Evon in one of the Project Petros cases. Stern greeted Paul and also shook hands with Evon with a tiny bow, although she was unsure he actually remembered her.

A skinny female clerk appeared then from the back room to announce the commissioners were ready, and Evon summoned Tooley and Hal from the hall. By the time they returned to the conference room, a deputy sheriff was steering Cass Gianis in from a side door. He moved with mincing steps, since he wore leg irons and manacles, both connected to a metal chain that circled the waist of his blue jumpsuit. Paul asked the deputy’s permission before embracing his brother.

Although the Gianises were obviously identical twins, seeing them side by side Evon recognized that, like her friends the Sherrell sisters back in Kaskia, they had not matured as exact photocopies. Cass was a tad taller, and somewhat broader. The most notable difference was that Paul’s nose had been broken years ago. There was a funny story about that, retold in every profile of Paul, because, during their honeymoon in 1983, his wife, Sofia, had accidentally hit him with a tennis racket when he was trying to teach her the game. His father had supposedly taken one look at the bandage when they returned and said, ‘I thought I told you not to talk back.’ Paul had been left with a purplish lump at the bridge that looked a bit like a knuckle. Both brothers wore glasses, Cass’s simple clear plastic prison-issue frames, Paul’s black and stylishly squared. By some accounts, Paul had given up his contacts to obscure his broken nose, but to Evon it made the contrast in their profiles more noticeable. The resemblance between the twins was strong otherwise, except that Cass parted his thick hair, grown out as a privilege of minimum security, on the left, while Paul combed his hair the other way.