Identical (29 page)

“Talk about a design flaw,” Tim said.

“Right,” said Evon. “And humans have heartbreak.”

For a second, Tim hugged her to his side.

Hal slammed down the phone.

“There have to be plant forms that have more brains than bankers,” he declared, and directed Evon and Tim to his sofa. They took their places dutifully. She spoke.

“I know your hair is on fire with the bankers and YourHouse, so we’ll make this fast. The DNA came back early. The blood isn’t Paul’s.”

Hal gasped, winced, and dropped the pen he’d been holding.

“Damn,” he said, and repeated the word a few times. “So it
is
Cass’s?”

“No,” Evon said. She sat forward in a locker room posture, her elbows on her knees. It was game time for her, Tim realized. “It’s not from either of them.”

Hal’s full face went still, and his eyes flicked around under the weight of a fact neither he, nor anyone else for that matter, had imagined.

“Neither?”

Evon nodded.

“You’re saying that Paul dismissed his lawsuit to keep us from doing a test that shows that his brother and him, they’re both innocent?”

“We didn’t say they’re both innocent,” Evon answered. “That’s possible. But you still have Cass’s fingerprints, shoe-prints, the tire tracks, the sperm fraction. It’s hard to say he wasn’t there.”

“But whose blood is it?” Hal asked.

“We don’t know for sure. We had specimens from your family and Paul and Cass and it doesn’t belong to any of those people.”

“That’s it? Yavem didn’t say anything else about whose it could be? There’s no other identifying trait?”

Evon looked at Tim for a second, then faced her boss.

“He said the blood is a woman’s.”

“A woman?” Hal slammed back in his chair, his mouth wide open. “A woman? And do we have any idea who?”

“Best guess is Lidia Gianis.” She took Hal through the reasoning-the blood, the ring.

“Auntie Lidia killed my sister?”

“It’s possible,” said Evon.

“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Let me tell you something. My Aunt Lidia was strong and tough, and she was old-school enough that she’d have whacked my sister a good one if she got fresh. But banging her skull on the headboard a few times? No chance. And even if you made me believe that, there is no way she’d let her son go to prison for her. That’s the standard-issue Greek mother. She’d put a dagger in her breast for her children.”

“It’s what we have,” Evon said. “Maybe Cass and she did it together, and he pled by himself to make the best of it.”

“Why would my Aunt Lidia want to kill my sister? OK, she doesn’t want Cass hanging with Dita. How about smacking her son upside the head instead? This is ridiculous. And there’s nothing at all on Paul? Paul’s been taking his mother’s punches?”

“We don’t know, Hal. The one person against whom there’s no physical evidence of any kind is Paul.”

“Except the bullshit he told the police, covering for his brother.”

“If Lidia killed your sister by herself, then even that statement was true.”

Hal sat back again in his big leather chair and turned from both of them. He reached to his desk and tossed a pen at an empty corner of the room. Finally he revolved back, seized by a new idea.

“But there’s no physical evidence against Aunt Lidia, right? I mean nothing definitive. We don’t know for sure it’s her blood. She’s not the only person in the world who’s type B. Can we get her fingerprints?”

Evon looked at Tim. He just shrugged. He couldn’t imagine how, but there was no point saying no until he thought about it.

“OK,” Hal said. He waved his hand, letting them go.

Evon checked with Hal in an hour. His door was open. He was canted back in his chair, his hands behind his head as he stared solemnly into space. She grazed a knuckle on the door. His large eyes, surrounded by purplish flesh, briefly revolved toward her, then, after the briefest effort at a smile, he looked again to the place where the wall and ceiling met.

“I was just thinking back to when we were all kids,” Hal said. “When I used to go over to Lidia’s with Teri. A lot of the time I ended up looking after Paul and Cass. I always envied the two of them, to tell you the truth.”

This confession, not atypical of Hal when he grew reflective, alarmed Evon for a second, until she reminded herself that Hal had no reason to know how much jealousy he should have felt. Then again, there would never be any telling what part of the truth he had sensed.

“They were fifteen years younger than me, and used to follow me around like ducklings. But sometimes I’d look at them, the way they were with each other, and I was jealous. ‘They’re never alone,’ I’d think. ‘Never.’ It seemed like a wonderful thing. When I was their age, I was this fat weirdo that nobody wanted to talk to at school.” Hal smiled ruefully at the recollection of the child he was, although Evon doubted that the pain of that past was fully subdued. “And I wished I could be like them. With a twin. Somebody who’d never hate you, or look down on you, because he was just the same, somebody who’d never turn away from you. It still seems like a blessing to me. Crazy?”

Two nights ago, Evon had returned home on the bus in the midst of an unpredicted rainstorm, the drops, big as grapes, pelting down with assaultive force. Heather was in the doorway of the building, huddled under the cantilever close to the glass entry, but the overhang had not offered her much protection in the high wind. Her hair had been reduced to waterlogged strands and her hat and coat were soaked gray. As a result, it took Evon a moment, as she continued striding toward Heather in rage, to recognize what she had done. Her hair had been dyed to match Evon’s murkier shade, and she’d probably swaddled herself in bulky sweaters to make it appear she’d gained some weight. If Heather could have chopped six inches off her legs, she might have been a better copy of Evon, but the imitation was nonetheless careful. She wore a slouch hat Evon owned and that Burberry coat Evon had bought for both of them. At a distance, Evon was suddenly and irrationally afraid that Heather might even have sacrificed her looks with cosmetic surgery to create some resemblance. As Heather started forward, Evon could see that she had studied Evon’s posture and her jocky, slightly bowlegged stride. Evon was stunned but also infuriated. Did Heather think this was love? Apparently so. Or was it, as Evon suspected, the most abject confession of dependence? Perhaps Heather thought this was what Evon wanted from her, to erase herself completely. Was that love, reducing two to one?

Evon had told Heather that she was going to the police station to swear out a protection order and went at once before she could change her mind.

“I don’t know,” Evon said now in answer to Hal’s question. “It must make them crazy with each other at times.”

“Sure,” Hal said. “But they’re tight for the most part. They always were. Must be nice. Me?” he said. “I don’t even have a sister any more.”

He shook his head about that, then they both went back to work.

St. Basil’s Home for the Aged was operated by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and had the reputation of a first-class operation, as these kinds of places went. It looked like an old school, a broad three-story structure of red brick, surrounded by precisely landscaped grounds. Whatever the irony, Lidia Gianis’s place of final residence was supported largely through the generosity of the Kronons and a few other wealthy Greek families. Over the years, Tim had had several former neighbors move in here, with no complaints from any of them, except for the obvious one, that their move out was likely to be in a casket.

Evon had talked to Tim for a while to convince him to do this. Whatever the Gianises’ motives, she said, they had hidden the truth, from the Kronons, and from Tim and the other investigators. There was nothing disrespectful or cheap about getting answers to questions that should have received more forthright responses a long time ago. It was a good sales pitch, but the idea of trying to take advantage of an addled old lady still didn’t sit well with him.

“Came to visit Lidia Gianis,” he announced at the reception desk.

The young woman, a college volunteer by the look of her, had a spray of turquoise in the front of her short hairdo. With the phone to her ear for another conversation, she asked, “You are?”

“Tim Brodie. Old friend from church.”

She gave him the room number and pointed the way. Tim limped down the corridor wondering how soon his moment would come for a place like this, with the sprightly odors of disinfectant and air freshener not quite hiding the more unsettling smells of defecation and death. But it was a fine-looking place, decorated Colonial, with wooden pilaster strips in the corners of the hall and heart-backed chairs and comfy sofas in the reception area, all the furniture done in tasteful small prints, Martha Stewart on a tight budget. He passed by the chapel, fairly good-size, with white pews and a lovely dark walnut altarpiece. Three icons, elongated medieval figures on gold fields, were set on each side of the opening to the altar table, the crucifix and the stained glass window.

Clomping further down the hall, he heard live music and couldn’t resist following the sound to the door of the dayroom. The old faces, mostly women’s of course, were raised to the strains of a cello as if it were a sweet breeze. The young Asian woman with the instrument between her knees was quite talented, judging from her tone and bowing. Her music, Brahms, was offered as a gift, a reminder of the eternal and evenhanded power of beauty, a thought that stirred him deeply. He actually found himself wiping one eye as he moved on.

Once he reached Lidia’s door, he asked for help from one of the staff members circulating in their bright smocks. She summoned Lidia’s attendant. A stout black lady with short straightened hair, she approached, smiling broadly. She had a bad hip and rolled her body around it as she moved. He introduced himself and she shook with both hands, a kindly soul.

“I’m Eloise,” she said. “Take care of Lidia most of the time.”

“She decent for a visitor?”

“Oh yeah, we pretty her up every day and she just love it.” Eloise waved him behind her, but stopped with her hand on the silver doorknob. “If she get nasty, don’t mind her. Them dements are like that, you know.” She put her good hip to the door.

Lidia’s private room had the ambience of a decent chain hotel. The decorating scheme was all pastels, with plush carpeting and sheer curtains under the opened drapes, and a flowered print spread on the twin bed. Lidia sat in a beige recliner. A broad window behind her admitted a comforting rush of daylight, but her face was raised to the gray glow of a TV, from which Tim recognized the voices of
Law and Order
. A blanket rested on her lap. Lidia looked, for lack of any other term, hollowed out. She was far thinner than the woman he recalled, and beneath the makeup, her cheeks were now bunkers in her face. The black eyes were worst, clouded and shifting. Her entire head seemed compressed by whatever damage was occurring in her brain. It made his heart sore to see it, but it was what happened, what was happening to him. Rise and fall. The circle turns. His granddaughter, Stefanie, had called yesterday to say she was pregnant and Tim was still aloft on that news.

“Hey now, Lidia,” said Eloise, “Mr. Tim here come to see you. And you look so nice today. Don’t she look nice, Mr. Tim?”

Tim could only nod, still shy of paying compliments to a woman who was not his wife.

“See,” said Eloise, “you wearing that bracelet your sons brought you on Valentine’s Day. She always looking at the jewelry she got on.”

Lidia’s vague eyes turned to her wrist, which she studied as if she were surprised to find she had one. When she glanced back, she cast a cold look at Tim.

“Is he my husband?” Lidia asked Eloise.

“Oh no, honey. He just a friend.” Eloise propped Lidia up in the leatherette recliner. “You all go head and visit. I’m just outside, case you need me.”

Tim sat down in a wooden-armed chair a few feet from Lidia.

“Do I know you?” she asked Tim.

“Tim Brodie, Lidia. We met a million years ago at St. D’s.”

“I don’t know you,” she said. “I had a stroke and my memory is not so good.”

“Yeah, well, my memory isn’t what it once was either.”

In thirty years on the Force, and twenty-five-plus as a PI, he’d done lots of interviews under daunting circumstances, questioning children and the mentally handicapped, and naturally enough, the desperately bereaved. But this would be a new chapter and he had no idea how to start.

On Lidia’s bedside table were photographs of her two daughters and the twins and a passel of kids.

“Now who are all these folks?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. The girl just put them there. But they’re all nice people.”

Tim picked up one photograph, a group shot of her grandchildren, Paul’s two boys and her daughters’ daughters.

“Now these grandkids of yours, they’re a good-looking bunch.” Tim meant it. The Gianises were always a handsome family.

Lidia was frowning. “Is that who they are?” she asked.

“Beautiful,” Tim said. “All of them.”

“My daughter is a movie star.”

“I know.” She was referring to Helen, who was still maybe the most gorgeous woman Tim had ever met face-to-face. She was said to be a handful, personally, and never got further than a brief role in one of the soaps. According to the local gossip, she was on husband four or five by now, a strumpet by the straitened standards of St. D’s.

“Yes, I think they’re all nice people. I have a son, did you know that?”

“Two, I believe.” He tapped the picture of the twins, a recent one, Paul with his lumpy nose and Cass beside him, just a tad bigger.

“Identical twins,” she said. “No one can tell them apart.”