Identical (34 page)

Just on a hunch, he decided to sit on her house. Given how unstrung she’d appeared, she might need some smoothing.

He returned to the library. He put the cell phone listed on the brokerage website into a reverse directory, but the billing went to the office. The Tri-Cities’ white pages online showed a T. Wisniewski on Clyde, which was about three blocks from the realty office. He used the street maps on the assessor’s website to get the property identification number for that address, then confirmed with a different listing that Beata Wisniewski received that real estate tax bill. By 5:30 p.m., he’d driven out to the string of three-story row houses. Daylight saving had started and the young inhabitants were strolling in the mild night, a good half of them walking their dogs.

He circled for quite some time. About 6:30, he saw the Audi go down the side street, and he reached the alley soon enough to see the vehicle pull into a garage. He drove past slowly and glimpsed a splinter of Beata through the rear fence. It took a while until somebody pulled out of a space within sight of her front door, but Tim parked then and waited. He had no idea where Paul had camped out. But he’d seen lots of guys chucked out by their wives, and most didn’t go far from home, not so much to be contrary as to consolidate whatever they had left. About half an hour after the sun had gone down, a little past 8:30, a light popped on in what he guessed was Beata’s living room. Seconds later a car pulled up a few spaces in front of him. It was a gray Acura like the one he’d seen in Sofia’s garage back in February. Leaving the vehicle, a man actually ran the first couple of steps as he made his way down the block. Tim thought he recognized who it was as the fella passed under the streetlights, but the guy was on the move, and Tim saw poorly in the dark. He took a few photos during the instant the man appeared again beneath Beata’s porch light. He was in her house only a second before emerging, lugging a huge suitcase, with Beata right behind him. They jumped in the Acura and were gone.

He tried to follow them, but given his vision, he had little chance. He lost the Acura as it mixed into the swirl of traffic close to the Nearing Bridge.

Tim pulled over to study the photos he’d taken, just to be sure he’d gotten it right. Enlarged, the digital photos turned grainy. Still, they confirmed what he thought.

He’d finally found Cass Gianis.

On Sunday night, Tim drove back to Grayson and parked kitty-corner to the Gianises’ orange-brick house. The newsies and the cop stationed in the circular were all gone, probably because their various employers didn’t care to pay double overtime. But the mail carrier’s information meant that Sofia might return now. And there were indeed lights on. He kept his binocs on the place until he saw Sofia move through the kitchen, then he walked across and rang the bell. In a minute, he could hear somebody behind the heavy varnished oak door, and a face flashed in the little viewing panel on top. The dog he’d heard last time was yapping indignantly.

Sofia opened, dressed in blue jeans, the dog bounding beside her. She didn’t look especially well. Without makeup, her skin was lumpy. Her lip actually trembled as she stared at him with her giant eyes.

“Mr. Brodie, please. Please. Can’t you respect our privacy?
Please.
”

The dog, a young lab, just old enough to have grown into her paws, reared up and clawed the screen. Tim put a hand forward to quiet her down.

“‘Tim,’” he said. “Think you’re old enough to be calling me that.”

“We’ve been through hell and back for twenty-five years now. We’re just trying to put things back together. Don’t we get peace at some point? Hal Kronon is crazy.”

“I hear you, hon,” he said. “I do. Truth is, figuring it all out may mean more to me than it does to Hal at this stage. Here it is, twenty-five years later, and I’m finding out I didn’t do much of a job.”

“I’m sure that’s not true, Mr. Brodie.”

“You know, Lidia’s fingerprints were there in Dita’s room. And what looks to be her blood.”

Sofia didn’t answer. She looked down at the tile floor of the entry.

“Sofia,” Tim said, “I’m thinking you stitched up Lidia’s arm after Dita was killed.”

Her face jerked up like a marionette’s on a string.

“Who told you that? Have you tapped our phones? Would you actually do that?”

“Of course not, Sofia.”

Behind her, Tim noticed a man on the landing of the house’s broad central staircase. It was Cass. Tim hadn’t been in the same room with him for twenty-five years and by now, without that lumpy nose, Cass had become the better-looking brother, a little more vital than Paul had appeared in the latter stages of the campaign. He descended the stairs quickly and circled his left arm around Sofia to ease her out of the doorway.

“Good night, Tim,” he said, and used his free hand to close the door.

On Monday morning, Sofia and Cass were all over the news. Some PR adviser had convinced them to do the equivalent of a perp walk in front of the vipers’ nest of lenses. The Kindle County all-news cable channel covered the event live, which Tim watched from home. The pair emerged from the house shyly, standing together with uncertain smiles, their hands a hairsbreadth apart. The cameras swirled around them, while reporters shouted over each other with questions to which the couple didn’t respond. In the midst of all of that, the dog escaped from the house and Cass had to chase her, whistling and clapping. The pup was a bit wild and raced around for a second, but finally returned, lying at Cass’s feet to avoid further scolding, her tail flapping on the driveway. Cass led her inside by the collar, then exchanged a chaste peck on the cheek with Sofia before raising the garage door with a key. Each departed in a different car.

And where in the heck would he be going anyway? Tim wondered.

Paul, too, was back at work. The cameras got him pushing through the revolving door of the LeSueur Building about 9, smiling but shaking off the requests for comment as he made his way through the Art Deco lobby with its artful brass decorations. Building security guards held back the cameras as Paul reached the elevators.

On Wednesday, Tim went out to Grayson at 5:30 a.m. Whatever deal Cass and Sofia had made with the press seemed to have stuck. The camera vans were all gone. Around six, Sofia in her older Lexus rolled out of the garage, undoubtedly headed for surgery.

Tim stayed put to see if Cass’s Acura would emerge, as it did around 8. It was clear to Tim after following Cass about five minutes that he was looking for a tail. He’d go two or three blocks, then back into a driveway and come out going the other direction. Tim avoided Cass the first time he used the maneuver, but when Tim turned the corner moments later, the Acura was at the curb, facing the other way beside the heavy old trees in the parkway. Cass actually smiled at Tim and lifted a hand to wave.

Tim called Evon.

“I’m gonna have to rent a new car every day,” he told her. “I’m curious as hell to know where Cass is going.”

“Do we care?” she asked.

“Maybe it’s just because I don’t have something better to do, but I look at all these stories about Cass and Sofia. You see one that says what kind of job he’s got?”

“He’s opening a charter school, isn’t he? He’s trying to get an exemption from the state Board of Education, because he has a felony record. Didn’t I read that?”

“Where’s this school? When’s it open? And what kind of schoolteacher gives a damn about being followed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re just sick of the reporters. Hal hasn’t asked me anything for a week. He’s in a big melee with his bankers.” Apparently, within days of the YourHouse closing, Hal’s lending consortium had decided to mark down the portfolio of unsold single-family houses ZP had just bought. The lawyers on both sides were fighting like minks, and negotiating around the clock.

“I’ll pay for the rental cars myself, if you want,” Tim offered.

“No, he still wants dirt on the Gianises. There are columnists and bloggers all over the country writing about getting ‘Krononed,’ meaning having some big-money maniac destroy you politically with phony charges. He’d be happy to have any information that shows there’s something fishy with Paul. And what about Brünnhilde? Any sign of her?”

He was driving by Beata’s house on Clyde every day, but the mail was piled up on the concrete lip under the mail slot in her front door, so much of it that the winter storm door was ajar.

On Thursday morning, in a rented Ford Escape, he lay two blocks off the Gianis house, but still lost Cass in the traffic as he headed into Center City. With no better alternative, Tim went down to the three hundred block on Morgan, where the letter carrier had said she was forwarding Paul’s mail, to see what he could suss out.

Two new high-rises took up the block, here on the edge of Center City. When Tim was in the orphanage this part of town was all industrial, with huge square warehouses of unfaced brick and factories with looming smokestacks. It was a big trip in those days to come into DuSable. Each class went once a year, riding in on the Rock Island Line. He remembered the excitement, feeling queasy on the rolling carriages, then frightened by the size and might of the city, but the sight that most amazed him was at the other end, where a railroad turntable spun the locomotives around in the days before the engine cars were built to run backward.

Both new buildings had large banners in the windows, red lettering three feet tall, offering units for sale and rent. He entered each to see if there might be a directory of residents, but door-persons were stationed at security desks in both lobbies, and he decided to wait before calling any notice to himself. Sooner or later, the Gianises were going to accuse him of stalking and seek an order of protection. He spent the day eyeing the doors and driveways to the buildings, listening to a tape he’d gotten at the library of the same book of Greek myths he’d been trudging through.

Friday morning, he was there again early, hoping to catch sight of Paul leaving one of the buildings on his way to work. Instead, he saw Cass’s Acura arrive at the 345 Building about 8:45 and slide down the ramp into the private parking garage underneath. Tim left the blinkers on in his rented Corolla, and dodged traffic to cross the street, thinking it might be worth it now to check the directory. He had just opened the outer glass door to the lobby when a blue Chrysler convertible came up the same driveway. The vehicle was no more than thirty feet away, and he got a good look at the driver, who stopped at the top to check the cars in the street coming from both directions before turning right onto Morgan. It was Paul.

Tim limped back across the avenue to the rental car. He was lucky. Paul got caught at a light two blocks down and Tim managed to follow him all the way to a seven-story concrete parking structure across from the LeSueur Building. Paul soon emerged with his briefcase as he headed in to work.

Tim drove back to 345. When he’d wandered by yesterday, he’d seen visitors poking around at a small screen built into the security desk, using an attached telephone handset. The guard was gone for the moment and Tim lifted the receiver and followed the instructions on the screen, pressing the pound key to bring up a listing of residents. There were no Gianises, but he scrolled through and found T. Wisniewski in unit 442. He called for the hell of it, but there was no answer after eight rings.

He stood there sorting out the possibilities. Beata had a house, so she’d probably rented this place for Paul, but that had to be before he split with Sofia. There wouldn’t be much point to putting things in her name now. Paul was still a famous face and word that he was living here would get around. Maybe it had been what the rogues would call their ‘stabbin cabin,’ although it seemed to Tim that Paul would have risked a lot less attention going through the back door of Beata’s house. And what all was Cass doing here? The two brothers didn’t figure to be on the best terms right now.

“Help you?” asked a portly middle-aged lady, who’d emerged from the package room and resumed her post on a high swivel chair behind the rosewood security desk. She wore a sport coat with
345
, the building logo, emblazoned above her heart. He could see from her squint that she’d been warned to watch out for somebody like him.

The 345 building, like the competitor down the block, was developed to meet all the needs of a busy urbanite. Here on the first floor, there was a gym and an overpriced organic grocery, and a couple of other small shops behind them.

“I was just looking for the dry cleaner,” Tim said, expecting her to direct him to the cleaner whose sign he’d seen next door. Instead, it turned out there was a dry cleaning establishment here, too.

“Right down the hall.” She pointed to the granite corridor. He could feel her watching as he gimped off, and for safety’s sake he entered the store with its steamy smell of starch. An Asian lady asked if she could help. She had quite an accent, and he needed to get her to repeat herself twice, what with the noise of the pressing machine behind her. In the interval, an idea came to him, just a way to confirm that Paul was living here now.

He turned every pocket in his sport coat inside out as the lady watched.

“Supposed to pick up my boss’s dry cleaning. But I don’t have the ticket.”

“What name?”

He told her Gianis and spelled it. She looked in her receipts and then threw the switch to start the merry-go-round of garments shimmering in their plastic wrappers. So Paul was here. Tim was about to go through the routine of telling her he’d forgotten his wallet, too, but she hung two suits from the hooked stainless arm that extended over the counter.

“You forgot one suit t’ree week,” she said.

“Really?” He looked at the second garment. It was exactly the same as the one in front of it, a lightweight blue wool with a faint herringbone. He hoisted the plastic sleeve for one second, as if trying to be sure the suit was his, and looked inside to see the label of a bespoke tailor, Danilo. If it was the guy Tim was thinking of, Danilo made clothes for athletes and mobsters, a clientele for whom he kept his mouth shut.