Identical (5 page)

“You have to sue. Period. Personally, Ray, I’m not spinning my wheels asking what Hal’s got. Because if he’s got anything real, Paul’s not gonna be mayor anyway.” Crully turned toward his candidate. “So, Paul, either quit now or sue.”

Crully flipped his pencil in the air and let it bounce on the table and left the room.

Tim Brodie lived in the same Kewahnee neighborhood in which Paul and Cass Gianis had grown up, and where Hal had started out. The little hip-roofed bungalows, all of them built of brick before the Second World War, sat squat as toads on forty-foot lots, with huge old trees in the snowy parkways. When Tim bought his house in 1959, not long after he’d made detective, he felt he’d done whatever people were talking about when they had told him to grow up and make something of himself.

Now he awoke with a start. He was on the plaid family room sofa, a heavy volume on his chest. He sat up with an ominous grunt and waited until his body and his head came back to him. His leg ached unbearably just for a moment whenever he awoke. Tim didn’t know if the pain subsided or he merely got used to it. He had waited all his life for time to catch up to him and now it had.

He recognized the doorbell. When he could move, he made his way to the front door. Ordinarily, he’d expect it to be his granddaughter, Stefanie, but he’d been over there with her and her funny little husband last night. Instead, he saw a woman on his stoop, breathing fog in the cold. She was someone he knew, he realized, but he just couldn’t place her.

He opened the front door but not the glass storm.

“Evon Miller,” she said, and offered her hand. “From ZP.”

“Oh, hell,” he answered. He stepped back at once to welcome her. He’d met Evon a few times, the first when she took the position at ZP of his pal from the Force, Collins Mullaney. Collins had liked the job, but had to fall on his sword because a ZP real estate manager in Illinois was paying bribes to lower the company’s property taxes. Collins parachuted out with a big package and had no ill will toward Evon. She was a good egg, a bandy little gal, a former FBI agent who years back had busted several state court judges. She’d been in the Olympics, too. Field hockey was Tim’s memory. Also didn’t make any secret of the fact she was gay, which was something Tim had gotten over early in his life when he tried to make a go of it playing the trombone. What the hell did he care who you slept with, if you had good pitch and kept time?

“To what do I owe the honor?” he asked, once he had her inside. He told her to take off her coat. She was OK-looking, thick-built but with a little bit of a stylish way about her and short blondish hair. Her face was wide, and in the strong daylight, he could see she had kind of pebbly skin.

“Need to talk to you about something,” she said. “I’ve been calling your cell for three days.”

“Really?” Tim saw the contraption on the table in the foyer where he’d set it when he got done following around Corus Dykstra from YourHouse. Dead. He laughed as he slid the phone in his pocket. “I was actually wondering why my daughter called the landline yesterday. Don’t get old,” he told her. It was the drifting part of age, the way his mind seemed to have no home on earth, which often surprised him.

He offered Evon coffee, but she declined.

“Grew up in a Mormon town,” she said. “My dad was a Jack, but I just never developed the habit. I’ll take a glass of water, if that’s OK.”

He was in a plaid flannel shirt and twill pants and Evon could see he’d been asleep. His face was red and his white hair, some of it starting to yellow, was sticking straight up in patches where it should have been pushed over his bare scalp. He had a lumpy, marked face like an old potato, and he had become one of those elderly guys with a permanent wary expression, seemingly afraid that any second now somebody might take advantage of him. Tim handed her the glass and then led her back toward the family room, where he said he liked to sit. She had some memory that Tim was a widower, and the house probably looked just the same as when his wife passed a few years back, crowded with the relics of a lifetime. It was the kind of place where you had to turn sideways to move around the furniture. The walls were thick with photographs, both family shots and scenery, as well as children’s paintings. And every tabletop was forested with objects: Limoges figurines. Little lacquered boxes. Glass paperweights. Books and more framed photos. They could have done
Antiques Roadshow
here for a month.

In the back room, a sunny add-on with tall windows, there was soft music, a swing take on “It’s All Right With Me.” A crooner’s voice yielded to a trombone solo, and Tim stood for one second, listening with his eyes closed and a finger raised. Then he silenced the old phonograph and lifted an LP tenderly from a turntable, slipping it into a grayed sleeve. He had been reading, too, and slid a mark into a huge volume.

“Greek myths,” he answered, when she asked about the book. “Once Maria passed, I figured I better get on to what was left on my lists. Said I’d read Shakespeare and got through
The Comedy of Errors
, but that’s kind of a slapstick piece, you know, twins separated at birth. I can handle the comedies, but
King Lear
, whoa, that’s tough. These old tales”-he hefted the book with both hands-“don’t seem to put me to sleep so fast.” In the light, she could see the white whiskers he hadn’t shaved this morning standing on his cheeks. “So you here about Dykstra and YourHouse?” he asked.

“Not really. But Hal says you turned up a lot of great stuff following him around. Frankly, if I’d known what the boss had you up to, I’d have tried to stop him. The whole deal could have cratered.”

Tim shook his head. “Nobody notices an eighty-one-year-old guy. They look right through you.”

The melancholy frankness of the observation silenced Evon for a second, but Tim didn’t seem to be seeking sympathy. She turned the subject and asked Tim if he’d seen the papers this week. Laughing, he pointed to a pile in the kitchen, all sheathed in blue plastic, another thing that seemed to be getting past him. Evon handed over Wednesday’s front page, and he groaned at the headline: “Kronon: Gianis Part of Sister’s Murder.”

“Me oh my,” he said, as he scanned the article.

“Paul sent Hal a letter demanding a retraction, and Hal won’t budge. In fact, he repeated this stuff to a couple more reporters. And he’s planning to put ads on TV saying the same thing. Gianis filed suit for defamation late yesterday.”

“Oh dear,” said Tim. He knew all about how people could be when somebody they loved got murdered. A brick could fall off a building and kill someone you cherished, and it wouldn’t be quite as hard to accept as a homicide. When some goofed-up stranger made a conscious choice to end the life of a person precious to you, it knocked the pins out from everything we assume in living with each other. Tim had spent more than twenty-five years on the Force, many of them nodding and patting hands and telling people that they’d be best off letting it go in time. But some folks just couldn’t. And Hal was one of them.

Evon said, “I didn’t realize until I started reading some old news articles that you’d been in charge of Dita’s murder investigation.”

Tim snorted. “Wasn’t anyone in charge of that investigation.”

“Well, Hal says you had some thoughts about Paul and the murder, back in the day. Is that true?”

“Not how I recall,” he answered. “I was never content we’d gotten answers to every question. So Hal’s right as far as that goes. But how many cases can you say that about? Most of them I ever worked on. There’s always some piece of it you don’t have quite right.”

While she’d waited to hear back from Tim, Evon had had her assistant print out everything on the Internet concerning Dita’s death. The murder, when it occurred, had been a sensation. It seemed to stimulate a seething mixture of pathos and bloodlust and grim satisfaction in the public, seeing this kind of tragedy befall people so privileged, in the palace they’d fled to to avoid the troubles of the city. Instead, someone had crept into Dita’s bedroom, while the other members of her family slept, and killed her, leaving a trail of blood and glass. The case topped the headlines for weeks, especially when Zeus quit the governor’s race. According to the papers, there were no hard leads. And then out of nowhere, a few months later, Cass Gianis agreed to plead guilty to second-degree. But there was never a word about Paul, unless you counted the mention that Cass was an identical twin. When Paul had started his political career, talk of the murder had briefly revived. All the profiles of Paul said he visited Cass several times every month and supposedly wrote him before going to sleep each night. Paul never discussed the crime, merely repeated that he loved his brother.

“How did you even get involved in the investigation?” Evon asked Tim. “Were you detailed out there by Kindle County?”

“Nope, I wasn’t even on the job any more. Hit fifty-five the year before, went into my brother-in-law’s heating business. No, Zeus, Hal’s dad, asked me to get involved.”

“How did he find you?”

“Oh, I’d known Zeus and them forever. Kronons lived two blocks over when Maria and I moved in here.” Tim hoisted himself up for a second to point out the rear window of the sun-room. “My wife was Greek. Baptized all my kids at St. Demetrios. Even spoke a couple words myself. President of the men’s club four years. But she come to lose her faith, Maria did. Not her values, mind you. But she just couldn’t touch her knee to ground and celebrate the Lord after our daughter died.” Tim’s old face grew heavy as he thought about that, then he cleared his throat again.

“The Greeks, I’m not telling anybody anything they don’t know, they really don’t have time for anybody but Greeks. But Zeus must have figured I was close enough. Very clubby, the Greeks. Very proud, you know. Make fun of themselves so no one else can. ‘We invented democracy and been sitting on our asses ever since.’ But they’re a conquered people. Had the Ottomans with their foot on their throats for five hundred years. That’ll take the spunk out of you, especially your men. But they don’t like to admit that. Gives the Turks too much credit.” His gray eyes came back to her then and lingered. She could tell he’d forgotten the question.

“You and Zeus were friends?”

Tim laughed. “Zeus, he was too grand for me. He’d glad-hand you, but he’d left the folks from the neighborhood way behind. What would you expect of somebody calls himself Zeus?”

“Wasn’t that his name?”

“Oh, hell no.” Tim grabbed the top of his head with his big raw hands to force his memory back into it. “Zisis,” he said finally. “That’s what he was baptized. But of course he wasn’t in school long with American kids before they were calling him ‘Sissy.’ So by high school he was saying ‘Zeus.’ Can’t blame him, I guess.”

She asked again how it was Zeus had gotten Tim involved and he laughed once more, a phlegmy, geezy sound.

“See,” said Tim, “that investigation wasn’t any more organized than a barroom brawl. Nobody had taken control of the crime scene. Zeus and Hal and the mom had been in there twenty times before the first cop arrived. The Kronons had actually cleaned up a little bit, the mom had, even arranged the body, before anybody thought to call the police. Not that there was any real point in bringing that bunch in anyway. Out there in Greenwood County, they hadn’t seen a murder in eighteen years, and probably hadn’t known what to do then. Which didn’t keep them from mucking around for a day or two. Then they asked for the state police, but there was too much politics with Zeus running for governor. Every trooper was out there to watch somebody else. Meanwhile Zeus is a basket case, he starts in screaming he wants the FBI. He gets them, too, for all they know about murders. So now you got three sets of nincompoops.” Tim’s eyes popped up when he realized who he was speaking to. “No offense,” he added.

“None taken,” she said. The Feds and the locals-that was like the Civil War, a battle to be fought in a different form in every generation.

“You had three different teams of evidence techs go through there,” Tim said, “each with different samples. Some tests get performed three times, some don’t get done at all. Everybody thinks somebody else is running leads. It was an unholy mess. So about a week along, Dickie Zapulski calls me. Zeus has asked the state police to hire me as a special to lead the investigation. Zeus got on the phone next and pretty much begged. Truth told, I wasn’t loving the heating business, or my brother-in-law, but I didn’t actually miss the street. But I felt for Zeus. I’d lost a daughter. So I said, OK, put me in charge. Not that anybody was actually willing to listen to me.”

When Evon had found out, not long after taking the job, that Hal had a PI on retainer, she’d gone in to see Collins Mullaney, who’d stayed on a month for the transition. He reassured her about Tim, who he said was maybe the best homicide dick in Kindle County in his time. ‘What was great about Timmy was he didn’t get distracted,’ Collins had told her. ‘He didn’t care who was humping who this week in McGrath Hall,’ referring to the headquarters of the Kindle County Unified Police Force. ‘And he didn’t get caught up hating the perps either. He’d smack a kid who spit on him, just like the rest, but he always said the same thing, no matter how big a shitbum. “Didn’t have a soul who cared enough to teach ’em how to behave.” Kind of “there but for the grace” with him. I think he grew up in an orphanage himself.’

The crime scene, Tim said, didn’t point in any particular direction. The first police to arrive had found the French door to the balcony open. It had rained hard that evening, right at the end of the St. Demetrios picnic, and there was a set of deep shoe-prints in the flower bed under Dita’s window, which made it look as if somebody had dropped from above. There were some tire impressions, too, down the hill, where you’d hide a vehicle, but there’d been two hundred cars there earlier in the day, so you couldn’t make as much from that. Upstairs, one of the panes in the French door was broken out between the mullions, with the glass scattered on the tiny balcony outside, and quite a bit of blood painted on the jagged glass, and the inside of the door and the carpet below. The blood trail ran into Dita’s bathroom, where, by simple count, there appeared to be a towel missing, suggesting that the killer had used it to bind a wound. The ABO typing that was state-of-the-art in 1982 classified the blood in the room as B. Dita and the rest of the Kronons were O, so there was no doubt of an intruder. From the brass knob on the outside of the French door, the initial techs also lifted a good set of fingerprints, which had remained there despite the fierce rainstorm that had pelted that side of the house. No way to date prints, but the best guess was that they belonged to the intruder.