Identical (6 page)

“Dita is killed in her bed,” Tim said, “which is still made. Apparently she’s tuckered out and watching the tube for a while, before going out to meet her girlfriends at a bar. She’s in her robe and undies. No vaginal trauma, no tearing, but rape kit is positive for semen-then again, that could be from any time in the last forty-eight hours. Type B, though. Somebody smacked her first, damn hard, then grabbed her face. You could see the bruising in both cheeks. The hit on the left side made finger stripes. Meaning we’re probably looking for somebody right-handed. And whoever it was had worn a ring, because there’s a big circular bruise. The police pathologist’s thought is our perp whacked her, then sort of covered her mouth with his hand and rattled her skull against her headboard. She dies of an epidural hematoma. Lividity and the bleeding from the scalp wound shows she wasn’t dead for several minutes after she was beaten. But the pathologists can’t say whether or not she lost consciousness. Probably though, since she didn’t call for help.” Tim recited all of this like the prayers in a breviary. The murder was twenty-five years ago, but for many people she knew in law enforcement, the details of a big case were burned onto their brains. There were few jobs more intense than having to save everybody in town from a bad guy.

“What’s the time of death?”

“Well, you know, it’s a Greek picnic, they’re eating all day, so it’s hard to tell for sure from the stomach contents, but the pathologist says 10:30, give or take. Right around ten, according to the toll records, she gave her boyfriend Cass a call. So she dies after that.”

“Who found her?”

“Zeus. He wasn’t much of a witness, not that I’d have done any better. Clear recollection that he heard the window break and comes running down the hall. Pretty shaky after that. Best memory seems to be that he sees Dita on the bed. The TV is on, and he asks her what’s doing, but he catches sight of the shattered pane in the door and the blood and goes straight there. Looking out, he thinks he sees a dark figure, male, disappearing into the woods. When he turns back to talk to Dita, she doesn’t answer. So he comes over, touches her, shakes her. It actually takes him a minute to fathom she’s dead. He calls the family doctor. Then sits with his daughter. Can’t even imagine going down the hall to tell her mother.” Tim stopped there with his own memories. When Katy passed, they’d all known it was coming, but Maria had gone home to sleep and so he had to call her. He still remembered the feeling. He was here, but not really, the rest of him was still in the past when his six-year-old daughter was alive.

Evon asked the status of the investigation when he got involved.

“They were chasing their tails. The operating theory was that the bad guy crawled in thinking she wasn’t there, caught her unaware and he grabbed her like that to keep her from screaming, then he took off, afraid somebody had heard the commotion. But each department had its own spin. The locals are thinking it was a burglary gone bad. State police are talking to everybody at the picnic, hoping somebody noticed Mr. Stranger Danger. Zeus is still pretty much a mess, and blaming himself. Why didn’t he hear her getting beat? And he’s convinced she’s been killed by his enemies to get even with him.”

“Enemies?” Evon asked.

“Turned out Zeus had a passel. Pretty sharp elbows when it came to business. There was the Greek mob, too, not to mention the husbands and boyfriends of the girls he was always after. Even turned out that some of the boys from the North End warned him not to run against Rafe Demuzzio in the primary. FBI was looking at that.”

“And when did Cass come into the investigation?”

Tim said the police had spoken to Cass as part of the initial canvass, but he claimed to know nothing. At the start, Zeus was sure Cass was uninvolved, and cops being cops, they were reluctant to suspect a police cadet. About three weeks in, the phone company produced the toll records from Dita’s phone and Cass was reinterviewed briefly, but Cass said he and Paul weren’t home and Dita had merely left a short message on his answering machine, which he erased that night.

“Cass, he would have been the last person I’d have thought of, to tell the truth. Him and Paul were in high school with my middle daughter, Demetra, and I knew them from church. Solid kids, in my book, both of them. But you know,” he said, “it’s the ones you think you know that fool you.” Tim thought about that and squeezed his lips with his hand.

“About a month along, we had a big meeting, every investigator, just to see what we’d missed, which was quite a bit. By then two, three of Dita’s girlfriends had said she’d made up her mind to drop Cass, she was sick of all the trouble with his family. So I go over and take a peek at Cass’s employment file in McGrath Hall,” said Tim. “Blood type B. His prints are on file, too. I ask the Greenwood PA for a subpoena and sure enough, the prints match out with the doorknob and a lot of other lifts around the room. So now we’re thinking, maybe the call at 10 was to whistle his butt over there so she could tell him
adios
.

“Anyway, the Greenwood prosecutor, he wants to question Cass in the grand jury, but Cass hires Sandy Stern who won’t let him talk. There’s a lot of cat-and-mousing for a month. Stern is like, ‘Those fingerprints mean nothing. Cass was climbing the drainpipe every night to tickle her fancy.’ And the same girlfriends who said Dita was going to eighty-six Cass, when we push, they give that part up, too.”

“Cass was jocking Dita right down the hall from her parents? Doesn’t sound like my idea of fun,” Evon said.

Tim closed his eyes and let his head revolve loosely, like a leaf in a breeze. Who knew what folks thought of as fun, especially in that department?

“Zeus, of course, that was the one thing he went off about, when I told him that part. No boyo was making time with his little petunia right in his
casa
. But I’m suspicioning it’s probably true.”

“Really?”

“Sure, cause if Cass was climbing up there to make whoopee, that meant he knew how to get in there the night she’s killed. So I get the PA to subpoena his credit card records, and we put together a little task force to check out every pair of shoes he bought in the last year, and sure enough, about a week into that, we find he got himself a pair of Nikes whose tread matches the impressions in the flower bed. Those tracks down the hill could have come from the Bridgestones on Cass’s old Datsun, too, except there’s ten thousand cars in the Tri-Cities with the same tires.

“But we issue a search warrant, for his clothes and shoes and vehicle, and for a physical exam, to see if we can find the scar where he was cut. We get the shoes we’re looking for. Nothing turns up with the clothes, but Luminol in the car shows blood traces, type B again. By now, Stern won’t produce Cass for the physical exam, instead files a bunch of motions, and then when he’s just about run out that string, Sandy comes in and offers to plead Cass. He wants manslaughter, ten years’ minimum security. Zeus and Lidia, the twins’ mom, they go back to smooching in the choir room at church, so he’s heartbroken for her and is fine with whatever, but Hermione, Dita’s mom, and Hal, they wouldn’t hear of ten years. Finally, right before the PA was going to return an indictment, all of them settled at second-degree for twenty-five years, but still minimum security. The judge gave Cass a month before he surrendered so he could stand up at Paul’s wedding.”

“And were you OK with that result?”

“Depends how you mean. The sentence, I never thought that was my business. Minimum security irritated some of the other cops, but I’m like, ‘It’s prison, not torture, any nice college boy would get torn apart at Rudyard, especially a former cadet.’ The thing that bothered me was he wouldn’t answer questions. Never did. He pled, said he done it, that was it.”

“Well, what questions were there to answer?”

“The windowpane just for one. The glass is all outside, on the little concrete balcony under the French door. Meaning the window was broken from the inside. So how’d he get in?”

“You already told me. He’d climbed up there before. What was your term? ‘Making whoopee’?”

“That’s OK. Maybe he arrives hoping for romance, or knowing what’s on her mind. Either way, she says, ‘No, I’m done with this,’ and he loses it and smacks her. When she passes out, he panics and flees. But if you’re inside already, why not just open the latch and leave?”

“Maybe he’s trying to make it look like a break-in. Only he really doesn’t know much about crime scenes. So he cracks the glass the wrong way.”

“Nice.” Tim chuckled and pointed a thick finger at her with true admiration. The knuckle was crooked and swollen with arthritis. “Only Cass Gianis is a police cadet. And the other thing is, breaking glass, that makes noise. If you want to escape, why raise that kind of ruckus? What sense does that make?”

“So you didn’t like him for the crime?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying I had a few questions. There wasn’t any couch in my office for the defendant to lay down on and explain what was in his head or his heart, assuming anybody ever knows. But we had his fingerprints in her bedroom and on the door. Blood was his type. Shoes match. And there’s motive because she was going to drop him. And he gave a shit-ass alibi when he was first questioned right after the crime, said he was with his twin brother-”

“Paul?”

“Right. Said they were larking around that night, drinking beers over the river. Course nobody saw them. Cass couldn’t even name the liquor store where they bought the six-pack, said Paul got ’em.”

“And did Paul back that?”

Tim scratched his chin while he looked at the beamed ceiling of what had once been a porch.

“Seems to me he might have, now that you mention it. You know, it was just part of the initial canvass. Troopers talked to everybody who’d been with Dita at the picnic. Report couldn’t have been more than a paragraph. I would probably still have it.”

“Really?”

“Down in the basement. I didn’t have any staff, and I was in a different office every couple of days, so I figured I’d rather keep all the reports at home. Show you if you like.” Tim used a chair arm to hoist himself to his feet and wobbled a bit with the first step. Evon watched him. He was somewhat stooped now behind the shoulders, but he remained a big man, well over six feet, with the proportions of a tight end. In the day, he must have commanded a lot of attention on the street. He motioned for her to follow, and then opened a door in the kitchen and descended unevenly toward the cellar. The old wooden steps were steep, and Tim held on to the rail and kept his other hand on the brick wall to steady himself. His twill pants were halfway down his butt.

The basement, when they reached it, was even more crowded than the upstairs. There was a distinct cellar reek, a combination of mildew and dust, and all manner of things crammed in-grimy bicycles with flat tires, garden hoses, racks of clothes, hickory-shafted golf clubs, old TVs, broken furniture. The light from a cellar window slanted over some of the mess.

“Did you ever hear of a rummage sale?” Evon asked him.

“My daughters are even worse than me. Don’t want to part with anything Maria touched. Let them figure it out when I’m gone,” he said, and laughed, utterly cheerful about his own mortality. He turned sideways to get past an old chifforobe and reached a metal filing cabinet, a beige box from which the paint had rusted off in uneven blots. He seemed to know at once where everything would be. He crouched over the bottom drawer and pulled out a file, then went to pull the chain on a bulb. He turned the pages with some difficulty, his fingers stiff, licking the tip of his thumb now and then.

“Here you go,” he said finally. He read the report for a second, then handed it to Evon.

It was just as he recalled, too. Short interview, two days after Dita’s death. Paul said Cass was with him all night after the picnic, hanging out at Overlook Park on the river. A stone lie. Cass couldn’t have been with him, because, as Cass acknowledged subsequently, he’d been with Dita, punching her around and killing her.

“This is gold, you know,” Evon told him.

“It is?”

“This man wants to be mayor. Leader of the police. But he lied his ass off to the cops to keep his brother out of trouble. Even after he’d been hired to be a deputy prosecuting attorney.”

“Who wouldn’t? I’m not sure I’d want to vote for a man who wouldn’t save his brother. Besides, that’s all politics. Hal can keep his crazy politics. That’s not my concern.” Tim waved a hand past his big nose.

“But it proves what Hal’s been saying. That Paul was involved from the start. He covered up for his brother. And maybe there’s more to it. Those shoes? They’re identical twins. So the Nikes could have fit Paul. I bet they always shared clothes. Were they still living together?”

“You kidding? Greek family? Hal was still with his parents and he was forty. Yeah, the Gianis twins were both of them at Lidia and Mickey’s. Paul, I think, was about to move out.”

“What about fingerprints? Do identical twins have the same fingerprints?” Evon was feeling some excitement. She always did the job and her job was to make Hal right. She was surprised about the velocity with which she was willing to suspect Paul, whom she’d always liked, even admired. But there was an elusive quality to him that had never sat quite right with her. You could spend lots of time with Paul Gianis, as she had, and still come away feeling he was guarding something essential about himself.

But Tim moved his head from side to side.

“Seems as I remember, twins’ prints look somewhat alike, but when they’re in the womb and they reach out and touch the whoosywhatsit-” He stopped to find the word.

“Placenta?”

“Right. No, they have different fingerprints.”

Evon absorbed that, then reread the report.

“Can I take this?”

Tim shrugged. “Public record now. PA in Greenwood did what they always do when Cass was indicted, threw all the police reports in the court file to prove the defendant had had full discovery before he pled guilty.”