Identical (7 page)

Evon strayed a hand to the filing cabinet.

“What else have you got in there, Tim? Any chance I can pay you to look through all your files and see if there’s any more about Paul?”

He laughed. “No need to pay me. I’m on the long end with the Kronons. I’ve been getting a check every January first for twenty-five years.”

“I know,” she said. “It comes out of my budget.” She smiled, though. “Nobody’s ever really explained it.”

“It was just Zeus’s way of thanking me for dropping everything and taking over the investigation. When this here was done with, I wasn’t too keen to go back to the heating business. Zeus wanted to hire me at ZP, but I’d had enough bosses as a cop to last me a lifetime. So I decided to become a PI, and Zeus was like, ‘OK, we’ll give you a retainer every year.’ I won’t lie either. Helped plenty, especially when I was getting started.” Mullaney had told her that these days Tim worked principally for criminal lawyers, turning up stuff the cops had missed, and also for a number of insurance defense lawyers. Tim was the guy who’d debunk a workman’s comp claim with photos showing the guy who said he was injured lifting weights. Brodie could also write a good report and was relaxed on the witness stand. He’d always had as much work as he wanted, although that had to be petering out at his age. “’Tween Zeus and Hal, they haven’t called me ten times. This thing I did last week, with Corus, must have been the first in five years. So yeah, you want me to look at the files, I’ll look at ’em. I’ll keep track of the time, but it’ll be a long while before you owe me anything.”

Upstairs, she collected her parka, which had ended up on the sofa next to his heavy book. There was a faint odor in the kitchen of last night’s dinner, which she hadn’t noticed when she came in.

“You keep going with those myths,” she said.

“Oh, I will. Was just reading about the myth of love when you rang the bell.”

“Myth?” said Evon. “You mean love’s not real? I wish somebody had told me that before I moved in with my girlfriend.”

She rarely said anything so personal, but she couldn’t pass on the joke. Not that it was all a joke in Heather’s case. But Tim was mightily amused. He laughed in his husky way for a long time.

“No,” he said, “Aristophanes says we were all four-legged creatures to start, some the same sex, but most half man and half woman. Zeus was afraid us humans would get too powerful so he sliced us right down the middle, and everybody spends their life looking for the matching piece. What do you think of that?” He laughed again, tickled by the idea.

“I think it makes as much sense as any other explanation.”

Tim found her response amusing as well, then limped ahead to show her out. When they got to the foyer, he lingered to face her.

“You don’t really think Paul Gianis had a hand in murdering Dita, do you?”

“What was he lying for?” Evon asked. “He knew what to say, and more important, he recognized that he had to lie for Cass’s sake. Which means he had a lot of information by then, Tim. Maybe they
were
together that night. Maybe that’s why Cass never wanted to answer questions.”

Tim pondered, but an unhappy thought seemed to pull at his face.

“Don’t like thinking I missed the boat like that,” he said. He considered the prospect for a second, then opened the heavy door.

Her given name was not Evon Miller. She had been born DeDe Kurzweil, in the Kaskia Valley in Colorado, and grew up on a family farm, where her father planted alfalfa, pinto beans and corn. He was a quiet, bowlegged man, a Jack Mormon, who’d left the church-and his parents and sibs with it-to please his wife, who said, only after their wedding, that her LDS conversion simply had never taken root in her heart. DeDe was the fifth of seven children, right about the place you’d expect the kids to start getting lost, and she was lost, aware, long before she understood why, that she did not seem to fit. She never knew when to smile, or how to make people like her, especially her mother.

But on the playing field, with a field hockey stick in her hand, she made herself real. Her father had been a baseball star, who’d signed with the Twins after his mission and played A ball until his family needed him on the farm. All her father’s athletic ability had lit in her-at least that was what both she and her father believed. She fell asleep a hundred times with a stick in her hand, thinking over her moves. She was runner-up for Female Athlete of the Year in Colorado, went to Iowa on a full ride, and in 1984 was selected for the US Olympic field hockey team. She came home with a bronze medal and no idea of what would happen next. It was like coming into the daylight after a dozen years in a tunnel of ambition and competition. At a college jobs fair, she signed up to get more info about the Bureau and was at Quantico three months later. She loved the FBI, every day, for twenty years. The bureaucracy, the paperwork, the regs could make you buggy, but to a person, everyone she worked with was incandescent with pride in the mission, and gripped by a zeal to do right. It was the same kind of striving that had been so central to her life in sports.

In 1992 she’d accepted an assignment to leave the Des Moines RA, resident agency, and go undercover here, pretending to be Evon Miller, paralegal, actually serving as the watchdog over a dirty lawyer who’d turned and was secretly recording his payoffs to various judges. She chose the name Evon herself, borrowing it from a second cousin whose parents had intended a country spelling of Yvonne. But nobody, not even her cousin, pronounced the name that way. ‘Like “even better,” ’ her cousin customarily explained. DeDe longed for the same self-confidence.

Petros, the undercover project, was a far-reaching success-six judges, nine lawyers and a dozen court clerks and sheriff’s deputies were convicted-and after the last trial Evon had been called to D.C. to receive the FBI Medal, the greatest honor bestowed on agents. Even her mother sat there with her chest puffed out, accepting everybody’s congratulations.

But by then, there had been a bigger reward. The chance to be someone else had made her someone else. She came out, for one thing. But far more important, she began to understand what it would feel like to enjoy being herself. The thought of going back to DeDe was as unwelcome as returning to prison. She changed Kindle County to her OP, office of preference, and received permission from D.C. to continue to be known as Evon Miller, the only name anybody here had ever called her. By now, even Merrel, the sister Evon had always been closest to, had taken to referring to her that way.

She was so much happier than earlier in her life, when she’d felt like a handball ricocheting at high speed off walls she’d never seen coming. These days her main preoccupation, in the rare idle moment when she let her mind light there, was wondering how happy she had the right to be. No one could expect perfection.

She tended to deliver that admonition to herself at moments like this, when she was holding off the familiar combination of anger and humiliation that consumed her at the prospect that Heather Truveen, her girlfriend, would disappoint her again. It was Saturday night and Evon sat in the ballroom at the Kindle County Athletic Club, a gorgeous old room, with oaken pillars three stories high, that had been beautifully transformed for the wedding of Francine and Nella, the friends who had introduced Evon to Heather. The rows of stacking chairs had all been jacketed in white satin and an amphora full of white roses marked the spot on the riser where the ceremony would occur. Beside her, Evon had saved a seat on the aisle, knowing Heather would savor every detail of the brides’ attire. But any second, they would be stepping down the satin runner on the opposite arms of Nella’s dad. Evon had discreetly removed her BlackBerry from her handbag to see if Heather had sent any messages, when she finally arrived.

“Made it,” Heather whispered, and dropped her blonde head to Evon’s shoulder and nuzzled her for a second. Heather smelled surprisingly fresh, as her scent, Fracas, briefly surrounded Evon.

They had been together a year and a half now. Heather was thirty-eight, a creative executive at Coral Glotten-funny, a little wild, clever and very beautiful. She’d been a model to start, a tall elegant blonde whose grace reminded Evon of Merrel, who’d always been the most beautiful woman Evon knew and who Evon grew up longing to resemble. When Evon was eleven, Merrel gave her the Easter dress Merrel had made four years before. Her older sister curled Evon’s hair, and shortened the hem another inch just before church. ‘Doesn’t she look nice?’ Evon heard her sister ask their mother upstairs. ‘Nice as she can,’ her mother answered, ‘but she’ll never be much to write home about.’

One of the many good things that had happened when she was dispatched to Kindle County in 1992 was that she had to pretend to be the girl-on-the-side of the government’s rascally lawyer-informant and was obligated to look the part. Her hair was dyed to a brighter shade of blonde and sheared into the hedgehog style of the time, as if someone had taken a mower to one side of her head. She wore four-inch heels and lots of makeup every day, and stylish clothes, and discovered that she liked all of that far more than she’d ever let on to herself.

But no matter how big a lipstick lesbian she was, she’d never imagined being attractive to someone as glamorous as Heather. Beauty came to Heather in the same effortless manner in which Evon had excelled at sports. Heather was naturally fit, despite seldom working out, and never restricting what she ate. She was a true ash blonde-she boasted to Evon the first time they had dinner that the rugs matched the drapes-and was actually more beautiful with the swollen sleepy look she had in the morning.

And Heather was fun, carefree and blazingly funny. For the first several months, Evon found her endlessly amusing, even though Heather’s impulsiveness seldom took account of what Evon wanted. Awake in the middle of the night, Heather became entranced by an infomercial about Brazil and while Evon was asleep rebooked a vacation they’d planned for months. One evening, Heather walked into the apartment and waved her hands at the furniture she had spent months choosing. ‘This is all wrong,’ she said. ‘The sofa has to go.’ The sofa was crimson mohair and had been special-ordered at a cost of several thousand dollars. Evon nearly reeled at the waste, but was delighted at the same time to have exceeded the boundaries that had confined her all her life. When Heather returned to the store, she ordered a full second living room and asked them to hold it, awaiting the day she would change her mind again. Evon had roared when she heard.

But naturally the humor faded. Watching her girlfriend toss out an expensive top she’d worn only once, Evon retrieved it from the can. ‘Give it away, at least,’ she told Heather, who flicked a hand at the bother. With time, Evon began to see beneath the beautiful mask. Heather worked hard on the exterior because what was inside was often beyond her control. Black funks frequently gripped her and made her impossible and bearish. She drank too much, too often, and in that state was lacerating. And she was frustratingly fickle. Their plans had been to make a day out of getting ready for the wedding, go for spa treatments and mani-pedis. Instead, Heather slid out of bed at 8 a.m. and announced she had to work. Her principal client, Tom Craigmore, ever more demanding, wanted an all-day with his creative team for the line of athletic clothing he was going to launch in the fall.

“Where did you change?” Evon asked Heather now.

“The office.”

Heather had left the apartment without a bag, which meant her dress had been on a hanger at work and that she had known for some time their plans for today were doomed. Why not say something earlier, why put off being the source of disappointment? Heather was a baby that way. She’d come from a crazy messed-up home, a philandering father who’d killed himself eventually and a mother who’d never really touched the ground long enough to notice that her children were in distress. Heather as a result was afraid to face disapproval.

The ceremony began. It was a wedding with an asterisk. Francine and Nella had gone to Boston last weekend to be legally married. What was taking place here, in the presence of friends and family, was all that local law allowed, a religious commitment ceremony.

The officiant, an Episcopal priest who was a longtime friend to both women, blessed their union beautifully.

“Life,” he said at one point, “is much too cruel to go through it alone.” The remark pierced Evon like an arrow. Yes. That was true. She took Heather’s hand and squeezed it hard.

And on the power of that observation, it turned into a great night. A few years back, at the age of fortysomething, Evon had found out that she loved to dance. The music, especially the seventies tunes of her teens-“Stairway to Heaven,” Springsteen-liberated her as liquor or drugs did other people. Heather and she danced until they were a clammy mess, requesting four separate run-throughs of “Born To Run.” The club personnel shooed everybody out at 1 a.m.

By the time they arrived home, Heather was caught up in the inebriated fantasy of the wedding she would make. She had a thousand ideas: walking down an aisle lit by floating candles, in doubled crystal globes also containing orchids, the ceremony conducted on a mat of fresh lavender.

“And I want Cartier,” Heather announced. “My kisses do not begin with Kay, and if you come home with Zales, I don’t even know your name.” Heather was laughing when she said it, but there was a knife blade buried in her eyes.

When Heather left her to shower, Evon, who’d had far more to drink than usual, felt a stark mood shadow her heart. Heather’s talk of marriage, her regal demands, left Evon feeling how remote the chances were. Her doubts had little to do with her skepticism about whether same-sex marriage would ever be legal in this state, or even whether she had shed enough of a closeted person’s anxieties to be able to refer out loud to anyone as her “wife.” Something else concerned her, even if all the champagne made it impossible for her to be more precise. It was a shock to find herself dubious, because the story of the relationship had been that she pursued Heather, put up with her, forgave her. And it was true that she still craved Heather, loved her zany side and terrific sarcasm, and had touched something strong and good in herself by doting on her. In the past several months she’d realized she was basically Heather’s mother, which was not as bad a deal for Evon as putting it that way made it sound, because she enjoyed-no, relished-being a kinder, more patient and understanding person toward Heather than Evon’s mother had been to her. She wasn’t prepared yet to give any of that up.