Identical (24 page)

“What about the fingerprint card Greenwood County just sent to Dr. Dickerman?” asked Mel. “Can we have that?”

“Nope,” said the judge. “I was about to get to that. The fingerprint lifts from the house are encompassed by my ruling, and Dr. Dickerman should turn those over to Mr. Kronon. The fingerprints Senator Gianis gave for purpose of this lawsuit belong to him and should be returned forthwith. The fingerprint card of Cass Gianis belongs to Greenwood County, since the county is allowed by law to maintain a database of fingerprints for future criminal investigations. Cass Gianis’s blood will be returned to him, after proper notice to Kindle County, which is the only prosecutor’s office for fifty miles with no legal representative here at the moment.”

Everybody in the courtroom howled at the small joke. Evon had noticed long ago that any effort at humor somehow seemed side-splitting when it came from the bench.

“And with that, Mr. Horgan, Senator Gianis’s motion for voluntary nonsuit is granted and this case is dismissed. Good day, all of you, and thank you for your presence.”

The judge left the bench.

Tooley motioned Tim to come forward to receive the evidence the judge had just ruled belonged to Hal. Tim signed the receipts and marked the envelopes and containers with his initials and the date and time. Sandy Stern had caught sight of Tim doing this and stepped over to pay his respects.

“This was the finest detective any of us ever saw,” Stern told Evon, who’d come forward with Tim to help him keep everything straight. She still wasn’t convinced Stern knew who she was.

“So I’ve heard.”

“That’s why old folks hang on,” Tim told them both. “To hear all those compliments they didn’t deserve in the first place.”

All three were still laughing when Mel Tooley approached Stern and took him by the elbow.

“What the hell was that?” Mel asked.

Stern smiled in his serene, enigmatic fashion.

“Well,” said Stern, “the judge is supposed to be the smartest person in the room. It’s satisfying when it actually happens, no?”

Tooley did not appear convinced.

For once Mel had no trouble convincing Hal not to speak to the press, since he appeared, just like Evon, utterly befuddled. Along with Hal, Tim and Mel and Evon squeezed into Hal’s Bentley to go back to ZP. Tim kept all the evidence in his lap. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take it to Dr. Yavem or not.

“Did we just win or did we just lose?” Hal asked as soon as Delman, the driver, closed the door, which shut with the padded sound of a jewelry case.

“You just watched the baby get divided,” said Mel. He clearly lacked Stern’s appreciation for the judge’s performance.

“I think we may be OK,” Evon said. She’d been thinking about all of this for some minutes.

“Really?” Hal was eager for any good news.

“The idea was to do the DNA testing, right? We have the blood evidence from the house, right, from the French door? That’s clearly the murderer’s.”

“But we don’t have the DNA from either brother,” Mel said.

“We got the fingerprint lifts from the house. Lots of them were identified as Cass’s. You can extract DNA from old fingerprints.”

“You can?” Hal was delighted to hear it.

“It’s not for sure,” Evon said, “but we can try. I mean, Yavem can. I know it’s been done. It only takes a speck. With that many prints, he’s bound to get something.”

“What about Paul?” Mel asked. “Dickerman has to give back his fingerprints.”

“You can get DNA off the bone from a chicken wing somebody ate. Or a cigarette they smoked. If Tim follows Paul around for a couple of days, I’ll bet he can pick up something.”

“Great,” said Tim, who’d said nothing to this point. “Paul knows who I am. Our paths have been crossing since Cass and him went to grade school with Demetra. And he’s seen me in court. They’ll throw my butt out wherever I turn up.”

“Maybe not,” Evon said. “You’re the one who’s always telling me old men are invisible. And if they throw you out, you just refer the assignment to a buddy you trust who works as a PI. You must know a hundred old codgers who’d be good.”

Tim didn’t smile, but Hal said, “Fabulous.” Even Tooley had brightened a little, less chagrined by having been so far outflanked by the judge.

Tim drove the evidence to Yavem’s lab, then returned to the cubicle he’d been given at ZP to use the computer to study Paul’s daily calendar, posted on his campaign website. Gianis’s schedule seemed superhuman, when you remembered that he had stiff legislative duties and still kept a law office. He was shaking hands at bus stops and train stations during the morning and afternoon rushes. He attended fund-raisers at breakfast, lunch and the cocktail hour, and convened press events several times a week, at which he announced policy initiatives. There was one at a fire station today, where he was going to discuss his proposal for the future of the department, a tender subject, since over the last thirty years better building techniques had made as many as a third of the firefighters here and elsewhere in the country redundant. In the evenings and weekends, Paul tended to do town hall meetings in community centers or local places of worship. Out of curiosity, Tim had compared Paul’s schedule to that of his top three opponents, none of whom appeared to be exhausting themselves the same way. It just made you wonder what could possibly be worth it. And there wouldn’t be any letup if Paul got to city hall. That wasn’t a 9-to-5 job either.

That night Tim attended Paul’s town hall at the JCC in Center City. Gianis drew a small crowd, no more than seventy-five people, but he looked enthusiastic as he charged up the stairs to the stage in the center’s auditorium. He was wearing a camel hair sport coat but no tie and began by speaking on his own under the lights for about fifteen minutes. Paul was charming and relaxed as he talked about his campaign’s three s’s-schools, safety, stability, meaning stable finances-and growing up here in Kindle County. He’d worked every day in Mickey’s grocery until he started college. He told funny stories about putting price stickers on canned goods, from the time Cass and he were five years old.

“In my family,” Paul said, “the invention of the bar code was a bigger deal than landing on the moon.”

As soon as he turned to the audience for questions, there were several about dismissing his lawsuit against Hal. Occasionally, as he was pondering his answers, he removed his heavy glasses to rub the purple bump on his nose.

“To be blunt,” he said about the lawsuit, “we made a mistake. I was upset that someone was saying these kinds of things about me, and I wanted to take a stand. But at a certain point, when people become obsessed you have to accept that they’re not rational. They’re going to believe what they want to, no matter what you do.”

The explanations seemed to go down well with most of the small crowd. An old fellow in a flannel shirt stood up then and gave a long tirade about bullies like Kronon, swinging their billions like truncheons. If rich people could spend without limit trying to decide elections, we were basically back to where we started, when the only voters were white men with property. The audience applauded. Eventually the questions turned to school funding and the quality of lunches.

Midway through the evening, Paul opened a bottle of water that had been left on the podium and drank deeply. Tim kept his eye on it after that.

When Paul left the stage, Tim was at the back of the line of five or six people waiting to speak to the candidate personally. Standing on the last stair, Paul took a long draught from the water bottle and emptied it while he was conversing with an elderly woman who had a pointed question about the crumbling county hospital. Up close, Paul looked tired, with ashy marks under his eyes that seemed to have appeared since Tim had last seen him in court.

During his years as a PI, Tim had collected a set of disguises he used on prolonged follows-silly wigs, secondhand work jumpsuits, even a couple of dresses he wore in desperate moments. It was impressive, really, how unsuspecting people were in general. For this event, he’d stayed simple, shedding his old topcoat in favor of a parka. He put on the glasses he wore to drive at night, and got another stocking cap that he tugged all the way down and kept on all evening. Now, Tim stepped up and reached for the bottle after Paul screwed the top back on.

“I’ll take care of that for you, Senator.”

Gianis handed it over, careful to say thank you, before turning to the next person in line. Moving off with the water bottle, Tim thought he could feel Paul do a double take, but Tim feigned dropping the plastic container in a trash bin, and pushed it up the sleeve of his parka while he had his hand in the can. He sealed the bottle in a plastic bag as soon as he got to his car and took it over to Dr. Yavem’s office first thing in the morning. The doctor’s young colleague told Tim that they expected the DNA results to be back in three weeks.

February 29, Cass’s name day-not the make-do event they normally observed on March 1 when they were young, but his real name day, the birth date of St. Kassianos, which rolled around once every four years. In the last month, there had been far more tension with Cass than Paul had ever anticipated, and hoping to smooth things over, he’d planned a grand celebration. It would be the first name day party for Cass in twenty-five years, an open house for relatives and neighbors so they could get acquainted again. Then Tim Brodie had started sneaking around with that subpoena, like a cat after a bird, and the party had to be scotched. Sofia called the guests and blamed the cancellation on campaign emergencies. Even now, when the lawsuit had been dismissed, it seemed to make more sense for Cass to lie low. There was no telling exactly what Kronon was going to attempt next, but he was virtually guaranteed to try to drag Cass into it.

So their celebration had ended up decidedly more restrained. Earlier in the day, the twins went to St. Basil’s Home to see their mother, then continued separately to a round of evening campaign events. Back here at 9, they carried in from Athenian House, and were joined by a few guests. Sofia and Paul’s sons, Michael and Stephanos-Steve to everyone-had driven in from Easton to congratulate their uncle, but stayed only briefly. Both boys still seemed nonplussed by the sight of the twins together. Beata Wisniewski had come for dinner, but left immediately afterwards, with a 6 a.m. flight to visit her mother in Tucson.

Beata had first come into their lives in 1981 as Cass’s girlfriend, his passion before Dita. A big gorgeous blonde, nearly six feet tall, Beata was an eighteen-year-old cadet in the police academy who had encouraged Cass to apply, too. But even before Cass was accepted, they had flamed out. Beata fell for one of her training officers, Ollie Ferguson, whom she married almost immediately. Cass, more disappointed than heartbroken, had gotten involved with Dita several months later. As it happened, neither choice of partners had worked out particularly well for either of them. These days, Beata sold real estate, mostly commercial, but she’d found them this apartment overnight when they’d realized that Tim Brodie was on Cass’s trail. She had even placed the lease in her name. She, too, seemed uncomfortable with the new order of things, of being with the family with secrets to keep, and looked relieved to depart.

Now Cass sat beside Sofia, across from Paul at the round dining table that had come with the furnished apartment. Sofia had stayed up all night, baking baklava, loukoumades and diples, and the vinylized mahogany veneer was dusted with flakes of phyllo and a scatter of crushed walnuts that had fallen off the pastries as they were consumed. A small pyramid of opened store boxes, Cass’s presents, was at the far end.

The apartment was, in a way, a cheery place. The living space faced the river and had good early light through the broad windows. The floor plan was open, without walls between the kitchen, dining room and living area. There were two small bedrooms behind the west wall. Sofia had brought lots of family photos so the feel was less sterile. But it still was basically a hideout. Cass usually came and went in disguise, and Paul had to be careful to coordinate his arrivals so they were not seen together.

Following Beata’s departure, Cass removed the blue cashmere sweater she’d bought him, so that the twins were again dressed identically. Looking across the table, Paul felt almost as if they’d retreated to being six-year-olds in the same sailor suit. Each wore a white broadcloth shirt and the pants from one of the blue 140-weight suits Paul’s tailor had made. The same Easton rep tie was in the pocket of each man’s jacket, hanging on the back of his chair. The only real difference was that for the evening, Cass had shed the black glasses. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and, with the celebrating over, reached into his suit pocket and tossed down the new nasal prosthetic Sofia had had crafted at the end of January. The little knot of silicone resembled the bent joint in somebody’s finger, leaving aside the transparent wings meant to make the piece blend into Cass’s skin. The coloration was so precise it looked as if Cass had dumped a living thing on the table. He could pass easily without makeup, but especially with the heavy powder they both wore every day for the cameras, the prosthetic was indetectable.

“This thing is still killing me,” he said. He’d removed his glasses apparently because of how much the bridge of his nose hurt. Cass sounded put out, which, so far as Paul was concerned, was becoming his regular tone. Sofia picked up the prosthetic and went to the kitchen behind them to hold it under the hot tap.

“You’re not getting all this new adhesive off,” she said. “You have to make sure it’s removed every day from the piece and your skin. You know that.” She told him to apply an antibacterial ointment to his nose every night for the rest of the week. There were other surgical adhesives without the same history of irritation, but they’d chosen this one, newly on the market, thinking it would make the prosthetic more secure in the prolonged heat of the camera lights.