Lisa Scottoline: Mistaken Identity

Bennie crossed the threshold with a nonchalance that fooled no one and walked down a narrow gray corridor, as stifling as the waiting room but mercifully quiet. The only sounds were echoes of faraway shouting and the clatter of her pumps down the hall. She hit a battered button and rode the empty cab to the third floor. On the landing was a smoked glass window that obscured the guard sitting behind, who accepted the request slip Bennie passed through a slot. “Room 34,” said the guard’s muffled voice, and the door to Bennie’s right unlocked with a mechanical ca-thunk and opened a crack.

She walked through the door to another gray corridor, this one with a set of doors on the left, each leading to a gray cubicle. Inmates entered the cubicles from doors off a secured hallway on the other side, and all the doors locked automatically when they closed. Each cubicle, about four feet by six, contained two chairs facing each other and a beige wall phone for calling the guard. Only a Formica counter divided felon from lawyer. Though it had never bothered Bennie before, it felt oddly inadequate today. She walked to the end of the corridor, opened the door to Room 34, and did a double take when she saw the inmate.

“Are you Alice Connolly?” Bennie asked.

“Yes,” the inmate answered with a cocky smile. “Surprised?”

Bennie eyed the prisoner up and down, her gaze ending its bewildered journey at Connolly’s face. The inmate looked like a prettier, albeit streetwise, version of Bennie herself, though her hair was a brassy, fraudulent red and had been scissored into crude layers. She had Bennie’s broad cheekbones and full lips, but wore enough makeup to enhance those features. She looked as tall as Bennie, but was model-thin, so her orange jumpsuit seemed almost fashionably baggy. Her eyes-round, blue, and wide-set-matched Bennie’s exactly, rendering the lawyer momentarily speechless.

Connolly extended a hand over the counter. “Pleased to meet you. I’m your twin,” she said.

Bennie stared at the inmate in disbelief. Her twin ? “My twin ? Is this a joke?”

“No, not at all,” Connolly said. She let her hand fall unshaken to her side and spread her palms. “Look at me. We’re identical twins.”

Bennie shook her head slowly. It wasn’t possible. Despite the similarity in their features, there was a chill to the inmate’s affect that Bennie had never seen in a mirror. It made the comparison between them that of a cadaver to a living person. “We may look alike, but we’re not twins.”

“You’re just surprised. I know, I was, too. But it’s true.”

“It can’t be.” Bennie couldn’t wrap her mind around it. She kept shaking her head. Her own eyes looked back at her from the prisoner’s face. “You didn’t say anything about this when you called, Connolly. You said you needed a new lawyer.”

“I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, you wouldn’t have come. You’d have thought I was nuts.”

“You are.”

“You didn’t know about me, huh? I didn’t know about you either, until the other day.” Connolly sat down on the other side of the counter and gestured to the chair opposite her. “Better sit, you look kind of pale. It’s strange, finding out you have a twin. I know, I just went through it.”

“This is crazy. I don’t have a twin.” Bennie sank into the plastic seat on her side of the counter, slowly regaining her emotional footing. At almost forty, Benedetta “Bennie” Rosato was the only child of an ailing mother and a father she’d never met. She didn’t have a twin, she had a law firm. Plus a young boyfriend and a golden retriever. “I don’t have a twin,” Bennie repeated, with confidence.

“Yes, you do. Give it time. It’ll sink in. Look, we’re built the same. I’m six feet tall, and I can see you are, too. I weigh a hundred and forty-five pounds. You’re heavier, but not by that much, right?”

“I’m heavier. Leave it alone.”

“You’re kind of muscular. Do you work out?”

“I row.”

“Row boats?” Connolly appraised Bennie with a critical eye. “It’s built up your shoulders too much. You know, you should lose some weight, do something with yourself. You have a pretty face but you don’t wear enough makeup. Your hair needs a cut and some color. I got a friend on the outside could shape it up for you. Make you look hot. You want my color?”

“No, thanks,” Bennie said, taken aback.

“Look, it’s weird for me, too, seeing you. Trippy. Somebody who looks like me, without makeup. You’re another me.”

“I’m not another you,” Bennie shot back reflexively. The very thought. An inmate, maybe a murderer. “We’re not twins just because we look a little alike. Lots of people look alike. People tell me all the time, ‘I know someone who looks exactly like you.’ ”

“This isn’t that. Look at my face. Don’t you believe your own eyes?”

“Not necessarily. I’m a trial lawyer, the last thing I believe in is appearances. Besides, I know who I am.”

“You only know half the story. I’m the other half. Listen. I even sound like you. My voice.” Connolly spoke quickly and her tone was direct, a vague echo of the lawyer’s tone and cadence.

“You could be doing that on purpose.”

“You mean, fake it? Why would I do that?”

“To get me to take your case.”

“You think I’m lying to you?” Pain creased Connolly’s brow, and because it looked so much like Bennie’s own, it made the lawyer regret her words, if not her thoughts.

“What else can I think?” Bennie said, defensive. “I mean, something’s wrong here. I don’t have a twin. There’s just me, there always has been, my whole life. That’s it.”

Connolly cocked her head. “My birthday is July 7, 1962, same as yours. How could I fake that?”

“My birthday? You could find that out anywhere. It’s listed in my alumni directory, Martindale-Hubbell, Who’s Who of American Lawyers, a hundred places.”

“We were born in Pennsylvania Hospital.”

“Most of Philadelphia was born at Pennsylvania Hospital.”

Connolly’s blue eyes narrowed. “You were born first, at nine in the morning. I was born fifteen minutes later. You weighed ten pounds at birth. How would I know that, huh?”

Bennie paused. It was true. She was born at 9:00 A.M. She used to think, just in time for work. Had she mentioned that ever, in an interview? “You could find that out. I’m sure birth records are public.”

“Not the time of your birth, what you weighed. That’s not public.”

“It’s the information age, everything’s public. Or maybe it was a lucky guess. Christ, you can look at me and guess I weighed ten pounds at birth. I’m an Amazon.”

“Okay, how about this?” Connolly leaned forward on slim but sturdy arms. “Our mother is Carmella Rosato and our father is William Winslow.”

Bennie’s mouth went dry. It was her mother and father. Her father’s name hadn’t been published anywhere. “How did you know that?”

“It’s the truth. Our father took off before we were born. Carmella gave up her second-born twin. Me.” Bitterness puckered Connolly’s lovely cheeks, but Bennie noted she was avoiding the question.

“I asked you, how do you know my father’s name?”

“Bill and I are friends. Good friends.”

“ Bill? You’re good friends with my father?”

“Yes. He’s a very nice man. A caretaker. You didn’t know that, did you? Bill told me he never met you and that Carmella was too sick to visit. What’s the matter with her, with our mother? Bill won’t talk about it, like it’s a secret.”

Our mother? Bennie shook her head in confusion. She couldn’t understand how Connolly knew about her father. Her mother had hated the man who hadn’t stayed long enough to marry her, and as Bennie had grown to adulthood, her father had simply become irrelevant, a footnote to a busy life. “None of this makes sense.”