Lisa Scottoline - Mistaken Identity

Mary leapt to shift the subject. “You watch boxing, Pop? I thought you were a baseball fan.”

“I like the fights. I boxed when I was young. Way back when.”

“Tell us about it,” Mary asked, but her mother’s face told her she was only postponing the inevitable, which was still better than nothing. Every lawyer likes an extension of time.

“Not much to tell. Not like Golden Gloves or nothin’. A lot of us fought, from the neighborhood. Cooch, Johnnie, Freddie. You met them guys, Mare. I could hit hard, take a punch, too. But I wasn’t quick enough. My feet.”

“Maria,” her mother interrupted. She touched her husband’s forearm, which was Italian code for shut up now. “What kinda case she got you workin’ on?”

Mary didn’t have to ask her mother who “she” was. Bennie Rosato had become the Antichrist in the DiNunzio household last year. “Just a case. A normal case.”

“What you mean, normal?”

“I just have to do some research, is all. Talk to witnesses, work in the library. Today I met with one of my old classmates, she’s teaching handicapped children-”

“Witnesses. What kinda witnesses?”

Mary sipped some water. The kitchen was sweltering. Nobody could cross-examine like a mother. “You know, regular witnesses. Trial witnesses.”

“What kinda trial?”

“You know, a trial. It’s not my trial. I’m not trying the case or anything.” Mary glanced at Judy for help, but she’d become suspiciously reabsorbed in her spaghetti. “I’m also finishing a brief in that First Amendment case I told you about, remember? That’s my main case, in federal court. It’s for the Third Circuit, the federal court of appeals. Very important stuff, Ma. This is where you say you’re so proud of me. That I’m a genius, that they’re lucky to have me.”

“She got you on a murder case, don’t she?” Vita DiNunzio set down her fork, and Mary knew she was in trouble.

“Just this one.”

“I knew it!” She slammed the table with a palm that only looked fragile. The table wiggled, the plates jumped, and water pooled in the jelly glasses.

“It’s not on Bennie, it’s on me. If you want to blame anybody, blame me.”

“She almost got you killed !” her mother shouted, her voice quivering with age and emotion.

“I’m fine, Ma. Everything’s fine.”

Across the table, Angie looked grave. “Relax, Ma. Mary will be very careful. She’ll take care of herself. She won’t do anything risky. Will you, Mare?”

“No, absolutely not,” Mary said, on cue. “I’m very careful. Not doing anything dangerous at all.” Leave it to Angie to know how to handle her mother. Growing up, the twins had worked as a tag team and in the unspoken division of parents, Angie had gotten their mother and Mary their father. “Last year was a one-time thing, Ma. This is just a run-of-the-mill criminal trial. I’ll be very careful.”

“Basta!” her mother said, standing up abruptly. Her face flushed through the thin, broken skin of her cheeks. She fairly shook in her flowered housedress. “I’ll go down there right now!”

“What? Where?”

“I’ll go down to that office right now and tell that witch she’s not putting my daughter on no murder case!”

Mary closed her eyes, mortified. “You’re not doing that, Ma. The office is closed. Bennie’s not even there.” She didn’t mention that her mother couldn’t drive. It didn’t seem like the right time.

“I’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ll tell her. She’ll listen to me, I’ll make her!”

“Ma, it’s my job.”

“Then you quit !”

Mary almost laughed. “I can’t do that. I have to make a living. My rent alone is-”

“Move home!” She threw her arms in the air, her elbows knobby and her underarms slack. “Don’t tell me you’re too old! Camarr Millie, her daughter lives at home and she’s thirty-six!”

“I’m not quitting. I’m a lawyer, I like my job,” Mary said, not believing the words even as they fell from her mouth. Who could sell a happy lawyer?

“Matty, talk to her,” her mother barked, nudging her husband, and Mary realized for the first time that her parents played on a tag team of their own. She looked at her father, and pain twisted his features as he tugged the napkin bib from the neck of his T-shirt. He didn’t say a word, and still a knife of guilt went through her.

“Pop, it’s my job,” Mary said. “I have to do my job.”

“We thought you wasn’t doin’ no more murder cases, baby,” he said softly.

“I can’t pick and choose, Pop. You know that, you worked. Could you have one of your crew picking his own work?”

Suddenly her mother pushed her chair under the table, her eyes edged with tears, and hurried from the kitchen. “Ma, wait!” Angie called out, and bolted from the table after her. Judy looked astonished, and Mary tensed in the stifling kitchen.

Her father reached across the table and touched her hand, his palm warm. “Mare, I’m not gonna tell you your business. All I’m gonna tell you is boxing is a mean business, a dirty business. Lotsa people get hurt. Make sure you’re not one of them.”

“Don’t worry, Pop,” Mary said, the words hard in coming.

Watching the scene, Judy felt dumbstruck. Her mother didn’t cry. Her father didn’t call her “baby.” Her family preferred their melodrama on a television movie-of-the-week, behind a curve of expensive glass. Or on a stage, at a distance. Yet, as moved as Judy was by the emotion of Mary’s parents, she was struck by their words. Matty DiNunzio was right. Boxing was a dirty, dangerous business. Maybe the Della Porta murder had less to do with cops and more to do with boxers. The lawyers had been following Connolly’s theory, but Judy didn’t trust Connolly the way Bennie did. She decided to follow up, alone. She didn’t want to put Mary in harm’s way. She didn’t want her best friend hurt.

And she certainly didn’t want to answer to Vita DiNunzio.

Bennie cruised the block in the dark before she pulled up in front of Della Porta’s rowhouse, making sure there were no news vans or reporters out front. Trose Street was quiet, with only a few people out. She parked and locked the Expedition, got out with the case file, and plucked through her keys until she found the one to Della Porta’s apartment.

Bennie climbed the stoop to the entrance, unlocked the inside door, and went up the stairs to the apartment. She opened the door at the top of the stair, thinking about Connolly. How it must have felt for her to come home to this apartment, to Della Porta. What it was like to find him dead. Bennie had experienced that horror herself, except that she’d loved profoundly the man she’d found. How could this happen to both her and Connolly? Wasn’t it too coincidental?

She opened the door, entered the apartment, and flicked on the switch for the overhead light. The apartment looked the same as before, the living area on the left, with the bloodstain. She walked to the faintly rusty outline and flashed on the awful day she saw the pool of blood on her lover’s desk. Bennie stared at the bloodstain, deep in thought. She had to admit that she was starting to feel, more than she could logically justify, that Connolly was her twin. Maybe because Bennie had watched Connolly, observed the way she looked and acted. Noted her mannerisms and the coincidences in their lives. Yet the more time Bennie spent around Connolly, the more she felt she understood her, even as she trusted and liked her less. It was paradoxical, but Bennie was starting to feel of Connolly in some way. It was an uneasy sensation, being suddenly uncomfortable in her own skin.