Lisa Scottoline: Mistaken Identity

“No.” Surf shook his head. “Connolly’s hair is dyed red. Rosato’s a blonde. Also, Rosato’s heavier, remember?”

“No, I never even saw Rosato. I could give a flying fuck.” Reston snorted. “It’s a con, kid. A hustle. Connolly is the master of shit like that. Look how she scammed us.”

“So what if it’s a scam? It doesn’t matter. If Connolly gets Rosato on her case, we’re fucked.”

Next to Surf, Joe Citrone listened in his typical stony silence. Joe was near retirement age, tall, with a bony nose that was bracketed by elongated wrinkles around a small mouth and a sharp chin. Joe didn’t talk much and always looked sad to Surf because he had those dark circles under his eyes that Italians get. Still, Joe was the smartest cop Surf knew.

“Joe,” Surf said, turning to him. “What do you think? Katie’s girlfriend says they’re look-alikes. Why would she shit us?”

“Don’t know.”

“Do you know Katie’s girlfriend? You know everybody.”

“Scotty’s daughter.”

“That’s her. So, would she bullshit Katie about something like this?”

“Don’t know.”

“You think they’re twins?”

“Don’t know.”

McShea started laughing again. “Joe on the witness stand: ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘Don’t know.’ ”

“The Joe Game! The Joe Game! The Joe Game!” they shouted, banging on the table, except for Surf. It was the Joe Game and they played it all the time to get a rise out of Citrone. “Here’s Joe at home,” Reston said, starting. “The wife says, ‘Honey, you want spaghetti?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘Honey, you havin’ fun at Disney World?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘Honey, you love me?’ ‘No.’ ”

McShea slapped the table with a heavy hand. “I got one! Joe in bed.” His animated features fell into deadpan. “‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘ Oh. ’ ”

Citrone ignored their laughter and finished his cheesesteak, which only made McShea and Reston laugh harder. Surf couldn’t stand it. What was the matter with these assholes? Maybe Joe wasn’t smart at all. Maybe he just never said enough to sound stupid. “I shoulda never got involved,” Surf said. “I knew it. Goddammit, I knew it.”

“Shut up with that, you’re embarrassing yourself.” Reston made a face. “Ooh, I’m ascared of Rosato.”

Surf kept shaking his head. “She’s smarter than that turd who’s on the case now. And she ain’t ours.”

“Big deal,” Reston said. “She got an all-girl law firm. Hey, you think they get their periods at the same time?” He nudged McShea. “What a fuckin’ nightmare. Lawyers on their periods.”

McShea stopped laughing when he caught the concern on Surf’s face, then reached over and chucked the junior cop on the chin. “Don’t worry, girlfriend. If Rosato takes the case, which I tell you she won’t, she won’t have time to get ready. What is it, a week away, and half that time she’ll be givin’ interviews. Newspapers, TV, cable. You know how she is. When she’s not at the bank, she’s in front of the camera.”

“Cha-ching!” Reston said, but Surf only glowered.

“I’ll do something about this, if you won’t.”

Citrone rubbed his fingertips together, brushing off invisible crumbs. “Don’t, kid,” he said quietly.

“Don’t what? Deal with it?”

Citrone’s expression didn’t change. “Just, don’t.”

“I can deal with it. I know what to do. I can’t sit around with my thumb up my ass.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Citrone said, and everybody accepted it as the last word.

Everybody, that is, except Surf.

Alice Connolly lay on the thin bed in her cell. No inmate stayed in her cell during unrestricted time unless she was doing something she didn’t want the guards to see or was doing something with the guards she didn’t want anyone else to see, but Alice spent all her time alone in her cell. She had laid down the law with her white-trash cellie, Diane. Stay the fuck out. Diane had gone along. She was only twenty-three, but looked fifty because of the crack. Pipers looked like they were born at fifty.

Alice squirmed to get comfortable in the bed. The cell, of gray cinderblock, contained a stainless steel sink and over it a plastic mirror the size of a tabloid. A skinny Formica ledge built into the wall was supposed to be a desk, with a beat-up stool bolted to the floor next to the stainless toilet bowl. The bowl had no lid and the cell stank all the time. Alice didn’t turn away from the toilet; it wouldn’t do any good. She lay in the uncomfortable bed and stared at the blank wall opposite her.

Alice kept no personal articles in her cell, unlike most inmates. No pictures of boyfriends with beer cans in their hands or school photos of kids in front of a fake blue sky. The latest fad in the house was magazine pages folded into an accordion fan. The women set them in pencil holders like goddamn flowers, trying to make the shithole a home. Christ. Alice didn’t see the point. Ever since the day they handed her her blues and showed her the cell, she had spent every minute of every day thinking of a way out. She’d be convicted for sure. She wasn’t about to go to trial and let Pennsylvania plug her full of joy juice.

So from day one, Alice became the model inmate. Scrubbed the kitchen floor, scraped scum off the shower stalls, taught computer. Tried to find anywhere she could slip out, any way. Connected with the gang leaders, the do-rags and the spics, trying to learn what she could. Even tapped her little wetback mule, Valencia, for information. But in a year Alice had gotten nowhere. Her trial was around the corner.

And then it had fallen into her lap. The only bit of luck in her life. It happened the day the guard knocked on her cell door and told her somebody named William Winslow had come for a visit.

Idon’t know any Winslow , Alice had said, but she was curious. She’d changed into the ugly orange jumpsuit after the pat-down, gotten the plastic bracelet with the bar code on it, and gone down to the visiting room. It was a large room, with steel chairs facing each other in groups of four, and the seats were full. Families yapped and boyfriends copped feels under the NO KISSING sign. Sitting by himself was an old man who looked like a scarecrow. He was tall and thin and his head dipped forward like his neck was stuffed with hay. He wore a tweed sportjacket with a flannel shirt and a brown felt hat that he tugged off when he spotted Alice.

This old coot was her visitor? Alice had almost laughed out loud. She went over and sat down opposite him. The man kept clearing his throat, but he couldn’t seem to get a word out. Up close his face was thick with tan and wrinkles. Alice asked him who he was and why was he here. Then he’d told her she was his little girl. He said he’d given her up for adoption.

What the fuck are you talking about? she’d said. She wasn’t adopted, not that she knew, but her parents were too dead to ask. Not that they’d been the greatest parents anyway, even when they were alive.

This is you, as a baby, the scarecrow had said. Holding a black-and-white photo in a shaking hand.

Fine. Whatever. He was a geezer, maybe he was senile. She took the photo, of a fat baby with round eyes. It looked like every baby in the world. Alice handed him back his picture and told him to get fucked. He’d been in the cornfield way too long. But from then on, Bill kept coming back to visit, once a month for about six months. The guards kidded her that she had a groupie, it happened all the time. Crazy johns who liked bad girls, bringing them shit. Some of the shit they made, like the young Jamaican who brought Diane little boxes with pictures pasted on them. Others brought money.