Scott Turow - Identical

“Evon talked to Georgia, Aunt Teri. Evon, tell my aunt. Did you think Georgia was just making this up?”

Evon told Teri that Georgia actually appeared reluctant to share her information, but Teri wasn’t hearing it.

“Sorry, girlie, but I’ve known that woman her entire life. I’m sure Georgia has convinced herself about some of this. But Paul telling her Cass was innocent? She just wants everybody to know how close she was to Paul.”

“She was,” Hal protested. He had removed his suit coat and his tie and sat, with an arm on the sofa back, close to his aunt, his large belly looking a little like he’d strapped on a flour sack.

“Georgia was old news the day Paul saw Sofia at that picnic. Everybody knew it but Georgia. Dora Michalis told me that Paul started showing up at the hospital to have coffee with Sofia the very next week.”

Evon was impressed with the old lady’s recall of events twenty-five years ago, although Dita’s murder had probably kept many details from that period fresh. Even Hal seemed to realize he’d been trumped.

“These families were together always and were then torn apart,” Teri said, “and I grant you that had started before Dita’s murder. But that is nothing to revel in. Lidia has been my best friend for eighty years. Your father would have hated this, Hal.” She said something in Greek and Hal, although clearly displeased, translated for Evon.

“‘He who respects his parents never dies.’”

“Don’t make faces,” said Teri. “From the day Cass was arrested Zeus said the same thing-”

Hal interrupted, his lips indeed pouched in distaste. “‘A tragedy for both families.’ I know.”

“Your mother, I grant you, she wanted Cass strung up at first, but after your father passed she took his point of view. When Paul first ran for office, I heard her hush you a hundred times when you carried on the way you’ve been doing now. You just never liked those twins.”

“That’s not so. I babysat for them, Aunt Teri.”

“And complained afterwards. Lord only knows what it was that bothered you.”

Hal took in the point for a second, but refused to give ground.

“I respected my parents when they were alive, Aunt Teri. And I treasure their memory.” He pointed to the shelves holding their pictures. “But I’m not letting them run my life from the grave.”

The old lady was still shaking her head so that her layered gold necklaces rattled.

“I’m telling you, it’s disrespectful to use your father’s money to punish Paul. Zeus wouldn’t have stood for that.”

Hal recoiled. Teri had hit the sorest point, and Hal, being Hal, endured an instant when his eyes appeared to water. As far as Evon could tell, the biggest issue in Hal’s life was his father, even though Zeus had been dead since 1987, killed accidentally on a trip to Greece. But as someone put it to Evon when she was considering coming to ZP, ‘Hal is trying to walk in his father’s shoes in feet half his size.’ Zeus had been a force, smart and magnetic and handsome, who would probably have been governor of this state had grief not driven him out of the race. Hal was none of those things and he knew how often others made the unfavorable comparison. As a result, his life, in considerable measure, was dedicated to a losing competition with his father’s ghost. Hal never spoke ill of Zeus. In fact, he quite often described his father as ‘a god,’ for whom he genuinely seemed to hold limitless affection and respect. But he was determined to prove that his own success was not due to what he had inherited. The principal evidence was relentless expansion of his father’s shopping center empire. In the early 1990s he had taken ZP public as a REIT, and since then he’d made a number of strategic acquisitions like the YourHouse deal, which was close to being publicly announced. Hal himself was now worth more than a billion dollars. But his nails were still bitten down to ragged stumps, and so he tended to speak with his hands in fists, to avoid displaying the manifest evidence of everything that nibbled at him from inside.

With Teri’s last remark, it was apparent he was losing his sense of humor with her.

“Knock it off, Aunt Teri. It’s not Dad’s money, it’s mine. I’ve made twice what he did.”

Even Teri knew she’d gone too far. She threw a wrist and her bangles at him but said nothing more. Instead she thumped her cane on the floor and tried to pull herself to her feet. Hal, ever loyal, clambered up to grab her by the elbow. Her hand groped in the air until she caught him by the cheek and kissed him, leaving a vivid imprint.

“You’re a good boy, Hal. My number one nephew.” An old joke, of course. She had no other nephew. She reached after Evon. “Here. You walk me out. He’s too important.” Evon substituted her arm for Hal’s, despite his mild protests.

They were no more than thirty feet from Hal’s door when the old lady stopped. She averted her face, trying to find the little fragment of sight she retained so she could see Evon.

“You have to make him stop this. This will come to grief for everyone.”

“Ms. Kronon, I’m an employee. No one tells your nephew what to do.”

“So you say, but he likes you. He values your judgment.”

“Well, so far, there’s been more to his suspicions than I would have guessed. I have no basis to tell him to stop at this point.”

Authoritative as always, Teri said, “Paul had nothing to do with killing Dita. Aphrodite wasn’t just Hal’s sister. She was my niece and I loved her. Don’t you think I’d be the first to want Paul punished, if he had any hand in her murder?”

Evon walked Teri to the ZP reception area, where German, who served as both her caregiver and her butler, was waiting. When the elevator arrived, he stepped inside and held the door for Teri, but she didn’t move, angling her head again to see Evon.

“You’re the lesbian, aren’t you?”

Evon still didn’t like being known that way. It said both too much and too little. But Teri was an old lady. Evon managed a polite nod. Teri stared a second and took a step closer, so that Evon noticed how thick the powder was in the channels engraved in Teri’s face.

“Wish I’d been born in your time,” she said quietly, then felt with the crook to make her way into the elevator.

Du Bois Lands had been hired in the PA’s office about three years after Paul, and ended up as the junior prosecutor in the courtroom where Paul held the first trial chair. D.B. was a good lawyer-exact in his thinking, a better writer than most of the deputy prosecutors, and a passionate and charming courtroom advocate. Paul and he enjoyed working together, and spent time outside the office. Sofia was particularly fond of Du Bois’s wife, Margo, a pediatrician, and even after Paul left the PA’s office, the couples saw each other once or twice a year.

Then in 1993, D.B.’s uncle, Sherman Crowthers, had been indicted for extracting bribes as a judge in the Common Pleas section of the Superior Court, where personal-injury lawsuits were heard. Judge Crowthers was an American tragedy. An all-Mid Ten tight end at the U, who had grown up picking walnuts on a plantation in Georgia, he became one of the Tri-Cities’ premier criminal defense lawyers and a leading figure in the civil rights movement. His first triumph was successfully representing Dr. King, who was arrested here after leading open housing marches in 1965.

No one ever really understood why Sherm had fallen under the venal spell of the chief judge in Common Pleas, Brendan Tuohey. Sherm lived high-the black nouveau riche thing, not much different from the Greek nouveau riche thing Paul saw growing up-but he’d made his fortune before going on the bench. One friend said Sherm’s explanation was twisted but simple: ‘Mama didn’t raise no fool.’ He refused to be a black man who got less while many of the white judges around him turned their seats on the bench into ATMs.