Scott Turow - Identical

By now, he needed to pee again. There were times he felt the urge the minute he walked out of the john. Going tinkle every ten minutes was just part of being an old guy. Sometimes, he’d study his body with amazement at the damage time had done, all the sagging and the pallor of his flesh, white as a fish belly. There was so much that didn’t work any more. Sometimes it seemed to take a minute just to pick up a coin. And his mind often reminded him of a car in which the shifter just couldn’t find the gear. But occasionally there were pleasing surprises. Yesterday morning he woke up with a hard-on and considered it like a visitor from another planet. He’d thought he was pretty much dead in that area and felt good about himself for hours afterward.

There were so many retired police officers out this way that the Fraternal Order of Police lodge had bought up the VFW hall several years back, when the veterans’ group pretty much went broke. The yeasty odor of spilled beer greeted him as soon as he opened the door. The big hall on the first floor was empty, but he could hear noise above and took the worn stairs.

Up here, there was a long old-fashioned mahogany bar with mirrors behind it. The rest of the room was occupied by a few eight-sided card tables with green felt. It looked like nobody had taken a mop or broom to the pine floor in several years. A crowd of old-timers were around one of the tables, with several onlookers as the players tossed around quarters and cards. Tim wasn’t three steps into the room when he heard his name called at volume.

“Jesus Christ, I thought you were dead. I really did.” It was Stash Milacki, who had a seat at the table, laughing so hard his face was bright red. Stash had a brother, Sig, who was crooked as a stick and got Stash made detective, but Stash wasn’t bad on the job, although he never reached Homicide, which was what everybody wanted.

Tim laughed at the sight of him, but went off to do his business before returning to shake Stash’s hand. Stash must have put on fifty pounds since Tim saw him last, and he was no lightweight back then. Now he was an old guy with a red face who had to spread his legs on the barrel chair to make way for his belly.

“Talk to him and don’t talk to me,” someone said. Tim only now recognized Giles LaFontaine on the other side of the table. With his trim gray moustache, Giles looked twenty years younger than Stash. Tim had shared a beat with Giles when he first was on the street. “So you just another broke old bastard like the rest of us, can’t afford to go play golf in Florida?” Giles asked.

“Eh,” said Tim. “I been lucky. Still work now and then as a PI.”

“Really?” said Stash, like he didn’t believe him.

“Do some stuff for ZP, for one,” said Tim. It was the only one at the moment, but no point being precise.

“Now what kind of piece of shit is that?” Giles asked. “Those commercials? I had my grandson with me the other day and one of these ads come on, the one with the old girlfriend, and the grandson he’s sure it’s a joke. ‘No,’ I tell him, ‘this crazy man, Kronon, he really thinks Paul Gianis killed that girl.’ That’s true, right?”

“That’s true.”

“I owned the TV station,” said Giles, “I wouldn’t let him put that shit on the air.” Paul lived in this neighborhood for years and people here were proud of his prominence and success. There were a couple of fellas around the table who didn’t appear as vehement as Giles, but he wouldn’t back down. “The brother done his time, that oughta be the end of it. It’s twenty-five years later and now all the sudden this crackpot says Paul was in on it. That doesn’t wash, not with me.”

“What’s the brother up to now?” Tim asked.

Giles shrugged as he peered at his cards. A guy next to him, Italian or Mexican from his looks, said, “Didn’t the papers say he wanted to teach ex-cons? Like what he’d been doing inside?”

Another fellow, sitting behind the players, spoke up.

“Bruce Carroll lives right next door to the Gianises. You know him?”

Tim didn’t.

“Bruce said he and the missus are home most days and they haven’t caught sight of him. Cass. That’s the brother, right? He’s probably hiding out from the reporters, but they haven’t seen him go in or out, except the day he came home from prison.”

“Did he leave town?” Tim asked.

The man who’d been speaking just shook his head. “Might be. But if I spent twenty-five years in the can, I’d want to hang out with my family. Paul’s his identical twin, isn’t he? Close, right? For years, I been reading how Paul and him wrote each other every day.”

“Me?” said another man. “Twenty-five years inside? I’d get four girls and a bottle of whiskey and tell them to see how much I could take.”

The men around the table all laughed.

For the most part, Tim didn’t spend much time with ex-cops. There were three former Homicide dicks he’d played golf with every summer Saturday for at least thirty years, but that had stopped for him when Maria took sick. That proved to be the end of the game, too. Dannaher’s back was too bad for him to swing much, and Rosario couldn’t see where the ball went. Carter could see fine, but forgot where the ball had landed by the time he left the tee. Leaving aside the golf buddies, Tim’s closest pals were all former musicians. Some still played and Tim loved to hear them, but his hands were too stiff for him to do much with a trombone, and his embouchure was gone. Mostly he and his friends listened to music, grunting at the best passages, telling stories of old gigs and good players. His best friend, Tyronius Houston, had moved out to Tucson and begged Tim to visit. There were a couple of others who’d be showing up around here again in April, once the weather improved.

Tim used the john again before he departed, then drove back to the Gianises’ house and sat across the street. Near six, a car finally pulled into the garage. When the door went up, he caught sight of another vehicle parked inside, a gray Acura. These days, Paul was probably being driven around by his campaign staff. Given the darkness at 5:30, when the lights came on in the first floor of the house, Sofia was displayed as clearly as if she were on a stage set. With his binoculars, Tim watched her whisk through the kitchen in her green surgical scrubs. He put his car in gear and pulled into their round driveway.

Sofia Michalis had been one of those kids who stood out from the time she could talk. Maria was friendly at church with Sofia’s mom, who, with four older kids already, tended to act like her baby was possessed. Sofie could read, literally, not long after she was upright, and started school a year early. But unlike some other kids Tim had seen who were isolated by phenomenal intelligence, Sofia always seemed outwardly normal, with huge intense black eyes, almost like a cartoon character’s. She’d been a classmate of Tim’s middle daughter, Demetra, and Sofia was one of those little girls you couldn’t have in the house too often. She’d play jacks with De and then, if Tim was at home, would stop off in the kitchen to ask him about his latest case. By the age of seven, Sofia was reading the newspaper cover to cover every day. She was preoccupied frequently with questions about the methodology of detection-how did fingerprint powder stick to the ridges? How could you tell for sure what a person reduced to a skeleton had looked like? It was all he could do at times to keep from answering, ‘How in the hell do I know?’ But then, after mulling over his answers, she would turn back into a kid.

‘There aren’t any bad people like that around here, right?’ she asked him about one of Tim’s goriest cases, a serial murderer named Delbert Rooker who’d killed several young women.