Scott Turow - Identical

“I don’t like this man and I don’t know who he is.”

He fled the room and waited in the hall while Eloise summoned another attendant, a little Filipina who couldn’t reach five feet with a hand over her head. She seemed to have a good way with Lidia and Eloise left the two of them while she walked Tim out.

“She get like that some, but she is really such a sweet lady mostly. Funny thing, though. Must have been she had a little of that in her somewhere along. The doctors all say they just don’t know. Some of them, those bad traits come out, some the Alzheimer just change them completely.”

“No worries,” said Tim. “She kept looking at her right wrist.”

“She do like that, hundred times a day. Them boys always giving her jewelry, so she got something to see.”

Tim nodded. The twins gave her the jewelry so people would think Lidia was fixated by the gems, rather than the scar.

“She ever say where that scar on her wrist came from?”

“Broke a window, she said once. You know, they tell you one thing one day and something else tomorrow.”

“But she is right-handed, isn’t she?”

“Oh yeah. Some of them dements, they forget so much they don’t even know which hand to use to pick up a spoon. But she ain’t like that. She use that right hand for everything.”

“How long have you taken care of her?”

“Lidia? Oh, it’s three, four years at least. She wasn’t so bad when she come in here. Only thing was she could never keep those boys straight. Sometime she tell me Paul was here and sometime she call him Cass. But these days she don’t hardly recognize either one. Lots of times she call them something else entirely once they gone.”

“And what might that be?”

Eloise stopped. “What is that name? She’s sayin it all the time.” Eloise touched the wooden support rail that ran along the wall as if it might help her recollection. “Brings me in mind of something whenever she do it.” One hand shot up when her memory finally sparked. “Oh, I know. It’s one of them cartoons my grandkids watch. Fella always got lightning in his hand, this character.”

Tim got it quickly. “Zeus?”

“Zeus!” She beamed. There was a good deal of gold in Eloise’s mouth. “That’s who she tell me come visit. More than once. Must be they resemble him some to her mind.”

Once he was home, Tim paged through his files until he found the bundle of clippings from Dita’s murder. There were photos of Zeus in nearly every story. Then Tim called up Paul’s campaign site. It was ridiculous, frankly, when you looked at it, the resemblance he and so many other folks never saw, let alone remarked on. The shape of the face differed a bit but the three men shared the same nose and hair and mouth and eyes. What had Mickey made of their looks? Probably nothing. People didn’t see what they didn’t want to. Was that the hardest part of life, to look at it fresh and without preconceptions? Or would it just be unbearable chaos that way?

The next morning Tim went out to McGrath Hall to deliver Lidia’s fingerprints. McGrath had been the police headquarters since 1921. The red stone heap might have passed for a medieval fortress, with stone arches over the massive planked oaken doors and notched battlements on the roof. When Tim was on the Force, he had hated the place, because he only got called down for somebody to bust his chops over something he could do nothing about. Then his last year and a half as a cop, they made him acting chief of Homicide, a job he never asked for, and gave him an office here. The gossip and intrigue that swirled through the halls was like a maelstrom that was just going to suck him down, and he often wished he could come and go in disguise. The milieu of the place became a big part of what had driven him into retirement.

Dickerman’s office was in the basement of the building. If the brass had their way, Mo would have been situated halfway to China. They hated him, because Mo was always using his eminence to bend them backward with threats to raise a public ruckus if they wouldn’t buy a new piece of equipment or software he wanted. The higher-ups thought, often with good reason, that the money could be better spent on other aspects of policing. But on a force that like most urban departments was frequently mired in controversy, if not scandal, Mo and his worldwide reputation were assets they could not afford to dispense with.

“How was Hollywood?” Tim asked when he arrived. Mo’s lab down the hall was huge and state-of-the-art, but his small office was barely big enough for his desk and his metal filing cabinets. His garden windows were half-height and emitted only the barest light through the wells.

“Those people,” Mo answered, but said no more.

Mo had retained possession of the original lifts from Dita’s room, because Mo’s travel schedule had kept Tim from picking them up. He handed over Lidia’s prints now. Mo had insisted on negotiating a new contract with Tooley, which acknowledged that this examination wouldn’t utilize any of the prints Judge Lands had ordered returned to other parties. Mo was a stickler, knowing that there were plenty of people in the county who’d use any controversy, especially in his outside employment, as a reason to oust him. He promised to begin the print comparison that night. He was one of those widowers who minimized his time at home.

“You know,” Tim said, “I never got to ask you about that thing with Cass’s prints from Hillcrest. Last time we talked, you were wanting to get a look at Paul’s ten-card, because you thought Cass’s intake prints at Hillcrest didn’t match the crime scene.”

Mo looked through his heavy frames for some time and then got up to shut the oak door. It had an old-fashioned frosted wired pane in the middle on which Dickerman’s name was printed in block letters.

“You remember that day last month when Lands whistled me up to the bench to report on my findings about Paul’s prints?” Mo asked.

“Sure.”

“I nearly wet my socks. I was just waiting for him to ask me the wrong question and I’d look like Ralph Kramden. You know, ‘Humanah humanah.’”

Tim laughed. It wasn’t a bad imitation of Jackie Gleason.

“I thought you said Paul’s prints didn’t match the crime scene.”

“They don’t. Now that I’ve finally gotten a look at Cass’s ten-card, I can exclude even the inconclusives.”

“And what about Cass himself?”

“You remember a few days after Greenwood finally found Cass’s prints and sent them over here, Lands said I had to give them back. Stern had an associate hie out this way to carry the card back to Greenwood County that afternoon. What does that tell you?”

“Maybe there was something they didn’t want you to figure out. Maybe Cass’s prints don’t match the crime scene either?”

“They do. With all the craziness in this case, that wouldn’t have been a complete surprise. But the minute I got that card, I looked at everything. Cass’s prints were all over Dita’s room, just the same as Logan said back in 1983, including the outside knob of the French door.”

“So what was the big deal?”

Mo looked away and poked his tongue to his cheek.

“It’s been a while, I’ll tell you, since I was sitting up at night thinking about a case. I was ready to hire a brass band when Lands finally entered the dismissal.”

At his age, Tim now and then found himself having unpredictable lapses, where he simply couldn’t follow the loops of an ordinary conversation. That seemed to be happening now.

“I’m not catching the drift, Mo. Cass’s prints are all over Dita’s room and Paul’s aren’t. What’s strange?”

Dickerman wiped his lips with his whole hand.