Scott Turow - Identical

“I think they call them assisted living.”

“Whatever.”

She told him she had to get in to the office, but promised to return to have lunch. Once he saw her to the door, Tim sat in the sun-room and put Kai and J.J. on and listened to them play. All the time Tim tooted on the trombone as a kid, he believed he was going to be that good, and there was no more chance of that than of his becoming a 747. And he thought he was a good cop and a decent man, but he was willing to buy all of Zeus’s palaver because it bought him a little more comfort in life. None of the investigators, so far as Tim recalled, had even thought to cast a look in Zeus’s direction, because of the blood. But Tim was the guy experienced enough to have seen through it.

The truth was often so damn painful. People couldn’t stand to live with it. And him thinking he was in the truth business. No one really was. You took as much as you could and called it quits.

But there was music and sunshine. And maybe when he got himself around other people every day, he might even find some cute old gal. Evon had said the same thing a lot of folks did. In those places a guy who could still drive was more popular than a billionaire. Maria would forgive him. What Sofia had told him had helped. Sitting here on his plaid couch, he again felt his love for Maria, which would last as long as he did.

He put his hands over his face to give the rising shame and indignation about Zeus another second to drain. It would come and go for days. But he slapped his thighs.

Life, thought Tim, almost age eighty-two, goes on.

When Evon got to the ZP Building, Hal was locked in the giant conference room with a battalion of bankers and lawyers, a few of whom would emerge now and then and scurry to a side office for conferences or phone calls to superiors. The meeting had been expected to last two hours and was now in hour four. On the business side of ZP’s offices, there was a portentous silence. A lot of people seemed to be holding their breath.

Finally, after lunch, Hal’s assistant, Sharize, told Evon he was free. The bankers and lawyers were filing out, men and women in blue suits who looked like teams of pallbearers in training, one face grimmer than the next.

She entered the vast conference room, which was normally partitioned into three, but Hal was on the phone with Mina and he held up a hand. Evon sat in a chair in the hall until he was finished, a good fifteen minutes.

When Sharize brought Evon in, Hal’s suit coat was on the back of his chair. He’d removed his tie, and his white shirt was darkened by large spots of sweat. He sat in front of the vast bank of windows over the spangled river, peering abjectly at the wall. Another portrait of Zeus was over there, in the center of the sycamore wainscoting, so perhaps that’s where Hal had started, but now he seemed to be indulging his habit of looking at nothing at all. When he finally saw Evon, he withdrew his middle finger, on which he’d been nibbling, from his mouth, and gave her a quick smile, but it was in the nature of a wince.

“It’s over,” he said.

“What is?”

“ZP.”

Evon found she had sat down, still a good thirty feet from her boss.

“How could that be?”

“Housing prices are dropping, even collapsing at YourHouse’s end of the market. The bankers have locked arms and want another 150 million dollars in collateral on the YourHouse deal, which has to come out of the equity on the commercial projects. But the other lenders-often the same frigging people-won’t give up their senior positions. In fact, retail is down. And, according to the economists, going down further. Which means the shopping centers’ values are tanking, too, because rents have to drop. I thought we were pretty conservatively leveraged, but unless there’s a giant change, we’ll be in bankruptcy by the end of the year and the ZP shareholders, starting with me, will be wiped out. I may even vote for Obama.” He smiled wanly then. “Joke,” he said.

She repeated herself. How could that be?

“Well, I asked the same thing. But it’s just arithmetic. I never imagined all of this stuff would go down at the same time. Nobody did. The bankers will reassess at year-end, but we need to make a public announcement now, which will crater the stock. It’s doom.”

“How do you feel, Hal?”

He laughed.

“Awful. My dad started with a duffel bag of cash he’d borrowed from my grandfather and worked his whole life, built an empire, and I’ve lost the whole thing. In a couple of months. I’m glad he didn’t live to see it. I truly am. I can’t even imagine what he would say.”

Evon pondered. “If he was honest, I’m sure he’d tell you he’d made a lot worse mistakes.”

“I doubt that.” His fingernails were back in his mouth. Evon considered telling Hal that it was Zeus’s honesty, not his mistakes, that was subject to doubt, but she couldn’t see what good it would do at the moment.

“Do you want to talk about the Gianises?”

He flipped a hand. Who cares?

“Long-short, Cass says he didn’t do it. He pled because the way the evidence was going to shake out, there was a good chance both Lidia and he would end up in prison.”

“So Lidia did kill my sister?”

She ran him through all the reasons to doubt that. He nodded as if he understood, but Evon realized she had only a small fraction of his attention.

“So who beat her up like that?” Hal asked.

Evon waited, then went with the answer she’d planned.

“We don’t know. We just don’t know.”

“Huh,” he said. If Hal ever sat down to do the math, about who was in the house, who was strong enough, there would only be one person left in the equation. But Hal might not work that out in this lifetime. His father probably had to stay up on the mountain for Hal to be who he was.

“You know what my wife said when I told her I just lost a billion dollars?” he said to Evon.

This was going to be a classic. “What?” Evon asked.

“‘It will be better for us.’ How do you like that? I mean, we’ll have enough. No plane. I’ll have to get rid of the horse farm. Stuff like that. But I won’t have to keep the lamp lit for my father. I can do what I want, instead of trying to maintain his monument. That was her point. She might be right. I feel too crappy now to know.”

“Good for Mina,” said Evon.

“She’s a good one,” he said.

She felt sorry for Hal, terrible, the more so as she thought everything over. At end, Hal for all his many faults had been the most honest guy around. He had acted for the most part as a loyal brother and son pursuing the truth. And now in his mid-sixties he was going to have to see if he had the strength to become somebody else.

“You better shine up your résumé,” he told her. “Get it out on the street.”

She hadn’t thought of that yet. She was going to be out of a job herself, assuming Hal was right. Whoever bought up ZP’s properties would probably be a bigger operation. They’d come in and clean house. It didn’t matter. Since she’d started making big money, she’d always kept two years’ living expenses in cash and she’d find another job anyway. Headhunters called all the time. She just needed love. That was really the work she had left.

“I’ll give you the greatest reference ever,” Hal said. “Which you deserve.”

“I appreciate it.”

She walked over and gave Hal a hug, which was a first.

“I really don’t think your dad would have done any better, Hal. Give yourself a break on that.”

“I just didn’t see any of this coming,” he said. “I should have. It’s right in front of my face. Of everyone’s really. The same economists who told me that the housing market had bottomed out are now saying there’s going to be a plague of foreclosures soon, because people won’t be able to sell their houses for what they owe. The banks, everybody holding those mortgage bonds, everybody will be doing the hurt dance. How could we all miss it?”