Scott Turow - Identical

“Not that I know of,” Paul answered. Horgan, who’d done criminal defense work for decades, had asked the question so casually that Paul had responded with equal nonchalance. But Ray was still a sly cat. Only now that his steel blues stayed put on Paul did he realize that Ray had been asking the same thing for ten minutes, in hopes of an unequivocal response.

But Crully wouldn’t let him answer. Mark stood up, all five-six of him, but still looking, from the hard set of his face, like somebody you wouldn’t want to mess with. He was done wasting time.

“You have to sue. Period. Personally, Ray, I’m not spinning my wheels asking what Hal’s got. Because if he’s got anything real, Paul’s not gonna be mayor anyway.” Crully turned toward his candidate. “So, Paul, either quit now or sue.”

Crully flipped his pencil in the air and let it bounce on the table and left the room.

Tim Brodie lived in the same Kewahnee neighborhood in which Paul and Cass Gianis had grown up, and where Hal had started out. The little hip-roofed bungalows, all of them built of brick before the Second World War, sat squat as toads on forty-foot lots, with huge old trees in the snowy parkways. When Tim bought his house in 1959, not long after he’d made detective, he felt he’d done whatever people were talking about when they had told him to grow up and make something of himself.

Now he awoke with a start. He was on the plaid family room sofa, a heavy volume on his chest. He sat up with an ominous grunt and waited until his body and his head came back to him. His leg ached unbearably just for a moment whenever he awoke. Tim didn’t know if the pain subsided or he merely got used to it. He had waited all his life for time to catch up to him and now it had.

He recognized the doorbell. When he could move, he made his way to the front door. Ordinarily, he’d expect it to be his granddaughter, Stefanie, but he’d been over there with her and her funny little husband last night. Instead, he saw a woman on his stoop, breathing fog in the cold. She was someone he knew, he realized, but he just couldn’t place her.

He opened the front door but not the glass storm.

“Evon Miller,” she said, and offered her hand. “From ZP.”

“Oh, hell,” he answered. He stepped back at once to welcome her. He’d met Evon a few times, the first when she took the position at ZP of his pal from the Force, Collins Mullaney. Collins had liked the job, but had to fall on his sword because a ZP real estate manager in Illinois was paying bribes to lower the company’s property taxes. Collins parachuted out with a big package and had no ill will toward Evon. She was a good egg, a bandy little gal, a former FBI agent who years back had busted several state court judges. She’d been in the Olympics, too. Field hockey was Tim’s memory. Also didn’t make any secret of the fact she was gay, which was something Tim had gotten over early in his life when he tried to make a go of it playing the trombone. What the hell did he care who you slept with, if you had good pitch and kept time?

“To what do I owe the honor?” he asked, once he had her inside. He told her to take off her coat. She was OK-looking, thick-built but with a little bit of a stylish way about her and short blondish hair. Her face was wide, and in the strong daylight, he could see she had kind of pebbly skin.

“Need to talk to you about something,” she said. “I’ve been calling your cell for three days.”

“Really?” Tim saw the contraption on the table in the foyer where he’d set it when he got done following around Corus Dykstra from YourHouse. Dead. He laughed as he slid the phone in his pocket. “I was actually wondering why my daughter called the landline yesterday. Don’t get old,” he told her. It was the drifting part of age, the way his mind seemed to have no home on earth, which often surprised him.

He offered Evon coffee, but she declined.

“Grew up in a Mormon town,” she said. “My dad was a Jack, but I just never developed the habit. I’ll take a glass of water, if that’s OK.”

He was in a plaid flannel shirt and twill pants and Evon could see he’d been asleep. His face was red and his white hair, some of it starting to yellow, was sticking straight up in patches where it should have been pushed over his bare scalp. He had a lumpy, marked face like an old potato, and he had become one of those elderly guys with a permanent wary expression, seemingly afraid that any second now somebody might take advantage of him. Tim handed her the glass and then led her back toward the family room, where he said he liked to sit. She had some memory that Tim was a widower, and the house probably looked just the same as when his wife passed a few years back, crowded with the relics of a lifetime. It was the kind of place where you had to turn sideways to move around the furniture. The walls were thick with photographs, both family shots and scenery, as well as children’s paintings. And every tabletop was forested with objects: Limoges figurines. Little lacquered boxes. Glass paperweights. Books and more framed photos. They could have done Antiques Roadshow here for a month.

In the back room, a sunny add-on with tall windows, there was soft music, a swing take on “It’s All Right With Me.” A crooner’s voice yielded to a trombone solo, and Tim stood for one second, listening with his eyes closed and a finger raised. Then he silenced the old phonograph and lifted an LP tenderly from a turntable, slipping it into a grayed sleeve. He had been reading, too, and slid a mark into a huge volume.

“Greek myths,” he answered, when she asked about the book. “Once Maria passed, I figured I better get on to what was left on my lists. Said I’d read Shakespeare and got through The Comedy of Errors , but that’s kind of a slapstick piece, you know, twins separated at birth. I can handle the comedies, but King Lear , whoa, that’s tough. These old tales”-he hefted the book with both hands-“don’t seem to put me to sleep so fast.” In the light, she could see the white whiskers he hadn’t shaved this morning standing on his cheeks. “So you here about Dykstra and YourHouse?” he asked.

“Not really. But Hal says you turned up a lot of great stuff following him around. Frankly, if I’d known what the boss had you up to, I’d have tried to stop him. The whole deal could have cratered.”

Tim shook his head. “Nobody notices an eighty-one-year-old guy. They look right through you.”

The melancholy frankness of the observation silenced Evon for a second, but Tim didn’t seem to be seeking sympathy. She turned the subject and asked Tim if he’d seen the papers this week. Laughing, he pointed to a pile in the kitchen, all sheathed in blue plastic, another thing that seemed to be getting past him. Evon handed over Wednesday’s front page, and he groaned at the headline: “Kronon: Gianis Part of Sister’s Murder.”

“Me oh my,” he said, as he scanned the article.

“Paul sent Hal a letter demanding a retraction, and Hal won’t budge. In fact, he repeated this stuff to a couple more reporters. And he’s planning to put ads on TV saying the same thing. Gianis filed suit for defamation late yesterday.”

“Oh dear,” said Tim. He knew all about how people could be when somebody they loved got murdered. A brick could fall off a building and kill someone you cherished, and it wouldn’t be quite as hard to accept as a homicide. When some goofed-up stranger made a conscious choice to end the life of a person precious to you, it knocked the pins out from everything we assume in living with each other. Tim had spent more than twenty-five years on the Force, many of them nodding and patting hands and telling people that they’d be best off letting it go in time. But some folks just couldn’t. And Hal was one of them.