Identical

12

In prospect, Evon had regarded retirement from the FBI as something akin to dying. She had her twenty in more than three years ago, but was required to wait until age fifty to claim her retirement benefits-about half her salary for the rest of her life, one of the big selling points of the Bureau to start. Within the agency, the standard advice was to go as soon as possible, when you were young enough to establish yourself in another career, but she’d thought she had time to figure out her future-until a local headhunter called. With the headlines then about ZP employees in Illinois bribing tax assessors, Hal and the board had decided to replace Collins Mullaney as head of security with somebody who had shining armor and a crime-buster reputation. The fact that Evon had also done an MBA in the weekend program at Easton-a way to stay busy after Doreen died-and had management experience as deputy special agent in charge of the Kindle County RA made her a perfect fit, and one to whom Hal made the proverbial offer she couldn’t refuse.

So here she was, the senior vice-president for security at a publicly traded company. But the most unexpected aspect of the job was how much she loved it. Heather, who could be astute about everybody else, had sized Evon up accurately one night when she said, ‘You’re just one of those people who loves to work.’ True, but the challenges were intricate in masterminding security for a company that owned 246 malls and shopping centers in thirty-five states, with over three thousand employees. She basically confronted the same issues as a suburban police chief, with far less authority. There was a big-league felony on one of their properties every day-serious drug deals, truck hijackings, shootings. Terrorism preoccupied her, since the haters could make quite a statement by, for instance, blowing up a mall during Christmas season. Over two thousand security guards roamed their sites, most rented from an outside vendor, but they became her problem when they stole from tenants or, like one creep, raped somebody in a clothing store dressing room. Every day she had to deal with reports of road rage in the parking lots, vandalism somewhere, kids caught smoking pot on the security cameras, slip-and-falls, and six-year-olds getting their sleeves snagged in the escalator. Who would have believed that so many protest groups would desire to make their case in the local mall? And none of that considered internal operations, where she was responsible for computer security and investigating the astonishing range of misbehavior your own employees could think up, everything from sexual harassment to a guy in Denver who was pocketing the proceeds when he rented out the far side of the company parking lot for football games at Mile High Stadium. Not to mention compliance issues, which brought the never-ending grillings from the lawyers. Often, she was still at her desk at ten at night and back at seven, with not much time in between when her brain went into neutral.

Her days, of course, were frequently prolonged by hours listening to Hal. Apparently, a session was about to begin. His slender assistant, Sharize, appeared in Evon’s doorway to tell her she was needed immediately. In Hal’s vast office, she found him seated on the beige ultra-suede sofa near the windows beside his elderly Aunt Teri. A desperate look emanated from amid the dark rings that often made Hal’s brown eyes look like caves.

“Aunt Teri is giving me hell about taking our licks at Paul Gianis.”

Evon had known the old lady since coming to work here. Childless, Teri had always been close to her only nephew, and now that both his parents were gone, Hal spoke to her at least once a day, often in marathon conversations that made him late for meetings and conference calls. Evon admired the old woman in a way, although she frequently had the sense that Teri had become a prisoner of her own outrageousness, the foul-mouthed, razor-tongued spinster who’d toughed her way through the world, and by now was a self-conscious imitation of the gutsy and shameless old broad everybody expected. Hal took great pleasure in recounting their adventures together. Teri, for example, had taken Hal bungee jumping without his parents’ knowledge when he was sixteen-he admitted she virtually cast him off the bridge-and flown him to see the monuments at Mount Rushmore, piloting the plane herself, not long after she’d gotten her license. Hal loved to burnish her legend, speaking of the men she drank under the table-starting with him-or the way that Teri would routinely announce at family dinners that she was taking a trip the following week, usually to Manhattan or Miami, to get laid. There had apparently been only a few serious boyfriends, and none of them able to keep up with her.

“This serves no purpose,” Teri said to her nephew, largely ignoring Evon. She had a hand on her gnarly cane, which looked to be an old shepherd’s crook, undoubtedly Greek, and half her face was covered in large turquoise-framed sunglasses. Macular degeneration had left the old lady legally blind. “I’ve never liked vengeful people, Herakles. Never. Paul had nothing to do with that murder. And you know it.”

Evon had met a few folks approaching ninety who retained considerable physical grace, and Teri might have been one of them if she had ever been persuaded to give up alcohol and cigarettes. Sometimes Hal let her smoke in the office, but she hadn’t lit up yet, a sure sign that he wanted to get her on her way. Teri’s appearance was, to be honest, about as trashy as a half-blind octogenarian could get away with, with giant rose balls of rouge inflaming her cheeks, dyed shoulder-length blonde hair resembling a pile of hay, and crimson fingernails grown out like talons. Beneath the rouge and powder-and a full daily baptism in perfume-she seemed to have shrunk inside her own skin, which hung in folds from her forearms. She wore lipstick the color of a fire hydrant, and gold jewelry by the pound, huge pieces clanking on her neck and around her wrists. She was seriously bent and one hip was terrible. But she remained willful and cagey, and except for occasional difficulty remembering names, her intellect was largely undimmed. The reverence she was automatically due as a person of advanced age made her a tough customer, and she knew it.

Hal continued to resist.

“The hell I do. Have you been watching TV?”

“Georgia Cleon is a jealous twat,” said Teri. “She’s bitter. Nobody told her to marry Jimmy. I’m sorry it turned out bad for her, but that wasn’t Paul’s fault. She’s just mad because”-she was briefly stumped for a word-“because Paul dumped her. Or dumped on her. However they say he broke her heart. Isn’t that what they say now?” She finally turned to Evon, but only for brief clarification.

“Dumped her,” said Evon quietly. That was the term Heather used in her messages on Evon’s cell. She talked until the allotted time ran out, bouncing between extremes, raging and then begging for another chance. ‘I can’t believe you dumped me. I deserved so much better from you,’ last night’s barrage had started. Evon had no explanation for why she listened to every word until the message was cut off. Because you love her. Because you are hoping in every syllable to hear some semblance of the beautiful girl you fell in love with-beautiful and graceful, and sane.

“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.