Identical

19

Shirley Wilhite,” said the voice on Tim’s cell phone, the next morning. “Bet you thought I forgot about you.” It was about 11 a.m., and Tim was settled in the sun-room, reading more of his book on the Greek myths, while Kai Winding tooted along from the phonograph. His first thought was that Shirley had to be another widow-they phoned all the time with every imaginable angle, anything from a casserole too delicious not to share or women who claimed they were returning his call. “They took forever getting those records from storage. Everybody thinks they have too much to do. That’s what’s wrong with this country, if you ask me.”

He talked to her another second, feeling, as he often did, that he was playing from behind. Then it came to him: She was from the ring company in Utah.

“Lucky we were still using paper back then,” said Shirley Wilhite. “Five years later, we had everything on floppy disks. Remember them? Try finding somebody who can make sense of those things. Easton College, right? What was your nephew’s name?”

“Gianis.” He spelled it. In Utah, Paul’s name meant nothing. “Not really my nephew, by the way. I just call him that.”

“Oh sure. I’m Auntie Shirley to half my neighbors’ kids.”

“Exactly.”

“OK.” She took a second. “We got two of them.”

“Twin boys. I’m looking for Paul.”

“OK. All right, well, he bought two rings.”

“Two?”

“Let me look here. Yeah. One a man’s, one a woman’s. Same model. The J46 with emblem. Now I need the catalog.” He heard her clattering around. “No, we don’t make it any more. I think the K106 might look the most like it. I’m going to send you pictures. You use a computer?”

“Some.”

“Well, the current catalog is online. But I’ll send you copies of the old catalog, so you know what he had. Got a fax number?”

“Can you give me pictures of the woman’s ring, also? Maybe he’ll want to replace both. And if it’s not too much trouble, send the order form, too. Maybe he’ll want to make a claim for insurance.”

“Not a problem. Happy to help.”

Two rings? He considered that. Late in the afternoon, he was on his way into Center City to pick up the faxes, which he’d directed to ZP. He passed Georgia Lazopoulos’s house and on impulse parked and rang the bell.

She stared at him through the storm door. Her dark raccoony eyes and the rest of her heavy face instantly took on a glum reproachful weight.

“You said you wouldn’t bother me again.” Her voice was muffled by the glass, but clear. She was dressed as she had been when they’d been here last time, in pink stretch pants and a dowdy ruffled top.

“I just need to ask you one question about that class ring Paul wore.”

“Paul didn’t wear a class ring,” she answered, and closed the door.

She had been a sweet-natured young woman, at least as much as Tim had seen of her. It was a wonder sometimes what life did to people. He started down the stoop, then reconsidered, and climbed back up and rang again. Nothing to lose.

“You told us he wore a class ring,” he said, as soon as the door opened.

“No, I didn’t. And frankly I wish I hadn’t told you anything. You made a fool out of me, you and that woman who was with you. There isn’t a person around here that doesn’t think I was crazy to let you make that tape. I sound like a vengeful old witch.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” said Tim, “not to us. Or to you for that matter.”

“Everybody’s mad at me. They think I went out of my way to do Paul dirty. Even Cass showed up here to give me a piece of his mind.”

“Cass did?” It was the first Tim had heard of anybody seeing Cass since the day he’d left prison. “When did that happen?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A few days after the ad went on television. He wanted me to talk to their lawyers, and I said I wasn’t making that mistake twice. He just stood where you’re standing and said, ‘There’s nothing for him to say, Georgia, except that he’s sorry you’re still so hurt.’ He made me feel this small.” Her hand came up for a second.

“But he didn’t say anything on that commercial was untrue, did he?”

She didn’t answer, but brooded. Her fingers had never left the knob to her front door and now she started to close it again.

“Wait,” said Tim. “I don’t understand about the ring.” He was afraid the confrontation with Cass had turned her around. She would disavow everything she’d told them before. “I know he bought one.”

“That’s what you asked me-did Paul buy a ring like Cass? And I said he did.”

“Seems he bought two, actually. I thought he must have given you the other one, because the second was for a woman.”

“No, that was Lidia’s. She’d always sworn her sons were going to be educated, even though there wasn’t anybody in her family or Mickey’s who’d been to college. She never made any secret that she wished she’d gone. So the twins thought it would be sweet to get her a class ring. They knew their mom. I think Lidia showed the damn thing to every person she met for the next ten years.”

Georgia, of course, hadn’t gone to college either. Tim couldn’t guess if it was Lidia, always a strong personality, or the ring that spurred her bitterness.

“And Paul wore the other one, right?”

She looked through the door with a purely hateful expression for one moment and then turned away without a word, leaving Tim on the cold concrete. He more or less thought he was expected to go, but she’d left the front door open, and so he waited in the freezing air, hoping she might return-which she finally did. When she arrived, she snatched the storm door open and reached out to drop something in his palm. It was the ring. There was a large red stone in the center, with the numbers 19 and 79 raised from the embossed design on either side.

“See? You can have that for all I care. Paul gave it to me when he graduated. I wore it around my neck on a chain. Remember when girls used to do that? It wasn’t the ring I wanted, but it was a step in the right direction, I thought. Stupid me.”

“So he didn’t have the ring when Dita was killed?”

“Jesus, Tim. Are you listening? I had the ring. I was wearing it. I wore it most places and I sure as hell was going to wear it to the church picnic with all those other girls sniffing around Paul. As far as I know, Paul has never had that ring on his hand in his entire life. He didn’t like rings or jewelry. He thought that kind of stuff wasn’t for guys. I could barely get him to wear a watch.”

Tim looked down at the ring, then back at Georgia, whose face had darkened again. She heaved a great sigh and opened the storm door once more, but only briefly enough to snatch the ring back. With that, she wheeled and slammed the door behind her.

“No ring,” said Evon. They sat in her office. She had one shoe on a trash can as a footrest. “Didn’t she tell us Paul wore a ring?”

He told her Georgia’s version and she nodded. “She’s right. She said Paul bought a ring like Cass. But you’d have thought she would have told us what became of it.”

Tim looked askance at her. No woman he knew was going to volunteer that a fella had kept her on the string three more years with a class ring instead of a diamond. Evon got his point.

“Besides,” Tim said, “she probably didn’t understand the significance. As loose as that investigation was, I don’t think there was much in the papers about Dita’s bruise pattern or what it meant.”

“So Paul didn’t wear a ring, and Cass did,” Evon said by way of recapitulation.

“Right. So it appears.”

“And Paul’s fingerprints aren’t there, and Cass’s are.”

“Right.”

“I think the boss may want to think twice about opposing Paul’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.”

“Maybe. There is one other thing.” He’d been sitting on what Dickerman had told him about Cass’s print card from Hillcrest not matching the lifts from the crime scene. Tim had given Mo his word not to repeat that, but by now Dickerman had had the time to reconcile the discrepancy and Tim had heard no more about it. Nonetheless, at the outset, he warned Evon that Mo sometimes viewed things in his own way.

“There’s a story about Mo, not sure it’s true, but somebody’s sister swears she saw it happen. You know the light-rail, how you buy a ticket, purple inbound, white outbound? So Mo is headed out to the airport and he gets on with his white ticket and sticks it in the little ticket holder on the back of the seat in front of him. And he sees everybody else has got a purple ticket, and he actually turns to the lady beside him and says, ‘Look at all these idiots on the wrong train.’”

Evon laughed hard. “That can’t be true,” she said.

“You get the point.” He explained what Mo had concluded from looking at the photocopy of Cass’s prints at Hillcrest.

“That can’t be true either,” she said. “How could it? He said in court that Paul doesn’t match any of the lifts from the scene. So what is he saying now? Neither of them were there?”

Tim shrugged. He had absolutely no answer.

“We never got Cass’s fingerprints, did we?”

“Never came close. That’s another weird thing. Supposedly even the neighbors don’t see hide nor hair of Cass, but Georgia told me he came right to her door to read her out for making that commercial.”

“So he’s not on vacation?”

“Apparently not.”

Eventually, Tim asked how she was doing in her personal life, and she answered with a bitter little smile.

“I spent most of last night researching how to get an order of protection.”

He groaned.

“It’ll be a long time before I go down this road again, Tim. I can’t stand the disappointment.” She smiled ruefully and asked him, “What does Shakespeare have to say about that?”

He didn’t answer but started rummaging in the inner and outer pockets of his sport coat. Finally, he found what he was looking for folded in fourths in his wallet and held it out.

“Are you kidding?” she asked.

“Read it. That’s from Comedy of Errors.”

It was another scrap of ruled paper with a quotation written out in block letters, about being a drop of water in the ocean, looking for another drop.

“Now what does this mean?” she asked, after she’d read it over several times. When she handed the scrap back, Tim studied it again.

“I’m not so sure,” said Tim. “Except everybody finds all this confusing at times. And disappointing. But there’s an ocean out there. You shouldn’t stop. Not at your age. If Maria had died when I was fifty, I’d have thought, ‘I’m too young to be alone.’”

“But not now? You know what they say, Tim. A man your age who can still drive can get the former Miss Universe.” He laughed about that, even though it was a tender spot. He couldn’t see much at night any more and tried to avoid driving after dark. Pretty soon, his sight wouldn’t be adequate for daylight, either. That meant he’d have to go to Seattle. One of his daughters or the other begged him at least once a week to make the move. But he wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. He wasn’t ready to leave his house, and his things, and the life he’d had with Maria.

“Not now. No appetite for it. I have my folks to love. Daughters and the grandkids, and the ones I still hold in my heart, Maria and Kate. They’re all precious to me, each of them, they taught me who I am. But at this age, you’re just holding on to that, enjoying it. But fifty? I’d say, ‘I can do this again, learn more, change more, love more.’ I really would.”

She looked up at him from her desk, still not sold. When he reached the door, he turned back.

“You can’t tell anybody that stuff about Dickerman. That’s simply on the QT.”

“They call it the DL these days, Tim,” she said, smiling. “And that’s too goofy to repeat to anybody. Did you ever talk to Dickerman after he analyzed Paul’s prints?”

“Tried, but I haven’t caught up with him.” Mo had been on the West Coast lecturing at several police academies, and then, believe it or not, in Hollywood, where he was a consultant for a TV show. Now that forensic science was hot stuff on television, you could barely hit the clicker without seeing Mo poking his heavy black-framed glasses back up on his nose on one true-crime show or another.

“Circle back when you can,” Evon said. “Just so we can cross that one off the list.”

He wished her a good weekend, which was meant in jest. She’d be here both days doing compliance stuff for the YourHouse deal, which would finally close on Monday.