Identical

24

Zeus had left his sister a considerable bequest, and Teri had been a shrewd businessperson in her own right, often investing in real estate with her brother. Her condo occupied far too much space for one person, especially somebody who had trouble seeing or getting about. Yet Aunt Teri was basically trapped here by her treasures, which she’d accumulated around the world and with which, Hal said, she would never part. He claimed she was like one of the pharaohs who would prefer to be entombed with all the stuff.

The condo was in one of the lavish old Art Deco buildings constructed in the 1920s on the river’s edge, not far from Center City. It sported fancy limestone arches and decorations on the exterior, and a red tile roof. Teri’s apartment had the feeling of a Fabergé egg, every inch elaborately decorated and ribbed in gilt. Each object was gold-the picture frames, the table legs. Even the many glass display cases for her various collections were etched in gold leaf. Within the boxes were the eclectic range of things that fascinated Teri-African jewelry, buttons of whalebone, antique children’s toys, and of course erotica. An entire case, a yard square, was dedicated to phalluses-a Greek tradition, she pointed out, but one that nonetheless sent her nephew screaming. Hal walked in with a scarf and covered the case the minute he arrived.

Teri had welcomed Evon’s request for a meeting without any questions. Tim had wanted to come, too, but Evon told him without further explanation that she felt Teri and she had a rapport.

“So, what’s up?” Teri had a highball that her servant, old German, had poured for her without apparent instruction, and she settled herself on the large chesterfield with a flowery pattern, her cane at hand almost in the manner of a scepter. Even at home, Teri was in her heavy makeup and jewelry. Seated ten feet away, Evon could smell the old lady’s perfume. On the gold-leafed wooden coffee table in front of her, Teri had everything she might need positioned precisely so she could find it-the remotes for the TV and the audio system, a cordless telephone, her drink and a golden bell, presumably used to summon German.

“We got some surprising results from our DNA tests,” Evon told her.

Teri screwed up her stoplight-colored mouth and made no effort to contain herself.

“Fuck,” she said. “I was afraid of this.”

“Is that why you wanted Hal to stop the investigation?”

Teri didn’t respond, just shook her head of broom-straw hair from side to side.

“What a goddamned mess,” she finally said. “All right. Tell me.”

Evon tried to explain the DNA testing protocol and how it had inadvertently turned into a paternity test, but Teri interrupted.

“Don’t beat around the bush, dear.”

Evon sensed already that she wasn’t the one holding back information.

“Well, Hal isn’t Zeus’s son. Not biologically.”

“Fuck,” Teri said again. “You’re not going to tell him, are you?”

“That’s why I’m here. Tim and I-we don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“That’s for damn sure. It would break him in two. Definitely not.”

“If worse came to worst, we wanted to be able to say we talked to you and that you agreed it wasn’t in Hal’s best interest to share that information with him.”

“Scapegoat, right? That’s what you’re looking for?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“Put it however you want. You can’t tell him. Period.” Teri frumped around on the sofa, agitated by the notion, and unconcerned about the crossed obligations Evon felt. “I suppose you’re wondering whose he is?”

“I’m not sure it’s my place.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Just so you understand how it happened. And why Hal can’t find out. Did you ever hear that crap how my brother was a big hero who nearly died in an army hospital during World War II?”

“Hal talks about that all the time.”

“Well, it was true, in a way. But Zeus wasn’t overseas. He was in basic training. And he got the mumps.”

“Like kids?”

“Pretty serious with a grown-up. Especially a man. It nearly did him in. One of his senior officers was a Greek and he called my father and we all took the train down to Fort Barkley in Texas. Zeus was pretty fuckin’ sick, I want to tell you. Fever of 106. Face was the size of a watermelon and his balls had swollen up, they looked like a couple of damson plums. Took a peek when my folks weren’t looking. Quite a sight. Anyway, he made it. But the doctors told us at the time, there wasn’t much chance he was going to be able to have kids.

“So when he mustered out and comes back with Hermione and Herakles, I knew something was up. He kind of dripped out the story over the years. Hermione, you know, she was a Vasilikos. Did you hear that?”

“Greek mobsters, right?”

“Right. Yeah, my dad-what a dickhead that man was-he was a big Mafia wannabe. And he had the wrong kind of acquaintances in Athens and Zeus went to pay respects. Hal was just a newborn, a month or so old. Family was telling some fairy tale that the father was a dead Resistance fighter, but apparently she’d spread her legs for some German colonel, who’d skipped town when the Americans kicked the Nazis’ brown-shirted behinds. My big brother was the kind to see an opportunity. And Hermione, no way around it, she was a piece of ass in those days. So he came back here with a wife and an heir and a duffel bag full of money. And in some ways, it all worked out.

“My brother held Hal close always, because Zeus knew he was the only child he’d ever have. Zeus took some tests, but it was as the army docs had predicted, a sperm count close to zero. He always made out like it didn’t bother him, but a Greek guy, one like Zisis? Everything he did in life, I think, came from the fact that his nuts would have been more useful making noise in a couple of maracas.”

“Something to prove?” Evon asked.

“Exactly. Building all of these vast shopping malls, remaking the landscape. And naturally he fucked every woman he could find to say yes, and a few who may have only been thinking about it.”

Evon still marveled at these stories of Zeus as mob crony and philanderer. The Zeus she knew originally was the myth Hal created, undoubtedly with his father’s influence. That Zeus was not merely the kind of man Hal aspired to be, but someone to whom he would always rank second. The irony, Evon was realizing, was that no matter how much of a brat, Hal probably was the better person. If money hadn’t magnified his worst traits, people would even have described Hal as a good guy.

“Well, what about Dita?”

“Oh, she was Zeus’s. I don’t know exactly how they did it. I think the doctors sucked him out with a vacuum or something several times and saved it, and then turned Hermione upside down and shot it into her from a fire hose.”

“Really?”

“Of course not.” Unseeing, Teri still looked around to enjoy her laugh at Evon’s expense. “It was some fertility treatment. What had happened was our dad was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early fifties. And even then the doctors, the ones who knew anything, blamed cigarettes. We all smoked like we should have had brick chimneys on our heads, Zeus and my dad and mom and me, and Zeus took it in mind that if he stopped cold my dad would, too. Our dad, he was way too big an asshole to do something like that, even for his son, so he croaked himself instead. But apparently, smoking can also fry your nuts. Who knew? But some little cupcake Zeus had been balling comes to him about 1956 for money for an abortion. He was sure she was running a scam, but rather than tell her the truth, he goes off for another test, and lo and behold, there are quite a few little beasties swimming around in his spunk now. So that’s where Dita comes from, eventually.”

“Well, she’s not Zeus’s only child,” Evon said.

In her big turquoise glasses, Teri looked through the haze of her own smoke trying to make out what little she could of Evon.

“I figured that had to come out in the wash, too.”

“And how did that happen?” Evon asked.

“Well, dear, I think he put his nasty where it didn’t belong.” Teri got another good chuckle over herself. “You know, you look back, you’re always amazed by what went past you. I always knew Zeus and Lidia took quite a shine to one another when we were all kids. Not that anything could come of it. There was always one of those burning-hot old-country grudges between the families. Lidia’s people, they didn’t have the spit to wet their palms, but they still took some pride in looking down on the Kronons. I was sixteen before I set foot in her house. Lidia and me, we just all the time met up at the library.” ‘Li-berry,’ Teri pronounced it.

“At church with the youth group, the priest, Father Demos, he was sweet-natured but not up to these city kids. He’d be talking to himself and one couple or another would sneak off to the choir room. We all did it some. It was sort of like playing spin the bottle. I took my turns, too. That was how I started to figure I was barking up the wrong tree. The boys just left me cold.” Teri laughed out loud at the memory, proud of the defiance if nothing else. But Evon knew that for a woman of Teri’s age to say that, even to herself, had taken considerable courage.

“Anyway, Zeus and Lidia, I knew they were taking more turns than others. But twenty years later, I figured everybody had grown up and moved on, and my Lidia, she needed a job. You got more use out of a spare tire than anybody could of Mickey with his messed-up heart.

“Lidia, when I finally heard the story from her, many years on, she made it sound like Zeus had his way with her, but I never got an answer when I asked how many times exactly she got herself taken advantage of.” Teri cackled for a second. She loved the way sex made idiots out of everybody. She was on her brother’s side in a determinedly old-fashioned way. But Lidia was the sole support of her family, without any choices. Zeus was, politely put, a complete asshole. “Anyway, she got herself knocked up and never said a word to Zeus, or me for that matter. Probably didn’t want to turn me against my brother.”

“And what about Mickey, her husband? Did he know?”

“Well, sick as he was, everybody kind of took it as one hell of a surprise when Lidia got pregnant, but he always acted happy about it. Course after I knew the real story, it made me wonder how big a cluck he could have been. While she was pregnant, she was always whispering to her closest friends how he could still manage about a minute’s worth, but even then I wondered. But she must have convinced him. You can never tell what people will choose to believe.

“Right after Mickey’s surgery, it was like the twins’ second birthday party, and Mickey was drunk, and started in how they were no children of his, and Lidia, who usually would go crazy angry when she was upset, she just got weepy on him. ‘Don’t say that, Mickey. Why would you say something like that? They’re yours and you know that. You can’t be saying things like that.’ Pretty soon he was bawling, too, and begging her to forgive him. Even when he started breathing fire about Zeus a few years later, he never said anything about my brother touching his wife. That’s another thing you can’t tell Hal-that those boys are Zeus’s. Can you imagine? They are, he isn’t. You’d have to post guards at the windows.”

Evon’s instinct was the same as Teri’s. Not only would Hal be devastated, he was likely eventually to go into one of his bewildering tailspins, obsessing over the legal complications that might entitle the twins to some share of Zeus’s estate. Evon and Tim had agreed that the best solution when they finally spoke to Hal was to stay on the subject-the tests showed the blood at the scene was from neither of the Gianis twins. That might be shock enough to keep Hal from asking his usual sideways questions. Hal was preoccupied anyway these days, inasmuch as his bankers were raising questions about the YourHouse deal that Hal and his lawyers felt should have been posed before the closing.

“If we end up having to tell him the blood is a woman’s,” Evon said, “he’s not going to leave it at that. He’ll want to know who killed his sister-and what Lidia had to do with it.”

Teri shifted back among the silk pillows, trying again to get an eye on Evon.

“And why say that?”

“It has to be Lidia’s blood at the scene. The twins have a type-B parent, and it wasn’t your brother. Lidia wore an Easton class ring on her right hand that would have left that circular bruise on Dita’s cheek. And you can see now why she was desperate to stop Cass’s relationship with Dita. Tim and I are beginning to wonder if Cass pled guilty to keep his mother out of prison.”

Teri pursed her bright mouth and shook her head adamantly.

“Lidia didn’t kill my niece.”

“And Cass did?” Evon asked.

“Hon, I’m just like you. I wasn’t there. But I’ve known Lidia Gianis my entire life, and I’ve heard all of her secrets by now. And she didn’t kill my niece. Worse comes to worst, I’ll tell Hal the same thing. She’d say it to you herself, if she could, poor thing. I still go over there to see her, when I can stand it. The caregivers, they dress her up and move her around as if she was a doll. But her brain is like the stuff you scrape out of a cantaloupe. Breaks my heart. She can still talk some, if you don’t mind hearing the same thing five times in a minute. But she didn’t kill Dita.”

Evon struggled with this a second. Teri had clearly not reached the end of what she knew, but the old lady wasn’t going to share the rest, and Evon had no place to demand it.

“You know,” Teri said, “I didn’t think this was why you were calling. Hal said your girlfriend did you wrong and then went all batshit crazy on you. Thought you wanted advice, one old dyke to another.”

Evon laughed out loud at Teri’s boldness, but she was embarrassed that Heather had made her the talk of the ZP Building. Hal hadn’t heard about Evon’s domestic problems from her.

“She showed up at my apartment building last night and I swore out a protection order at the police station.”

“Oh dear,” Teri said. “Doesn’t sound like a good time.”

“It hasn’t been. I may be off relationships for the rest of my life. You seem to have survived.”

“I don’t know,” Teri said. “I always had my doubts about that stuff from Aristotle, that love is one soul inhabiting two bodies. But if you think I’m sitting here by myself with a highball and a cigarette because I wouldn’t prefer some old biddy coming in to nag me to get rid of both of them, you’re wrong. Here’s another saying.” She reverted to Greek.

“Meaning?”

“That’s Socrates. ‘Find a good wife and you’ll be happy; if not you’ll become a philosopher.’”

Evon was laughing when German came in. Teri apparently had been ordered by her doctors to take an afternoon nap. She fussed at him but got ready to say good-bye. Evon walked around the coffee table to hug the old woman and Teri brought her face and her powerful scents to Evon’s cheek.

“Oh, you’re such a nice girl,” she said.

Hal was screaming at somebody on the blower when Evon and Tim were shown into his office the following afternoon. It sounded from all the talk of collateral that it must have been one of his bankers. Tim went to the window for a minute to enjoy the view from the fortieth floor. He’d lived his whole life pretty close to the ground, no more than two stories for the most part, four if you counted his time in McGrath Hall. He felt excited as a country boy by the chance to stare through the wall of glass at the full stretch of the Tri-Cities. From here, you could see the River Kindle, a satin ribbon in today’s sun, cutting the municipalities apart. Within the embrace of the river’s branches sat block upon block of his city, the perfect squares that looked from this vantage like the pieces in a children’s toy, but which were actually full of all that throbbing life. The feeling welled into Tim again that had come to him as he aged: All in all, people were a whole lot of fun.

Evon moved over to stand beside him. Eventually she pointed, with a grim chuckle, to a bug that had somehow worked its way in between the two layers of glass in the double-paned window. It was some kind of beetle that had gotten flipped onto its back. With the bug unable to turn itself over, its six little legs were churning wildly.

“Talk about a design flaw,” Tim said.

“Right,” said Evon. “And humans have heartbreak.”

For a second, Tim hugged her to his side.

Hal slammed down the phone.

“There have to be plant forms that have more brains than bankers,” he declared, and directed Evon and Tim to his sofa. They took their places dutifully. She spoke.

“I know your hair is on fire with the bankers and YourHouse, so we’ll make this fast. The DNA came back early. The blood isn’t Paul’s.”

Hal gasped, winced, and dropped the pen he’d been holding.

“Damn,” he said, and repeated the word a few times. “So it is Cass’s?”

“No,” Evon said. She sat forward in a locker room posture, her elbows on her knees. It was game time for her, Tim realized. “It’s not from either of them.”

Hal’s full face went still, and his eyes flicked around under the weight of a fact neither he, nor anyone else for that matter, had imagined.

“Neither?”

Evon nodded.

“You’re saying that Paul dismissed his lawsuit to keep us from doing a test that shows that his brother and him, they’re both innocent?”

“We didn’t say they’re both innocent,” Evon answered. “That’s possible. But you still have Cass’s fingerprints, shoe-prints, the tire tracks, the sperm fraction. It’s hard to say he wasn’t there.”

“But whose blood is it?” Hal asked.

“We don’t know for sure. We had specimens from your family and Paul and Cass and it doesn’t belong to any of those people.”

“That’s it? Yavem didn’t say anything else about whose it could be? There’s no other identifying trait?”

Evon looked at Tim for a second, then faced her boss.

“He said the blood is a woman’s.”

“A woman?” Hal slammed back in his chair, his mouth wide open. “A woman? And do we have any idea who?”

“Best guess is Lidia Gianis.” She took Hal through the reasoning-the blood, the ring.

“Auntie Lidia killed my sister?”

“It’s possible,” said Evon.

“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Let me tell you something. My Aunt Lidia was strong and tough, and she was old-school enough that she’d have whacked my sister a good one if she got fresh. But banging her skull on the headboard a few times? No chance. And even if you made me believe that, there is no way she’d let her son go to prison for her. That’s the standard-issue Greek mother. She’d put a dagger in her breast for her children.”

“It’s what we have,” Evon said. “Maybe Cass and she did it together, and he pled by himself to make the best of it.”

“Why would my Aunt Lidia want to kill my sister? OK, she doesn’t want Cass hanging with Dita. How about smacking her son upside the head instead? This is ridiculous. And there’s nothing at all on Paul? Paul’s been taking his mother’s punches?”

“We don’t know, Hal. The one person against whom there’s no physical evidence of any kind is Paul.”

“Except the bullshit he told the police, covering for his brother.”

“If Lidia killed your sister by herself, then even that statement was true.”

Hal sat back again in his big leather chair and turned from both of them. He reached to his desk and tossed a pen at an empty corner of the room. Finally he revolved back, seized by a new idea.

“But there’s no physical evidence against Aunt Lidia, right? I mean nothing definitive. We don’t know for sure it’s her blood. She’s not the only person in the world who’s type B. Can we get her fingerprints?”

Evon looked at Tim. He just shrugged. He couldn’t imagine how, but there was no point saying no until he thought about it.

“OK,” Hal said. He waved his hand, letting them go.

Evon checked with Hal in an hour. His door was open. He was canted back in his chair, his hands behind his head as he stared solemnly into space. She grazed a knuckle on the door. His large eyes, surrounded by purplish flesh, briefly revolved toward her, then, after the briefest effort at a smile, he looked again to the place where the wall and ceiling met.

“I was just thinking back to when we were all kids,” Hal said. “When I used to go over to Lidia’s with Teri. A lot of the time I ended up looking after Paul and Cass. I always envied the two of them, to tell you the truth.”

This confession, not atypical of Hal when he grew reflective, alarmed Evon for a second, until she reminded herself that Hal had no reason to know how much jealousy he should have felt. Then again, there would never be any telling what part of the truth he had sensed.

“They were fifteen years younger than me, and used to follow me around like ducklings. But sometimes I’d look at them, the way they were with each other, and I was jealous. ‘They’re never alone,’ I’d think. ‘Never.’ It seemed like a wonderful thing. When I was their age, I was this fat weirdo that nobody wanted to talk to at school.” Hal smiled ruefully at the recollection of the child he was, although Evon doubted that the pain of that past was fully subdued. “And I wished I could be like them. With a twin. Somebody who’d never hate you, or look down on you, because he was just the same, somebody who’d never turn away from you. It still seems like a blessing to me. Crazy?”

Two nights ago, Evon had returned home on the bus in the midst of an unpredicted rainstorm, the drops, big as grapes, pelting down with assaultive force. Heather was in the doorway of the building, huddled under the cantilever close to the glass entry, but the overhang had not offered her much protection in the high wind. Her hair had been reduced to waterlogged strands and her hat and coat were soaked gray. As a result, it took Evon a moment, as she continued striding toward Heather in rage, to recognize what she had done. Her hair had been dyed to match Evon’s murkier shade, and she’d probably swaddled herself in bulky sweaters to make it appear she’d gained some weight. If Heather could have chopped six inches off her legs, she might have been a better copy of Evon, but the imitation was nonetheless careful. She wore a slouch hat Evon owned and that Burberry coat Evon had bought for both of them. At a distance, Evon was suddenly and irrationally afraid that Heather might even have sacrificed her looks with cosmetic surgery to create some resemblance. As Heather started forward, Evon could see that she had studied Evon’s posture and her jocky, slightly bowlegged stride. Evon was stunned but also infuriated. Did Heather think this was love? Apparently so. Or was it, as Evon suspected, the most abject confession of dependence? Perhaps Heather thought this was what Evon wanted from her, to erase herself completely. Was that love, reducing two to one?

Evon had told Heather that she was going to the police station to swear out a protection order and went at once before she could change her mind.

“I don’t know,” Evon said now in answer to Hal’s question. “It must make them crazy with each other at times.”

“Sure,” Hal said. “But they’re tight for the most part. They always were. Must be nice. Me?” he said. “I don’t even have a sister any more.”

He shook his head about that, then they both went back to work.