Identical

25

St. Basil’s Home for the Aged was operated by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and had the reputation of a first-class operation, as these kinds of places went. It looked like an old school, a broad three-story structure of red brick, surrounded by precisely landscaped grounds. Whatever the irony, Lidia Gianis’s place of final residence was supported largely through the generosity of the Kronons and a few other wealthy Greek families. Over the years, Tim had had several former neighbors move in here, with no complaints from any of them, except for the obvious one, that their move out was likely to be in a casket.

Evon had talked to Tim for a while to convince him to do this. Whatever the Gianises’ motives, she said, they had hidden the truth, from the Kronons, and from Tim and the other investigators. There was nothing disrespectful or cheap about getting answers to questions that should have received more forthright responses a long time ago. It was a good sales pitch, but the idea of trying to take advantage of an addled old lady still didn’t sit well with him.

“Came to visit Lidia Gianis,” he announced at the reception desk.

The young woman, a college volunteer by the look of her, had a spray of turquoise in the front of her short hairdo. With the phone to her ear for another conversation, she asked, “You are?”

“Tim Brodie. Old friend from church.”

She gave him the room number and pointed the way. Tim limped down the corridor wondering how soon his moment would come for a place like this, with the sprightly odors of disinfectant and air freshener not quite hiding the more unsettling smells of defecation and death. But it was a fine-looking place, decorated Colonial, with wooden pilaster strips in the corners of the hall and heart-backed chairs and comfy sofas in the reception area, all the furniture done in tasteful small prints, Martha Stewart on a tight budget. He passed by the chapel, fairly good-size, with white pews and a lovely dark walnut altarpiece. Three icons, elongated medieval figures on gold fields, were set on each side of the opening to the altar table, the crucifix and the stained glass window.

Clomping further down the hall, he heard live music and couldn’t resist following the sound to the door of the dayroom. The old faces, mostly women’s of course, were raised to the strains of a cello as if it were a sweet breeze. The young Asian woman with the instrument between her knees was quite talented, judging from her tone and bowing. Her music, Brahms, was offered as a gift, a reminder of the eternal and evenhanded power of beauty, a thought that stirred him deeply. He actually found himself wiping one eye as he moved on.

Once he reached Lidia’s door, he asked for help from one of the staff members circulating in their bright smocks. She summoned Lidia’s attendant. A stout black lady with short straightened hair, she approached, smiling broadly. She had a bad hip and rolled her body around it as she moved. He introduced himself and she shook with both hands, a kindly soul.

“I’m Eloise,” she said. “Take care of Lidia most of the time.”

“She decent for a visitor?”

“Oh yeah, we pretty her up every day and she just love it.” Eloise waved him behind her, but stopped with her hand on the silver doorknob. “If she get nasty, don’t mind her. Them dements are like that, you know.” She put her good hip to the door.

Lidia’s private room had the ambience of a decent chain hotel. The decorating scheme was all pastels, with plush carpeting and sheer curtains under the opened drapes, and a flowered print spread on the twin bed. Lidia sat in a beige recliner. A broad window behind her admitted a comforting rush of daylight, but her face was raised to the gray glow of a TV, from which Tim recognized the voices of Law and Order. A blanket rested on her lap. Lidia looked, for lack of any other term, hollowed out. She was far thinner than the woman he recalled, and beneath the makeup, her cheeks were now bunkers in her face. The black eyes were worst, clouded and shifting. Her entire head seemed compressed by whatever damage was occurring in her brain. It made his heart sore to see it, but it was what happened, what was happening to him. Rise and fall. The circle turns. His granddaughter, Stefanie, had called yesterday to say she was pregnant and Tim was still aloft on that news.

“Hey now, Lidia,” said Eloise, “Mr. Tim here come to see you. And you look so nice today. Don’t she look nice, Mr. Tim?”

Tim could only nod, still shy of paying compliments to a woman who was not his wife.

“See,” said Eloise, “you wearing that bracelet your sons brought you on Valentine’s Day. She always looking at the jewelry she got on.”

Lidia’s vague eyes turned to her wrist, which she studied as if she were surprised to find she had one. When she glanced back, she cast a cold look at Tim.

“Is he my husband?” Lidia asked Eloise.

“Oh no, honey. He just a friend.” Eloise propped Lidia up in the leatherette recliner. “You all go head and visit. I’m just outside, case you need me.”

Tim sat down in a wooden-armed chair a few feet from Lidia.

“Do I know you?” she asked Tim.

“Tim Brodie, Lidia. We met a million years ago at St. D’s.”

“I don’t know you,” she said. “I had a stroke and my memory is not so good.”

“Yeah, well, my memory isn’t what it once was either.”

In thirty years on the Force, and twenty-five-plus as a PI, he’d done lots of interviews under daunting circumstances, questioning children and the mentally handicapped, and naturally enough, the desperately bereaved. But this would be a new chapter and he had no idea how to start.

On Lidia’s bedside table were photographs of her two daughters and the twins and a passel of kids.

“Now who are all these folks?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. The girl just put them there. But they’re all nice people.”

Tim picked up one photograph, a group shot of her grandchildren, Paul’s two boys and her daughters’ daughters.

“Now these grandkids of yours, they’re a good-looking bunch.” Tim meant it. The Gianises were always a handsome family.

Lidia was frowning. “Is that who they are?” she asked.

“Beautiful,” Tim said. “All of them.”

“My daughter is a movie star.”

“I know.” She was referring to Helen, who was still maybe the most gorgeous woman Tim had ever met face-to-face. She was said to be a handful, personally, and never got further than a brief role in one of the soaps. According to the local gossip, she was on husband four or five by now, a strumpet by the straitened standards of St. D’s.

“Yes, I think they’re all nice people. I have a son, did you know that?”

“Two, I believe.” He tapped the picture of the twins, a recent one, Paul with his lumpy nose and Cass beside him, just a tad bigger.

“Identical twins,” she said. “No one can tell them apart.”

He agreed.

“My sons come here all the time. One of them is a big deal, too. Is he an actor?” she asked Tim. “People just love him. They tell me so all the time. Everyone here knows who he is.”

Tim said he knew Paul, too, then asked about Cass, hoping for any information. Cass seemed to be some kind of shapeshifter, materializing, then disappearing.

“Oh yes. They are such good boys, both of them.”

“I thought the other one, Cass, didn’t he have some trouble?”

Lidia pondered a second and shook her head. “I had a stroke and my memory’s not so good.” She raised her hand again and stared at the bracelet, which, by whatever logic was left to her, once more brought her attention to Tim. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

“Tim Brodie, sweetheart. I thought maybe we could play a little game, you and me. See here?”

He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and removed an inkless fingerprint pad and several pieces of eight and a half-by-eleven copier paper. He showed her how it worked, putting her whole hand on the pad and the way the impressions magically appeared on the page. She was childishly amused by the process, and they continued for several minutes. Lidia offered no objection when he bore down on her fingers to roll the print onto the sheet.

Being with Lidia couldn’t help putting him in mind of Maria’s last days, when she was mostly gone and couldn’t speak. All in all, his wife was the kindest person he had ever known-love seldom left her and she had filled their house with love like light. But in dying she became ornery and sharp-tongued, and frequently raised her voice to him, telling him that whatever he did was not right. It was a grief impossible to bear at the time, the raw unfairness that she had to die and leave as final memories ones of her being somebody else.

Nothing was fair, when you got down to it. People tried to be fair and made up rules about what was fair, but those laws didn’t have much to do with what really happened, if you were willing to notice. Here he was, no more than eight years younger than Lidia, playing with her like a child. He was still mostly himself, and she was just a little fraction of the proud, regal soul he’d observed from a distance. You couldn’t help but pay attention to Lidia in those days. The power of life swelled through her-it was like the swirling red lines on an old barber pole, no start or end, but you had to stare.

“Are you my husband?” Lidia asked as he was putting the papers and the pad back into his coat.

“No, Lidia. Just a friend.”

“I don’t see my husband much. I think he may still be mad, you know.” Mickey had been dead twenty years. As Tim recalled the story, Mickey had been terrified of the initial open-heart surgery in 1959, when it was a recent innovation, but he came through like a champ. A little less than thirty years later, the pig valve had to be replaced, an act of routine maintenance, but Mickey stroked out on the operating table.

“And what would Mickey be angry about?”

“He never really said, but I knew he was always mad about Zeus.”

“What about Zeus exactly?”

The question stopped her cold.

“Some silliness,” she said. “I don’t really recall. You must forgive me. I had a stroke and my memory’s not so good.”

Tim nearly laughed out loud. She was all but gone but she remained crafty.

“But why would Mickey be mad about Zeus?”

“Mickey?” she asked.

Tim considered his options.

“Lidia, did Zeus ever know he was the father of Paul and Cass?”

“Oh no,” she answered, and clapped a hand straight to her chest. Some thoughts seemed to tumble through her head, then slide away like the rush over a waterfall. She looked again at her wrist. It was her right hand she kept gazing at, Tim realized.

“That’s a beautiful bracelet,” Tim said. “Mind if I see it?”

He took her hand. Doing the prints, he had noticed the Easton College class ring her boys had given her. It was quite loose now on her finger. The top of the ring, with the crest and the stone and the raised numerals of the year, hung down toward her palm. But forty pounds ago, it would have fit well and was substantial enough to have left that bruise on Dita’s left cheek.

Yet what he’d missed before was the scar. Beneath the bracelet, reaching from the back of her wrist upward a good six inches, there was a line of shiny, whitish flesh. The scar looked like a river running through a topical map, wiggling a bit within neat margins. It was the scar, he suddenly realized, not the bracelet, that preoccupied her.

“Where did you get that mark on you, sweetheart?” he asked.

Lidia slowly raised her arm to study it.

“Oh, that,” she said. “I cut myself.”

“How? You recall?”

She contemplated, then repeated her mantra about her stroke. But she never lowered her arm.

“And who sewed it up for you?” From the even look of the scar, and the faint little puckers on either side made by the sutures, it appeared that a surgeon had closed that wound. When Zeus brought Tim on to the investigation of Dita’s killing, the investigators, in the midst of their infighting, still hadn’t checked the ERs for cut cases the night of the murder. Tim spread the canvass to every hospital for thirty miles. Naturally they discovered several bad lacerations treated that Sunday night and the next morning, but none of those patients proved to be of any interest.

Tim touched the scar gently.

“Sure looks like you had a doctor for that.”

“I think it was that girl,” Lidia said, the limb still aloft. Tim took her hand and lowered it, before her arm started to hurt.

“Which girl is that, sweetie?”

“You know her.” She smiled at Tim, as if he were playing a game. “So smart. Such a nice girl. She became a doctor.”

Tim tried to recall when Sofia Michalis got back to town after med school. Then he remembered Georgia’s complaints about the attention Paul had paid Sofia at the picnic.

“It turned out OK for her,” Tim said. “Was that who did your stitches there? Sofia?”

Lidia tried to hold the thought, but shook her head.

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” Lidia said. She apologized again about her stroke.

“Sofia is the woman Paul married.”

“Oh yes. Paul is a big deal. Everyone loves him.”

“Any chance, Lidia, you got that cut at Zeus’s house?”

She looked again and this time touched the patch of smooth skin.

“Did I?” she asked. The idea seemed to make sense to her. From the dark contraction of her irises, he could see her struggling. “My memory is not very good.”

“Did that happen before or after you hit Dita?” he asked her.

In response to the question, a slim fragment of mental agility again returned to her, just long enough to set something off, some kind of alarm perhaps. She reared back, then began rotating her head and her thin floss of gray hair.

“Did you hit Dita?” he asked her.

“Who is that?” she asked.

“Zeus’s daughter. The girl Cass was seeing. Did you end up hitting her, Lidia?”

Her head went side to side for quite some time, more in sorrow, it seemed, than disagreement.

“I really can’t talk about that,” she said.

“And why not?”

“Oh, it’s such a long time ago. Do I know that man?” She was pointing at Sam Waterston on the TV.

“Did you hit Dita, Lidia.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “You should ask my sons. They know better than me.”

He was going to quarrel with the evident logic of that-how would her sons know better than she whom she’d walloped? — but there was a more focused manner in the way she was shaking her head around, determined, as it were, to let go of the bad thought. He’d promised himself he was going to treat Lidia with dignity and avoid upsetting her. He was nearing the end of what either one of them could tolerate.

“Lidia, did you kill Dita Kronon?”

She stared at Tim. “Do I know you?”

He reintroduced himself and she explained about her stroke.

“Who killed Dita Kronon, Lidia?”

“Oh, that was all so sad,” she said. For a moment, worry consumed her time-whittled face. “That girl was no good.”

“The daughter? Dita?”

“She had a terrible tongue in her mouth.”

“And did you kill her?”

“Oh no,” she answered, as if the idea were as laughable as if Tim had asked if she’d made a recent visit to Jupiter. She stopped for some time, turning her wrist as she sorted through the strange rush of ideas.

“You sure you didn’t kill her, Lidia?”

The question this time brought about a mercurial change. Her brow closed and her look became sharp, even fierce, as that lingering remnant of the darkly determined woman of decades ago once more asserted itself.

“They just never believe me,” she said. “They never believe me.”

“Who doesn’t, dear?”

“You can just go away. I’m tired of all of this. I don’t know who you are, and you’re just asking all these questions to embarrass me. You can go away. Who are you anyway?” She cast a look at the door. “What is that girl’s name?”

“Eloise?”

She shouted for Eloise. When the attendant didn’t appear promptly, Lidia, with no warning, grabbed the remote for the television and threw it at Tim. He got a hand up partially, but it clipped his scalp. In the meantime, Lidia leaned over her chair and swung at him with a closed fist. She didn’t come close. Shocked, he’d risen to his feet and was backing away. Lidia was screaming that she didn’t like him when Eloise finally came through the door.

“I don’t like this man and I don’t know who he is.”

He fled the room and waited in the hall while Eloise summoned another attendant, a little Filipina who couldn’t reach five feet with a hand over her head. She seemed to have a good way with Lidia and Eloise left the two of them while she walked Tim out.

“She get like that some, but she is really such a sweet lady mostly. Funny thing, though. Must have been she had a little of that in her somewhere along. The doctors all say they just don’t know. Some of them, those bad traits come out, some the Alzheimer just change them completely.”

“No worries,” said Tim. “She kept looking at her right wrist.”

“She do like that, hundred times a day. Them boys always giving her jewelry, so she got something to see.”

Tim nodded. The twins gave her the jewelry so people would think Lidia was fixated by the gems, rather than the scar.

“She ever say where that scar on her wrist came from?”

“Broke a window, she said once. You know, they tell you one thing one day and something else tomorrow.”

“But she is right-handed, isn’t she?”

“Oh yeah. Some of them dements, they forget so much they don’t even know which hand to use to pick up a spoon. But she ain’t like that. She use that right hand for everything.”

“How long have you taken care of her?”

“Lidia? Oh, it’s three, four years at least. She wasn’t so bad when she come in here. Only thing was she could never keep those boys straight. Sometime she tell me Paul was here and sometime she call him Cass. But these days she don’t hardly recognize either one. Lots of times she call them something else entirely once they gone.”

“And what might that be?”

Eloise stopped. “What is that name? She’s sayin it all the time.” Eloise touched the wooden support rail that ran along the wall as if it might help her recollection. “Brings me in mind of something whenever she do it.” One hand shot up when her memory finally sparked. “Oh, I know. It’s one of them cartoons my grandkids watch. Fella always got lightning in his hand, this character.”

Tim got it quickly. “Zeus?”

“Zeus!” She beamed. There was a good deal of gold in Eloise’s mouth. “That’s who she tell me come visit. More than once. Must be they resemble him some to her mind.”

Once he was home, Tim paged through his files until he found the bundle of clippings from Dita’s murder. There were photos of Zeus in nearly every story. Then Tim called up Paul’s campaign site. It was ridiculous, frankly, when you looked at it, the resemblance he and so many other folks never saw, let alone remarked on. The shape of the face differed a bit but the three men shared the same nose and hair and mouth and eyes. What had Mickey made of their looks? Probably nothing. People didn’t see what they didn’t want to. Was that the hardest part of life, to look at it fresh and without preconceptions? Or would it just be unbearable chaos that way?

The next morning Tim went out to McGrath Hall to deliver Lidia’s fingerprints. McGrath had been the police headquarters since 1921. The red stone heap might have passed for a medieval fortress, with stone arches over the massive planked oaken doors and notched battlements on the roof. When Tim was on the Force, he had hated the place, because he only got called down for somebody to bust his chops over something he could do nothing about. Then his last year and a half as a cop, they made him acting chief of Homicide, a job he never asked for, and gave him an office here. The gossip and intrigue that swirled through the halls was like a maelstrom that was just going to suck him down, and he often wished he could come and go in disguise. The milieu of the place became a big part of what had driven him into retirement.

Dickerman’s office was in the basement of the building. If the brass had their way, Mo would have been situated halfway to China. They hated him, because Mo was always using his eminence to bend them backward with threats to raise a public ruckus if they wouldn’t buy a new piece of equipment or software he wanted. The higher-ups thought, often with good reason, that the money could be better spent on other aspects of policing. But on a force that like most urban departments was frequently mired in controversy, if not scandal, Mo and his worldwide reputation were assets they could not afford to dispense with.

“How was Hollywood?” Tim asked when he arrived. Mo’s lab down the hall was huge and state-of-the-art, but his small office was barely big enough for his desk and his metal filing cabinets. His garden windows were half-height and emitted only the barest light through the wells.

“Those people,” Mo answered, but said no more.

Mo had retained possession of the original lifts from Dita’s room, because Mo’s travel schedule had kept Tim from picking them up. He handed over Lidia’s prints now. Mo had insisted on negotiating a new contract with Tooley, which acknowledged that this examination wouldn’t utilize any of the prints Judge Lands had ordered returned to other parties. Mo was a stickler, knowing that there were plenty of people in the county who’d use any controversy, especially in his outside employment, as a reason to oust him. He promised to begin the print comparison that night. He was one of those widowers who minimized his time at home.

“You know,” Tim said, “I never got to ask you about that thing with Cass’s prints from Hillcrest. Last time we talked, you were wanting to get a look at Paul’s ten-card, because you thought Cass’s intake prints at Hillcrest didn’t match the crime scene.”

Mo looked through his heavy frames for some time and then got up to shut the oak door. It had an old-fashioned frosted wired pane in the middle on which Dickerman’s name was printed in block letters.

“You remember that day last month when Lands whistled me up to the bench to report on my findings about Paul’s prints?” Mo asked.

“Sure.”

“I nearly wet my socks. I was just waiting for him to ask me the wrong question and I’d look like Ralph Kramden. You know, ‘Humanah humanah.’”

Tim laughed. It wasn’t a bad imitation of Jackie Gleason.

“I thought you said Paul’s prints didn’t match the crime scene.”

“They don’t. Now that I’ve finally gotten a look at Cass’s ten-card, I can exclude even the inconclusives.”

“And what about Cass himself?”

“You remember a few days after Greenwood finally found Cass’s prints and sent them over here, Lands said I had to give them back. Stern had an associate hie out this way to carry the card back to Greenwood County that afternoon. What does that tell you?”

“Maybe there was something they didn’t want you to figure out. Maybe Cass’s prints don’t match the crime scene either?”

“They do. With all the craziness in this case, that wouldn’t have been a complete surprise. But the minute I got that card, I looked at everything. Cass’s prints were all over Dita’s room, just the same as Logan said back in 1983, including the outside knob of the French door.”

“So what was the big deal?”

Mo looked away and poked his tongue to his cheek.

“It’s been a while, I’ll tell you, since I was sitting up at night thinking about a case. I was ready to hire a brass band when Lands finally entered the dismissal.”

At his age, Tim now and then found himself having unpredictable lapses, where he simply couldn’t follow the loops of an ordinary conversation. That seemed to be happening now.

“I’m not catching the drift, Mo. Cass’s prints are all over Dita’s room and Paul’s aren’t. What’s strange?”

Dickerman wiped his lips with his whole hand.

“It’s that print card from Hillcrest.”

“What about it?”

“Well, as soon as I got Cass’s original impressions from Greenwood, I compared them to the prints from Hillcrest, and I know that’s a laser copy, and there’s no evidentiary value, but those are not Cass Gianis’s fingerprints-the ones from the institution? They look a lot alike, but in the minutiae, there are distinct differences.”

“Are you saying they’re Paul’s?”

Mo took quite some time before saying yes. “From everything I could see, the answer is yes.”

Tim felt his mind spinning like a tire trapped in the snow.

“What the hell?” Tim finally said.

“I know. I was standing right there. I was looking Paul Gianis in the face when I took his fingerprints. You saw me do it. But the prints I took in the courthouse match the prints from Hillcrest.”

“Jesus,” said Tim.

Mo pointed. “Same rules: Not a word to anybody. If this ever got out, Horgan and Stern would have to come after me. They’d make a stink that I was looking at stuff I should have returned, and they’d say my opinion is a sign of incompetence. I don’t need any of that.”

Tim promised. He knew Mo had arrived at the wrong conclusion about Paul’s fingerprints, he just couldn’t figure out why. You could see even Mo was of the same mind.