Identical

29

On Sunday night, Tim drove back to Grayson and parked kitty-corner to the Gianises’ orange-brick house. The newsies and the cop stationed in the circular were all gone, probably because their various employers didn’t care to pay double overtime. But the mail carrier’s information meant that Sofia might return now. And there were indeed lights on. He kept his binocs on the place until he saw Sofia move through the kitchen, then he walked across and rang the bell. In a minute, he could hear somebody behind the heavy varnished oak door, and a face flashed in the little viewing panel on top. The dog he’d heard last time was yapping indignantly.

Sofia opened, dressed in blue jeans, the dog bounding beside her. She didn’t look especially well. Without makeup, her skin was lumpy. Her lip actually trembled as she stared at him with her giant eyes.

“Mr. Brodie, please. Please. Can’t you respect our privacy? Please.”

The dog, a young lab, just old enough to have grown into her paws, reared up and clawed the screen. Tim put a hand forward to quiet her down.

“‘Tim,’” he said. “Think you’re old enough to be calling me that.”

“We’ve been through hell and back for twenty-five years now. We’re just trying to put things back together. Don’t we get peace at some point? Hal Kronon is crazy.”

“I hear you, hon,” he said. “I do. Truth is, figuring it all out may mean more to me than it does to Hal at this stage. Here it is, twenty-five years later, and I’m finding out I didn’t do much of a job.”

“I’m sure that’s not true, Mr. Brodie.”

“You know, Lidia’s fingerprints were there in Dita’s room. And what looks to be her blood.”

Sofia didn’t answer. She looked down at the tile floor of the entry.

“Sofia,” Tim said, “I’m thinking you stitched up Lidia’s arm after Dita was killed.”

Her face jerked up like a marionette’s on a string.

“Who told you that? Have you tapped our phones? Would you actually do that?”

“Of course not, Sofia.”

Behind her, Tim noticed a man on the landing of the house’s broad central staircase. It was Cass. Tim hadn’t been in the same room with him for twenty-five years and by now, without that lumpy nose, Cass had become the better-looking brother, a little more vital than Paul had appeared in the latter stages of the campaign. He descended the stairs quickly and circled his left arm around Sofia to ease her out of the doorway.

“Good night, Tim,” he said, and used his free hand to close the door.

On Monday morning, Sofia and Cass were all over the news. Some PR adviser had convinced them to do the equivalent of a perp walk in front of the vipers’ nest of lenses. The Kindle County all-news cable channel covered the event live, which Tim watched from home. The pair emerged from the house shyly, standing together with uncertain smiles, their hands a hairsbreadth apart. The cameras swirled around them, while reporters shouted over each other with questions to which the couple didn’t respond. In the midst of all of that, the dog escaped from the house and Cass had to chase her, whistling and clapping. The pup was a bit wild and raced around for a second, but finally returned, lying at Cass’s feet to avoid further scolding, her tail flapping on the driveway. Cass led her inside by the collar, then exchanged a chaste peck on the cheek with Sofia before raising the garage door with a key. Each departed in a different car.

And where in the heck would he be going anyway? Tim wondered.

Paul, too, was back at work. The cameras got him pushing through the revolving door of the LeSueur Building about 9, smiling but shaking off the requests for comment as he made his way through the Art Deco lobby with its artful brass decorations. Building security guards held back the cameras as Paul reached the elevators.

On Wednesday, Tim went out to Grayson at 5:30 a.m. Whatever deal Cass and Sofia had made with the press seemed to have stuck. The camera vans were all gone. Around six, Sofia in her older Lexus rolled out of the garage, undoubtedly headed for surgery.

Tim stayed put to see if Cass’s Acura would emerge, as it did around 8. It was clear to Tim after following Cass about five minutes that he was looking for a tail. He’d go two or three blocks, then back into a driveway and come out going the other direction. Tim avoided Cass the first time he used the maneuver, but when Tim turned the corner moments later, the Acura was at the curb, facing the other way beside the heavy old trees in the parkway. Cass actually smiled at Tim and lifted a hand to wave.

Tim called Evon.

“I’m gonna have to rent a new car every day,” he told her. “I’m curious as hell to know where Cass is going.”

“Do we care?” she asked.

“Maybe it’s just because I don’t have something better to do, but I look at all these stories about Cass and Sofia. You see one that says what kind of job he’s got?”

“He’s opening a charter school, isn’t he? He’s trying to get an exemption from the state Board of Education, because he has a felony record. Didn’t I read that?”

“Where’s this school? When’s it open? And what kind of schoolteacher gives a damn about being followed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re just sick of the reporters. Hal hasn’t asked me anything for a week. He’s in a big melee with his bankers.” Apparently, within days of the YourHouse closing, Hal’s lending consortium had decided to mark down the portfolio of unsold single-family houses ZP had just bought. The lawyers on both sides were fighting like minks, and negotiating around the clock.

“I’ll pay for the rental cars myself, if you want,” Tim offered.

“No, he still wants dirt on the Gianises. There are columnists and bloggers all over the country writing about getting ‘Krononed,’ meaning having some big-money maniac destroy you politically with phony charges. He’d be happy to have any information that shows there’s something fishy with Paul. And what about Brünnhilde? Any sign of her?”

He was driving by Beata’s house on Clyde every day, but the mail was piled up on the concrete lip under the mail slot in her front door, so much of it that the winter storm door was ajar.

On Thursday morning, in a rented Ford Escape, he lay two blocks off the Gianis house, but still lost Cass in the traffic as he headed into Center City. With no better alternative, Tim went down to the three hundred block on Morgan, where the letter carrier had said she was forwarding Paul’s mail, to see what he could suss out.

Two new high-rises took up the block, here on the edge of Center City. When Tim was in the orphanage this part of town was all industrial, with huge square warehouses of unfaced brick and factories with looming smokestacks. It was a big trip in those days to come into DuSable. Each class went once a year, riding in on the Rock Island Line. He remembered the excitement, feeling queasy on the rolling carriages, then frightened by the size and might of the city, but the sight that most amazed him was at the other end, where a railroad turntable spun the locomotives around in the days before the engine cars were built to run backward.

Both new buildings had large banners in the windows, red lettering three feet tall, offering units for sale and rent. He entered each to see if there might be a directory of residents, but door-persons were stationed at security desks in both lobbies, and he decided to wait before calling any notice to himself. Sooner or later, the Gianises were going to accuse him of stalking and seek an order of protection. He spent the day eyeing the doors and driveways to the buildings, listening to a tape he’d gotten at the library of the same book of Greek myths he’d been trudging through.

Friday morning, he was there again early, hoping to catch sight of Paul leaving one of the buildings on his way to work. Instead, he saw Cass’s Acura arrive at the 345 Building about 8:45 and slide down the ramp into the private parking garage underneath. Tim left the blinkers on in his rented Corolla, and dodged traffic to cross the street, thinking it might be worth it now to check the directory. He had just opened the outer glass door to the lobby when a blue Chrysler convertible came up the same driveway. The vehicle was no more than thirty feet away, and he got a good look at the driver, who stopped at the top to check the cars in the street coming from both directions before turning right onto Morgan. It was Paul.

Tim limped back across the avenue to the rental car. He was lucky. Paul got caught at a light two blocks down and Tim managed to follow him all the way to a seven-story concrete parking structure across from the LeSueur Building. Paul soon emerged with his briefcase as he headed in to work.

Tim drove back to 345. When he’d wandered by yesterday, he’d seen visitors poking around at a small screen built into the security desk, using an attached telephone handset. The guard was gone for the moment and Tim lifted the receiver and followed the instructions on the screen, pressing the pound key to bring up a listing of residents. There were no Gianises, but he scrolled through and found T. Wisniewski in unit 442. He called for the hell of it, but there was no answer after eight rings.

He stood there sorting out the possibilities. Beata had a house, so she’d probably rented this place for Paul, but that had to be before he split with Sofia. There wouldn’t be much point to putting things in her name now. Paul was still a famous face and word that he was living here would get around. Maybe it had been what the rogues would call their ‘stabbin cabin,’ although it seemed to Tim that Paul would have risked a lot less attention going through the back door of Beata’s house. And what all was Cass doing here? The two brothers didn’t figure to be on the best terms right now.

“Help you?” asked a portly middle-aged lady, who’d emerged from the package room and resumed her post on a high swivel chair behind the rosewood security desk. She wore a sport coat with 345, the building logo, emblazoned above her heart. He could see from her squint that she’d been warned to watch out for somebody like him.

The 345 building, like the competitor down the block, was developed to meet all the needs of a busy urbanite. Here on the first floor, there was a gym and an overpriced organic grocery, and a couple of other small shops behind them.

“I was just looking for the dry cleaner,” Tim said, expecting her to direct him to the cleaner whose sign he’d seen next door. Instead, it turned out there was a dry cleaning establishment here, too.

“Right down the hall.” She pointed to the granite corridor. He could feel her watching as he gimped off, and for safety’s sake he entered the store with its steamy smell of starch. An Asian lady asked if she could help. She had quite an accent, and he needed to get her to repeat herself twice, what with the noise of the pressing machine behind her. In the interval, an idea came to him, just a way to confirm that Paul was living here now.

He turned every pocket in his sport coat inside out as the lady watched.

“Supposed to pick up my boss’s dry cleaning. But I don’t have the ticket.”

“What name?”

He told her Gianis and spelled it. She looked in her receipts and then threw the switch to start the merry-go-round of garments shimmering in their plastic wrappers. So Paul was here. Tim was about to go through the routine of telling her he’d forgotten his wallet, too, but she hung two suits from the hooked stainless arm that extended over the counter.

“You forgot one suit t’ree week,” she said.

“Really?” He looked at the second garment. It was exactly the same as the one in front of it, a lightweight blue wool with a faint herringbone. He hoisted the plastic sleeve for one second, as if trying to be sure the suit was his, and looked inside to see the label of a bespoke tailor, Danilo. If it was the guy Tim was thinking of, Danilo made clothes for athletes and mobsters, a clientele for whom he kept his mouth shut.

He took both suits off the hanging arm and held them out in front of himself, trying to make out the difference. He moved them from hand to hand a few times and finally hung both on the stainless steel arm again, so the shoulders were fully aligned. Now he caught it. The second suit, the one in back now, was probably half a size larger at the shoulder, and the sleeve was a micrometer longer as well.

“Three weeks, huh?” he asked her.

“Yeah.” She showed him the receipt. Written on it in marker was “442,” but that show-and-tell exhausted her patience.

“You pay now,” she said. So he opened his wallet and went through the whole act, cussing himself out and asking her to point him to an ATM.

Monday was Memorial Day. Tim was going to his granddaughter’s for a picnic with her husband’s family later in the day, and he had looked forward to that all weekend, sharing the young couple’s excitement about Stefanie’s pregnancy, and getting congratulated for having hung around long enough to see some of his DNA arrive in another generation. With nothing better to do until then, he decided to park across from 345 for a few hours that morning. Cass’s Acura appeared close to 10 a.m. Just as on Friday, roughly five minutes after Cass arrived, Paul pulled out in the Chrysler. Tim followed Paul to his senatorial office, and then to a parade in his district.

On Tuesday, Tim was at 345 at 7:30 a.m., wearing the twill navy-blue uniform from the old heating and ventilation business he’d briefly been in with his brother-in-law twenty-five years ago. Both the waist-length jacket and the matching billed hat sported the shield of Bob’s company, which he’d sold off a decade ago. These days, the pants didn’t quite close over his belly, but he made it look OK with a belt and a safety pin.

He stood outside the 345 garage on the concrete divider that separated the incoming from the outgoing traffic. As soon as a car pulled out and sped into the street, he ducked under the closing door and continued down the ramp into the garage. A Cadillac heading up honked and Tim raised his hands in protest, pretending that he had every right to be here.

There were two floors, smelling unpleasantly of oil and engine fumes. The best he could do was lurk near the bottom of the ramp, sucked back against the cinder block wall. When the Acura came in, it circled straight down to the lower level. Tim took the stairs and waited until he saw the Chrysler head back up. He walked around the floor several minutes before finding the Acura, the engine still warm.

He was stationed on the bottom level of the garage Wednesday. He knew there was a fair chance he was going to get his elderly butt arrested for trespassing but curiosity had a serious grip on him. He had five hundred dollars cash on him for bail and had alerted Evon.

Cass pulled in at about 8:55, and spent a minute jogging cars. He moved the Acura into the space the convertible had been in, then returned with his briefcase to the Chrysler he’d left running across the row.

Inside the Chrysler, Cass disappeared from view. Tim walked by at about fifty feet. He didn’t risk more than a quick look, and thought Cass was peering down at a computer, his shoulders shifting slightly. Tim walked up to a meter on the wall, pretended to monkey with it, then limped back in the other direction at the leisurely pace of a man getting paid by the hour. This time, when he passed by he could see clearly that Cass had his face in his hand, gripping the bridge of his nose, as if he was suffering a sinus headache or had come to grief over something. Afraid to stare, Tim went up one floor and stood beside the garage door, thinking he’d get a better look at Cass in the break of light when the door rose. And he did. But the driver was Paul.

“There’s just one man,” he said as he sat in Evon’s office Thursday afternoon.

“Give me a break.”

“Cass leaves the house. And Paul goes to work. I’ve been down in the garage three times now. Cass is living with Sofia, but once he leaves the house, he’s pretending to be Paul. He’s putting a prosthetic over the bridge of his nose every morning.”

Evon couldn’t keep from laughing.

“Come on. A fake nose? Does it have a Groucho moustache attached, too?”

“That’s how he’s getting away with it. Because nobody would ever believe it.”

“I’ll say.”

“No, listen.” Tim waved at her with both hands. He was quite excited and pleased with himself for figuring this out. “What does Sofia do for a living? She remakes faces all the time, and uses all kinds of prosthetics as part of it. You can go on the U Hospital website for the Reconstructive Surgery Department and see them-prosthetic noses and ears and chins and jaws and cheeks. Whole features or a piece of them for people who’ve lost, say, their nose to disease or accident or surgery or gotten it shot up or blown off. She’s been doing it twenty-five years. There’s a gal they call an anaplastologist who actually fabricates the prosthesis to Sofia’s specifications. I’ve been reading all about it. The prosthetic is silicone and hand-painted with all kinds of pigments to be an exact match for the skin-freckles, veins, whatever is on the rest of the nose, and the edges are feathered so thin it blends right in, especially under those glasses Paul wears. I mean they use 3-D cameras and computers to make an exact casting. Look on the Internet. Close-ups like you were kissing the person and you can’t tell. It’s amazing.”

“Come on,” Evon said again.

“Yesterday when I saw him put it on, he must have been late, and he did it in the car. I figure he was painting on the surgical adhesive they use, cause it’s got to cure in the air a little before it works. Today he had more time and went up to the men’s room on the first floor. I’d put on a wig and a dress so I could follow him close and got in the elevator with him when he headed back down to the garage. He’d recombed his hair so the part was on the other side, and put on black frames like Paul, and fixed up his nose. I was standing right next to him. I’m telling you, you absolutely couldn’t tell.”

“A dress? How much do I have to pay for a picture?”

“It’s not in the budget,” he answered.

Evon looked down at her desk.

“How could that possibly work, Tim? I thought you said you followed him to court yesterday.”

“I did.”

“A man spends twenty-five years in prison and then knows how to practice law?”

“You think it’s that hard? Most of it’s just common sense.”

“Never seemed that way to me,” Evon answered. “OK. And where’s Paul?”

“There is no Paul. I’m telling you Cass is being Paul.”

“So there never were twins? I was just seeing things when the two of them were standing side-by-side at pardon and parole?”

“Well obviously there used to be two. I just don’t know about now.”

“And where did the real Paul go?” Evon asked.

“I’m trying to figure this out. There were identical twins in California. Sisters. Good seed and bad seed. And the bad seed started living her sister’s life. Hired a hit man to kill the good sister, but the hit man narced her out and the bad seed is in San Quentin for life.”

“So Cass covets Paul’s wife, kills Paul and takes over his life. Right?”

“He’s already been convicted on one murder,” Tim said.

“And he committed this one with Sofia’s agreement? This is the Sofia you’ve known since she was born?”

“It’s just one idea.”

“And why bother announcing that Paul and Sofia have split up? Why doesn’t Cass just go around with his fake nose pretending to be Paul?”

“Cause there’s supposed to be two of them.”

“So say Cass has gone to Iraq. Or Alaska.”

“I don’t know. He needs to air his face out with that adhesive. You can’t wear it too long. So maybe that’s why he wants to play both of them. It’s just crazy is all.”

“And what about Brünnhilde?” Evon asked.

“Beata? Maybe Paul’s hiding with her.”

“You said it was Cass who drove her away. Right? You took pictures. And why would a man who’s spent the last decade in the public eye want to hide from anything?”

Nothing ever added up in this case. Cass was sentenced to prison, but Paul entered the facility and was standing in the courthouse rotunda twenty-five years later. Lidia had been with Dita the night of the murder, bled all over the room, but her son pled to the murder.

“And not that Hal will care about paying these expenses,” Evon said, “but what does any of this have to do with who murdered Dita?”

Tim’s mouth soured as he thought.

“Something,” he finally said. “I can’t tell you how exactly, not yet. But if we figure this out, we’re going to get to the bottom of Dita’s murder, too. I have that feeling.”

“OK, but how are we going to do that, Tim? You can’t just go up to the guy and yank on his nose. What if you follow him into the men’s room and confront him?”

“It’s a single pew, for one thing. And he’d probably have me arrested for stalking, call me crazy, and lob a couple of mortar shells at Hal, too.” Tim sat thinking. “Maybe there’s another way to smoke them out. You think you still remember how to follow somebody?”

She straightened indignantly in her large desk chair. The stuff you learned on the job, in situations when lives were on the line, was etched onto the fibers of your nerves. The skills were always there.

“Brodie, I could get inside your jock and you wouldn’t know it. Especially if I got a little assistance.”

He answered, “Let’s see.”