Identical

35

Nella and Francine had a cabin on Lake Fowler and Evon spent Saturday and Sunday with them. Nella, another former jock, had been trying to convince Evon to take up golf. She’d thought initially that the game was too sedentary, but she was starting to warm to the challenges, and they ended up playing both days.

Driving back into town Sunday night, Evon decided to pay a call on Aunt Teri. It was past 9, but Evon had been waiting to see the old lady. The doorman downstairs put Evon on the phone and Teri invited her up. The old woman in a brocaded caftan was at the door with her cane, her face averted so she could hear the sound of Evon’s approach. Teri’s face was a glistening pond of cold cream, and she’d put up her hair for the night. The tiny pink plastic curlers were wrapped tight, exposing the elderly woman’s pale scalp, except on the back of her head where she’d covered the mess with a sheer net. Without her sunglasses, Teri’s eyes proved to be surrounded by pouches of brown flesh that looked like used tea bags.

Teri touched her head. “Well, I suppose if you came to get laid, this jinxed it.”

Despite herself, Evon laughed. “Sorry, Teri. Timing is everything.”

She didn’t mind the banter with the old lady, but the truth was that Evon had always been slow to get to the point of sex with anyone. The bar scene never held much charm.

Teri used her cane to orient herself and clumped along to her golden living room. German had apparently roused himself when he heard Teri moving about and was standing there in his paisley silk robe, still looking tidy with his fuzz of cropped gray hair. Teri told him he could go.

“Watches those ridiculous reality shows,” she told Evon once he left. “People eating goats’ eyeballs and seeing who can stand the most paper cuts. So fucking stupid. What about a drink?”

Evon seldom indulged, except at parties, more or less out of deference to her father who’d never taken it up, but she thought the old woman might be more relaxed if she had company. Evon said she’d have whatever her hostess was drinking. Teri made her way with her stick to the tea cart holding a troop of brown bottles, and then handed a cut-glass crystal tumbler to Evon, while she settled herself on her overstuffed sofa.

“OK, shoot,” said Teri. “Ti yenaete?” Hal often used that phrase, which apparently meant ‘What’s up?’

Evon realized she had not planned what to say, but she told Teri that Tim had finally cornered Cass Gianis.

“He says he didn’t kill Dita. And I have a feeling you have a good idea who did.”

“Ah.” Teri took a healthy sip.

“The first thing-I guess the most important thing-is I need to be sure that it wasn’t Hal.”

“Hal? Oh no no no.” Teri found the idea amusing. “My nephew might be better off if he had a little more killer in him. The best I know is that he was still out necking with Mina when Dita was murdered. He walked in to find that crazy scene. He’s the one who called the police, if I’m remembering. Tim didn’t recall that?”

Tim probably never knew. By the time he took over the case a week later, the family members had all been cleared because their blood didn’t match what had been spilled in Dita’s room.

“Well, Tim’s pretty sure it wasn’t Lidia.” She repeated to Teri what Cass had told him.

“Same as Lidia told me.”

“Right.” Evon took a second. “That’s one reason I’m here. I figured from what you said last time that you probably talked to Lidia about Dita’s murder.”

“Not immediately,” Teri said. “But she finally put it all on the table with me maybe three months after Dita was killed. Lidia was just in a state. You know, we spoke every morning in those days. And every day it was the same thing. She couldn’t finish her sentences. She burst into tears over nothing. Finally, I said, ‘Afto einae anoeto!’ ‘This is craziness!’ ‘You have to tell me what’s going on.’ We met at St. D’s and sat in the pews in the sanctuary and talked for hours. Oh, and she cried. Cried and cried. And so did I, of course. Dita was my only niece and I saw more than a little bit of myself in her.”

In the church, Teri said, Lidia had told her about Zeus and the twins, and Lidia’s plan to ask Dita to stop seeing Cass. “I understood why she couldn’t tell her sons. But why not come to me? If anyone could talk sense to Dita, I was the best one to try. But I guess Lidia was embarrassed that she’d kept the secret from me for so long. Maybe she was afraid I wouldn’t believe her after all that time. Anyway, Dita had smart-mouthed her way into getting slapped. Probably would have done my niece some good if that happened more often, but not that hard. Apparently, Lidia caught her with a full swing. She shocked herself.”

Evon asked if Teri believed that Lidia had hit Dita only once. She did, Teri said, but not for the reasons that convinced anyone else.

“Lidia wouldn’t have done that to me,” said Teri. “Hal and Dita, they were all I had. She wouldn’t have taken either one from me, no matter how angry she got. But when I asked Lidia who else could have beat up Dita, I thought she was more evasive.”

“She believed Cass had killed her?”

“Well, if Dita was OK when Lidia ran out of the house and dead when Cass left, it seemed fairly obvious to me. And it must have worried her, too. When I heard a few months later that Cass was pleading guilty, I wasn’t surprised. He was always the more excitable of the two boys. My heart broke for Lidia, of course.”

“Tim doesn’t believe Cass did it either. Not any more.” Evon picked up her drink but only so she could look down into it. “I guess that means your brother killed his daughter.”

Teri didn’t answer, but even without much sight, she was reluctant to face Evon. The old woman was silent some time, which made for an unusual moment.

“Do you think we have obligations to the dead?” she asked Evon.

“I visit my parents’ graves when I go home. Is that what you mean?” That was almost a lie, since she prayed a lot longer over her father.

“Not really. Here,” she said, and raised her tumbler but only to gesture with it. “Truth told, I never knew exactly what to make of my brother. Of course, I loved him like crazy. You had to. He was the biggest thing on earth, so grand, and he carried it off. He was a good brother, loyal, always looked out for me, and a good father to Hal, who looked up to Zeus so much. Zeus had his points. But he was too much like our father, who I may have told you was just a big stinking turd.” Teri wound her head around in lingering contempt and disbelief, then paused again to reflect.

“I sometimes think,” Teri said, “we’re all sort of like twins-who we want to believe we are, and the person others see. They look alike, but you know, most folks probably make out someone in the mirror a little more appealing than how it might strike somebody else. But my brother, that was an odd thing with him. He knew the worst about himself. Didn’t face it often, and forgot it as fast as he could. But it was always there stuffed down inside him somewhere, like a loaded musket. And he was dead set on never letting anybody else find out. So do I ignore that?”

Evon told her the truth. That was Teri’s decision.

“Sure it is,” said Teri. “You bet your ass. But here’s the problem. As you might have noticed, dear, I’m old. And what I know-it could matter if this blame parade starts up again somehow. So I’ll trust you. But this is a truth that would hurt a lot of people.”

“Hal?”

“Especially. So you need to keep this to yourself, unless there really is no choice.”

“What if I tell Tim?”

“I’ll leave that to you. But Tim’s definitely another of the folks who would be hurt.”

Evon was too startled to respond. Teri looked up to the ceiling, where there was a gilded molding she could probably no longer see, then said abruptly, “All right. Let’s get this done.” She adjusted her position on the sofa and took another solid mouthful from her drink.

“You probably know, from the time of Dita’s death, my brother wanted to rebury her on Mount Olympus.”

“So she could be among the other gods and goddesses?”

“Whatever. He certainly thought that was where he belonged when his time came. Zeus, he really sometimes seemed to believe in the Greek gods. At least when it suited him. What he liked was that so many of them behaved so badly, so often. Nothing like Jesus. Zeus, if he got drunk enough, would tell you Jesus was a wimp. Zeus, the god Zeus? He truly was my brother’s role model. All-powerful and full of vices.

“At any rate, on the fifth anniversary of Dita’s death, Hermione and he thought they could bear the trip. Hal and Mina had three small children at home, but I went. Most of Olympus is a national park, but my people, they build churches everywhere, and Zeus had found a little chapel there with a graveyard. The old priest came out to say some prayers. It was a beautiful ceremony. A few of Hermione’s Vasilikos relatives had come up to Thessaly from different parts. And Dita’s casket was returned to the earth. In my bedroom, I’ve got some thyme I picked out of the rocks there to remember her.

“Afterwards, we went back to the villa Zeus had rented. Hermione’s relatives and some locals came to pay their respects, but they weren’t there long. Pretty soon it was Zeus and Hermione and me. My brother was in an absolutely black mood. ‘I am a bad man,’ he said as he sat there on that sofa. That was not the first time I’d heard that from him, by the way, but I doubt he’d ever made those kinds of remarks to that silly little clothes rack he’d married. But now he looks up and says, ‘I killed our daughter.’ Just like that. Like, ‘It snowed.’”

Teri, now that she’d decided to share this, was engaged by the storytelling. She had scootched herself forward on the sofa and was waving her whiskey around now and then as she spoke. Zeus’s description of the killing was brief. Lidia’s visit had caused Dita to make some awful comment about her father, which Zeus never specified, but which he admitted led him to strike his daughter in rage.

“Afterwards, of course, he was mortified he’d be discovered. So he weaseled around so that the police put your friend, Tim, in charge, figuring Tim was bound to be more unsuspecting of Zeus. And afterwards, he gave Tim a healthy retainer every year, just to be sure he kept seeing Zeus in a kindly light.”

“God,” Evon said. She now understood Teri’s warning that the truth could wound Tim. She finally took a nip of her drink. To her it would forever taste like gasoline. She said to Teri, “I know Zeus didn’t realize Cass was his son, but did he care at all that a twenty-five-year-old was doing his time?”

“Oh, he said something silly at one point, that no expert could say for sure that it wasn’t Lidia’s slap that caused Dita’s death. As if that justified sticking Cass in the pokey. But, no, like I said, Zeus was a lot like our father. He just convinced himself that bad stuff he’d done hadn’t happened. But reburying Dita had waked it all in him and he said he had decided to turn himself in as soon as we got back.

“It was a minute before either Hermione or me could react, but then she started carrying on. I’d never seen her act like that, throwing things and screaming. She spit on Zeus, smacked him. He just sat there. Not that she wasn’t entitled. He’d killed their daughter. But once she was done calling him a monster for that, she said that what he was going to do would only make things worse-abandoning her in old age, bringing shame on their family, and shattering Hal. And why? In order to spare Lidia, who Hermione always somehow felt he loved more than her.

“I just left her to the screaming, and tried to sleep. As far as I could tell, they were up all night.

“The next morning, Zeus seemed to have settled her down enough that she’d agreed to take a walk with him back to the graveyard. So off they went, and no more than an hour later, I hear all this shouting and hear sirens up the mountain. The servants in the villa were in a tizzy and dragged me out with them. And there was Hermione telling the police about these strange men who had followed Zeus and her. She said she was walking alone, fifty paces in front of him, when she heard Zeus scream. Next she sees is these men tearing off and Zeus way down below, broken on the rocks like a child’s toy.”

“Did you believe that? That strangers had tossed him down the mountain?”

“Ohee,” Teri said, moving her head from side to side. She actually laughed at the idea. Zeus’s enemies would not kill a father in mourning, according to Teri. But Hermione was a Vasilikos and the Greek police couldn’t wash their hands of the matter fast enough.

“Hermione never cracked. Once we came back, I saw next to nothing of her, except on family occasions. She became another one of these Greek widows, keeping company with almost no one but her son and grandchildren, and dressed in black. Designer stuff, of course. But black.” Teri cackled.

“And Cass stayed in prison.”

“Yes. That was sad. Of course, I returned from Greece determined to honor my brother’s wishes and go to the prosecutor in Greenwood County. I hired a lawyer, a fellow named Mason. Ever heard of him?”

“George?” He was a judge now, but still one of Evon’s closer friends. “You couldn’t have done better.”

“Well, he listened to all this and said, ‘Is your sister-in-law going to back you?’ ‘Fuck no,’ I said. I knew better than that. Admit she had a motive to push her husband off the mountain? Blacken his name and devastate her son? And reward Lidia, who she despised? I’m no lawyer, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Your friend George just shook his head. ‘A prosecutor is going to look at this and laugh. You come forward only after your brother dies, when you can conveniently lay the whole thing at his feet with no consequence to him. His wife, who was in the room, denies he ever said anything like that. And who do you hope to free as a result? Only the son of your best friend. We can do it, Teri, but I’ll tell you right now there isn’t a soul in that courthouse who is going to believe you. Frankly, I think I might deserve a bonus if you don’t end up charged with perjury.’ If it was just about me, I might have carried on anyway. But to tear Hal apart with no point? Cass wasn’t getting out. Your friend Mason convinced me of that.”

“And you never told Lidia.”

“How could I? She’d have demanded that I go to the prosecutor. What else would a mother do? A lot of people thought Hermione was dull, but she was a survivor. She knew I was cornered.”

The old lady emptied her tumbler. She was done.

“A secret,” she said to Evon again, as punctuation.

Evon went to set her glass down on the tea cart, but Teri reached for it when she realized where Evon was headed. She made a remark about wasting good whiskey and took a long draught.

“Forgive me for not showing you out,” she said. “I’ll probably just fall asleep here.”

Evon offered to help her to bed but the old lady was content with her bad habits.

“How is your life, dear?” she asked, as Evon picked up her purse. “What happened to Loopy Loo?”

She described yesterday’s events to Teri. “She probably got out of jail last night. I never checked to find out.”

“And how do you feel?”

“Like I got trapped in a washing machine on spin cycle.”

Teri liked the description and had a long laugh.

“It’ll probably take you a while to recover, but don’t give up hope.”

“That’s what Tim tells me. Anyway, I can’t escape my own nature. It’s what I want, deep inside.”

“Course it is. You ought to try to be happy for your own sake, but if that doesn’t convince you, then try because there were so many of us who never even got the chance.”

That thought, a new one, pierced Evon straight through the heart.

“Come give your old Aunt Teri a hug.”

She did. The old woman still smelled like she was wearing an entire cosmetics counter. Teri looked up, unseeing, and touched Evon’s cheek. She told Evon again she was a good girl.

Evon stopped at Tim’s house on Monday morning on her way to work. He was up and welcomed her, ushering her back to the sun-room. She was worried about what to tell him, but by now he’d figured it all out on his own.

“You don’t need to beat around the bush. It was Zeus, wasn’t it? Kept me on his side all these years, didn’t he? I’ve been a fool before. But never for money.”

“Tim-”

“It’s OK,” he said. “I should have looked that gift horse in the mouth a long time ago. I knew Zeus’s colors. But he got the drop on me with the grieving-father stuff. A fella like Zeus, they always know the soft spots. Damn him to hell anyway.”

“I knew you were going to take it hard.”

“Of course I am. Let an innocent man go off to prison? Now how’s that for a capstone on my career? Oh, jeepers,” he said, and looked bereft as he stared at the floor. “I certainly have worked my last for ZP.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Yeah, I do. Time anyway. I’ll go out to Seattle and see how much I like it. Lot of hills and young people. I’m still not sure it’s the right place for a gimpy old man. I guess I’ll find one of those graduated dying places, where you get a little help to start and eventually leave in a box.”

“I think they call them assisted living.”

“Whatever.”

She told him she had to get in to the office, but promised to return to have lunch. Once he saw her to the door, Tim sat in the sun-room and put Kai and J.J. on and listened to them play. All the time Tim tooted on the trombone as a kid, he believed he was going to be that good, and there was no more chance of that than of his becoming a 747. And he thought he was a good cop and a decent man, but he was willing to buy all of Zeus’s palaver because it bought him a little more comfort in life. None of the investigators, so far as Tim recalled, had even thought to cast a look in Zeus’s direction, because of the blood. But Tim was the guy experienced enough to have seen through it.

The truth was often so damn painful. People couldn’t stand to live with it. And him thinking he was in the truth business. No one really was. You took as much as you could and called it quits.

But there was music and sunshine. And maybe when he got himself around other people every day, he might even find some cute old gal. Evon had said the same thing a lot of folks did. In those places a guy who could still drive was more popular than a billionaire. Maria would forgive him. What Sofia had told him had helped. Sitting here on his plaid couch, he again felt his love for Maria, which would last as long as he did.

He put his hands over his face to give the rising shame and indignation about Zeus another second to drain. It would come and go for days. But he slapped his thighs.

Life, thought Tim, almost age eighty-two, goes on.

When Evon got to the ZP Building, Hal was locked in the giant conference room with a battalion of bankers and lawyers, a few of whom would emerge now and then and scurry to a side office for conferences or phone calls to superiors. The meeting had been expected to last two hours and was now in hour four. On the business side of ZP’s offices, there was a portentous silence. A lot of people seemed to be holding their breath.

Finally, after lunch, Hal’s assistant, Sharize, told Evon he was free. The bankers and lawyers were filing out, men and women in blue suits who looked like teams of pallbearers in training, one face grimmer than the next.

She entered the vast conference room, which was normally partitioned into three, but Hal was on the phone with Mina and he held up a hand. Evon sat in a chair in the hall until he was finished, a good fifteen minutes.

When Sharize brought Evon in, Hal’s suit coat was on the back of his chair. He’d removed his tie, and his white shirt was darkened by large spots of sweat. He sat in front of the vast bank of windows over the spangled river, peering abjectly at the wall. Another portrait of Zeus was over there, in the center of the sycamore wainscoting, so perhaps that’s where Hal had started, but now he seemed to be indulging his habit of looking at nothing at all. When he finally saw Evon, he withdrew his middle finger, on which he’d been nibbling, from his mouth, and gave her a quick smile, but it was in the nature of a wince.

“It’s over,” he said.

“What is?”

“ZP.”

Evon found she had sat down, still a good thirty feet from her boss.

“How could that be?”

“Housing prices are dropping, even collapsing at YourHouse’s end of the market. The bankers have locked arms and want another 150 million dollars in collateral on the YourHouse deal, which has to come out of the equity on the commercial projects. But the other lenders-often the same frigging people-won’t give up their senior positions. In fact, retail is down. And, according to the economists, going down further. Which means the shopping centers’ values are tanking, too, because rents have to drop. I thought we were pretty conservatively leveraged, but unless there’s a giant change, we’ll be in bankruptcy by the end of the year and the ZP shareholders, starting with me, will be wiped out. I may even vote for Obama.” He smiled wanly then. “Joke,” he said.

She repeated herself. How could that be?

“Well, I asked the same thing. But it’s just arithmetic. I never imagined all of this stuff would go down at the same time. Nobody did. The bankers will reassess at year-end, but we need to make a public announcement now, which will crater the stock. It’s doom.”

“How do you feel, Hal?”

He laughed.

“Awful. My dad started with a duffel bag of cash he’d borrowed from my grandfather and worked his whole life, built an empire, and I’ve lost the whole thing. In a couple of months. I’m glad he didn’t live to see it. I truly am. I can’t even imagine what he would say.”

Evon pondered. “If he was honest, I’m sure he’d tell you he’d made a lot worse mistakes.”

“I doubt that.” His fingernails were back in his mouth. Evon considered telling Hal that it was Zeus’s honesty, not his mistakes, that was subject to doubt, but she couldn’t see what good it would do at the moment.

“Do you want to talk about the Gianises?”

He flipped a hand. Who cares?

“Long-short, Cass says he didn’t do it. He pled because the way the evidence was going to shake out, there was a good chance both Lidia and he would end up in prison.”

“So Lidia did kill my sister?”

She ran him through all the reasons to doubt that. He nodded as if he understood, but Evon realized she had only a small fraction of his attention.

“So who beat her up like that?” Hal asked.

Evon waited, then went with the answer she’d planned.

“We don’t know. We just don’t know.”

“Huh,” he said. If Hal ever sat down to do the math, about who was in the house, who was strong enough, there would only be one person left in the equation. But Hal might not work that out in this lifetime. His father probably had to stay up on the mountain for Hal to be who he was.

“You know what my wife said when I told her I just lost a billion dollars?” he said to Evon.

This was going to be a classic. “What?” Evon asked.

“‘It will be better for us.’ How do you like that? I mean, we’ll have enough. No plane. I’ll have to get rid of the horse farm. Stuff like that. But I won’t have to keep the lamp lit for my father. I can do what I want, instead of trying to maintain his monument. That was her point. She might be right. I feel too crappy now to know.”

“Good for Mina,” said Evon.

“She’s a good one,” he said.

She felt sorry for Hal, terrible, the more so as she thought everything over. At end, Hal for all his many faults had been the most honest guy around. He had acted for the most part as a loyal brother and son pursuing the truth. And now in his mid-sixties he was going to have to see if he had the strength to become somebody else.

“You better shine up your résumé,” he told her. “Get it out on the street.”

She hadn’t thought of that yet. She was going to be out of a job herself, assuming Hal was right. Whoever bought up ZP’s properties would probably be a bigger operation. They’d come in and clean house. It didn’t matter. Since she’d started making big money, she’d always kept two years’ living expenses in cash and she’d find another job anyway. Headhunters called all the time. She just needed love. That was really the work she had left.

“I’ll give you the greatest reference ever,” Hal said. “Which you deserve.”

“I appreciate it.”

She walked over and gave Hal a hug, which was a first.

“I really don’t think your dad would have done any better, Hal. Give yourself a break on that.”

“I just didn’t see any of this coming,” he said. “I should have. It’s right in front of my face. Of everyone’s really. The same economists who told me that the housing market had bottomed out are now saying there’s going to be a plague of foreclosures soon, because people won’t be able to sell their houses for what they owe. The banks, everybody holding those mortgage bonds, everybody will be doing the hurt dance. How could we all miss it?”

She puffed up her lips. She could say it again, but it had become a tired phrase. People see what they want to.

“I’m going to take a couple of hours,” she said. She had lunch with Tim-she preferred he didn’t end up sitting alone for long stretches today. And she wanted to air out her head. Maybe go for a run along the river.

Hal repeated something to her in Greek.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“My dad used to say it all the time. ‘May the gods guide us gently.’”