Identical

4

Tim Brodie lived in the same Kewahnee neighborhood in which Paul and Cass Gianis had grown up, and where Hal had started out. The little hip-roofed bungalows, all of them built of brick before the Second World War, sat squat as toads on forty-foot lots, with huge old trees in the snowy parkways. When Tim bought his house in 1959, not long after he’d made detective, he felt he’d done whatever people were talking about when they had told him to grow up and make something of himself.

Now he awoke with a start. He was on the plaid family room sofa, a heavy volume on his chest. He sat up with an ominous grunt and waited until his body and his head came back to him. His leg ached unbearably just for a moment whenever he awoke. Tim didn’t know if the pain subsided or he merely got used to it. He had waited all his life for time to catch up to him and now it had.

He recognized the doorbell. When he could move, he made his way to the front door. Ordinarily, he’d expect it to be his granddaughter, Stefanie, but he’d been over there with her and her funny little husband last night. Instead, he saw a woman on his stoop, breathing fog in the cold. She was someone he knew, he realized, but he just couldn’t place her.

He opened the front door but not the glass storm.

“Evon Miller,” she said, and offered her hand. “From ZP.”

“Oh, hell,” he answered. He stepped back at once to welcome her. He’d met Evon a few times, the first when she took the position at ZP of his pal from the Force, Collins Mullaney. Collins had liked the job, but had to fall on his sword because a ZP real estate manager in Illinois was paying bribes to lower the company’s property taxes. Collins parachuted out with a big package and had no ill will toward Evon. She was a good egg, a bandy little gal, a former FBI agent who years back had busted several state court judges. She’d been in the Olympics, too. Field hockey was Tim’s memory. Also didn’t make any secret of the fact she was gay, which was something Tim had gotten over early in his life when he tried to make a go of it playing the trombone. What the hell did he care who you slept with, if you had good pitch and kept time?

“To what do I owe the honor?” he asked, once he had her inside. He told her to take off her coat. She was OK-looking, thick-built but with a little bit of a stylish way about her and short blondish hair. Her face was wide, and in the strong daylight, he could see she had kind of pebbly skin.

“Need to talk to you about something,” she said. “I’ve been calling your cell for three days.”

“Really?” Tim saw the contraption on the table in the foyer where he’d set it when he got done following around Corus Dykstra from YourHouse. Dead. He laughed as he slid the phone in his pocket. “I was actually wondering why my daughter called the landline yesterday. Don’t get old,” he told her. It was the drifting part of age, the way his mind seemed to have no home on earth, which often surprised him.

He offered Evon coffee, but she declined.

“Grew up in a Mormon town,” she said. “My dad was a Jack, but I just never developed the habit. I’ll take a glass of water, if that’s OK.”

He was in a plaid flannel shirt and twill pants and Evon could see he’d been asleep. His face was red and his white hair, some of it starting to yellow, was sticking straight up in patches where it should have been pushed over his bare scalp. He had a lumpy, marked face like an old potato, and he had become one of those elderly guys with a permanent wary expression, seemingly afraid that any second now somebody might take advantage of him. Tim handed her the glass and then led her back toward the family room, where he said he liked to sit. She had some memory that Tim was a widower, and the house probably looked just the same as when his wife passed a few years back, crowded with the relics of a lifetime. It was the kind of place where you had to turn sideways to move around the furniture. The walls were thick with photographs, both family shots and scenery, as well as children’s paintings. And every tabletop was forested with objects: Limoges figurines. Little lacquered boxes. Glass paperweights. Books and more framed photos. They could have done Antiques Roadshow here for a month.

In the back room, a sunny add-on with tall windows, there was soft music, a swing take on “It’s All Right With Me.” A crooner’s voice yielded to a trombone solo, and Tim stood for one second, listening with his eyes closed and a finger raised. Then he silenced the old phonograph and lifted an LP tenderly from a turntable, slipping it into a grayed sleeve. He had been reading, too, and slid a mark into a huge volume.

“Greek myths,” he answered, when she asked about the book. “Once Maria passed, I figured I better get on to what was left on my lists. Said I’d read Shakespeare and got through The Comedy of Errors, but that’s kind of a slapstick piece, you know, twins separated at birth. I can handle the comedies, but King Lear, whoa, that’s tough. These old tales”-he hefted the book with both hands-“don’t seem to put me to sleep so fast.” In the light, she could see the white whiskers he hadn’t shaved this morning standing on his cheeks. “So you here about Dykstra and YourHouse?” he asked.

“Not really. But Hal says you turned up a lot of great stuff following him around. Frankly, if I’d known what the boss had you up to, I’d have tried to stop him. The whole deal could have cratered.”

Tim shook his head. “Nobody notices an eighty-one-year-old guy. They look right through you.”

The melancholy frankness of the observation silenced Evon for a second, but Tim didn’t seem to be seeking sympathy. She turned the subject and asked Tim if he’d seen the papers this week. Laughing, he pointed to a pile in the kitchen, all sheathed in blue plastic, another thing that seemed to be getting past him. Evon handed over Wednesday’s front page, and he groaned at the headline: “Kronon: Gianis Part of Sister’s Murder.”

“Me oh my,” he said, as he scanned the article.

“Paul sent Hal a letter demanding a retraction, and Hal won’t budge. In fact, he repeated this stuff to a couple more reporters. And he’s planning to put ads on TV saying the same thing. Gianis filed suit for defamation late yesterday.”

“Oh dear,” said Tim. He knew all about how people could be when somebody they loved got murdered. A brick could fall off a building and kill someone you cherished, and it wouldn’t be quite as hard to accept as a homicide. When some goofed-up stranger made a conscious choice to end the life of a person precious to you, it knocked the pins out from everything we assume in living with each other. Tim had spent more than twenty-five years on the Force, many of them nodding and patting hands and telling people that they’d be best off letting it go in time. But some folks just couldn’t. And Hal was one of them.

Evon said, “I didn’t realize until I started reading some old news articles that you’d been in charge of Dita’s murder investigation.”

Tim snorted. “Wasn’t anyone in charge of that investigation.”

“Well, Hal says you had some thoughts about Paul and the murder, back in the day. Is that true?”

“Not how I recall,” he answered. “I was never content we’d gotten answers to every question. So Hal’s right as far as that goes. But how many cases can you say that about? Most of them I ever worked on. There’s always some piece of it you don’t have quite right.”

While she’d waited to hear back from Tim, Evon had had her assistant print out everything on the Internet concerning Dita’s death. The murder, when it occurred, had been a sensation. It seemed to stimulate a seething mixture of pathos and bloodlust and grim satisfaction in the public, seeing this kind of tragedy befall people so privileged, in the palace they’d fled to to avoid the troubles of the city. Instead, someone had crept into Dita’s bedroom, while the other members of her family slept, and killed her, leaving a trail of blood and glass. The case topped the headlines for weeks, especially when Zeus quit the governor’s race. According to the papers, there were no hard leads. And then out of nowhere, a few months later, Cass Gianis agreed to plead guilty to second-degree. But there was never a word about Paul, unless you counted the mention that Cass was an identical twin. When Paul had started his political career, talk of the murder had briefly revived. All the profiles of Paul said he visited Cass several times every month and supposedly wrote him before going to sleep each night. Paul never discussed the crime, merely repeated that he loved his brother.

“How did you even get involved in the investigation?” Evon asked Tim. “Were you detailed out there by Kindle County?”

“Nope, I wasn’t even on the job any more. Hit fifty-five the year before, went into my brother-in-law’s heating business. No, Zeus, Hal’s dad, asked me to get involved.”

“How did he find you?”

“Oh, I’d known Zeus and them forever. Kronons lived two blocks over when Maria and I moved in here.” Tim hoisted himself up for a second to point out the rear window of the sun-room. “My wife was Greek. Baptized all my kids at St. Demetrios. Even spoke a couple words myself. President of the men’s club four years. But she come to lose her faith, Maria did. Not her values, mind you. But she just couldn’t touch her knee to ground and celebrate the Lord after our daughter died.” Tim’s old face grew heavy as he thought about that, then he cleared his throat again.

“The Greeks, I’m not telling anybody anything they don’t know, they really don’t have time for anybody but Greeks. But Zeus must have figured I was close enough. Very clubby, the Greeks. Very proud, you know. Make fun of themselves so no one else can. ‘We invented democracy and been sitting on our asses ever since.’ But they’re a conquered people. Had the Ottomans with their foot on their throats for five hundred years. That’ll take the spunk out of you, especially your men. But they don’t like to admit that. Gives the Turks too much credit.” His gray eyes came back to her then and lingered. She could tell he’d forgotten the question.

“You and Zeus were friends?”

Tim laughed. “Zeus, he was too grand for me. He’d glad-hand you, but he’d left the folks from the neighborhood way behind. What would you expect of somebody calls himself Zeus?”

“Wasn’t that his name?”

“Oh, hell no.” Tim grabbed the top of his head with his big raw hands to force his memory back into it. “Zisis,” he said finally. “That’s what he was baptized. But of course he wasn’t in school long with American kids before they were calling him ‘Sissy.’ So by high school he was saying ‘Zeus.’ Can’t blame him, I guess.”

She asked again how it was Zeus had gotten Tim involved and he laughed once more, a phlegmy, geezy sound.

“See,” said Tim, “that investigation wasn’t any more organized than a barroom brawl. Nobody had taken control of the crime scene. Zeus and Hal and the mom had been in there twenty times before the first cop arrived. The Kronons had actually cleaned up a little bit, the mom had, even arranged the body, before anybody thought to call the police. Not that there was any real point in bringing that bunch in anyway. Out there in Greenwood County, they hadn’t seen a murder in eighteen years, and probably hadn’t known what to do then. Which didn’t keep them from mucking around for a day or two. Then they asked for the state police, but there was too much politics with Zeus running for governor. Every trooper was out there to watch somebody else. Meanwhile Zeus is a basket case, he starts in screaming he wants the FBI. He gets them, too, for all they know about murders. So now you got three sets of nincompoops.” Tim’s eyes popped up when he realized who he was speaking to. “No offense,” he added.

“None taken,” she said. The Feds and the locals-that was like the Civil War, a battle to be fought in a different form in every generation.

“You had three different teams of evidence techs go through there,” Tim said, “each with different samples. Some tests get performed three times, some don’t get done at all. Everybody thinks somebody else is running leads. It was an unholy mess. So about a week along, Dickie Zapulski calls me. Zeus has asked the state police to hire me as a special to lead the investigation. Zeus got on the phone next and pretty much begged. Truth told, I wasn’t loving the heating business, or my brother-in-law, but I didn’t actually miss the street. But I felt for Zeus. I’d lost a daughter. So I said, OK, put me in charge. Not that anybody was actually willing to listen to me.”

When Evon had found out, not long after taking the job, that Hal had a PI on retainer, she’d gone in to see Collins Mullaney, who’d stayed on a month for the transition. He reassured her about Tim, who he said was maybe the best homicide dick in Kindle County in his time. ‘What was great about Timmy was he didn’t get distracted,’ Collins had told her. ‘He didn’t care who was humping who this week in McGrath Hall,’ referring to the headquarters of the Kindle County Unified Police Force. ‘And he didn’t get caught up hating the perps either. He’d smack a kid who spit on him, just like the rest, but he always said the same thing, no matter how big a shitbum. “Didn’t have a soul who cared enough to teach ’em how to behave.” Kind of “there but for the grace” with him. I think he grew up in an orphanage himself.’

The crime scene, Tim said, didn’t point in any particular direction. The first police to arrive had found the French door to the balcony open. It had rained hard that evening, right at the end of the St. Demetrios picnic, and there was a set of deep shoe-prints in the flower bed under Dita’s window, which made it look as if somebody had dropped from above. There were some tire impressions, too, down the hill, where you’d hide a vehicle, but there’d been two hundred cars there earlier in the day, so you couldn’t make as much from that. Upstairs, one of the panes in the French door was broken out between the mullions, with the glass scattered on the tiny balcony outside, and quite a bit of blood painted on the jagged glass, and the inside of the door and the carpet below. The blood trail ran into Dita’s bathroom, where, by simple count, there appeared to be a towel missing, suggesting that the killer had used it to bind a wound. The ABO typing that was state-of-the-art in 1982 classified the blood in the room as B. Dita and the rest of the Kronons were O, so there was no doubt of an intruder. From the brass knob on the outside of the French door, the initial techs also lifted a good set of fingerprints, which had remained there despite the fierce rainstorm that had pelted that side of the house. No way to date prints, but the best guess was that they belonged to the intruder.

“Dita is killed in her bed,” Tim said, “which is still made. Apparently she’s tuckered out and watching the tube for a while, before going out to meet her girlfriends at a bar. She’s in her robe and undies. No vaginal trauma, no tearing, but rape kit is positive for semen-then again, that could be from any time in the last forty-eight hours. Type B, though. Somebody smacked her first, damn hard, then grabbed her face. You could see the bruising in both cheeks. The hit on the left side made finger stripes. Meaning we’re probably looking for somebody right-handed. And whoever it was had worn a ring, because there’s a big circular bruise. The police pathologist’s thought is our perp whacked her, then sort of covered her mouth with his hand and rattled her skull against her headboard. She dies of an epidural hematoma. Lividity and the bleeding from the scalp wound shows she wasn’t dead for several minutes after she was beaten. But the pathologists can’t say whether or not she lost consciousness. Probably though, since she didn’t call for help.” Tim recited all of this like the prayers in a breviary. The murder was twenty-five years ago, but for many people she knew in law enforcement, the details of a big case were burned onto their brains. There were few jobs more intense than having to save everybody in town from a bad guy.

“What’s the time of death?”

“Well, you know, it’s a Greek picnic, they’re eating all day, so it’s hard to tell for sure from the stomach contents, but the pathologist says 10:30, give or take. Right around ten, according to the toll records, she gave her boyfriend Cass a call. So she dies after that.”

“Who found her?”

“Zeus. He wasn’t much of a witness, not that I’d have done any better. Clear recollection that he heard the window break and comes running down the hall. Pretty shaky after that. Best memory seems to be that he sees Dita on the bed. The TV is on, and he asks her what’s doing, but he catches sight of the shattered pane in the door and the blood and goes straight there. Looking out, he thinks he sees a dark figure, male, disappearing into the woods. When he turns back to talk to Dita, she doesn’t answer. So he comes over, touches her, shakes her. It actually takes him a minute to fathom she’s dead. He calls the family doctor. Then sits with his daughter. Can’t even imagine going down the hall to tell her mother.” Tim stopped there with his own memories. When Katy passed, they’d all known it was coming, but Maria had gone home to sleep and so he had to call her. He still remembered the feeling. He was here, but not really, the rest of him was still in the past when his six-year-old daughter was alive.

Evon asked the status of the investigation when he got involved.

“They were chasing their tails. The operating theory was that the bad guy crawled in thinking she wasn’t there, caught her unaware and he grabbed her like that to keep her from screaming, then he took off, afraid somebody had heard the commotion. But each department had its own spin. The locals are thinking it was a burglary gone bad. State police are talking to everybody at the picnic, hoping somebody noticed Mr. Stranger Danger. Zeus is still pretty much a mess, and blaming himself. Why didn’t he hear her getting beat? And he’s convinced she’s been killed by his enemies to get even with him.”

“Enemies?” Evon asked.

“Turned out Zeus had a passel. Pretty sharp elbows when it came to business. There was the Greek mob, too, not to mention the husbands and boyfriends of the girls he was always after. Even turned out that some of the boys from the North End warned him not to run against Rafe Demuzzio in the primary. FBI was looking at that.”

“And when did Cass come into the investigation?”

Tim said the police had spoken to Cass as part of the initial canvass, but he claimed to know nothing. At the start, Zeus was sure Cass was uninvolved, and cops being cops, they were reluctant to suspect a police cadet. About three weeks in, the phone company produced the toll records from Dita’s phone and Cass was reinterviewed briefly, but Cass said he and Paul weren’t home and Dita had merely left a short message on his answering machine, which he erased that night.

“Cass, he would have been the last person I’d have thought of, to tell the truth. Him and Paul were in high school with my middle daughter, Demetra, and I knew them from church. Solid kids, in my book, both of them. But you know,” he said, “it’s the ones you think you know that fool you.” Tim thought about that and squeezed his lips with his hand.

“About a month along, we had a big meeting, every investigator, just to see what we’d missed, which was quite a bit. By then two, three of Dita’s girlfriends had said she’d made up her mind to drop Cass, she was sick of all the trouble with his family. So I go over and take a peek at Cass’s employment file in McGrath Hall,” said Tim. “Blood type B. His prints are on file, too. I ask the Greenwood PA for a subpoena and sure enough, the prints match out with the doorknob and a lot of other lifts around the room. So now we’re thinking, maybe the call at 10 was to whistle his butt over there so she could tell him adios.

“Anyway, the Greenwood prosecutor, he wants to question Cass in the grand jury, but Cass hires Sandy Stern who won’t let him talk. There’s a lot of cat-and-mousing for a month. Stern is like, ‘Those fingerprints mean nothing. Cass was climbing the drainpipe every night to tickle her fancy.’ And the same girlfriends who said Dita was going to eighty-six Cass, when we push, they give that part up, too.”

“Cass was jocking Dita right down the hall from her parents? Doesn’t sound like my idea of fun,” Evon said.

Tim closed his eyes and let his head revolve loosely, like a leaf in a breeze. Who knew what folks thought of as fun, especially in that department?

“Zeus, of course, that was the one thing he went off about, when I told him that part. No boyo was making time with his little petunia right in his casa. But I’m suspicioning it’s probably true.”

“Really?”

“Sure, cause if Cass was climbing up there to make whoopee, that meant he knew how to get in there the night she’s killed. So I get the PA to subpoena his credit card records, and we put together a little task force to check out every pair of shoes he bought in the last year, and sure enough, about a week into that, we find he got himself a pair of Nikes whose tread matches the impressions in the flower bed. Those tracks down the hill could have come from the Bridgestones on Cass’s old Datsun, too, except there’s ten thousand cars in the Tri-Cities with the same tires.

“But we issue a search warrant, for his clothes and shoes and vehicle, and for a physical exam, to see if we can find the scar where he was cut. We get the shoes we’re looking for. Nothing turns up with the clothes, but Luminol in the car shows blood traces, type B again. By now, Stern won’t produce Cass for the physical exam, instead files a bunch of motions, and then when he’s just about run out that string, Sandy comes in and offers to plead Cass. He wants manslaughter, ten years’ minimum security. Zeus and Lidia, the twins’ mom, they go back to smooching in the choir room at church, so he’s heartbroken for her and is fine with whatever, but Hermione, Dita’s mom, and Hal, they wouldn’t hear of ten years. Finally, right before the PA was going to return an indictment, all of them settled at second-degree for twenty-five years, but still minimum security. The judge gave Cass a month before he surrendered so he could stand up at Paul’s wedding.”

“And were you OK with that result?”

“Depends how you mean. The sentence, I never thought that was my business. Minimum security irritated some of the other cops, but I’m like, ‘It’s prison, not torture, any nice college boy would get torn apart at Rudyard, especially a former cadet.’ The thing that bothered me was he wouldn’t answer questions. Never did. He pled, said he done it, that was it.”

“Well, what questions were there to answer?”

“The windowpane just for one. The glass is all outside, on the little concrete balcony under the French door. Meaning the window was broken from the inside. So how’d he get in?”

“You already told me. He’d climbed up there before. What was your term? ‘Making whoopee’?”

“That’s OK. Maybe he arrives hoping for romance, or knowing what’s on her mind. Either way, she says, ‘No, I’m done with this,’ and he loses it and smacks her. When she passes out, he panics and flees. But if you’re inside already, why not just open the latch and leave?”

“Maybe he’s trying to make it look like a break-in. Only he really doesn’t know much about crime scenes. So he cracks the glass the wrong way.”

“Nice.” Tim chuckled and pointed a thick finger at her with true admiration. The knuckle was crooked and swollen with arthritis. “Only Cass Gianis is a police cadet. And the other thing is, breaking glass, that makes noise. If you want to escape, why raise that kind of ruckus? What sense does that make?”

“So you didn’t like him for the crime?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying I had a few questions. There wasn’t any couch in my office for the defendant to lay down on and explain what was in his head or his heart, assuming anybody ever knows. But we had his fingerprints in her bedroom and on the door. Blood was his type. Shoes match. And there’s motive because she was going to drop him. And he gave a shit-ass alibi when he was first questioned right after the crime, said he was with his twin brother-”

“Paul?”

“Right. Said they were larking around that night, drinking beers over the river. Course nobody saw them. Cass couldn’t even name the liquor store where they bought the six-pack, said Paul got ’em.”

“And did Paul back that?”

Tim scratched his chin while he looked at the beamed ceiling of what had once been a porch.

“Seems to me he might have, now that you mention it. You know, it was just part of the initial canvass. Troopers talked to everybody who’d been with Dita at the picnic. Report couldn’t have been more than a paragraph. I would probably still have it.”

“Really?”

“Down in the basement. I didn’t have any staff, and I was in a different office every couple of days, so I figured I’d rather keep all the reports at home. Show you if you like.” Tim used a chair arm to hoist himself to his feet and wobbled a bit with the first step. Evon watched him. He was somewhat stooped now behind the shoulders, but he remained a big man, well over six feet, with the proportions of a tight end. In the day, he must have commanded a lot of attention on the street. He motioned for her to follow, and then opened a door in the kitchen and descended unevenly toward the cellar. The old wooden steps were steep, and Tim held on to the rail and kept his other hand on the brick wall to steady himself. His twill pants were halfway down his butt.

The basement, when they reached it, was even more crowded than the upstairs. There was a distinct cellar reek, a combination of mildew and dust, and all manner of things crammed in-grimy bicycles with flat tires, garden hoses, racks of clothes, hickory-shafted golf clubs, old TVs, broken furniture. The light from a cellar window slanted over some of the mess.

“Did you ever hear of a rummage sale?” Evon asked him.

“My daughters are even worse than me. Don’t want to part with anything Maria touched. Let them figure it out when I’m gone,” he said, and laughed, utterly cheerful about his own mortality. He turned sideways to get past an old chifforobe and reached a metal filing cabinet, a beige box from which the paint had rusted off in uneven blots. He seemed to know at once where everything would be. He crouched over the bottom drawer and pulled out a file, then went to pull the chain on a bulb. He turned the pages with some difficulty, his fingers stiff, licking the tip of his thumb now and then.

“Here you go,” he said finally. He read the report for a second, then handed it to Evon.

It was just as he recalled, too. Short interview, two days after Dita’s death. Paul said Cass was with him all night after the picnic, hanging out at Overlook Park on the river. A stone lie. Cass couldn’t have been with him, because, as Cass acknowledged subsequently, he’d been with Dita, punching her around and killing her.

“This is gold, you know,” Evon told him.

“It is?”

“This man wants to be mayor. Leader of the police. But he lied his ass off to the cops to keep his brother out of trouble. Even after he’d been hired to be a deputy prosecuting attorney.”

“Who wouldn’t? I’m not sure I’d want to vote for a man who wouldn’t save his brother. Besides, that’s all politics. Hal can keep his crazy politics. That’s not my concern.” Tim waved a hand past his big nose.

“But it proves what Hal’s been saying. That Paul was involved from the start. He covered up for his brother. And maybe there’s more to it. Those shoes? They’re identical twins. So the Nikes could have fit Paul. I bet they always shared clothes. Were they still living together?”

“You kidding? Greek family? Hal was still with his parents and he was forty. Yeah, the Gianis twins were both of them at Lidia and Mickey’s. Paul, I think, was about to move out.”

“What about fingerprints? Do identical twins have the same fingerprints?” Evon was feeling some excitement. She always did the job and her job was to make Hal right. She was surprised about the velocity with which she was willing to suspect Paul, whom she’d always liked, even admired. But there was an elusive quality to him that had never sat quite right with her. You could spend lots of time with Paul Gianis, as she had, and still come away feeling he was guarding something essential about himself.

But Tim moved his head from side to side.

“Seems as I remember, twins’ prints look somewhat alike, but when they’re in the womb and they reach out and touch the whoosywhatsit-” He stopped to find the word.

“Placenta?”

“Right. No, they have different fingerprints.”

Evon absorbed that, then reread the report.

“Can I take this?”

Tim shrugged. “Public record now. PA in Greenwood did what they always do when Cass was indicted, threw all the police reports in the court file to prove the defendant had had full discovery before he pled guilty.”

Evon strayed a hand to the filing cabinet.

“What else have you got in there, Tim? Any chance I can pay you to look through all your files and see if there’s any more about Paul?”

He laughed. “No need to pay me. I’m on the long end with the Kronons. I’ve been getting a check every January first for twenty-five years.”

“I know,” she said. “It comes out of my budget.” She smiled, though. “Nobody’s ever really explained it.”

“It was just Zeus’s way of thanking me for dropping everything and taking over the investigation. When this here was done with, I wasn’t too keen to go back to the heating business. Zeus wanted to hire me at ZP, but I’d had enough bosses as a cop to last me a lifetime. So I decided to become a PI, and Zeus was like, ‘OK, we’ll give you a retainer every year.’ I won’t lie either. Helped plenty, especially when I was getting started.” Mullaney had told her that these days Tim worked principally for criminal lawyers, turning up stuff the cops had missed, and also for a number of insurance defense lawyers. Tim was the guy who’d debunk a workman’s comp claim with photos showing the guy who said he was injured lifting weights. Brodie could also write a good report and was relaxed on the witness stand. He’d always had as much work as he wanted, although that had to be petering out at his age. “’Tween Zeus and Hal, they haven’t called me ten times. This thing I did last week, with Corus, must have been the first in five years. So yeah, you want me to look at the files, I’ll look at ’em. I’ll keep track of the time, but it’ll be a long while before you owe me anything.”

Upstairs, she collected her parka, which had ended up on the sofa next to his heavy book. There was a faint odor in the kitchen of last night’s dinner, which she hadn’t noticed when she came in.

“You keep going with those myths,” she said.

“Oh, I will. Was just reading about the myth of love when you rang the bell.”

“Myth?” said Evon. “You mean love’s not real? I wish somebody had told me that before I moved in with my girlfriend.”

She rarely said anything so personal, but she couldn’t pass on the joke. Not that it was all a joke in Heather’s case. But Tim was mightily amused. He laughed in his husky way for a long time.

“No,” he said, “Aristophanes says we were all four-legged creatures to start, some the same sex, but most half man and half woman. Zeus was afraid us humans would get too powerful so he sliced us right down the middle, and everybody spends their life looking for the matching piece. What do you think of that?” He laughed again, tickled by the idea.

“I think it makes as much sense as any other explanation.”

Tim found her response amusing as well, then limped ahead to show her out. When they got to the foyer, he lingered to face her.

“You don’t really think Paul Gianis had a hand in murdering Dita, do you?”

“What was he lying for?” Evon asked. “He knew what to say, and more important, he recognized that he had to lie for Cass’s sake. Which means he had a lot of information by then, Tim. Maybe they were together that night. Maybe that’s why Cass never wanted to answer questions.”

Tim pondered, but an unhappy thought seemed to pull at his face.

“Don’t like thinking I missed the boat like that,” he said. He considered the prospect for a second, then opened the heavy door.