The Single Twin

by Sean Little

  “That’s what I said!” Duff held out a fist. “Bump me!”

  Gates ignored him. “It’s still not enough to walk up to a seven, soon-to-be-eight term congressman and ask him why he bought a baby thirty-five years ago.”

  Betts sighed and closed the files on his desktop. He looked at the clock. “If you geniuses can come up with hard evidence, not this flaccid, floppy, maybe shit you just laid on my desk, we’ll talk. In the meantime, Gates and I will look into tying the murder of Montrell Davies to anything to do with Stevens’s camp. It does seem suspicious that you waltz in here with this atom bomb of a case and the vic we find is wearing a Stevens T-shirt.”

  “Fine. We’ll do your dirty research.” Duff pushed himself out of the chair.

  Betts held up a hand before Duff could finish whatever rant he was about to start. “Hey, fellas. And lady.” Betts beckoned the three other people in the room to get closer to his desk. “I don’t think it needs to be said, but if any of this about Stevens is true, it’s a nightmare shitstorm in a bottle. If we have proof and can convince a judge we’re right, that’s one thing. Until we can hardline some concrete, no-bullshit evidence about this, then we don’t got jack. We don’t breathe a single fucking word about this outside of this room. You don’t tell your families. You don’t type it into an anonymous chatroom online. You don’t do nothing with this. The only place we discuss it is in private, and then only amongst the four of us. Capiche? If this leaks before we have proof, the bottle breaks and the nightmare shitstorm lands on all of us.”

  Duff stuck out a hand, little finger jutted out at an angle. “We could all pinky-swear not to tell.”

  Gates elbowed Duff in the side. “Do you take anything seriously?”

  “Cheesesteaks,” said Duff. “I take cheesesteaks as seriously as a bowel obstruction.”

  “Fitting terminology.”

  “Are we flirting, Detective?” Duff winked at her.

  Gates rolled her eyes in exasperated disgust. “Are we done here?”

  “As done as it gets, I guess,” said Betts. “Go forth and sin no more. And speak no more of this until you get me some sort of proof.”

  “Betts, you look tired,” said Duff.

  “I think you might have aged me a few years today, not gonna lie.” Betts looked at the three people in the room, making eye contact with each of them. “You realize this will end up going to the F’Bees if this is a congressman being implicated in murder and baby-buying, right?”

  “Probably better that way,” said Abe.

  “Less on your plate. You can stick to murders related to drugs and infidelity. Those are simple. Solvable. These sorts of things will get you to retirement, Detective.” Duff laid a finger alongside his nose and flicked it at Betts like Redford in The Sting.

  ABE AND DUFF walked to The Fucking Embarrassment in silence. When they got there, Abe told Duff, “I’ll drop you at the office. I have to go to Katherine's and pick up Tilda.”

  “I’ll go with you. I haven’t seen that little punkette in a few months, other than when I smoke her playing Call of Duty online. To be fair, that’s her own damn fault. Girl needs to learn to quick-scope.”

  “She said she wanted dinner with just me and her, and I haven't really spent much time with her since Katherine and I split, so—”

  Duff held out his hands to calm Abe. “Relax, you old butthole-clencher. I won’t come to dinner. I’ll just ride to your place, and then I’ll be on my merry. I have something I need to do over by your old house.”

  Abe didn’t want to argue or deny Duff access to Tilda. Duff saw her even less than Abe did, and Abe knew that on many levels, she was more or less his only family. They were very close. They played video games together. When she needed someone to vent to, someone who wouldn’t judge, she called her Uncle Duff. Matilda was probably the only person on the planet who Duff would actually take a bullet for, probably the only person whose company he actually enjoyed. He had been the first person to see her besides Abe or Katherine. She was as close to a child as he would ever have, too. Abe acquiesced. “Fine. You can come say hello.”

  “We could all go to Portillo’s.” Duff slid into the passenger seat.

  “Oh, you could walk to Portillo’s, and Tilda and I will go someplace where we can have a conversation.” Abe climbed behind the wheel and started the car. After a moment of protest, the faithful Swedish engine fired up and the grinding, gravelly purr filled the cabin.

  Duff let the subject of dinner drop. He got serious for a moment. “How are we going to prove Marcus Stevens is Mindy Jefferson’s twin?”

  “D.N.A. is my only thought.”

  “Can we get access to a D.N.A. lab?”

  Abe thought about it for a second. “Maybe. If I call in a favor or two.”

  “Then, the second question would be: can we get access to Marcus Stevens’s D.N.A.?”

  “Oh, easy. I have his old hairbrush in my desk at the office. That’s where I keep all the D.N.A. of the suspects we’ve never met of cases we’ve just started.”

  “Perfect,” said Duff. “Then we don’t have to sneak into his surely alarm-rigged home and steal his new one.”

  “How do we get close to a senator’s son in this day and age of security and hyper-vigilance?”

  “Maybe I’ll pull some strings for us.” Duff’s tone was mysterious.

  “You better have some really magical strings.”

  Duff twiddled his fingers together like a child with a secret. “Oh, I’ve got strings, friend. I’ve got strings you wouldn’t believe.”

  Abe pulled The Fucking Embarrassment into traffic and headed toward Katherine’s home. His old home. He missed living in a real home.

  THE ALLARD FAMILY, when they were a trio, lived in a quaint shotgun-style row house on a plain, brown-brick neighborhood in one of the neighborhoods not too far from Chicago proper. The house was near the end of a long city block located on a narrow street. The street needed to be made a one-way because with cars parked on both sides of it, it reduced the travel lane to a single car-width. However, it was still a two-way, so if you were heading northbound on the street and someone came southbound, it was usually a tense ballet of which person could find an open spot to pull into and wait for the other person to pass. All the houses on the street were gated with waist-high wrought-iron fences. They didn’t really keep anyone out, although they did serve as a deterrent to keep dogs from dropping presents on the postage-stamp yards. Between each house was barely enough space for a thin man to walk through. There were no windows on the sides of the houses, only on the front and back, shotgun-style.

  When Abe pulled up, Katherine was sitting on the porch swing Abe had hung on the little covered porch several years ago as an anniversary present. She waved at the two men as they stepped out of the car.

  “House still looks good,” said Duff. “Kath’s keeping it up well enough. Lesbians are good with their hands, though. That’s the stereotype, isn’t it? Power tools and work boots and haircuts that would look good on a 1950s shop teacher.”

  “It’s been two months, not two years. Why wouldn’t the house still look good?”

  “Duff, you look like shit.” Katherine called to Duff from the porch. It was her standard way of greeting him. It meant she cared.

  Duff opened the front gate and walked up the steps. He gave Katherine a hug. “Hey, lady Katie. How goes the beaver hunt?”

  “Eh...having probably about the same rate of success as you have finding a date, I’d say.” Katherine broke their hug and held Duff at arm’s length. “How’d you get that cut on your lip?”

  “Making new friends at the bar as usual.”

  “Your observational powers are unique, but they piss people off.” Katherine lightly patted his cheek in a matronly way. “I love you, but you’re going to piss off the wrong Pollack hunyock someday, and it’s going to get you killed.”

  “I should be so lucky,” said Duff. “Where’s the weasel?”

  “
In her room. Go say hello.”

  Duff shouldered past Katherine and into the house. Katherine stood at the top of the steps, hands on her hips, and smiled down at Abe who remained in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “How are you, Abe?”

  “I’m okay. Doing fine, I guess.” Abe suddenly felt extremely self-conscious, as if he shouldn’t be there. It was as if he was infringing on her private domain, which was stupid because two months ago, he had still been living in that very house. It all felt different now. It wasn’t his house anymore. The house looked the same. Not a single thing about it had changed. But, it was all different. It was like going back to your hometown after graduating from college and expecting to fall back into your old routines. At some point, you truly can’t go home again. The day Abe left, Katherine had told him he didn’t have to go, they could make things work somehow, but he still left. For both their sakes.

  “You boys working?” Katherine knew well the hit-or-miss, feast-or-famine life of private investigations. It was one of the reasons she requested no alimony when they did the paperwork to finalize their divorce. The house was paid off. She had a good job as a science teacher at the nearby middle school. She didn’t want or need Abe killing himself to slip her an extra hundred bucks each month.

  “We are. Really weird case, too. But, I can’t say anything about it just yet.”

  “I understand. Duff having fun with it?”

  “No more so than normal.”

  Katherine nodded. The smile on her face was genuine, but the awkwardness between them was palpable. They were still trying to figure out what they were to each other now. They had stopped being lovers a long time ago, before Katherine could got over the repression of her sexual identity. She knew she did not want sex with a man, even Abe who had been her partner through storms and sun. They were no longer roommates. They were still sort of partners, but not really. There were still decisions to make about Tilda’s upbringing, but for the most part they had done their job. She was happy, healthy, smart, and well-adjusted. She would be done with school in a little under three years. And then what? Without Tilda between them giving a need to bring them together, would they ever speak again? There were a lot of questions between them neither could answer.

  Luckily, Duff rescued them by kicking open the front door and striding through it with Tilda slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Did one of you order a petulant teenager who is probably getting too big for her fat uncle to carry around like this anymore?”

  “Put me down, Duffer.” Tilda was laughing. This had been their game for more than a decade. Despite his girth and laziness, Duff possessed a lot of fat man strength, the sort of muscle that came from having to motivate on a three-hundred pound frame on a daily basis.

  Duff set the girl on her feet. She jumped down the steps and flung herself at her father, messy tendrils of wavy red hair trailing behind her. “Daddy!”

  Abe caught Tilda as she leapt. He had spoken to her almost daily on FaceTime, and he saw her whenever she asked to see him, but it had been almost two weeks since he last saw her in person, and she looked different. She changed too much too fast. When he was not there to witness the changes on a daily, sometimes hourly basis, it felt like she was making light-year leaps into her future. Already she was taller than her mother, though she was still a head shorter than her father. Abe hugged his daughter close to him. “Hi, Monkeyface. Want to go eat?”

  “Can we get pizza?”

  “We can get anything you want.”

  Tilda lowered her voice. She spoke in Abe’s ear. “Mom’s on a health food kick again. No meat, no wheat, no white foods other than cauliflower.”

  Abe tried not to gag. “Sounds awful. Let’s go get a whole wheat crust with extra meat and double cheese.”

  “Perfect!” Tilda ran to The Fucking Embarrassment and climbed into the passenger seat. She used to have to sit in the backseat for safety. Those days were over. Abe missed those days.

  “I’ll have her back in a couple of hours,” said Abe.

  “Take your time,” said Katherine.

  From the porch, Duff waved to Tilda. “Don’t let your dad stiff you with the bill.”

  “I won’t.” Tilda waved goodbye to her mother and uncle-by-proximity.

  “You want to stay for dinner, Duff?” asked Katherine.

  He patted her shoulder. “Thanks for the offer, but I have other things on my mind this eve.” Duff walked down the steps and started strolling down the sidewalk. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and whistled “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana while he walked.

  THEY WENT TO Tilda’s favorite pizza place, Dino’s. It was only a couple of miles from the house. It was a greasy little hole-in-the-wall of a joint, but they made the big, oversized, floppy New York-style slices Tilda loved. Abe, being more of a Chicago guy at his core, preferred the more traditional regional deep-dish with a cornmeal crust, but he was there more for Tilda than the pie. Tilda ordered a large slice of ham-and-pineapple, a combination Abe considered an abomination to true pizza-lovers the world over, and Abe went with the six-cheese blend special, The Wisconsinite.

  While they waited for their slices to be heated up in the big pizza oven they sat at a small, two-person table inside the darkened restaurant and made small talk. Tilda told her father about school, and about her grades, and about how she was thinking about maybe trying out for the school play, but freshmen never really ever got cast for anything so she wasn’t sure she could handle the rejection. Abe told her about the more mundane cases he and Duff were working on, and about the murder they’d solved two days ago. He kept it simple and factual, leaving out the gorier details. Tilda liked hearing about how her father and uncle solved crimes. Abe liked seeing the pride in her face when he told her humbly how they solved the murder in less than twenty minutes.

  The pizza was finally brought over to their table glistening with delicious grease and steaming from the oven heat. They were given ice water in cheap, red plastic tumblers. Abe dumped a couple of spoonfuls of parmesan on his slice, just to add to the overwhelming cheesiness of his slice. As they had since Tilda was little, Abe and Tilda folded their slices in the center, held them toward each other, and touched the tips of their slices like a toast. Then it was time to dig in. True to his nature, Abe’s first bite dripped a greasy glob of sauce onto his chest. Only a small spot, but it stained the fabric sure enough. Abe owned precious few shirts that didn’t bear some remnant of his clumsiness around food. “Aw, would you…” Abe couldn’t even finish his feeble curse. He dropped the pizza and started dabbing his napkin into his water glass to minimize the damage.

  Tilda, quite used to Abe’s misadventures in food, paid him no mind. After two bites of pizza, she set her slice down. She appraised her father with a serious look. She reached out and touched his hand. “Dad, are you doing okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m great. Why?”

  “You look sad. You sound sad on the phone. You look like you’re sort of being a ghost, lately.”

  “I’m great.” Abe smiled bravely. He was not sure if the smile made it to his eyes, though. Emotionless eyes give away a fake smile every time.

  “I talked to Mom a lot after you guys separated. She feels super guilty about everything. You know that, right?”

  Abe stopped Tilda right there. “Hey, none of this is your mom’s fault. I blame society. Things were a lot different for gay people when she and I were young. A lot of gay people were taught to repress those feelings, told all sorts of stupid things to make them feel bad about it. When I was a boy the worst thing other boys could call you was faggot. I should know; I got called faggot a lot. But your mom was just trying to do right by her family, by me—it’s not her fault.”

  “Oh, I know. I have the internet, Dad. I read a lot.”

  “I’m sure you do, but reading it is not the same as having been there.” He tried to smile again. “I’m fine. Honestly. I’m happy for your mother; she’s finally a
ble to be her true self. I hope she’s happier now. Is she happier now?”

  “She is. Sort of.” Tilda looked down at her pizza. She squirmed uncomfortably and her cheeks flared pink. “Dad, the reason I wanted to have dinner with you tonight was because I wanted to ask you something. Mom was sort of against it, but she said if you were okay with it she would be, too.”

  “This sounds heavy.” Abe set his pizza down. The apprehension a father gets when his teenager is being serious about something was ping-ponging around his gut.

  Tilda went on the defensive, trying to soothe his nerves. “Oh, it’s not. Not really. It’s just one of those things that…” She trailed off. She started blushing harder. Tilda’s fair features really did not hide her emotions well. When she was embarrassed, lying, or angry her skin flashed vermillion. The only time she could lie effectively was if she’d caught a severe sunburn earlier in the week which for her fair skin could be done by passing by an open window on a hot day. Katherine and Abe bought sunscreen by the bucketful when Tilda was young.

  Tilda blew out a breath. “Okay, here goes. Magnus Veit asked me to go out with him. Like on a date.”

  Part of Abe had been waiting for this, so he was not completely blindsided. It was still something of a shock, though. Tilda had completed her freshman year of high school. She was almost fifteen. She would be starting her sophomore year in a few weeks. That all fell right in line with being a teenager as Abe understood it. Abe fought not to look like Tilda had bowled him over. He tried to play it cool and aloof. “Oh, did he?”

  “Yeah. Mom says she thinks I’m too young to start dating, but it’s not like a date. It’s just, a few of my friends are sort of pairing up to go see a movie and get something to eat and hang out at the mall for a bit. It’s a group of us going.”

  Abe plastered a smile to his face. “That sounds like it would be fun.”

  “Mom said she wouldn’t say no if you thought it might be okay I go.”

  That stupid, archaic, caveman-part of Abe’s brain was screaming, No! He was not ready for his little girl to become a young woman. The logical part of his brain knew this day would come eventually. Abe had resolved long ago he was never going to be one of those alpha-male dads who posed for prom pictures with shotguns in hand. Sure, it might be a joke, but it was some sort of twisted thought-process that stated those fathers were somehow the anointed knight-guardians of their daughters’ virginities. Abe thought the whole mindset was bizarre and kind of sick. He had The Talk with Tilda when she turned twelve. Katherine had been telling her things for years, as well. Abe had done his best to lay the groundwork for a daughter who could make her own decisions, and he had to trust she would do what was right for herself when the time came to make major decisions later. Abe spent years trying to prepare his daughter to be an adult, and now that she was ready to take the first major milestone step, it felt like it was too soon. Abe wasn’t ready for it.