The Single Twin

by Sean Little

  Unless there was a scandal, of course.

  It was no surprise to Abe someone was trying to keep Mindy Jefferson from learning the truth about her brother if it was indeed true her brother was really Marcus Stevens. A scandal in an election year would unseat Stevens, probably handing the election to the Republicans. In the contentious current political climate, it was no wonder why he needed to keep his seat. If he got elected once more, he could groom a replacement—Marcus, most likely—and retire in six years assured his progeny would continue the family business. Illinois would keep their beloved senator in office, his boy would be set to continue to shape the country and live off the lobbyists’ endless rolls of cash, and the Democrats would retain the ever-so-important senate seat.

  How deep does this conspiracy go? Abe wondered. While his own powers of perception were not as sharp as Duff’s, they were still of a much higher caliber than those of an average man. Hanging around Duff, he’d picked up a few things. One of those things was doing something Duff called “webbing.” He would look at a figure and spiral out from the central node to everyone who would likely be involved based on evidence. Sometimes, this created new pictures. Sometimes, this created new leads.

  Robert “Even” Stevens was the central figure. He adopted a baby from a now-deceased woman when the woman was a teen. She was no longer part of the web, but her daughter was. Did the baby himself know? A secret adoption did not seem to be the sort of thing a man would tell his child. It was probably safe to assume Marcus was immune from the web. The likelihood he knew nothing about his adoption was overwhelming. However, there was the issue of the man who was with Stevens when he took the baby from Mindy’s mother. Whoever he was, he had to know. And there was no way Kimberly Stevens did not know herself. No mother would be oblivious to a change in babies like that. Who else knew? If Mindy’s mother was paid for silence, and she kept her silence, her node of the web ends with Mindy. The man, the white man Sherry Franklin saw at the hospital the night the twins were born: where did his node go? Who was he?

  Hypothetically, if Robert and Kimberly Stevens kept their silence, then the white man’s node was the only question mark. Otherwise, all was buttoned-up tightly. It was a neat package.

  Abe rushed up the stairs to his apartment. A cacophony of sounds poured from open windows and from behind too-thin walls, conversation, guitars being plucked, Pink Floyd albums, various sports games. Abe ignored the noise. A couple of his neighbors called out a greeting to him when they saw him, but he only returned a half-hearted wave.

  Abe logged onto his laptop and used the residence’s weak Wi-Fi to search for old photos of Robert Stevens. Specifically, he was looking for photos from 1983. Anyone who was close enough to Stevens to help him more or less purchase a baby would undoubtedly be in photos with him during his campaign. Using image-search engines, Abe quickly located a half-dozen photos of Stevens with young, handsome, smiling white men. All the photos were in black-and-white. Color photos still weren’t standard practice in journalism, even in the mid-’80s. They were still shooting on 35-millimeter film and developing rolls in darkrooms by hand.

  A few of the pictures appeared to just be glad-handing shots taken with supporters, but one looked to be a war room shot of Stevens and a young man with a floppy haircut studying a polling report with grim expressions on their faces. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, both about the same height, both about the same build. Abe clicked the picture and read the caption: Democratic candidate Robert Stevens and campaign manager Ron Tasker study the most recent voter survey.

  Abe did a broad search for the name Ron Tasker. To the average Joe in America, he was a nobody. If you were in the know for both Chicago and Washington D.C. political circles, Tasker was well-known as a behind-the-curtain man, the type of guy who kept the machinery of politics well-greased. You never really saw him out front, he didn’t do a lot of interviews, but if you wanted to know why Stevens won his first senatorial race, then you need only look to what Tasker did behind the scenes. He was a fixer of problems and greaser of palms.

  Abe found a few more pictures of Tasker from the mid-’80s. Then he found a couple of Robert Stevens from the same time period. He printed them out on his little printer in the apartment. The pictures would not win any quality awards, but they were clear enough for someone to give a positive I.D. Abe needed to go back to Sherry Franklin and get her to look at them. A thirty-five-year gap might have made her memory fuzzy. He doubted any positive identification from Sherry this far gone from the actual date of the birth would mean much in a court of law, but it would mean their theories around the case meant something. She might not be able to remember their faces. It might be a wasted trip. It was something, at least. Something was always better than nothing.

  That done, Abe stared at the wall. What else was there to do? He could sleep, but he did not feel very tired. Often, no matter how tired he was, the very act of getting prepared for bed would wake him back up, and then he would spend hours laying on his back staring at the ceiling alone in bed. When he was married, even toward the end when there was almost zero physical contact between Katherine and him, he still liked lying in bed next to her at night. He liked the angle her body weight gave their mattress. If she was out late for an event or if she was gone for the weekend, he never used to be able to sleep. In a lot of ways, that was his problem now. As much as he hated to admit it, he somehow slept better cocooned in the bathtub at the office than he did spread out on a cheap queen-sized mattress in his apartment. It had only been a couple of months, though. He knew he had to try, had to give it time. He would adapt. Eventually.

  Somewhere in the complex, at least one dude was having sex. The amorous wails of a woman who was either filming a porno or trying to convince some poor sap he possessed the Dick of Life was going over the top with her vocalizations. When Abe was a teenager it probably would have made him hot. Now that he was middle-aged, out-of-shape, and depressed, it just annoyed him. He’d never made Katherine sound like that. Contrarily, she almost never made any noise. Abe didn’t believe it was possible to make a woman sound like that unless she was acting.

  Tilda’s plea for Abe to start dating began to plink around his mind. Abe was almost forty-five. He knew what he looked like. He knew his personality was not something toward which women gravitated. He knew his bank account would repel most women looking for stability in a relationship. He felt like he was a better man when he was married and had a family at home, but those days were over. Abe wasn’t Duff, though. Whereas Duff practically salivated at being alone and abhorred the idea of cultivating a relationship, Abe liked women. He liked being in a relationship. There was security there he could not get being alone. He would like to find love again. He would even like to get married again. He had no desire to have another child, though. Not at this point in his life. It had been fun to run after Tilda was he was still relatively young. Now, the aches and pains of forty-something had caught him, and he could not imagine getting down on his hands and knees and playing a spirited game of Horsey with a toddler bursting with unbridled energy.

  The very idea of trying to go out and start up a relationship again felt like an insurmountable obstacle. Abe did not know where to find women his age. The thought of trying to date one of the twenty-somethings who populated the bars was exhausting. Abe did not want to admit it, but he was probably done with relationships. It would take a very specific woman for him to fall in love again. That fact depressed him even more. He envied the kind of guy who could just approach any woman, be confident with any woman. He even envied the schmuck upstairs who was railing the bad actress, although he could have done without having to listen to her histrionics.

  Abe decided to turn in for the night. At least in bed, he might fall asleep and not have to dwell in his own thoughts. Sitting at the table and staring blankly at the wall, his own thoughts were all he had. He considered popping a couple of Benadryl. Two of those little pink pills usually knocked him unconscious in about tw
enty minutes. Do not operate heavy machinery, indeed. As a bonus, when he woke up in the morning, his sinuses were usually clear. However, it would be very easy for him to become dependent on something that would make him sleep. He tried homeopathic products in the past, but none of that snake-oil was worth the price of the bottles it came in. He even tried melatonin pills, but they just made him mellow, not sleepy. It was better to lie awake and stare at the darkness. Sleep would come, eventually.

  His nightly routine was extensive since he became single. He disrobed to his boxer shorts, inspected fingernails and toenails, brushed his teeth, and flossed. He never used to floss, but now he had time. He had nothing better to do. Flossing was becoming one of his favorite things to do. He actually felt useful when he flossed. After that, he rinsed with Listerine. He played a game with himself every night. He would set the stopwatch on his phone and try to ignore the burn of the alcohol longer than he did the night before. Right now, his personal best was up to twenty-four seconds. He trimmed any stray nose hair. He inspected his ears, too. At some point, he started losing hair on his head and started growing hair on his ears like some sort of sick, cosmic joke. He’d made it thirty-five years in life without ear hair, and then one day he looked in the mirror and there was fuzz on the tops of his ears. Not long after, an inch-long white hair appeared jutting out from the tragus of his ear like a flag of surrender. Give up now; you’re old.

  When all the physical acts of self-preservation were complete, Abe would stare at himself in the mirror. He had done this nightly since he was thirteen. There had never been a single night where he wasn’t disappointed. With a sigh, he turned off the bathroom light and went to bed.

  He turned the large, rotary stand fan at the foot of his bed to high. The head swiveled left and right and made the room’s temperature drop from miserable to merely stifling. In bed, he plugged his phone in to charge. As the last act before beginning a futile battle with the evasive demon of sleep, he texted Duff. We need to go back to Schaumburg tomorrow.

  A second later came Duff’s reply. Let’s go now!

  Before Abe could respond, there came a heavy, rapid thumping at his door.

  -11-

  DUFF ENTERED ABE’S apartment in a huff. “Stevens killed the baby.”

  “What baby? Where?” Abe was still in his boxer shorts. He stumbled back to his room to find clothes. He should be used to Duff bursting in on him and saying weird things after twenty years, but does anyone ever become immune to that sort of thing? Not really.

  Duff went to the fridge and pilfered a can of diet Coke. He popped the top and took a draw, belching loudly afterward. “The original baby, his biological baby. He killed it. It died. That’s why he needed an illegal adoption. That’s why he preyed on a vulnerable single mother and made such an outrageous deal. He needed a baby roughly the same age as his infant who died.”

  Abe had not really considered that aspect of the story. “I thought he needed a baby to complete his family man image all the voters seem to demand.”

  “Kimberly Stevens was pregnant. I saw it with my own eyes when I was a boy. She would have given birth maybe a week or three before Stevens came after the infant in Maryland.”

  “There’s a lot of difference between a newborn and a three-week-old.” Abe tugged on his khakis and an old Northwestern hoodie. Go Wildcats.

  “True. But there’s not a lot of difference between a two-month-old and a three-month-old, right?”

  “Well, sure there—”

  “Not if the kid isn’t seen. Not if the kid has no reference photos.” Duff was insistent. This was the thing that made sense to him therefore it was unable to be anything else. “This is how I see it going down: The Stevenses have a baby. That baby dies, probably from violence. If the baby had died of natural causes, that’s a sympathy vote. Therefore, violence. They have to cover it up. They quickly find a vulnerable young black girl giving birth in the vicinity, some nobody they could intimidate and pay off. They make the deal, take the baby, and blammo! Instant cover-up. Keep the baby out of the media for a few months, and when the pictures do start getting snapped, no one is any wiser.”

  “I guess it makes sense.” Abe hated to concede Duff’s point. It was convincing, though. Abe went to the kitchen table and picked up the sheaf of papers he printed earlier. “Check this out. We need to go back to Sherry Franklin to see if she can I.D. Stevens and his campaign manager, Ron Tasker. These are pictures from the year Mindy Jefferson was born. If these were the guys in the delivery room, then we got him.”

  “A rookie nurse identifying two guys almost four decades after the fact won’t hold up in court.”

  “It doesn’t have to hold up in court. Not yet. It will just let us know we’ve got the right guys. Right now, all we’ve been going on is a hunch. We have no proof. You concocted a wild story which fits the weird parameters of this whole mess. It might be right. Maybe it’s entirely wrong. If Stevens was never in the delivery room, we’re back to square one.”

  Duff could not fathom his version of events being incorrect. All the pieces fit. If the pieces fit, then the situation was what it was, always. “He was definitely in the delivery room. Abe, you know I’m right.”

  “Yes, because you’re usually right. Sometimes, you’re not.”

  “When? Name one instance I was wrong!”

  “Remember when you said if we went and got colonics together it would be a good bonding experience?”

  Duff winced. That had been a really weird day. “Okay, that sucked, yes. But, Kenny Loggins seemed to enjoy them so much. How could Kenny be wrong? He took the highway to the danger zone.”

  “We’ll go to Schaumburg first thing tomorrow. Hell, we’ll get up early so we can miss the rush hour traffic. Then we’ll politely bother Sherry Franklin one more time, see if she remembers anyone from these pictures, and we’ll go tell Betts and Gates.” Abe gestured to the lousy couch in the furnished bachelor pad. “You can stay the night if you want.”

  Duff grimaced when he looked at the couch. “Rental furniture. Do you have any idea how many gallons of bodily fluids have probably been spilled on that thing?”

  Abe held up a finger to silence him. “No. If I thought about it for one single instant, I’d light this entire place on fire and run screaming.”

  “Seriously, man. Bachelor resorts like this hellhole are basically painted with semen and tears.”

  Abe’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Why’d you have to do that? I was fine it the way it was, but you had to ruin it.”

  “I’m bringing the truth, Abe.”

  “Fine, you can sleep on my bed, but you’re above the covers, I’m below. You can have my Cubs lap blanket as covers if you really need it.”

  It was a hot night, so Duff would not need it. He was used to sleeping in his clothes, anyhow. “Fair deal. I insist we abide by the unspoken golden rule of sleeping platonically with another straight dude: no pole-to-hole arrangements, no big spoon, little spoon, either.” Duff followed Abe into the bedroom. Abe slipped under the sheets on his side of the bed. Duff laid down next to him on top of the sheets.

  “We’ll get a couple of hours of sleep and hit the road by six, okay? We shouldn’t have to deal with too much traffic if we can get to Schaummy before seven.”

  “Deal. Can we get breakfast when we get there? Rolling up on someone at seven bells is inconsiderate, even by my standards.”

  “Fine, we can get breakfast.”

  “Abe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s find a diner, like a real one. Not Denny’s, not a chain restaurant. No fast food, either. I want a place with a name like Billy’s Family Diner. A place that smells like burned coffee and hash and has a waitress named Roz or Erma.”

  “I’m sure we can find a local diner in Schaumburg.”

  “I dunno, man. It’s Schaumburg. That’s like the land of nothing but chain restaurants. Pickings might be slim out there.”

  There was silence, a long, protracted spell
of quiet, where only the fan and the faint sound of some TVs elsewhere in the apartment complex could be heard. Both men lay on their backs, hands folded on their chests. They stared at the ceiling together. The bad actress had called it a night a while back. There was an omnipresent din of road noise from the traffic which never ceased but it was a static hum, almost a soothing whisper.

  “I think I’m gonna get French toast.”

  “I don’t need to know that.”

  Duff huffed breath into his cupped hand. “Damn. Onion breath. Can I borrow your toothbrush?”

  “Only if you want me to kill you and then myself.”

  “Drama queen.”

  “Go to sleep, Duff.”

  Abe rolled over on his side and faced away from Duff. He hated to acknowledge it but with Duff on Katherine’s side of the bed the mattress had that angle that felt so familiar. For the first time since he moved out of the house, Abe actually felt like he got a halfway-decent night’s sleep. He just did not want to make a habit of bedding-down with C.S. Duffy.

  THE WORST WAY to wake up, according to Abe’s father, who had served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, was to hear the word “incoming” being shouted loud enough to wake you from a dead sleep. If that was true, then the second-worst way was to wake up with C.S. Duffy’s gaping maw horse-breathing stale Coney-dog-with-extra-onion-breath into your sniffer. When the snort-snoring of Duff woke Abe pre-dawn, Abe quickly realized he should have let Duff use his toothbrush.

  Abe left Duff sleeping while he showered, but when he finished and dressed, he slapped the big man’s foot. Duff had never taken off his sneakers. “Time to roll.”