Dead Ringer

by Lisa Scottoline

  Wow. “Fighting?”

  David smiled. “Combat, yes.”

  “Jeez. And in all those places. I’ve been to Pennsauken. It’s nice, in summer.” This would be in the category of saying anything, even dumb stuff. Bennie knew next to nothing about the military, from a lifetime of being philosophically opposed, and also a big chicken besides. And all she knew about SEALs she had learned from Hollywood. “I mean, wasn’t Demi Moore—”

  “There are no female SEALs.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “Tell me more about your twin.”

  “Oh, is this the enough-about-me part?” Bennie set down her coffee. It was kind of frustrating. “You don’t like to talk about yourself, do you, David?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re kind of intense.”

  “Very.”

  “So, why? Would you elaborate?”

  David burst into laughter, a deep, rich masculine sound. “I don’t think I’ve elaborated in my life. If I were the kind of man who elaborated, I’d be the kind of man who liked talking about himself, wouldn’t I?”

  “Okay, maybe.” Bennie couldn’t help but smile. At least he could laugh at himself. David was like an action figure, with bendable arms. And what arms.

  “Now tell me about your twin. Alice. What did she serve time for?”

  “Drug dealing, which she did, and murder, which she didn’t.”

  “Wonder how she knew you’d be at the river.”

  Bennie thought about it. “I used to row on a very regular schedule, but it was interrupted three weeks ago by this trial.”

  “So she’s been following you for a month, at least, to know your schedule.”

  Hearing it out loud gave Bennie the creeps. She sipped her coffee but the creeps were still there. Creeps are the only thing that coffee doesn’t cure.

  “So what are you going to do, to protect yourself?”

  “Protect myself?” Bennie hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “Yes. You’re under attack. How will you counter it?”

  “Well, I changed my clothes so she couldn’t dress like me. To make it harder for her to pose as me.”

  “You changed your clothes?” David mock-shuddered. “Tough tactics. Watch out.”

  “It’s just the first step,” Bennie said defensively. You try losing an identical twin. “I’ll do whatever I have to. I’ll figure it out. I always do.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “No, I don’t. Thanks, but I don’t need help.” Bennie knew it sounded like she needed help. She didn’t think she needed help, but she didn’t know how to make it sound better.

  “I can help you. I’d be happy to.”

  Bennie flushed red, with the three thousand emotions she was feeling at once. Gratitude. Embarrassment. Sheer schoolgirl crushiness. But his tone was so matter-of-fact that it didn’t sound like a come-on. His tone simply matched his words. It was an offer of help, straight up. Damn.

  “Is this a hard one?” David asked, cocking his head. “A choice. Yes or no.”

  “How can you help me with Alice?”

  “I know stuff, as you put it. And I have the time.”

  Bennie thought about it. He was a SEAL, but still, would that help? All he could do was raise the Titanic, save golden retrievers, and defend our democratic way of life. Still, he was a complete and total stranger. And it was confusing, letting him into her life in such a personal way. Plus he was way too hot and it distracted her. “You don’t have to help. Thanks, but no. I’m sure I can hire someone. A private detective, or a security guy.”

  “Fine.” David nodded. “Though before I go, I am kind of curious how Alice got in here. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. Obviously it wasn’t through the front door, since the cops had already broken in and nailed it shut.”

  “Maybe we can find out.”

  “But you’re not trained in stuff like that, are you?”

  “No, but I’ll figure it out. I always do.”

  Bennie smiled, against her better judgment. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted him involved even to that extent, but he had saved Bear, the cops were no help, and her investigator had prostate problems. She doubted that David had prostate problems. His prostate was probably pink and spongy and in perfect shape. She banished the thought. Definitely, on the make. “I can’t see how she got in. No forced entry, and it’s not like she pretended she was me.”

  “Let’s get to work.” David went over to the sink with his empty coffee mug, rinsed it under the faucet, then opened the skinny KitchenAid dishwasher and placed it upside down on the white plastic rack. That clinched it:

  If David Holland wasn’t Superman, he was basically the same thing.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was kneeling in front of her backdoor in his silly sweatpants, running his fingertips between the glass panes like a surgeon. Beside him, Bennie petted Bear’s thick glossy fur, scratching the flyaway crimps behind his ear, more for her comfort than for his. Her head throbbed. Her eyelids dropped. Her arms ached from the swim, and her shins had been scratched by the sea monsters. Bennie tried to think about what to do next, but she was fried. And she appreciated David’s trying to help, but she was starting to feel guilty about it.

  “David, do Navy SEALs ever give up?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Guessed as much.” Bennie thought about calling the associates and updating them, but she was too tired. She rubbed her forehead irritably and leaned on the glass of the backdoor. “David, I appreciate it, but—” Suddenly, she felt the windowpane give way under her hand. It popped out of the window and fell outside the door to the flagstone, where it shattered with a tinkling sound. Bennie looked over, astonished. “Jeez.”

  “Way to go.” David rose to his feet, rising up on powerful thighs, and unlocked the door with the old-fashioned key in the lock. “You always keep this key in the lock?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s what happened. She cut the glass, unlocked the door, and replaced the pane.” David ran a fingertip along the inside of the pane and his finger came away with white gunk on it. “She puttied it back in place. It would have stayed that way if you hadn’t leaned on it so hard.”

  Bennie’s mouth dropped open. “Are you serious? That’s kind of professional, isn’t it?”

  “If she’s the one who did it. She could have had an accomplice, or she could simply be that professional, as you put it.”

  Bennie considered the possibilities, with a shudder. “But she’s not that smart, is she?”

  “Are you? She’s your twin.”

  “Right, of course. I forgot I was very smart.” Bennie was about to remark on his powers of perception when the telephone rang. She went to the kitchen, set down her empty mug, and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she asked, her eyes on the broken glass.

  “Bennie?” The voice on the line was one she didn’t recognize, a man’s. “Is this Bennie Rosato?”

  “Who is this?” Bennie asked coldly. She didn’t like strange men using her first name. Unless they wore Capri pants and trained commandos.

  “This is Jim Mattuck with the Philly News, and I was wondering if you would care to comment—”

  “Excuse me, Jim. You’re calling my home late at night, and I have no further comment on my arrest. All charges against me will be dropped after the preliminary hearing, I guarantee it.”

  “I wasn’t calling for comment on your arrest, Ms. Rosato.” The reporter paused, suddenly uncertain. “Haven’t you . . . seen the news? On TV?”

  “No.” Bennie felt her stomach tense. “What news?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there was a murder tonight.”

  18

  Boxy TV news vans littered Walnut Street, their tall microwave towers cutting into the night sky, with their logos, painted in cheery colors, incongruous in the grim scene. Red lights arched through the darkness, flashing from the bubble tops of white police cr
uisers that blocked the street, and a uniformed cop directed traffic away from the number street and kept it moving up Walnut. Onlookers gathered behind splintered blue-and-white sawhorses that cordoned off the area, mostly teenage boys with backward baseball caps. They tried to get on camera, waving, jumping, and flashing peace signs behind TV reporters talking into black foam microphones in pools of fake light, softened to a more flattering level by wiggly circular reflector screens held up by assistants with aching arms.

  Bennie had seen it all before, but it seemed oddly new as she hurried through the commotion, her heart in her throat, hustling in her running shoes over thick rubbery TV cables stretched like trip wires across the street. She ignored the reporters dogging her with tape recorders and microphones, tuning out their questions in her pain, and she didn’t stop moving forward until a uniformed cop halted her in the middle of the street, at a sawhorse wreathed with yellow plastic tape.

  “You can’t pass, here, miss,” the cop said tiredly. He was heavyset and he’d said it thirty times already tonight. “This is a crime scene.”

  “I know, I’m a lawyer. My name is Bennie Rosato, and the victim was my client.” Bennie couldn’t believe she was saying these words. Her mouth could barely form them. Her mind couldn’t process it. Robert. Dead. Murdered. “His name is Robert St. Amien.”

  “Sorry, Ms. Rosato, I can’t let you through.” The cop shook his head, his eyes shaded and barely visible under the shiny patent brim of his cap. “Only police personnel. If you’re a lawyer, you should know that. You could contaminate the scene.”

  “Come on, please.” Bennie peered over his shoulder and across the street. Between a florist’s shop and an old-fashioned shoe-repair store lay an alley whose entrance was completely obstructed by police personnel and vehicles. The murder had happened right in Center City, the business district, and it was the second murder here in as many months. The press had flocked to the scene, spinning a story they’d already tagged The Tourist Murders, like a miniseries.

  Bennie stood on tiptoe to get a better look. Between the light cast by the streetlights and the ritzy storefronts, still lit for window-shopping, she could pick out the chrome grille of the sober black Econoline that read OFFICE OF THE MEDICAL EXAMINER in yellow block letters. It was parked askew, across the two-lane number street, and its double doors at the back lay undoubtedly open. So the body hadn’t been taken yet. Robert. He is lying there, dead. “I have to get in there! I am a lawyer, I’m his lawyer. I was with him in court today, I swear it.”

  “No can do. Now back off. Step away from the—”

  “Who’s been assigned to the case from Homicide? I know some of those guys.” Bennie squinted across the street, scanning the assembled personnel. Uniformed cops, their light blue summer shirts bright spots in the gloom, stood talking in small groups that formed a clotted ring around the mouth of an alley. He had to have been killed in the alley. Against the far curb was the MOBILE CRIME van, but no crime techs were coming or going. Murder scenes always struck Bennie as remarkably static for such a dramatic, horrifying event, but this time the inactivity was driving her nuts. Why isn’t anybody doing anything? “Officer, who’s been assigned? Can you find out?”

  “No way I can interrupt, miss. Now step away or I’ll have you arrested.”

  “They tried that already.” Bennie had had it. She had to get to that alley. Then it struck her. Why was Robert here, anyway? He lived uptown, about eight blocks west. What was he doing here? She needed answers and she needed to be at his side. Then she got an idea. She hung over the barricade and began waving her arms.

  “I’m here, Inspector!” Bennie shouted at no police inspector in particular, and the cop at the sawhorse turned to look behind him.

  “The inspector’s here?” he asked in surprise, and in that moment Bennie ducked under the barricade and bolted toward the scene.

  “Hey, you! Lady! Stop!” the cop called out, giving chase. The uniforms near the medical examiner’s van turned around at the shouting, and Bennie recognized one of them. Officer Banneman, the cop who had been at her house tonight.

  “Banneman, it’s me, Bennie Rosato, remember?” she shouted as she ran to him, reaching him. “I’m the one at the house, with the golden retriever. Remember?” Bennie wasn’t even out of breath. If she couldn’t outrun a beat cop, she should turn in her Sauconys.

  “Oh, you,” Banneman said, with an audible sigh. “The B & E that wasn’t.”

  “It was, we figured it out. She cut the glass, in the backdoor.”

  “No kidding?” Banneman looked surprised. “We’ll have to get over and have a look at that. Where’s your friend, the big guy?”

  “He left,” Bennie said. She had sent David to his Jeep with a thank-you and declined his offer to come along. For some reason that seemed hours ago. The cop from the barricade caught up with them and grabbed Bennie’s arm.

  “You know this lady, Banneman?” he asked, miffed. “She says she’s a lawyer and the vic is her client.”

  “She’s legit.” Banneman waved him off and turned to Bennie, his eyes narrowing in the dim light. “Cut the glass, huh? You call it in, so they could make a report?”

  “I didn’t have the chance. I heard about this. I needed to get here.” Bennie tried to look over his shoulder. At the mouth of the alley, the mobile techs had set up the klieglights they used to illuminate nighttime crime scenes, and the lights threw off an eerie glow from their metal stands, the calcium white light hovering close to the ground like an electrical fog. Bennie spotted a crime tech in a baggy jumpsuit bent over at the mouth of the alley, silhouetted in the klieglight, then other men hunched over, squatting. She saw nothing beyond them but shadows. She made a megaphone of her hands and shouted at the group. “Who’s assigned to this case from Homicide? Does anybody know? Kovich? Brinkley?”

  “Yo,” came a voice from the alley, and in the next minute a grim-faced man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and a striped tie emerged from the shadows. He wore wire-rimmed glasses under a scissored spray of silvery Phil Donahue hair, and his manner was intelligent, if not downright bookish. Into the back pocket of his pressed pants he slipped a long, skinny steno pad, of the type carried by detectives. “I heard you were looking for the primary, and I don’t like people yelling at my scenes.” Despite his gruffness, he extended a hand. “Bob Needleman.”

  “Sorry.” Bennie introduced herself. Her handshake wasn’t as firm as usual.

  “Kovich and Brinkley are on day tour this month, but they told me about you.” It was too dark to determine his eye color, but he had an easy grin. “You’re the famous Bennie Rosato.”

  “Guilty.” Bennie couldn’t manage a smile. “Robert St. Amien was my client. My friend.”

  “So I hear. My condolences.”

  So it is really true. Bennie had hoped he’d say that there’d been some mistake, and she entertained that fantasy for a moment longer. “Oh, sorry, the victim of this murder is Robert Amien, not Robert St. Amien! Oops!”

  “I admire your work, Ms. Rosato. The civil rights work, not the police cases.”

  “Fair enough. Thanks.” Bennie peeked over his shoulder to the shadows. “Can I see what happened to him? It was a stabbing, they said on the news.”

  “You’ve been to scenes before.” It sounded like a statement, but the detective waited for an answer, and she nodded. He pursed his lips and took her arm gently. “All right then. This one isn’t pretty. Keep your cool. If you gotta leave, leave. You know what Kovich always says, ‘Leave or heave.’”

  She nodded, noting the kindness in his eyes, which turned out to be light blue. She sensed that Robert would be in good hands. They edged forward, going into the alley, where a ring of personnel clustered in the middle. The coroner, an older man wearing a yarmulke over a balding head, was kneeling over the middle of the alley, and Bennie recognized him: Dr. Feldman, one of the best on rotation. His two assistants, both black men, flanked him, bent over, working. They’d be finishing the tasks t
hey performed at the crime scene, bagging the hands to preserve trace evidence under the fingernails and making final notations on the position and condition of the body.

  Robert’s body. Bennie looked away.

  The alley couldn’t have been more than three feet wide, with a concrete floor that dipped in the center, presumably sloping down to a drain somewhere. A tiny snake of greasy water lay stagnant in the gulley, its surface shiny with oil and littered with a striped straw, a few cigarette butts, and an old Daily News sports section, and Bennie tried not to think about Robert lying among the trash. He doesn’t belong here. The alley reeked of rotting garbage from rusty blue BFI Dumpsters that overflowed at its head, and its walls were lined with old red brick, its color dimmed with age and grime, its mortar grayed and crumbling, granulated. The activity in the alley had stirred up its dirt, soot, and silt, and particulates leavened the air, sparkling as they floated into the exacting beams of the klieglight. It must have been why the light looked foggy at a distance. Bennie felt her brain returning to function.

  “What happened?” she heard herself say in a hushed tone, even though she didn’t know if Detective Needleman was listening. She wasn’t sure she was addressing him, or anyone at all.

  “He was stabbed to death. We looked but didn’t recover the knife. Same MO as that murder, last month, you heard of it. He was about the same age, fiftyish, from Belgium, it happened two blocks away.”

  Bennie nodded, sickened.

  “This body was found by a Temple kid walking by, out with his buddies, he called on his cell.” Needleman checked his watch, pressing on a tiny button so its purple numbers glowed in the dark. “That was about ten-thirty. An hour ago, at this point. Tentative time of death was nine o’clock, but that’s only tentative. We found the vic’s wallet beside him, credit cards and cash gone. Watch gone, too. And a ring, I think. Had a slight indent on the ring finger. Same as the guy from Belgium.”