Identical

by Scott Turow

  “Do you have the time to nose around a little? Just to be sure. It’ll keep Hal off my back.”

  “Hell yeah. I admit the whole thing eats at me.”

  With all the unfinished business in life, all the crimes where ancillary questions went unresolved, it surprised him that he remained preoccupied by the killing of Dita Kronon and the many pieces that didn’t quite fit. He had thought for a quarter of a century that Cass Gianis committed the murder, and perhaps he had. But for Tim the case had been safely filed under “Jobs Done Right.” At eighty-one, it was unsettling to see your supposed accomplishments unravel, since it left you to wonder how many more would come apart over time.

  “Hal’s still pissed that Paul wouldn’t tell him the story,” Evon said.

  “Guy spends two years running for mayor,” Tim answered, “and then won’t recite a little piece of ancient history to get himself a better shot at the job? Whatever tale he has to tell has gotta be worse than what people were already thinking. Or at least as bad.”

  After much thought in the booth, Tim had still punched his ballot for Paul. In his concession speech, Paul said Sofia and he were going to take some time to consider the future, but until now Tim had not realized that meant their relationship. It was one of the truest adages he knew that you could never tell from the outside what was happening in a marriage. Sometimes inside, as well. All in all, it sounded like the Gianises had themselves one hell of a mess.

  He told Evon he’d poke around a little more to see if recent developments had shaken loose something new. Evon asked him to check back before taking on any big expenses.

  Tim didn’t expect any of the Gianises to be more inclined to talk to him, but there was no harm in asking. Sooner or later, he might wear one of them down. He phoned Sofia at work, but it went straight to voice mail, where the message said Dr. Michalis was out of the office. Naturally. There were slimers from all over America who wanted an interview. Tim took an old-fashioned approach and wrote a letter, addressed to Sofia at the house in Grayson, saying he was thinking about her and needed a few minutes.

  Around eleven, he went out to the Gianises’ house, joining at least six different TV vans with their potato-masher antennas on the roof. A county cop was in the driveway to keep the reporters from acting like jerks and creeping up to the windows. Tim caught sight of a cameraman he used to know just a little, Mitch Rosin, sitting on the back of his van, enjoying a cigarette in the mild weather. The flowering shrubs were in bloom, and the trees had exploded into green overnight a few weeks ago. At Tim’s age, there was a special pleasure in spring.

  Rosin squinted through his own smoke as Tim gimped up.

  “Brodie, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How the hell have you been?” Rosin worked as an independent and had produced some documentaries for the cable networks. His shoulder was a mess, he said, from carrying the camera for forty years, but otherwise it had been a great life, as a professional voyeur. The rear doors of the van had been thrown open and Tim sat beside Rosin on the dusty bed of the truck. They gabbed a good twenty minutes, laughing about old cases. Like a lot of people, Rosin remembered Tim from Delbert Rooker. Delbert had killed six schoolteachers and tried to abduct at least four more. He actually rented space in a meat locker along with the deer hunters and had the six bodies wrapped and hanging right there. Except for being a homicidal maniac, Delbert could otherwise have been Mr. Peepers, right down to the pocket protector. Worked for the state Department of Transportation approving truck licenses.

  “I take it,” said Rosin, “that he didn’t have a positive experience in grade school.”

  “So it seems. Guy never explained, though. We went in the apartment with a SWAT team. Here he is in a three-flat and he’s grabbing these poor women, sticking them in his trunk, and then dragging them up the stairs to a third-floor apartment in the middle of the night, wrapped in a tarp. No one ever hears or sees anything. And of course, he’s just inside his own sick world—not only took pictures but made audiotapes so he could relive each kill. And never cleaned up. There’s blood and hair all over the living room rug. We had him sitting in the kitchen, handcuffed to the radiator while we searched. I says, ‘Delbert, didn’t you know you shouldn’t be doing this stuff?’ I was just trying to knock out the insanity defense. But he shrugs. ‘Had it coming,’ he says. ‘All of them?’ I ask. ‘Had it coming.’ OK, well then that’s how he saw it.”

  Tim eventually asked what was up with the Gianises. Rosin told him that Paul’s and Sofia’s offices said each was on vacation. No one had a clue about Cass, whose latest whereabouts once again were unknown. There was no word on when any of them would be back, but the gossip shows all wanted the first footage of the new couple whenever they appeared, so Rosin was sitting here.

  While Tim was talking to Rosin, the mail carrier arrived in her little truck and took a trip to the house next door. A tiny dark woman wearing a pith helmet and PO-issued shorts, she clearly didn’t like doing her job on-camera and virtually dashed up to the neighbors’ mail slot.

  Tim tried not to react. He stood up and stretched and said something about moving his old bones. He drove around the block and ended up following the mail van for an hour, until the carrier stopped for lunch in a little Bibimbap hole-in-the-wall. She was jawing in Korean with the owners when Tim sat down beside her at the counter on one of the vinyl-covered round backless stools. She was a small woman, maybe fifty, with a beautiful coppery color and a wide sunny face. Her knotty little calves were displayed beneath the hem of her shorts with their maroon stripe down the seam. A large wooden cross hung from her neck, which Tim didn’t take as an especially good sign.

  He picked up a stray copy of the Tribune for a second, then put a hundred dollars in twenties down at her elbow.

  She stared at the money.

  “No way,” she said.

  “Just need a conversation,” he answered. “How long is the Gianises’ mail held?”

  She ate for some time, using her sticks, her face close to the bowl.

  She never looked down when she swept up the money and put it in her left pants pocket.

  “Monday.”

  “And have you delivered mail there for Cass? Cassian?”

  “Couple things.”

  “Any forwarding for Paul?”

  “Start last week.”

  “Where to?”

  She laughed. “I not the phone book.” Still she closed her eyes. “Center City. Tee hun-rat on Mo’gan.”

  “Three hundred on Morgan,” Tim repeated delicately.

  She nodded. He couldn’t think of anything else.

  Thursday morning, Tim decided to see if he could find Cass. There was a guy he used now and then, Dave Ng, who could get social security information. Tim never asked how, but over the years he took it that Dave had somebody—or somebody who had somebody—in Baltimore in Social Security HQ. This was too far over the line for Tim, except when he was desperate. Ng charged five hundred bucks that Tim would have to bury in his gas and mileage expenses for Evon. Ng called back in an hour.

  “Zero,” he said. Tim had never met Ng face-to-face and for all Tim knew, he was really a black guy named Marcellus. In payment, Tim mailed two blank postal money orders to a PO box in Iowa. “Last job was at the Hillcrest Correctional Facility downstate. No employment this year in either quarter.”

  He might have thought Cass was a phantom, but both Georgia and Eloise, the attendant at St. Michael’s, had seen him in the last few months.

  On the way back to the Gianis house, he stopped at the FOP lodge hall. There’d been a jar of pickled eggs on the bar he’d been thinking about for two months at least. It had been an entire era since he’d eaten one. The same bunch he’d encountered last time was playing pinochle, Stash and Giles and the guy who’d told him he was never going to find Cass, and three more. There was a pile of quarters in the center of the table.

  “God oh mighty,” said Stash at the sight of Tim. “Her
e comes the walking dead.”

  “Greetings from zombie land,” said Tim. He pulled a chair up behind Stash and said, “Jesus, you wasting all that money on a hand like that?”

  Stash turned full around and Tim laughed merrily.

  “I don’t even know the rules of this game,” he confessed. “Far as I know, you win with petunias.”

  “You still chasing around for Kronon?” Giles asked. “I’d have thought he’d have declared mission accomplished. He sure sank Paulie’s ship.”

  “Just some loose ends I’m trying to tie up, more for my own sake than anyone else’s,” Tim answered.

  He went to the bar and laid down two singles and ate two pickled eggs, then returned to the table to ask the guy who knew the Gianises’ neighbor if there was any news about Cass.

  “I actually talked to Bruce, after you were here. Told him you were on Cass’s trail.”

  Tim nodded. He hadn’t expected to fool anyone. Still, you could tell from the deliberate way the man didn’t look up from his cards that he thought he’d gotten the drop on Tim. He was a fair-size guy, basically bald but wearing the fringe of hair he had left long enough to overflow his collar. Man seemed decent enough, but Tim sensed he hadn’t actually been a cop, more a wannabe, probably welcome here because he lost a lot more than he won.

  “He said no sign of Cass,” the man said. “The wife saw Sofia in the driveway a couple months back and asked how it was all going and she just says, ‘We’re all so happy he’s home.’”

  “Yeah,” said one of the guys on the other side of the table, “apparently she was real happy.” A chorus of lurid laughter circled the table.

  “They were bound to hit the rocks anyway,” said Stash. “Paulie, he’s been catting around for years.”

  Tim had learned a long time ago not to say never. A dick could make a fool out of a lot of men. But still.

  “Now what kind of bullshit is that?” asked Giles, who’d been quick to defend Paul last time, too.

  “No bullshit to it. You know Beata Wisniewski?”

  “Any relation to Archie?” Tim asked.

  “His daughter.” Archie had been a captain who ran the Eighteenth District in the North End. There’d been stories for decades about drugs and cash disappearing from the dope-slangers out there. Plenty of defense lawyers told the same tale: A client who’d been dealing a pound ended up getting charged with selling six ounces. That was still enough to catch real time, but none of the dealers complained in court that the coppers had pinched their coke and were selling it themselves. If that was what was going on out there, and the PDs were pretty much sure of it, the captain figured to be getting some. Otherwise, he’d have gotten rid of the bums long before. But that was the days of yore by now.

  “She become a cop, too?” Tim asked.

  “Got into the academy straight out of high school, on some kind of waiver,” said Stash, “long time after that was supposed to have stopped. Good-looking girl, too. Big but fit. She rode with me right after she started on the job. About six months in, Cass pled guilty and she was freaked out about it. Apparently, Cass and her, they’d been tight at one point.”

  On the other side of the table, a dark guy circled his thumb and forefinger and poked his other index finger through, as if he knew something. Stash shook his head uncertainly.

  “She left the job after a few years when she got pregnant,” said Stash. “Married to a training officer, Ollie Somebody, who had a big bottle issue. Guy used to try to smack her around and of course she’s sober, and trained, and big, and apparently she put the asshole in the hospital twice. But finally she decides life’s too short. Anyway, Roddy Winkler’s got a son used to live in the same building she moved into. This would be just after Paulie started making real dough. And the kid, Roddy’s son, he was also a lawyer, and he said he saw Paul leaving her place in the early a.m., more than once.”

  “Jesus,” said the Mexican-looking character on the other side of the table, “I’m liking this story less and less. Not only is Paulie steppin out, but he’s poking his brother’s old girlfriend.”

  “Brother had to say go for it,” said the guy who knew the neighbor.

  “Weird shit,” said the man next to Tim. There was a brief discussion then about the number of guys who wanted a chance with the Doublemint Twins.

  “Early a.m.?” said Tim, going back to Stash’s story. “Don’t you think Sofia would notice the other side of the bed was a little cool?”

  “Fuck do I know?” asked Stash. “Wifey must have been traveling.”

  “There’s two kids at home.”

  “I’m just telling you what Winkler’s son said. You know, I bumped into him at Roddy’s and he says, ‘I got something’ll tickle you about your old partner.’ He said Paul was turning up every once in a while until she moved out two or three years ago.”

  “Like for a decade?” Tim asked. This was cop truth, third-rank hearsay which was valid until it was disproved.

  “So Paul’s president of the state senate by now,” Giles said, “and the press never picks this up?”

  “Everybody likes Paulie. They only throw mud on the ones they don’t care for. ’Sides, for all I know, they looked and never got anything they could print.”

  “What line of work was she in, this Beata?” asked Tim. “She go back on the job?”

  “Too smart for that. Sells real estate, I’m thinking. Commercial property.”

  The hand was over and Stash looked at Tim and just heaved his thick shoulders. Don’t blame him, he meant.

  Tim went back to use the facilities, as usual, then stopped at the bar and had one more pickled egg. The heartburn would be hellacious later, but you had to live a little.

  This business about Paul was a surprise, but it made the end of the Gianises’ marriage make a little more sense. On the one hand, it really had nothing to do with what Tim was up to. On the other, you could never tell what got passed along as pillow talk.

  He went to the public library in Grayson. They were closing libraries all over town, but this one was still bustling, patronized by lots of folks in his age range, and moms with kids too young for school. It had the sterile functional look of a lot of stuff built in the sixties, modern without a lot of frills. He found Beata Wisniewski’s business address on the Internet, and a smiling photo of her on the real estate brokerage’s website. As advertised. Good-looking girl, blonde with a little help for Mother Nature, but Tim never met a woman, his own Demetra included, who was blonde at age sixteen and didn’t regard it as her God-given right to maintain the same hair color for the rest of eternity. He called the brokerage. The secretary said Beata was out on a showing until 3, and Tim went over to the office, which was right on the east side of Center City near the U Hospital. This was an area where Tim wouldn’t go without his sidearm when he was a cop, and now it was all hip young folks. The real estate agency had apparently been situated here for a while, a three-story building with a gated lot. Ng could have gotten him the make of the car she owned, but he figured he knew who he was looking for, and as it turned out, it wouldn’t have been hard to spot her anyway. A big black Audi with the vanity plate BEATA pulled into the lot about 3:45. He got out of his car, limping toward her. The spring day had gotten windy.

  She was pretty much a Brünnhilde type, just big everything, not overly heavy, still nice-looking with her blonde hair upswept for a professional effect, and more than six feet tall in her high heels. She was wearing a light coat and had her briefcase under her arm, but she troubled herself for a quick smile when he came toward her. He extended his hand.

  “Ms. Wisniewski? Name is Tim Brodie. Knew your old man a little bit.”

  She stopped moving and her bluish eyes approached absolute zero. Her jaw set like a linebacker’s.

  “This is private property,” she said. “Next time you show your face here, I’ll call the cops and you can tell them about the good times you had with my father.”

  Driving away, Tim tried to
rewind the interlude frame by frame, hoping to determine when the ice storm had set in. Was it mentioning her dad? But he was pretty sure it was his own name that had chilled her. Which meant she knew who he was. Which meant in turn that the story about Paul and her had to be true.

  Just on a hunch, he decided to sit on her house. Given how unstrung she’d appeared, she might need some smoothing.

  He returned to the library. He put the cell phone listed on the brokerage website into a reverse directory, but the billing went to the office. The Tri-Cities’ white pages online showed a T. Wisniewski on Clyde, which was about three blocks from the realty office. He used the street maps on the assessor’s website to get the property identification number for that address, then confirmed with a different listing that Beata Wisniewski received that real estate tax bill. By 5:30 p.m., he’d driven out to the string of three-story row houses. Daylight saving had started and the young inhabitants were strolling in the mild night, a good half of them walking their dogs.

  He circled for quite some time. About 6:30, he saw the Audi go down the side street, and he reached the alley soon enough to see the vehicle pull into a garage. He drove past slowly and glimpsed a splinter of Beata through the rear fence. It took a while until somebody pulled out of a space within sight of her front door, but Tim parked then and waited. He had no idea where Paul had camped out. But he’d seen lots of guys chucked out by their wives, and most didn’t go far from home, not so much to be contrary as to consolidate whatever they had left. About half an hour after the sun had gone down, a little past 8:30, a light popped on in what he guessed was Beata’s living room. Seconds later a car pulled up a few spaces in front of him. It was a gray Acura like the one he’d seen in Sofia’s garage back in February. Leaving the vehicle, a man actually ran the first couple of steps as he made his way down the block. Tim thought he recognized who it was as the fella passed under the streetlights, but the guy was on the move, and Tim saw poorly in the dark. He took a few photos during the instant the man appeared again beneath Beata’s porch light. He was in her house only a second before emerging, lugging a huge suitcase, with Beata right behind him. They jumped in the Acura and were gone.