Mistaken Identity

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Cold fish, warm salad?” Her father’s hand flew to check his hearing aid, a gift from Mary. She’d been so thrilled when he agreed to wear it that she suggested eating in the dining room, but had been roundly rebuffed. “You sayin’ cold fish, warm salad, Mare? Where’s this at?”

  “Downtown.”

  “What kinda thing is that? How they make the salad warm?”

  “I don’t know. Either they don’t chill it or they heat it, I guess. It says on the menu, ‘A warm salad of wilted greens.’ ”

  “Wilted? Wilted means spoiled. They don’t serve it like that.”

  “Yes, they do. Put it right in front of you.”

  Her father snorted. “They should be ashamed of themselves! Crooks! Cold fish, warm salad! That’s ass-backwards.”

  “Watch your language, Matty,” said Mary’s mother, but her father pretended not to hear with alarming accuracy.

  “People pay good money for that? That’s cocka-mamie!”

  Mary caught her twin’s eye across the tight circle of the table and to her surprise, Angie was smiling over her water glass. Mary sighed inwardly. She used to be able to read her sister’s mind.

  “I did it!” Judy yelped suddenly. “Look!” Grinning, she held up a forkful of spaghetti balled like yarn.

  Mary laughed, and her father set down his fork and clapped, his dry, rough palms smacking thickly together. “Brava, Judy!” he said.

  “So tell us about your day, girls,” her mother said, and Mary hesitated. She didn’t want to tell her parents she was working on the Connolly case, but she didn’t want to lie, either. Like a good lawyer, she avoided the question.

  “You remind me of when we were little, Ma, and you’d ask what we learned in school that day.”

  “I’ll tell you what we learned,” Judy chirped up, finishing her forkful of pasta. “We learned that boxers have bad manners.”

  “Boxers?” Vita frowned, and Mary looked down at her plate. Oh, no.

  Matty DiNunzio’s face lit up. “You gotta case about boxing? What you gotta do with boxing?”

  “We had to question a witness today,” Judy answered, launching into what happened at the gym, apparently heedless of Mary’s kicks under the table. Matty DiNunzio hunched over the table on his elbows, his eyes widening as his wife’s narrowed. Mary knew her mother’s suspicions would be slow-cooking like tomato sauce. Thick bubbles popping on a steamy red surface.

  “You met Star Harald?” her father said, oblivious in his excitement. “He’s a heavyweight. I seen him box a couple months ago. He was on the cable. Madonne, whatta jab.”

  Mary leapt to shift the subject. “You watch boxing, Pop? I thought you were a baseball fan.”

  “I like the fights. I boxed when I was young. Way back when.”

  “Tell us about it,” Mary asked, but her mother’s face told her she was only postponing the inevitable, which was still better than nothing. Every lawyer likes an extension of time.

  “Not much to tell. Not like Golden Gloves or nothin’. A lot of us fought, from the neighborhood. Cooch, Johnnie, Freddie. You met them guys, Mare. I could hit hard, take a punch, too. But I wasn’t quick enough. My feet.”

  “Maria,” her mother interrupted. She touched her husband’s forearm, which was Italian code for shut up now. “What kinda case she got you workin’ on?”

  Mary didn’t have to ask her mother who “she” was. Bennie Rosato had become the Antichrist in the DiNunzio household last year. “Just a case. A normal case.”

  “What you mean, normal?”

  “I just have to do some research, is all. Talk to witnesses, work in the library. Today I met with one of my old classmates, she’s teaching handicapped children—”

  “Witnesses. What kinda witnesses?”

  Mary sipped some water. The kitchen was sweltering. Nobody could cross-examine like a mother. “You know, regular witnesses. Trial witnesses.”

  “What kinda trial?”

  “You know, a trial. It’s not my trial. I’m not trying the case or anything.” Mary glanced at Judy for help, but she’d become suspiciously reabsorbed in her spaghetti. “I’m also finishing a brief in that First Amendment case I told you about, remember? That’s my main case, in federal court. It’s for the Third Circuit, the federal court of appeals. Very important stuff, Ma. This is where you say you’re so proud of me. That I’m a genius, that they’re lucky to have me.”

  “She got you on a murder case, don’t she?” Vita DiNunzio set down her fork, and Mary knew she was in trouble.

  “Just this one.”

  “I knew it!” She slammed the table with a palm that only looked fragile. The table wiggled, the plates jumped, and water pooled in the jelly glasses.

  “It’s not on Bennie, it’s on me. If you want to blame anybody, blame me.”

  “She almost got you killed!” her mother shouted, her voice quivering with age and emotion.

  “I’m fine, Ma. Everything’s fine.”

  Across the table, Angie looked grave. “Relax, Ma. Mary will be very careful. She’ll take care of herself. She won’t do anything risky. Will you, Mare?”

  “No, absolutely not,” Mary said, on cue. “I’m very careful. Not doing anything dangerous at all.” Leave it to Angie to know how to handle her mother. Growing up, the twins had worked as a tag team and in the unspoken division of parents, Angie had gotten their mother and Mary their father. “Last year was a one-time thing, Ma. This is just a run-of-the-mill criminal trial. I’ll be very careful.”

  “Basta!” her mother said, standing up abruptly. Her face flushed through the thin, broken skin of her cheeks. She fairly shook in her flowered housedress. “I’ll go down there right now!”

  “What? Where?”

  “I’ll go down to that office right now and tell that witch she’s not putting my daughter on no murder case!”

  Mary closed her eyes, mortified. “You’re not doing that, Ma. The office is closed. Bennie’s not even there.” She didn’t mention that her mother couldn’t drive. It didn’t seem like the right time.

  “I’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ll tell her. She’ll listen to me, I’ll make her!”

  “Ma, it’s my job.”

  “Then you quit!”

  Mary almost laughed. “I can’t do that. I have to make a living. My rent alone is—”

  “Move home!” She threw her arms in the air, her elbows knobby and her underarms slack. “Don’t tell me you’re too old! Camarr Millie, her daughter lives at home and she’s thirty-six!”

  “I’m not quitting. I’m a lawyer, I like my job,” Mary said, not believing the words even as they fell from her mouth. Who could sell a happy lawyer?

  “Matty, talk to her,” her mother barked, nudging her husband, and Mary realized for the first time that her parents played on a tag team of their own. She looked at her father, and pain twisted his features as he tugged the napkin bib from the neck of his T-shirt. He didn’t say a word, and still a knife of guilt went through her.

  “Pop, it’s my job,” Mary said. “I have to do my job.”

  “We thought you wasn’t doin’ no more murder cases, baby,” he said softly.

  “I can’t pick and choose, Pop. You know that, you worked. Could you have one of your crew picking his own work?”

  Suddenly her mother pushed her chair under the table, her eyes edged with tears, and hurried from the kitchen. “Ma, wait!” Angie called out, and bolted from the table after her. Judy looked astonished, and Mary tensed in the stifling kitchen.

  Her father reached across the table and touched her hand, his palm warm. “Mare, I’m not gonna tell you your business. All I’m gonna tell you is boxing is a mean business, a dirty business. Lotsa people get hurt. Make sure you’re not one of them.”

  “Don’t worry, Pop,” Mary said, the words hard in coming.

  Watching the scene, Judy felt dumbstruck. Her mother didn’t cry. Her father didn’t call her “baby.” Her family preferred their melodrama on a televisio
n movie-of-the-week, behind a curve of expensive glass. Or on a stage, at a distance. Yet, as moved as Judy was by the emotion of Mary’s parents, she was struck by their words. Matty DiNunzio was right. Boxing was a dirty, dangerous business. Maybe the Della Porta murder had less to do with cops and more to do with boxers. The lawyers had been following Connolly’s theory, but Judy didn’t trust Connolly the way Bennie did. She decided to follow up, alone. She didn’t want to put Mary in harm’s way. She didn’t want her best friend hurt.

  And she certainly didn’t want to answer to Vita DiNunzio.

  29

  Bennie cruised the block in the dark before she pulled up in front of Della Porta’s rowhouse, making sure there were no news vans or reporters out front. Trose Street was quiet, with only a few people out. She parked and locked the Expedition, got out with the case file, and plucked through her keys until she found the one to Della Porta’s apartment.

  Bennie climbed the stoop to the entrance, unlocked the inside door, and went up the stairs to the apartment. She opened the door at the top of the stair, thinking about Connolly. How it must have felt for her to come home to this apartment, to Della Porta. What it was like to find him dead. Bennie had experienced that horror herself, except that she’d loved profoundly the man she’d found. How could this happen to both her and Connolly? Wasn’t it too coincidental?

  She opened the door, entered the apartment, and flicked on the switch for the overhead light. The apartment looked the same as before, the living area on the left, with the bloodstain. She walked to the faintly rusty outline and flashed on the awful day she saw the pool of blood on her lover’s desk. Bennie stared at the bloodstain, deep in thought. She had to admit that she was starting to feel, more than she could logically justify, that Connolly was her twin. Maybe because Bennie had watched Connolly, observed the way she looked and acted. Noted her mannerisms and the coincidences in their lives. Yet the more time Bennie spent around Connolly, the more she felt she understood her, even as she trusted and liked her less. It was paradoxical, but Bennie was starting to feel of Connolly in some way. It was an uneasy sensation, being suddenly uncomfortable in her own skin.

  Bennie stared down at the stain. Blood. It always came back to blood. She had to win this case. She had a duty, not only as Connolly’s lawyer, but maybe even as her sister. And there was one way to win. The ethics of it were arguable, but at the same time, she had an equal ethical duty to represent her client as zealously as possible. It was a thorny problem, but most were, in the law, and that’s what kept it interesting.

  “Just get on with it, girl,” Bennie said aloud, and hurried to the bathroom to save Connolly’s life.

  Snip, snip, went the scissors. Bennie had bought them at a drugstore on the way over and they were more suited to construction paper than hair. She squeezed the orange handles and tried again, cutting a strand of hair near the front of her face.

  Snip. The honeyed strand fell to the sink, where Bennie had spread out the day’s newspaper from her briefcase. Her hand moved an awkward inch to the back of her head and she grabbed another hank of hair.

  Snip, snip. A chunk fell to the newspaper, and she checked the bathroom mirror. The front part of Bennie’s hair was now clipped in layers. She already looked more like Connolly, even given the difference in their hair colors. Clearing the hair from her forehead emphasized the similarity in their eyes.

  Bennie looked at her reflection and imagined the way she and Connolly would look at counsel table, identical sisters, side-by-side in front of the jury. It would have to affect the jurors. Bennie knew she could get a jury to trust her; it was her greatest strength as a trial lawyer. And if she could get the jury on her side, it wouldn’t be much of a leap to get them on Connolly’s. Especially if every time they looked at Bennie, they saw Connolly. And vice versa.

  Bennie chopped away, preoccupied. Her first approach to the case — hiding the fact that she and Connolly were, or might be, twins — was wrong, and untenable now that the news was live at five. If the media was flogging the story that they were twins, why not go with it? Why not turn it to Connolly’s advantage? If Bennie went public with the twin issue, played it up, then every article the press wrote and every story they printed would generate sympathy for Connolly. The buzz had to reach the potential jurors, with the trial only a week away. Suddenly the tight time frame became an advantage, too.

  Bennie smiled grimly as she hacked away. It was a great plan, and there was no way the D.A. could counter it. Even if Judge Guthrie issued a gag order, the press would be off and spinning. Every “no comment” would tantalize. Snip, snip, snip. Bennie had disguised herself in the past, to look less like herself. This time she was disguising herself to look more like herself. A mask, inside out. If Connolly was her twin, the mask was Bennie’s true identity.

  She made a final cut and set the scissors on the edge of the sink. Snippets of blond hair covered the newspaper and filled the basin. She admired even her crude handiwork, turning her head left and right in front of the mirror. Her head felt lighter; she felt freer.

  She dived into her purse for her other new purchases, grabbed a tube of lipstick and twirled it open, revealing a rosy missile. She raised the lipstick with a schoolgirl’s excitement and applied it to her lips. She blotted like she’d seen her mother do as a young child, then reached back into the bag. Liquid eyeliner. She unscrewed the top, took the little brush, and made the first line on her left lid. The goop felt like a cold worm going on and looked worse, but she finished the job.

  Bennie looked in the mirror, unsatisfied. The makeup brought a bogus liveliness to her features, but her clothes were wrong. She whipped off her jacket and stuffed it onto the empty towel rack, then opened two buttons of her cotton blouse and tucked her collar under, so that her neckline mimicked the V-neck of Connolly’s prison jumpsuit. Bennie rechecked the mirror and was almost satisfied. The clothes underscored the effect of the haircut. At trial she’d dress her client and herself to match; not identically, that would be too obvious, but in the same colors and styles.

  Bennie grinned in the mirror, then quickly deflated. Something was wrong. Her smile looked too warm, too happy. Her eyes crinkled at the corners and her nose wrinkled at the bridge. Connolly never smiled that way. Her smile, such as it was, came off as cynical, hardened. Could Bennie make herself look exactly like Connolly?

  She stepped back from the mirror, tilted her mouth down at the corners, and knit her brow deeply. She checked the mirror. Too much. She stroked her cheeks, smoothing the animation from her features. She needed her face to look slack, vaguely without affect, like Connolly. She closed her eyes and imagined how it felt to be raised with remote parents, never to find a career that satisfied her, and ultimately to be charged for a heinous crime she didn’t commit. To be on trial for her very life.

  Bennie slipped deeper inside Connolly’s mind. She imagined herself discovering that she had been put up for adoption, and that as lousy as her life had turned out, she had an identical twin who became a successful lawyer. Who was chosen over her by their mother; whose success was attained through her sacrifice. Who had taken her very blood for her own. Bennie opened her eyes and looked in the mirror. The expression on her face was Connolly’s.

  Bennie was Connolly.

  And it terrified her.

  30

  Mary sat in the conference room in the office, trying to concentrate on the file. It was late; the firm was empty and quiet. Judy had said she had to stop by Jenkins Law Library for research, and Mary felt lonely working on her own. Across the street, a single lighted floor in a dark office building made an illuminated stripe, like a ribbon of Correcto-tape against the black sky.

  Mary’s coffee went cold as her gaze rolled restlessly over the 911 transcripts fanned out in front of her. She’d read them three times, but they only confirmed her instinct that Connolly was guilty. Mary understood the need for every defendant to have a lawyer, but it was another matter entirely to be that lawyer. You
couldn’t graduate from parochial school and feel otherwise. There was no known cure for a Catholic education.

  Her gaze wandered out the window and back again. Not only had she made her mother cry, she was working overtime to help a woman who had committed the worst sin imaginable. Try as she might, Mary couldn’t shake the feeling that God floated above the acoustic tiles of the conference room, due north of the fax machine. He was an old white God with a soft gray beard, sitting on an immense throne, like at the Lincoln Memorial. He was flanked by seraphim who had previously taught handicapped children to ride ponies. His wispy eyebrows met in consternation as he gazed down upon the bar association.

  Then Mary remembered Bennie’s words. Pretend the Connolly case is just like any other case. An antitrust case, for example, where the criminals had manicured fingernails and thought a Glock went ticktock. Mary squared her shoulders and picked up the Investigation Interview Record, the notes that detectives took when they questioned a witness at the Roundhouse. It would tell her what the Commonwealth witnesses would say.

  Q: I understand that you may have some information about the incident. Please tell me what you know about the events of May nineteenth.

  A: Well, it was yesterday, and I was trying to put the baby to sleep.

  Q: Go on. About what you heard.

  A: I heard a gunshot. It was so loud. After I heard the gunshot, I went to my door and I saw Alice Connolly running from the house.

  Mary stared at the sheet and flashed on an earlier question-and-answer, the one she had memorized as a six-year-old. The Baltimore Catechism, in a soft blue cover.

  Q: Who made you?

  A: God made me.