“Paul?”
“Right. Said they were larking around that night, drinking beers over the river. Course nobody saw them. Cass couldn’t even name the liquor store where they bought the six-pack, said Paul got ’em.”
“And did Paul back that?”
Tim scratched his chin while he looked at the beamed ceiling of what had once been a porch.
“Seems to me he might have, now that you mention it. You know, it was just part of the initial canvass. Troopers talked to everybody who’d been with Dita at the picnic. Report couldn’t have been more than a paragraph. I would probably still have it.”
“Really?”
“Down in the basement. I didn’t have any staff, and I was in a different office every couple of days, so I figured I’d rather keep all the reports at home. Show you if you like.” Tim used a chair arm to hoist himself to his feet and wobbled a bit with the first step. Evon watched him. He was somewhat stooped now behind the shoulders, but he remained a big man, well over six feet, with the proportions of a tight end. In the day, he must have commanded a lot of attention on the street. He motioned for her to follow, and then opened a door in the kitchen and descended unevenly toward the cellar. The old wooden steps were steep, and Tim held on to the rail and kept his other hand on the brick wall to steady himself. His twill pants were halfway down his butt.
The basement, when they reached it, was even more crowded than the upstairs. There was a distinct cellar reek, a combination of mildew and dust, and all manner of things crammed in-grimy bicycles with flat tires, garden hoses, racks of clothes, hickory-shafted golf clubs, old TVs, broken furniture. The light from a cellar window slanted over some of the mess.
“Did you ever hear of a rummage sale?” Evon asked him.
“My daughters are even worse than me. Don’t want to part with anything Maria touched. Let them figure it out when I’m gone,” he said, and laughed, utterly cheerful about his own mortality. He turned sideways to get past an old chifforobe and reached a metal filing cabinet, a beige box from which the paint had rusted off in uneven blots. He seemed to know at once where everything would be. He crouched over the bottom drawer and pulled out a file, then went to pull the chain on a bulb. He turned the pages with some difficulty, his fingers stiff, licking the tip of his thumb now and then.
“Here you go,” he said finally. He read the report for a second, then handed it to Evon.
It was just as he recalled, too. Short interview, two days after Dita’s death. Paul said Cass was with him all night after the picnic, hanging out at Overlook Park on the river. A stone lie. Cass couldn’t have been with him, because, as Cass acknowledged subsequently, he’d been with Dita, punching her around and killing her.
“This is gold, you know,” Evon told him.
“It is?”
“This man wants to be mayor. Leader of the police. But he lied his ass off to the cops to keep his brother out of trouble. Even after he’d been hired to be a deputy prosecuting attorney.”
“Who wouldn’t? I’m not sure I’d want to vote for a man who wouldn’t save his brother. Besides, that’s all politics. Hal can keep his crazy politics. That’s not my concern.” Tim waved a hand past his big nose.
“But it proves what Hal’s been saying. That Paul was involved from the start. He covered up for his brother. And maybe there’s more to it. Those shoes? They’re identical twins. So the Nikes could have fit Paul. I bet they always shared clothes. Were they still living together?”
“You kidding? Greek family? Hal was still with his parents and he was forty. Yeah, the Gianis twins were both of them at Lidia and Mickey’s. Paul, I think, was about to move out.”
“What about fingerprints? Do identical twins have the same fingerprints?” Evon was feeling some excitement. She always did the job and her job was to make Hal right. She was surprised about the velocity with which she was willing to suspect Paul, whom she’d always liked, even admired. But there was an elusive quality to him that had never sat quite right with her. You could spend lots of time with Paul Gianis, as she had, and still come away feeling he was guarding something essential about himself.
But Tim moved his head from side to side.
“Seems as I remember, twins’ prints look somewhat alike, but when they’re in the womb and they reach out and touch the whoosywhatsit-” He stopped to find the word.
“Placenta?”
“Right. No, they have different fingerprints.”
Evon absorbed that, then reread the report.
“Can I take this?”
Tim shrugged. “Public record now. PA in Greenwood did what they always do when Cass was indicted, threw all the police reports in the court file to prove the defendant had had full discovery before he pled guilty.”
Evon strayed a hand to the filing cabinet.
“What else have you got in there, Tim? Any chance I can pay you to look through all your files and see if there’s any more about Paul?”
He laughed. “No need to pay me. I’m on the long end with the Kronons. I’ve been getting a check every January first for twenty-five years.”
“I know,” she said. “It comes out of my budget.” She smiled, though. “Nobody’s ever really explained it.”
“It was just Zeus’s way of thanking me for dropping everything and taking over the investigation. When this here was done with, I wasn’t too keen to go back to the heating business. Zeus wanted to hire me at ZP, but I’d had enough bosses as a cop to last me a lifetime. So I decided to become a PI, and Zeus was like, ‘OK, we’ll give you a retainer every year.’ I won’t lie either. Helped plenty, especially when I was getting started.” Mullaney had told her that these days Tim worked principally for criminal lawyers, turning up stuff the cops had missed, and also for a number of insurance defense lawyers. Tim was the guy who’d debunk a workman’s comp claim with photos showing the guy who said he was injured lifting weights. Brodie could also write a good report and was relaxed on the witness stand. He’d always had as much work as he wanted, although that had to be petering out at his age. “’Tween Zeus and Hal, they haven’t called me ten times. This thing I did last week, with Corus, must have been the first in five years. So yeah, you want me to look at the files, I’ll look at ’em. I’ll keep track of the time, but it’ll be a long while before you owe me anything.”
Upstairs, she collected her parka, which had ended up on the sofa next to his heavy book. There was a faint odor in the kitchen of last night’s dinner, which she hadn’t noticed when she came in.
“You keep going with those myths,” she said.
“Oh, I will. Was just reading about the myth of love when you rang the bell.”
“Myth?” said Evon. “You mean love’s not real? I wish somebody had told me that before I moved in with my girlfriend.”
She rarely said anything so personal, but she couldn’t pass on the joke. Not that it was all a joke in Heather’s case. But Tim was mightily amused. He laughed in his husky way for a long time.
“No,” he said, “Aristophanes says we were all four-legged creatures to start, some the same sex, but most half man and half woman. Zeus was afraid us humans would get too powerful so he sliced us right down the middle, and everybody spends their life looking for the matching piece. What do you think of that?” He laughed again, tickled by the idea.
“I think it makes as much sense as any other explanation.”
Tim found her response amusing as well, then limped ahead to show her out. When they got to the foyer, he lingered to face her.
“You don’t really think Paul Gianis had a hand in murdering Dita, do you?”
“What was he lying for?” Evon asked. “He knew what to say, and more important, he recognized that he had to lie for Cass’s sake. Which means he had a lot of information by then, Tim. Maybe they were together that night. Maybe that’s why Cass never wanted to answer questions.”
Tim pondered, but an unhappy thought seemed to pull at his face.