“Tech put a hemastick on that. It was her blood. And there were traces on the left side of her face. So my thought was that Dita wiped off her cheek, when that little cut started in bleeding. But that’s the only blood on her hands. She never reached back to touch her scalp wound. Must have passed out before she knew she was bleeding.”
“So what was the issue with the pathologist?”
“Seemed to me like Dita was with Cass or whoever for a while. He smacked her on the cheek, they talked, she wipes that little faint trickle of blood from the cheek, and then he wallops her against the headboard, maybe ten minutes later. Dr. Goren, she agreed that the slap came first. But she wasn’t with me about the color of the bruises-said that could have been related to the closeness of the vessels to the skin. And that tiny little cut would have been stanched when the assailant grabbed her.”
“The blood on the knuckle?”
“Goren said maybe Dita did reach back to her scalp before losing consciousness, just grazed the area. I say that would have been her right hand. Truth, of course, is it could have happened either way. So we never had a meeting of the minds about the timing. Pathologist thought she gets slapped and is just stunned by that when he grabs her again and pounds her head back.”
“Why stunned?”
“Well, there’s no sign of a struggle. Didn’t even turn her head as he’s bouncing it off the furniture-blows are more or less in one place. And look at her right hand. You’d have thought she might have fought back and he would have grabbed it. No bruising at the wrist. Same with the left hand. And there weren’t any foreign skin cells under her fingernails. DNA these days might show something different. But we all figured he caught hold of her pretty fast. Strong guy, though. Try grabbing my head to push it back.” Evon did. “Not so easy. There’s some natural resistance,” Tim said, “even if she didn’t have time to lift a hand.”
“And what was the significance of the timing? What did it mean to you if there was a lapse between the blows?”
“Well, hell, if she’s slapped and sits there with the assailant for ten minutes, instead of screaming for help, it’s got to be somebody she knew.”
“Maybe an intruder held a knife or a gun on her.”
“And then beat her to death, instead of using the weapon?”
“A gun makes noise.”
“So does breaking a window. More likely someone she knew.”
“That all fits Cass, right?”
“Or Paul. Sure. Like I said, Zeus was so hysterical, putting on so much pressure for results, it was hard for anybody to think straight.”
His remark reminded Evon of something.
“You said last month that Zeus thought Dita had been killed by his enemies.”
“The Greek mob.”
“Right, but I didn’t understand that.”
Tim laughed and sank back into the sofa cushions. This was going to be another one of his stories.
“Around Athens, there’s a bunch called the Vasilikoses. Started out running a pretty big protection racket in the twenties. Smart guys. Their motto is ‘Not a lot from a little, but a little from a lot.’ Twenty-five drachmas a week. Who can depend on the police anyway? Nikos, Zeus’s dad, he’s here but kind of a wannabe who’s got some connection to a lot of these big-time Athens gunslingers. During WW Two, Zeus gets sent as a translator to join the Allied forces in Greece when they arrived in October 1944, once the Germans took a powder. Apparently, Nikos has his son check in with his pals. Zeus was there until May 1946, and he comes home with his pretty young wife, Hermione, whose maiden name is Vasilikos, and baby Hal, who’s a year then, and a duffel bag full of cash and booty that the Greek mob wanted out of the country, before the civil war starts and the commies win and take it all away from them.”
“Zeus told you this?”
“A little. He didn’t need to say much. This was pretty much common knowledge around St. D’s.”
“And what’s with the duffel bag?”
Tim laughed the same way, made merry, like most cops, by the eternal oddities of the way humans behaved.
“Zeus builds his first shopping center in 1947. You know, he’s a genius. He figures out Americans want to shop. But where’s the do-re-mi come from to get started, he’s just some mustered-out soldier boy from Kewahnee?”
“The duffel bag?”
“So they say. So Zeus gets rich, but you know, back in Athens, there’s kind of a dispute. Cause nobody there seems to have thought their money was going to be Zeus’s bankroll. He’s like, ‘This is America, you don’t hide money under the mattress, besides it worked out.’ To Zeus’s way of thinking, he got a loan which he paid back with big-time interest, and in Athens they’re thinking, ‘No, guess we made an investment and we want a piece forever.’ And Zeus is like, ‘Go jump.’ And they’re like, ‘We’ll see.’ Hermione’s dad, Zeus’s protector, he’d kicked the bucket the year before Dita was murdered. So it fits. Even the way Zeus died. You ever hear that story?”
She knew Zeus had died in an accident in Greece. No more than that.
“The Greeks,” said Tim, “they’re always running back to the homeland, but Zeus, because of the bad blood, he never wants to go. From the day Dita dies, Zeus had this notion to rebury her on Mount Olympus and finally, on the fifth anniversary of her death, Hermione agrees. Some of her Vasilikos relatives come up for the ceremony. And the next morning, Zeus goes out for a walk, to meditate over the grave, and he never returns. They find him five hundred feet down the mountain.” Tim shifted his big shoulders. “Around St. D’s, there weren’t many who didn’t think he was shoved.”
Evon had never heard a word about Greek gangsters from Hal, even though he often spoke about both of his parents when he had a drink in his office at the end of the day. What did they say? A vast fortune washes away the sins of prior generations. To Hal, Zeus was an Olympian figure, the embodiment of the pure genius of entrepreneurship. Hal probably knew no better, either. Or didn’t ask. Tim had already explained it to her.
People believe what they want to believe.
16
The same afternoon, Tim drove out to Easton University. It was not forty minutes this time of day, when the traffic was good. Easton was what people thought of when they talked about college, rolling hills and redbrick buildings with classic white gables and Doric columns, the oldest private university in the Midwest. It wasn’t all rich types any more. All kinds of parents and their kids-Indian and Vietnamese and Polish, black and brown-had figured out that a school like this was the ticket for life. These young people, all of them, when you got their attention away from their damn cell phones, shared the same alert, confident look, so different from that of the poor kids Tim had encountered when he was on the job. These youngsters met your eye and smiled; they had nothing to fear from grown-ups. Demetra, Tim’s middle daughter, was an Easton grad. She’d attended with the benefit of a substantial scholarship, and Tim and Maria had both loved visiting, seeing their child strolling around among all these young people, radiant with their prospects in life.
He found the Alumni House, a small brick building with a white wooden arch over the doorway. He had a cock-and-bull story ready for the woman who greeted him at the reception desk.
“My nephew was at my house and lost his class ring down the drain in the sink. Thought maybe I’d contact the company that sold it to him and see if they could replace it. Any chance somebody here knows the outfit?”
“What class?”
“Seventy-nine.”
Even after close to twenty-five years as a PI, Tim still had a hard time with the fibbing, a frequent occupational hazard, since he liked to believe that his whole professional life had been an effort to get at the truth. But when he was carrying a badge, he gave a lot of defendants a line about how much better it would go for them if they just puked up all the ugly details of a murder, when he knew for a stone fact that many of those kids might walk away, if they just shut up. Every job required some white lies now and then to do it right. And he knew how far he could go. He never said anything that would have gotten his wrinkled old ass arrested.