The woman was gone a long time, but came back with the name of a company in Utah. Apparently they’d been doing business with Easton College for half a century.
He then crossed the campus to have a look at the law school’s yearbooks. Easton University School of Law was a big gray stone Gothic hunk with a large central courtyard. The dorms, the classrooms, the law library were all in here. Kids from all over campus came to lounge on the huge lawn in the spring.
The yearbooks, he discovered, were stored in the library. What a gorgeous place that turned out to be, three stories tall, with long oak tables that looked like there should be armored knights surrounding them, and oak wainscoting clear to the ceiling. The balcony level was rimmed by a polished brass rail. One of the research librarians retrieved the 1982 volume for Tim without any question, even though he was prepared with another story about how he wanted to get a photocopy of his nephew to use for his fiftieth-birthday card. The yearbook for 1982 contained two photos of Paul Gianis, a head shot, like the ones for the other 160 graduates, and a group pose of Paul among the members of the law review. Seated with the editors in the front row, Paul had a hand on each thigh. And no dang ring visible, not on either hand. The picture had to have been snapped only months before Dita was killed. The photos of Paul in the 1980 and 1981 volumes were no help either.
There were two computers near the front desk for general use, mostly so kids could check their e-mail, and no password was needed to access a Web browser. Half his work as a PI could be done on the Internet these days, and for a person his age, Tim thought he could handle a computer reasonably well. Nothing fancy. He was way out of his league with cases involving computer security breaches. But he could type a name into a search engine.
There were hundreds of images online of Paul Gianis, most from the last decade. Tim examined them one by one, but whenever Paul’s hand was visible, the only ring he wore was his wedding band.
Driving back to town, with the rush hour starting, he called the company that manufactured Easton’s class rings.
“Oh dear,” said the woman he got on the phone. “We’ll have to get the records from the warehouse. And I don’t know if we can replace it. Styles change, you know.”
“Love to surprise him if I can.”
“We’ll check.”
His last stop was to try to serve Cass with the subpoena Tooley had drafted. Sofia and Paul lived in Grayson, an area at the western edge of the county that had long been home to teachers and cops and firefighters who were forced by residency requirements to remain in the Tri-Cities. It was a neighborhood of tidy three-bedroom houses, one step up from the bungalows of Tim’s neighborhood in Kewahnee. On the corners there tended to be larger houses with sloping lawns, usually owned by the doctors and lawyers, bankers and insurance agents who served the locals. The Gianis house was one of the very nicest, built, according to what Tim had read in the Tribune archives, near the turn of the nineteenth century by the Morton family who owned the department stores. The newspaper referred to the architectural style as ‘Romanesque revival,’ ochre brick decorated with lots of concrete festoonery in the shapes of laurels. It had a green tile roof, and copper gutters that had taken on that seafoam patina. There were lights on upstairs but no cars in the driveway. He focused his binoculars on the house for several minutes, but he saw no sign of movement. Both of Paul and Sofia’s sons were in college at Easton, according to the papers.
By now, he needed to pee again. There were times he felt the urge the minute he walked out of the john. Going tinkle every ten minutes was just part of being an old guy. Sometimes, he’d study his body with amazement at the damage time had done, all the sagging and the pallor of his flesh, white as a fish belly. There was so much that didn’t work any more. Sometimes it seemed to take a minute just to pick up a coin. And his mind often reminded him of a car in which the shifter just couldn’t find the gear. But occasionally there were pleasing surprises. Yesterday morning he woke up with a hard-on and considered it like a visitor from another planet. He’d thought he was pretty much dead in that area and felt good about himself for hours afterward.
There were so many retired police officers out this way that the Fraternal Order of Police lodge had bought up the VFW hall several years back, when the veterans’ group pretty much went broke. The yeasty odor of spilled beer greeted him as soon as he opened the door. The big hall on the first floor was empty, but he could hear noise above and took the worn stairs.
Up here, there was a long old-fashioned mahogany bar with mirrors behind it. The rest of the room was occupied by a few eight-sided card tables with green felt. It looked like nobody had taken a mop or broom to the pine floor in several years. A crowd of old-timers were around one of the tables, with several onlookers as the players tossed around quarters and cards. Tim wasn’t three steps into the room when he heard his name called at volume.
“Jesus Christ, I thought you were dead. I really did.” It was Stash Milacki, who had a seat at the table, laughing so hard his face was bright red. Stash had a brother, Sig, who was crooked as a stick and got Stash made detective, but Stash wasn’t bad on the job, although he never reached Homicide, which was what everybody wanted.
Tim laughed at the sight of him, but went off to do his business before returning to shake Stash’s hand. Stash must have put on fifty pounds since Tim saw him last, and he was no lightweight back then. Now he was an old guy with a red face who had to spread his legs on the barrel chair to make way for his belly.
“Talk to him and don’t talk to me,” someone said. Tim only now recognized Giles LaFontaine on the other side of the table. With his trim gray moustache, Giles looked twenty years younger than Stash. Tim had shared a beat with Giles when he first was on the street. “So you just another broke old bastard like the rest of us, can’t afford to go play golf in Florida?” Giles asked.
“Eh,” said Tim. “I been lucky. Still work now and then as a PI.”
“Really?” said Stash, like he didn’t believe him.
“Do some stuff for ZP, for one,” said Tim. It was the only one at the moment, but no point being precise.
“Now what kind of piece of shit is that?” Giles asked. “Those commercials? I had my grandson with me the other day and one of these ads come on, the one with the old girlfriend, and the grandson he’s sure it’s a joke. ‘No,’ I tell him, ‘this crazy man, Kronon, he really thinks Paul Gianis killed that girl.’ That’s true, right?”
“That’s true.”
“I owned the TV station,” said Giles, “I wouldn’t let him put that shit on the air.” Paul lived in this neighborhood for years and people here were proud of his prominence and success. There were a couple of fellas around the table who didn’t appear as vehement as Giles, but he wouldn’t back down. “The brother done his time, that oughta be the end of it. It’s twenty-five years later and now all the sudden this crackpot says Paul was in on it. That doesn’t wash, not with me.”
“What’s the brother up to now?” Tim asked.
Giles shrugged as he peered at his cards. A guy next to him, Italian or Mexican from his looks, said, “Didn’t the papers say he wanted to teach ex-cons? Like what he’d been doing inside?”
Another fellow, sitting behind the players, spoke up.
“Bruce Carroll lives right next door to the Gianises. You know him?”