“You know,” Teri said, “I didn’t think this was why you were calling. Hal said your girlfriend did you wrong and then went all batshit crazy on you. Thought you wanted advice, one old dyke to another.”
Evon laughed out loud at Teri’s boldness, but she was embarrassed that Heather had made her the talk of the ZP Building. Hal hadn’t heard about Evon’s domestic problems from her.
“She showed up at my apartment building last night and I swore out a protection order at the police station.”
“Oh dear,” Teri said. “Doesn’t sound like a good time.”
“It hasn’t been. I may be off relationships for the rest of my life. You seem to have survived.”
“I don’t know,” Teri said. “I always had my doubts about that stuff from Aristotle, that love is one soul inhabiting two bodies. But if you think I’m sitting here by myself with a highball and a cigarette because I wouldn’t prefer some old biddy coming in to nag me to get rid of both of them, you’re wrong. Here’s another saying.” She reverted to Greek.
“Meaning?”
“That’s Socrates. ‘Find a good wife and you’ll be happy; if not you’ll become a philosopher.’”
Evon was laughing when German came in. Teri apparently had been ordered by her doctors to take an afternoon nap. She fussed at him but got ready to say good-bye. Evon walked around the coffee table to hug the old woman and Teri brought her face and her powerful scents to Evon’s cheek.
“Oh, you’re such a nice girl,” she said.
Hal was screaming at somebody on the blower when Evon and Tim were shown into his office the following afternoon. It sounded from all the talk of collateral that it must have been one of his bankers. Tim went to the window for a minute to enjoy the view from the fortieth floor. He’d lived his whole life pretty close to the ground, no more than two stories for the most part, four if you counted his time in McGrath Hall. He felt excited as a country boy by the chance to stare through the wall of glass at the full stretch of the Tri-Cities. From here, you could see the River Kindle, a satin ribbon in today’s sun, cutting the municipalities apart. Within the embrace of the river’s branches sat block upon block of his city, the perfect squares that looked from this vantage like the pieces in a children’s toy, but which were actually full of all that throbbing life. The feeling welled into Tim again that had come to him as he aged: All in all, people were a whole lot of fun.
Evon moved over to stand beside him. Eventually she pointed, with a grim chuckle, to a bug that had somehow worked its way in between the two layers of glass in the double-paned window. It was some kind of beetle that had gotten flipped onto its back. With the bug unable to turn itself over, its six little legs were churning wildly.
“Talk about a design flaw,” Tim said.
“Right,” said Evon. “And humans have heartbreak.”
For a second, Tim hugged her to his side.
Hal slammed down the phone.
“There have to be plant forms that have more brains than bankers,” he declared, and directed Evon and Tim to his sofa. They took their places dutifully. She spoke.
“I know your hair is on fire with the bankers and YourHouse, so we’ll make this fast. The DNA came back early. The blood isn’t Paul’s.”
Hal gasped, winced, and dropped the pen he’d been holding.
“Damn,” he said, and repeated the word a few times. “So it is Cass’s?”
“No,” Evon said. She sat forward in a locker room posture, her elbows on her knees. It was game time for her, Tim realized. “It’s not from either of them.”
Hal’s full face went still, and his eyes flicked around under the weight of a fact neither he, nor anyone else for that matter, had imagined.
“Neither?”
Evon nodded.
“You’re saying that Paul dismissed his lawsuit to keep us from doing a test that shows that his brother and him, they’re both innocent?”
“We didn’t say they’re both innocent,” Evon answered. “That’s possible. But you still have Cass’s fingerprints, shoe-prints, the tire tracks, the sperm fraction. It’s hard to say he wasn’t there.”
“But whose blood is it?” Hal asked.
“We don’t know for sure. We had specimens from your family and Paul and Cass and it doesn’t belong to any of those people.”
“That’s it? Yavem didn’t say anything else about whose it could be? There’s no other identifying trait?”
Evon looked at Tim for a second, then faced her boss.
“He said the blood is a woman’s.”
“A woman?” Hal slammed back in his chair, his mouth wide open. “A woman? And do we have any idea who?”
“Best guess is Lidia Gianis.” She took Hal through the reasoning-the blood, the ring.
“Auntie Lidia killed my sister?”
“It’s possible,” said Evon.
“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Let me tell you something. My Aunt Lidia was strong and tough, and she was old-school enough that she’d have whacked my sister a good one if she got fresh. But banging her skull on the headboard a few times? No chance. And even if you made me believe that, there is no way she’d let her son go to prison for her. That’s the standard-issue Greek mother. She’d put a dagger in her breast for her children.”
“It’s what we have,” Evon said. “Maybe Cass and she did it together, and he pled by himself to make the best of it.”
“Why would my Aunt Lidia want to kill my sister? OK, she doesn’t want Cass hanging with Dita. How about smacking her son upside the head instead? This is ridiculous. And there’s nothing at all on Paul? Paul’s been taking his mother’s punches?”
“We don’t know, Hal. The one person against whom there’s no physical evidence of any kind is Paul.”
“Except the bullshit he told the police, covering for his brother.”
“If Lidia killed your sister by herself, then even that statement was true.”
Hal sat back again in his big leather chair and turned from both of them. He reached to his desk and tossed a pen at an empty corner of the room. Finally he revolved back, seized by a new idea.
“But there’s no physical evidence against Aunt Lidia, right? I mean nothing definitive. We don’t know for sure it’s her blood. She’s not the only person in the world who’s type B. Can we get her fingerprints?”
Evon looked at Tim. He just shrugged. He couldn’t imagine how, but there was no point saying no until he thought about it.
“OK,” Hal said. He waved his hand, letting them go.
Evon checked with Hal in an hour. His door was open. He was canted back in his chair, his hands behind his head as he stared solemnly into space. She grazed a knuckle on the door. His large eyes, surrounded by purplish flesh, briefly revolved toward her, then, after the briefest effort at a smile, he looked again to the place where the wall and ceiling met.
“I was just thinking back to when we were all kids,” Hal said. “When I used to go over to Lidia’s with Teri. A lot of the time I ended up looking after Paul and Cass. I always envied the two of them, to tell you the truth.”
This confession, not atypical of Hal when he grew reflective, alarmed Evon for a second, until she reminded herself that Hal had no reason to know how much jealousy he should have felt. Then again, there would never be any telling what part of the truth he had sensed.
“They were fifteen years younger than me, and used to follow me around like ducklings. But sometimes I’d look at them, the way they were with each other, and I was jealous. ‘They’re never alone,’ I’d think. ‘Never.’ It seemed like a wonderful thing. When I was their age, I was this fat weirdo that nobody wanted to talk to at school.” Hal smiled ruefully at the recollection of the child he was, although Evon doubted that the pain of that past was fully subdued. “And I wished I could be like them. With a twin. Somebody who’d never hate you, or look down on you, because he was just the same, somebody who’d never turn away from you. It still seems like a blessing to me. Crazy?”