“I’m an idiot,” he told Evon, when he reached her. “It’s right in front of our faces.” He reminded her about Father Nik telling Georgia that he’d seen Cass on TV, or Dickerman saying Paul’s prints matched those of the man who’d entered Hillcrest. Eloise, the attendant at St. Basil’s, said that when Lidia’s son visited her, sometimes she called him Cass and sometimes Paul. “This little masquerade we’ve been watching. What says it hasn’t been going on for twenty-five years?”
Tim had driven past the entrance to the roadside rest area, which was slightly elevated from the highway, when he caught sight of the gold Lexus parked there. He braked and pulled to the shoulder. Looking back, he saw Sofia rushing toward the one-story brick square that housed the restrooms. A plume of air shimmered behind each exhaust pipe, meaning her need was too urgent even to bother cutting the engine.
The ramp exiting the rest area was ahead of him. Tim inched his way along the gravel shoulder. The egress was posted on both sides with the red circle of the DO NOT ENTER signs. Tim waited for two campers to depart, then swung a hard right and drove in. A guy in an SUV with his family had seen the stunt and waited, but he hung his head out the window as Tim passed. “If you’re too old to read, you shouldn’t drive.”
Tim nodded humbly and continued. In the meantime, he finally saw Cass, who alighted from the passenger’s side, circling to the driver’s door. He’d abandoned the disguise—the prosthetic was gone, and he’d recombed his hair and changed glasses. Sofia was on her way back now, and with one foot in the car, Cass called out to her, probably to say he was ready to drive. But the Lab took the opportunity to squeeze past him and flew out in a blur, charging over to the dog walk, where she tried to frisk around with the other hounds, one of whom reared up on its leash and began barking ferociously. Both Cass and Sofia gave chase.
While they were gone, Tim pulled in beside the Lexus. Its motor remained running. Tim went around to the open door, killed the engine and grabbed the car key. He threw it under the mat in the trunk of his rental car, a blue Chevy Impala, then called Evon for just a second. “I got them,” he told her and hung up, because he could see the two strolling back, with the dog now leashed. Sofia caught sight of Tim first and stopped dead about ten yards away.
“Tim, please,” she said.
“How about the three of us sit down at one of those tables over there and have a conversation? Won’t take long.”
“We don’t owe anyone any explanations,” Cass said. He was a pace ahead of Sofia. “Least of all Hal.”
“Well, I’m not sure about that. My best guess is that you pled guilty to a crime you didn’t commit.”
Cass took that in, then motioned to Sofia to proceed.
“I don’t think you’re going very far,” Tim said. “I have your key.”
Cass charged past and peered through the Lexus’s driver’s side window. When he turned back, his expression was hateful.
Tim said, “You don’t really want to beat up an old man with all these people around.”
“I was thinking more about calling the police.”
“Cass, that would be the wrong move. I’d have to give them the whole story, at least what I know. They’d take your fingerprints, and then they’d go over to Paul’s law office, and his senatorial office, and you’d end up arrested for fraud, and false personation of a public official, impersonating a lawyer—God knows what else. Why don’t we talk first?”
Sofia reached for Cass’s hand, and Tim could see him slump in resignation. The three proceeded to a picnic table near the low brick building that housed the bathrooms and vending machines. The tabletop was a smooth speckled plastic meant to inhibit graffiti, but that still hadn’t hindered the gangs from engraving their signs, probably with cordless Dremel tools. There was also a huge white splash of hardened bird poop, beside which several kids had used permanent markers to draw hearts containing their initials. Youth.
The dog continued to bounce around at the end of her lead, and was soon wound up in the steel legs that bowed under the table. Tim played with her a second. In his house, Maria and he had always owned dogs, mutts, but they’d been some of the best friends of his life. Part of his daughters’ sales pitch for moving to Seattle was that with so many people to help him, Tim would be able to get another pup. Living here, he’d hesitated, unsure how his leg would do with three long walks a day in every kind of weather.
“She’s a good one,” said Tim. “How old?”
“Eighteen months,” said Sofia. “She hasn’t read those books that say she’s supposed to have stopped acting like a puppy.”
“Whatta you call her?”
“Cerberus. Paul named her.”
“Cause she’s such a ferocious watchdog,” said Cass, and shook his head at the folly.
“That was the dog that kept people from escaping from Hades, right? With three heads?”
“I’m waiting for her to grow the first one,” Cass answered. “But she’s definitely got the part down about keeping us in hell.”
“She’ll settle down,” Tim said. “Just like kids. They all grow up, just at their own rates.”
None of them said any more then, so that the great humming roar of the highway surrounded them—the engines’ throaty growl and the tires singing on the pavement and the spumes of rushing air spilling off the vehicles speeding along. The dog had actually taken a seat at Tim’s feet as he scratched her ears.
“Cass, how about you tell me what happened the night Dita died?”
“Why are you so sure I didn’t kill her?”
“Well, she was hit on the left side of the face, for one thing, which means the assailant was probably right-handed. You’re a lefty.”
“That didn’t bother you twenty-five years ago.”
“Not sure I knew that twenty-five years ago. Which is pretty odd in itself. Like you or Sandy were trying to avoid pointing a finger at somebody else.” Tim reviewed the mounting evidence against Lidia.
“What about my fingerprints? And semen?”
“Dita’s girlfriends all said you were skivvying up there every night to make out with her.”
Sofia pushed Cass’s arm. “Just tell him.”
Cass closed his eyes. “I don’t believe this. And if I tell you, who do you tell?”
Tim offered the deal Evon and he had already agreed upon. Hal was entitled to know the details of his sister’s death. The rest—phony noses and switching places—was an interesting sidelight, but not essential for Kronon. That stuff could stay right here.
“Assuming one thing,” Tim said.
“Which is?” Cass asked.
“That nobody else got murdered.”
Cass started to say something in protest, then shushed himself and scanned the rest area. He was in his blue suit pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his arms. His striped Easton rep tie, which he wore every day, was probably in his jacket, which was on the back seat of Sofia’s car.
“I can only tell you for sure what I know.”
Tim said that would make a good start. Cass pressed his face into his palms to give himself the heart to begin.
“The night Dita died,” he said, “Paul and I left Zeus’s picnic together and went to the Overlook and sat on the hood of my car and drank a few beers. We actually talked mostly about our love lives. There was a lot of ribbing until I told him I was going to ask Dita to marry me, which, to put it mildly, was not well received. Around 10, since we weren’t talking to each other any more, we headed back to our parents’. Our dad was in a state. My mom had told us that Teri would take her home, but she hadn’t turned up and Nouna Teri hadn’t seen her since six. I checked our answering machine, thinking maybe she’d called our number for some reason. Instead, I had this hysterical message from Dita, who said my mother had been there belting her around.”
“That was the call from her phone to yours?”
“Right.” Cass nodded, a weighty motion involving his whole upper body. Lie num
ber one, Tim thought. Cass told the investigators that Dita’s only message was a request for him to call, which he’d immediately erased. “Paul hopped in my dad’s car to look for my mom and I sped over to Dita’s. I climbed up to her room and let myself in through the French window. I didn’t even notice the broken pane until I was inside, when I saw the blood. It was all over the place, on the wall and the window. Dita was on the bed and there was a ton of blood there, too, soaking the pillow and smeared on the headboard. And she was dead. I checked her pulse. She was already cool to the touch.”
“And you realized your mother had killed her?”
In reply, Cass grimaced and seesawed his shoulders. He took a second to give each shirt cuff another roll.
“I definitely didn’t like the way it looked,” he answered.
“Which is why you didn’t call 911 or wake up the Kronons.”
“Right. Which is why I just jumped down off the balcony—”
“Leaving the footprints—”
“I guess. And I ran back to the car. She had to be on foot. I figured that without a car, she’d walk down to Greenwood Village and call my dad to pick her up, so I went in that direction. About halfway there, I saw her. A hundred people must have driven past her. She was sitting up but somehow she’d gone down on the other side of a culvert. This bloody towel was still around her arm. She’d gotten blood all over her face somehow, and she was pretty much out of it. I had her home in twenty minutes.”
“That’s the type-B blood we found in your car?”
“It was Mom’s, right. My father was insane, of course, but Paul and I knew that taking her to the hospital was as good as turning her in. So we called Sofia.”
Tim turned to Sofia, who, up until now, had been listening as she held on to Cass’s arm. Now she frowned. Even twenty-five years later, she was probably embarrassed at having had a part in fooling Tim. Nonetheless, she shared her part forthrightly.
“Lidia had severed the radial vein. No one would answer when I asked how she’d done it, but I knew they were afraid of taking her to the ER. Both boys were claiming Mickey’s illness had made her phobic about hospitals. In any event, closing the wound wasn’t a problem, but the amount of blood she’d lost concerned me. I thought she was on the verge of hypovolemic shock, which could have caused heart failure. Her BP, all things considered, wasn’t horrible, but I told them if she developed a high fever, or any one of ten other symptoms, she had to be transfused. I came back the next day to check on her. She wasn’t good but she was better.”
“And did she admit she killed Dita?” Tim asked.
Cass wound his head about vehemently.
“Never. Absolutely never. She was literally too confused to talk about it for a few days. She admitted that she ‘slapped’ Dita—Mom’s word”—Cass made the quotation marks in the air—“and agreed that Dita might have ‘bumped’ her head, but she said Dita was still shouting at her when she left. Of course, once we knew Dita died of an epidural hematoma, that made sense. But Lidia absolutely denied that she took hold of Dita’s jaw or whammed her skull against the headboard. Nothing like that. No beating.”
“And what did you think of that?”
“We believed, Paul and me, that that was what she wanted to think. And you know, the blood loss could have affected her memory.”
“Did you think she’d killed Dita?” Tim asked again.
“Our mom had quite a temper. ‘Tha sae deero!’” Cass abruptly sang out. He had a finger raised and his voice lifted into a high-pitched rasp that sounded like the Wicked Witch of the West. He was imitating his mother, threatening a smack on the behind. “Those were terrifying words in our house. She’d hit us with a ping-pong paddle. There was no sitting down for days. She was rough when she was angry. But Dita was fit and strong. I couldn’t see our mom overpowering her that way. So to be honest, no, I don’t think I’ve ever made myself believe it.
“Of course, a prosecutor probably wouldn’t have much doubt. There were a thousand people to testify how odd it was for Lidia to have shown up at that picnic, let alone end up in Dita’s room. Plenty of folks knew my mom was convinced that my father would never talk to me again, if I married Dita. And my mom had given up any hope of convincing me to break it off, so there was a reason for Dita and her to get pretty heated.
“But even assuming a prosecutor believed my mom’s version, that she hit Dita once and Dita knocked her head accidentally—the best Lidia would have come out with was a plea to aggravated assault. With a death associated, especially the daughter of a guy who was on the verge of becoming governor, Paul and I both expected that she’d catch serious pen time. Lidia said she’d kill herself before she ever set foot in prison. She never backed away from that. I mean, people do that, don’t they?”
“Threaten it? Often. Carry through? A lot less.” Tim had seen a few suicides on the way to the slammer, young men all with obvious worries, a couple of them addicts, too, who couldn’t face withdrawal.
“But even that wasn’t what made it complicated,” Cass said.
“Sounds complicated enough,” Tim answered.
Cass gave him a small, sick smile, somehow meant to be at Brodie’s expense.
“Suppose,” said Cass, “Mom came forward and told the truth. Gave you guys the same story she told us, and you took that as gospel. Where did Dita’s other injuries come from? I’m the only other person who was in Dita’s room before Zeus found her dead. My fingerprints are there, my footprints are in the flower bed. Dita’s message said she was calling the police. My brother and my dad would have to admit that I headed over to the Kronons’. The prosecutors would say I got into a struggle with Dita to keep her from turning my mom in. Or because she was supposedly going to drop me.”
Tim drew back. “You were afraid we’d charge both of you?”
“Why not? Plead my mom to the assault and give her immunity and force her to testify against me. Or better yet, let two different juries sort it out—immunize both of us and call me to the stand in my mom’s trial and her in mine. Pretty, right? Mother against son, and son against mother. They could do it. Each of our stories implicated the other. Maybe the prosecutors would find a medical expert to say that Lidia’s slap and my supposed wallops were each contributing causes of Dita’s death. Not that they needed to legally. In separate trials, they could pin the whole thing on each of us one at a time.”
Tim rolled all of this around. He’d like to say that cooler heads would have prevailed, but Cass had a point. With all the hysteria and the press attention, a lot of prosecutors would have ended up charging both Lidia and Cass.
“My mom, of course, she’d have lied and owned the murder to save me. But Lidia Gianis on page one as a killer? Her plan was to swallow hemlock—you know my mom would have the perfect dramatic touch—but letting her claim the whole crime was like handing her the cup.” Cass smiled wanly. Down in the parking lot of the rest area, a couple’s voices were raised in a quarrel. They were arguing about paying for a motel. “And we weren’t sure she could carry it off anyway.”
Tim made a mouth as he thought, arguing it through with himself. They’d never thought about gender-testing the blood in 1982. It wasn’t routine, and everything said it was a man’s crime anyway. But even back then, people knew about chromosomes. The blood in the room would have corroborated Lidia, if she said she was the murderer. But with Cass’s fingerprints on the doorknob, and with fresh shoe-prints outside, any good investigator would have been pretty sure she was covering for her son.
“It was a mess, a horrible mess, no matter what we did,” Cass said.
“So you pled?”
“So I pled.”
Tim stared straight at Cass. “And Lidia Gianis let her son give up the prime of his life, while she walked away?”
“That’s what happened.”
“No, it’s not,” said Tim. He reached down again to play with the dog. She was still young enough to nip at his fingers and hold on. “I been following you
more than a week now, Cass, watching you stick on a phony nose every morning and go to work and play your brother. And what finally hit me today is that this costume party didn’t just start. You couldn’t pretend to be Paul—practice law, be the state senator—unless you’d been doing that for years now. I think the two of you traded off the time inside. That’s why you made such a big deal about minimum security. Because there’s not one of those facilities you can’t just walk away from, especially if your brother’s waiting nearby to take your place. All you had to do was go for a walk in the woods and swap out your jumpsuit with him. So you were each Paul sometimes, and sometimes Cass.”
“That’s quite a theory.”
“The prints for the man who entered as a prisoner at Hillcrest—they don’t match the prints of the man who was in Dita’s room. They’re Paul’s. I say he went into the joint first, just in case this whole charade didn’t work. Can’t keep the wrong guy in prison, can you?
“And the beauty of it, of course,” Tim said, “is that you could talk your mom into doing this. You and Paul would each be out, at least at times. You’d both have a life, even if it was one you’d be sharing.” Tim glanced at Sofia. She wasn’t ever playing in the World Series of Poker. From the look of pure terror that had enlarged her eyes and stretched across her face, Tim could tell he’d gotten this right. “Must have been a little complicated at home, when Cass was sleeping in his brother’s bed,” he said. “I suspect that’s how you all ended up in your current predicament.”
Sofia looked away quickly and announced she was going to walk the dog.
“That’s quite a theory,” Cass said again.
“I’m pretty sure it’s what happened. Only part I’m wondering about is what you said I’d wonder about—how Dita is dead when you get there. Truth is, though, your mom’s version makes some sense to me. It took a pretty strong person to overpower Dita that way. That’s one more reason we were sure it was a man. Hard to believe a woman of your mom’s age could wham Dita around like that.”