by Scott Turow
“Did you believe that? That strangers had tossed him down the mountain?”
“Ohee,” Teri said, moving her head from side to side. She actually laughed at the idea. Zeus’s enemies would not kill a father in mourning, according to Teri. But Hermione was a Vasilikos and the Greek police couldn’t wash their hands of the matter fast enough.
“Hermione never cracked. Once we came back, I saw next to nothing of her, except on family occasions. She became another one of these Greek widows, keeping company with almost no one but her son and grandchildren, and dressed in black. Designer stuff, of course. But black.” Teri cackled.
“And Cass stayed in prison.”
“Yes. That was sad. Of course, I returned from Greece determined to honor my brother’s wishes and go to the prosecutor in Greenwood County. I hired a lawyer, a fellow named Mason. Ever heard of him?”
“George?” He was a judge now, but still one of Evon’s closer friends. “You couldn’t have done better.”
“Well, he listened to all this and said, ‘Is your sister-in-law going to back you?’ ‘Fuck no,’ I said. I knew better than that. Admit she had a motive to push her husband off the mountain? Blacken his name and devastate her son? And reward Lidia, who she despised? I’m no lawyer, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Your friend George just shook his head. ‘A prosecutor is going to look at this and laugh. You come forward only after your brother dies, when you can conveniently lay the whole thing at his feet with no consequence to him. His wife, who was in the room, denies he ever said anything like that. And who do you hope to free as a result? Only the son of your best friend. We can do it, Teri, but I’ll tell you right now there isn’t a soul in that courthouse who is going to believe you. Frankly, I think I might deserve a bonus if you don’t end up charged with perjury.’ If it was just about me, I might have carried on anyway. But to tear Hal apart with no point? Cass wasn’t getting out. Your friend Mason convinced me of that.”
“And you never told Lidia.”
“How could I? She’d have demanded that I go to the prosecutor. What else would a mother do? A lot of people thought Hermione was dull, but she was a survivor. She knew I was cornered.”
The old lady emptied her tumbler. She was done.
“A secret,” she said to Evon again, as punctuation.
Evon went to set her glass down on the tea cart, but Teri reached for it when she realized where Evon was headed. She made a remark about wasting good whiskey and took a long draught.
“Forgive me for not showing you out,” she said. “I’ll probably just fall asleep here.”
Evon offered to help her to bed but the old lady was content with her bad habits.
“How is your life, dear?” she asked, as Evon picked up her purse. “What happened to Loopy Loo?”
She described yesterday’s events to Teri. “She probably got out of jail last night. I never checked to find out.”
“And how do you feel?”
“Like I got trapped in a washing machine on spin cycle.”
Teri liked the description and had a long laugh.
“It’ll probably take you a while to recover, but don’t give up hope.”
“That’s what Tim tells me. Anyway, I can’t escape my own nature. It’s what I want, deep inside.”
“Course it is. You ought to try to be happy for your own sake, but if that doesn’t convince you, then try because there were so many of us who never even got the chance.”
That thought, a new one, pierced Evon straight through the heart.
“Come give your old Aunt Teri a hug.”
She did. The old woman still smelled like she was wearing an entire cosmetics counter. Teri looked up, unseeing, and touched Evon’s cheek. She told Evon again she was a good girl.
Evon stopped at Tim’s house on Monday morning on her way to work. He was up and welcomed her, ushering her back to the sun-room. She was worried about what to tell him, but by now he’d figured it all out on his own.
“You don’t need to beat around the bush. It was Zeus, wasn’t it? Kept me on his side all these years, didn’t he? I’ve been a fool before. But never for money.”
“Tim—”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I should have looked that gift horse in the mouth a long time ago. I knew Zeus’s colors. But he got the drop on me with the grieving-father stuff. A fella like Zeus, they always know the soft spots. Damn him to hell anyway.”
“I knew you were going to take it hard.”
“Of course I am. Let an innocent man go off to prison? Now how’s that for a capstone on my career? Oh, jeepers,” he said, and looked bereft as he stared at the floor. “I certainly have worked my last for ZP.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Yeah, I do. Time anyway. I’ll go out to Seattle and see how much I like it. Lot of hills and young people. I’m still not sure it’s the right place for a gimpy old man. I guess I’ll find one of those graduated dying places, where you get a little help to start and eventually leave in a box.”
“I think they call them assisted living.”
“Whatever.”
She told him she had to get in to the office, but promised to return to have lunch. Once he saw her to the door, Tim sat in the sun-room and put Kai and J.J. on and listened to them play. All the time Tim tooted on the trombone as a kid, he believed he was going to be that good, and there was no more chance of that than of his becoming a 747. And he thought he was a good cop and a decent man, but he was willing to buy all of Zeus’s palaver because it bought him a little more comfort in life. None of the investigators, so far as Tim recalled, had even thought to cast a look in Zeus’s direction, because of the blood. But Tim was the guy experienced enough to have seen through it.
The truth was often so damn painful. People couldn’t stand to live with it. And him thinking he was in the truth business. No one really was. You took as much as you could and called it quits.
But there was music and sunshine. And maybe when he got himself around other people every day, he might even find some cute old gal. Evon had said the same thing a lot of folks did. In those places a guy who could still drive was more popular than a billionaire. Maria would forgive him. What Sofia had told him had helped. Sitting here on his plaid couch, he again felt his love for Maria, which would last as long as he did.
He put his hands over his face to give the rising shame and indignation about Zeus another second to drain. It would come and go for days. But he slapped his thighs.
Life, thought Tim, almost age eighty-two, goes on.
When Evon got to the ZP Building, Hal was locked in the giant conference room with a battalion of bankers and lawyers, a few of whom would emerge now and then and scurry to a side office for conferences or phone calls to superiors. The meeting had been expected to last two hours and was now in hour four. On the business side of ZP’s offices, there was a portentous silence. A lot of people seemed to be holding their breath.
Finally, after lunch, Hal’s assistant, Sharize, told Evon he was free. The bankers and lawyers were filing out, men and women in blue suits who looked like teams of pallbearers in training, one face grimmer than the next.
She entered the vast conference room, which was normally partitioned into three, but Hal was on the phone with Mina and he held up a hand. Evon sat in a chair in the hall until he was finished, a good fifteen minutes.
When Sharize brought Evon in, Hal’s suit coat was on the back of his chair. He’d removed his tie, and his white shirt was darkened by large spots of sweat. He sat in front of the vast bank of windows over the spangled river, peering abjectly at the wall. Another portrait of Zeus was over there, in the center of the sycamore wainscoting, so perhaps that’s where Hal had started, but now he seemed to be indulging his habit of looking at nothing at all. When he finally saw Evon, he withdrew his middle finger, on which he’d been nibbling, from his mouth, and gave her a quick smile, but it was in the nature of a wince.
“It’s over,” he said.
>
“What is?”
“ZP.”
Evon found she had sat down, still a good thirty feet from her boss.
“How could that be?”
“Housing prices are dropping, even collapsing at YourHouse’s end of the market. The bankers have locked arms and want another 150 million dollars in collateral on the YourHouse deal, which has to come out of the equity on the commercial projects. But the other lenders—often the same frigging people—won’t give up their senior positions. In fact, retail is down. And, according to the economists, going down further. Which means the shopping centers’ values are tanking, too, because rents have to drop. I thought we were pretty conservatively leveraged, but unless there’s a giant change, we’ll be in bankruptcy by the end of the year and the ZP shareholders, starting with me, will be wiped out. I may even vote for Obama.” He smiled wanly then. “Joke,” he said.
She repeated herself. How could that be?
“Well, I asked the same thing. But it’s just arithmetic. I never imagined all of this stuff would go down at the same time. Nobody did. The bankers will reassess at year-end, but we need to make a public announcement now, which will crater the stock. It’s doom.”
“How do you feel, Hal?”
He laughed.
“Awful. My dad started with a duffel bag of cash he’d borrowed from my grandfather and worked his whole life, built an empire, and I’ve lost the whole thing. In a couple of months. I’m glad he didn’t live to see it. I truly am. I can’t even imagine what he would say.”
Evon pondered. “If he was honest, I’m sure he’d tell you he’d made a lot worse mistakes.”
“I doubt that.” His fingernails were back in his mouth. Evon considered telling Hal that it was Zeus’s honesty, not his mistakes, that was subject to doubt, but she couldn’t see what good it would do at the moment.
“Do you want to talk about the Gianises?”
He flipped a hand. Who cares?
“Long-short, Cass says he didn’t do it. He pled because the way the evidence was going to shake out, there was a good chance both Lidia and he would end up in prison.”
“So Lidia did kill my sister?”
She ran him through all the reasons to doubt that. He nodded as if he understood, but Evon realized she had only a small fraction of his attention.
“So who beat her up like that?” Hal asked.
Evon waited, then went with the answer she’d planned.
“We don’t know. We just don’t know.”
“Huh,” he said. If Hal ever sat down to do the math, about who was in the house, who was strong enough, there would only be one person left in the equation. But Hal might not work that out in this lifetime. His father probably had to stay up on the mountain for Hal to be who he was.
“You know what my wife said when I told her I just lost a billion dollars?” he said to Evon.
This was going to be a classic. “What?” Evon asked.
“‘It will be better for us.’ How do you like that? I mean, we’ll have enough. No plane. I’ll have to get rid of the horse farm. Stuff like that. But I won’t have to keep the lamp lit for my father. I can do what I want, instead of trying to maintain his monument. That was her point. She might be right. I feel too crappy now to know.”
“Good for Mina,” said Evon.
“She’s a good one,” he said.
She felt sorry for Hal, terrible, the more so as she thought everything over. At end, Hal for all his many faults had been the most honest guy around. He had acted for the most part as a loyal brother and son pursuing the truth. And now in his mid-sixties he was going to have to see if he had the strength to become somebody else.
“You better shine up your résumé,” he told her. “Get it out on the street.”
She hadn’t thought of that yet. She was going to be out of a job herself, assuming Hal was right. Whoever bought up ZP’s properties would probably be a bigger operation. They’d come in and clean house. It didn’t matter. Since she’d started making big money, she’d always kept two years’ living expenses in cash and she’d find another job anyway. Headhunters called all the time. She just needed love. That was really the work she had left.
“I’ll give you the greatest reference ever,” Hal said. “Which you deserve.”
“I appreciate it.”
She walked over and gave Hal a hug, which was a first.
“I really don’t think your dad would have done any better, Hal. Give yourself a break on that.”
“I just didn’t see any of this coming,” he said. “I should have. It’s right in front of my face. Of everyone’s really. The same economists who told me that the housing market had bottomed out are now saying there’s going to be a plague of foreclosures soon, because people won’t be able to sell their houses for what they owe. The banks, everybody holding those mortgage bonds, everybody will be doing the hurt dance. How could we all miss it?”
She puffed up her lips. She could say it again, but it had become a tired phrase. People see what they want to.
“I’m going to take a couple of hours,” she said. She had lunch with Tim—she preferred he didn’t end up sitting alone for long stretches today. And she wanted to air out her head. Maybe go for a run along the river.
Hal repeated something to her in Greek.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“My dad used to say it all the time. ‘May the gods guide us gently.’”
A Note About Sources
My fascination with twins began before I was three years old, when my sister, Vicki, arrived. The twin whom my mother had carried with Vicki was stillborn. That event loomed over my childhood, and thus what it meant to be and have—and lose—a twin, and the inevitable contrast to other love relationships, has been a preoccupation of mine at some level ever since, and one that I knew would eventually find its way into one of my novels.
I had been working on Identical a few months when I realized I had salvaged some of the raw details of the central crime from one of Chicago’s most infamous unsolved murders, that of Valerie Percy, which occurred in September 1966, a few miles from my parents’ house. The daughter of the wealthy industrialist Charles Percy, then running—successfully, it would turn out—for the United States Senate, Ms. Percy was killed in her father’s lakeside mansion in Kenilworth, Illinois, while family members, including her identical twin sister, slept nearby. Although I’ve clearly scrambled elements, I should say unequivocally that there is no resemblance intended between any member of the Percy family and any of the wholly imagined characters of my novel, including all of the Kronons and Gianises.
A far more self-conscious inspiration for the novel came from what I had always taken as one of the most touching of the Greek myths, the story of the Gemini, Castor and Pollux. The identical twins were said to have been born after their mother, Leda, Queen of Sparta, was raped by Zeus, who had taken the form of a swan to catch her unaware. The myth has many variations, but one of the most common is that the sole difference between the twins was that Pollux was immortal, like his father, while Castor, like his mother, was not. When Castor was fatally wounded, Pollux could not bear the loss and asked Zeus to let him share his immortality with his twin. The brothers therefore alternated time in Hades and on Mount Olympus. For those familiar with the myth, the parallels between it and my story should be plain, as is the fact that I did not allow the old tale to be any more than a fabric on which I did my own embroidery.
I had a lot of wonderful help in writing this book. I am especially indebted to two friends, Dr. Julie Segre, senior investigator at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and a renowned scholar in the area of law and genetics, as well as a novelist. Both Julie and Lori took considerable time coaching me on the state of DNA learning circa 2008. A few lines of Dr. Yavem’s dialogue have clear roots in a speech Lori gave to the annual meeting of the American S
ociety of Human Genetics in San Francisco, November 7, 2012. I take it for granted that despite both Julie’s and Lori’s patient teaching, I misunderstood something; the resulting errors are solely my fault.
I also want to thank Camille Rea, MAMS, CCA, a board-certified clinical anaplastologist at the Maxillofacial Prosthetics Clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center. Ms. Rea welcomed me to her lab and was illuminating on details that found their way into the novel. Again, she bears no responsibility for any factual mistakes I’ve made.
My gratitude also to Emi Battaglia, at Grand Central, my pal Nick Markopoulos and his friend George Chalkias, and Tina Andreatis, who all corrected some of my blunders about Greek language and customs.
Finally, I had several discerning advance readings of the manuscript from friends and relations. They are, alphabetically, Steve Drewry; Adriane Glazier, who also contributed the title; Jim McManus; Dan Pastern; Julian Solotorovsky; Ben Schiffrin; Eve Turow; and my most faithful advance reader, Rachel Turow. My editor, Deb Futter, was everything a good editor can be: patient, incisive and invaluable. Likewise, my wonderful agent, Gail Hochman. Loving thanks to them all.
Also by Scott Turow
Innocent
Limitations
Ordinary Heroes
Ultimate Punishment
Reversible Errors
Personal Injuries
The Laws of Our Fathers
Pleading Guilty
The Burden of Proof
Presumed Innocent
One L
In the long-awaited sequel to Presumed Innocent, Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto are once again pitted against each other in a riveting psychological match.
A preview of Innocent follows
Available now
Prologue
Nat, September 30, 2008
A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father.