Identical by Scott Turow Page B

in—grimy bicycles with flat tires, garden hoses, racks of clothes, hickory-shafted golf clubs, old TVs, broken furniture. The light from a cellar window slanted over some of the mess.
    “Did you ever hear of a rummage sale?” Evon asked him.
    “My daughters are even worse than me. Don’t want to part with anything Maria touched. Let them figure it out when I’m gone,” he said, and laughed, utterly cheerful about his own mortality. He turned sideways to get past an old chifforobe and reached a metal filing cabinet, a beige box from which the paint had rusted off in uneven blots. He seemed to know at once where everything would be. He crouched over the bottom drawer and pulled out a file, then went to pull the chain on a bulb. He turned the pages with some difficulty, his fingers stiff, licking the tip of his thumb now and then.
    “Here you go,” he said finally. He read the report for a second, then handed it to Evon.
    It was just as he recalled, too. Short interview, two days after Dita’s death. Paul said Cass was with him all night after the picnic, hanging out at Overlook Park on the river. A stone lie. Cass couldn’t have been with him, because, as Cass acknowledged subsequently, he’d been with Dita, punching her around and killing her.
    “This is gold, you know,” Evon told him.
    “It is?”
    “This man wants to be mayor. Leader of the police. But he lied his ass off to the cops to keep his brother out of trouble. Even after he’d been hired to be a deputy prosecuting attorney.”
    “Who wouldn’t? I’m not sure I’d want to vote for a man who wouldn’t save his brother. Besides, that’s all politics. Hal can keep his crazy politics. That’s not my concern.” Tim waved a hand past his big nose.
    “But it proves what Hal’s been saying. That Paul was involved from the start. He covered up for his brother. And maybe there’s more to it. Those shoes? They’re identical twins. So the Nikes could have fit Paul. I bet they always shared clothes. Were they still living together?”
    “You kidding? Greek family? Hal was still with his parents and he was forty. Yeah, the Gianis twins were both of them at Lidia and Mickey’s. Paul, I think, was about to move out.”
    “What about fingerprints? Do identical twins have the same fingerprints?” Evon was feeling some excitement. She always did the job and her job was to make Hal right. She was surprised about the velocity with which she was willing to suspect Paul, whom she’d always liked, even admired. But there was an elusive quality to him that had never sat quite right with her. You could spend lots of time with Paul Gianis, as she had, and still come away feeling he was guarding something essential about himself.
    But Tim moved his head from side to side.
    “Seems as I remember, twins’ prints look somewhat alike, but when they’re in the womb and they reach out and touch the whoosywhatsit—” He stopped to find the word.
    “Placenta?”
    “Right. No, they have different fingerprints.”
    Evon absorbed that, then reread the report.
    “Can I take this?”
    Tim shrugged. “Public record now. PA in Greenwood did what they always do when Cass was indicted, threw all the police reports in the court file to prove the defendant had had full discovery before he pled guilty.”
    Evon strayed a hand to the filing cabinet.
    “What else have you got in there, Tim? Any chance I can pay you to look through all your files and see if there’s any more about Paul?”
    He laughed. “No need to pay me. I’m on the long end with the Kronons. I’ve been getting a check every January first for twenty-five years.”
    “I know,” she said. “It comes out of my budget.” She smiled, though. “Nobody’s ever really explained it.”
    “It was just Zeus’s way of thanking me for dropping everything and taking over the investigation. When this here was done with, I wasn’t too keen to go back to the heating business. Zeus wanted to hire me at ZP,