“Zeus told you this?”
“A little. He didn’t need to say much. This was pretty much common knowledge around St. D’s.”
“And what’s with the duffel bag?”
Tim laughed the same way, made merry, like most cops, by the eternal oddities of the way humans behaved.
“Zeus builds his first shopping center in 1947. You know, he’s a genius. He figures out Americans want to shop. But where’s the do-re-mi come from to get started, he’s just some mustered-out soldier boy from Kewahnee?”
“The duffel bag?”
“So they say. So Zeus gets rich, but you know, back in Athens, there’s kind of a dispute. Cause nobody there seems to have thought their money was going to be Zeus’s bankroll. He’s like, ‘This is America, you don’t hide money under the mattress, besides it worked out.’ To Zeus’s way of thinking, he got a loan which he paid back with big-time interest, and in Athens they’re thinking, ‘No, guess we made an investment and we want a piece forever.’ And Zeus is like, ‘Go jump.’ And they’re like, ‘We’ll see.’ Hermione’s dad, Zeus’s protector, he’d kicked the bucket the year before Dita was murdered. So it fits. Even the way Zeus died. You ever hear that story?”
She knew Zeus had died in an accident in Greece. No more than that.
“The Greeks,” said Tim, “they’re always running back to the homeland, but Zeus, because of the bad blood, he never wants to go. From the day Dita dies, Zeus had this notion to rebury her on Mount Olympus and finally, on the fifth anniversary of her death, Hermione agrees. Some of her Vasilikos relatives come up for the ceremony. And the next morning, Zeus goes out for a walk, to meditate over the grave, and he never returns. They find him five hundred feet down the mountain.” Tim shifted his big shoulders. “Around St. D’s, there weren’t many who didn’t think he was shoved.”
Evon had never heard a word about Greek gangsters from Hal, even though he often spoke about both of his parents when he had a drink in his office at the end of the day. What did they say? A vast fortune washes away the sins of prior generations. To Hal, Zeus was an Olympian figure, the embodiment of the pure genius of entrepreneurship. Hal probably knew no better, either. Or didn’t ask. Tim had already explained it to her.
People believe what they want to believe.
16
The same afternoon, Tim drove out to Easton University. It was not forty minutes this time of day, when the traffic was good. Easton was what people thought of when they talked about college, rolling hills and redbrick buildings with classic white gables and Doric columns, the oldest private university in the Midwest. It wasn’t all rich types any more. All kinds of parents and their kids-Indian and Vietnamese and Polish, black and brown-had figured out that a school like this was the ticket for life. These young people, all of them, when you got their attention away from their damn cell phones, shared the same alert, confident look, so different from that of the poor kids Tim had encountered when he was on the job. These youngsters met your eye and smiled; they had nothing to fear from grown-ups. Demetra, Tim’s middle daughter, was an Easton grad. She’d attended with the benefit of a substantial scholarship, and Tim and Maria had both loved visiting, seeing their child strolling around among all these young people, radiant with their prospects in life.
He found the Alumni House, a small brick building with a white wooden arch over the doorway. He had a cock-and-bull story ready for the woman who greeted him at the reception desk.
“My nephew was at my house and lost his class ring down the drain in the sink. Thought maybe I’d contact the company that sold it to him and see if they could replace it. Any chance somebody here knows the outfit?”
“What class?”
“Seventy-nine.”
Even after close to twenty-five years as a PI, Tim still had a hard time with the fibbing, a frequent occupational hazard, since he liked to believe that his whole professional life had been an effort to get at the truth. But when he was carrying a badge, he gave a lot of defendants a line about how much better it would go for them if they just puked up all the ugly details of a murder, when he knew for a stone fact that many of those kids might walk away, if they just shut up. Every job required some white lies now and then to do it right. And he knew how far he could go. He never said anything that would have gotten his wrinkled old ass arrested.
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
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
