way to work. Instead, he saw Cass’s Acura arrive at the 345 Building about 8:45 and slide down the ramp into the private parking garage underneath. Tim left the blinkers on in his rented Corolla, and dodged traffic to cross the street, thinking it might be worth it now to check the directory. He had just opened the outer glass door to the lobby when a blue Chrysler convertible came up the same driveway. The vehicle was no more than thirty feet away, and he got a good look at the driver, who stopped at the top to check the cars in the street coming from both directions before turning right onto Morgan. It was Paul.
Tim limped back across the avenue to the rental car. He was lucky. Paul got caught at a light two blocks down and Tim managed to follow him all the way to a seven-story concrete parking structure across from the LeSueur Building. Paul soon emerged with his briefcase as he headed in to work.
Tim drove back to 345. When he’d wandered by yesterday, he’d seen visitors poking around at a small screen built into the security desk, using an attached telephone handset. The guard was gone for the moment and Tim lifted the receiver and followed the instructions on the screen, pressing the pound key to bring up a listing of residents. There were no Gianises, but he scrolled through and found T. Wisniewski in unit 442. He called for the hell of it, but there was no answer after eight rings.
He stood there sorting out the possibilities. Beata had a house, so she’d probably rented this place for Paul, but that had to be before he split with Sofia. There wouldn’t be much point to putting things in her name now. Paul was still a famous face and word that he was living here would get around. Maybe it had been what the rogues would call their ‘stabbin cabin,’ although it seemed to Tim that Paul would have risked a lot less attention going through the back door of Beata’s house. And what all was Cass doing here? The two brothers didn’t figure to be on the best terms right now.
“Help you?” asked a portly middle-aged lady, who’d emerged from the package room and resumed her post on a high swivel chair behind the rosewood security desk. She wore a sport coat with
The 345 building, like the competitor down the block, was developed to meet all the needs of a busy urbanite. Here on the first floor, there was a gym and an overpriced organic grocery, and a couple of other small shops behind them.
“I was just looking for the dry cleaner,” Tim said, expecting her to direct him to the cleaner whose sign he’d seen next door. Instead, it turned out there was a dry cleaning establishment here, too.
“Right down the hall.” She pointed to the granite corridor. He could feel her watching as he gimped off, and for safety’s sake he entered the store with its steamy smell of starch. An Asian lady asked if she could help. She had quite an accent, and he needed to get her to repeat herself twice, what with the noise of the pressing machine behind her. In the interval, an idea came to him, just a way to confirm that Paul was living here now.
He turned every pocket in his sport coat inside out as the lady watched.
“Supposed to pick up my boss’s dry cleaning. But I don’t have the ticket.”
“What name?”
He told her Gianis and spelled it. She looked in her receipts and then threw the switch to start the merry- go-round of garments shimmering in their plastic wrappers. So Paul was here. Tim was about to go through the routine of telling her he’d forgotten his wallet, too, but she hung two suits from the hooked stainless arm that extended over the counter.
“You forgot one suit t’ree week,” she said.
“Really?” He looked at the second garment. It was exactly the same as the one in front of it, a lightweight blue wool with a faint herringbone. He hoisted the plastic sleeve for one second, as if trying to be sure the suit was his, and looked inside to see the label of a bespoke tailor, Danilo. If it was the guy Tim was thinking of, Danilo made clothes for athletes and mobsters, a clientele for whom he kept his mouth shut.
He took both suits off the hanging arm and held them out in front of himself, trying to make out the difference. He moved them from hand to hand a few times and finally hung both on the stainless steel arm again, so the shoulders were fully aligned. Now he caught it. The second suit, the one in back now, was probably half a size larger at the shoulder, and the sleeve was a micrometer longer as well.
“Three weeks, huh?” he asked her.
“Yeah.” She showed him the receipt. Written on it in marker was “442,” but that show-and-tell exhausted her patience.
“You pay now,” she said. So he opened his wallet and went through the whole act, cussing himself out and asking her to point him to an ATM.
Monday was Memorial Day. Tim was going to his granddaughter’s for a picnic with her husband’s family later in the day, and he had looked forward to that all weekend, sharing the young couple’s excitement about Stefanie’s pregnancy, and getting congratulated for having hung around long enough to see some of his DNA arrive in another generation. With nothing better to do until then, he decided to park across from 345 for a few hours that morning. Cass’s Acura appeared close to 10 a.m. Just as on Friday, roughly five minutes after Cass arrived, Paul pulled out in the Chrysler. Tim followed Paul to his senatorial office, and then to a parade in his district.
On Tuesday, Tim was at 345 at 7:30 a.m., wearing the twill navy-blue uniform from the old heating and ventilation business he’d briefly been in with his brother-in-law twenty-five years ago. Both the waist-length jacket and the matching billed hat sported the shield of Bob’s company, which he’d sold off a decade ago. These days, the pants didn’t quite close over his belly, but he made it look OK with a belt and a safety pin.
He stood outside the 345 garage on the concrete divider that separated the incoming from the outgoing traffic. As soon as a car pulled out and sped into the street, he ducked under the closing door and continued down the ramp into the garage. A Cadillac heading up honked and Tim raised his hands in protest, pretending that he had every right to be here.
There were two floors, smelling unpleasantly of oil and engine fumes. The best he could do was lurk near the bottom of the ramp, sucked back against the cinder block wall. When the Acura came in, it circled straight down to the lower level. Tim took the stairs and waited until he saw the Chrysler head back up. He walked around the floor several minutes before finding the Acura, the engine still warm.
He was stationed on the bottom level of the garage Wednesday. He knew there was a fair chance he was going to get his elderly butt arrested for trespassing but curiosity had a serious grip on him. He had five hundred dollars cash on him for bail and had alerted Evon.
Cass pulled in at about 8:55, and spent a minute jogging cars. He moved the Acura into the space the convertible had been in, then returned with his briefcase to the Chrysler he’d left running across the row.
Inside the Chrysler, Cass disappeared from view. Tim walked by at about fifty feet. He didn’t risk more than a quick look, and thought Cass was peering down at a computer, his shoulders shifting slightly. Tim walked up to a meter on the wall, pretended to monkey with it, then limped back in the other direction at the leisurely pace of a man getting paid by the hour. This time, when he passed by he could see clearly that Cass had his face in his hand, gripping the bridge of his nose, as if he was suffering a sinus headache or had come to grief over something. Afraid to stare, Tim went up one floor and stood beside the garage door, thinking he’d get a better look at Cass in the break of light when the door rose. And he did. But the driver was Paul.
“There’s just one man,” he said as he sat in Evon’s office Thursday afternoon.
“Give me a break.”
“Cass leaves the house. And Paul goes to work. I’ve been down in the garage three times now. Cass is living with Sofia, but once he leaves the house, he’s pretending to be Paul. He’s putting a prosthetic over the bridge of his nose every morning.”
Evon couldn’t keep from laughing.
“Come on. A fake nose? Does it have a Groucho moustache attached, too?”
“That’s how he’s getting away with it. Because nobody would ever believe it.”
“I’ll say.”
“No, listen.” Tim waved at her with both hands. He was quite excited and pleased with himself for figuring this out. “What does Sofia do for a living? She remakes faces all the time, and uses all kinds of prosthetics as part of it. You can go on the U Hospital website for the Reconstructive Surgery Department and see them-prosthetic noses and ears and chins and jaws and cheeks. Whole features or a piece of them for people who’ve lost, say, their nose to disease or accident or surgery or gotten it shot up or blown off. She’s been doing it twenty-five years.
