“How did you even get involved in the investigation?” Evon asked Tim. “Were you detailed out there by Kindle County?”
“Nope, I wasn’t even on the job any more. Hit fifty-five the year before, went into my brother-in-law’s heating business. No, Zeus, Hal’s dad, asked me to get involved.”
“How did he find you?”
“Oh, I’d known Zeus and them forever. Kronons lived two blocks over when Maria and I moved in here.” Tim hoisted himself up for a second to point out the rear window of the sun-room. “My wife was Greek. Baptized all my kids at St. Demetrios. Even spoke a couple words myself. President of the men’s club four years. But she come to lose her faith, Maria did. Not her values, mind you. But she just couldn’t touch her knee to ground and celebrate the Lord after our daughter died.” Tim’s old face grew heavy as he thought about that, then he cleared his throat again.
“The Greeks, I’m not telling anybody anything they don’t know, they really don’t have time for anybody but Greeks. But Zeus must have figured I was close enough. Very clubby, the Greeks. Very proud, you know. Make fun of themselves so no one else can. ‘We invented democracy and been sitting on our asses ever since.’ But they’re a conquered people. Had the Ottomans with their foot on their throats for five hundred years. That’ll take the spunk out of you, especially your men. But they don’t like to admit that. Gives the Turks too much credit.” His gray eyes came back to her then and lingered. She could tell he’d forgotten the question.
“You and Zeus were friends?”
Tim laughed. “Zeus, he was too grand for me. He’d glad-hand you, but he’d left the folks from the neighborhood way behind. What would you expect of somebody calls himself Zeus?”
“Wasn’t that his name?”
“Oh, hell no.” Tim grabbed the top of his head with his big raw hands to force his memory back into it. “Zisis,” he said finally. “That’s what he was baptized. But of course he wasn’t in school long with American kids before they were calling him ‘Sissy.’ So by high school he was saying ‘Zeus.’ Can’t blame him, I guess.”
She asked again how it was Zeus had gotten Tim involved and he laughed once more, a phlegmy, geezy sound.
“See,” said Tim, “that investigation wasn’t any more organized than a barroom brawl. Nobody had taken control of the crime scene. Zeus and Hal and the mom had been in there twenty times before the first cop arrived. The Kronons had actually cleaned up a little bit, the mom had, even arranged the body, before anybody thought to call the police. Not that there was any real point in bringing that bunch in anyway. Out there in Greenwood County, they hadn’t seen a murder in eighteen years, and probably hadn’t known what to do then. Which didn’t keep them from mucking around for a day or two. Then they asked for the state police, but there was too much politics with Zeus running for governor. Every trooper was out there to watch somebody else. Meanwhile Zeus is a basket case, he starts in screaming he wants the FBI. He gets them, too, for all they know about murders. So now you got three sets of nincompoops.” Tim’s eyes popped up when he realized who he was speaking to. “No offense,” he added.
“None taken,” she said. The Feds and the locals-that was like the Civil War, a battle to be fought in a different form in every generation.
“You had three different teams of evidence techs go through there,” Tim said, “each with different samples. Some tests get performed three times, some don’t get done at all. Everybody thinks somebody else is running leads. It was an unholy mess. So about a week along, Dickie Zapulski calls me. Zeus has asked the state police to hire me as a special to lead the investigation. Zeus got on the phone next and pretty much begged. Truth told, I wasn’t loving the heating business, or my brother-in-law, but I didn’t actually miss the street. But I felt for Zeus. I’d lost a daughter. So I said, OK, put me in charge. Not that anybody was actually willing to listen to me.”
When Evon had found out, not long after taking the job, that Hal had a PI on retainer, she’d gone in to see Collins Mullaney, who’d stayed on a month for the transition. He reassured her about Tim, who he said was maybe the best homicide dick in Kindle County in his time. ‘What was great about Timmy was he didn’t get distracted,’ Collins had told her. ‘He didn’t care who was humping who this week in McGrath Hall,’ referring to the headquarters of the Kindle County Unified Police Force. ‘And he didn’t get caught up hating the perps either. He’d smack a kid who spit on him, just like the rest, but he always said the same thing, no matter how big a shitbum. “Didn’t have a soul who cared enough to teach ’em how to behave.” Kind of “there but for the grace” with him. I think he grew up in an orphanage himself.’
The crime scene, Tim said, didn’t point in any particular direction. The first police to arrive had found the French door to the balcony open. It had rained hard that evening, right at the end of the St. Demetrios picnic, and there was a set of deep shoe-prints in the flower bed under Dita’s window, which made it look as if somebody had dropped from above. There were some tire impressions, too, down the hill, where you’d hide a vehicle, but there’d been two hundred cars there earlier in the day, so you couldn’t make as much from that. Upstairs, one of the panes in the French door was broken out between the mullions, with the glass scattered on the tiny balcony outside, and quite a bit of blood painted on the jagged glass, and the inside of the door and the carpet below. The blood trail ran into Dita’s bathroom, where, by simple count, there appeared to be a towel missing, suggesting that the killer had used it to bind a wound. The ABO typing that was state-of-the-art in 1982 classified the blood in the room as B. Dita and the rest of the Kronons were O, so there was no doubt of an intruder. From the brass knob on the outside of the French door, the initial techs also lifted a good set of fingerprints, which had remained there despite the fierce rainstorm that had pelted that side of the house. No way to date prints, but the best guess was that they belonged to the intruder.
“Dita is killed in her bed,” Tim said, “which is still made. Apparently she’s tuckered out and watching the tube for a while, before going out to meet her girlfriends at a bar. She’s in her robe and undies. No vaginal trauma, no tearing, but rape kit is positive for semen-then again, that could be from any time in the last forty-eight hours. Type B, though. Somebody smacked her first, damn hard, then grabbed her face. You could see the bruising in both cheeks. The hit on the left side made finger stripes. Meaning we’re probably looking for somebody right-handed. And whoever it was had worn a ring, because there’s a big circular bruise. The police pathologist’s thought is our perp whacked her, then sort of covered her mouth with his hand and rattled her skull against her headboard. She dies of an epidural hematoma. Lividity and the bleeding from the scalp wound shows she wasn’t dead for several minutes after she was beaten. But the pathologists can’t say whether or not she lost consciousness. Probably though, since she didn’t call for help.” Tim recited all of this like the prayers in a breviary. The murder was twenty-five years ago, but for many people she knew in law enforcement, the details of a big case were burned onto their brains. There were few jobs more intense than having to save everybody in town from a bad guy.
“What’s the time of death?”
“Well, you know, it’s a Greek picnic, they’re eating all day, so it’s hard to tell for sure from the stomach contents, but the pathologist says 10:30, give or take. Right around ten, according to the toll records, she gave her boyfriend Cass a call. So she dies after that.”