Mistaken Identity (22 page)

“But spoons are cool,” Mary insisted. “Real dagoes use spoons.”

“Why do you use that term?” Angie snapped, and Mary reflected that her twin had left her sense of humor at the convent, with no hope of recovery since she’d taken a job as a paralegal. Nothing about being a paralegal was funny.

“You know, Ange, you used to be a lot of fun.”

“Like you?”

“Exactly like me,” Mary said, and her meaning wasn’t lost on Angie, who averted her eyes.

“Girls, girls,” their mother said, her tone a warning.

Mary bit her tongue. Her chest felt tight. She didn’t know how to reach Angie, though they’d been so close as kids. Mary had always treasured their twinness, seeing it as unique and special, but the bond that Mary viewed as security, like moorings to a boat, Angie saw as confinement, the tether to the puppy. Angie had spent most of her adult life tugging at that leash, fighting to slip free of it completely. Mary regretted the loss, and the wound had been reopened by the Connolly case; Bennie was embracing a twin she had never known, just as Angie was pushing her away.

“Judy,” Angie said, “put the spoon down and pick up some spaghetti on your fork. Pick up just a little and twirl it against the side of the plate.”

Judy pierced a few strands of spaghetti with her fork, her expression grimmer than anybody’s eating spaghetti should be. “I’m a Stanford grad. I should be able to do this.”

“But you can’t,” Mary told her. “Because you won’t use the spoon.”

“Mary,” Angie warned, in the same tone their mother had used.

Mary’s face flushed. She felt suddenly warm in the tiny kitchen. Hot tomato sauce—“gravy” in the vernacular—bubbled in the dented metal saucepan on the stove and residual steam from a pot of spaghetti water curled into the air. The aroma filling the small kitchen—sharp with oregano, sweet with basil, chunky with sausage—that seemed so fragrant when Mary first came home now smelled cloying. “You know,” she said, “some people don’t eat spaghetti when it’s hot out. They think it makes them hotter to eat spaghetti.”

Mary’s mother looked over, squinting behind her glasses. “What you mean, no spaghett’?”

“No spaghetti in summer. If we ate cold things for dinner, we’d feel cooler.”

“Drink your water,” said her mother, and beside her, her father frowned deeply, his forehead fairly cleaving in two.

“What are you talkin’, a cold dinner? Cold isn’t dinner. If it’s cold, it can’t be dinner.”

“That’s not true, Pop,” Mary said, not sure why she was pressing such an inane point. She loved spaghetti in any weather. She would’ve eaten it in a steambath. “In restaurants they have cold dinners, like cold salmon with a salad. Sometimes they serve the salad warm.”

“Cold fish, warm salad?” Her father’s hand flew to check his hearing aid, a gift from Mary. She’d been so thrilled when he agreed to wear it that she suggested eating in the dining room, but had been roundly rebuffed. “You sayin’
cold
fish,
warm
salad, Mare? Where’s this at?”

“Downtown.”

“What kinda thing is that? How they make the salad warm?”

“I don’t know. Either they don’t chill it or they heat it, I guess. It says on the menu, ‘A warm salad of wilted greens.’ ”

“Wilted? Wilted means spoiled. They don’t serve it like that.”

“Yes, they do. Put it right in front of you.”

Her father snorted. “They should be ashamed of themselves! Crooks! Cold fish, warm salad! That’s ass-backwards.”

“Watch your language, Matty,” said Mary’s mother, but her father pretended not to hear with alarming accuracy.

“People pay good money for that? That’s cocka-mamie!”

Mary caught her twin’s eye across the tight circle of the table and to her surprise, Angie was smiling over her water glass. Mary sighed inwardly. She used to be able to read her sister’s mind.

“I did it!” Judy yelped suddenly. “Look!” Grinning, she held up a forkful of spaghetti balled like yarn.

Mary laughed, and her father set down his fork and clapped, his dry, rough palms smacking thickly together. “
Brava,
Judy!” he said.

“So tell us about your day, girls,” her mother said, and Mary hesitated. She didn’t want to tell her parents she was working on the Connolly case, but she didn’t want to lie, either. Like a good lawyer, she avoided the question.

“You remind me of when we were little, Ma, and you’d ask what we learned in school that day.”

“I’ll tell you what we learned,” Judy chirped up, finishing her forkful of pasta. “We learned that boxers have bad manners.”

“Boxers?” Vita frowned, and Mary looked down at her plate.
Oh, no.

Matty DiNunzio’s face lit up. “You gotta case about boxing? What you gotta do with boxing?”

“We had to question a witness today,” Judy answered, launching into what happened at the gym, apparently heedless of Mary’s kicks under the table. Matty DiNunzio hunched over the table on his elbows, his eyes widening as his wife’s narrowed. Mary knew her mother’s suspicions would be slow-cooking like tomato sauce. Thick bubbles popping on a steamy red surface.

“You met Star Harald?” her father said, oblivious in his excitement. “He’s a heavyweight. I seen him box a couple months ago. He was on the cable.
Madonne,
whatta jab.”

Mary leapt to shift the subject. “You watch boxing, Pop? I thought you were a baseball fan.”

“I like the fights. I boxed when I was young. Way back when.”

“Tell us about it,” Mary asked, but her mother’s face told her she was only postponing the inevitable, which was still better than nothing. Every lawyer likes an extension of time.

“Not much to tell. Not like Golden Gloves or nothin’. A lot of us fought, from the neighborhood. Cooch, Johnnie, Freddie. You met them guys, Mare. I could hit hard, take a punch, too. But I wasn’t quick enough. My feet.”

“Maria,” her mother interrupted. She touched her husband’s forearm, which was Italian code for shut up now. “What kinda case she got you workin’ on?”

Mary didn’t have to ask her mother who “she” was. Bennie Rosato had become the Antichrist in the DiNunzio household last year. “Just a case. A normal case.”

“What you mean, normal?”

“I just have to do some research, is all. Talk to witnesses, work in the library. Today I met with one of my old classmates, she’s teaching handicapped children—”

“Witnesses. What kinda witnesses?”

Mary sipped some water. The kitchen was sweltering. Nobody could cross-examine like a mother. “You know, regular witnesses. Trial witnesses.”

“What kinda trial?”

“You know, a trial. It’s not my trial. I’m not trying the case or anything.” Mary glanced at Judy for help, but she’d become suspiciously reabsorbed in her spaghetti. “I’m also finishing a brief in that First Amendment case I told you about, remember? That’s my main case, in federal court. It’s for the Third Circuit, the federal court of appeals. Very important stuff, Ma. This is where you say you’re so proud of me. That I’m a genius, that they’re lucky to have me.”

“She got you on a murder case, don’t she?” Vita DiNunzio set down her fork, and Mary knew she was in trouble.

“Just this one.”

“I knew it!” She slammed the table with a palm that only looked fragile. The table wiggled, the plates jumped, and water pooled in the jelly glasses.

“It’s not on Bennie, it’s on me. If you want to blame anybody, blame me.”

“She almost got you
killed
!”
her mother shouted, her voice quivering with age and emotion.

“I’m fine, Ma. Everything’s fine.”

Across the table, Angie looked grave. “Relax, Ma. Mary will be very careful. She’ll take care of herself. She won’t do anything risky. Will you, Mare?”

“No, absolutely not,” Mary said, on cue. “I’m very careful. Not doing anything dangerous at all.” Leave it to Angie to know how to handle her mother. Growing up, the twins had worked as a tag team and in the unspoken division of parents, Angie had gotten their mother and Mary their father. “Last year was a one-time thing, Ma. This is just a run-of-the-mill criminal trial. I’ll be very careful.”

“Basta!”
her mother said, standing up abruptly. Her face flushed through the thin, broken skin of her cheeks. She fairly shook in her flowered housedress. “I’ll go down there right now!”

“What? Where?”

“I’ll go down to that office right now and tell that
witch
she’s not putting my daughter on no murder case!”

Mary closed her eyes, mortified. “You’re not doing that, Ma. The office is closed. Bennie’s not even there.” She didn’t mention that her mother couldn’t drive. It didn’t seem like the right time.

“I’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ll tell her. She’ll listen to me, I’ll make her!”

“Ma, it’s my job.”

“Then you
quit
!”

Mary almost laughed. “I can’t do that. I have to make a living. My rent alone is—”

“Move home!”
She threw her arms in the air, her elbows knobby and her underarms slack. “Don’t tell me you’re too old! Camarr Millie, her daughter lives at home and she’s thirty-six!”

“I’m not quitting. I’m a lawyer, I like my job,” Mary said, not believing the words even as they fell from her mouth. Who could sell a happy lawyer?

“Matty, talk to her,” her mother barked, nudging her husband, and Mary realized for the first time that her parents played on a tag team of their own. She looked at her father, and pain twisted his features as he tugged the napkin bib from the neck of his T-shirt. He didn’t say a word, and still a knife of guilt went through her.

“Pop, it’s my job,” Mary said. “I have to do my job.”

“We thought you wasn’t doin’ no more murder cases, baby,” he said softly.

“I can’t pick and choose, Pop. You know that, you worked. Could you have one of your crew picking his own work?”

Suddenly her mother pushed her chair under the table, her eyes edged with tears, and hurried from the kitchen. “Ma, wait!” Angie called out, and bolted from the table after her. Judy looked astonished, and Mary tensed in the stifling kitchen.

Her father reached across the table and touched her hand, his palm warm. “Mare, I’m not gonna tell you your business. All I’m gonna tell you is boxing is a mean business, a dirty business. Lotsa people get hurt. Make sure you’re not one of them.”

“Don’t worry, Pop,” Mary said, the words hard in coming.

Watching the scene, Judy felt dumbstruck. Her mother didn’t cry. Her father didn’t call her “baby.” Her family preferred their melodrama on a television movie-of-the-week, behind a curve of expensive glass. Or on a stage, at a distance. Yet, as moved as Judy was by the emotion of Mary’s parents, she was struck by their words. Matty DiNunzio was right. Boxing was a dirty, dangerous business. Maybe the Della Porta murder had less to do with cops and more to do with boxers. The lawyers had been following Connolly’s theory, but Judy didn’t trust Connolly the way Bennie did. She decided to follow up, alone. She didn’t want to put Mary in harm’s way. She didn’t want her best friend hurt.

And she certainly didn’t want to answer to Vita DiNunzio.

B
ennie cruised the block in the dark before she pulled up in front of Della Porta’s rowhouse, making sure there were no news vans or reporters out front. Trose Street was quiet, with only a few people out. She parked and locked the Expedition, got out with the case file, and plucked through her keys until she found the one to Della Porta’s apartment.

Bennie climbed the stoop to the entrance, unlocked the inside door, and went up the stairs to the apartment. She opened the door at the top of the stair, thinking about Connolly. How it must have felt for her to come home to this apartment, to Della Porta. What it was like to find him dead. Bennie had experienced that horror herself, except that she’d loved profoundly the man she’d found. How could this happen to both her and Connolly? Wasn’t it too coincidental?

She opened the door, entered the apartment, and flicked on the switch for the overhead light. The apartment looked the same as before, the living area on the left, with the bloodstain. She walked to the faintly rusty outline and flashed on the awful day she saw the pool of blood on her lover’s desk. Bennie stared at the bloodstain, deep in thought. She had to admit that she was starting to feel, more than she could logically justify, that Connolly was her twin. Maybe because Bennie had watched Connolly, observed the way she looked and acted. Noted her mannerisms and the coincidences in their lives. Yet the more time Bennie spent around Connolly, the more she felt she understood her, even as she trusted and liked her less. It was paradoxical, but Bennie was starting to feel
of
Connolly in some way. It was an uneasy sensation, being suddenly uncomfortable in her own skin.