Sins Of The Father

by James, Harper

‘You’ll have to take me out for a ride in it,’ Charlotte said.

  ‘Sure. And any time you want to clean it, there’s a ton of cleaning products in the trunk.’

  She stood back and admired it.

  ‘I still don’t know why you wanted to ...’

  A smile crept across her lips and he knew what was coming next.

  ‘And about time too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t what me. You’ve finally decided to stop chasing Sarah’s shadow and re-join the human race.’

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘And that’s why I bought this car, is it?’

  ‘It’s okay, no need to be embarrassed.’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘It’s perfectly natural.’

  ‘I’m not embarrassed.’

  ‘Whatever you say. Who’ve you got lined up?’

  ‘I haven’t got anybody—’

  ‘Ha! It’s the cop isn’t it. What’s her name? Cath?’

  ‘Kate.’

  ‘See. I knew I was right.’

  And he knew he could never win. A long time ago he decided to make a list of every argument with her he’d ever won, see if he could maybe get into double figures before he died. The ink in his pen had dried up before he ever made the first entry.

  ‘Isn’t she a bit old for you?’

  ‘She’s two years older.’

  ‘Mmm. She’ll have to get a move on if she’s going to have children.’

  ‘You do remember I’m still actually married to Sarah?’

  She made some dismissive noise, not even words, but the meaning was clear—she wasn’t interested in irrelevant details, in ancient history. He had no idea how he’d got drawn into this ridiculous conversation. Charlotte took hold of his elbow and steered him towards the house. Evan let go of Max’s collar and he shot off ahead of them into the house.

  ‘How are things with Mitch?’

  ‘C’mon, I’ll make you some coffee. You can tell me all about her. And remember, give me enough notice, I’ll get the kids to make sure it’s gleaming every time you want to take her out in it.’

  It was as if he hadn’t asked about Mitch. He didn’t push it, it was probably for the best.

  He managed to escape two cups of coffee and one gruelling interrogation later. He was so keen to get away as he trotted down the path to the waiting cab, he never saw the car that had been parked twenty yards down from Charlotte’s house the whole time he was inside. And if the cab driver saw it make a U-turn and follow them all the way to the Register-Recorder’s Office, he certainly didn’t mention it to Evan.

  Chapter 12

  ‘DID YOU GET IT or not?’

  The words came out harsher than Hugh McIntyre meant them to, but he cut himself some slack. Lisa wasn’t the one who had her hand nailed to a picnic table, after all. It was the painkillers, he couldn’t think straight he was taking so many of them.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it.’

  The yes came out as an irritated, sibilant hiss. She dug in her handbag and pulled her father’s cell phone out. McIntyre took it away from her, as good as snatched it out of her hand.

  ‘You have no idea how difficult it was to get that.’

  ‘And you have no idea what it was like having to hide in the garage while you and daddy had supper on the other side of the wall.’

  He picked up a wine glass and held it out, his other hand on his hip.

  ‘Another glass of wine, daddy? Ooh, yes please darling, make it a big one.’

  She almost laughed—he could imitate her father perfectly when he wanted to—but he was in such a foul mood these past days, he’d have taken it the wrong way, thought she was laughing at him. Then her mouth turned down as she remembered the other night when he’d knocked a matching glass out of her hand and threatened her. He hadn’t even apologized when he came home. She hadn’t forgotten—or forgiven.

  ‘If I hadn’t given him anything to drink, he wouldn’t have gone to the bathroom and then how would I have got his phone? And it was your choice to hide in the garage. You could have gone out.’

  She felt a sadness descend on her at the mention of the garage. She tried not to go in there if she could help it. She hadn’t been in there more than a half-dozen times since Kevin hanged himself. What she needed right now was for Hugh to put his arms around her, hold her, tell her it wasn’t her fault.

  He wasn’t paying any attention to her any more. It was one of the things that annoyed her, he just switched off when he was bored with a conversation—or losing an argument. He had his nose stuck in the instructions for the piece of software he’d ordered off the internet a couple days ago.

  ‘What are you putting on it?’

  He’d told her before but she’d forgotten most of it. Besides, he liked talking about all that technical stuff. It might help, might stop him acting like a bear with a sore head.

  ‘It’s an iPhone tracker.’

  She was right. The petulant man with the sore head and even sorer hand had been transformed into a little boy with a new toy.

  ‘It turns his phone into a listening device.’

  ‘I don’t really understand.’

  And if he gave her his patronizing look, she was going to punch him.

  ‘It lets me switch on the phone’s microphone remotely. I can listen in on everything he’s saying.’

  ‘Won’t he know?’

  ‘Apparently not.’ He was still fiddling away as he talked, installing the software. ‘I can use the camera, look at anything I like, pictures, messages, anything. If you can do it with the phone in your hand, you can do it remotely with this. And it’s got a GPS tracker so I don’t have to worry about where he goes when he’s not in his car.’

  She shook her head in amazement.

  ‘Is any of that legal?’

  He looked up from what he was doing and gave her a long-suffering look.

  ‘Do you care?’

  She shrugged, tucked her hands into her armpits.

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He put several extra syllables in the word, just for emphasis.

  ‘Besides, anybody can buy it off the web, so it must be. You don’t have to be law enforcement or even a registered private investigator.’

  ‘It’s not right though, is it?’

  She got the look again. The don’t be so naïve look.

  ‘The end justifies the means. Or don’t you want to know what he’s up to?’

  ‘He’s not up to’— she spat the words out as if they were contaminated—‘anything.’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  There were times when she wanted to slap the smug look off his face. She bet there was no sign of it when they were nailing his hand to the picnic bench. It made her shudder to think of the sort of people he was involved with, what they were capable of. And now this, bugging her own father’s cell phone.

  ‘There, that’s done.’

  He held the phone out to her. She looked at it. If she took it, there was no going back. Reluctantly she took it before he started shaking it in her face.

  ‘Now call daddy and tell him: silly billy, you drank so much wine, you left your phone behind.’

  Chapter 13

  EVAN LEANED BACK IN the cab and pulled his Zippo lighter out of his pocket, re-read the verse that he knew so well, the one engraved into the worn, pitted metal.

  We the unwilling

  Led by the unqualified

  To kill the unfortunate

  Die for the ungrateful

  Everything was pushing him down the same path. The constant reminders via email, text and hand-written note that Carl Hendricks’ army buddy was out there somewhere, somewhere close. And then Charlotte’s insane conclusion that he’d bought Destiny’s Corvette in order to further his hitherto non-existent sex life, now that he’d—according to her—moved on from Sarah. The time was fast approaching when he would go out to Hendricks’ farm. He couldn’t put it off much longer. Unless Floyd Gray made
a move first, of course.

  The cab dropped him off and he made his way down into the bowels of the building housing the BDM section of the Register-Recorder’s Office, his heart heavy. Not for the first time, he wished they’d merge the Register-Recorder’s Office with the DMV so he could deal with Rizzo for all his inquiries. Every time he came here, it was just his luck to get this same unhelpful clerk. Today was no exception.

  He put on his best friendly face as he approached the counter, got a blank stare back for his trouble. The girl was about five feet five tall with an extra six inches of attitude on top.

  ‘Hi ...’

  He looked for a name badge. She wasn’t wearing one.

  ‘Yes?’

  Her tone was an unusual mix of petulance and boredom. He placed a slip of paper with the name Margarita Narvaez on the counter. The girl glanced down at it.

  ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He shrugged. ‘She was born August 12, 1948—’

  ‘That’s a start.’

  She took the slip of paper, got as far as writing August.

  ‘But not in the U.S.’

  Her pen froze in mid-air, hung there a couple of seconds until she felt her point was made sufficiently, and then she drew a deliberate line through what she’d written. He reckoned when she took the paper away, there’d be a nasty score in the counter top.

  ‘I thought it might be useful anyway. I’m after a death record, sometime after June 1965. Or a marriage’—he tried to think, how likely would it be that a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl would get married while she was still heavily pregnant, given it wasn’t going to be to the father of her child—‘from say, early 1966 onwards.’

  From the look on her face, you’d think she misheard, thought he’d said 1866. He almost wished he had.

  ‘It won’t be on the database. I’ll have to check the microfilm.’

  The old hard-copy records had been transferred to microfilm sometime in the 1970s and then, years later, directly onto the computerized database, leaving a lot of records that never made the transition from microfilm to database. It was a pain in the neck and just his luck that he needed something from that period from this particular clerk. From the sound of her voice, microfilm was another word for stone tablets.

  Quick as you can then, you sour-faced cow.

  ‘Okay, I’m going to get some coffee while I wait. Can I get you anything?’

  He took the way she turned on her heel and trudged off as a no. He didn’t know why he bothered. He didn’t want another coffee anyway, he’d had more than enough at Charlotte’s. He took a seat and checked his phone. There was a text message from Guillory.

  How many speeding tickets you got in your new toy since you hung up on me the other day?

  He was tempted to tell her how Charlotte planned to give it an extra shine for her, then something made him hold back.

  Ha, ha. And I didn’t hang up on you.

  Then, before her reply came back, the clerk was standing at the counter, a spool of microfilm in her hand, a when-you’re-ready look on her face. He jumped up.

  ‘That was quick.’

  She gave him a tight smile. Her voice took on a patronizing tone, as if she was talking to a puppy.

  ‘Like you asked, I started looking for deaths from the beginning of 1966. It didn’t take long.’

  He was about to correct her—he’d said marriages from early 1966 onwards—then he stopped himself. Misunderstanding or not, she’d found something.

  ‘You found her death certificate?’

  The clerk nodded and handed the spool of microfilm to him.

  ‘You want record number 66-107. Microfilm machine’s over there.’

  Evan took the spool automatically as his mind processed what she’d said. Margarita’s death was the one hundred and seventh death in the county in 1966. It was a very low number, she must have died in the first few weeks or days of that year. He thought back to his first meeting with Hanna when they’d estimated that Margarita’s baby would have been born in late December 1965. It had only been an estimate, the actual date could have been early January 1966.

  ‘Did she die—’

  He’d been about to ask the clerk if she died in childbirth. Too late, the clerk was already trudging back to her desk. It would take something along the lines of a nuclear explosion to make her turn around again. He took the spool of microfilm to the machine and loaded it up, turned on the light. There was a button to feed the film through. He pressed it, just tapping it and stopping so he didn’t overshoot. It didn’t take long, as the clerk said. He found record 66-107 in the second week of January. The death certificate was dated January 12, 1966 and gave details of her age, seventeen, the next-of-kin, her father Hector Narvaez, and her address. He scrolled down to the section filled in by the doctor attending the death. The cause of death was listed as drowning.

  But it was the location of death that made him sit up straight. Margarita drowned at home. And as far as he could see, that could only mean one thing—she’d drowned in the bathtub.

  A feeling of immense sadness settled on him like a shroud. Margarita had died so young. Everything about her short life was surrounded by tragedy. He felt suddenly cold as if it were him lying dead in a tub of water as the last vestiges of warmth faded to a deathly chill.

  Her death raised more questions than it answered. Had she given birth by then or not? Or had she chosen to have the baby at home, in the bathtub—and drowned as a result of some terrible accident? Possibly her child too.

  And if it wasn’t an accident that left two possibilities—she’d taken her own life or she’d been assisted.

  ***

  GUILLORY HAD BEEN RIGHT. He’d found a way to get her to help without having to tell her anything. If Margarita’s death wasn’t an accident or suicide, it meant she’d been drowned by somebody else. There were three other people living with her at that time—her mother, who he ruled out, her father, Hector, and her brother, Jesús. He could ask Guillory to check whether either man had been arrested for the murder of Margarita Narvaez without having to mention her name.

  ‘Let me get my diary,’ Guillory said, when she answered the phone, a smile in her voice, ‘see when I’m free.’

  Evan couldn’t help smiling himself as he remembered his sister’s words.

  ‘It’s, uh, not exactly about dinner—’

  ‘Sorry, gotta go—’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what I’m working on?’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t tell me.’

  There was a pause, then her throaty laugh came down the line. He loved the sound of her laugh, could have told her if she kept that up, maybe she’d get her way sooner than she thought.

  ‘I knew you’d manage to do it,’ she said.

  ‘Right, let me get my diary—’

  ‘Stop being an ass, Buckley. Somehow, you’ve managed to find a way for me to do your work for you, without having to tell me anything about it.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy.’

  ‘Spit it out. What do you want?’

  ‘I need to know if either Hector or Jesús Narvaez’—he spelled the name out for her—‘was arrested or convicted of a homicide that took place in January 1966.’

  There was the silence he now expected every time he mentioned 1965 or ‘66. People had got so used to computers and computerized databases, they’d got lazy, that was the trouble.

  ‘1966.’

  ‘Yup. You thinking of applying for a job in the Register-Recorder’s Office?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I just thought you’d fit in well there. At least Narvaez isn’t a common name.’

  ‘I’ve had a great idea. While I’m rooting around in the bowels of the earth, you can get busy finding out the best place for dinner. And making a reservation. Get them to put some champagne on ice while you’re at it. Real champagne mind, not some cheap imitation.’

  The phone went dead in his ear.


  He had a better idea. He needed to get himself something to drive while he left the Corvette at Charlotte’s, so he called a cab to take him to the car rental office. Despite her protestations, he’d only just taken charge of a nondescript brownish-gray Honda, when she called him back.

  ‘Nothing on either of them.’

  It was a result in one way. He could rule out murder. It also eliminated what would have been the easiest answer. She was still talking.

  ‘Sorry, I missed that.’

  ‘I said, there was another hit for the same name—’

  ‘What, a homicide?’

  ‘No, there was an autopsy report’—he felt his breath catch in his throat as she said the words, silently mouthed the words he wanted to hear her say next—‘for a Margarita Narvaez. I don’t know if you’re interested—it’s not a common name and the date was right, so I pulled it anyway. Save myself another journey down into the dungeon. Save you the price of another dinner.’

  At that moment he’d have bought her dinner every day for a month.

  ‘So, do you want it?’

  He cleared his throat, put on his best take-it-or-leave-it voice.

  ‘Yeah, why not. It might be connected.’

  He was glad she was on the other end of the phone, couldn’t see his face, the stupid grin on it. He wished he could see hers. She wasn’t stupid. He’d asked about homicide reports and she’d found an autopsy report, all for the same name, all the same time frame. She was a detective after all, a proper one. It wasn’t much of a leap to put it all together.

  ‘I’ve scanned it already, I’ll email it over.’

  It occurred to him she hadn’t made any mention of what was in the autopsy report. She’d have read it, it was human nature. Drowning in the bathtub couldn’t be that common, you’d pass a remark of some sort. It could only be that she’d already worked it all out and didn’t want to put him into an awkward position.

  She was right, he owed her dinner.

  ‘Thanks Kate. You got your diary handy?’

  He wasn’t expecting the next sound that came down the line, the sound of air sucked in through teeth.

  ‘I’m pretty tied up at the moment, Evan, I’ll have to get back to you.’