Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  They’d never liked each other, his mother and Cora. Grace Elaine had never spoken about it, would never speak about it, but Somers knew. The night they’d announced their engagement, Somers’s mother had ignored the good news. She’d said something vapid and meaningless—about a dessert, maybe?—and she’d done what she did best: she’d pretended that everything in her life was perfect. Problems, in Grace Elaine’s world, were to be ignored. The way she had ignored the first time Somers had hurt another child. First grade. The pencil machine. Forest Robinson had a quarter, had been standing in line to buy a pencil, and Somers didn’t have a quarter. Somers had wanted to buy one. It had been as simple as that. Forest got a bloody nose, and Somers got a pencil. Even when Miss Gosa, who’d seemed old at the time but who had probably been in her late twenties—she was still teaching, the last time Somers had checked—had sent Somers to the office, Grace Elaine had resolutely refused to acknowledge that anything had been wrong. It had been a misunderstanding.

  How many misunderstandings had there been? Misunderstandings had been the backbone of Somers’s life through elementary and middle school. Misunderstandings had explained all the shit Somers had done. Misunderstandings and the occasional acknowledgment that boys would be boys. Misunderstandings had explained everything up until the night that Somers told his parents he’d never play football again. There had been fights. There had been screaming. And in the end, Somers had offered up Hazard as a sacrificial lamb. Hazard didn’t even know it, but Somers had done it: he’d made Emery Hazard into a scapegoat. That had been the end of his parents’ screaming. After that, only silence. They had gone back to pretending everything was all right. Only now, with Hazard returned to Wahredua, that illusion could be broken.

  For a last moment, Somers thought about Grace Elaine and those misunderstandings. At some point in high school, Somers had realized that he was doing something wrong. At some point, his mother’s explanations had lost their magical ability to soothe his conscience, to wipe away guilt and shame. What had changed? Somers knew, but he knew in a restless, dream-shadowed way—in a way that he refused to examine head-on. He knew, though, that it was only luck or God or fortune that had saved him from the path his mother had worked so hard to hoe and hack and clear, a path to narcissism and sociopathy. Only luck or God or—

  “Hazard, I’m sorry.” He forced the words out, and they sounded dry and creaky. “It was just a shock, hearing that. It’s not something anybody would want to hear.”

  Hazard didn’t nod. He didn’t shrug. He didn’t move. For all Somers could tell, he wasn’t even breathing. He was just those two flat scarecrow eyes.

  “You’re going to think I’m still in denial,” Somers continued, “but I don’t believe she did it. Because of this.” He spun the recorder in his hand.

  “What’s on it?” Cora said.

  “Bad news,” Somers said. He took her hand and squeezed it. “Cora, we’re going to take it from here.”

  “Police business,” Cora said. She stretched the corduroy sleeves over her palms and smiled. “Just like the good old days.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, nothing to be sorry about. I remember, John-Henry. I haven’t forgotten. The late nights. The phone calls. The secrets.”

  “They’re not secrets. It’s official business. Police business. It’s not you; I can’t tell anyone.”

  She was still smiling, and Somers knew that smile like he knew how to dodge an iron flying across the living room. “Like I said: police business. Nothing really changes, does it?”

  “Cora.”

  “I’ll leave you boys to take care of business. Bye, Emery. Bye, John-Henry.”

  “Call you tonight.”

  “I may be out,” she said as she walked towards the door.

  Somers thought about calling after her, trying to find a new way through an old, thorny argument, and then the moment was past, and she was gone.

  “She’s not going out,” Somers said.

  No response from Hazard, but the big man’s arms shifted slightly.

  “She’s saying that to piss me off.”

  “Play the recording.”

  Shaking his head, Somers thumbed the play button, and the recording sprang to life. A man was in the middle of the sentence. His patrician, twenty-thousand-dollar inflections were unmistakable.

  “Newton,” Somers whispered.

  “Shut up and let me listen.”

  On the recording, Newton continued, “—halfway here already. Kansas. Did I say that already? In twelve hours, the problem will be resolved.”

  “You don’t need to say Kansas.” The second voice belonged to Glennworth Somerset. “Anybody with an eye left in his head could tell you he was coming from Kansas. He might as well be marching on Atlanta and burning a trail across two states. What kind of idiot have you hired?”

  Newton’s voice, when he spoke again, held an annoyed burr. “He’s highly recommended. Excellent at what he does. And don’t pretend that we don’t need him.”

  “It’s not my fault that the financing—”

  “It’s no one’s fault. It’s everyone’s fault. We failed to consider this possibility, and that’s the end of it. The bitch has us over a barrel, though, and we know it, and she knows it. You’ve seen the emails. You’ve seen the terms—” Newton broke off into a bitter laugh. “What she’s calling terms. They’ll have the land, and we’ll be lucky if we can get out of the whole mess just scraping even.”

  “My son—”

  “Your son will be fine. This is a problem. We take care of the problem the way we always have.”

  “I want you to promise that—”

  Before Somers’s father could finish whatever he might have demanded, something sounded in the background—a door opening, Somers guessed—and the voices cut off, mixed with the scramble of chairs sliding back and wood creaking. Then the recording ended. Somers slid the device into his pocket and studied Hazard’s face.

  The best part about working with Hazard was that he was smart. Already on the pale, hard lines of his face, his fierce intelligence showed itself as his mind turned over the significance of the conversation Somers had just played. Somers waited.

  “Strong, Matley, Gross,” Hazard said.

  Somers nodded. Strong, Matley, Gross was the name of the investment firm that had figured so prominently in their last case. Thomas Strong, the CEO, had been murdered by one of his staff. At the same time, another employee had been working to undermine the firm while solidifying a land deal with InnovateMidwest—the real estate development company of which Mayor Sherman Newton was a major shareholder.

  “We knew,” Hazard said, “that Newton was involved in what happened at Windsor. He hired Frerichs to try to kill everyone there.”

  “That’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about Windsor. He’s talking about the land deal that Columbia tried to set up. He’s talking about us, Ree. He’s talking about killing us.”

  “Your father—”

  “My father was recording that conversation for a reason, Hazard. He said what he said because he had a reason. He does everything for a reason; that’s who he is.”

  “Why do you think he recorded the conversation?”

  “To blackmail Newton.”

  Hazard’s straw-colored eyes held steady on Somers.

  “What? It’s obvious.”

  “He said some incriminating things himself.”

  “Trust me,” Somers said. “If it ever came down to it, my father would squeal like a weasel. He’d barter for immunity before he handed over the recording, and then it wouldn’t matter what he said.”

  Hazard nodded slowly, but the shadow of doubt lingered on his face. “And you think this is why Stillwell shot your father? Because of the recording?”

  “Don’t play dumb. My father has evidence that Newton tried to kill half a dozen people, including two police officers. Somehow Newton must have figur
ed it out. He’s tough. He wouldn’t sit around and wait for the inevitable.”

  Already shaking his head, Hazard said, “That’s a leap. We know your father had the recording. We don’t know that Newton knew about it. There’s no reason to think he did.”

  “Those bullets in my father say otherwise.”

  “Somers—”

  “Ree, I need you to back me on this. I need you to go with me to Cravens. At least let her listen to the evidence. We’ll get those emails, the ones from Columbia, that show how Strong, Matley, Gross was tied up with InnovateMidwest. If Cravens still won’t let us go after Newton, then I’ll listen to what you’ve been saying.”

  Hazard shook his head again, more emphatically. “You can lie to yourself, Somers. Lie all you want. But don’t lie to me. You’ve got this in your head. You’re like a dog with a bone. And it’s making you blind.”

  “I’m not lying. And I’m not blind. You told me to work this case like a real detective. That’s what I’m doing. My gut tells me this is the way to go, and now we’ve got evidence.” By the end of the short, sharp speech, Somers felt like gasping for breath. All the air had been vacuumed from his lungs.

  After a long, silent moment, Hazard nodded, but there was a flicker of something on his face. Not the usual emotions that Somers associated with Hazard: annoyance, frustration, anger, pain; not even the deep, underlying loneliness that Hazard thought he hid from the whole world. No, this was something else. Something that shook Somers as cleanly as if someone had taken a bat to his ankles and shoved him in a pair of roller skates. Pity. Emery Hazard felt pity for him, and it hit harder than anything else Somers could have seen.

  Somers opened his mouth to tell Hazard where he could shove his pity, but before he had a chance, Hazard’s phone rang. Hazard answered and spoke quietly into the phone. The pauses grew longer between his responses. His face tightened. Everything about him tightened until he looked like a guitar string ready to snap. After punching a button on the screen to end the call, Hazard stood silent for a moment.

  “Well?”

  “That was Mayor Newton. He wants to see me in his office. He says we need to talk.”

  HAZARD FOCUSED ON DRIVING THE VW, but it was harder than he would have liked. Even with the sun out and the sky blue and glassy, the ice on the roads was thick, resisting the day’s best efforts to melt it. When Hazard took corners, the VW liked to skid, and the ice was turning those skids into long, sliding swoops.

  Somers hadn’t stopped talking since they left the house. “He wants to see you?” That was the third time. Maybe the fourth. “He wants to see you, but not me.” It was definitely the fourth.

  “That’s all he said.”

  “But why? Why would he want to see you? My father was the one who was shot. I’m the one he knows. I’m the one he should be talking to.”

  “I don’t know,” Hazard said through gritted teeth. “That’s all he said.”

  “Do you think he knows?”

  “Knows what?”

  “That we know about him. About everything at Windsor. About the recording.” Somers absently touched his pocket where he had stashed the recorder. Then he threw himself back in the seat, his arms exploding out to fill the remaining space in the VW. “I don’t know, Ree. I don’t even know what he could know.”

  “You need to calm down.”

  “Calm down? Sherman Newton hires someone to kill my father. We’re about fifteen minutes away from proving it, and all of the sudden he wants to talk to you. That’s not a coincidence. No way.”

  Ahead, a cluster of government buildings occupied several of the city’s grassy blocks. Most of the buildings had been built in the sixties and seventies, and they looked like it: they were plain, almost severe in their absence of decoration, and instead of carvings or adornments they stood out because of the bleak lines that framed them. From a distance, the composite stone facings looked yellowed with age. Even the windows looked yellow, cheap stuff, not glass but the kind of material you might see in a boarded-up storefront.

  In contrast to those stark, squat structures, Wahredua’s city hall was a masterpiece of craftsmanship. Built of limestone, it had lost most of its glimmering sheen over the last hundred years—the stone was dove-colored, and in some place, it had darkened to gray. But the city hall had been built in an age when quality was valued even at cost, and it had been built by men who had been determined to do their best. A rotunda topped the sculpted stone, and brass—still polished, thanks to years of careful maintenance—sparked at the top of the dome. A few blocks away, Hazard knew, the Wahredua police department was still housed in the old Catholic school, with most of its angels and most of its devils chipped away, and a few of each lingering within the walls. Inside city hall, he knew, plenty of devils had also found a home.

  “I’m just going to say it,” Somers said. Hazard found a spot and parked the car. “I’m going to walk right up to him, look in straight in the eyes, and I’m going to tell him.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Tell him I know he tried to kill my father. I want to see how he looks. I want to be the one.” Somers lunged for the door handle.

  Before Somers could reach it, though, Hazard snagged his coat and hauled him backward. “That’s a stupid idea.”

  “He called us over here,” Somers said, squirming away from Hazard’s grip. “Why? So he can gloat? So he can rub it in my face? I’m not going to let him shit down my throat and call it dinner, Ree. I’m going to tell him—”

  Growling, Hazard shook Somers hard. Hard enough that Somers’s teeth clicked together and his head snapped forward. “Will you listen to yourself? You’re being stupid.”

  Dark crimson lines stained Somers’s cheekbones. “Don’t do that again.”

  “Then don’t act stupid.” Hazard held onto Somers’s coat for a moment longer, sighed, and released him. “You know we don’t have a case. Not yet. And you know—” He tapped Somers’s skull. “—that if you say something to Newton, it’ll give him a chance to cover his tracks. You’re being stupid, and you’re not normally stupid, so stop it.”

  Somers said nothing. A minute passed, a full minute, and it felt like it might have been twenty. Then, flattening his hair where Hazard had touched him, Somers shook his head. “You don’t even believe he did it. You’re trying to—I don’t know.”

  “Is this how it’s going to be with you? One minute you’re laughing and joking, the next you’re running off thinking with—Christ, I don’t know what you’re thinking with. Your gun? Your dick? What is it with you?”

  “You think my mother set this up. You just want to keep me from embarrassing you.”

  “I’m a cop. I haven’t made up my mind, and that’s something you’d be smart to do too. Until we have hard proof, that’s the only thing we can do.” Then Hazard snorted. “And I stopped caring about what you think, what anybody thinks, a long time ago.”

  For a moment, the fury in Somers’s face disappeared, and something—

  —knowing—

  —dangerous moved in the troubled blue of his eyes. Then it was gone, but it left Hazard feeling unsettled.

  “So are you going to stay here?” Hazard said. “Or are you going to keep quiet when we go in there?”

  “He wanted to talk to you.”

  “And you’re my partner, so you’re going too. Unless you’re too much of an asshat, that is.”

  Somers didn’t have a response to that. A few minutes later, they walked into city hall together. Its interior matched the outside: granite floors worn smooth by generations of concerned citizens; wood framing that glowed with polish and use; textured glass, the gold-leaf lettering flaking off; and a single, faded mural of steamboats paddling the Grand Rivere. It didn’t take them long to find the mayor’s office, but his secretary—an aging man who looked older, even, than Newton—left them sitting on an unpadded bench for twenty minutes.

  “So much for right now,”
Somers muttered.

  “It’s a power play.”

  Neither of them spoke after that. At some unseen signal, the ancient secretary rose on creaky knees and ushered them into the office. The carpet was blue but flattened from age and use, and the furniture—a desk, a table shoved under the far window, and a handful of chairs—looked like it had come straight out of the fifties. The only thing new seemed to be the model of Wahredua that stood on the table. Styrofoam trees, charily spraypainted green, and a translucent plastic river, and hundreds of buildings that represented, as far as Hazard could tell, a fairly accurate version of Wahredua. A white sheet covered a portion of the model, and that, Hazard guessed, was not as accurate—not yet. Although the sheet hid the details from view, Hazard could tell that several of the draped buildings were much taller than anything currently standing in Wahredua. He was looking, he guessed, at Sherman Newton’s development plan for the city, and he wondered how much blood would stain the streets by the time Newton finished.

  Newton was rising, shuffling around the desk, his shock of white hair bobbing as he greeted them. The liver spots on his jawline looked darker than ever. Seated in the chairs in front of the desk were Sheriff Bingham, his khaki uniform taut over the slight bulge of his belly, and Bing. Of the three men, only Bing looked human, and only because his grief was so evident: sweat plastered his normally curly hair to his scalp, and grief had stripped him down to the bone: he looked gaunt, as though tragedy had taken great bites out of him in the last twenty hours. Hazard shook hands with Newton and with the sheriff, but his gaze lingered on Bing. Hazard had forgotten, had chosen to forget, that Bing had lost a child in last night’s shooting. Glennworth Somerset had survived impossible odds, but Hadley Bingham had died, and her father mourned her loss.

  For a moment, though, Hazard was a boy himself, barely sixteen, kneeling on the rocky beach, the stones cutting into his knees. Bing’s hand was tangled in his hair, and Hazard was too young, too small, too weak to fight off the older boy, the stronger boy, Wahredua’s golden sun. For a moment again, Hazard felt himself helpless and Bing dragged him across the rocks. For a moment again, polyester burned his cheeks. Brass stuttered across his lips, filling his mouth with its taste.