Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  Hazard didn’t say anything. Hazard didn’t shift in his seat. To most people, it might have looked like Hazard hadn’t heard Jeremiah’s jab. But Somers wasn’t anybody. He could read the anger in the clenched cords of Hazard’s jaw. Even as a boy—skinny Emery Hazard, who probably weighed a hundred pounds when he was sopping wet—he’d always had that same way of being angry: silent, but filled with rage like gasoline and a match just rasping the striker strip.

  “Mr. Walker,” Somers said, “was it one of those three men who said that Stillwell had a gun?”

  “Stillwell? Was that his name? Yes, I suppose it had to be one of them.”

  A thought struck Somers. “Where was the mayor?”

  “Mayor Newton?”

  “Yes. Where was he during all of this?”

  “Right there. I mean, he wasn’t helping with—what was his name? Stillwell?—he wasn’t helping with Stillwell, but he was right there.”

  “He might have been the one who said that Stillwell had a gun?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You’re sure he was right there?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Sheriff Bingham took that red bag and passed it to the mayor. I remember that very clearly.”

  “And then?”

  “The mayor carried it with him to the back of the house. That was the end of it. As I said, we all hurried back to being drunks and cowards. Until,” a smile quirked the corners of his mouth, “the two of you made your dramatic entrance. That gave everyone quite a scare. Marita Baker just about jumped out of her garters, and she’s on the shady side of seventy.”

  Somers rubbed his forehead. Another mistake, storming into the house like that. Another idiot mistake. They’d seen the front door, heard the shouting, and instinct and training had taken over. Another embarrassment for his parents to live down. Through the booze, though, something was calling to him about that moment.

  And then Hazard was speaking. “How did Stillwell get into the house?”

  “He walked through the front door. I already told you, remember? He was singing.”

  “He walked through the door?”

  “Yes. Detective, I’m not trying to be rude, but aren’t we talking in circles now? This is right where we started.”

  “He walked in,” Somers said, and his gaze slowly drifted to Hazard. Their eyes met. Hazard’s eyes, like straw at the end of a perfect summer, eyes that caught the light, eyes you could stare into for a day, a month, a hundred years, and you’d never get tired of them. “He walked into the house.”

  Hazard nodded.

  “Mr. Walker,” Somers said, reeling in his thoughts, trying to burn off the haze on his brain. “What—you and my—”

  “What is the nature of your relationship with Mrs. Somerset?” Hazard said.

  “Now we’ve reached the uncomfortable portion of our conversation. It’s been coming. This is a talk that’s been coming for a long time. Your mother hoped it wouldn’t come to this; she never wanted you to know, John-Henry. She wouldn’t want to hurt you. But I knew you’d find out. It’s a small town. Nobody has any secrets.”

  Someone does, Somers thought. Someone has plenty of secrets. Someone tried to kill my father, and there’s a secret lying under that.

  “Your mother and I have been seeing each other for about five years. In fact, we’ll be celebrating our anniversary at the end of January.” Jeremiah laughed; neither Somers nor Hazard joined him. “It feels strange talking about this, I have to admit. Talking about it openly, I mean.”

  “Why should it feel strange?” Somers said. “You’ve been committing adultery with my mother for five years. I think it’d be normal by now.”

  The words landed like a slap, eroding the last of the good humor etched into Jeremiah’s face. He took a sour sip of the Scotch. “You’ll understand when you’re older. Not now; you’re too young now. You see the world, and you still see sharp lines and bright colors. You see everything as a choice, you chalk life up to free will, you make decisions the hinge on which destiny swings. When you’re older, though, you’ll see.” He set down the empty glass and rubbed his fingers together, as though he had something sticky on them. “Homo economicus. You know that term?”

  “The economic man,” Hazard said. “The perfectly rational, perfectly self-interested agent. One of the underlying assumption of traditional economics.”

  “A lie. A fallacy. A myth. A waste of reams of paper and gallons of ink and a lot of lives. I, at least, have wasted plenty of ink on it. And too much of my life.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Somers said.

  “Free will. Agency. Self-determination. Choice. I’ve studied them. I know them. I’ve held them under a microscope, so to speak, and seen how they wriggle, seen how they breed. We build our lives on them. Nations build their lives on them. And you know what? It’s all bullshit. Nobody chooses. Not really. Oh, we think we choose. But all the choices we made, they were made for us, ten years ago, fifty, a hundred, a million. We’re just riding mine cars down the rail. If the rail turns, we turn. Otherwise, we just hold on for our lives.”

  “Railroad tracks have switching stations,” Hazard said. “Your analogy is flawed.”

  Irritation flickered on Jeremiah’s face, and he dismissed Hazard’s comment with a twitch of his fingers. “There’s proof, you know. Einstein. God doesn’t play dice. Economists, well, we’ve played our games and built our sandcastles, but it’s all based on that ridiculous assumption that men are rational, that they make rational choices. It’s not true, though. And the research is starting to show it. We make choices based on product placement, based on attractiveness, based on our ‘guts,’ based on anything except reason. We make a consistent stream of bad decisions, and we rationalize away our decision-making so that we feel like we’re in charge. I bought it because I wanted it. I punched him because he deserved it. I kissed her . . .”

  “I’m feeling like I made a few bad decisions myself,” Somers said. The sullen, amber sloshing of the Scotch him was crystallizing into a headache. “This is all really interesting, Mr. Walker—”

  “Riveting,” Hazard said. “Your students must be pounding down the doors to get to your class.”

  “But we’re not here for a crash-course into new economics.”

  “You should be,” Jeremiah said. “You should be listening more carefully.”

  “I think we’ve listened long enough,” Hazard said. “Where did you and Mrs. Somerset go during the party? Towards the end of the party, more specifically. Before the shooting.”

  “You think I chose this,” Jeremiah said, his eyes fixed on Somers. “You think I wanted this.”

  “Please answer the question, Mr. Walker,” Hazard said. “Without another faulty analogy, without another long-winded pity party.”

  “You think I killed Glenn Somerset because I had a reason. But like most crimes, reason had nothing to do with this. You’re looking for sane thinking, but whoever did this was not sane. You’re looking for homo economicus, but this killer was not rational. The killing wasn’t rational.”

  “So that means you didn’t shoot my father,” Somers said. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I respected your father. We were friends. We are friends. But your mother—” Jeremiah paused, helplessness flooding his face. “Homo economicus. When I was younger, when I still believed all that crap, I had a woman who loved me. She was younger. She was—” He paused. Something complex, a mixture of craft and cunning and terror, blended in his features. “She was not who I needed to be with. It would have been foolish to be with her, to stay with her. My career, my prospects, and then there was the boy.” He swallowed. “And I told myself that I was being rational, that I had made the correct, self-interested choice. Now, though, do you know what I think?”

  “I think,” Hazard said, “you’re a self-indulgent bastard who left Hollace shirtless in the cold. That’s
what I think of you.”

  The color drained from Jeremiah in one, sudden rush, leaving him looking more jaundiced than ever. He didn’t respond to Hazard, though. He said, “Now, though, I know that it was because I wasn’t in love. Love is a golden collar. Love takes your prisoner. Love drags you through the mud, skins your hands and knees, and throws you naked, helpless, to the wolves. And you can’t run from it, you can’t deny it, any more than you can run from yourself, deny yourself. Any more than you can tell the earth to stop spinning. You think I’m a bastard. Maybe I am. But I didn’t choose it. Call it fate if you want. Collision. Catastrophe. Unstoppable forces rushing against each other. Call it whatever you want, but I didn’t choose it.”

  Through the headache, Somers felt something shift inside him. Unstoppable forces rushing against each other, and in his mind he saw—

  —the locker room—

  —waves slapping white cliffs, collision, catastrophe, fate. That shift inside him, the fractional movement of the vast, supporting pillars of his identity, was dangerous. Something crucial to himself, to who he was, had just inched towards collapse. Somers shivered, and he turned away from the thought, away from the danger—aware of it, but not willing to face it. Not yet.

  Collision. Unstoppable forces rushing towards catastrophe.

  Then he shook off the words, realizing that Hazard was speaking.

  “That’s very poetic, Mr. Walker. Very eloquently put. Could you say a little bit more about these uncontrolled forces? What else have they caused you to do? Besides, that is, conducting an affair with a married woman.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jeremiah said, his long hands folding and unfolding around each other. “But one day, you will.”

  That structural prolapse, Somers thought with another wave of—what? Panic? He could feel it inside himself. The danger of everything toppling in a rush of dust and stone like a building imploding.

  “What did you feel compelled to do?” Hazard said, leaning forward in his seat, his size suddenly magnified. “You said that you were friends with Glenn Somerset. Why did you say that you were friends, in the past?”

  “It was a mistake. We were still friends. Are still friends. I didn’t do anything to Glenn. I’d never hurt him.”

  “Aside from sleeping with his wife,” Somers heard himself say. “My mother.”

  “He—” Jeremiah paused. “They had grown apart. They aren’t in love. I don’t know if they ever were, not really, not the way love takes hold of some people. Your father would have been hurt if he found out, and I never wanted that. And your mother didn’t want that either. We were just—we were lonely. Both of us. And loneliness grows by the ounce, day by day, until you can’t carry it anymore.”

  Collision, Somers heard inside himself, and the word came with the grating of massive forces stirring. Catastrophe.

  “Drop it.” The crack in Somers’s voice surprised even him. “Enough of the shit about love. Enough of all your shit. Answer our questions. That’s it. That’s all. Then we’re done here.”

  “Yes,” Jeremiah said, rubbing the fingers of one hand together, as though testing for the same stickiness he had noticed earlier. “Go on.”

  “Where did you and Grace Elaine Somerset go during the party?” Hazard asked.

  “We stayed in the house the whole time.”

  “Where did you go inside the house?”

  “Several places. As you know, the party took up most of the main floor. We weren’t together the whole time, but I stayed in the family room for most of the evening.”

  “And towards the end, shortly before the shooting?”

  “Yes, we were together then. Talking in the family room, that’s all.”

  “That’s a lie,” Somers said.

  “No, it’s true. We were in the family room, right by the big Christmas tree. Your father—he was trying to make your mother angry. There was a girl—”

  “I know what my father was doing. I don’t need you to tell me. You’re lying. Where did you go? And don’t tell me you were in the family room the whole time. I saw you leave.”

  “We went into the kitchen. And then into the garage.”

  “Why?”

  “John-Henry,” Jeremiah said, pausing, awkwardness contorting his voice.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hazard said into the strained quiet. “What did you see in the kitchen? Was there anyone else there? What did you see in the TV room?”

  “In the kitchen? Nothing. No, wait—”

  Somers interrupted him. “Of course it matters. What were you doing in the garage?”

  This time, a flush infused Jeremiah’s golden skin. “It’s not really appropriate conversation, John-Henry. Your mother and I—we were—it’s not—”

  “Go back to the kitchen,” Hazard said. “What were you going to say?”

  The rational part of Somers knew to let it drop. The rational part of Somers wanted to pull back on the reins, turn the buggy around, and get out of this storm. But the rational part of his brain had dropped the reins, and the rest of him was running wild. His words cut into the silence. “You were going to fuck her? Is that what you were going to say? You were going to fuck my mother in the garage during the family Christmas party?”

  Jeremiah looked down at his hands, which wrapped and folded and tangled themselves.

  “That’s enough,” Hazard said. “Go get some air.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. Go outside. Cool down.”

  Somers couldn’t though. He’d lost control of himself. All the chaos that had been brewing inside him, it had finally overflowed. Those tectonic shifts had upset whatever tenuous balance remained, and now the rational part of him could only sit back, shake its head, and hope it survived long enough to pick up the pieces. It felt like watching the world through a stranger’s eyes, it felt like hearing a stranger’s voice, his hands were a stranger’s hands, running over the textured fabric of the sofa. He didn’t even remember moving to stand there.

  “No, I’m fine.” Somers said. “All right. You were going to fuck my mother in the garage. Fuck her on top of one of those fancy cars my dad loves. You saw something in the kitchen? What’d you see? A box of condoms you forgot the last time you were there?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Hazard hissed.

  “The bag. That fuzzy pink bag, the one that man, the shooter, had been carrying like a Santa Claus bag. It was on the floor at the far end of the kitchen, near the TV room. I remember because it looked so out of place.”

  “A bag,” Somers said. “You saw a goddamn bag.”

  “What about inside the TV room?” Hazard asked.

  Jeremiah stopped wringing his hands long enough to spread them. “Nothing. I mean, the man was sitting there. He was naked.”

  “That’s all he was doing?” Hazard pressed. “Sitting?”

  Jeremiah spread his hands again. His eyes crinkled at the corners as though he were seeing something far off, and he shrugged. “I wasn’t really paying attention. No. Wait. I remember—” Another pause infused his posture with awkward discomfort. “I thought he was, well, pleasuring himself.”

  “You thought he was jacking off?” Somers heard that stranger say with his voice. “You really had your mind on one thing.”

  “But he wasn’t. I realized that almost immediately. He was rocking back and forth, hands between his legs—you can see why I thought what he did—but then he sat upright. He was holding something between his hands.”

  “What?” Hazard said.

  “Well—nothing. I mean, nothing I could see. And I didn’t really try to see. To be honest, I was still a little afraid of him, and he was just sitting there in that chair, all alone. I thought he might—God, who knows? Come after us. Talk to us. Look at us. I told you, I’m a coward. We all were.”

  Through the insane, drunken cloud of his thoughts, a lightning bolt struck, illuminating Somers’s mind for a moment. F
or that moment, just for that moment, rational thinking returned. His hands. He might come after us. Stillwell with his hands between his legs. And Jeremiah’s words: Then he sat upright. He was holding something between his hands.

  Whoever had uncuffed Stillwell, he had done it before Jeremiah and Grace Elaine passed through the kitchen. So why had Stillwell waited so long to start shooting?

  HAZARD DROVE SLOWLY. The VW chugged and whined as the tires sought purchase in the snow, but the car’s rattling eased as they crested the hill and began the slippery slide towards Market Street. A few blocks ahead, the road flattened out alongside the river. It was the last Saturday before Christmas, and everyone in Wahredua had turned out to do last-minute shopping. And while Market Street couldn’t exactly compare to the shopping mall past Wroxall College, it still had gift shops, specialty stores, and a few trendier clothing boutiques that had popped up along the revitalized waterfront. Cars clogged the road; the Crofter’s Mark building, where Hazard and Somerset had their apartment, looked farther away than ever.

  Since leaving Jeremiah’s apartment, Somers had said nothing. He leaned against the glass. His breath fogged crystal rosettes on the window, and he shaded his eyes. He was sick, Hazard guessed—and not just from the drinking. Sick from having to find his mother in another man’s bed. Sick from having to face truths about his family, about his parents, that he had managed to hide from himself for a long time. Sick mostly, Hazard guessed, from running face first into reality like a brick shithouse.

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop looking at me out of the corner of your eyes like I’m going to turn green or explode or, Jesus, I don’t know.” Somers’s shifted his hand, as though a particularly tricky particle of sunlight had managed to reach his eyes.

  “Are you going to barf?”

  “For hell’s sake.”

  “You’re pale. You’re sweating. You keep squirming around, and you’ve pasted your face to the glass.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “If you’re going to throw up, you’d better open the damn door.”