Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  Somers, nodding, studied the street. “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean maybe?”

  “I mean, you saw how she acted last night.”

  Hazard grunted. He still had his hand wrapped around the keys, like he was ready to fire the VW up and peel away.

  “She was messed up,” Somers said. “She was scared. She knew something was wrong, but she wasn’t ready to say it.”

  “She barely said two words.”

  “You saw her. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  For a moment, Hazard’s frustration was palpable. His fingers knotted in the keychain. “I don’t know.”

  “I know. Swinney isn’t the kind to shoot first. She wants to talk to us.”

  “What about the Haverford?”

  “What?”

  “That story your dad told you. The dirty cop, the one who shot his partner. What about that? I mean, here we are in Smithfield. Perfect place to get rid of a cop who’s asking too many questions.”

  “Then you should be worried about me, not about Swinney.”

  Hazard snorted.

  “We talk to Swinney and see where it goes,” Somers said. “She’s got something on Lender, and Lender’s got something on Newton. It’s the oldest trick in the book, Ree. We just keep squeezing until we get our guy.”

  For another moment, Hazard’s fingers whitened around the keys. Then, with a gruff burst of breath, he kicked open the door.

  “Somebody’s going to steal my car. We’re going to have to walk home.”

  That might not be the worst thing, Somers thought as he peeled himself from the VW’s upholstery. Not even close to the worst thing.

  Already the sun had dipped towards the horizon. Another hour of daylight. An hour tops. Somers shivered, although the air was still. The last of the sunlight was curling back from the ground in tired ribbons, and the temperature had dropped steadily. This cold, the air brought tears to Somers’s eyes. It froze the inside of his nose. It did, however, blunt his headache, and that made the rest of it worth it. Well, almost.

  “Where?” Somers asked, glancing up and down the block.

  Hazard shook his head and moved down the row of storefronts. He passed the wings and seafood place—immune, apparently, to the flashing neon shrimp—passed Berta Gutierrez’s office, passed the dollar market, its storefront tinseled and chromatic with mass-produced holiday decorations. The next storefront was vacant; the sign out front said, Goyo Sucks Ass, and at least a dozen other citizens had contributed their agreement that Goyo did, indeed, suck ass. The door was heavy, metal and yellowed glass backed by thick kraft paper. The lights inside were out.

  Hand on the door, Hazard glanced back.

  Somers gave the street one last glance. Was he sure? Hell no. But he’d worked Smithfield. He’d worked it for years, and he’d worked it well. A part of him, at least, was sure. He nodded. But he also eased the Glock from its holster at the small of his back.

  The door swung open easily. Inside, only darkness. Then the air shifted, and on the frozen currents came a mustiness, like wet carpet and a dog that’s been in the river and old socks all rolled together. Hazard’s face registered his disgust, but he said nothing. He had his .38 in his hand, and he eased into the store, keeping his back to the wall.

  Somers followed. What could go wrong: just about everything. Swinney with night-vision. Pop-pop. Two shots, that’s all, and they’d bleed out here. Nobody would find them until—summer, maybe? That was optimistic. When the smell got bad enough, yes, that might do it. But Somers breathed in another mouthful of river-dog and thought, no, no, the smell won’t be enough. Or maybe it would be Swinney and Lender both. Or maybe the place was rigged with explosives. C4. He eased sweaty fingers along the Glock. If it were just Swinney and a gun, he could go down shooting. If it were Swinney and a gun, he could throw himself in front of Hazard. Jesus Christ, where had that come from? But if it were a bomb—

  “Easy.” The voice was Swinney’s. “Follow the wall straight back. No lights out here.” Then her shoes clicked in the darkness. As Somers’s eyes adjusted to the gloom and the weak, wintery afternoon that seeped in around the boards, he saw Swinney disappear into a back room.

  Hazard still hadn’t breathed. He might as well have been carved out of marble. Pale, translucent, hard. He moved forward, following Swinney’s instructions, but he kept the .38 low at his side. Somers flipped the deadbolt on the door. Swinney hadn’t told him to, but she hadn’t told him not to, and he wasn’t sure which one bothered him more.

  When Somers reached the back room, Swinney spoke again. “Go ahead and close the door. Light’s right by you.”

  Somers nudged the door shut and flicked on the lights. Blinking against the sudden brightness, he tried to take in his surroundings. A single panel of fluorescent tubes hung overhead, wires exposed, like something after the apocalypse. A shelving unit took up one wall, loaded with toasters and blenders and waffle irons and enough dust to keep everything from flying away. The rest of the room was empty, stripped down to the studs and the blue-flowered linoleum. Swinney stood near the edge of the fluorescent light.

  It didn’t look good on her, fluorescents. The tremulous light hollowed out her cheeks, gouged dark rings around her eyes. It washed color from her and left her looking sallow, like something that had been kept out of the sun, like old newspaper cracking at the edges. She was older than Somers and Hazard, and she’d stayed clear of the worst of it this far, but Somers could tell that when it did catch up, middle age was going to hit like a real bitch. Her hair, buzzed down to fuzz except for a few long strands in the front, was normally reddish blond, but the lights stole the color and left it looking rusty.

  “You boys are jumpy,” she said. She didn’t have a gun in her hand, but she stood with hands on hips, her jacket pushed back far enough to show the holster under her arm.

  “Jesus, Swinney,” Somers said. “What is this?” He glanced around the room once more and holstered his Glock. “Are you playing some kind of spy game?”

  Instead of answering, Swinney cocked her head towards the street. “Anybody else?”

  “What?”

  “Did anyone follow you? Did you bring anyone? It’s pretty simple.”

  “No, just us.”

  “You tell anyone?”

  “Come on, Swinney. You know me better than that.”

  She nodded, but her eyes speared Hazard. “You?”

  Hazard shook his head.

  “You should know him better than that too,” Somers said. “After everything—”

  “After what? After three months?” She balled up her fists and pressed them under her eyes—not like she was crying, but like she was holding her face together, like it might all come to pieces if she pulled her hands away. “I’ve known Al for, what? Ten years? Twelve?” She laughed, and Somers knew that sound, had heard plenty of guys make it after a hit in football, the breath knocked out of them and no way in the world they’d get it back right away. “Yeah, him, this guy, him I can trust. Sure. And Al—” She broke off with that same asphyxiated noise again.

  Hazard cleared his throat, but Somers shook his head. He took a step forward, waited, and then another step. Swinney was tensed like she was about to run the hurdles, and at Somers’s next step, she scurried back. He didn’t press closer; he paused at the rim of the fluorescent light. Its buzz sounded like an old propeller plane. The river-dog smell had faded, and now Somers could smell booze: not yeasty, hoppy beer, but something hard, like whatever Swinney had been drinking was one step up from rubbing alcohol.

  “He’s cuckoo.” The words seemed torn from Swinney. She gestured now with one hand, drawing circles at her temple. “Cracked up, I guess. That’s the only thing. He won’t talk to me about it. Won’t look at me, not in the eyes.”

  “He’s dirty, Swinney.”

  “No.” Her hand moved reflexively to the holstered pistol. “No. He’s not.”

  Behind
Somers, Hazard shifted, but Somers waved a hand for Hazard to stay back.

  “All right. So tell us: what’s going on? Why call us out here?”

  Outside, a car horn blared, followed by men’s voices exchanging curses, followed by laughter, followed by silence. The fluorescent panel shivered. Swinney’s face, in that light, was dead. Her hand hung in the air, inches from her sidearm, and then it dropped like gravity had finally caught up with it.

  “He’s got to be sick. He’s got to be so sick he doesn’t know what he’s doing, you know? People get like that. For a long time, nobody knows. They get up. They go to work. My uncle. He was weird. Hard to get along with, I could tell that even as a kid. My aunt left him, and my mom and dad talked about it a lot at night when they thought I couldn’t hear them, and they were glad. Glad that she’d left him. And he’d get up and go to work. Every day. He sold, shit, I don’t know. Paperclips. That kind of stuff.”

  Hazard’s cold voice cut through the break in her story. “What does your uncle—”

  “Let her finish,” Somers said.

  Swinney blinked, as though startled to realize that they were still there, as though she’d become lost in her own story.

  “Go on,” Somers said.

  “He got up and went to work.” Swinney shrugged. Again, in the distance, horns hammered the air. “Until one day he didn’t. One day, he didn’t show up. And then another day. It must have been a while before someone called the police. My parents didn’t even know he was missing. They’d stopped talking to him after my aunt left, and most of this I learned a lot later, as an adult.” She hesitated, on the cusp of whatever she wanted to say, not quite able to bring herself to say it.

  Somers waited. And, thank God, Hazard kept his trap shut.

  “He was in his house. He’d covered everything with tin foil. The walls. The windows. The sofa. There was a picture in the paper, and I found it a long time after, and you can see the TV, one of those old models with the round legs, and the whole thing wrapped in tinfoil like a Christmas present. He was in the bedroom. He’d built a—it sounds like I’ve watched too many movies. A pod, I guess. He started with cardboard, but he’d been wrapping it in Saran wrap, tighter and tighter, and he covered that with foil, and one day he got inside and he wrapped plastic around the door, and that’s how they found him. Sitting on a lawn chair he’d dragged into that pod. Asphyxiated; he’d wrapped the whole thing so damn tight he couldn’t breathe. Just sitting there like it was summer and he could take another lemonade if you had one.” She delivered the last words with wonder in her voice, seeing something Somers couldn’t see, and then she was silent.

  “You think Lender’s crazy,” Somers said.

  “He’s got to be. What he’s doing, the way he’s acting.”

  “Can you tell us anything specific?”

  “You know what I’m going to say. You goddamn well know it. But yes. I can give you something specific. Thanksgiving, when the two of you got your asses frozen at that old house on the edge of town. Lender got weird. Real weird about all of it.”

  “You weren’t even here,” Hazard said. “Not at the beginning.”

  “I didn’t need to be here. I talked to you on the phone. And I talked to Lender too, remember? You wanted to know if there was a way off that damn piece of land, so we called him up. He said there wasn’t.”

  “Except there was,” Somers said.

  “Yeah. There was. And I asked Lender about that. I didn’t think anything of it, really. I was just—it was ribbing, you know. He acts like he knows every square inch of this place, and then the one time it matters, he fouls up. So I said something about it, and he tried to play it off like a joke, but I could tell it wasn’t a joke. Not to him. I could tell it spooked him a little.”

  “That’s when you realized something was wrong.”

  “No. No, not really. I didn’t think much about it at all. But it was here.” She tapped the back of her head. “Just itching a little. And then other things started to happen. Little things. Phone calls that he wouldn’t answer. Or calls he’d get off real sudden. Text messages. A lot of texts that he’d never explain, or he’d say something half-assed about his wife or about dinner or whatever. And he’d be gone sometimes.”

  “Spaced out?”

  “No, gone. We’d be working, and I turn around to say something to him, and he’d be gone. He always had an explanation. He had to run to the pharmacy. He thought he’d pick up lunch. He wanted to fill up the car before rush hour. Any one of those things, I wouldn’t have thought about it. Lender, well, it’s like partnering with a goddamn efficiency checklist. But I had that bug biting at the back of my brain, and that’s the hell of it, you know, suspicion. Once you think something might be wrong, all the signs of it are there. Could be everything’s fine. Could be everything’s in your head. But that’s the problem: you can’t tell.”

  “Until last night.”

  “Until last night.” Full stop, like she never meant to say another word about the subject.

  “Swinney, what happened?”

  “I lied. I’m a fucking liar, and if that means you want to take this to Cravens and get my badge, that’s fine. I’ll go with you.” She fetched a deep breath. “Honest, it’ll be a relief.”

  “What did you lie about?” Somers asked. The river-dog smell had almost faded—no, not faded, his brain said, you’re just used to it—but the booze smell on Swinney seemed stronger than ever. Her eyes were glassy with it. And glassy with grief and with pain and with the wall she was trying to throw up.

  “Stillwell never went for my gun.”

  Somers struggled to control his breathing. Even breaths. You’ve got her now, but even breaths. Slow. Steady. Look her in the eyes, normal, everything’s normal.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Swear by my nieces and nephews, swear on their snotty little hands, I don’t.”

  “But,” Hazard rumbled, “you can guess.”

  “Yeah. Fuck me. I can.”

  “Go on,” Somers said.

  “We parked. Way back from the hospital doors, and that seemed funny, so I asked Lender what he was thinking. I mean, we had a naked man we had to march into the hospital, and there wasn’t any reason to make it harder than it needed to be. Lender told me it was what Stillwell deserved. He said something like, ‘You saw what he did. The bastard can stand for a cold walk.’ Something like that.”

  “Doesn’t sound like Lender.”

  “That’s what I thought. But you know how it is after a call. Especially after a shooting. Your blood’s going. And we’d caught the bastard. We had him right there. No messy detective work. No hunting him down. We had him. It felt good. I was pissed about what had happened to your father and that girl, but it was a righteous pissed off. So I went along with Lender. Let the bastard walk, I thought. If he’s uncomfortable, so what. If he cuts his feet a little, so what.” She paused. “If I’d said something, if I’d been a decent human being, he’d be alive.”

  “You said it yourself,” Hazard said. “Nobody’s thinking clearly after a shooting. And cops are never thinking clearly after one of their own gets shot.”

  “What happened next?” Somers asked.

  “We got out of the car. Lender was getting Stillwell out of the back. I was coming around the front of the car. I waited there, and Lender marched Stillwell towards me. I shuffled off to one side, and I started walking towards the hospital. That’s when it happened. I heard the gunshots. So many of them. He just kept firing. I grabbed my gun. I turned around. Stillwell had staggered back against the car. He was already dead. Oh, yeah, his eyes were open, and he was moving, but he was dead. He had two holes in his chest, and nobody comes back from that, not unless Jesus himself decides to step in. But Lender kept shooting. Plugged him three more times, all center mass, all in a row, until he’d emptied the goddamn gun. Lender was sitting there in the snow like he’d fallen. And then Stillwell droppe
d, and I ran for the hospital. They couldn’t do anything. I knew that. But—but I had to tell someone. It was like I was a kid again. I had to tell someone. I had to—” Her voice shook. “I had to tell someone it wasn’t my fault. And then I lied.”

  “You told us Stillwell had his hand on your gun,” Hazard said. For the first time since the conversation began, the big man moved into the cone of fluorescent light. In its glow, he became two-toned: the ghastly sheen of skin and the blue-black bruising of his hair and eyes. “You told us he was trying to get it.”

  “Lie. A big fucking one.”

  “You were trying to protect Lender.” Hazard’s voice had become brutal. “You were trying to cover for your partner.”

  “No. No, honest to God.”

  “Then what?” Hazard took a step towards her, and Swinney seemed to shrivel, paper folding in the heat of a fire, the instant before the flame catches. Swinney didn’t answer, though; she only shook her head, frozen in the fluorescents’ grimy light.

  Somers’s mind raced. Why had she lied? Not to cover for Lender, so what had she been trying to do? Something so horrible that she wouldn’t even say it. Something about that instant—

  Catching Hazard’s arm, Somers gave his partner a shove and met Swinney’s eyes. “Us.”

  The terror in her eyes made Somers sick.

  “You did it because you were afraid Lender was going to shoot us.”

  After another frozen moment, she nodded.

  There it was: the thing so horrible that Swinney couldn’t even bring herself to say it, couldn’t bring herself to speak out loud what had driven her to lie. It was one thing for a cop to shoot a suspect, especially a murderer like Stillwell. It was another thing entirely for a cop to kill another cop. And for what felt like the hundredth time that day, Somers found himself thinking of the Haverford, and of his father, and of the story of the dirty cop who had shot his partner in a crack-den. Was it the worst thing in the world, that special kind of betrayal? Somers didn’t know. He thought, though, that it was one of the worst.

  “I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And so I said what I did. As soon as I said it, I knew I’d made a mistake. And then Lender dropped the gun, and my brain started telling me I’d been seeing things, and it was easier to believe that I’d been hopped up on adrenaline, that I’d imagined all of it.”