Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  “What changed your mind?” Somers said, but his mind was still in the Haverford. It could have happened in a room like this. It could have happened with the same moldering carpet, the same linoleum with its tacks ripping free, the same smell of a dog marinating in the river. A place like this. Could Hazard put a gun to his head and pull the trigger? Could he do something like that to Hazard?

  Why not, a horrible voice—horrible because it was his voice, because he recognized it, because he knew the truth of it. Why not? You’ve done it before.

  He realized he’d missed something. “Say that again.”

  “Lender. I went to see him, and he wasn’t in the house. So I started looking for him. I found him sitting in his car on Jefferson Street. He had a pair of binoculars. He was watching someone.”

  Hazard swore.

  “Us,” Somers said.

  “You were sitting in front of the window at the Real Beef. And so I asked him what he was doing. He freaked out. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t look at me. I started pressing him. I got real close. I was angry, in his face. I wanted some damn answers after all the shit he’d put me threw. Nothing. He got in his car and drove out of there as fast as he could.”

  Somers echoed Hazard’s swear and shook his head.

  “But,” Swinney said, and with that single word, her voice seemed grew hard and strong and hot. “The bastard didn’t get away before I filched this.”

  She held up a small black rectangle. Lender’s mobile phone.

  “No passcode,” Swinney said, flipping open the outdated model. “It’s too old, too simple. But it does have call history. And I thought I wanted to see who called Lender last night.”

  “Who?”

  Shaking her head, Swinney held out the phone. “I said I thought I wanted to see who called him. Turns out, though, I’m a coward. I ran the number.”

  “Who was it?” Somers said. “What happened?”

  “This is as far as I go,” Swinney said. “You want my badge, you can have it. You want to drag me in front of Cravens, I’ll go like a lamb. But the rest of it, hunting down Lender, dealing with this. I just—look, I can’t. He was my partner. Is my partner, I guess.” She shook her head again, as though that explained everything and nothing, and then dropped the phone into Somers’s hand. “Go ahead and call the number.”

  “Who—”

  “Just call it.”

  The number showed on the screen—local, that much Somers could tell from the area code. He punched the call button.

  A phone began to ring. The sound was disjointed. Doubled.

  Hazard pulled out the mobile phone they had retrieved from the ME’s office earlier that day. On its screen, where earlier there had been a picture of Hadley Bingham, now flashed Lender’s number as an incoming call.

  “How,” Hazard asked in his deep, icy voice, “did a dead girl call in a hit on Wayne Stillwell?”

  SWINNEY LEFT THEM. She left without further explanation, without further justification, without anything remotely close to hope. It wasn’t just the fluorescents that had robbed her of her color; as she passed Somers, her eyes were soft and pliable, like dead things after rigor.

  When she had gone, Hazard and Somers stood in the dark room, with the smell of moldy carpeting and rotting wood filtered through every breath they took. Hazard held Hadley Bingham’s phone in one hand. He wasn’t studying it. He was just holding it, looking at it, as though he could see inside the glass and steel. For all Somers knew, Hazard probably could. Just one more superpower that his partner possessed, like his uncanny ability to piece together the cases they worked.

  “Well?” Somers said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Did you figure it out?”

  Twenty or thirty seconds passed with Hazard still staring at the phone. Then he shrugged and extended it to Somers. Somer, taking it, gave it a cursory examination and tapped the screen.

  “She’s got it locked.”

  “Of course she’s got it locked. If she hadn’t, I would have already looked through it.”

  Handing back the phone, Somers sighed. “Yeah, I know. I was just saying it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people just say things sometimes, Ree. It’s called communicating.”

  Hazard’s big shoulders went up, and he snatched the phone and shoved it in his pocket.

  “What now?” Somers said.

  “Who would know the passcode for Hadley’s phone? Assuming she didn’t choose something obvious, something stupid, like her birthday.”

  That didn’t sting, not really, but Somers knew Hazard had meant it to. “Have you tried her birthday?”

  Hazard didn’t answer, which meant that he hadn’t.

  “You think we need to talk to her parents?”

  “They were at the party. Her father is one of our suspects.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Do you think we need to talk to them?”

  “I didn’t realize you were asking a question. I thought you were just saying something. I thought you were communicating.”

  “Jesus, Ree. I just—that’s not what I meant.”

  “Let’s go,” Hazard said.

  “To see Bing?”

  Hazard didn’t answer, and Somers finally had to follow his partner to the car.

  “First thing that’s gone right all day,” Hazard muttered as he brushed snow from the windshield. Flakes drifted across the street in silent spirals. Above them, the sun had finished setting, and darkness had moved in. With darkness had come clouds, and Somers wondered what this storm would bring. A dusting? Or would it dump another three or four inches? He didn’t know if he could stand any more snow. Ever since Windsor, ever since those endless days of snow and ice and clouds, he just didn’t know if he could stand it.

  “Great,” Somers said, eying the cherry-red VW. “Yeah, finally.”

  The drive back into town was quiet. Hazard was still bristling like a porcupine, and Somers was dealing with the ache in his head. It had come back now with a vengeance. His mind turned over and over, but just the same old questions, the same lack of answers. Who would hire Stillwell to shoot Somers’s father? Why? Motives were plentiful. The old three standbys presented themselves for consideration: money, sex, and drugs.

  There had been no hint of drugs, no whiff of anything like that in the investigation. Wahredua and Dore County had their problems with meth production, like the rest of Missouri, but those were small-time operations.

  Money, however, was a powerful motivator, and Glenn Somerset was a rich man. Aside from his personal wealth, his influence and his investments in various financial organizations made him a force to be reckoned with, especially in the surrounding counties. Again, Mayor Newton seemed the most likely culprit. Newton had large investments in Dore County. His development firm, InnovateMidwest, had purchased up swaths of Wahredua and surrounding areas. Just the month before, Newton had tried to have a half dozen people killed in order to protect his investment on a valuable piece of land—never mind that Somers couldn’t actually prove it. Did Glenn Somerset have something that Newton wanted? A piece of land? Stock in a local company? Had Somers’s father refused to sell?

  Or had it gone the other way? Had Somers’s father been trying to get something out of Newton? Had Glenn Somerset pressed a little too hard to wring a concession out of Newton? Maybe with the aid of the recording that he had kept? From what Somers knew of Mayor Newton, any of those would be sufficient reason for a murder.

  “I can hear you grinding your teeth,” Hazard said. “Stop it.”

  “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”

  “I wasn’t communicating with you.”

  “Yeah. You’re always so good about communicating.”

  Hazard’s big hands wrapped more tightly around the steering wheel. After a moment, he said, “You still think it’s Newton.”

  “I don’t know what I think.”
>
  “No. You don’t know what the motive is. But you still think it was Newton.”

  “You still think it was my mother.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “What? Why not?” Somers felt his mouth tighten into a grin, even though he didn’t particularly feel like grinning. “Don’t tell me you’re trusting your gut.”

  Hazard scoffed.

  “What then?”

  For a few seconds, Hazard didn’t answer. Then he shrugged. “Jeremiah doesn’t have a motive. He already he has what he wants.”

  “That’s what he said. You believe him?”

  “I do.”

  “Why? Because he’s educated? Because he talks like a college man?”

  “Because of your mother.”

  “What?”

  Hazard shifted in his seat. “Why does it matter? I told you I don’t think it was either of them. That’s enough.”

  “No, go on. Tell me about my mother.”

  “This is stupid.”

  “You think you’re so good at communicating, well, communicate. Open your fucking mouth. Tell me about my mother.”

  Hazard slowed the VW. They had eased past the edge of Smithfield, past the gray zone between the toxic neighborhood and its surroundings. Now, in front of a darkened elementary school, Hazard stopped the VW. Snowflakes kissed the windshield and melted.

  “She’s happy.”

  Somers undid his seatbelt, battered the VW’s door open, and got out into the snow. It licked his eyelashes, clinging in fat drops as he came around to the driver’s side and opened the door.

  “Get out of the car. Get out here and say that again.”

  “I know you’re upset—”

  “Get out of the car.”

  Hazard didn’t sigh. He didn’t frown or grimace. He didn’t show any sign of it, but Somers could feel the weary patience rolling off his partner, and it only made him angrier. The anger had come out of nowhere, like lightning. In 1997, lightning had struck a mostly dry wheatfield, and it had gone up in flames. The fire had spread across half the county before the storm got heavy enough to put it out. Somers remembered that, remembered not the heat—he hadn’t been close to the fire itself—but he remembered the ground afterward, the blackened, split earth, and the stumps of plants, the char. This anger was that. It was hot. It ate up the ground quickly inside him. A part of him knew that it leaving burnt, fissured ground behind, but he didn’t care.

  “You’re emotional because of everything that’s happened. Your father being shot, the confrontation with your mother—”

  Somers hit him before he even realized he was moving. It wasn’t a full-on punch, but it was a jab, and Hazard’s head rocked back. Blood showed where his lip had split, black against Hazard’s ivory skin.

  “Say it again. Say that about my mother again.”

  Hand pressed to his bleeding lip, Hazard said nothing. No fear in those eyes. Those scarecrow eyes. They caught the ambient glow from the headlights and sparked. He’d always looked like that. In high school, when Somers and Mikey Grames and Hugo Perry would corner him, when they’d take turns slapping him around, kicking his ass, it had always been like that. This lack of fear. The cold fury. If he’d been afraid, they might have stopped. If he’d cowered, cried out, whimpered, they might have gotten bored. But this, the way those scarecrows eyes sparked like they were motherfucking meteors, this made a man want to do insane things.

  “Say it again,” Somers said.

  “This one time. Just this one time.” Hazard didn’t look troubled, but the way he spoke—like he had a mountain on his chest. The sound of it made Somers hesitate. “Because of what you’ve gone through. But never again.”

  “Say what you said about my mother. Say it to me.”

  “She’s happy—” Hazard didn’t quite finish the word. The punch landed, cracking his head to the side, and then Somers barreled into him, hammering low on Hazard’s ribs, driving the bigger man backward. They tumbled onto the ground, and the fight turned into a brawl—ugly, brutal, consisting of huffing breaths and wild, short-range punches. They rolled in the snow. They rolled in the yellow light of the VW. Somers had only bits and pieces of it in his head: a swath of light cutting across Hazard’s face, the deadly calm that he saw there, the feeling of Hazard’s belly caving under a punch.

  Then they came to a stop. Hazard was on top of Somers, his weight pinning the smaller man’s arms. For a moment, Somers struggled. It was like trying to uproot a tree. Then, as suddenly as the rage had come upon him, it was gone. He slumped into the cold of the snow. The pebbled texture of the road pressed against his neck. Hazard got to his feet and lurched away, and Somers lay there, staring up into the sky. Eyes wet. Just snow. Just snow in my lashes, he thought, as though that were the most important thing in the world, and he blinked rapidly.

  When Somers got to his feet, Hazard stood in the middle of the road, hunched slightly. He tried to straighten when he saw Somers, and pain flashed in his face, pulling him back into his hunched pose. His lip had split in a second place, and blood stained his chin like the aftermath of a grisly feast.

  “Ree—”

  “She’s happy, Somers. I know that’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth. There’s no reason for her to want to kill your father. She has everything she wants right now. But it’s not that. That’s not why I think she didn’t do this.”

  “I fucked up, Ree.” Somers took a step towards the car, and then, shaking his head, he took a step away. “I really fucked up.”

  “It’s me.”

  The words made Somers stop. His shoes had scraped snow clear of the yellow line down the center of the road, and Somers focused on the double yellow, trying not to be sick.

  “I made a mistake at the party. I thought she was angry at your father. But she wasn’t. She was angry at me. She hates me. They both do.”

  Somers wanted to beg him to drop it. He would have dropped to his knees. He would have kissed Hazard’s shoes. He would have done anything to keep the rest of it from happening, but none of it would help. What was coming for him was an avalanche, and prayers couldn’t stop avalanches, tears couldn’t stop avalanches, pleading couldn’t stop a goddamn avalanche. He’d started this avalanche fifteen years ago when he had lied because it was easier than facing the truth. And now here it was. It had taken all these years, but the avalanche was finally here. It was going to bury him.

  But it didn’t.

  Hazard’s shoes crunched the snow, and then the VW groaned as the big man’s weight settled into the car. “Get in,” Hazard said. “We’ve got to interview Bing and his wife.”

  “Ree, after what I just did—”

  “You don’t get a pass on this, Somers. Get in the car.”

  Somehow, the avalanche had missed him. Miracle of miracles, it had roared past him, furious, hungry, but it had missed him. It was gone, all of it shunted away. Somers’s throat tightened. He tried to vomit, and his throat contracted and bobbed, but nothing came up. He spat, the saliva staining the slush red.

  That avalanche had been rushing right for him. Right goddamn for him. And it had missed. Somers wiped sweat from his brow, no longer feeling the cold, and made his way on tottering legs to the car. So why didn’t he feel any better?

  HAZARD'S LIP THROBBED AS HE PULLED the VW into Bing’s driveway. Somers had hit hard—not, perhaps, his full strength, but still plenty of it. It didn’t matter that Somers had telegraphed the punches. A blind man could have read them from a mile off, but it didn’t take away any of the sting. If anything, it only made the ache in Hazard’s head worse. Why had he let Somers hit him? Why had he stood there and taken it? He could have stepped out of the way. He could have shut his fat mouth. He knew how Somers moved and how Somers fought, and with a little luck, he could have broken Somers’s arm. But he hadn’t. He let the blond man crack him in the teeth. Twice.

  “He’s doing all right,” Somers said, glancing out the window
.

  The house was past the realm of doing all right and somewhere, in Hazard’s evaluation, well into the realm of gross consumption. Bing’s house was obviously new. Everything was perfect: the lanterns along the driveway, the white clapboard, the shutters the color of holly berries. There was even a Christmas wreath on the door. It might have weighed ten pounds—the wreath, not the door. It might have weighed more. It was a hell of a lot of wreath.

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “That’s what you usually do.” Snow crunched under Hazard’s feet as he left the car and started up the driveway.

  Somers trotted to catch up, and for a few moments, the only sound was their footsteps shattering the crust of ice on old snow. Above them, the clouds had thickened, blotting out the night sky, and the snow continued at a trickle.

  But Hazard’s mind wasn’t on the snow. It wasn’t on the crisp, crystalline snaps of ice underfoot. It wasn’t on the stinging cold. For the second time in two days, Hazard was going to be face to face with Bing. It had been—what? Fifteen years? Sixteen? No, fifteen. Fifteen years. You can look him in the eye, Hazard told himself, ignoring his heart as it thumped. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. You can look him right in the motherfucking eye.

  But part of him was eighteen again, gangly, awkward, and filled with that mixture of private shame and public indifference that had cut him off from the world that surrounded him. Part of him was eighteen again, sitting on the sandy strip of beach of Lake Palmerston. He had gone with his parents; after Jeff had died, he had done almost everything with his parents. Hazard’s mother, as usual, had packed crustless ham sandwiches on Wonder Bread, Orange Crush soda, two cans of fruit cocktail, and an ancient transistor radio. His father had brought two six-packs of Budweiser. Hazard remembered his father’s hands, the blunt, thick fingers nestling the beer into the ice, twisting the bottles neck-deep.