Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  They surrounded Hazard on every side, those doll eyes: watching him, as though waiting for the moment the light failed. Too many of those stupid movies Nico likes, he told himself. Too much time with Somers. And maybe it was true because Emery Hazard had never had room in his life for imaginary monsters—there had been too many real ones. But now, even with his hand controlling the light’s striations, something childlike and primitive stirred inside him. Just those damn movies. Just Nico’s movies. Just Somers, with all his stupid intuitions and emotions, getting inside Hazard’s head and screwing everything up, like a grain of sand in Swiss clockwork. But Hazard could feel—no, Hazard knew, he knew in his gut—that this might have been a room where a girl had slept, but she hadn’t slept without nightmares.

  He went through the drawers in her vanity, uncovering a hundred different shades of gray and blue and smoke-colored eyeshadow, dark lipsticks, mascara, foundation, and God only knew what else. Nothing incriminating, though. No secret diary. No hidden archive of photographs. Hazard searched her bed, too, even going so far as to lift the mattress. His hand ached, the old cut throbbing across his palm, but he found nothing. He lifted the lace ruffle, but he found nothing under the box spring. Nothing behind the headboard. Nothing rolled into the curtains or the valance. Nothing buried in the sweaters and skirts and panties. Nothing.

  And that was strange. Hazard’s own room was clean and sparse, but he was a rarity. Somers’s room—or Nico’s, for that matter—told a different story. Most people collected things, not really meaning to, but it happened nevertheless. Old movie tickets, cough drop wrappers, loose change, house keys, lint, receipts, school work. Christ, there wasn’t so much as a tube of lip balm. Hadley Bingham, Hazard guessed, hadn’t been this clean in life. So why had her room been cleaned the day after her death?

  Without answers, Hazard moved into the bathroom. The light from his phone glanced off the enameled tub, sparkled on chrome fixtures, and painted porcelain the color of old bone. Nothing here either. No crusted toothpaste in the sink. No half-used bars of soap. No dust. Even the toilet paper roll was fresh and untouched. Hazard toed the trash can. Empty. If he wanted answers, he’d have to get a search warrant. He already knew, from what he had seen downstairs, that Bing and his wife wouldn’t give up answers easily. Perhaps the cleaning had been compulsive, a way of avoiding the crushing grief of their daughter’s death. But perhaps—Hazard hesitated, casting one last glance around the bathroom. Perhaps it had been more than grief.

  As he turned to go, the light from his phone shone on something small and white behind the toilet. Hazard leaned forward, settling his weight on the sink so that he could stretch behind the porcelain fixture. Something long and white. Hard plastic. A toothbrush, maybe. Something that had missed on the way to the trash can, maybe. Or something that had been knocked—

  Hazard’s elbow caught the soap dish, and it shattered against the tile. Damn it. From downstairs, footsteps moved, and then Bing called out, “Who’s up there?”

  He knew he had only seconds before Bing found him. Hazard stretched, the cut on his hand burning, and his fingers closed around the plastic. He plucked it from behind the toilet, glanced at it, and then made a decision.

  It wasn’t an easy decision, but it wasn’t hard either. It happened in the same way that all of Hazard’s crucial decisions happened: with a kind of ghostly clarity, luminous without any sort of true light behind it. Someone else, someone not Hazard, would have called it acting on his gut, acting on intuition, and Hazard would have laughed at that. But he also knew that this decision, like others before it, would slip away from his best efforts at analysis. When the moment had passed, when he had time to think clearly, the trappings of reason would fall away, and the inescapable logic that Hazard felt so keenly would grow fuzzy and indistinct, and he would be left uneasy, the way he felt after drinking himself into oblivion, not quite sure what he had done—or what some unknown, unknowable part of himself had done.

  This is how it happened, he thought, with Jonas Cassidy and the foil-wrapped bricks of heroin and that stupid, stupid, stupid kiss. This was how mistakes happened, he was thinking even as he made the decision. You screwed up then. You’re screwing up now. And strangely, he thought of what Somers would do. Somers wouldn’t do this. Somers would have found another way. That, maybe, was the real difference between them. The essential difference. Not logic. Not intuition. Not charm and snub-nosed practicality. This decision, and the dark place inside Emery Hazard where it came from.

  As the footsteps reached the doorway, Hazard spun the pregnancy test and slid it up his sleeve like a magician prepping for a show. That image of the magician, too, felt like something that had seeped into Hazard’s life through exposure to Somers and Nico. But the foreign image persisted. A magician doing a magic trick. And it would have been a hell of a show. Here’s the big reveal, kids. Ta-da. Fireworks and everything. Because the pregnancy test, that little tube of white plastic that Hazard had found—forgotten, ignored—behind Hadley’s toilet, that test had been positive.

  BING THREW THEM OUT OF THE HOUSE. Somers wasn’t quite sure how it happened. One minute, he was sitting in the living room, jotting down names and descriptions of acquaintances from Chicago. Daisy Bingham was watching him like she wouldn’t mind taking a knife and fork to him, and Somers was starting to wonder where the hell Hazard had gotten off to. The next minute, Hazard staggered into the room, barely catching himself from falling, and Bing surged in behind him. Before anyone could say a word, Bing shoved Hazard again, propelling him towards the door. Hazard was big. He was more than big; he was like a tank, like one of those goddamn Bradleys, muscle on top of muscle on top of muscle. But Bing was big too. And Bing was furious.

  And that’s how Somers found himself stumbling down the front steps as Bing shouted, “Get the fuck out of my house.” He just kept shouting it, variations on the same theme, while Daisy clung to the doorframe, staring at them, oblivious to the cold, her glassy eyes wide with interest.

  Hazard had retreated to the VW, his hands braced on the cherry-red roof like he was trying to hold the car in place against the force of Bing’s fury. Somers stared up at Bing, who was transformed by rage: his dark curls whipped by the wind, his cheeks scrubbed red, but mostly the eyes. Jesus, those eyes. Somers remembered those eyes. When he’d thrown like shit, when he’d forgotten a play, when he’d fumbled. Those eyes, every damn time.

  Those eyes, all that anger, and just like that, Somers fell back twenty years to that night in the car. In Somers’s car. In the Camaro. The tap at the window. Bing staring down at him through the glass. And that picture, that fucking picture tumbling out of Somers’s hand like someone had spring-loaded it.

  Somers hauled himself back from the memory, back from the old, boyhood terror that accompanied it. He clutched at the present: at the cold stinging his ears, at the slush under his feet, at the tingle in his belly like he had to piss a river.

  “Bing, what the hell?”

  “Your queer-ass partner was sneaking around my house.” Bing turned and marched into the house. “I see either of you around here again without a warrant, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  When Bing was gone, Daisy lingered in the doorway, one leg drawn up, her weight supported by the frame, as though she were posing for some obscure winter photoshoot. She dipped towards Somers, a smirk teasing her features, and jiggled her shoulders. Hard nipples, the color of frozen molasses, twitched free of the negligee, and her smirk exploded into laughter. Still laughing, she twisted around and disappeared into the house.

  “Insane,” Somers said, stamping his feet against the cold. “Everybody in this whole town is fucking insane. You. You’re insane. Fucking lunatic.”

  Hazard just got into the car.

  Dropping into the passenger seat, Somers continued, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Pretty standard,” Hazard said, shifting the car into gear, snow squelching under the tires as they roll
ed forward. “Don’t tell me you’ve never done it before.”

  Somers grimaced. He had done it before, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that to Hazard. It was an old trick: no warrant, not enough to justify a warrant, so you got someone to invite you inside. Once you were inside, you could look around as much as you wanted. With one important proviso.

  Stretching to slap Hazard across the back of his head, Somers paused. In the pale glow from the dash, the crusted cuts on Hazard’s lip looked like thicker patches of shadow. A surge of guilt washed up into Somers, and he pulled his hand back.

  Hazard grunted. “Good choice.”

  “Screw you. You’re not supposed to get caught, Ree.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Especially not when I’m in the middle of an interview.”

  “She didn’t have anything left to tell us.”

  “She was giving me names. People that might have—”

  “She didn’t have anything valuable to tell us. So while you were enjoying the view, I decided to do some real police work.” Hazard jimmied his arm in a funny motion, and something slid out of his sleeve and fell into Somers’s lap.

  A pregnancy test. The cheap kind—Somers knew because the year before they’d had Evie, he’d spent about half his salary on these things for Cora. Two red lines.

  “She was pregnant?”

  “You figure that out by yourself?”

  “This is why people don’t like you.” Somers turned the pregnancy test over, not because he expected to find a name or some other relevant detail but because he needed something to do with his hands. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Hadley’s bathroom. Private. Only accessible through her bedroom.”

  “Maybe a friend?”

  “You heard her mom. Hadley didn’t have any friends.”

  “Not unless one of her gay boyfriends got pregnant.”

  Hazard didn’t respond.

  “That was a joke.”

  “Her room had been cleaned. The bathroom had been cleaned.”

  “The whole house was clean.”

  “I’m talking clean like a motel room. Like nobody ever lives there, but they want you to feel like someone does.”

  “So it was clean.” Somers spun the pregnancy test again. Vaguely he thought that someone had peed on this piece of plastic, but it was too late to worry about that. “So they were grieving. In a frenzy. You know people get like that.”

  “You think they looked like they were in a frenzy? They keep a clean house, but only like any other normal people. They’re not neat freaks; they didn’t care so much about the sofa she ripped up.”

  Somers spun the white plastic tube again. “So that’s it, huh?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Hazard’s silence was deep. Deep enough to drop a rocketship into. Deep enough you’d never see that damn rocket ship again. And after a few minutes of that silence, Somers cracked.

  “I just think it’s funny that you’ve already switched sides.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?”

  “You think Hadley Bingham was the intended victim.”

  “Her parents think that.”

  “You think that. That’s why you were snooping around her room. That’s what you think this is.” Somers displayed the pregnancy test. “Motive. Right? That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “You already know what I think. Must be fucking wonderful being you.”

  “If Hadley really was the intended vic, who wanted to kill her?”

  Hazard didn’t answer, didn’t shift position, but his breathing changed. It was harder, heavier breathing now.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Somers said. “You really are insane.”

  “It looked like your father was pretty friendly with Hadley. If she was pregnant—”

  “No. You don’t even get to finish that sentence. We don’t know who this pregnancy test belonged to. We don’t know that my father had anything to do with her. We saw them for, what, five minutes? That’s all. And she was on top of him, wasn’t she? Don’t laugh. Don’t—don’t fucking snicker at me.”

  “I coughed.”

  “So that’s your theory now, is it? My father knocked her up. He hired Stillwell to come kill her. He arranged for Stillwell to shoot him five times just so it would look like he wasn’t behind it.”

  “You’re the one with all the theories. You’re the one with all the big ideas.”

  “Yeah, you want another big idea? How about this? Say you’re right. Say my father knocked her up. I don’t believe that, all right, but just say. It could go the other way. You heard Hadley’s parents. You heard what she did back in Chicago. That’s her M.O. That’s her track record. She probably was pissed that my father wouldn’t marry her, and so she planned the whole thing.”

  “I thought Mayor Newton was behind all of this.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ. You really do. You really do think she was the vic.”

  “She was a vic. One of them, Somers. And your dad was a victim too. I don’t think anything else. I’m waiting for evidence. Conclusive evidence, not hearsay, not speculation, not anecdotes summoned up by grieving and emotionally-distraught witnesses.”

  “So what? I’m just imagining all this?”

  “Honestly, Somers? I don’t know what the hell is going on with you. You’re high as a fucking kite one minute. The next, you might as well be facedown in an alley, trying to find a quarter for booze. I’ve cut you slack. A hell of a lot of it, to be honest. Your dad got shot, and I don’t know what that’s like. But—”

  “Go on. What?”

  In the ashen light from the dash, Somers thought he saw red staining Hazard’s fair skin. “But I don’t get it.”

  “What?”

  “Bing. You act different around him.”

  “How?”

  The next breath Hazard took was deeper, like a man readying himself for a plunge. “Like you’re afraid of him. And look, before you rip my throat out, I know I’m shit for this kind of thing. Most of the time, I don’t get what’s going on in people’s heads. I don’t want to get it. But when Redgie Moseby wanted to start something with me, you about broke his nose. And I’ve heard about other times too. People talk. People even talk to me sometimes. I heard about that asshat at the supermarket. You chucked him in a dairy case or something. But Bing shows up, Bing calls me queer, Bing—I don’t know. I’m not saying you have to handle any of that stuff for me. I don’t need that. But I don’t get this, what’s happening.”

  It was, in a strange way, one of the most intimate things Emery Hazard had ever said to Somers. His acknowledgment of what Somers had done, driven by guilt and a desire to amend the past, struck deep at Somers. Hazard’s tone, outside its normal range of icy dismissal or icy anger, had drifted somewhere warmer, somewhere that sounded dangerously like concern.

  The shooting, the lack of sleep, the rollercoaster case, all of it had cracked Somers’s foundations in a way he hadn’t known possible. Those fissures sent waves of emotions through him, and now he found himself blinking back tears, his breath hot and moist, almost choking him. He had to say something. He had to say the right thing, the perfect thing, because this was so close to the perfect moment. Fifteen years he’d spent ashamed of what he’d done to Hazard, and here it was, the opportunity he’d never hoped would arrive. The perfect thing, that’s what he had to say before the moment slipped away.

  “Meat locker.”

  Hazard rarely looked surprised, but right then, his eyes were wide enough for boxcars to pass through. “What?”

  “It wasn’t a dairy case. It was a meat locker. A case, I guess, really.”

  “Uh—”

  “He said he heard you liked sausage. That guy, Jimmy Redondo, at the supermarket. So I s
hoved him inside the frozen meat case with all the sausages. Ripped one open. Shoved as much of it as I could in his mouth. I took a picture and said it looked like he liked sausage too.”

  The air fizzed like the moment before a lightning strike. This was it, Somers realized. He’d screwed up. This was his last transgression, the perfect example of his failure to live up to anything like Hazard’s own rigid control and discipline. What would Hazard do next? Pull over, kick Somers out, and tell him to walk home? Serve me right, Somers thought. It would serve me damn right.

  Hazard started to laugh. It was a basso noise, and it rumbled through Hazard’s chest, practically shaking the air. He laughed so hard he eased off the gas and let the car drift up against the curb. He laughed so hard he gripped the wheel with both hands and laid his head down on it. And then, from deep inside himself, Somers felt laughter bubble up.

  The laughter went on longer than it should have. It spilled out of Somers, cresting over the wall he had built to hold back pain and fear and worry, and when it ended, Somers felt drained, relieved, but also energized. The pressure inside him, the pressure that had threatened to shear through his foundations and wreck him totally, had eased. It was still there, but hell, now Somers could handle it.

  With silence falling between them, Somers found that he could think more clearly.

  “All right.”

  “What?”

  “All right, I see what you mean. About Hadley and my dad. About the different ways things could have played out.”

  Hazard, silent as a stone, showed no reaction.

  “I’m not saying I agree with you. I’m not even close to saying that. But I’m saying I see it. I’m not blind.”

  “And?”

  “And it could have been somebody else that got her pregnant, you know. It could have been one of the boyfriends.”