Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

“I went over there. To Hadley’s, I mean. I just—I couldn’t take it anymore. Frank says I’m just being a dumb macho jock. Maybe that’s true. I don’t care. She can do what she wants to me. She can’t do that to him, though.”

  “She can’t do anything to anyone,” Somers said, his voice gentle as Dusty brushed at his eyes again. “How did Hadley react?”

  “She wouldn’t even see me. Her dad just about broke my shoulder when I tried to get in the house. Big guy, you know? He threw me on my ass. And the wife called the police, so I just scrammed.” Staring at his feet, Dusty shrugged again. “Stupid jock shit, right?”

  “No. Not at all. You were standing up for someone you care about. You were trying to protect someone. That’s not stupid, it’s not macho, and it has nothing to do with being a jock.” Somers had to bite back the rest of his words: he wanted to tell Dusty that Frank was a little asshole, that Dusty deserved better, that there was someone else who would value him and appreciate the qualities that Frank mocked. But none of that was what a detective needed to say.

  It was there, though. It was there, and that soundtrack played over vivid memories of Somers in high school: of the day he had held Hazard’s arms and watched Mikey twist a knife through skin the color of Ivory soap; the day he had shoved Hazard down a flight of stairs—that’s what fags get—even if he had done it to protect Hazard; that day in the locker room, his hair still damp from the shower, seeing true desire, real desire, for the first time in his life in Emery Hazard’s eyes.

  Hazard’s voice bit into the silence. “How’d you end up at the Christmas party?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What does that mean?”

  Somers waved Hazard back and said, “Why don’t you explain how you ended up at the Christmas party?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. She called me out of the blue. It wasn’t even her number, so I didn’t answer the first few times. Then I listened to one of the messages, and it was her, so I called her back—”

  “Just a second. She called you from a different number?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where did she call you from?”

  “No clue.”

  “Could she have called you from this phone?” Hazard’s question interrupted the flow, and again he produced the mobile phone from his pocket.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Try calling her back. Let’s see.”

  Dusty drew out his phone, thumbed the screen, and a moment later the phone in Hazard’s hand buzzed. Wordlessly, Hazard stuffed it back into his pocket.

  “So,” Somers said. “She called you from this phone, not from the one she usually used. Is that strange? Did it seem strange at the time?”

  “Yeah, of course. I tried to ask her about it, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. She just—she kept talking about how good everything had been, how she was sorry, how she wanted to see us again before she moved.”

  “Before she moved?”

  Dusty shoved his hands deeper between his legs, still trying to escape the cold. “Yeah, sure. Why are you looking at me like that? They’re moving, right? I say back to Chicago, but Frank thinks they’ll go somewhere new.”

  “Who told you they were moving?”

  “I don’t get this. Are they moving or aren’t they?”

  “Who told you?” Hazard barked.

  “Hadley. What’s going on? Why are you acting weird?”

  “What did she say exactly?” Somers said.

  Dusty’s whole face screwed up in concentration. It was comical but somehow endearing—all that earnest energy spent in one single direction. It wasn’t hard to see why Frank or Hadley or anybody else would have liked this boy. “She said something like, ‘I just wanted to see you before we go.’ And I asked where she was going, and she started talking about the Christmas party.”

  Before we go. Somers turned the phrase over in his head. It might have meant that Hadley and her family were moving. In some innocent context, absent any knowledge of Hadley’s history of violence and psychosis, someone could have taken it for a statement about geography. Especially someone young and innocent and generous and perhaps slightly slow. Someone like Dusty.

  “What? What I just told you, what about it? What are you thinking?”

  “Hadley had been through a lot,” Somers began slowly. “And she had a history. Do you think she might have meant—”

  “She wasn’t violent. She—she never would have hurt anyone.”

  “Except Frank,” Hazard said with his typical brutality. “Except you. Except her parents. Except people back in Chicago.”

  Dusty was shaking his head. “You’re wrong. She wasn’t like that. She was—something changed, yeah, but she wasn’t like that. That person, the one you’re talking about, that wasn’t Hadley.”

  “You didn’t know Hadley,” Hazard said, and there was so much pain in Dusty’s face that for a moment, Somers wanted to sock his partner in the jaw. “The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be for you.”

  Still shaking his head, Dusty didn’t answer, but the pain in his face only grew worse. He had been wounded in a way that he had never been hurt before, and this wound would leave a scar. “You think she—what? She was going to kill herself?”

  Or did, Somers thought. Or she did kill herself. She hired that man just like she did in Chicago, and this time she got what she really wanted. The thought disturbed him, and not just because of the tragedy in the statement. It disturbed him because it meant that maybe there was no grand conspiracy behind his father’s shooting. Maybe there was just a sad, sick girl who had engineered her own horrifying release.

  “Tell us about the party,” Somers said.

  Dusty frowned; he looked lost, paddling to stay afloat in his own dark thoughts.

  “Dusty. What happened at the party?”

  “We got there late.”

  “You and Frank and Hadley?”

  “No, just me and Frank. We—Frank didn’t want to go. I did. We kind of had it out.”

  “But you went.”

  “Yeah, we went. And Hadley wouldn’t have anything to do with us. She wouldn’t talk to us. She’d barely look at us. Frank just wanted to leave, and I felt stupid. I mean, we didn’t fit in. But I didn’t want to leave either. Hadley had invited us. I knew—” He bit back what he’d been about to say, and the pain of it was visible in his face. “I thought she wanted to make things right. So I made Frank stay.” The pain in his face intensified, pinching his features, and he burst out, “You think she did all that? You think she wanted to die? Jesus, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have—I never would have let her do something like that.”

  “We don’t know what happened, Dusty. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Can you tell me about the rest of the night? What did you see? Were you there when Mr. Stillwell got there?”

  “Is that his name, the guy who shot her?”

  “That’s his name.”

  Dusty considered that for a moment. His eyes looked dry, but he wiped at them again, and when he spoke, his voice was stronger. “We got there after him. People were still talking about it, and I knew he was in the back room, but I didn’t really pay any attention. We were there for Hadley.”

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see anyone go back there?”

  “What? No. Just you guys. And then Hadley’s dad came back, and then the sheriff and the mayor came back.”

  “Anything else? Anyone who went in the kitchen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about you?”

  “What?”

  “You and Frank went back there. You pulled Hadley off Mr. Somerset and took her back there.”

  “No, we didn’t—”

  “Dusty, don’t lie to me. We saw you go back, my partner and I.”

  “We just—I had to talk to Hadley. Frank told me I was being
stupid, but I had to. I had to know if she’d been lying, if that phone call was a lie, if she just dragged us to that party to, I don’t know, to rub it in our faces. But we didn’t do anything. We just went into the kitchen.”

  “Not into the TV room?”

  “Is that the big room? No.”

  “Not outside.”

  “No.” That was a lie, though; it showed in Dusty’s furtive glance away from Somers.

  “You didn’t go outside?”

  “No, I told you.”

  “What did the three of you do?”

  “Nothing. Hadley wouldn’t talk. She wouldn’t even stand still. She got away from us and went into the bathroom, and then Frank got pissed and left and I had to stand there like an idiot.”

  “Did you see a bag?” Hazard said.

  “No.”

  “A pink bag with fake fur trim. White fur. Kind of like a Santa Claus bag.”

  Dusty’s mouth dropped open. “How’d you know about that?”

  “So you did see it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?” Somers asked.

  “At her house.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Hadley’s. That’s her bag, that’s what you’re talking about, right? Her Victoria’s Secret bag?”

  “Pink with white fur trim. Looks like Santa’s bag, but the wrong color.”

  “Yeah, that’s her bag. You found it?”

  “Why don’t you tell us about it first?” Somers said.

  Again, Dusty flushed, and his eyes flitted to the darkened hallway. “This was back in November. Black Friday. She was doing some shopping, and I asked her to—aw, Jesus.” He paused, buried his face in his hands, and in a muffled voice said, “Do I have to?”

  “It’s important,” Hazard said, his voice a whip-crack.

  “It was just for fun. I asked her to pick out some stuff. For—” He bit his lip. “For, um. Frank. Come on, do I really have to?”

  “What happened?”

  “She bought it. She showed it to me. Then she said she was going to play Santa this year, like she was going to keep it all in the bag and then give everything to Frank in person, just to see what he did. I couldn’t talk her out of it. I didn’t really want to talk her out of it. This was—this was before things had gotten bad, and I knew Frank would like that kind of game.”

  “Then you had a falling out.”

  “No. Well, yeah, but before that, somebody broke into her car and stole it. The bag and everything. I mean, I was bummed, but it was kind of a relief. I didn’t know how I was going to look her in the eyes after I watched her give that stuff to Frank.”

  Somers fought to conceal a smile at the boy’s discomfort. “And?”

  “That’s it. I mean, she never found it. I’d already given her the money for it, and that really sucked.”

  A trickle of the same worry ran through Somers. This was all so strange. It was obvious, now, that Hadley had somehow been involved in his father’s shooting. But had she been an easy ruse, a way for the killer to try to hide his tracks by drawing attention to a disturbed girl with a violent history? Or had the shooting really been aimed at her, and Glenn Somerset was an innocent—at least, relatively—bystander?

  “You didn’t see the bag at the party?”

  “What? No. Why?”

  Somers didn’t answer, but his thoughts turned to their other eyewitness statements. Jeremiah Walker had seen Wayne Stillwell carrying a pink bag. Bing had seen him carrying a red bag. And Daisy claimed that Stillwell hadn’t been carrying a bag at all. Somers didn’t have Hazard’s ruthless logic, mapping out possibilities and then crossing them off. But he did have his gut, and he trusted his gut. Right then, his gut was telling him something was wrong with all of this. Something that made him nervous.

  “Anything else?” Somers asked. “Anything strange you noticed?”

  Dusty shook his head.

  “We’re done here,” Hazard said.

  But as Hazard turned to go, another question bubbled up out of the depths of Somers’s mind. He fished in his pocket and brought up the length of silver chain that he had found at his parents’ house, dropped near the outdoor heaters. The heaters that had so conveniently been used to cause a blackout.

  He already knew the answer to his question by the shadow of horror that passed across Dusty’s face.

  “Is this yours?”

  “No.”

  “Dusty.”

  “No. It’s not.” A pause. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Dusty.”

  “It’s not mine. It’s fucking not mine.”

  “It’s an interesting piece.” Somers settled the length of chain, with its broken heart, across his palm. “This looks like it’s meant to be one of a pair. I imagine boyfriend and girlfriend usually exchange them.”

  “Or boyfriend and boyfriend,” Hazard said.

  “Yeah, so what? I already told you, it’s not mine.” Dusty shifted in his seat and then sprang to his feet. “Look, can you go?”

  “Sit down,” Somers said.

  “I want you to go.”

  “Sit down,” Hazard said in that same whip-crack.

  Color drained from Dusty’s face, and he collapsed onto the stool. Hunched and shivering, his face washed white, he looked like he’d been dragged out of a frozen lake.

  “This is yours,” Somers said. “The clasp is worn out. See here. That’s how it fell off; the clasp slipped, and it fell right off you, and you never knew.”

  Shaking his head, Dusty blew out his cheeks; he looked like a man desperately trying to hold his breath.

  Somers spoke carefully. He wasn’t sure of his theory, not entirely, and he knew he had to keep his outline vague or risk exposing himself to contradiction. “You’re not telling me something, Dusty. You lied to me. You told me you didn’t go outside, but here’s the proof. Where did Frank go when he got upset? Where did you go while he and Hadley were gone?”

  Dusty rocked silently on his stool.

  “I guess there are a couple of possibilities. Maybe you went outside to the heaters. Maybe you knew what was going to happen because you’d set the whole thing up. Maybe you were tired of how Hadley had been treating you. Maybe you could have put up with that, but you couldn’t stand what she was doing to Frank. For him, you would have done just about anything. Including getting rid of Hadley. You said it yourself. You couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “No,” Dusty said, the word bursting out of him in terror.

  “I saw the other piece of this necklace in Frank’s room. It was just lying there. Did you have a fight? Did he throw it at you?”

  “No,” Dusty moaned.

  Somers waited, considering the tortured boy. “All right. Here’s another possibility: maybe it was Frank. Did he hate Hadley so much that he planned this out? Was he jealous that you slept with her? You say he wasn’t, but a lot of guys don’t know how bad jealousy stings until they feel it themselves. Maybe he didn’t enjoy seeing you two together. Maybe that was eating away with him. And the way she treated him, the things she did to him—maybe you’re right. Maybe it wasn’t you out at the heaters. Maybe—”

  “No,” Dusty said, his voice thick, his eyes fever-bright and fixed on Somers. “It’s mine. I did what you were saying. I went out to the heaters. I had to get out of that house. I just needed air, and it must have fallen off. But I didn’t do anything else, I swear.”

  “You’re a fucking terrible liar.” The voice came from the hallway. Frank stood there. Wrapped in a blanket, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy, he looked like death—or maybe death after a round in the microwave. “It’s not his. It’s mine. I did it.”

  “What did you do?” Somers said.

  “No,” Dusty shouted. “Shut up, Frank.” Somers tried to speak, but Dusty launched off the stool. “Just shut your mouth, all right? I’m handling this.”

  Even with the color of a da
y-old corpse, Frank still had a perfect sneer. “You? Handling this? Please. You don’t even know what you’re saying.”

  “What did you do, Frank?” Somers asked again.

  “Nothing,” Dusty said, interposing himself, his arms wide with incredulity. “He didn’t do anything. He’s just saying stuff. I don’t know why, but he’s just talking.”

  “I killed Hadley.”

  The words sucked the air from the room. Dusty grew smaller, shrinking into his hoodie, his broad shoulders drooping into a tired vee. “He didn’t. He’s just talking.”

  “How?” Again, Hazard’s voice cut through the thick air.

  Frank looked momentarily startled. “What?”

  “How did you do it?” Hazard pronounced each word carefully, slowly, as though speaking to someone not too bright.

  The words stained Frank’s cheeks pink, and he tilted his head again, that look of a man ready to take a punch and then throw a mean hook. “Like you said. I went outside. I messed with the heaters. That’s what made the lights go out.”

  Somers could read the lie in the boy’s posture, in his belligerence, in the frantic light in his eyes as he scrambled to complete his story.

  “And?” Hazard said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She wasn’t killed by the heaters. Or by the lights going out.”

  “All right. I gave that creep a gun.”

  “Where’d you get the gun?”

  “What the fuck does it matter? It’s my necklace. I was out there. I’m telling you I did it, all right? Jesus Christ, will you just arrest me already.”

  Somers shook his head and got up; the chair creaked in relief. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m lying? I’m lying, you miserable piece of shit? I just told you I killed her. I did. I’d kill her again, a hundred times, just shoot that cunt right in the—” He had worked himself into hysterics, the words peaking into a shrill shriek before the boy threw himself at Somers. Dusty caught him, wrestled him back, and pinned him against the wall. Frank fought him for longer than Somers expected; it made the earlier struggle in the bedroom look tame, and when Frank finally collapsed, exhausted, he had torn the stitching in Dusty’s hoodie and had left bloody scratches down the bigger boy’s face.