Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  “This is important. You heard her. She said she’s going to ruin your life.”

  “Good luck.”

  “This is serious.”

  “No, Nico. It’s not. She’s petty. She’s self-involved. She’s old. And she’s got nothing left to worry about. But she’s not dangerous. Except maybe to her husband.”

  Nico’s eyebrows shot up. “You think she did that?”

  “Jesus, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “You think she hired that guy?”

  “I’m not talking about an ongoing investigation with you.”

  “Oh my God. You do.”

  “No, I don’t. I was shooting my mouth off. Which is one reason we should do less talking. So can we go now?”

  But Nico still didn’t move. One his arms came up, his fingers mussing Hazard’s long, carefully styled hair. Hazard shook his head and pulled away, but Nico didn’t notice. His other hand hooked Hazard’s belt.

  “We’re not—”

  “Oh grow up,” Nico said, his voice once again sounding like he was a few states away. “She’s not that kind of wife.”

  “What?”

  “Jealous. I mean, she might be jealous, but I don’t think she’s jealous of her husband.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Jocasta.”

  “What?”

  “Oedipus Rex. It’s a play.”

  “I know what the fucking play is. Look, we’ve been in here forever. People are going to start talking. Can we—”

  “Jocasta is the mom.”

  “Nico, I swear to fuck that I’m going to—wait, you think she’s in love with Somers.”

  “You heard her.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “You heard what she was just saying. You heard how she was saying it. Insane, that was your word for it. Psychoanalysts call it the Jocasta complex, kind of like the inverse of the Oedipal complex.”

  Hazard paused, considering the statement. “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “It’s a theology degree. You wouldn’t believe the kind of crap I have to read.”

  “Yeah, but—” Hazard couldn’t finish his objection. Pieces began to fall into place. The bitter, twisted look of jealousy on Grace Elaine’s face at the Christmas party. Hazard had assumed it was about Glenn and Hadley, but—but had she been looking at Glenn? Or had she glanced backward, looking at Hazard and Somers? Hazard couldn’t remember. And he thought, too, of her predatory approach, as though she were in competition with Hazard. Cora’s story filtered through Hazard’s mind, the story about her engagement, and Grace Elaine’s hidden rage that her son might marry. “Jesus, that’s wrong.”

  Jeremiah Walker’s words came back to Hazard, the echo eerily close to Nico’s speech: 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.

  “That’s life,” Nico said. “Emery, you’ve got to be careful. Feelings like that, they make people do crazy stuff. Totally irrational, even when they seem like they’re—hey, what are you—”

  The killing wasn’t rational. Hazard grabbed Nico and shifted the boy out of his way. Everything had fallen into place: the emails to Wayne Stillwell, the red Santa bag, the shooting that had claimed Hadley Bingham’s life, and Lender’s gun. Hell, why had he been so blind about Lender’s gun? Charging into the party, he went in search of Somers.

  ALONE IN THE KITCHEN, SOMERS CONSIDERED the empty bottle of Jose Cuervo and wondered if he could get away with a mimosa or two. Hell, maybe three. He’d had the kitchen to himself for a few minutes now. Ever since he’d peeked out the doorway and seen Hazard talking to Grace Elaine, seen Hazard glance up, seen the—

  —pain—

  —fury in Hazard’s face. And then he’d retreated into the kitchen, suddenly, blessedly alone, and pounded the rest of the tequila. And he could grab a mimosa. He could grab two. He might even make it back to the kitchen before Cora came back or before another guest noticed him. It would only take—

  “Somers, holy hell, here you are.” Swinney stepped into his path, cutting Somers off before he could exit the kitchen and grab a drink or two. Or three. “It’s your party, isn’t it? I turned this place upside down looking for you, and you’re in the kitchen. Happy birthday.” She glanced over her shoulder and added, “I guess I’d be hiding out too if so many of those fucking Wiese rats showed up at my party.”

  For the first time, Somers noticed how she looked. Her reddish-blond hair lay dull and flat against her scalp. Dark pouches hung under her eyes. But her face had a jittery energy like she was running on a hundred and twenty volts of java. The corner of her mouth twitched when she wasn’t talking, and what the fuck was that about?

  “I got him,” Swinney said, pressing into the kitchen and forcing Somers back. “I fucking got him, Somers. He’s not going to get away with it.” Her eyes blurred. The corner of her mouth twitched harder and faster than ever. “I’m not going to let him get away with it, not a chance, not a Christ-loving chance of it.”

  “Swinney, what are you—”

  “Look.” Producing a battered smartphone from inside her jacket, Swinney corraled Somers with an elbow, forcing him into a tight corner at the back of the kitchen. Her mouth twisted and twitched like she’d bit down on a jumper cable, and her hands shook as she punched at the screen. “Here. Just take a look at these stupid motherfuckers.”

  The first picture was so blurry that Somers, at first, thought he was looking at a piece of abstract art. Nice lines, he thought. Nice color. A certain dominance towards the horizontal. The kind of mouth-shit he’d spew when Cora dragged him to another gallery of another mediocre artist. But then he recognized, even in the jumbled photograph, the structure he was looking at.

  “Big Biscuit?”

  “Damn right Big Biscuit. And look at this.” Swiping at the screen, she brought up the next photo.

  It had been taken with steadier hands—or maybe Swinney had found a tripod or something—and the resolution was much better. This time, Big Biscuit’s familiar walls and sign were perfectly visible, and slightly off-center in the photograph was one of the diner’s plate glass windows. The picture had been taken from outside, Somers realized. From Swinney’s car, he guessed. Silhouetted at the table closest to the window, three men were eating breakfast.

  Swinney swiped again, and the next photograph was zoomed in. The resolution deteriorated, but some of the details were magnified, easier to pick out. One of the men had curly hair and an unmistakable nose, but in case Somers had any doubts, a big cattleman hat sat on the table next to the man, and a badge gleamed on his chest. The man next to him had a shock of snowy white hair. The photograph was too poor quality to expose the liver spots on his chin and jaw, but he was easily identifiable even in profile: the Right Honorable Mayor Sherman Newton. The third man was thin, built more like an accountant than a cop, with a bristle-brush mustache and enormous glasses. Albert Lender.

  Swinney swiped again. And again. And again. It was like watching a comic strip unfold. Newton and Bingham and Lender eating, eating, eating, eating, eating. Somers kept waiting for it: a wad of cash, a manila envelope, a roll of wrinkled bills. The payoff. Swinney swiped and swiped, and Somers waited and waited, and then the last picture jagged back and Somers realized they’d reached the end of Swinney’s surveillance.

  A ping went off inside Somers’s chest, and then another ping, and then another. Hot, steady pulses of excitement. This was it. Not the smoking gun, not exactly, but this was almost as good. He’d suspected the three of them were working together. No, that wasn’t right. He’d known. In his gut, he’d known it was the three of them, never mind what Hazard said. And here was the proof, picture perfect. They’d done it. Somers didn’t know the details, not yet. He couldn’t put this in front of Cravens or the county prosecutor. But that pulse in his chest, tha
t steady pinging, it told him that he’d been right.

  “This is it?”

  “For now,” Swinney said, dropping her phone into a pocket.

  “It’s not enough.”

  “You see it, though.” Swinney had one hand on the countertop, and her index finger came down hard. “You know.”

  “I know—”

  But before Somers could finish, Hazard burst into the kitchen. His color was high, staining his normally pale complexion, and Somers recognized the expression in his face. The tightly-controlled animation in Hazard’s features, normally impassive, only arose when Hazard’s mind was working at full speed—when he was cracking one of their cases.

  “It’s him,” Hazard said in his low, gravelly voice, but even that voice trembled with excitement. “Bing. He did it.”

  “The sheriff, right. We’ve got the pictures—”

  “No, not the sheriff. Bing.”

  Somers was already shaking his head. “Take a look at this.” He jerked his head at Swinney, and Swinney produced the smartphone and thumbed through the pictures.

  After perhaps a dozen of the grainy, distant shots, Hazard gave an irritated shake of his head and shoved the phone away. “That’s nothing. That’s bullshit. Listen, I’m telling you I figured it out. It was Bing.”

  “It was Bing.”

  “Yes.”

  Somers couldn’t explain what happened next—not at the conscious level of his mind, anyway. But his shoulders tightened. His stomach dropped. A twisting tension began deep inside him, two powerful forces crashing against each other, the quaking that predicted massive, tectonic shifts.

  “All right,” he managed to say.

  “It wasn’t about your dad at all,” Hazard said, that rare excitement controlling his face. “It was Hadley. Bing was going after her. I’m not sure why, not yet. She was going to tell someone, I think. We’ll have to talk to her boyfriends again, but it sounded like she wanted to tell them, like maybe she’d even tried to tell them—”

  “Tell them what?” Jesus, Somers thought, massaging his jaw. Everything was so tight. His shoulders, his neck, his jaw. How could his jaw be so goddamn tight?

  “Tell them—” Hazard’s eyes revealed his confusion at Somers’s question. “What he was doing to her. Molesting her. Abusing her. Isn’t it obvious—”

  “No. No, Hazard. It isn’t obvious.” And damn, that sounded wrong. Hazard. Not Ree, that’s not what he called him. Hazard. Since when had he gone back to that name? “Why don’t you explain it to the rest of us? All the simpletons in the room, go on, you need to explain it.”

  “You’re upset.”

  It made Somers laugh, and then it felt like his jaw would shatter like someone dropping a glass, just a crack and then a thousand pieces everywhere. “Go on. You’ve got some kind of proof? Tell me about Bing. Tell me about what you said he was doing. Do you have any proof of it? Those kids last night, did they even suggest something like that? Did they—”

  “No. No, that’s not what I meant. We’ll have to ask them some more questions. We’ll talk to Daisy again. We’ve got a new angle to work.”

  “A new angle?” Jesus. Just Jesus, how could anybody feel like this, like he was being pulled apart and shoved back together. Harder now. Like he might really come to pieces. “Buddy, we don’t need a new angle. This case has a million shitty angles. And the one angle, the only angle that makes any sense, we’ve finally got proof on. Thanks to Swinney, Hazard. Not because of anything you and I did.” The tremors had gotten worse, had really worked their way into his hands. “She’s been doing the real police work on this while we’ve wasted our time chasing shit from the past. She’s the one who’s finally got something that can put us on the right track.”

  “Those pictures?” Hazard waved a hand, dismissing the phone, dismissing Swinney, dismissing everything Somers had been building up to. With one wave. With one casual, goddamn wave. “Those pictures,” Hazard continued, “don’t show a thing. Not one thing. Three guys eating breakfast, Somers. That’s it. What do you think you’ve got there? Evidence of conspiracy to commit murder? Mary and motherfucking Joseph, Somers, open your eyes. You’ve got pictures of three guys at a goddamn diner. That’s not a crime.”

  “We’ve got the recording. We’ve got proof that my father—”

  “We’ve got proof that your father was into shit up to his neck just like he always is. That’s what we’ve got proof of. We don’t even know that anybody else knew about that recording. It was locked in his safe. I’m telling you, we’ve been looking at it all wrong—”

  “Of course we have.”

  Hazard paused, thrown off by Somers’s abrupt agreement. “What?”

  “Of course we’ve been going about it wrong. Looking at it wrong. Whatever the hell you said. This is how it always is, right? I bumble along. I make an ass out of myself. And then you swoop in and all of the sudden you’ve got all the answers. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that how you like to play this? Go on. Explain.”

  Swinney, pocketing the phone, slipped towards the door. “You two hammer this out. I’ll just—”

  “No.” Somers latched onto her. “Stay. You want to hear a genius at work? Here we go. Go on, Ree. Tell her why Bing wanted to kill my father. Or his daughter. Or whatever the fuck you think happened.”

  “I don’t get this. I don’t get what’s going on. It’s not me. It’s not always me. At Windsor—”

  And that was the worst part, the way he said those two words: At Windsor, like he was throwing Somers a bone, just a goddamn bone so Somers would stop bothering him. “Oh, you don’t get what’s going on? That’s interesting. That must be the first fucking time in the history of the fucking world.”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “I’m not angry. Swinney and I, we thought we had something. That was stupid, though, right? You don’t even want to hear it. You’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Emery?” Nico poked his head into the kitchen and then came into the room, pausing, his gaze moving among them. “What’s going—”

  “Great,” Somers said. “This is just perfect. Kindergarten. We’re running a fucking daycare out of my house.”

  “Watch it,” Hazard said.

  “I am watching it. That’s what a kindergarten is, right? I just watch. I watch kids, like this kid you’re dragging around. It’s all watching. That’s all I do. I should just—no, Swinney, stay the fuck here, I want you to hear this—I should just watch kids, is that what I’m good for? Like this kid, the one you’re dragging around town?”

  “I said watch it.”

  “Yeah, watch it. Jesus, two syllables. That’s all I can get out of you. Watch it. Watch it. You’re some kind of fucking broken record right now, is that it? What should I watch? Him? I should watch this baby you’ve been stringing along until you get bored with him, even if he does have a nice ass and a pretty face—”

  The punch happened so fast that Somers didn’t even see it. His head cracked against the cabinets, and his legs went linguini, and just like that, just as fast as that goddamn punch, that massive, tectonic unsettling inside him stopped. Everything fell back into place, and suddenly Somers felt clear-headed and tired and ashamed.

  Shaking his hand, Hazard grabbed Nico by the shirt and propelled him towards the door.

  “Ree,” Somers said, and he took a step, but his legs were still all noodles and his head was ringing like every Christmas bell west of the Mississippi. “Hey, wait, I’m sorry—”

  Swinney caught him before he could fall, and then Hazard and Nico had disappeared out into the whitewashed winter. Somers stared out into the shocked faces of the closest guests. Then he turned and threw up into the sink.

  HAZARD DROVE RECKLESSLY. The little VW slid across icy patches, skidded around corners, and, on their last turn, bumped up against a fire hydrant. Nico pressed a handkerchief to the still-healing cut in Hazard’s hand. One of the stitches had popped, and
the sucker was bleeding like hell.

  When they hit a red light, Nico grabbed the steering wheel. “Either you pull over, or you let me drive.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Like hell you’re fine. You can’t even breathe. And your hand—”

  The light flipped to green, and Hazard punched the accelerator. He couldn’t breathe? That was bullshit. He could breathe fine. He was taking a breath. A million breaths. The world spun, and Hazard forced himself to draw more air into his lungs. See? Fine. He could breathe like a champ.

  “Emery.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. Will you pull over?”

  Hazard didn’t bother to reply.

  “Pull over, or I’m getting out at the next light.”

  Hazard hesitated. “Maybe I won’t stop at the next light.”

  To his surprise, Nico started to laugh. His slender fingers tightened, compressing the bandage against Hazard’s palm, and Nico laughed harder. In spite of himself, Hazard felt some of the rage seep away. He didn’t laugh, not quite, but he suddenly knew he was acting like a fool, and that helped temper the insane anger that he felt.

  When they rolled to a stop at the next light, Nico laughed even harder. A smile touched the corners of Hazard’s lips. Not because he thought anything was funny but because there was something about Nico, about how open he was, how honest, how happy and easily amused he was, that touched a wounded, aching spot inside Hazard.

  “That looks better on you,” Nico said, his laughter subsiding into a grin as he touched the corner of Hazard’s mouth.

  Hazard turned his head and kissed the inside of Nico’s hand.

  “You’re still shaking.”

  “I’m still angry.”

  “At what? John-Henry? Don’t be. He was drunk. And he was—”

  “He was a gaping asshole is what he was, Nico.”

  “He was upset.”