Sins Of The Father

by James, Harper

  Or they’d looped around the block already to cut him off.

  He opened his door and stuck his head out, trying to see past the truck. The driver got the wrong end of the stick, thought he was going to shout at him as well as lean into the horn.

  ‘Okay, okay. I told you five minutes. Jesus Christ. What are you, in a hurry to get to the office? Didn’t you fire enough people yesterday? Got a bunch more you need to do today?’

  Hanna ignored him, ignored the sound of him laughing at his own joke. He leaned further out. He still couldn’t see around the truck. He got all the way out of the car and stepped to the right. The driver got the wrong idea again, stepped forward to meet him, blocking his view. The boxes were still balanced precariously on his arm as he tried to do too many things at once.

  ‘What’s your problem? You think because you’ve got a car like—’

  Hanna looked up at the sky in frustration, then suddenly snapped, a red mist descending on him, the like of which he hadn’t felt for thirty years. He put his hands under the edge of the bottom box and brought them up sharply, pushing up and away. The boxes flew into the air, over the driver’s head and rained down onto the ground behind him.

  ‘Hey! What the—’

  He didn’t get to finish. Hanna put both hands on his chest and shoved. The guy yelled and went sprawling backwards. He landed on his butt on top of the untidy heap on the ground, half of them bursting open with his weight.

  Hanna stepped over him, muttering idiot through his teeth. The street beyond the truck was clear, nothing blocking the end. He walked back to his car, gave one of the boxes a good kick as he went past. The driver yelled a mouthful of abuse at his back.

  He didn’t care if anyone was following him now. He felt wired, in the mood for anything. Or anyone. There wasn’t much anyone could do to him now anyway. He got in the car and backed all the way down the street, the parked cars either side a blur in his peripheral vision, and shot out into the main street without looking or caring. He floored it, burned rubber all the way to Buckley’s office.

  He sat in his car in the parking lot outside Buckley’s office with his arms on the steering wheel, his head resting on them. He felt tired, that hazy crashed feeling you get when the adrenaline stops flowing.

  He couldn’t put it off any longer.

  He got out and went to put right what had been eating at him for fifty years.

  Chapter 3

  EVAN WAS GOING TO punch Frank Hanna soon if he didn’t stop saying that.

  I don’t blame you for the death of my son-in-law

  He’d said it at least three times already. It wasn’t clear which of them he was trying to convince. Evan had a hard time keeping the lid on his guilt as it was. And now Kevin Stanton’s father-in-law was telling him not to blame himself as well. If he kept it up much longer, Evan would be the one swinging on the end of a rope in his garage.

  ‘I’d like to hire you to look into it.’

  ‘What do you mean? It was suicide.’

  Hanna waved that away.

  ‘No, not that, something else. I was talking to the detectives looking into Kevin’s death. One of them said something about you. It wasn’t exactly a recommendation, but it stuck in my mind.’

  Evan nodded, wondered what Guillory had been saying about him. Something nice, he hoped.

  ‘They said Buckley’s got the monopoly on stubborn and stupid. Made me think, that’s the man for me.’

  Evan sat up straight as if someone had put a cattle prod up through the seat of his chair.

  ‘Kate Guillory said that?’

  ‘No, it was the other one, the fat one.’

  ‘Ryder.’

  Hanna nodded.

  ‘You should’ve asked Kate.’

  ‘I did. She said much the same thing, just different words. You don’t give up—even when everybody else thinks you should. That will be very important on this case.’

  Evan leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head wondering where this was going.

  ‘Want to hear what else she says?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Nothing you haven’t heard before, eh?’ Hanna said with a knowing smile.

  ‘And you still want to hire me?’

  ‘Definitely. This is a very delicate, personal matter. If I’m honest, I don’t expect it to end well.’

  He paused, waited, as if to give Evan a chance to show him the door if that was the way he wanted to play it. Evan stayed put. He was intrigued. Not many clients told you they expected you to fail before you even got started.

  ‘Good. I also need somebody who’s going to tell me how it is, whatever it is. I don’t want sugar-coated, don’t want somebody pussy-footing around because they don’t want to hurt my feelings. The detectives said that wouldn’t be a problem for you.’

  Mr Feelings Trampled-on nodded his head and told him to continue.

  ‘I’m not long for this earth. I have pancreatic cancer. I’m seventy-one and if the more pessimistic estimates are right, I won’t make it to seventy-two.’

  He said it as if he was describing how long the auto mechanic said his car transmission would last.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone yet. In a minute you’ll understand why.’

  Evan cocked his head like a curious dog might.

  ‘Not even your daughter?’

  ‘She’s the last person I’d tell.’

  ‘Kevin?’

  Hanna shook his head, a helpless gesture. He fingered the wedding band he still wore, turning it in half revolutions around his finger.

  ‘I would have told him. I didn’t find out until after he died.’

  Evan went to speak but Hanna held up a hand to stop him. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the edge of Evan’s desk, palms pressed together. Close up, he looked a lot worse than his detached, almost dismissive, account of his condition suggested.

  ‘Even before I found out I’ll be meeting my maker sooner than I thought, I planned to leave all my business assets to Kevin. Kevin, not Lisa. She would have benefitted from them as well of course—for as long as she stayed with him. I was grooming Kevin to take over the business when I stepped down. None of that’s going to happen now.’

  ‘And now that Kevin’s gone, you don’t want to leave it to Lisa.’

  The yellow tinge to Hanna’s skin seemed more pronounced at the suggestion. He rubbed his face with the heels of his hands.

  ‘It would be as good as giving it to McIntyre.’

  Evan got a glimpse of the hard-nosed businessman as Hanna talked, even though he was talking about his own flesh and blood. As far as he was concerned, you make your bed and you lie in it—literally in his daughter’s case. If she made a bad call, it was no skin off his nose. Blood was exactly the same thickness as water.

  ‘I’m not going to leave my daughter penniless. My house is worth millions and I have another one in the Bahamas. I’ve got a private jet and a ton of cash and investments. She gets all of that. She won’t starve. What she chooses to do with it is up to her. Or McIntyre. They can sell the lot and drink themselves into an early grave. It’ll be their loss, and theirs only.’

  And good riddance seemed to hang in the air between them.

  He paused and took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. A vein throbbed in his tightly clenched jaw. It struck Evan that here was a man who had always gotten what he wanted in life. Now he was up against something he couldn’t control. His own mortality—and it wasn’t sitting well with him.

  ‘If I left them in charge of my business and they let it go under, other people’s livelihoods are at risk. A lot of people who worked hard for me their whole lives would suffer. I haven’t worked my whole life to have somebody like him piss it all up the wall. I won’t let that happen.’

  ‘Don’t you have some kind of succession planning in place? The board of directors, that sort of thing.’

  Hanna waved his hand dismissively.

  ‘Yes, yes, all that’s in place. Bu
t there’s something else.’

  He suddenly looked very much his seventy-one years, his body frailer than when he’d pumped Evan’s hand energetically on his arrival, walking in with a spring in his step and looking like he owned the place.

  A frisson of nervous excitement as if someone was walking over his grave went through Evan. He caught himself gripping the arms of his chair tightly, as if Hanna might try to pry him out. He forced himself to relax.

  ‘I want to make amends. Amends for something I did’—he looked down at his lap and Evan saw him swallow thickly—‘or didn’t do, a very long time ago. Something I’ve lived with and been ashamed of my whole life.’

  No pressure.

  ‘You want me to help you make amends?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He fixed Evan with a stare, eyes clear and unwavering, raised his hand and pointed directly at Evan’s face.

  ‘I want you to know my illness is purely physical. There is nothing whatsoever the matter with my mind, when I tell you I want you to find somebody for me—somebody who may never have existed.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘A LONG TIME AGO, I made a mistake. And I didn’t do the right thing.’

  Things fell into place in Evan’s mind. All the talk of not wanting to leave his business interests to his daughter, and now the phrase the right thing.

  ‘You got a girl pregnant.’

  Hanna nodded. His gaze was somewhere far off in the distance, about as far from the piercing stare he’d speared Evan with a moment ago as could be.

  ‘You want to know if she had the child. A son.’

  ‘It was the second biggest mistake I ever made,’ Hanna said, snapping out of his reverie. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  The sudden request took Evan by surprise. He was expecting Hanna to tell him what the biggest mistake was. And he’d never smoked himself, didn’t even have an ashtray.

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,’ Hanna said, dropping the hand that had been on its way to his pocket.

  ‘No, it’s okay. Really. ‘

  Hanna got his cigarettes out looking a bit sheepish. He cleared his throat noisily. Evan was sure he heard a death rattle in there, even if the cancer was pancreatic, not lung.

  ‘I wouldn’t normally impose ... it’s just I’ve never spoken a word about this to anyone. Not even to my wife, God rest her soul, and we were married almost fifty years. It’s affected me more than I would have thought.’

  Evan nodded sympathetically, watched him as he put the cigarette between his lips, then pat each pocket systematically.

  ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve forgotten my lighter. I don’t suppose—’

  Without thinking Evan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his Zippo—the one he’d found in Carl Hendricks’ basement, the one he carried with him everywhere. He passed it to Hanna. He didn’t even know if it worked. He’d never tried it.

  ‘Not sure if it works.’

  Hanna took it and glanced at it. His face fell, his mouth slightly open. Then he shook his head.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Hanna didn’t answer immediately, tried the lighter instead. It caught the second time. He lit the cigarette and sucked half of it down in one hit, hung his head backwards and let it out slowly towards the ceiling.

  ‘I’m fine. It’s just the coincidence.’

  Evan wasn’t listening. A hot little worm of excitement had started up in his belly. He was trying to work out what the implications of the lighter working were. Did lighter fuel evaporate inside a lighter, particularly an old one like the Zippo? If so, what did that imply about how long it had been sitting in Hendricks’ basement chamber?

  ‘Are you alright?’ Hanna said, turning the lighter over in his hand.

  ‘Yeah, sorry—’

  ‘Nice lighter. You weren’t in Vietnam, were you? No, of course not. You’re far too young. You’ll see in a minute why I was taken by surprise for a moment there.’

  He pushed the lighter across the desk towards Evan, took another hit on the cigarette, almost finishing it. It had done the trick. He looked a lot better for it, as ready as he’d ever be to bare his soul to Evan.

  ‘When I was eighteen, I met a girl, a Mexican girl, and got her pregnant ... you might want to take notes.’

  Evan got a notebook out of his top drawer, found a well-chewed pen. Hanna waited patiently as he scrawled a few loopy swirls to get it going.

  ‘Okay. What was her name?’

  ‘Margarita Narvaez. I don’t think it’s a common Latino name, so that should help.’

  As it turned out, Evan could have left his notebook in the drawer and written everything Hanna told him on the back of his hand. Apart from her name, the only thing he came away with was she was sixteen when they met and was born between mid-June and mid-September 1948. The baby would have been born sometime around December 1965 if it was born at all.

  ‘Was she a U.S. citizen?’

  Hanna snorted, his lips pressed into a tight line.

  ‘Ha! You sound exactly like my father. May he rot in hell.’

  Hanna didn’t apologize for or explain his outburst. Evan didn’t ask, he’d get to it if it was important.

  ‘According to him, she identified me as a good prospect, actively pursued me and then deliberately fell pregnant—all to get U.S. citizenship.’

  Evan made the mistake of shrugging.

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘That wasn’t how it happened with us.’

  Evan blanched at the tone of voice and held up his hands in apology. Hanna withdrew his jutting chin, his jaw moving tightly. The glint in his eyes said it’d be back in Evan’s face if he made another remark like that.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

  Hanna pinched the skin between his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Evan gave him time, controlled his natural urge to tap his pen impatiently on his teeth. Then Hanna reached out and picked up Evan’s Zippo, turned it over in his hands.

  ‘Have another cigarette, if you want.’

  Hanna shook his head.

  ‘I was an idiot. I stupidly told my father.’

  Evan guessed that was Hanna’s biggest mistake. It was a good guess even if he didn’t know it at the time—how that one single event set in motion all the tragedy that came afterwards.

  ‘You were eighteen, for Christ’s sake.’

  Hanna gave him a look that said when he wanted sympathy or excuses from Evan, he’d ask for them. Until that time, Evan knew what he could do with his sympathy.

  ‘What did he do?’ Evan said.

  ‘He sent some people to see her.’

  ‘Some people?’

  ‘You don’t need to know.’

  It was time to take Hanna at his word about not wanting anybody to pussy-foot around him. If he was going to get fired, he might as well do it before putting in any more time.

  ‘To do what exactly?’

  Hanna shrugged, dropped his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know. Threaten her. Buy her off. Force her to have an abortion. He never told me and I never asked. I never saw or spoke to her again after that so I couldn’t ask her either.’

  ‘You didn’t try to see her again?’

  ‘No.’

  He suddenly flipped the Zippo in the air, caught it again.

  ‘That’s where this comes into the story.’

  He ran his finger over the inscription on the lighter. Evan watched his lips moving silently as he read the words.

  We the unwilling

  ‘I wish I’d had one of these to carry around with me, remind me ...’

  He shook his head, his lips a tight line under the nicotine-stained mustache, eyes not leaving the faded inscription. Evan couldn’t imagine why he’d want one. He’d never seen a face so utterly forlorn. And he could have told him, it didn’t bring him much in the way of comfort either. If he’d thought it would bring Hanna any peace, he’d have told him to keep it.

  ‘People of your gene
ration have no idea what it was like back then, in the mid-sixties and early seventies. The whole Vietnam thing. Maybe your father told you?’

  He held up the Zippo, raised an eyebrow. Evan shook his head.

  ‘It wasn’t his. He didn’t go.’

  ‘Lucky guy. Like me.’

  His voice had a bitter edge to it now, not dulled by the passage of time.

  ‘It’s hard to comprehend now, being sent to the other side of the world to fight somebody else’s war. And if you were lucky enough to make it back home in one piece, you got spat on by your fellow, holier-than-thou, banner-waving Americans. You know, the ones who were lucky enough to not go. It was every young man’s worst nightmare.’

  He was right, Evan couldn’t understand what it must have been like over there. It didn’t matter how many times you watched Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, nobody who hadn’t been there could understand. The bitterness in Hanna’s voice he understood all too well.

  ‘You were in college. That got you a deferment, didn’t it?’

  ‘It did. For as long as I was there.’

  He held up a finger, a crux of the matter gesture.

  ‘But if I hadn’t toed the line, done exactly as my father said, I wouldn’t have stayed there very much longer. Not only that, the last resort safety net—family in Canada—would have been pulled out from under me. I’d have had to take my chances with everybody else.’

  He let out a short bark of a laugh that was mainly bark, not so much laugh.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Life is so ironic.’

  The twist to his mouth said ironic was a polite way of describing what he really meant.

  ‘If we’d got married and had the baby, I’d have been home free. Even after good old LBJ moved the goal posts and let them draft married men, having a baby cut the risk to almost nothing.’

  He shook his head and tapped the Zippo on the desk, an irritating, insistent noise.

  ‘The thing is, Margarita would still only have been seventeen. She’d have needed her father’s permission to get hitched. The only thing I do know about her family is they were strict Catholics. There would’ve been nothing her father would’ve liked more than to send the privileged white bastard who got his daughter pregnant out of wedlock to rot in hell—or Vietnam, as it was called back then.’