Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  “She’s dead because he liked the attention. She’s dead because he encouraged her, for God’s sake.”

  “She’s dead because Wayne Stillwell shot her.”

  “Let’s go,” Somers said. “I’m going to—I don’t know what I’m going to do. Let’s just go.”

  Hazard moved to slide the drawer back, and then he stopped. In a plastic bag next to Hadley’s body, Kamp had stored her possessions: a black clutch, a pearl necklace, a mobile phone. There would be no investigation into Hadley’s death. These paltry belongings would be returned to her family.

  “What are you doing?” Somers asked as Hazard retrieved plastic gloves from Kamp’s desk. “Hazard—Ree—you can’t—” Somers fell silent as Hazard opened the plastic bag and removed the phone.

  Without speaking, Hazard found an unused bag, carefully wrapped the phone, and stored it in his pocket.

  “We can’t take that.”

  “We aren’t. I am.”

  “Ree, if someone finds out—”

  Hazard stripped off the gloves and threw them in the wastebasket. “We’re on leave, Somers. Forced leave. If anybody finds out about any of this, we’ll be out of a job. Don’t pretend this is something else.”

  Somers was silent as they returned to Hazard’s cramped VW. Hazard handed over Stillwell’s address, taken from Kamp’s file, and Somers plugged it into his phone. They drove across Wahredua, towards Smithfield and its warrens of abandoned buildings, drug dens, prostitution, and crime. As they drove, a smile tugged at the corners of Somers’s mouth.

  “What?” Hazard finally snapped.

  “You know what I realized? Taking that phone? I bet that’s the closest you’ve ever come to getting a girl’s phone number.”

  The crack of Somers’s head against the window was immensely satisfying.

  ASIDE FROM THE ACHE IN HIS SKULL—Hazard still didn’t know how to take a joke—Somers felt surprisingly good. Oh, sure, he hadn’t slept. His body had a strangely heavy weightlessness, like an anvil that had been let loose in outer space. His thoughts, disjointed and fragmented, floated between anger and determination.

  But overall, he felt good. He had the shooter’s name and address. He had a possible suspect in Mayor Newton. And most of all, he had Emery Hazard. Hazard, with his eerily cold, analytical way of seeing the world. That dispassionate reasoning was worth a hell of a lot. Even if Hazard couldn’t take a damn joke.

  The address for Stillwell’s last official place of residence was deep in Smithfield. Smithfield, situated on the northwest side of Wahredua, where the old Missouri Pacific lines ran and the newer—and already downtrodden—trailer park stood, was the dark side of town. It was a place where people tried as hard as they could to look the other way. It was a place where nobody wanted to know your name. It was the place where John-Henry Somerset, a recruit fresh out of the academy, had cut his teeth. These streets were still his streets, and today, he was going to prove that.

  As they pulled up in front of a block of apartments, the winter sunlight slashed out from the horizon. At this hour, the light ran parallel to the snow, so that the long, ruffled blankets glowed. Beer cans and broken bottles, poking out of that white radiance, ruined the effect somewhat. The building itself looked like this winter, maybe even this day, might be its last. The bricks crumbled along the corners, revealing the lighter-colored, powdery innards, and even with snow covering the roof, it was clear that swaths of shingles had been ripped away and never replaced. Somers had seen buildings implode on TV, controlled demolitions where cement and steel and glass folded inwards, and he half-expected this apartment building to do the same: shrivel up, fall, and exhale one last, dusty breath.

  “You know this place?”

  Somers shook his head.

  When they reached the front door, though, Somers saw the brass lettering under the cramped porch: The Haverford. “Shit.”

  Hazard paused with his hand on the buzzer. “What?”

  “This place is trouble.”

  “You said you didn’t know this place.”

  “I didn’t.” The wind whistled down Somers’s collar, and he shivered as he gestured at the nameplate. “You don’t remember that name?”

  Hazard shook his head.

  “The Haverford? Hollace Walker? Senior year?”

  “I said I don’t remember.”

  “You were friends with Hollace, weren’t you? Didn’t he tell you—”

  “I wasn’t friends with anyone, Somers. Did you hit your head too hard?”

  “He was trying to impress some of the guys. He came here to buy some coke.”

  “It’s freezing out here; do I really need a history lesson?”

  “Three cops have been shot inside the Haverford. How’s that for a history lesson? Don’t ring that damn buzzer, Hazard. We’re not going in this way. Not unless we’re wearing Kevlar.”

  Without waiting for a response, Somers abandoned the cramped porch and strode down the block. Hazard came after him, his huge feet compacting the snow, crunch-crunch-crunch. The wind picked up again, blowing snow crystals in Somers’s eyes, and he blinked them clear; the sunlight made the beaded melt iridescent. On the next block, a bulky figure hauled a shopping cart by its front, using both hands two drag frozen wheels through the snow. Somers watched the man—the woman?—with the shopping cart and thought Smithfield never changed. He could be gone a hundred years and he’d come back and it would be the same. Shittier, but the same, if those two things could be true at the same time.

  “Three cops got shot? And Cravens didn’t blow this thing down?”

  “Three cops didn’t get shot at the same time. I said three cops have been shot inside the Haverford.” Somers turned the corner, following the south side of the massive brick apartment building towards a fire door. “Murray got shot here in seventy-nine. He survived. Shot in the ass by a grandmother. The woman didn’t even get out of her lawn chair, just lined up a shot through the door and got Murray in the right cheek. Murray says those were different times. He even went back on the streets when he could walk again.”

  “In the ass?”

  “Ask him about it sometime.”

  “No thanks.”

  “The other two, they were different. About ten years ago. Maybe twelve. I was still at college, so I only heard about it when I moved back. But everybody was still talking about it a few years later when I got the Smithfield beat. Everybody wanted to make sure I knew what had happened.” He paused outside the metal fire door. The snow along the frame had been knocked free, and in the snowfall, footprints beat a path in and out of the doorway. A quarter-inch of the door protruded past the lip of the frame, and Somers pinched that thin length of metal and pulled. Scattering snow, the door swung open.

  “They were trying to scare you.”

  “Some of them.” Inside, they stood in the shaft of a stairwell. The steps were barely wide enough for a grown man, and Somers knew that if he stretched, he could touch both walls at the same time. A slurry of half-frozen snow and dirt and spilled tobacco covered the steps, and Somers picked his way through the mess. “My father, he was trying to scare me. He made that happen, you know.”

  “Smithfield?”

  Without looking back, Somers could imagine the skepticism on Hazard’s face. “Yes, Smithfield. He pulled some strings, had Cravens stick me out here.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Nobody had to tell me. Glenn Somerset isn’t particularly subtle. The day I got the posting, my father called. He took me out to dinner. Just the men, you see. A conversation between men. And he told me his own version of what had happened in the Haverford, and he said if I wanted to get my head blown off, I had the perfect opportunity. Then he called over the waiter and asked for the dessert menu. He ordered a fucking cherry cobbler.”

  The memory of that night clung to Somers: it had been a bistro, a pop-up restaurant that had barely lasted long enough to get the menus printed,
but Somers still remembered the smell of rosemary, the waxiness of the cheap linens, the pop and creak of new vinyl upholstery. And he remembered his father leaning back, a forkful of cherry cobbler levitating at eye level, and the message in his father’s face.

  “So he was trying to warn you. Why would he get you posted there and then warn you about it?”

  “Because that’s what my father does.” Somers glanced up. Stillwell’s apartment was in the four hundreds, and that meant there were still two more flights to go. Dull circlets of sunlight, penetrating a single row of glass blocks in the wall, did little to alleviate the darkness in the stairwell, but they gave enough light to reveal the vapor of Somers’s breath. “That’s what Glenn Somerset is best at. Hammer and tongs. Or hammer and anvil, I guess. Rock and a hard place. Frying pan and fire. Once he’s got you where he wants you, he hits as hard as he can and expects you to pop.”

  “You’re saying he—what? He got you that posting in Smithfield because he wanted to make you quit?”

  “He wanted to make me go to law school.”

  Hazard snorted. “You?”

  Somers paused; his shoe squelched into the slush covering the steps. “Yeah, me. Is that so hard to believe?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why’d you say it like that?”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened with the other two cops? Or am I going to freeze my balls off in this stairwell?”

  “I got good grades, Hazard.”

  “Fine. Whatever. Can we go?”

  “I took the LSAT.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know that?”

  “Either start moving, or I’ll plant you on your asshole. Understand?”

  Somers pushed himself up to the next step, careful to slide his shoe backward—forcefully—along the step. Slush splattered wetly, and Hazard swore.

  “Nico just got this suit cleaned.”

  “You want to hear about those two detectives?”

  “Did you hear what I said? He’s going to kill me.” Hazard paused. “You didn’t say they were detectives.”

  “Partners. At the Haverford on some sort of drug-related investigation.”

  “Jesus Christ. We don’t do drugs. Lender and Swinney do drugs.”

  For a moment, the only answer was the slap of their soles on the wet cement. Then Somers spoke. “They were both shot. One in the head—dead instantly, of course. The other in the gut, in the chest, in the legs. Hard to say, but I doubt those happened all at once. I’m guessing whoever did that shooting, he did it slow and purposeful. I bet he really took his time. Made sure that detective enjoyed every minute of it.”

  “Why the hell are you telling me this?”

  “Because there’s so many damn stairs and because I feel like it. You know what my father told me?”

  Again Somers pictured that bistro—Le Gourmand Toulousain? Was that the name? His fingers curled inwards, as though still clutching that too-slick tablecloth. The smell of cherry cobbler, acidic, stung his mouth.

  “Do you know?” Somers asked the dark, hulking silence behind him.

  “Fuck me if I know. You’re going to tell me anyway.”

  “He said the one who was shot in the head, that bullet was a .38 Special.”

  They climbed another full flight of stairs before Hazard said, “So what? He was saying that the cops turned on each other?”

  “No.” Somers stopped at the fourth-floor landing, put his hand on the access door, and paused. “He was saying one cop turned on the other. Killed his partner. Shot him in the head. The way I always imagined it, it was a plan that went wrong. This detective, the dirty one, he must have been taking orders from someone. They showed up at the Haverford. Maybe it was the wrong place. Maybe it was the wrong time. The dirty cop shoots his partner. And then—” Somers shrugged.

  “And then whoever is paying him shoots him.”

  “Takes his goddamn time doing it too.”

  “What’s to say your dad didn’t make up that detail? Did you ever check?”

  “Did I ever investigate a dirty cop who’d been gunned down and lionized? No, Hazard. I wanted to keep my job.”

  “You should—”

  “My father doesn’t lie, anyway. At least, not unless he absolutely has to. He usually finds a way to make the truth much more devastating. You know what makes this whole thing the biggest bitch of all, though?”

  For the first time since they had started up the stairs, Somers glanced at his partner. Hazard’s pale complexion was heightened by the darkness; the shadows pooled under his eyes, leaving only those glittering, straw-colored irises staring back.

  “What really pisses me off about this, what makes the whole thing unbearable, is that my father was right. There’s a dirty cop on the force. Odds are, there are a lot more than Lender who are dirty. I could shoot Lender just for that, just for proving my father right.”

  When Hazard spoke, his voice had become low, rasping like scree sliding down a mountain. “What about Hollace?”

  And then, there it was again: that night, that last night with Bing at the party. Somers wanted to squeeze his eyes shut; memories rolled through him like a film on a reel, twenty-four frames per second, and if he squeezed his eyes shut, he’d have to see them in living color. The coke, and the party, and the bedroom, and the photograph. God damn Hollace Walker. But even that wasn’t really fair, because Somers had unrolled the fuse a long time before that night, and the coke was just the spark that got everything going.

  “Nothing,” Somers managed to say, his eyes still open, fixed on the empty dark of the stairwell. “Not a damn thing happened to Hollace Walker.”

  THE DOOR TO APARTMENT 423 WAS LOCKED, but Somers slid a credit card through the loose frame, and a moment later the door swung open. Inside, the apartment looked even worse than the crumbling building that surrounded it. Once the high-pile carpet had been a fluffy oatmeal color; now, after God only knew how many years, it had been flattened into a hard, polyester shine the color of dirty socks. Cheap particle paneling covered the walls, and over the years tenants had knocked various holes and gouges and divots into the boards, exposing the compacted sawdust within.

  Wayne Stillwell’s contribution to the apartment, it seemed, was garbage: heaping, contractor bags of garbage filled much of the space, while more garbage overflowed onto the other available surfaces. Crushed plastic cups, empty pizza boxes, microwave dinner trays, shredded t-shirts, a pair of hot pants wrapped around a vaguely vaginal ceramic lamp, wads of cotton batting that had, at some point, been shat upon, and three-quarters of a taxidermied dachshund—fortunately, in Somers’s opinion, it was the front three-quarters, although to judge by the little dog’s eternal grimace, it didn’t seem too pleased with its afterlife.

  And everywhere, everywhere, Santa Claus with children. A pair of shelves peeled back from the wall, rusty teeth slipping from the plaster. Crowding those shelves were sculptures of Santa, snow globes with Santa, hand-painted wooden tablets with Santa, even a Santa diorama made of toothpicks and marshmallows and a scrap of red flannel no bigger than Somers’s thumbnail. In all of the representations, children crowded around Santa. In one of the snow globes, children gathered at Santa’s knee, as though listening to a bedtime story. One of the sculptures showed them tearing open presents while Santa looked on with a smile. No, not a smile. A leer. A grotesque twisting of a mouth made fat, caked with crimson lipstick. The marshmallow Santa held a whip made of Red Vines, his arm back, ready to flail the marshmallow children lashed to his sleigh.

  “This is disgusting,” Hazard said, prodding a pizza box with the toe of his shoe.

  “This is insane. Genuinely, certifiably insane.” Somers moved deeper into the apartment. More Santa decorations covered the walls: cheap four-color prints torn out of magazines, flattened Coca-Cola cans, a pair of stuffed dolls. Stillwell had even hammered decorative ceramic plates to the walls; one
of the nails went right through Santa’s crotch. “What was he? A pedophile?”

  Hazard only grunted; he still stood near the door, studying the apartment. He looked like he thought he might catch something if he moved any closer.

  “He liked Santa,” Somers reported as he ducked his head around the corner: a kitchen, the linoleum rubbed away in spots to reveal plywood, a microwave the size of a small car, and more Santas. Some of Stillwell’s collection was homemade—or at least, modified. One of the kitchen Santas held a metal skewer; on the end of it, Stillwell had impaled thumb-sized baby dolls. “But he did not like children.”

  Hazard had stripped off his jacket and was now rolling up his sleeves. From one pocket he produced a pair of disposable gloves.

  “Hey,” Somers said. “What about me?”

  Wordlessly, Hazard pulled a second pair of gloves and flung them at Somers.

  As Hazard waded into the garbage, Somers followed the apartment towards the back of the building. He passed through the kitchen, glanced into a bathroom with chipped tile and a blackened bathtub—it looked as though a grease fire had charred the enamel—and found the bedroom.

  The hoarding was worse here; black contractor bags mounted to the ceiling, filling the air with the stale, decaying smell of aged, yellowed paper and body odor and the slightly sweet, slightly gassy smell of fermentation. A path led through the bags, and Somers had to turn sideways to squeeze between the walls of garbage. How had Stillwell, with his sagging gut, managed to fit through here?

  The path crooked once, and at the end of it Somers found the bed. One side of the queen mattress was covered with old newspapers; Somers handled one, and the edge of the paper crumbled. The date was June 7, 1987, and when he set the paper back down, some of the ink transferred to his glove, leaving a smeared inversion of the print. The bedsheets were matted, and a brownish stain outlined where Stillwell had slept. How long would it take to stain sheets like that? Five years of never changing them? Ten? Once, Cora had asked Somers to change their bedding, and he had forgotten. She’d come home that night, come home from whatever it was she’d been doing—tap? Had she been going to tap classes? Or had it been a benefit dinner, even back then?—and she’d been furious. Two weeks. The sheets had been on there two weeks, and she’d ripped the sheets off the bed and washed them herself, and Somers had spent that night the next night and a lot more after that on the couch. Christ, and that had just been two weeks.