Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  Waiting at the elevator door was Jeremiah Walker. He was tall, taller even than Hazard, but thin. Stoop-shouldered, he looked older than he was, even with his honey-colored skin unmarked by wrinkles. He offered two glasses of Scotch.

  “Cold outside, Detectives.”

  Hazard waved one away. Somers, though—Somers was itching. The drinks at The Real Beef had been—

  —a mistake—

  —nice, but they weren’t enough. Not for this. Not for looking into the eyes of a family friend, someone that had been at birthday parties and holiday dinners and picnics in Rogers Park, someone who might be—

  —sleeping with his mother—

  —a murderer.

  “We’re fine,” Hazard said, shaking his head as Somers reached for the glass.

  “Just a small one,” Somers said, although the drink that Jeremiah had poured was anything but small.

  “Not when we’re on duty.”

  “We’re not on duty, though. Remember?” Somers took a sip of the Scotch. It was peaty. It burned. It hit like a jackhammer, and that was everything he needed. “This is more of an unofficial visit, Jeremiah.”

  “I know. Come in. Would you like something to eat?”

  “We’re fine,” Somers said.

  “Let me just check on your mother,” Jeremiah said. “Please, sit down.”

  The shock of the words made Somers half-afraid he’d drop the glass of Scotch. His fingers tightened around it reflexively. In spite of the Scotch’s fire, the glass was cold, cold enough to slide right through his grip and shatter. He tilted his head back and slammed the drink down.

  Jeremiah didn’t notice; he moved deeper into the loft, calling Grace Elaine’s name.

  “You’re back to this kind of shit?” Hazard said, drawing the glass out of Somers’s hand and shoving his partner towards a sofa draped with an African-print throw. “What, one thing goes wrong and you’re going to drink yourself sick?” Another shove. “You’re going to pound booze when we’re trying to interview a suspect.” Another shove. Somers’s knees hit the back of the sofa, and he stretched back a hand out of reflex, his fingers brushing the coarse fibers of the throw. “A potential murderer.” No shove. This time, Hazard stepped in, until they were nose to nose. The smell of Hazard, clean, lingering soap, masculine sweat, overpowered Somers. God, the drink was starting a fire, a real fire, and Somers felt his legs shake. “I thought you had this under control.”

  “I do.”

  “I mean being a goddamn alcoholic.”

  “I’m not an—I’m fine. I just had a couple of drinks. My father got shot last night. I’ve got a right to loosen up, all right?”

  “Loosen up on your own time, when it’s not going to get me killed.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  “I’m full of shit? You’re the one who’s been talking big about solving this case, and now all of the sudden you’re getting plastered.”

  “You’re full of shit because you always act like you’re so much better than me. You’re full of shit because you just screwed up this investigation worse than I ever could. And you’re full of shit because you can’t stand that you got canned and now you’re here. Which one of us can hold down a job? Which one of us hasn’t been fired for—” Somers stopped, but it was too late.

  Hazard had gone even paler than usual, except for two sullen red spots in the hollows of his cheeks. Without a word, he stepped around Somers—hitting him with his shoulder as he did—and dropped onto the sofa.

  “Look, Ree, I didn’t mean—

  “For the last time, Somers, don’t call me that. Please.”

  And it was that please that hit the hardest. Please. Since when had Emery Hazard ever said please? Not since high school, maybe. No, not even then. Jesus Christ, please. What had Somers just done?

  Jeremiah returned with Grace Elaine on his arm, and Somers took an unsteady step and planted himself on the sofa next to Hazard. His mother looked . . . happy. She was smiling, and it wasn’t the cocktail party smile, it wasn’t the PTA smile, it wasn’t even Methodist Ladies’ Quilt and Supper Circle smile. It was a real, silver-dollar smile, and Somers felt it ring true even across the room. It was one of the worst things he’d ever seen.

  Somers had suspected, while growing up, that his parents were different from other people. Now, older, he knew that most children experienced something similar: the normal mixture of household disillusionment and teen angst. That suspicion had evolved, however, into a certainty after Somers had left home. His parents were cold, distant, unattached. An only child, he had grown up assuming—no, that wasn’t true—pretending that his loneliness was normal. And when he’d gotten to college, when he’d visited the families of friends, when he’d spent time with Cora, just the two of them, starting their lives together, he’d realized that there had been something wrong in his home, something he’d never been able to articulate. Seeing that smile, though, shook all the supports, all the bridgework, all the efforts Somers had made to explain away that childhood. Seeing that smile made Somers distinctly aware of the possibility that his mother was perfectly capable of happiness.

  Just not with him.

  The realization sloshed against the slow fire of the Scotch, steaming up, clouding Somers’s vision. He didn’t realize he’d missed something until Hazard elbowed him. What had Jeremiah been saying? Something about being willing to help.

  “Thank you,” Somers said, taking a gamble.

  His mother rolled her eyes. She and Jeremiah sat in matching, tubular chairs, their clasped hands suspended in the space between them. No sign of shame on his mother’s surgically smooth cheeks. No hint of red.

  “He’s drunk,” she said to Jeremiah. “This really isn’t a good idea.”

  “What isn’t a good idea, Mother?”

  But Grace Elaine didn’t answer. It was Jeremiah who did, speaking softly, his eyes locked on the woman next to him. “I’ve thought you should know for a long time, John-Henry. About your mother and me. I didn’t like hiding this.”

  “From me? You were worried about what I thought?” Hazard elbowed him again, but Somers ignored him. “But you weren’t worried about my father. You weren’t worried about what he thought. That, that didn’t bother you at all.”

  “Cool it,” Hazard hissed.

  “This is what I was talking about,” Grace Elaine said, rising and freeing her hand from Jeremiah’s. “He’s completely irrational. It’s always been like this: pouting, tantrums.” Her cool blue eyes drifted over Somers, as though she were seeing him underwater. “He’s an absolute child about anything that disturbs his perfect world.”

  “I’m a child?” Somers didn’t remember getting to his feet, but he was standing now, an accusing finger lancing towards his mother. “I’m irrational? I’m the one with a perfect world? What about you, Mother? What about the time I kept missing at tee ball? You wouldn’t let me sit down. I had to stand up there for twenty minutes, sobbing, until the coach finally just called the game.”

  “You would have quit. I didn’t raise a quitter.”

  “And the time I broke the Chretien vase? You know, the one in the front hall? And the Newtons were about to come over, but you couldn’t have that, so I got sent to a reform school for the summer when I was eight years old, and you called off dinner and said you had a headache.”

  Grace Elaine’s mouth thinned. “And look at you now. God only knows how you would have turned out if I hadn’t taken steps.”

  “And then you and father cut me out of your lives—”

  “Don’t be dramatic, John-Henry.”

  “You stopped talking to me. You stopped looking at me. I was seventeen years old, and I might as well have been a ghost in my own house because you were angry that I wasn’t going to go out for football at Mizzou.”

  “Because of him. Because this—this moral degenerate, he got into your head, and you weren’t strong enough or smart enough to do any
better. We had options. We had choices. Your father had already talked to Jim Abeilhe at the Tegula plant. He spoke with the sheriff, and Bing was going to take care of things at school. For heaven’s sake, John-Henry, he even drove into town one night and found that Grames boy, offered him—” Grace Elaine stopped. The pink in her cheeks snapped out, leaving her pale and waxy.

  “He what?”

  Grace Elaine’s mouth tightened.

  “What did he do, Mother? He went to Mikey Grames and did what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nothing we ever did for you mattered. You made sure of that, didn’t you?” To Somers’s surprise, he realized his mother was crying. She raised one hand, and it shook slightly as she did so, and she held it gently under one eye—not wiping, just holding it there. “Excuse me,” she said. She walked deeper into the loft, her head high, her hand still held against her cheek until she disappeared into a room at the back.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Somers muttered, taking a step. But the Scotch had made him unsteady, and his anger—and the sudden, sickening pit that had opened inside him—blinded him. He crashed into the coffee table, spilled forwards, and probably would have put his face through the glass if Hazard hadn’t caught him. Hands hard and steady, Hazard straightened Somers.

  Somers couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear to know what Hazard was thinking, what he suspected, what he might know. All of it had come rushing out, all the worst shit, and now Somers learned that there was more. That his father had paid off Mikey Grames to—what? Make Hazard’s life miserable? Worse? Hurt him? Kill him? Somers tried to pull away, but Hazard held him.

  “We should go,” Hazard said.

  “No,” Somers said, the word sounding bubbly and loose.

  “No,” Jeremiah said, shaking his head as he rose. “Give me a moment. We need to talk.” He moved towards the room where Grace Elaine had gone.

  Somers waited for the explosion, for the accusations, for the threats. He waited for the worst of it: the hatred he would see in Hazard’s eyes. The betrayal. And Hazard would be right to feel that way. He’d be right to hate Somers because the truth was, Somers was a piece of shit. Somers knew that. And he knew, now, that he could never make up for the past. He could never outrun it. Maybe some people could, but not Somers. It would always be there, like quicksand, dragging him down—and the harder he fought against it, the faster he sank.

  But all Hazard said was, “Why don’t you get some air?” And he gave Somers a gentle push towards the loft’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Somers didn’t want air. He didn’t want anything except a shallow hole in the ground where he could close his eyes and make everything stop spinning for once in thirty-three fucking years. But he made his way to the window.

  It gave out over the city and the riverfront. As the sun slanted across the sky, the blue of the sky had softened, losing its brittle clarity and fuzzing into a robin’s egg blue. Steam from boilers and furnaces feathered up from Wahredua’s brick buildings. The river sheared off one side of town, and its brown waters looked still. Somers leaned closer. Even shut, the window leaked cold into the air, and that helped a little. It helped with all that fire and steam inside Somers. It helped a little with the sickening emptiness. It helped a little, but only a little. And out on the river, chunks of ice bobbed. Somers put his forehead against the glass—Jesus, cold—and observed. Just chunks of ice, bobbing against each other as they drifted. In Somers’s vision, it looked like they were only moving a few fractions of an inch. In reality, he knew, they were racing along. And that was what all this had been like, he realized: from the outside, for a while, life had been slow and sedate. And now he was in the middle of it, right in the middle, and it was like somebody had tossed him into a flooding river.

  Jeremiah’s shoes clicked on the floor as the older man returned. He looked even more tired now, and his hands—very old hands, Somers thought—clasped in front of him. “She’s upset, but she’ll be fine.” His dark eyes found Somers. “She does love you, you know.”

  Somers meant to scoff, but the sound came out more like a sob.

  Jeremiah’s clasped hands wriggled and strained, but all he said was, “She’s a complicated woman.”

  “I’ll say.” Hazard’s words, spoken in his usual voice—low, cold, unyielding—splintered the strange tension. “What I’d like to know is if she’s the kind of complicated that would murder her own husband?”

  Jeremiah nodded, as though he’d been expecting the question. “Are you asking that because we’re involved in a relationship?”

  “I’m asking because someone tried to kill Glennworth Somerset last night, and I’d like to know who.”

  “And the spouse is always the first person to look at. Yes, I understand. As you must already know, Detective Hazard, Grace Elaine is a passionate woman. She feels deeply and strongly. She is not the type, however, to hire a man to shoot her husband.”

  “Not even when it would make her a rich woman?”

  “If that is the motive, then you must believe I am a suspect too. Is that correct?”

  “I’d like to know what you saw at the party last night. And what you did.”

  “Yes,” Jeremiah said. He paced across the room to the liquor cabinet, poured himself a Scotch, and took a sip. “Yes, I’m Grace Elaine’s romantic interest. I would make an excellent suspect. I have motive. I have means—in the sense, at least, that I could have the financial resources to hire someone to kill Glenn. But did I have opportunity?”

  “Tell me about what happened at the party, Mr. Walker.”

  “I must have had opportunity, otherwise you wouldn’t be taking this so seriously.” Jeremiah turned, his eyes half-closed as if in recollection, as the Scotch floated towards his lips again. After another drink, he nodded. “When we went into the kitchen. That’s what you believe. Either Grace Elaine or I freed that lunatic.”

  “Just tell him what you saw at the goddamn party,” Somers said, peeling his frozen forehead from the glass. It felt as though it had ripped off a layer of skin. “From the minute Wayne Stillwell appeared to the minute the lights went out.”

  If Somers’s tone bothered Jeremiah, he didn’t show it. He just nodded and sipped at his Scotch. “Stillwell came in through the front door. I was in the family room, but I heard him singing.”

  “Singing?” Somers said. “I thought he was acting crazy. Waving a gun around.”

  “No, he was singing. ‘Deck the Halls,’ and all that. I could tell that something was off—everyone was getting agitated, that much was obvious—so I went to take a look. A naked, high Santa Claus. Even as a college professor, I don’t see stuff like that very often.”

  “And the gun?”

  “What gun?”

  Somers paused; for a moment, everything contracted to that question. “Did he have a gun?”

  “I don’t know. He might have. He must have, right, because he did all that shooting. But at the time—” A slight crease appeared in Jeremiah’s forehead. “He had on a red Santa cap and he had a red bag over his shoulder. I think it was supposed to look like Santa’s traditional bag, but it didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Somers pressed the questioning, ignoring Hazard’s look. “What was different?”

  “The color, for one thing. It was red but too light. And the fur trim is usually white, at least, in most of the paintings I’ve seen, but this one was pink. Glittery.”

  No gun, Somers was thinking, his mind racing back to that night. His father had—no. No, it hadn’t been his father who had said that Stillwell had a gun. It had been Sheriff Bingham. And he had said—what? Something else. Something strange.

  Before Somers could recall the sheriff’s remark, though, Jeremiah continued speaking. “He might have had the gun in the bag.”

  “What makes you say that?” Hazard said.

  “He must have had a gun. Haven’t we gone over this? You’re the ones who said he had a gun.”

  �
�No, we asked if he had a gun. You assumed—”

  Somers broke in. “Go on, Mr. Walker. Tell us the rest of what happened.”

  Jeremiah pulled at his Scotch. “Everyone rushed him. No, not everyone. Most everyone wanted away from him. No screaming, but you could tell the people were about a hair away from it. Nerves, you know, like the air could pop from all the tension. But people did go for him. They grabbed him. Your father,” he nodded at Somers, “and the sheriff and his son. They were going to throw him out of the house, I think—they were shoving him that way, and you know how your father gets, John-Henry, like he’d shove Jesus off the cross if he wanted a little more room—” Jeremiah paused. “Yes, they were going to throw him out of the house. But then someone yelled, ‘Gun,’ and that stopped your father cold. They talked for a moment, so soft I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and then they dragged him to the back of the house.”

  “But you didn’t see a gun?” The sick feeling had returned, clouding Somers’s thoughts. He knew that what Jeremiah was saying was important. He knew that it might be critical for the case. But his thoughts were slushy, granular, and why’d he have to drink that damn tequila?

  “No.”

  “Who said that he had a gun?”

  Jeremiah paused in the act of lifting the glass to his mouth. “I don’t know. Why?”

  “You can’t remember? Or you don’t know?”

  “Is there a material difference?”

  “In this case,” Hazard said, “yes, there very well might be. Which is it: you don’t remember, or you don’t know?”

  “I’m not sure.” Jeremiah sounded petulant, put out by the harshness of Hazard’s response. “I’d had a drink. Everyone had. And the action with that lunatic, it all happened fast. A few moments, that’s all it took. And then it was over. They rushed him out of there, and the rest of us were so ashamed of being cowards, and still so frightened by what had happened, that we tried our hardest to convince ourselves we were happy and gay. Oh. Apologies. It just feels like a holiday phrase.”