Paternity Case

by Gregory Ashe

  At eighteen, though, there was only so much time he could spend with his parents. His mother worked a book of word jumbles, and every time she discovered something she made the same noise—Ah—and clicked her tongue and then the pencil scratched along the cheap paper. Ah. Click. Scratch. Ah. Click. Scratch. Frank Hazard had eaten fruit cocktail out of the can with a plastic spoon, and when the spoon snapped, he drank down the remainder of the can, syrup and all. Frank Hazard, who had never understood his strange son—who still didn’t understand his son. He had sat under the beach umbrella, a cold beer resting on his chest, and he had talked in bursts, a staccato repeat that reminded Hazard of gunfire. It hadn’t been directed at anyone, and at the same time, it had been directed at Emery. “Look at the ass on her. Those tits didn’t come off a factory line. Cardinals are playing a doubleheader tomorrow. Pass me another.”

  On and on like that. Ah. Click. Scratch. Bet you most guys would kill to get in her pants. Ah. Click. Scratch.

  And so he had left. Hazard had wandered down the beach, shooting past the crowds of teenagers he recognized from school, past the college boys playing volleyball with their shirts off—dangerous, keep walking, you might as well stare at the sun—following the curve of the shoreline. It had been afternoon by then. Late afternoon. The sun dropped like a wrecking ball, striking the edge of the lake, throwing long, golden light that looked like it would last forever. He had kept walking. The line of sand thinned, and the scrub grew denser until Hazard found himself no longer walking on the beach but walking behind it, screened from the last of the sand and water by knotted bushes.

  It had been the laughter that had stopped him. Laughter like people having fun, nothing mean about it, just honest fun. He had laughed like that with Jeff. Not often, but it had happened. Not since, though. Since Jeff’s death, well, a part of him had dried up. He was still carrying that around inside himself, something dead and dried up. But he liked the sound of the laughter, so he stopped and squatted on a rock. In just his swimsuit, he faced the low golden heat and listened. Just for a minute, that was all.

  And then the tone of the laughter changed. It had gone from easy, open, and honest to tense. Not unhappy. Not yet. But there was worry in it.

  Hazard looked.

  Through the tangled bushes, he saw a rocky stretch of beach. No sand here. Four people were in the water: two boys and two girls. College age. He recognized Bing, of course. Bing was always at the high school. For shop class. For football practice. For the girls. Bing was always everywhere: at the park, at the Royale 8 Theaters, at Sully’s Drive-thru. Even if you didn’t see him, he was there because people were talking about him or thinking about him. That was just who he was. And as Hazard watched, Bing stripped off his t-shirt and swung it, lasso-style, before tossing it onto the beach.

  He was beautiful. And right then, Hazard knew to look away, to walk away. But Bing was just so beautiful. Still trim, but with adult muscle that even the brawniest high school boy lacked. Every inch of him corded, rippled, straining. A short black stubble across his chest and under his arms, and the shocking realization in Hazard’s mind that Bing shaved his chest, shaved his pits, the dark stubble just above the low-slung curve of his swimsuit, maybe he even shaved his junk, and then, because he was eighteen and because delicious thoughts hovered at the edge of his brain, Hazard had a titanium boner.

  “Come on,” Bing was saying, hooking his thumbs into the swimsuit. “It’ll be fun.”

  And the girls were laughing, blushing, splashing backward, shaking their heads. Bing’s buddy was laughing, hiking up his shoulders to wriggle out of his shirt, laughing but blushing too, nervous, wanting to impress Bing as much as he wanted to impress the girls, and Hazard didn’t know anything could get harder than titanium, but Jesus fuck was he hard. And lonely. That thought was distant, clear, and the voice of an older, sadder part of himself immune to the rushing hormones.

  “Aw, just do it already,” Bing had said, laughing again, pulling on the suit, stretching it obscenely to reveal the dark stubble—thank you God, yes, it was stubble—under the red-and-blue polyester. And Hazard was drooling, his mouth thick with his own spit, choking him. “Come on,” Bing said again, “just—”

  Hazard never knew what called Bing’s attention. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t made a sound unless getting so hard your dick might pop, unless that was enough movement and sound to call attention. But at that moment, Bing’s head swiveled. The girls turned, drawn by Bing’s movement, and they spotted Hazard too.

  Now, older, Hazard knew that if it had ended there—if nothing more had happened—he might have escaped with just getting his ass kicked. He might have even gotten clean away. But it hadn’t ended there.

  The girls had laughed. They had burst into hysterical peals of laughter, convulsing, sagging against each other, dragging themselves down into the shallow blue-brown of the lake. Humiliation had flickered across Bing’s face. And then, in its place, rage.

  Hazard had tried to run, but Bing was bigger and faster, and he caught Hazard before he had reached the beach proper. He had dragged Hazard back, dragged him through the bushes, heedless of the bushes—scratching Hazard to hell, but scratching himself up even worse.

  By now the girls had stopped laughing. They leaned against each other, their weight shifted away from Bing and Hazard, their faces a mixture of embarrassment and worry. The boy had dragged on his shirt, and now he stood on the rocky strip of beach, shifting from one foot to the other, inspecting his soles, looking anywhere but at Bing and Hazard.

  “You know what we’ve got here?” Bing said.

  Nobody answered. His buddy hunkered down, eyes fixed on the gravel.

  “We’ve got ourselves a real live faggot. The only one in town.” Bing’s open-handed slap caught Hazard and knocked him sideways, but Bing caught him by the hair and hauled him upright. “On your knees faggot. Stay right there on your knees. Where a faggot ought to be.”

  “Bing, ease up,” his buddy said.

  “C’mon,” one of the girls said, but when Bing looked at her, she splashed backward so fast that she slipped and fell.

  “Right. There.” Bing spoke each word with a full stop, and he punctuated them with slaps. “That’s. Where. A. Fag. Should. Be.” He hesitated. Hazard’s ears were ringing. The world had gone white at the edges, and he would have fallen if Bing hadn’t still held him by the hair. “Right?”

  The white at the edges of the world intensified.

  “I said, right?”

  Hazard wasn’t sure if he said something. Even now, years later, he wasn’t sure.

  “This is what you wanted?” And the next thing Hazard knew, his face was pressed into the red-and-blue polyester, against Bing’s compressed junk. It smelled like dick, like the lake, like Banana Boat sunblock. It was both hard and soft, and the realization sent a cord of fear through Hazard, realizing that Bing was getting off on this. “Well?” Bing dragged Hazard in again, mauling his junk with Hazard’s face, grinding against Hazard’s mouth and burning Hazard’s lips with the sand that clung to the red-and-blue polyester. “This is what all you fags want, right? What? It’s not how you like it?”

  “Jesus, Bing, get off him,” one of the girls cried. Bing hesitated, and Hazard was dimly aware of the second girl marching off, her flip-flops dangling from one hand.

  “Yeah, man. Leave him alone.” Bing’s buddy heaved himself to his feet, but he didn’t move, as though still waiting for Bing’s approval.

  “He’s bleeding,” the girl said.

  And that broke the spell. Bing pushed Hazard away, and Hazard went down, rocks biting into his back. His knees, sliced from the beach, bled in thin, pink trickles where the lake water still clung to him.

  And then Bing had left, and his buddy had hopped along after him, and the last girl had stayed there, the lake sloshing against her calves, and she had called out, “Are you ok?” And after another minute, she had left.

  Now, in hin
dsight, Hazard could lay it all out in facts, in statistics, in black-and-white—the way he liked it, the way he liked everything. Bullying was about power. Bullying was about control. And bullying was about an audience. Sometimes, Hazard knew, it was only an audience of one, but most bullies played to bigger crowds. Most bullies wanted a full house every night of the week. And when Bing’s audience had turned on him, the game had lost its fun. Hazard had seen Bing again, plenty of times that summer, and Bing had never looked at him, never acknowledged him. He had seen Bing with Somers. He had seen them laughing together. And he wondered if they had been laughing at him, if Somers had become part of the audience. Back then, Somers had still been seeking out opportunities to torment Hazard. Maybe Bing had noticed. Maybe Bing had decided to share some ideas. Not that it mattered. That was what he had told himself for a long time.

  In hindsight, it was all black and white. But at the time, his knees bloody, his eyes burning with tears, it had been a huge, hideous knot inside him. It had been a nightmare, a horror. The pain, the humiliation, those had been bad enough. But worse had been the feel of Bing hardening against his mouth. Hazard had told himself, as he lay on the pebbled beach, that would be the last time anyone hurt him for pleasure. But then there had been Alec and the belt. Then there had been Billy. And then—

  “Hey,” Somers said, with the tone of someone repeating himself. “You in there?”

  They stood at the front door, and from within the house came the sound of footsteps.

  “Hey,” Somers said again. “How hard did I hit you?”

  Before Hazard had to answer, the door swung open. Framed by the jambs, Bing looked like something that had hit the highway at seventy miles an hour. His dark curls were in disarray, heavy and greasy. His clothes—jeans and a Shake Shack t-shirt—showed spilled coffee. But it was his face that shook Hazard out of the last of the memory.

  This wasn’t the face of the bully he had known in high school. Sure, the tight line of the jaw was the same. Sure, he had the same aristocratic features, like he’d been born to spend his life hitting golf balls off a yacht. But those features, all of them, had been flattened, as though something had scraped away a layer of Bing and left this paler, shallower version behind. Hazard found himself confronting a surprising—and disturbing—realization.

  He felt sorry for Bing.

  “John-Henry,” Bing said, blinking into the darkness. “What—did something happen? Your dad—”

  “No, nothing like that. We just came by to see how you’re doing.”

  Bing blinked again. Backlit by the house, for a moment, he seemed not to understand what they were saying, as if the darkness beyond his threshold had cut all lines of communication. Then he nodded. “It’s not a good time. We’re—” He didn’t sob or choke or cough. He just paused, and his throat rippled, like he might like a sip of water. “Can you come back another time?”

  “Bing, we really need to talk.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He shuffled into the house, the door hanging open behind him, and it gave Hazard the momentary image of a submarine hatch let open, and all the air bubbling out while the water and darkness rushed in.

  They followed him into the living room, and Bing motioned for them to sit. Everything in the place was expensive: real wood furniture—none of that particle board—and leather sofas like swimming pools. Hazard sank into the leather, trying to stifle a satisfied groan. His back hurt. His feet hurt. And now his head hurt, thanks to Somers.

  “What happened to you?” Bing said. “You look like you got into a fight.”

  “Opened the car door too fast.”

  Somers rolled his eyes, as if to say that Hazard was a terrible liar, but Bing didn’t seem to care. “What’s going on?”

  “Is your wife here?” Somers asked.

  “John-Henry, what is this? Is this about—Jesus. Is this about Hadley?”

  “We just want to talk to you.”

  “That’s what you keep saying. I don’t understand. Is this about Hadley, or isn’t it? I talked to Chief Cravens. She said that son of a bitch got shot. He was trying to escape. You know, the guy that—the guy that—” He cut off again with that parched little swallow. “And my dad, he told me the same thing.”

  “That’s true. Wayne Stillwell is dead.”

  “Then—what? Is this a follow-up?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, will you tell me what it is? You show up at my door, you tell me you have to talk to me—right now, you won’t take no for an answer—and then you won’t say what you want. I lost my daughter—”

  “Bing?”

  From a darkened hallway that stood off the living room, a woman’s voice reached them. Then her shape appeared, nothing more than a glossy outline against the darkness: dark hair cascading down to dark shoulders, and the rest just a suggestion of a body.

  “Go back to bed,” Bing said. “Whatever this is, I’ll take care of it.” He flashed a furious look at Somers and Hazard.

  “They’re here to talk about Hadley?”

  “I don’t know what they’re here to talk about.” Bing rose and took a step towards the hall. “Daisy, you’re upset. You should be in bed.”

  Hazard waited for a sob, or outright weeping, or even for anguished silence. Instead, though, what followed was a hard laugh. Hard, but brittle, like storm glass after too many seasons. Daisy Bingham took a step forward, and light picked out her features now. She was beautiful. Even Hazard noted that much. And her beauty, he realized, was a magnification of Hadley’s. What he saw in front of him—chestnut hair with flecks of fire, delicate, doll eyes, even the mouth—they were Hadley’s features given maturity and refinement. That mouth, though, compressed into a red slash as the laugh died away. Daisy took another step, and then another until the full light of the living room fell on her, and Hazard found himself studying her.

  No signs of grief. That was the first thought, branded across the front of the brain. She wore a black negligee, and she seemed undisturbed by standing in front of two strange men. Somers, Hazard noticed, was staring at her too. Somers was staring so hard he’d be lucky if his tongue didn’t drop right out of his mouth. Hazard kicked his ankle. Hard.

  “Ow—Mrs. Bingham,” Somers managed to turn his wince into a rising motion, and he held out a hand. “We haven’t met—”

  “No.” She ignored his hand, and her gaze moved from Somers to Hazard. “But Bing has told me all about you. About both of you, in fact. You’re here to talk about Hadley.”

  “We’re here to talk about what happened last night,” Somers said.

  “Why?” Bing stood next to his wife, slipping an arm around her. “If that guy, whatever his name, if he’s dead, why are you here? My dad told me it’s over.” A bitter bark escaped him. “That’s my dad for you. Doesn’t ask me if I’m ok. Doesn’t ask me what he can do. Just tells me it’s over. As if any of this—” His gesture took in a circle—maybe the house, maybe his life, maybe the universe. “As if it could be over just like that, just because he says so.”

  “We’re not convinced it’s over,” Somers said. “I didn’t think you were either. At the mayor’s office—”

  “Oh fuck that,” Bing said. “All he cares about is proving he wasn’t up to his elbows in this shit.”

  “Do you believe he was?” Somers kept his voice even, but Hazard could sense the nervous, coiled energy in the man.

  Neither Bing nor his wife spoke for a moment. “What kind of question is that?” Daisy asked. “What do you mean, saying something like that?”

  “It means we think someone hired Stillwell,” Hazard said. “I’d be interested to hear what you think about that.”

  Somers had enough self-control not to shoot Hazard a glance, but Hazard could guess at his partner’s irritation. Bing and Daisy stood still, shocked—for the moment—beyond words.

  “And you—” Bing spoke slowly like he was trying to find his way from one word to the next.
“You think someone wanted to kill Hadley? On purpose? Who?”

  “Does someone come to mind?” Somers asked.

  “No,” Bing said.

  “Me,” Daisy said. Fiddling with the strap of her negligee, she sat in a wingback chair facing them, her legs tucked to the side demurely. “Bing, don’t look at me like that. They would have found out anyway. Someone would have said something.”

  “She’s upset,” Bing said. He took a step towards his wife, his big hands—quarterback hands, wide receiver hands, football hands—splayed open, as though unable to catch what was coming at him now. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. Most days, I wouldn’t have minded killing Hadley myself.” Her lips curved, but Hazard couldn’t call the expression a smile. “She was a special kind of hell.” The cold grimace quirked at her lips again. “Brought out the mother in me, as you can see.”

  “What do you mean?” Somers said.

  “Nothing.” Bing was wiping at his forehead now. “They fought. Just mother-daughter stuff—”

  “Please, Bing. You’re embarrassing yourself. Our guests—” Daisy paused. “Do you want something to drink?”

  Somers shook his head. Hazard didn’t bother to answer.

  “Bing will have something to drink, won’t you, Bing?” Daisy flipped her head, and her chestnut hair glowed in the lamplight, looking more red than brown for an instant. Bing didn’t answer, but he took an unsteady step towards the sideboard, and from within the heavy, paneled furniture he produced a bottle.

  Daisy, ignoring him, continued, “You wanted to know what I mean? You saw her at the party, I assume. You saw her with—excuse me, Detective, but I’ll be blunt—you saw her with Glenn Somerset.”

  “What was she doing with my father?” Somers asked.

  “Flirting. Teasing. Taunting.” Daisy shrugged, and the lacy strap of her negligee slipped down one creamy shoulder. “Who knows what she was doing with him in her free time? At the party, she practically pulled her skirt over her head and asked him to—”