17 - Easier

Holden was upset, more so than he originally thought. He kept sniffing and wouldn’t look him in the eye. So Roan grabbed his jacket (the closest one on the coat tree beside the door. Only after he slipped it on did it occur to him that his fleece lined bomber jacket was probably inappropriate since the codeine was making him so warm. But fuck it, he’d already locked the front door).

Once they were in the car, he finally asked Holden, “Who is it?”

Holden put his hands on the steering wheel and rested his forehead against it for several seconds. “Of all the hypocritical bastards, that fucker knew, he’s known all his life, and he dares to get high and mighty with me. I’m so angry, Roan, I can barely hold it together. I broke my coffee table, you know? I put a hole in my wall. The landlord’s gonna freak when he sees that.”

“Who is it? Who’s your dad?”

He sighed heavily. “My dad.”

“Yes, exactly. Who’s your dad?”

Holden looked at him sidelong, eyes narrowed as if in pain. “My dad. Daniel Krause.”

Roan stared back at him, wondering if the codeine was effecting his comprehension. “Your adopted dad.”

“And my biological father, apparently.”

“What?”

“He used to help out at Mission Creek. The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, so I asked a family friend, and she confirmed he worked there on and off, helping out, for a few years. His name is Dan, but his family nickname is Dane because he’s named after his father’s brother, the other Daniel. To separate the two, they called him Dane.”

Roan suddenly got it, and felt like a complete idiot. “Holy shit - your dad is your dad?”

Holden looked like he’d just been sucker punched by a nun, too startled to do much but just stand there and take it. “Does this … is he Zoë’s dad? Did he let his own daughter end up in the foster system?”

“I was unable to confirm Zoë’s parentage. You could have shared a father, but it’s also equally possible that you didn’t. No one knew.”

Holden rubbed his eyes, which were red and raw, hot with anger. “Fucking bastard. I knew he was a hypocrite, I knew he cheated on mom, but this … this is like a new level of hypocrisy. I was his real son. I was his real son, and when he kicked me out of the house, he told me he should have known I was damaged because my real mother was a fucking junkie. A fucking junkie he was fucking! If I’m damaged, it’s because I’m related to that hypocritical, stick up the ass motherfucker!” He slammed his hand on the steering wheel several times in succession, and Roan just let him.

Wow. So Pastor Krause had an illegitimate son - his own adopted son. It was likely that his wife didn’t know, although often women knew when their husbands were cheating, even if they decided to not believe their suspicions and pretended that everything was fine. Some people chose willful ignorance over the crushing pain of reality.

Holden rested his head against the steering wheel once more, and Roan just let him sit there, breathing hard, trying to contain his own rage. Roan watched red spots on his hands deepen; tomorrow he’d have bruises from punching his steering wheel. “Why don’t we wait until tomorrow?” Roan suggested, keeping his voice low and soothing. “You need to think about this. You can’t just go in there guns blazing.”

He sat up, eyes bright with anger. “Yes I fucking can! After all the hell that bastard put me through, I should go in with actual guns. Are you armed?”

“I could be wrong.”

He gave him that slit eyed evil look again. “How often are you wrong?”

“Lots. I’m not infallible.”

He snorted in disbelief. “You picked a hell of a time to be humble.”

“Let’s just go in, have a drink, and think about this. Okay? Five minutes. It won’t be anything.”

He actually did think about it, but then he grimaced and shook his head, reaching blindly for the keys stuck in the ignition. “I need to do this now. Otherwise I’ll just start plotting his murder, and I don’t wanna go to jail ‘cause of that fuck.” He started the car so hard the flywheel seemed to grind for a moment, a stark mechanical noise that would have made him cringe if it wasn’t for the soft cushion of the drugs.

Holden drove on in silence, and Roan rested his head against the cool glass of the passenger window, watching the lights scud by like colorful ghosts. He knew he should say something, but he had no words of comfort, no consolation prize, and just stumbling along in the dark might make it worse, so it was better to just keep his fucking mouth shut.

One thing you learned right away as a detective was there were no really neat endings. People were messy, and as a result everything they did was messy. Neat was nice, and it was a happy goal, but it was unrealistic.

Holden occasionally muttered to himself, sniffed, wiped his eyes and nose, jiggled his knee impatiently at stop lights. This was a different side of Holden. Suddenly he wasn’t the slick hustler, a man who oozed sex and used it as an easy weapon and a shield to hide behind. Now he had been revealed as a real person, a heartbroken and furious son, an abandoned child who never took it as casually as he claimed, Roan felt honestly bad for him, and he wanted to tell him this him was a lot more attractive and appealing than the glittery sex bomb he usually was, but he might take that as a come on, so he kept these thoughts to himself. But how funny. Roan liked to keep his darkness up, hide behind his cynicism, but at the end of the day he was so fragile he needed pills to keep him from falling apart; Holden needed his sexual abandon, because it was better than looking at the pain. They were both pretty fucked up, but in different ways.

He remembered asking Holden why he did what he did, and Holden asking him right back why he did what he did, as they both thought each man was above his profession. Here was the answer to both questions - because this allowed them to run away from themselves. Holden pretended to be other men’s fantasies so he didn’t have to face himself, and Roan dug into the dirty bits of other people’s lives so he didn’t have to deal with his own. What fucked up little messes they were. No wonder they got along so well.

Finally Holden turned down a long street in a quiet suburban housing development that showed its wealth by the size of the front lawns and the spaces between the two and three story houses, many of which had obvious chandeliers shining through expansive dining room windows. There were also old fashioned style streetlights on every corner, elegant pools of light illuminating street names like Sycamore and Aspen. Holden turned down Willow Street, and eventually parked outside a two story home painted sand and ecru, lights burning yellow through windows shaped like perfect rectangles. It should have looked warm and inviting, but somehow it didn’t. Somehow it looked like another world, one that they shouldn’t even attempt to cross into.

But Holden checked his appearance in the rearview mirror, making sure it didn’t look like he was crying, and then got out of the car. Roan followed, but with some reluctance. He was going to be watching a car crash, someone’s life derailing messily, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He’d seen so many in this line of work and in his life in particular. “Are you sure about this?” he asked Holden, as he followed him up the neat concrete path to the front porch. “This is a point of no return.”

He sighed, shoulders bunching under his jacket. He glanced at him, but his face was only partially illuminated by the porch light. “No, that passed already. Now we’re just wading through the wreckage.”

He’d just encapsulated both their lives so perfectly it was insane. Roan didn’t bother to tell him, though.

Holden knocked on the door, and Roan lingered at the bottom of the porch, wanting to keep as much distance between himself and this as possible. The door was soon opened by a petite older woman with ash blond hair courtesy of Clairol, although her haircut was clearly from a more expensive salon uptown. Her clothes were demure, a brown patterned skirt that fell below the knee and a long sleeved blue blouse, and yet they seemed almost formal for a casual night at home. They weren’t expecting company, were they?

The woman audibly gasped. “Holden?” she asked, with genuine shock. There was a war on her face between fear and relief.

“Did you know?” he demanded.

She stared up at him in confusion. “What?”

“Where is he?” Holden asked, shoving past her and storming into the house. “Dad! Get your lying motherfucking ass out here!”

“Holden!” she scolded. “Don’t you call your father -”

“He called me a faggot - that means I can call him any fucking thing I want!”

Roan stepped on the porch, which creaked slightly, and that made her turn away from her son and glance at him with more than a little fear. He held out his hand and tried to look harmless, but couldn’t quite muster a smile. “Hello Mrs. Krause, I’m Roan McKichan.”

She took his hand and shook it, her grip more of a suggestion of a squeeze than an actual one. The fact that he introduced himself seemed to have calmed her a little. “You’re a … um, friend of Holden’s?”

He could hear the air quotes around “friend”. “Not in the way you mean. I’m the private investigator he had look into his parentage.”

Standing there in the open doorway with the blandly attractive Mrs. Krause, Roan saw things were much worse than Holden expected. He watched the color drain from her already pale face, her wanly painted lips part just slightly in a mostly swallowed gasp. He was disappointed, but not really surprised. “You knew, didn’t you?”

She started shaking her head, but it almost became a nod until she stopped herself. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I know his mother was a drug addict -”

“- and your husband’s mistress for several years.” She flinched at the word mistress. “This was going to come out eventually. You must have known that.”

She was going to deny it, he saw it on her face, but they were both distracted by loud male voices arguing in another part of the house. She went towards it, turning away from him, and he followed after her, drifting like a gnat in her wake.

Holden and the man that must have been Pastor Krause were arguing in the living room, the Pastor standing in front of a recliner that still had the shape of him indented in its brown leather, The TV was on, showing a couple in flashy costumes dancing across a stage lit up like Vegas. It seemed an oddly cheerful counterpoint to the emotional devastation in the room. “Daniel, please!” Mrs. Krause pleaded, but he ignored her, just like her son.

Daniel Krause was maybe just an inch shorter than Holden, but equally broad across the shoulders, although Dane had forty pounds on his son, mostly in the gut, although his whole frame looked soft, well fed. This wasn’t a man who had had to struggle for anything in the last couple of years, and Roan almost envied him that. He had a beefy face he usually would describe as Irish, starting to get a little jowly, now flushing red with rage. “ - my house, screaming like a -”

“You’re my fucking father!” Holden shouted back, cutting him off. “My real fucking father! When the fuck were you gonna tell me, huh?! Because I‘m a fag did you decide never to tell me?!”

Dane looked indignant. “What are you on about?”

“Daniel,” his wife said warningly.

He looked at her, and then his annoyed glance turned into an icy blue stared that impaled Roan where he stood. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Mr. Krause, I’m Roan McKichan, a private investigator -”

“He discovered your dirty little secret, Dad,” Holden interrupted, throwing a lot of sarcastic punch into “Dad”. “So is Zoë my full sister? Are you her dad too? Did you let her go to the fucking foster care system ‘cause she wasn’t the son you always wanted?”

Mrs. Krause put a hand over her mouth like she was trying not to scream or vomit, and unshed tears made Holden’s eyes shine like wet diamonds. The indignance was starting to drain out of Dane slowly, as the realization he’d been firmly caught in a lie was dawning on him. That quickly became panic, which translated into rage, which he turned on the easiest target: him, the interloper. “How dare you dig into our personal business!” Dane roared at him, spittle flying. “You have no right to -”

“Did you make the 911 call?” Roan asked him quietly. It was actually the codeine making him mellow, but it was a good way to defuse the tension.

It certainly stopped the pastor in his tracks. He looked at him in great confusion, his pale eyebrows drawing together to make a V over his nose. He wasn’t blond, his hair was just so light brown it was almost a driftwood color, something halfway between brown and something else. Yeah, there was a family resemblance between Holden and Dane, although Holden clearly got most of his looks from his mother. “What?”

“The night Catherine Williams overdosed, someone claiming to be a male neighbor made a 911 call about her, but the police were unable to find this male neighbor, and in point of fact, she didn’t actually have one. The cops didn’t investigate it after the coroner ascribed her death to “misadventure”, but a newspaper reporter at the time noted the discrepancy and told me all about it. Was it you, Mr. Krause? Are you the one on that 911 tape?”

The emotional tone of the room shifted dramatically, although the drugs allowed him to view it from a purely clinical level. Something in Holden’s face collapsed; the rage was still making his eyes incandescent, but now something in him had hit the pause button. Mrs. Krause was now shaking, her shoulders trembling like she was silently crying, her hand still pressed to her mouth like she was holding in the world’s biggest scream. He actually felt bad for her, even though she had been complicit in her husband’s lie all these year. She was a good wife; surely there was a special place in heaven for that. In fact, he hoped so for her sake, because there was no way in hell it was going to pay off in the Earthly realm.

The pastor was glaring at him anew with fiery rage, but the smell he was giving off with acidic, almost rancid with fear. He was terrified. Flop sweat started glistening on his forehead as faintly, in the background, people started applauding on television. Roan stared back at him blandly, waiting for him to decide what he was going to say. Finally, he asked, “Are you making an accusation?”

“No, I’m asking a question. That was you, wasn’t it?”

His lips drew into a tight line. “I don’t answer to you.”

“Why are you so scared?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Yes, you are. I can smell it.”

He actually saw the decision in Dane’s eyes, but he let him do it because he was too tired to bother to react. Dane grabbed him roughly by the collar of his shirt and slammed him back against the wall, hard enough to cause a painting to fall off and break on the sand colored carpet. It startled a yelp out of his wife. “Smell it? What kind of bullshit is this, you slimy -”

Holden grabbed his own father in a chokehold, the kind you could only learn on some very nasty streets where fighting was usually for keeps, and yanked him away, off his feet. He then turned and smoothly tossed his father across the room, where he landed on the couch. He could have ripped his head off, he could have pounded him into mush - if you survived the streets, gay or not, you were one tough motherfucker; that’s why Hakes only targeted the newbies - but he must have still had his rage under control. “If he says you’re lying, you’re lying,” Holden told him, stepping between Roan and his father. “And if you don’t knock this shit off, I’ll turn you over to him, you stupid fuck.”

That almost made Roan laugh. Did he expect him to lion out on his dad? It would really be much easier to subdue him with a take down hold. He was pushing sixty and was clearly out of shape, he wouldn’t be hard to put down. There’d be no need to call on his lion side; his Human side could easily beat the shit out of him. Being a cop had taught him how to do that, if nothing else.

Dane sat up and smoothed his rumpled shirt, attempting some dignity as he continued staring hatefully at Holden. Roan didn’t know how to break it to him that dignity went screaming out of the house a long while ago. “What’s that supposed to mean? Turn me over to him?”

“Did you kill her?” Holden insisted.

“Holden!” Mrs. Krause exclaimed, horrified.

But Holden just held a hand out, gesturing for the only mother he remembered to shut the fuck up. “Did you, you lying fucking bastard? Was she threatening to tell your wife or your congregation all about you? All about your bastard kids and your fucking around?”

“How dare you!” Dane shouted, jumping to his feet, meaty hands balled into fists at his side, red flushing his face and traveling down his neck. But the fear smell was still on him, sharp and sour, thick enough to make Roan wince. He could also see the pastor’s pulse beating in his throat; he was pushing fast towards a cardiac event. “You have no right to barge in here and insult me and accuse me of all these filthy things!”

Roan tuned out their shouting and edged up to Mrs. Krause, who jumped when she noticed how close he was in her peripheral vision. “Please put a stop to this before someone gets hurt,” he told her quietly.

She looked at him with large, watery eyes, tear tracks carved like claw marks in the makeup on her cheeks. “What? I can’t -”

“You know what happened, you know the truth,” he said, and he knew she did. It was just that look she gave him when he told her he was a private eye. It was the look of a condemned man who knows he deserves everything he’s about to get. “Stop this now.” She shook her head, more tears spilling out of her eyes, a fear smell coming off her now, vinegary and almost a little bit sweet. “Do it for your son,” he told her, playing the guilt card. But he knew she loved Holden. She had raised him as her own, and he wondered now if she’d kept her mouth shut more for his sake than her husband’s. The only one who knew for sure was her.

She shut her eyes tight, as if trying to will herself awake, force herself out of this nightmare, and took a step back, hugging herself as if for warmth. But after a moment, she said quietly, “Stop.” Dane and Holden were arguing too loudly to hear her, so she took a breath and shouted, “Stop!”

The men looked at her, but with a sense of disinterest - she was just the woman who didn’t want them to fight anymore. But she opened her eyes and gave her husband a stern look in spite of the tears, and Roan saw a brief flash of panic on Dane’s face as she turned her glance to Holden. “I’ll tell you what happened.”