Moondogs - Alexander Yates [161]
She stared at him quietly, almost coldly, as though weighing options. Then she returned to the suitcase, unzipped the external pouch and extracted something no bigger than a dime. She dropped it into Benicio’s hand, and he felt a little sick. It was a stray piece of the birth control packet that he’d destroyed on the night she arrived. “I assumed I’d left them home, at first,” she said. “So I filled a new prescription at the drugstore in Glorietta.” The anger had drained from her voice. “How’s this for an excuse to bail?”
“It’s a good excuse,” Benicio said. He’d forgotten about the infantile act—it’d happened only minutes before he overheard Solita ransacking his father’s room, and he hadn’t given the pills a thought since. “That was a creepy, fucked-up thing for me to do,” he said, keeping his voice even. He felt that there was a lot riding on the next thirty seconds or so. “I don’t have a good excuse. My bad excuses are that I was upset and overtired. And I didn’t do it for … I did it out of guilt. We’d just had sex, and I felt really good, and I felt really guilty about that. I felt like we should cool it.”
“Well, now I feel like we should cool it,” Alice said. “I’m not leaving you, but I’m leaving. And you should take your time coming back.”
Benicio stood and went to her. “I don’t want you to go,” he said.
Alice teared up and let him hold her. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t be all you’ve got.”
Then she pulled out of his grip and returned to her suitcase, unpacking and repacking.
BENICIO WAS STILL UPSET when he met with the young man from Crespo Funeral Services in his father’s suite. The shy mortician was joined—to Benicio’s surprise—by Hon and a somber-looking Bobby Dancer. “I hope we’re not intruding,” Bobby said.
“You were Howard’s friends,” Benicio said. “You’re welcome.” He led them to his father’s study where they sat in leather office-style swivel chairs circling the round table. The funeral director glanced nervously from the kitchenette to the balcony doors as he laid out Howard’s pre-need contract. Signed in the summer of 1999, it originally stipulated that should Howard die in-country Crespo would restore and embalm the body and ship it back to Chicago for a service and interment. But just four months ago—a month after Ursula’s death—Howard had amended the pre-need to stipulate that his remains not leave Philippine soil. He’d ordered cremation and a private service held on a parcel of land he owned near Mainit Point, in Batangas. After the service his ashes were to be scattered in the ocean.
“Which brings me to the problem,” the funeral director said, even more nervous now. “Your father’s body is still at Makati Medical. The court has filed an injunction barring my people from proceeding with the cremation until a paternity suit is resolved. There’s an outstanding petition to collect samples—”
“You know who’s doing it,” Bobby said.
The muscles in Benicio’s face loosened. He walked to the kitchenette and poured bottled water into a tumbler. He emptied it in small sips. When he returned to the study he found that his legs wouldn’t bend to sit. “Do I have any options?”
“That depends,” Bobby said. “Do you have any idea if Howard is the father?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, she’s a liar—I’ve caught her at it more than once. But I’m not sure. He could be.”
“Well then, not many,” Hon said. “The judge has scheduled an emergency session to hear the petition, but that won’t happen until five days after the funeral. If you knew the suit was bogus you could grant the samples whenever … but if you don’t know, you shouldn’t chance it.”
“You could contact her lawyer,” Bobby said, “and offer them something. They don’t know how much money Howard has. They may settle and drop it. Or—”
“Or it could be gas on the fire,” Hon interrupted. “They’ll see an offer as a sign of weakness, because that’s what it is. They’ll turn it down, and in the end you’ll have a lawsuit. And you’ll lose it. Howie was