Sins of the Fathers

by Lawrence Block

  "Wendy Hanniford?"

  "Yes. An evil, Devil-ridden woman. She took my son away from me, away from his religion, away from God. She led him away from good paths and unto the paths of evil." His voice was picking up a timbre, and I could imagine his forcefulness in front of a congregation. "It was my son who killed her. But it was she who killed something within him, who made it possible for him to kill." His voice dropped in pitch, and he held his hands palms down at his sides. "And so I cannot mourn Wendy Hanniford. I can regret that her death came at Richard's hands, I can profoundly regret that he then took his own life, but I cannot mourn your client's daughter."

  He let his hands drop, lowered his head. I couldn't see his eyes, but his face was troubled, wrapped up in chains of good and evil. I thought of the sermon he would preach on Sunday, thought of all the different roads to Hell and all the paving stones therein. I pictured Martin Vanderpoel as a long, lean Sisyphus arduously rolling the boulders into place.

  I said, "Your son was in Manhattan a year and a half ago. That was when he went to work for Burghash Antiques." He nodded. "So he left here some six months before he began sharing Wendy Hanniford's apartment."

  "That is correct."

  "But you feel she led him astray."

  "Yes." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "My son left my home shortly after his high school graduation. I did not approve, but neither did I object violently. I would have wanted Richard to go to college. He was an intelligent boy and would have done well in college. I had hopes, naturally enough, that he might follow me into the ministry. I did not force him in this direction, however. One must determine for oneself whether one has a vocation. I am not fanatical on the subject, Mr. Scudder. I would prefer to see a son of mine as a contented and productive doctor or lawyer or businessman than as a discontented minister of the gospel.

  "I realized that Richard had to find himself. That's a fashionable term with the young these days, is it not? He had to find himself. I understood this. I expected that this process of self-discovery would ultimately lead him to enter college after a year or two. I hoped this would occur, but in any event I saw no cause for alarm. Richard had an honest job, he was living in a decent Christian residence, and I felt that his feet were on a good path. Not perhaps the path he would ultimately pursue, but one that was correct for him at that point in his life.

  "Then he met Wendy Hanniford. He lived in sin with her. He became corrupted by her. And, ultimately-"

  I remembered a bit of men's-room graffiti: Happiness is when your son marries a boy of his own faith. Evidently Richie Vanderpoel had functioned as some variety of homosexual without his father ever suspecting anything. Then he moved in with a girl, and his father was shattered.

  I said, "Reverend Vanderpoel, a great many young people live together nowadays without being married."

  "I recognize this, Mr. Scudder. I do not condone it, but I could hardly fail to recognize it."

  "But your feeling in this case was more than a matter of not condoning it."

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because Wendy Hanniford was evil."

  I was getting the first twinges of a headache. I rubbed the center of my forehead with the tips of my fingers. I said, "What I want more than anything else is to be able to give her father a picture of her. You say she was evil. In what way was she evil?"

  "She was an older woman who enticed an innocent young man into an unnatural relationship."

  "She was only three or four years older than Richard."

  "Yes, I know. In chronological terms. In terms of worldliness she was ages his senior. She was promiscuous. She was amoral. She was a creature of perversion."

  "Did you ever actually meet her?"

  "Yes," he said. He breathed in and out. "I met her once. Once was enough."

  "When did that take place?"

  "It's hard for me to remember. I believe it was during the spring. April or May, I would say."

  "Did he bring her here?"

  "No. No, Richard surely knew better than to bring that woman into my house. I went to the apartment where they were living. I went specifically to meet with her, to talk to her. I picked a time when Richard would be working at his job."

  "And you met Wendy."

  "I did."

  "What did you hope to accomplish?"

  "I wanted her to end her relationship with my son."

  "And she refused."

  "Oh, yes, Mr. Scudder. She refused." He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. "She was foulmouthed and abusive. She taunted me. She-I don't want to go into this further, Mr. Scudder. She made it quite clear that she had no intention of giving Richard up. It suited her to have him living with her. The entire interview was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life."

  "And you never saw her again."

  "I did not. I saw Richard on several occasions, but not in that apartment. I tried to talk to him about that woman. I made no progress whatsoever. He was utterly infatuated with her. Sex-evil, unscrupulous sex-gives certain women an extraordinary hold upon susceptible men. Man is a weakling, Mr. Scudder, and he is so often powerless to cope with the awful force of an evil woman's sexuality." He sighed heavily. "And in the end she was destroyed by means of her own evil nature. The sexual spell she cast upon my son was the instrument of her own undoing."

  "You make her sound like a witch."

  He smiled slightly. "A witch? Indeed I do. A less enlightened generation than our own would have seen her burned at the stake for witchcraft. Nowadays we speak of neuroses, of psychological complications, of compulsion. Previously we spoke of witchcraft, of demonic possession. I wonder sometimes if we're as enlightened now as we prefer to think. Or if our enlightenment does us much good."

  "Does anything?"

  "Pardon?"

  "I was wondering if anything did us much good."

  "Ah," he said. He took off his glasses and perched them on his knee. I hadn't seen the color of his eyes before. They were a light blue flecked with gold. He said, "You have no faith, Mr. Scudder. Perhaps that accounts for your cynicism."

  "Perhaps."

  "I would say that God's love does us a great deal of good. In the next world if not in this one."

  I decided I would rather deal with one world at a time. I asked if Richie had had faith.

  "He was in a period of doubt. He was too preoccupied with his attempt at self-realization to have room for the realization of the Lord."

  "I see."

  "And then he fell under the spell of the Hanniford woman. I use the word advisedly. He literally fell under her spell."

  "What was he like before that?"

  "A good boy. An aware, interested, involved young man."

  "You never had any problems with him?"

  "No problems." He put his glasses back on. "I cannot avoid blaming myself, Mr. Scudder."

  "For what?"

  "For everything. What is it that they say? `The cobbler's children always go barefoot.' Perhaps that maxim applies in this case. Perhaps I devoted too much attention to my congregation and too little attention to my son. I had to raise him by myself, you see. That did not seem a difficult chore at the time. It may have been more difficult than I ever realized."

  "Richard's mother-"

  He closed his eyes. "I lost my wife almost fifteen years ago," he said.

  "I didn't know that."

  "It was hard for both of us. For Richard and for myself. In retrospect I think that I should have married again. I never... never entertained the idea. I was able to have a housekeeper, and my own duties facilitated my spending more time with him than the average father might have been able to manage. I thought that was sufficient."

  "And now you don't think so?"

  "I don't know. I occasionally think there is very little we can do to change our destiny. Our lives play themselves out according to a master plan." He smiled briefly. "That is either a very comforting thing to believe or quite the opposite, Mr.
Scudder."

  "I can see how it could be."

  "Other times I think there ought to have been something I could have done. Richard was drawn very much into himself. He was shy, reticent, very much a private person."

  "Did he have much of a social life? I mean during high school, while he was living here."

  "He had friends."

  "Did he date?"

  "He wasn't interested in girls at that time. He was never interested in girls until he came into that woman's clutches."

  "Did it bother you that he wasn't interested in girls?"

  That was as close as I cared to come to intimating that Richie was interested in boys instead. If it registered at all, Vanderpoel didn't show it. "I was not concerned," he said. "I took it for granted that Richard would ultimately develop a fine and healthy loving relationship with the girl who would eventually become his wife and bear his children. That he was not involved in social dating in the meantime did not upset me. If you were in a position to see what I see, Mr. Scudder, you would realize that a great deal of trouble stems from too much involvement of one sex with the other sex. I have seen girls pregnant in their early teens. I have seen young men forced into marriage at a very tender age. I have seen young people afflicted with unmentionable diseases. No, I was if anything delighted that Richard was a late bloomer in this area."

  He shook his head. "And yet," he said, "perhaps if he had been more experienced, perhaps if he had been less innocent, he would not have been so easy a victim for Miss Hanniford."

  We sat for a few moments in silence. I asked him a few more things without getting anything significant in reply. He asked again if I wanted a cup of coffee. I declined and said it was time I was getting on my way. He didn't try to persuade me to stay.

  I got my coat from the vestibule closet where the housekeeper had stashed it. As I was putting it on I said, "I understand you saw your son once after the killing."

  "Yes."

  "In his cell."

  "That is correct." He winced almost imperceptibly at the recollection. "We didn't speak at length. I tried only to do what little I could to put his mind at rest. Evidently I failed. He... he elected to mete out his own punishment for what he had done."

  "I talked to the lawyer his case was assigned to. A Mr. Topakian."

  "I didn't meet the man myself. After Richard... took his own life... well, I saw no point in seeing the lawyer. And I couldn't bring myself to do it."

  "I understand." I finished buttoning my coat. "Topakian said Richard had no memory of the actual murder."

  "Oh?"

  "Did your son say anything to you about it?"

  He hesitated for a moment, and I didn't think he was going to answer. Then he gave his head an impatient shake. "There's no harm in saying it now, is there? Perhaps he was speaking truthfully to the lawyer, perhaps his memory was clouded at the time." He sighed again. "Richard told me he had killed her. He said he did not know what had come over him."

  "Did he give any explanation?"

  "Explanation? I don't know if you would call it an explanation, Mr. Scudder. It explained certain things to me, however."

  "What did he say?"

  He looked off over my shoulder, searching his mind for the right words. Finally he said, "He told me that there was a sudden moment of awful clarity when he saw her face. He said it was as if he had been given a glimpse of the Devil and knew only that he must destroy, destroy."

  "I see."

  "Without absolving my son, Mr. Scudder, I nevertheless hold Miss Hanniford responsible for the loss of her own life. She snared him, she blinded him to her real self, and then for a moment the veil slipped aside, the blindfold was loosed from around his eyes, and he saw her plain. And saw, I feel certain, what she had done to him, to his life."

  "You almost sound as though you feel it was right for him to kill her."

  He stared at me, eyes briefly wide in shock. "Oh, no," he said. "Never that. One does not play God. It is God's province to punish and reward, to give and to take away. It is not Man's."

  I reached for the doorknob, hesitated. "What did you say to Richard?"

  "I scarcely remember. There was little to be said, and I'm afraid I was in too deep a state of personal shock to be very communicative. My son asked my forgiveness. I gave him my blessing. I told him he should look to the Lord for forgiveness." At close range his blue eyes were magnified by the thick lenses. There were tears in their corners. "I only hope he did," he said. "I only hope he did."

  Chapter 8

  I got out of bed while the sky was still dark. I still had the same headache I'd gone to bed with. I went into the bathroom, swallowed a couple of aspirins, then forced myself to put in some time under a hot shower. By the time I was dry and dressed, the headache was mostly gone and the sky was starting to brighten up.

  My head was full of fragments of conversation from the night before. I'd returned from Brooklyn with a headache and a thirst, and I'd treated the second more thoroughly than the first. I remember a sketchy conversation with Anita on Long Island-the boys were fine, they were sleeping now, they'd like to come in to New York and see me, maybe stay overnight if it was convenient. I'd said that would be great, but I was working on a case right now. "The cobbler's children always go barefoot," I told her. I don't think she knew what I was talking about.

  I got to Armstrong's just as Trina was going off duty. I bought her a couple of stingers and told her a little about the case I was working on. "His mother died when he was six or seven years old," I said. "I hadn't known that."

  "Does it make a difference, Matt?"

  "I don't know."

  After she left I sat by myself and had a few more drinks. I was going to have a hamburger toward the end, but they had already closed the kitchen. I don't know what time I got back to my room. I didn't notice, or didn't remember.

  I had breakfast and a lot of coffee next door at the Red Flame. I thought about calling Hanniford at his office. I decided it could wait.

  The clerk in the branch post office on Christopher Street informed me that forwarding addresses were only kept active for a year. I suggested that he could check the back files, and he said it wasn't his job and it could be very time-consuming and he was overworked as it was. That would have made him the first overworked postal employee since Benjamin Franklin. I took a hint and palmed him a ten-dollar bill. He seemed surprised, either at the amount or at being given anything at all besides an argument. He went off into a back room and returned a few minutes later with an address for Marcia Maisel on East Eighty-fourth near York Avenue.

  The building was a high-rise with underground parking and a lobby that would have served a small airport. There was a little waterfall with pebbles and plastic plants. I couldn't find a Maisel in the directory of tenants. The doorman had never heard of her. I managed to find the super, and he recognized the name. He said she'd gotten married a few months ago and moved out. Her married name was Mrs. Gerald Thal. He had an address for her in Mamaroneck.

  I got her number from Westchester Information and dialed it. It was busy the first three times. The fourth time around it rang twice and a woman answered.

  I said, "Mrs. Thal?"

  "Yes?"

  "My name is Matthew Scudder. I'd like to talk to you about Wendy Hanniford."

  There was a long silence, and I wondered if I had the right person after all. I'd found a stack of old magazines in a closet of Wendy's apartment with Marcia Maisel's name and the Bethune Street address on them. It was possible that there had been a false connection somewhere along the way-the postal clerk could have pulled the wrong Maisel, the superintendent could have picked the wrong card out of his file.

  Then she said, "What do you want from me?"

  "I want to ask you a few questions."

  "Why me?"

  "You lived in the Bethune Street apartment with her."

  "That was a long time ago." Long ago, and in another country. And besides, the wench is dead. "I have
n't seen Wendy in years. I don't even know if I would recognize her. Would have recognized her."

  "But you did know her at one time."

  "So what? Would you hold on? I have to get a cigarette." I held on. She returned after a moment and said, "I read about it in the newspapers, of course. The boy who did it killed himself, didn't he?"

  "Yes."

  "Then why drag me into it?"