Sins of the Fathers

by Lawrence Block

  "It all fits."

  "How?"

  "Too complicated to explain."

  "Meaning bugger off? I don't mind. The mere satisfaction of knowing I've been helpful, Matthew, is reward enough for me. It's not as though I'd want a story to tell my grandchildren in my old age."

  Chapter 12

  Eddie Koehler was away from his desk. I left a message for him to call me back, then went downstairs and picked up a paper at the newsstand in the lobby. I had worked my way through to Dear Abby when the phone rang.

  He thanked me for sending Kenny to him, his voice wary as he did so. I wasn't on the force, and he shouldn't have to kick any of it back to me.

  I set his mind at rest. "You could do me a little favor in return. You can find someone to make a few phone calls or look in the right books. I could probably do it myself, but it would take me three times as long."

  I spelled it out for him. It was an easy way for him to balance the books with me, and he was glad to grab it. He said he'd get back to me, and I told him I'd hang around and wait for his call.

  It came almost exactly an hour later. J.J. Cottrell, Inc., had had offices in the Kleinhans Building at William and Pine. The firm had published a Wall Street tip sheet for about a dozen years, going out of business at the time of the proprietor's death. The proprietor had been one Arnold P. Leverett, and he'd died two and a half years ago. There had been no one named Cottrell connected with the firm.

  I thanked him and rang off. That rounded things out neatly enough. I hadn't been able to find a Cottrell because there had never been one in the first place. It was reasonable to assume that Leverett had played some sort of role in Wendy Hanniford's life, but whether it had been a large or a small role was now no longer material. The man couldn't be reached for comment without the services of a medium.

  For the hell of it I put through a call to the Eden Roc and got the manager again. He remembered me. I asked him if he could check the same register for Leverett, and it didn't take him as long this time because he knew right away where to find the records. Not too surprisingly, his records indicated that Mr. and Mrs. Arnold P. Leverett had been guests of the Eden Roc from the fourteenth to the twentieth of September.

  So I had the name of one of the men in her life. If Leverett had left a widow, I could go and annoy her, but it would be hard to think up a less purposeful act. What I'd really accomplished was more negative than positive. I could now forget about tracing the man who had taken her to Florida, and I could quit wondering who in hell J.J. Cottrell was. He wasn't a person, he was a corporation, and he was out of business.

  I went around the corner to Armstrong's and sat at the bar. It had already been a long day, and the drive to Mamaroneck and back had tired me more than I realized. I figured on spending the rest of the night on that barstool, balancing coffee and bourbon until it was late enough to go back to my room and go to sleep.

  It didn't work out that way. After two drinks I thought of something to do and couldn't talk myself out of doing it. It looked to be a waste of time, but everything was a waste of time, one way or another, and evidently something in me demanded that I waste my time in this particular fashion.

  And it wasn't such a waste after all.

  I caught a cab on Ninth and listened to the driver bitch about the price of gasoline. It was all a conspiracy, he said, and he explained just how it was structured. The big oil companies were all owned by Zionists and by cutting off the oil they would turn public opinion in favor of the United States teaming up with Israel to seize the oil-rich Arab territory. He even found a way to tie it all in with the assassination of Kennedy. I forget which Kennedy.

  "It's my own theory," he said. "Whaddaya think of it?"

  "It's a theory."

  "Makes sense, doesn't it?"

  "I don't know that much about the subject."

  "Yeah, sure. That's the American public for you. Nobody knows from nothing. Nobody cares. Take a poll on a subject, any subject, and half the people got no opinion. No opinion! That's why the country's going to hell."

  "I figured there was a reason."

  He let me out in front of the library at Forty-second and Fifth. I walked between the stone lions and up the stairs to the Microfilm Room. I checked my notebook for the date of Arnold P. Leverett's death and filled out a slip. A sad-eyed girl in jeans and a plaid blouse brought me the appropriate spool of film.

  I threaded it into the scanner and started going through it. It's almost impossible to go through old issues of the Times on microfilm without getting sidetracked. Other stories catch your eye and waste your time. But I forced myself to locate the proper obituary page and read the article on Arnold Philip Leverett.

  He didn't warrant much space. Four paragraphs, and nothing tremendously exciting in any of them. He had died of a heart attack at his home in Port Washington. He had left a wife and three children. He had gone to various schools and worked for various stockbrokers before leaving in 1959 to start his own Wall Street newsletter, Cottrell's Weekly Analyzer. He had been fifty-eight years old at the time of his death. The last fact was the only one that could possibly be considered pertinent, and it only confirmed what I had already taken pretty much for granted.

  I wonder what makes people think of things. Maybe some other story caught the corner of my eye and jogged something loose in my mind. I don't know what did it, and I wasn't even aware of it until I had already left the Microfilm Room and gone halfway down the stairs. Then I turned around and went back where I'd come from and got the Times Index for 1959.

  That was the year Leverett started his tip sheet, so maybe that was what had triggered it. I looked through the Index and established that it was also the year in which Mrs. Martin Vanderpoel died.

  I hadn't really expected to find an obituary. She had been a clergyman's wife, but he wasn't all that prominent, a minister with a small congregation out in the wilds of Brooklyn. I'd been looking for nothing more than a death notice, but there was a regular Times obit, and when I had the right spool in the scanner and ran down the page with her obituary on it, I knew why they'd thought she was worth the space.

  Mrs. Martin Vanderpoel, the former Miss Frances Elizabeth Hegermann, had committed suicide. She had done so in the bathroom of the rectory of the First Reformed Church of Bay Ridge. She had slashed her wrists, and she had been discovered dead in the bathtub by her young son, Richard.

  I went back to Armstrong's, but it was the wrong place for the mood I was in. I headed uptown on Ninth and kept going after it turned into Columbus Avenue. I hit a lot of bars, stopping for a quick drink whenever I got tired of walking. There are plenty of bars on Columbus Avenue.

  I was looking for something but I didn't know what it was until I found it. I should have been able to tell in advance. I had had nights like this before, walking through bad streets, waiting for an opportunity to blow off some of the things that had been building up inside me.

  I got the chance on Columbus somewhere in the high Eighties. I had left a bar with an Irish name and Spanish-speaking customers, and I was letting myself walk with the rolling gait that is the special property of drunks and sailors. I saw movement in a doorway ten or twelve yards ahead of me, but I kept right on walking, and when he came out of the doorway with a knife in his hand, I knew I'd been looking for him for hours.

  He said, "Come on, come on, gimme your money."

  He wasn't a junkie. Everybody thinks they're all junkies, but they're not. Junkies break into apartments when nobody's home and take television sets and typewriters, small things they can turn into quick cash. Not more than one mugger out of five has a real jones. The other four do it because it beats working.

  And it lets them know how tough they are.

  He made sure I could see the knife blade. We were in the shadows, but the blade still caught a little light and flashed wickedly at me. It was a kitchen knife, wooden handle, six or seven inches of blade.

  I said, "Just take it easy."

&n
bsp; "Let's see that fucking money."

  "Sure," I said. "Just take it easy with the knife. Knives make me nervous."

  I suppose he was about nineteen or twenty. He'd had a fierce case of acne not too many years ago, and his cheeks and chin were pitted. I moved toward my inside breast pocket, and in an easy, rolling motion I dropped one shoulder, pivoted on my right heel, and kicked his wrist with my left foot. The knife sailed out of his hand.

  He went for it and that was a mistake because it landed behind him and he had to scramble for it. He should have done one of two things. He should have come straight at me or he should have turned around and run away but instead he went for the knife and that was the wrong thing to do.

  He never got within ten feet of it. He was off balance and scrambling, and I got a hand on his shoulder and spun him like a top. I threw a right, my hand open, and I caught him with the heel of my hand right under his nose. He yelped and put both hands to his face, and I hit him three or four times in the belly. When he folded up I cupped my hands on the back of his head and brought my knee up while I was bringing his head down.

  The impact was good and solid. I let go of him, and he stood in a dazed crouch, his legs bent at right angles at the knees. His body didn't know whether to straighten up or fall down. I took his chin in my hand and shoved, and that made the decision for him. He went up and over and sprawled on his back and stayed that way.

  I found a thick roll of bills in the right-hand pocket of his jeans. He wasn't looking to buy milk for his hungry brothers and sisters, not this one. He'd been carrying just under two hundred dollars on his hip. I tucked a single back in his pocket for the subway and added the rest to my wallet. He lay there without moving and watched the whole operation. I don't think he believed it was really happening.

  I got down on one knee. I picked up his right hand in my left hand and put my face close to his. His eyes were wide and he was frightened, and I was glad because I wanted him to be frightened. I wanted him to know just what fear was and just how it felt.

  I said, "Listen to me. These are hard, tough streets, and you are not hard enough or tough enough. You better get a straight job because you can't make it out here, you're too soft for it. You think it's easy out here, but it's harder than you ever knew, and now's your chance to learn it."

  I bent the fingers of his right hand back one at a time until they broke. Just the four fingers. I left his thumb alone. He didn't scream or anything. I suppose the terror blocked the pain.

  I took his knife along with me and dropped it in the first sewer I came to. Then I walked the two blocks to Broadway and caught a cab home.

  Chapter 13

  I don't think I actually slept at all.

  I got out of my clothes and into bed. I closed my eyes and slipped into the kind of dream you can have without being entirely asleep, aware that it was a dream, my consciousness standing off to one side and watching the dream like a jaded critic at the theater. Then a batch of things came together, and I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep and didn't want to, anyway.

  So I ran the shower as hot as it gets and stood by the side of the tub with the bathroom door closed to create an improvised steam bath. I sweated exhaustion and alcohol out of my system for half an hour or so. Then I lowered the temperature of the shower enough to make it bearable and stood under it. I finished with a minute under an ice-cold spray. I don't know if it's really good for you. I think it's just Spartan.

  I dried off and put on a clean suit. I sat on the bed and picked up the telephone. Allegheny turned out to have the flight I wanted. It was leaving LaGuardia at five forty-five and would get me where I was going a little after seven. I booked a round-trip ticket, return open.

  The Childs' at Fifty-eighth and Eighth stays open all night. I had corned beef hash and eggs and a lot of black coffee.

  It was very close to five o'clock when I got into the back of a Checker cab and told the driver to take me to the airport.

  THE flight had a stop in Albany. That's what took it so long. It touched down there on schedule. A few people got off, and a few other people got on, and the pilot put us into the air again. We never had time to level off on the second lap; we began our descent as soon as we stopped climbing. He bounced us around a little on the Utica runway, but it was nothing to complain about.

  "Have a good day," the stewardess said. "Take care now."

  Take care.

  It seems to me that people have only been saying that phrase on parting for the past few years or so. All of a sudden everyone started to say it, as if the whole country abruptly recognized that ours is a world which demands caution.

  I intended to take care. I wasn't too sure about having a good day.

  By the time I got from the airport into Utica itself, it was around seven thirty. A few minutes of twelve I called Cale Hanniford at his office. No one answered.

  I tried his home and his wife answered. I gave my name and she told me hers. "Mr. Scudder," she said tentatively. "Are you, uh, making any progress?"

  "Things are coming along," I said.

  "I'll get Cale for you."

  When he came on the line I told him I wanted to see him.

  "I see. Something you don't want to go into over the telephone?"

  "Something like that."

  "Well, can you come to Utica? It would be inconvenient for me to come to New York unless it's absolutely necessary, but you could fly up this afternoon or possibly tomorrow. It's not a long flight."

  "I know. I'm in Utica right now."

  "Oh?"

  "I'm in a Rexall drugstore at the corner of Jefferson and Mohawk. You could pick me up and we could go over to your office."

  "Certainly. Fifteen minutes?"

  "Fine."

  I recognized his Lincoln and was crossing the sidewalk to it as he pulled up in front of the drugstore. I opened the door and got in next to him. Either he wore a suit around the house as a matter of course or he had taken the trouble to put one on for the occasion. The suit was dark blue with an unobtrusive stripe.

  "You should have let me know you were coming," he said. "I could have picked you up at the airport."

  "This way I had a chance to see something of your city."

  "It's not a bad place. Probably very quiet by New York standards. Though that's not necessarily a bad thing."

  "No, it's not."

  "Ever been here before?"

  "Once, and that was years ago. The local police had picked up someone we wanted, so I came up to take him back to New York with me. I took the train that trip."

  "How was your flight today?"

  "All right."

  He was dying to ask me why I had dropped in on him like this, but he had manners. You didn't discuss business at lunch until the coffee was poured, and we wouldn't discuss our business until we were in his office. The Hanniford Drugs warehouse was on the western edge of town, and he had picked me up right in the heart of the downtown area. We managed small talk on the ride out. He pointed out things he thought might interest me, and I put on a show of being mildly interested. Then we were at the warehouse. They worked a five-day week and there were no other cars around, just a couple of idle trucks. He pulled the Lincoln to a stop next to a loading dock and led me up a ramp and inside. We walked down a hallway to his office. He turned on the overhead lights, pointed me to a chair, and seated himself behind his desk.

  "Well," he said.

  I didn't feel tired. It occurred to me that I ought to, no sleep, a lot of booze the night before. But I didn't feel tired. Not eager, either, but not tired.

  I said, "I came to report. I know as much about your daughter as I'll ever know, and it's as much as you need to know. I could spend more of my time and your money, but I don't see the point."

  "It didn't take you very long."

  His tone was neutral, and I wondered how he meant it. Was he admiring my efficiency or annoyed that his two thousand dollars had only purchased five days of my time?

  I s
aid, "It took long enough. I don't know that it would have taken any less time if you had given me everything in the beginning. Probably not. It would have made things a little easier for me, though."

  "I don't understand."

  "I can understand why you didn't. You felt I had all I needed to know. If I had just been looking for facts you might have been right, but I was looking for facts that would make up a picture, and I'd have done better knowing everything in front." He was puzzled, and the heavy dark eyebrows were elevated above the top rims of his glasses. I said, "The reason I didn't let you know I was coming was that I had some things to do in Utica. I caught a dawn flight up here, Mr. Hanniford. I spent about five hours learning things you could have told me five days ago."