Sins of the Fathers

by Lawrence Block

  He sighed, fixed his eyes on mine. "How much of this did you guess at, Scudder?"

  "A little of it. I thought it might even have gone farther than that."

  "I'm not an animal."

  "People do things you wouldn't believe. And they aren't always animals. What happened the last time you saw Wendy?"

  "I've never told anyone about this. Why do I have to tell you?"

  "You don't. But you want to."

  "Do I?" He sighed again. "She was home from college. Everything was the way it had always been, but there was something about her that was different. I suppose she had already established a pattern of getting involved with older men."

  "Yes."

  "She came home late one night. She'd gone out alone. Perhaps she let someone pick her up, I don't know." He closed his eyes and looked back at that evening. "I was awake when she came home. I wasn't purposely waiting up for her. My wife had gone to sleep early, and I had a book I wanted to read. Wendy came home around one or two in the morning. She'd been drinking. She wasn't reeling, but she was at least slightly drunk.

  "I saw a side of her I had never seen before. She... she propositioned me."

  "Just like that?"

  "She asked me if I wanted to fuck. She said... obscene things. Described acts she wanted to perform with me. She tried to grab me."

  "What did you do?"

  "I slapped her."

  "I see."

  "I told her she was drunk. I told her to go upstairs and get to bed. I don't know if the slap sobered her, but a shadow passed over her face and she turned away without a word and climbed the stairs. I didn't know what to do. I thought perhaps I ought to go to her and tell her it was all right, that we would just forget about it. In the end I did nothing. I sat up for another hour or so, then went to bed myself." He looked up. "And in the morning we both pretended nothing had happened. Neither of us ever referred to the incident again."

  I drank what was in my glass. It all meshed now, every bit of it.

  "The reason I didn't go to her... I was sickened by the way she acted. Disgusted. But something in me was... excited."

  I nodded.

  "I'm not sure I trusted myself to go to her room that night, Scudder."

  "Nothing would have happened."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Everybody has mean little places inside himself. It's the ones who aren't aware of them who fly off the handle. You were able to see what was happening. That made you capable of keeping a lid on it."

  "Maybe."

  After a while I said, "I don't think you have much to blame yourself for. It seems to me that everything was already set in motion before you were in a position to do anything about it. It wasn't a one-sided thing when you responded physically to Wendy squirming around on your lap. She was behaving seductively, although I'm sure she didn't realize it at the time. It all fits together-competing with her mother, trying to find Daddy hiding inside every older man she found attractive. Lots of girls try to seduce professors, you know, and most professors learn to be very good at discouraging that sort of thing. Wendy had a pretty high success ratio. She was evidently very good at it."

  "It's funny."

  "What is?"

  "Earlier you made her sound like a victim. Now she sounds like a villain."

  "Everybody's both."

  NEITHER of us had very much to say on the way out to the airport. He seemed more relaxed than before, but I had no way of knowing how much of that was just on the surface. If I'd done him any good, I'd done so less by what I had found out for him than by what I'd made him tell me. There were priests and psychiatrists who would have listened to him, and they probably would have done him more good than I did, but I'd been elected instead.

  At one point I said, "Whatever blame you decide to assign yourself, keep one thing in mind. Wendy was in the process of turning out all right. I don't know how long it would have taken her to find a cleaner way of making a living, but I doubt it would have been much more than a year."

  "You can't be certain of that."

  "I certainly can't prove it."

  "That makes it worse, doesn't it? It makes it more tragic."

  "It makes it more tragic. I don't know if that's better or worse."

  "What? Oh, I see. That's an interesting distinction."

  I went to the Allegheny desk. There was a flight to New York within the hour, and I checked in for it. When I turned around, Hanniford was standing next to me with a check in his hand. I asked him what it was for. He said I hadn't mentioned more money and he didn't know what constituted a fair payment, but he was pleased with the job I had done for him and he wanted to give me a bonus.

  I didn't know what was fair payment, either. But I remembered what I had told Lewis Pankow. When somebody hands you money, you take it. I took it.

  I didn't get around to unfolding it until I was on the plane. It was for a thousand dollars. I'm still not sure why he gave it to me.

  Chapter 14

  In my hotel room I opened a paperback dictionary of saints and flipped through it. I found myself reading about St. Mary Goretti, who was born in Italy in 1890. When she was twelve a young man began making overtures to her. Eventually he attempted to ravish her and threatened to kill her if she resisted. She did, and he did, stabbing her over and over again with his knife. She died within twenty-four hours.

  After eight years of unrepentant imprisonment her murderer had a change of heart, I learned. At the end of twenty-seven years he was released, and on Christmas Day, 1937, he contrived to receive Communion side by side with Mary's widowed mother. He has since been cited as an example by those who advocate the abolition of capital punishment.

  I always find something interesting in that book.

  * * *

  I went next door for dinner but didn't have much appetite. The waiter offered to put my leftover steak in a doggie bag. I told him not to bother.

  So I went around the corner to Armstrong's and wound up at the corner table in back where it had all started just a few days ago. Cale Hanniford walked into my life on Tuesday, and now it was Saturday. It seemed as though it had been a lot longer than that.

  It had started on Tuesday as far as I was concerned, but it had in fact started a lot earlier than that, and I sipped bourbon and coffee and wondered how far you could trace it back. At some point or other it had probably become inevitable, but I didn't know just when that point was. There was a day when Richie Vanderpoel and Wendy Hanniford met each other, and that had to be a turning point of one sort or another, but maybe their separate ends had been charted far in advance of that date and their meeting only arranged that they would happen to one another. Maybe it went a lot further back, to Robert Blohr dying in Korea and Margaret Vanderpoel opening her veins in her bathtub.

  Maybe it was Eve's fault, messing around with apples. Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

  * * *

  "Buy a lady a drink?"

  I looked up. It was Trina, dressed in civilian clothes and wearing a smile that faded as she studied my face. "Hey," she said. "Where were you?"

  "Chasing private thoughts."

  "Want to be alone?"

  "That's the last thing I want. Did you say something about buying you a drink?"

  "It was an idea I had, yes."

  I flagged the waiter and ordered a stinger for her and another of the same for myself. She talked about a couple of strange customers she'd had the night before. We coasted through a few rounds on small talk, and then she reached out a hand and touched the tip of my chin with her finger.

  "Hey."

  "Hey?"

  "Hey, you're in a bad way. Troubles?"

  "I had a rotten day. I flew upstate and had a conversation that wasn't much fun."

  "The business you were telling me about the other night?"

  "Was I talking about it with you? Yes, I guess I was."

&nb
sp; "Feel like talking about it now?"

  "Maybe a little later."

  "Sure."

  We sat for a while, not saying much. The place was quiet as it often is on Saturdays. At one point two kids came in and walked over to the bar. I didn't recognize them.

  "Matt, is something wrong?"

  I didn't answer her. The bartender sold them a couple of six-packs and they left. I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

  "Matt?"

  "Just a reflex. I thought the place was about to be held up. Put it down to nerves."

  "Sure." Her hand covered mine. "Getting late," she said.

  "Is it?"

  "Kind of. Would you walk me home? It's just a couple of blocks."

  SHE lived on the tenth floor of a new building on Fifty-sixth between Ninth and Tenth. The doorman roused himself enough to flash her a smile. "There's some booze," she told me, "and I can make better coffee than Jimmie can. Want to come up?"

  "I'd like to."

  Her apartment was a studio, one large room with an alcove that held a narrow bed. She showed me where to hang my coat and put on a stack of records. She said she'd put on some coffee, and I told her to forget about the coffee. She made drinks for both of us. She curled up on a red plush sofa and I sat in a frayed gray armchair.

  "Nice place," I said.

  "It's getting there. I want pictures for the walls and some of the furniture will have to be replaced eventually, but in the meantime it suits me."

  "How long have you been here?"

  "Since October. I lived uptown, and I hated taking cabs to and from work."

  "Were you ever married, Trina?"

  "For three years, almost. I've been divorced for four."

  "Ever see your ex?"

  "I don't even know what state he lives in. I think he's out on the Coast, but I'm not sure. Why?"

  "No reason. You didn't have any kids?"

  "No. He didn't want to. Then when things fell apart I was glad we didn't. You?"

  "Two boys."

  "That must be rough."

  "I don't know. Sometimes, I guess."

  "Matt? What would you have done if there was a holdup tonight?"

  I thought it over. "Nothing, probably. Nothing I could do, really. Why?"

  "You didn't see yourself when it was going on. You looked like a cat getting ready to spring."

  "Reflexes."

  "All those years being a cop."

  "Something like that."

  She lit a cigarette. I got the bottle and freshened our drinks. Then I was sitting on the couch next to her and telling her about Wendy and Richard, telling her just about all of it. I don't know whether it was her or the booze or a combination of the two, but it was suddenly very easy to talk about it, very important that I talk about it.

  And I said, "The impossible thing was knowing how much to tell the man. He was afraid of what he might have done to her, either by limiting his affection for her or by behaving seductively toward her without knowing it himself. I can't find those answers any better than he can. But other things. The murder, the way his daughter died. How much of that was I supposed to tell him?"

  "Well, he already knew all that, didn't he, Matt?"

  "I guess he knew what he had to know."

  "I don't follow you."

  I started to say something, then let it go. I poured more booze in both our glasses. She looked at me. "Trying to get me drunk?"

  "Trying to get us both drunk."

  "Well, I think it's working. Matt-"

  I said, "It's hard to know just how much a person has any right to do. I suppose I was on the force too long. Maybe I never should have left. Do you know about that?"

  She averted her eyes. "Somebody said something once."

  "Well, if that hadn't happened, would I have left anyway sooner or later? I always wonder about that. There was a great security in being a cop. I don't mean the job security, I mean the emotional security. There weren't as many questions, and the ones that came up were likely to have obvious answers, or at least they seemed obvious at the time.

  "Let me tell you a story. This happened maybe ten years ago. Maybe twelve. It also happened in the Village and it involved a girl in her twenties. She was raped and murdered in her own apartment. Nylon stocking wrapped around her neck." Trina shuddered. "Now this one wasn't open-and-shut, there was nobody running around the streets with her blood on him. It was one of those cases where you just keep digging, you check out everybody who ever said boo to the girl, everybody in the building, everybody who knew her at work, every man who played any role whatsoever in her life. Christ, we must have talked to a couple of hundred people.

  "Well, there was one guy I liked for it from the start. Big brawny son of a bitch, he was the super in the building she lived in. Ex-Navy man, got out on a bad-conduct discharge. We had a sheet on him. Two arrests for assault, both dropped when the complainants refused to press charges. Complainants in both cases were women.

  "All that is enough reason to check him out down to the ground. Which we did. And the more I talked to him the more I knew the son of a bitch did it. Sometimes you just plain know.

  "But he had himself covered. We had the time of death pinpointed to within an hour, and his wife was prepared to swear on a stack of bibles that he'd spent the entire day never out of her sight. And we had nothing on the other side of it, not one scrap of anything to place him in the girl's apartment at the time of the murder. Nothing at all. Not even a lousy fingerprint, and even if we did, it meant nothing because he was the super and he could have put his prints there fixing the plumbing or something. We had nothing, not a smell of anything, and the only reason we knew he did it was we simply knew, and no district attorney would dream of trying to run that by a grand jury.

  "So we checked out everybody else who was vaguely possible. And of course we didn't get anywhere because there was nowhere to get, and the case wound up in the open file, which meant we knew it was never going to be closed out, which meant to all intents and purposes it was closed already because nobody would bother to look at it anymore."

  I got to my feet, walked across the room. I said, "But we knew he did it, see, and it was driving us crazy. I don't know how many people get away with murder every year. A lot more than anyone realizes. This Ruddle, though, we knew he was our boy, and we still couldn't do anything about it. That was his name, Jacob Ruddle.

  "So after the case was marked open, my partner and I, we couldn't get it out of our heads. Just couldn't get it out of our heads, there wasn't a day one of us didn't bring it up. So eventually we went to this Ruddle and asked him if he'd take a polygraph test. You know what that is?"

  "A lie detector?"

  "A lie detector. We were completely straight with him, we told him he could refuse to take the test, and we also told him it couldn't be entered in evidence against him, which it can't. I'm not sure that's a good idea, incidentally, but that's the law.

  "He agreed to take the test. Don't ask me why. Maybe he thought it would look suspicious of him to refuse, although he must have known we damn well knew he killed her and nothing was going to make him stop looking suspicious to us. Or maybe he honestly thought he could beat the machine. Well, he took the test, and I made sure we had the best operator available to administer the test, and the results were just what we expected."

  "He was guilty?"

  "No question about it. It nailed him to the wall, but there was nothing we could do with it. I told him the machine said he was lying. `Well, those machines must make a few mistakes now and then,' he said, `because it made one right now.' And he looked me right in the eye, and he knew I didn't believe him, and he knew there was nothing on earth I could do about it."

  "God."

  I went over and sat down next to her again. I sipped some of my drink and closed my eyes for a moment, remembering the look in that bastard's eyes.

  "What did you do?"

  "My partner and I tossed it back and forth. My partn
er wanted to put him in the river."

  "You mean kill him?"

  "Kill him and set him in cement and drop him somewhere in the Hudson."

  "You wouldn't do a thing like that."

  "I don't know. I might have gone along with it. See, he did it, he killed that girl, and he was an odds-on candidate to do it again sooner or later. Oh, hell, that wasn't all of it. Knowing he did it, knowing he knew we knew he did it, and sending the bastard home. Putting him in the river started sounding like a hell of a good idea, and I might have done it if I hadn't thought of something better."