Lawrence Block - Scudder 1979 - Sins of the Fathers

by Sins of the Fathers(lit)

  "What's so funny?"

  I took a shower and put my clothes back on again. It had been snowing hesitantly earlier, and now it was beginning to accumulate. I walked around the corner to Armstrong's and took a stool at the bar.

  He lived with her like brother and sister. He killed her and shrieked that he had fucked his mother. He rushed out into the street covered with her blood.

  I knew too few facts, and the ones I did know did not seem to fit together.

  I drank a few drinks and sidestepped a few conversations. I looked around for Trina, but she had left when her shift ended. I let the bartender tell me what was the matter with the Knicks this year. I don't remember what he said, just that he felt very strongly about it.

  Chapter 5

  Gordon Kalish had an old-fashioned pendulum clock on his wall, the kind that used to hang in railway stations. He kept glancing at it and checking the time against his wristwatch. At first I thought he was trying to tell me something. Later I realized it was a habit. Early in life someone must have told him his time was valuable. He had never forgotten, but he still couldn't entirely make himself believe it.

  He was a partner in Bowdoin Realty Management. I had arrived at the company's offices in the Flatiron Building a few minutes after ten and waited for about twenty minutes until Kalish could give me a chunk of his time. Now he had papers and ledgers spread out on his desk and was apologetic that he couldn't be more helpful.

  "We rented the apartment to Miss Hanniford herself," he said. "She may have had a roommate from the beginning. If so, she didn't tell us about it. She was the tenant of record. She could have had anyone living with her, man or woman, and we wouldn't have known about it. Or cared."

  "She had a female roommate when Miss Antonelli moved in as superintendent. I'd like to contact that woman."

  "I have no way of knowing who she was. Or when she moved in or out. As long as Miss Hanniford came up with the rent the first of every month, and as long as she didn't create a nuisance, we had no reason to take any further interest." He scratched his head. "If there was another woman and she moved out, wouldn't the post office have a forwarding address?"

  "I'd need her name to get it."

  "Oh, of course." His eyes went to the clock, then to his watch, then again to me. "It was a very different matter when my father first got into the business. He ran things on a much more personal basis. He was a plumber originally. He saved his money and bought property, a building at a time. Did all his own repair work, put the profits from one building into the acquisition of another. And he knew his tenants. He went around to collect the rent in person. The first of the month, or once a week in some of the buildings. He would carry certain tenants for months if they were going through hard times. Others he had out on the street if they were five days late. He said you had to be a good judge of people."

  "He must have been quite a man."

  "He still is. He's retired now, of course. He's been living down in Florida for five or six years now. Picks oranges off his own trees. And still pays his dues in the plumbers union every year." He clasped his hands together. "It's a different business now. We've sold off most of the buildings he bought. Ownership is too much of a headache. It's a lot less grief to manage property for somebody else. The building where Miss Hanniford lived, 194 Bethune, the owner is a housewife in a suburb of Chicago who inherited the property from an uncle. She's never seen it, just gets her check from us four times a year."

  I said, "Miss Hanniford was a model tenant, then?"

  "In that she never did anything to draw our attention. The papers say she was a prostitute. Could be, I suppose. We never had any complaints."

  "You never met her?"

  "No."

  "She was always on time with the rent?"

  "She was a week late now and then, just like everybody. No more than that."

  "She paid by check?"

  "Yes."

  "When did she sign the lease?"

  "What did I do with the lease? Here it is. Let's see, now. October 23, 1970. Standard two-year lease, renewing automatically."

  "And the monthly rent was four hundred dollars?"

  "It's three eighty-five now. It was lower then, there've been some allowable increases since then. It was three forty-two fifty when she signed it."

  "You wouldn't rent to someone with no visible means of support."

  "Of course not."

  "Then she must have claimed to be working. She must have provided references."

  "I should have thought of that," he said. He shuffled more papers and came up with the application she had filled out. I looked at it. She had claimed to be employed as an industrial systems analyst at a salary of seventeen thousand dollars a year. Her employer was one J.J. Cottrell, Inc. There was a telephone number listed, and I copied it down.

  I asked if the references had been checked.

  "They must have been," Kalish said. "But it doesn't amount to anything. It's simple enough to fake. All she needs is someone at that number to back up her story. We make the calls automatically, but I sometimes wonder if it's worth the trouble."

  "Then someone must have called this number. And someone answered the phone and swore to her lies."

  "Evidently."

  I thanked him for his time. In the lobby downstairs I put a dime in a pay phone and dialed the number Wendy had given. A recording informed me that the number I had dialed was no longer in service.

  I put my dime back in the phone and called the Carlyle. I asked the desk for Cale Hanniford's room. A woman answered the phone on the second ring. I gave my name and asked to speak to Mr. Hanniford. He asked me if I was making any progress.

  "I don't know," I said. "Those postcards you received from Wendy. Do you still have them?"

  "It's possible. Is it important?"

  "It would help me get the chronology in order. She signed the lease on her apartment three years ago in October. You said she dropped out of college in the spring."

  "I believe it was in March."

  "When did you get the first postcard?"

  "Within two or three months, as I remember it. Let me ask my wife." He was back a moment later. "My wife says the first card arrived in June. I would have said late May. The second card, the one from Florida, was a few months after that. I'm sorry I can't make it more specific than that. My wife says she thinks she remembers where she put the cards. We'll be returning to Utica tomorrow morning. I gather you want to know whether Wendy went to Florida before or after she took the apartment."

  That was close enough, so I said yes. I told him I'd call him in a day or two. I already had his office number in Utica, and he gave me his home number as well. "But please try to call me at the office," he said.

  BURGHASH Antiques Imports was on University Place between Eleventh and Twelfth. I stood in one aisle surrounded by the residue of half the attics in Western Europe. I was looking at a clock just like the one I had seen on Gordon Kalish's wall. It was priced at $225.

  "Are you interested in clocks? That's a good one."

  "Does it keep time?"

  "Oh, those pendulum clocks are indestructible. And they're extraordinarily accurate. You just raise or lower the weight to make them run faster or slower. The case of the one you're looking at is in particularly good condition. It's not a rare model, of course, but they're hard to find in such nice shape. The price might be somewhat negotiable if you're really interested."

  I turned to take a good look at him. He was in his middle or late twenties, a trim young man wearing flannel slacks and a powder-blue turtleneck sweater. His hair had been expensively styled. His sideburns were even with the bottoms of his earlobes. He had a very precise moustache.

  I said, "Actually, I'm not interested in clocks. I wanted to talk to someone about a boy who used to work here."

  "Oh, you must mean Richie! You're a policeman? Wasn't it the most unbelievable thing?"

  "Did you know him well?"

  "I hardly knew him
at all. I've only been here since just before Thanksgiving. I used to work at the auction gallery down the block, but it was terribly hectic."

  "How long had Richie worked here?"

  "I don't honestly know. Mr. Burghash could tell you. He's in back in the office. It has been pure hell for all of us since that happened. I still can't believe it."

  "Were you working here the day it happened?"

  He nodded. "I saw him that morning. Thursday morning. Then I was on a delivery all afternoon, a load of perfectly hideous French country furniture for an equally hideous split-level chateau in Syosset. That's on Long Island."

  "I know."

  "Well, I didn't. I lived all these many years in blissful ignorance that there even was a place known as Syosset." He remembered the gravity of what we were talking about, and his face turned serious again. "I got back here at five, just in time to help close up shop. Richie had left early. Of course by then it had all happened, hadn't it?"

  "The murder took place around four."

  "While I was fighting traffic on the Long Island Expressway." He shivered theatrically. "I had no idea until I caught the eleven o'clock news that night. And I couldn't believe it was our Richard Vanderpoel, but they mentioned the name of the firm and-" He sighed and let his hands drop to his sides. "One never knows," he said.

  "What was he like?"

  "I hardly had time to know him. He was pleasant, he was courteous, he was anxious to please. He didn't have a great knowledge of antiques, but he had a good sense of them if you know what I mean."

  "Did you know he was living with a girl?"

  "How would I have known that?"

  "He might have mentioned it."

  "Well, he didn't. Why?"

  "Does it surprise you that he was living with a girl?"

  "I'm sure I never thought about it one way or the other."

  "Was he homosexual?"

  "How on earth would I know?"

  I stepped closer to him. He backed away without moving his feet. I said, "Why don't you cut the shit."

  "Pardon me?"

  "Was Richie gay?"

  "I certainly had no interest in him myself. And I never saw him with another man, and he never seemed to be cruising anyone."

  "Did you think he was gay?"

  "Well, I always assumed it, for heaven's sake. He certainly seemed gay."

  I found Burghash in the office. He was a little man with a furrowed brow that went almost to the top of his head. He had a ragged moustache and two days' worth of beard. He told me he'd had cops and newspapermen coming out of his ears and he had a business to run. I told him I wouldn't take much of his time.

  "I have a few questions," I said. "Let's go back to Thursday, the day of the murder. Did Richie behave differently than usual?"

  "Not really."

  "He wasn't agitated or anything like that?"

  "No."

  "He went home early."

  "That's right. He didn't feel well when he came back from lunch. He had some curry at the Indian place around the corner, and it didn't agree with him. I was always telling him to stay with bland food, ordinary American food. He had a sensitive digestive system, and he was always trying exotic foods that didn't agree with him."

  "What time did he leave here?"

  "I don't keep track. He came back from lunch feeling lousy. I told him right away to take the rest of the day off. You can't work with your guts on fire. He wanted to tough it out, though. He was an ambitious kid, a hard worker. Sometimes he'd have indigestion like that, and then an hour later he'd be all right again, but this time it got worse instead of better, and I finally told him to get the hell out and go home. He must have left here, oh, I don't know. Three? Three thirty? Something like that."

  "How long had he been working for you?"

  "Just about a year and a half. He went to work for me a year ago last July."

  "He moved in with Wendy Hanniford the following December. Did you have a previous address for him?"

  "The YMCA on Twenty-third Street. That's where he was living when he came to work for me. Then he moved a few times. I don't have the addresses, and then I guess it was in December when he moved to Bethune Street."

  "Did you know anything about Wendy Hanniford?"

  He shook his head. "Never met her. Never knew her name."

  "You knew he was rooming with a girl?"

  "I knew he said he was."

  "Oh?"

  Burghash shrugged. "I figured he was rooming with somebody, and if he wanted me to think it was a girl, I was willing to go along with it."

  "You thought he was homosexual."

  "Uh-huh. It's not exactly unheard of in this business. I don't care if my employees go to bed with orangutans. What they do on their own time is their own business."

  "Did he have any friends that you knew of?"

  "Not that I knew of, no. He kept to himself most of the time."

  "And he was a good worker."

  "Very good. Very conscientious, and he had a feeling for the business." He fixed his eyes on the ceiling. "I sensed that he had personal problems. He never talked about them, but he was, oh, how shall I put it? High-strung."

  "Nervous? Touchy?"

  "No, not that, exactly. High-strung is the best adjective I can think of to describe him. You sensed that he had things weighing him down, keying him up. But you know, that was more noticeable when he first started here. For the past year he seemed more settled, as if he had managed to come to terms with himself."

  "The past year. Since he moved in with the Hanniford girl, in other words."

  "I hadn't thought of it that way, but I guess that's right."

  "You were surprised when he killed her."

  "I was astonished. I simply could not believe it. And I'm still astonished. You see someone five days a week for a year and a half, and you think you know them. Then you find out you don't know them at all."

  On my way out the young man in the turtleneck stopped me. He asked me if I had learned anything useful. I told him I didn't know.

  "But it's all over," he said. "Isn't it? They're both dead."

  "Yes."

  "So what's the point in poking around in corners?"

  "I have no idea," I said. "Why do you suppose he was living with her?"

  "Why does anybody live with anybody else?"

  "Let's assume he was gay. Why would he live with a woman?"

  "Maybe he got tired of dusting and cleaning. Sick of doing his own laundry."

  "I don't know that she was that domestic. It seems likely that she was a prostitute."

  "So I understand."

  "Why would a homosexual live with a prostitute?"

  "Gawd, I don't know. Maybe she let him take care of her overflow. Maybe he was a closet heterosexual. For my own part, I'd never live with anyone, male or female. I have trouble enough living with myself."

  I couldn't argue with that. I started toward the door, then turned around again. There were too many things that didn't fit together, and they were scraping against each other like chalk on a blackboard. "I just want to make sense out of this," I said, to myself as much as to him. "Why in hell would he kill her? He raped her and he killed her. Why?"

  "Well, he was a minister's son."

  "So?"

  "They're all crazy," he said. "Aren't they?"

  Chapter 6

  The Reverend Martin Vanderpoel didn't want to see me. "I have spoken with enough reporters," he told me. "I can spare no time for you, Mr. Scudder. I have my responsibilities to my congregation. What time remains, I feel the need to devote to prayer and meditation."

  I knew the feeling. I explained that I wasn't a reporter, that I was representing Cole Hanniford, the father of the murdered girl.

  "I see," he said.

  "I wouldn't need much of your time, Reverend Vanderpoel. Mr. Hanniford has suffered a loss, even as you have. In a sense, he lost his daughter before she was killed. Now he wants to learn more about her."

>   "I'd be a poor source of information, I'm afraid."

  "He told me he wanted to see you himself, sir."