Lawrence Block - Scudder 1979 - Sins of the Fathers

by Sins of the Fathers(lit)

  "Yes."

  "Then why drag me into it?"

  The fact that she didn't want to be dragged into it was almost reason enough in itself. But I explained the nature of my particular mission, Cale Hanniford's need to know about the recent past of his daughter now that she had no future. When I had finished she told me that she guessed she could answer some questions.

  "You moved from Bethune Street to East Eighty-fourth Street a year ago last June."

  "How do you know so much about me? Never mind, go on."

  "I wondered why you moved."

  "I wanted a place of my own."

  "I see."

  "Plus it was nearer my work. I had a job on the East Side, and it was a hassle getting there from the Village."

  "How did you happen to room with Wendy in the first place?"

  "She had an apartment that was too big for her, and I needed a place to stay. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

  "But it didn't turn out to be a good idea?"

  "Well, the location, and also I like my privacy."

  She was going to give me whatever answers would get rid of me most efficiently. I wished I were talking to her face-to-face instead of over the telephone. At the same time I hoped I wouldn't have to kill a day driving out to Mamaroneck.

  "How did you happen to share the apartment?"

  "I just told you, she had a place-"

  "Did you answer an ad?"

  "Oh, I see what you mean. No, I ran into her on the street, as a matter of fact."

  "You had known her previously?"

  "Oh, I thought you realized. I knew her at college. I didn't know her well, we were never close, see, but it was a small college and everybody more or less knew everybody, and I ran into her on the street and we got to talking."

  "You knew her at college."

  "Yeah, I thought you realized. You seem to know so many facts about me, I'm surprised you didn't know that."

  "I'd like to come out and talk with you, Mrs. Thal."

  "Oh, I don't think so."

  "I realize it's an imposition on your time, but-"

  "I just don't want to get involved," she said. "Can't you understand that? Jesus Christ, Wendy's dead, right? So what can it help her? Right?"

  "Mrs. Thal-"

  "I'm hanging up now," she said. And did.

  I bought a newspaper, went to a lunch counter and had a cup of coffee. I gave her a full half hour to wonder whether or not I was all that easy to get rid of. Then I dialed her number again.

  Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.

  She answered in the middle of the second ring. She held the phone to her ear for a moment without saying anything. Then she said, "Hello?"

  "This is Scudder."

  "Listen, I don't-"

  "Shut up a minute, you foolish bitch. I intend to talk to you. I'll either talk to you in front of your husband or I'll talk to you alone."

  Silence.

  "Now you just think about it. I can pick up a car and be in Mamaroneck in an hour. An hour after that I'll be back in my car and out of your life. That's the easy way. If you want it the hard way I can oblige you but I don't see that it makes much sense for either of us."

  "Oh, God."

  I let her think about it. The hook was set now, and there was no way she was going to shake it loose.

  She said, "Today's impossible. Some friends are coming over for coffee, they'll be here any minute."

  "Tonight?"

  "No. Gerry'll be home. Tomorrow?"

  "Morning or afternoon?"

  "I have a doctor's appointment at ten. I'm free after that."

  "I'll be at your place at noon."

  "No. Wait a minute. I don't want you coming to the house."

  "Pick a place and I'll meet you."

  "Just give me a minute. Christ. I don't even know this area, we just moved here a few months ago. Let me think. There's a restaurant and cocktail lounge on Schuyler Boulevard. It's called the Carioca. I could stop there for lunch after I get out of the doctor's."

  "Noon?"

  "All right. I don't know the address."

  "I'll find it. The Carioca on Schuyler Boulevard."

  "Yes. I don't remember your name."

  "Scudder. Matthew Scudder."

  "How will I recognize you?"

  I thought, I'll be the man who looks out of place. I said, "I'll be drinking coffee at the bar."

  "All right. I guess we'll find each other."

  "I'm sure we will."

  MY illegal entry the night before had yielded little hard data beyond Marcia Maisel's name. The search of the premises had been complicated by my not knowing precisely what I was searching for. When you toss a place, it helps if you have something specific in mind. It also helps if you don't care whether or not you leave traces of your visit. You can search a few shelves of books far more efficiently, for example, if you feel free to flip through them and then toss them in a heap on the rug. A twenty-minute job stretches out over a couple of hours when you have to put each volume neatly back in place.

  There were few enough books in Wendy's apartment, and I hadn't bothered with them, anyway. I wasn't looking for something which had been deliberately concealed. I didn't know what I was looking for, and now, after the fact, I wasn't at all sure what I had found.

  I had spent most of my hour wandering through those rooms, sitting on chairs, leaning against walls, trying to rub up against the essence of the two people who had lived here. I looked at the bed Wendy had died on, a double box spring and mattress on a Hollywood frame. They had not yet stripped off the blood-soaked sheets, though there would be little point in doing so; the mattress was deeply soaked with her blood, and the whole bed would have to be scrapped. At one point I stood holding a clot of rusty blood in my hand, and my mind reeled with images of a priest offering Communion. I found the bathroom and gagged without bringing anything up.

  While I was there, I pushed the shower curtain aside and examined the tub. There was a ring around it from the last bath taken in it, and some hair matted at the drain, but there was nothing to suggest that anyone had been killed in it. I had not suspected that there would be. Richie Vanderpoel's recapitulation had not been a model of concise linear thought.

  The medicine cabinet told me that Wendy had taken birth-control pills. They came in a little card with a dial indicating the days of the week so that you could tell whether you were up-to-date or not. Thursday's pill was gone, so I knew one thing she had done the day she died. She had taken her pill.

  Along with the birth-control pills I found enough bottles of organic vitamins to suggest that either or both of the apartment's occupants had been a believer. A small vial with a prescription label indicated that Richie had suffered from hay fever. There was quite a bit in the way of cosmetics, two different brands of deodorant, a small electric razor for shaving legs and underarms, a large electric razor for shaving faces. I found some other prescription drugs-Seconal and Darvon (his), Dexedrine spansules labeled For Weight Control (hers), and an unlabeled bottle containing what looked like Librium. I was surprised the drugs were still around. Cops are apt to pocket them, and men who would not take loose cash from the dead have trouble resisting the little pills that pick you up or settle you down.

  I took the Seconal and the Dex along with me.

  A closet and a dresser in the bedroom filled with her clothes. Not a large wardrobe, but several dresses had labels from Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor. His clothes were in the living room. One of the closets there was his, and he kept shirts and socks and underwear in the drawers of a Spanish-style kneehole desk.

  The living-room couch was a convertible. I opened it up and found it made up with sheets and blankets. The sheets had been slept on since their last laundering. I closed the couch and sat on it.

  A well-equipped kitchen, copper-bottomed frying pans, a set of burnt-orange enameled cast-iron
pots and pans, a teak rack with thirty-two jars of herbs and spices. The refrigerator held a couple of TV dinners in the freezer compartment, but the rest of it was abundantly stocked with real food. So were the cupboards. The kitchen was a large one by Manhattan standards, and there was a round oak table in it. There were two captain's chairs at the table. I sat at one of them and pictured cozy domestic scenes, one of them whipping up a gourmet meal, the two of them sitting at this table and eating it.

  I had left the apartment without finding the helpful things one hopes to find. No address books, no checkbooks, no bank statements. No revealing stacks of canceled checks. Whatever their financial arrangements, they had evidently conducted them on a cash basis.

  Now, a day later, I thought of my impressions of that apartment and tried to match them up with Martin Vanderpoel's portrait of Wendy as evil incarnate. If she had trapped him with sex, why did he sleep on a folding bed in the living room? And why did the whole apartment have such an air of placid domesticity to it, a comfortable domesticity that all the blood in the bedroom could not entirely drown?

  Chapter 9

  When I got back to my hotel there was a phone message at the desk. Cale Hanniford had called at a quarter after eleven. I was to call him. He had left a number, and it was one he had already given me. His office number.

  I called him from my room. He was at lunch. His secretary said he would call me back. I said no, I'd try him again in an hour or so.

  The call reminded me of J.J. Cottrell, Inc., Wendy's employment reference on her lease application. I found the number in my notebook and tried it again on the chance I'd misdialed it first time around. I got the same recording. I checked the telephone directory for J.J. Cottrell and didn't come up with anything. I tried Information, and they didn't have anything, either.

  I thought for a few minutes, then dialed a special number. When a woman picked up, I said, "Patrolman Lewis Pankow, Sixth Precinct. I have a listing that's temporarily out of service, and I have to know in what name it's listed."

  She asked the number. I gave it to her. She asked me to please hold the line. I sat there with the phone against my ear for almost ten minutes before she came back on the line.

  "That's not a temporary disconnect," she said. "That's a permanent disconnect."

  "Can you tell me who the number was assigned to last?"

  "I'm afraid I can't, officer."

  "Don't you keep that information on file?"

  "We must have it somewhere, but I don't have access to it. I have recent disconnects, but that was disconnected over a year ago, so I wouldn't have it. I'm surprised it hasn't been reassigned by now."

  "So all you know is that it's been out of service for more than a year."

  That was all she knew. I thanked her and rang off. I poured myself a drink, and by the time it was gone I decided that Hanniford ought to be back in his office. I was right.

  He told me he had managed to find the postcards. The first one, postmarked New York, had been mailed on June 4. The second had been mailed in Miami on September 16.

  "Does that tell you anything, Scudder?"

  It told me she had been in New York in early June if not before then. It told me she had taken the Miami trip prior to signing the lease on her apartment. Beyond that, it didn't tell me a tremendous amount.

  "Another piece of the puzzle," I said. "Do you have the cards with you now?"

  "Yes, they're right in front of me."

  "Could you read me the messages?"

  "They don't say very much." I waited, and he said, "Well, there's no reason not to read them. This is the first card. `Dear Mom and Dad. Hope you haven't been worrying about me. Everything is fine. Am in New York and like the big city very much. School got to be too much of a hassle. Will explain everything when I see you.' " His voice cracked a little on that line, but he coughed and went on. " `Please don't worry. Love, Wendy.' "

  "And the other card?"

  "Hardly anything on it. `Dear Mom and Dad. Not bad, huh? I always thought Florida was strictly for wintertime, but it's great this time of year. See you soon. Love, Wendy.' "

  He asked me how things were going. I didn't really know how to answer the question. I said I had been very busy and was putting a lot of bits and pieces together but that I didn't know when I would have something to show him. "Wendy was sharing her apartment with another girl for several months before Vanderpoel came on the scene."

  "Was the other girl a prostitute?"

  "I don't know. I rather doubt it, but I'm not sure. I'm seeing her tomorrow. Evidently she was someone Wendy knew at college. Did she ever mention a friend named Marcia Maisel?"

  "Maisel? I don't think so."

  "Do you know the names of any of her friends from college?"

  "I don't believe I do. Let me think. I seem to recall that she would refer to them by first names, and they didn't stick in my mind."

  "It's probably unimportant. Does the name Cottrell mean anything to you?"

  "Cottrell?" I spelled it, and he said it aloud again. "No, it doesn't mean anything to me. Should it?"

  "Wendy used a firm by that name as a job reference when she signed her apartment lease. The firm doesn't seem to exist."

  "Why did you think I would have heard of it?"

  "Just a shot in the dark. I've been taking a lot of them lately, Mr. Hanniford. Was Wendy a good cook?"

  "Wendy? Not as far as I know. Of course she may have developed an interest in cooking at college. I wouldn't know about that. When she was living at home, I don't think she ever made anything more ambitious than a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Why?"

  "No reason."

  His other phone rang, and he asked if there was anything else. I started to say that there wasn't and then thought of what I should have thought of at the beginning. "The postcards," I said.

  "What about them?"

  "What's on the other side?"

  "The other side?"

  "They're picture postcards, aren't they? Turn them over. I want to know what's on the other side."

  "I'll see. Grant's Tomb. Is that an important piece of the puzzle, Scudder?"

  I ignored the sarcasm. "That's New York," I said. "I'm more interested in the Miami one."

  "It's a hotel."

  "What hotel?"

  "Oh, for Christ's sake. I didn't even think of it that way. It could mean something, couldn't it?"

  "What hotel, Mr. Hanniford?"

  "The Eden Roc. Does that give you an important lead?"

  IT didn't.

  I got the manager at the Eden Roc and told him I was a New York City police officer investigating a fraud case. I had him dig out his registration cards for the month of September 1970. I was on the phone for half an hour while he located the cards and went through them, looking for a registration in the name of either Hanniford or Cottrell. He came up empty.

  I wasn't too surprised. Cottrell didn't have to be the man who took her to Miami. Even if he was, that didn't mean he would necessarily sign his real name on a registration card. It would have made life simpler if he had, but nothing about Wendy Hanniford's life and death had been simple so far, and I couldn't expect a sudden rush of simplicity now.

  I poured another drink and decided to let the rest of the day spin itself out. I was trying to do too much, trying to sift all the sand in the desert. Pointless, because I was looking for answers to questions my client hadn't even asked. It didn't much matter who Richie Vanderpoel was, or why he had drawn red lines on Wendy. All Hanniford wanted was a hint of the life that late she led. Mrs. Gerald Thal, the former Miss Marcia Maisel, would provide as much tomorrow.

  So until then I could take it easy. Look at the paper, drink my drink, wander over to Armstrong's when the walls of my room moved too close to one another.

  Except that I couldn't. I made the drink last almost half an hour, then rinsed out the glass and put my coat on and caught the A train downtown.

  WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday a
fternoon you wonder why they don't call it something else. In the evenings, with a good crowd drinking and cruising, there is a very real gaiety in the air. It may seem forced, and you may sense an undercurrent of insufficiently quiet desperation, but gay then is about as good a word as any. But not around three or four on a Thursday afternoon, when the place is down to a handful of serious drinkers with no place else to go and a bartender whose face says he knows how bad things are and that he's stopped waiting for them to get better.