Lawrence Block - Scudder 1979 - Sins of the Fathers

by Sins of the Fathers(lit)

  "What sort of things?"

  "I went to a few places. The Bureau of Vital Statistics in City Hall. The Times-Sentinel offices. The police station."

  "I didn't hire you to ask questions here in Utica."

  "You didn't hire me at all, Mr. Hanniford. You married your wife on-well, I don't have to tell you the date. It was a first marriage for both of you."

  He didn't say anything. He took his glasses off and put them on the desk in front of him.

  "You might have told me Wendy was illegitimate."

  "Why? She didn't know it herself."

  "Are you sure of that?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm not." I drew a breath. "There were two U.S. Marines from the Utica area killed in the Inchon landing. One of them was black, so I ruled him out. The other was named Robert Blohr. He was married. Was he also Wendy's father?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm not trying to pick scabs, Mr. Hanniford. I think Wendy knew she was illegitimate. And it's possible that it doesn't matter whether she did or not."

  He stood up and walked to the window. I sat there wondering whether Wendy had known about her father and decided it was ten-to-one that she had. He was the chief character in her personal mythology, and she had spent all her life looking for an incarnation of him. The ambivalence of her feelings about the man seemed to derive from some knowledge over and above what she had been told by Hanniford and her mother.

  He stayed at the window for a time. Then he turned and looked thoughtfully at me. "Perhaps I should have told you," he said finally. "I didn't conceal it on purpose. That is, I gave little thought at the time to Wendy's... illegitimacy. That's been a completely closed chapter for so many years that it never occurred to me to mention it."

  "I can understand that."

  "You said you had a report to make," he said. He returned to his chair and sat down. "Go ahead, Scudder."

  I started all the way back in Indiana. Wendy at college, not interested in boys her own age, interested always in older men. She had had affairs with her professors, most of them probably casual liaisons, one at least other than casual, at least on the man's part. He had wanted to leave his wife. The wife had taken pills, perhaps in a genuine suicide attempt, perhaps as a grandstand play to save her marriage. And perhaps she herself hadn't known which.

  "At any rate, there was a scandal of sorts. The whole campus was aware of it, whether or not it became officially a matter of record. That explains why Wendy dropped out of school a couple of months short of graduation. There was really no way she could stay there."

  "Of course not."

  "It also explains why the school wasn't desperately concerned that she had disappeared. I'd wondered about that. From what you said, their attitude was fairly casual. Evidently they wanted to let you know she was gone but weren't prepared to tell you why she had left, but they knew she had good reasons to leave and weren't concerned about her physical well-being."

  "I see."

  "She went to New York, as you know. She became involved with older men almost immediately. One of them took her to Miami. I could give you his name, but it doesn't matter. He died a couple of years ago. It's hard to tell now just how big a role he played in Wendy's life, but in addition to taking her to Miami he let her use his name when she applied for her apartment. She put his firm down as her employer, and he backed her up when the rental agent called."

  "Did he pay her rent?"

  "It's possible. Whether he paid all or part of her support at the time is something only he could tell you, and there's no way to ask him. If you want my guess, her involvement with him was not an exclusive one."

  "There were other men in her life at the same time?"

  "I think so. This particular man was married and lived in the suburbs with his family. I doubt that he could have spent all that much time with her even if either of them wanted it that way. And I have a feeling she was leery of getting too involved with one man. It must have shaken her a great deal when the professor's wife took the pills. If he was sufficiently infatuated with her to leave his wife for her, she was probably committed to him herself, or at least thought she was. After that fell apart she was careful not to invest too much of herself in any one man."

  "So she saw a lot of men."

  "Yes."

  "And took money from them."

  "Yes."

  "You know that for a fact? Or is it conjecture?"

  "It's fact." I told him a little about Marcia Maisel and how she had gradually become aware of the manner in which Wendy was supporting herself. I didn't add that Marcia had tried the profession on for size.

  He lowered his head, and a little of the starch went out of his shoulders. "So the newspapers were accurate," he said. "She was a prostitute."

  "A kind of prostitute."

  "What does that mean? It's like pregnancy, isn't it? Either you are or you aren't."

  "I think it's more like honesty."

  "Oh?"

  "Some people are more honest than others."

  "I always thought honesty was unequivocal, too."

  "Maybe it is. I think there are different levels."

  "And there are different levels of prostitution?"

  "I'd say so. Wendy wasn't walking the streets. She wasn't turning one trick after another, wasn't handing her money over to a pimp."

  "Isn't that what the Vanderpoel boy was?"

  "No. I'll get to him." I closed my eyes for a moment. I opened them and said, "There's no way to know this for certain, but I doubt that Wendy set out to be a prostitute. She probably took money from quite a few men before she could pin that label on herself."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Let's say a man took her out to dinner, brought her home, wound up going to bed with her. On his way out the door he might hand her a twenty-dollar bill. He'd say something like, `I'd like to send you a big bouquet of flowers or buy you a present, but why not take the money and pick out something you like?' Maybe she tried not to take the money the first few times this happened. Later on she'd learn to expect it."

  "I see."

  "It wouldn't be long before she would start getting telephone calls from men she hadn't met. A lot of men like to pass girls' phone numbers around. Sometimes it's an act of charity. Other times they think they enhance their own image this way. `She's a great kid, she's not exactly a hooker, but slip her a few bucks afterward because she doesn't have a job, you know, and it's tough for a girl to make it in the big city.' So you wake up one morning and realize that you're a prostitute, at least according to the dictionary definition of the term, but by then you're used to the way you're living and it doesn't seem unnatural to you. As far as I can determine, she never asked for money. She never saw more than one man during an evening. She turned down dates if she didn't like the man involved. She would even plead a fake headache if she met a man for dinner and decided she didn't want to sleep with him. So she earned her money that way, but she wasn't in it for the money."

  "You mean she enjoyed it."

  "She certainly found it tolerable. She wasn't kidnapped by white slavers. She could have found a job if she wanted one. She could have come home to Utica, or called up and asked for money. Are you asking if she was a nymphomaniac? I don't know the answer to that, but I'd be inclined to doubt it. I think she was compelled."

  "How?"

  I stood up and moved closer to his desk. It was dark mahogany and looked at least fifty years old. Its top was orderly. There was a blotter in a tooled leather holder, a two-tiered in-and-out box, a spindle, a pair of framed photographs. He watched me pick up both photographs and look at them. One showed a woman about forty, her eyes out of focus, an uncertain smile on her face. I sensed that the expression was not uncharacteristic. The other photo was of Wendy, her hair medium in length, her eyes bright, and her teeth shiny enough to sell toothpaste.

  "When was this taken?"

  "High school graduation."

  "And this is your wife?"

&nbs
p; "Yes. I don't know when that was taken. Six or seven years ago, I would guess."

  "I don't see a resemblance."

  "No. Wendy favored her father."

  "Blohr."

  "Yes. I never met him. I'm told she resembled him. I couldn't say one way or the other, on the basis of my own knowledge, but I'm told she does. Did."

  I returned Mrs. Hanniford's photo to its place on his desk. I looked into Wendy's eyes. We had become too intimate these past few days, she and I. I probably knew more about her than she might have wanted me to know.

  "You said you thought she was compelled."

  I nodded.

  "By what?"

  I put the photo back where it belonged. I watched Hanniford try not to meet Wendy's eyes. He didn't manage it. He looked into them and winced.

  I said, "I'm not a psychologist, a psychiatrist, any of those things. I'm just a man who used to be a cop."

  "I know that."

  "I can make guesses. I'd guess she could never stop looking for Daddy. She wanted to be somebody's daughter, and they kept wanting to fuck her. And that was all right with her because that was what Daddy was, he was a man who took Mommy to bed and got her pregnant and then went away to Korea and was never heard from again. He was somebody who was married to somebody else, and that was all right, because the men she was attracted to were always married to somebody else. It could get very hairy looking for Daddy because if you weren't careful he might like you too much and Mommy might take a lot of pills and it would be time for you to go away. That's why it was safer all around if Daddy gave you money. Then it was all on a cash-and-carry basis and Daddy wouldn't flip out over you and Mommy wouldn't take pills and you could stay where you were, you wouldn't have to leave. I'm not a psychiatrist and I don't know if this is the way it works in textbooks or not. I never read the textbooks and I never met Wendy. I didn't get inside of her life until her life was over. I kept trying to get into her life and I kept getting into her death instead. Do you have anything to drink?"

  "Pardon me?"

  "Do you have anything to drink? Like bourbon."

  "Oh. I think there's a bottle of something or other."

  How could you not know whether or not you had any liquor around?

  "Get it."

  His face went through some interesting changes. He started off wondering who the hell I thought I was to order him around, and then he realized that it was immaterial, and then he got up and went over to a cabinet and opened a door.

  "It's Canadian Club," he announced.

  "Fine."

  "I don't believe I have anything to mix it with."

  "Good. Just bring the bottle and a glass." And if you don't have a glass, that's all right, sir.

  He brought the bottle and a water tumbler and watched with clinical interest as I poured whiskey until the glass was two-thirds full. I drank off about half of it and put the glass down on top of his desk. Then I picked it up quickly because it might have left a ring otherwise, and I made hesitant motions and he decoded them and handed me a couple of memo slips that could serve as a coaster.

  "Scudder?"

  "What?"

  "Do you suppose a psychiatrist could have helped her?"

  "I don't know. Maybe she went to one. I couldn't find anything in her apartment to suggest that she did, but it's possible. I think she was helping herself."

  "By living the way she did?"

  "Uh-huh. Her life was a fairly stable one. It may not look like it from the outside, but I think it was. That's why she carried the Maisel girl as a roommate. It's also why she hooked up with Vanderpoel. Her apartment had a very settled feel to it. Well-chosen furniture. A place to live in. I think the men in her life represented a stage she was working her way through, and I would guess that she consciously saw it that way. The men represented physical and emotional survival for the time being, and I think she anticipated reaching a point where she wouldn't need them anymore."

  I drank some more whiskey. It was a little sweet for my taste, and a little too smooth, but it went down well enough.

  I said, "In some ways I learned more about Richie Vanderpoel than I did about Wendy. One of the people I talked to said all ministers' sons are crazy. I don't know that that's true, but I think most of them must have a hard time of it. Richie's father is a very uptight type. Stern, cold. I doubt that he ever showed the boy much in the way of warmth. Richie's mother killed herself when he was six years old. No brothers or sisters, just the kid and his father and a dried-up housekeeper in a rectory that could double as a mausoleum. He grew up with mixed-up feelings about both of his parents. His feelings in that area complemented Wendy's pretty closely. That's why they were so good for each other."

  "Good for each other!"

  "Yes."

  "For God's sake, he killed her!"

  "They were good for each other. She was a woman he wasn't afraid of, and he was a man she couldn't mistake for her father. They were able to have a domestic life together that gave them both a measure of security they hadn't had before. And there was no sexual relationship to complicate things."

  "They didn't sleep together?"

  I shook my head. "Richie was homosexual. At least he'd been functioning as a homosexual before he moved in with your daughter. He didn't like it much, wasn't comfortable about it. Wendy gave him a chance to get away from that life. He could live with a woman without having to prove his manhood because she didn't want him as a lover. After he met her he stopped making the rounds of the gay bars. And I think she stopped seeing men in the evenings. I couldn't prove it, but earlier she had been getting taken out for dinner several nights a week. The kitchen in her apartment was fully stocked when I saw it. I think Richie cooked dinner for the two of them just about every night. I told you a few minutes ago that I thought Wendy was working things out. I think both of them were working things out together. Maybe they would have started sleeping together eventually. Maybe Wendy would have stopped seeing men professionally and gone out and taken a job. I'm just guessing, that's all any of this is, but I'd take the guess a little further. I think they would have gotten married eventually, and they might even have made it work."

  "That's very hypothetical."

  "I know."

  "You make it sound as though they were in love."

  "I don't know that they were in love. I don't think there's any doubt that they loved each other."

  He picked up his glasses, put them on, took them off again. I poured more whiskey in my glass and took a small sip of it. He sat for a long while, looking at his hands. Every now and then he looked up at the two photographs on top of his desk.

  Finally he said, "Then why did he kill her?"

  "No way to answer that. He didn't have any memory of the act, and the whole scene got mixed up with memories of his mother's death. Anyway, that's not your question."

  "It's not?"

  "Of course not. What you want to know is how much of it was your fault."

  He didn't say anything.

  "Something happened the last time you saw your daughter. Do you want to tell me about it?"

  HE didn't want to, not a whole hell of a lot, and it took him a few minutes to get warmed up. He talked vaguely about the sort of child she had been, very bright and warm and affectionate, and about how much he had loved her.

  Then he said, "When she was, it's hard to remember, but I think she must have been eight years old. Eight or nine. She would always sit on my lap and give me hugs and... hugs and kisses, and she would squirm around a little, and-"

  He had to stop for a minute. I didn't say anything.

  "One day, I don't know why it happened, but one day she was on my lap, and I-oh, Christ."

  "Take your time."

  "I got excited. Physically excited."

  "It happens."

  "Does it?" His face looked like something from a stained-glass window. "I couldn't... couldn't even think about it. I was so disgusted with myself. I loved her the way you love a dau
ghter, at least I had always thought that was what I felt for her, and to find myself responding to her sexually-"

  "I'm no expert, Mr. Hanniford, but I think it's a very natural thing. Just a physical response. Some people get erections from riding on trains."

  "This was more than that."

  "Maybe."

  "It was, Scudder. I was terrified of what I saw in myself. Terrified of what it could lead to, the harm it could have for Wendy. And so I made a conscious decision that day. I stopped being so close to her." He lowered his eyes. "I withdrew. I made myself limit my affection for her, the affection I expressed, that is. Maybe the affection I felt as well. There was less hugging and kissing and cuddling. I was determined not to let that one occasion repeat itself."