Lawrence Block - Scudder 1979 - Sins of the Fathers
Page 16
"Well, I'll see if I can pick up tickets. They shouldn't be too hard to come by."
"Should I tell them, or should I wait until you actually have the tickets? Or do you want to tell them yourself?"
"No, you tell them. In case they have something else lined up.
"They'd cancel anything to see the game with you."
"Well, not if it's something important."
"They could even go back to the city with you. You could rent them a room at your hotel and put them on the train the next day."
"We'll see."
"All right. How have you been, Matt?"
"Fine. You?"
"All right."
"Things about the same with you and George?"
"Why?"
"Just wondered."
"We're still seeing each other if that's what you mean."
"He thinking about getting a divorce from Rosalie?"
"We don't talk about it. Matt, I've got to go, they're honking for me."
"Sure."
"And let me know about the tickets."
"Sure."
It wasn't in the early Post, but around two in the afternoon I had the radio on to one of the all-news stations and they had it. The Reverend Martin Vanderpoel, minister of the First Reformed Church of Bay Ridge, had been found dead in his bedroom by his housekeeper. The death had been tentatively attributed, pending autopsy, to the voluntary ingestion of an overdose of barbiturates. Reverend Vanderpoel was identified as the father of Richard Vanderpoel, who had recently hanged himself after having been arrested for the murder of Wendy Hanniford in the apartment the two had shared in Greenwich Village. Reverend Vanderpoel was reported to have been profoundly despondent over his son's death, and this despondency had evidently led him to take his own life.
I turned off the radio and sat around for half an hour or so. Then I walked around the block to St. Paul's and put a hundred dollars in the poor box, a tenth of what I'd received as a bonus from Cale Hanniford.
I sat near the back for a while, thinking about a lot of things.
Before I left I lit four candles. One for Wendy, one for Richie, the usual one for Estrellita Rivera.
And one for Martin Vanderpoel, of course.
The End