Sins of the Fathers

by Lawrence Block

  "Booze to get you drunk, and coffee to keep you sober."

  I shook my head. "Coffee never sobered anybody. It just keeps you awake. Give a drunk plenty of coffee and you've got a wide-awake drunk on your hands."

  "That what you are, baby? A wide-awake drunk?"

  "I'm neither," I told her. "That's what keeps me drinking."

  I got to my savings bank a little after four. I stuck five hundred in my account and took the rest of Hanniford's money in cash. It was my first visit since the first of the year, so they entered some interest in my passbook. A machine figured it all out in the wink of an eye. The sum involved was hardly large enough to warrant wasting the machine's time on it.

  I walked back on Fifty-seventh Street to Ninth, then headed uptown past Armstrong's and the hospital to St. Paul's. Mass was just winding up, and I waited outside while a couple dozen people straggled out of the church. They were mostly middle-aged women. Then I went inside and slipped four fifty-dollar bills into the poor box.

  I tithe. I don't know why. It's become a habit, as indeed it has become my habit to visit churches. I began doing this shortly after I moved into my hotel room.

  I like churches. I like to sit in them when I have things to think about. I sat around the middle of this one on the aisle. I suppose I was there for twenty minutes, maybe a little longer.

  Two thousand dollars from Cale Hanniford to me, two hundred dollars from me to St. Paul's poor box. I don't know what they do with the money. Maybe it buys food and clothing for poor families. Maybe it buys Lincolns for the clergy. I don't really care what they do with it.

  The Catholics get more of my money than anybody else. Not because I'm partial to them, but because they put in longer hours. Most of the Protestants close up shop during the week.

  One big plus for the Catholics, though. You get to light candles. I lit three on the way out. For Wendy Hanniford, who would never get to be twenty-five, and for Richard Vanderpoel, who would never get to be twenty-one. And, of course, for Estrellita Rivera, who would never get to be eight.

  Chapter 2

  The Sixth Precinct is on West Tenth Street. Eddie Koehler was in his office reading reports when I got there. He didn't look surprised to see me. He pushed some papers to one side, nodded at the chair alongside his desk. I settled into it and reached over to shake hands with him. Two tens and a five passed smoothly from my hand to his.

  "You look like you need a new hat," I told him.

  "I do indeed. One thing I can always use is another hat. How'd you like Hanniford?"

  "Poor bastard."

  "Yeah, that's about it. It all happened so quick he's left standing there with his jaw hanging. That's what did it for him, you know. The time element. If it takes us a week or a month to make a collar, say. Or if there's a trial, and it drags on for a year or so. That way things keep going on for him, it gives him a chance to get used to what happened while it's all still in process. But this way, bam, one thing after another, we got the killer in a cell before he even hears his daughter's dead, and by the time he gets his ass in gear the kid hangs himself, and Hanniford can't get used to it because he's had no time." He eyed me speculatively. "So I figured an old buddy could make a couple of bills out of it."

  "Why not?"

  He took a cold cigar out of the ashtray and relit it. He could have afforded a fresh one. The Sixth is a hot precinct, and his desk was a good one. He could also have afforded to send Hanniford home instead of referring him to me so that I could knock back twenty-five to him. Old habits die hard.

  "Get yourself a clipboard, bounce around the neighborhood, ask some questions. Run yourself a week's work out of it without wasting more'n a couple of hours. Hit him up for a hundred a day plus expenses. That's close to a K for you, for Christ's sake."

  I said, "I'd like a look at your file on the thing."

  "Why go through the motions? You're not gonna find anything there, Matt. It was closed before it was opened. We had cuffs on the fucking kid before we even knew what he did."

  "Just for form."

  His eyes narrowed just a little. We were about the same age, but I had joined the force earlier and was just getting into plainclothes when he was going through the Academy. Koehler looked a lot older now, droopy in the jowls, and his desk job was spreading him in the seat. There was something about his eyes I didn't care for.

  "Waste of time, Matt. Why take the trouble?"

  "Let's say it's the way I work."

  "Files aren't open to unauthorized personnel. You know that."

  I said, "Let's say another hat for a look at what you've got. And I'll want to talk to the arresting officer."

  "I could set that up, arrange an introduction. Whether he wants to talk to you is up to him."

  "Sure."

  TWENTY minutes later I was alone in the office. I had twenty-five dollars less in my wallet and a manila folder on the desk in front of me. It didn't look like good value for the money, didn't tell me much I didn't already know.

  Patrolman Lewis Pankow, the arresting officer, led off with his report. I hadn't read one of those in a while, and it took me back, from "While proceeding in a westerly direction on routine foot patrol duty" all the way through to "at which time the alleged perpetrator was delivered for incarceration to the Men's House of Detention." The Coptic jargon is a special one.

  I read Pankow's report a couple of times through and took some notes. What it amounted to, in English, was a clear enough statement of facts. At eighteen minutes after four he'd been walking west on Bank Street. He heard sounds of a commotion and shortly encountered some people who told him there was a lunatic on Bethune Street, dancing around with blood all over him. Pankow ran around the block to Bethune Street where he found "the alleged miscreant, subsequently identified as Richard Vanderpoel of 194 Bethune Street, his clothes in disarray and covered with what appeared to be blood, uttering obscene language at high volume and exposing his private parts to passersby."

  Pankow sensibly cuffed him and managed to determine where he lived. He led the suspect up two flights of stairs and into the apartment Vanderpoel and Wendy Hanniford had occupied, where he found Wendy Hanniford "apparently deceased, unclothed, and disfigured by slashes apparently inflicted by a sharp weapon."

  Pankow then phoned in, and the usual machinery went into action. The medical examiner's man had come around to confirm what Pankow had figured out-that Wendy was, in fact, dead. The photo crew took their pictures, several of the blood-spattered apartment, a great many of Wendy's corpse.

  There was no telling what she might have looked like alive. She had died from loss of blood, and Lady Macbeth was right about that; no one would guess how much blood a body can lose in the process of dying. You can put an ice pick in a man's heart and barely a drop of blood will show on his shirtfront, but Vanderpoel had cut her breasts and thighs and belly and throat, and the whole bed was an ocean of blood.

  After they'd photographed the body, they removed it for autopsy. A Dr. Jainchill of the medical examiner's office had done the full postmortem. He stated that the victim was a Caucasian female in her twenties, that she had had recent sexual intercourse, both oral and genital, that she had been slashed twenty-three times with a sharp instrument, most probably a razor, that there were no stab wounds (which might have been why he was opting for the razor), that various veins and arteries, which he conscientiously named, had been wholly or partially severed in the course of this mistreatment, that death had occurred at approximately four o'clock that afternoon, give or take twenty minutes, and that there was in his opinion no possibility whatsoever that the wounds had been self-inflicted.

  I was proud of him for taking such a firm stand on the last point.

  The rest of the folder consisted of bits of information which would ultimately be supplemented by copies of formal reports filed by other branches of the machine. There was a note to the effect that the prisoner had been brought before a magistrate and formally charged with homicide the da
y after his arrest. Another memo gave the name of the court-appointed attorney. Another noted that Richard Vanderpoel had been found dead in his cell shortly before six Saturday morning.

  The folder would grow fatter in time to come. The case was closed, but the Sixth's file would go on growing like a corpse's hair and fingernails. The guard who looked in and saw Richard Vanderpoel hanging from the steam pipe would write up his findings. So would the physician who pronounced him dead and the physician who established beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the strips of bedclothing tied together and knotted around his neck that had done him in. Ultimately a coroner's inquest would conclude that Wendy Hanniford had been murdered by Richard Vanderpoel and that Richard Vanderpoel had in turn taken his own life. The Sixth Precinct, and everyone else connected with the case, had already reached this conclusion. They had reached the first part of it well before Vanderpoel had been booked. The case was closed.

  I went back and read through some of the material again. I studied the photos in turn. The apartment itself didn't look to be greatly disturbed, which suggested the killer had been someone known to her. I went back to the autopsy. No skin under Wendy's fingernails, no obvious signs of a struggle. Facial contusions? Yes, so she could have been unconscious while he cut her up.

  She had probably been awhile dying. If he'd cut the throat first, and got the jugular right, she would have gone fast. But she had lost a lot of blood from the wounds on the torso.

  I picked out one print and tucked it inside my shirt. I wasn't sure why I wanted it but knew it would never be missed. I knew a desk cop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn who used to take home a copy of every grisly picture he could get his hands on. I never asked why.

  I had everything back in order and returned to the file folder by the time Koehler came back. He had a fresh cigar going. I got out from behind his desk. He asked me if I was satisfied.

  "I'd still like to talk to Pankow."

  "I already set it up. I figured you're too fucking stubborn to change your mind. You find a single damn thing in that mess?"

  "How do I know? I don't even know what I'm looking for. I understand she was hooking. Any evidence of that?"

  "Nothing hard. There would be if we looked. Good wardrobe, couple hundred in her handbag, no visible means of support. What's that add up to?"

  "Why was she living with Vanderpoel?"

  "He had a twelve-inch tongue."

  "Seriously. Was he pimping for her?"

  "Probably."

  "You didn't have a sheet on either of them, though."

  "No. No arrest. They didn't exist officially for us until he decided to cut her up."

  I closed my eyes for a minute. Koehler said my name. I looked up. I said, "Just a thought. Something you said before about time putting Hanniford on the spot. It's true in a way besides the one you mentioned. If she was killed by person or persons unknown, you'd have put the past two years of her life on slides and run them through a microscope. But it was over before it started, and it's not your job to do that now."

  "Right. So it's your job instead."

  "Uh-huh. What did he kill her with?"

  "Doc says a razor." He shrugged. "Good a guess as any."

  "What happened to the murder weapon?"

  "Yeah, I figured you wouldn't miss that. We didn't turn it up. You can't make much out of that. There was a window open, he could have pitched it out."

  "What's outside of the window?"

  "Airshaft."

  "You checked it?"

  "Uh-huh. Anybody coulda picked it up, any kid passing through."

  "Check for blood spots in the airshaft?"

  "Are you kidding? An airshaft in the Village? People piss out windows, they throw Tampax out, garbage, everything. Nine out of ten airshafts you'll find blood spots. Would you have checked? With the killer already wrapped up?"

  "No."

  "Anyway, forget the airshaft. He bolts out of the apartment with the knife in his hand. Or the razor, whatever the fuck it was. He drops it on the staircase. He runs out in the street and drops it on the sidewalk. He puts it in an open garbage can. He drops it down a sewer. Matt, we don't have an eyewitness who saw him come out of the building. We woulda turned one up if we needed one, but the son of a bitch was dead thirty-six hours after he cooled the girl."

  It kept coming back to that. I was doing a job the police would have done if they had had to do it. But Richard Vanderpoel had saved them the trouble.

  "So we don't know when he hit the street," Koehler was saying. "Two minutes before Pankow got to him? Ten minutes? He coulda chewed up the knife and ate it in that amount of time. Christ knows he was crazy enough."

  "Was there a razor in the apartment?"

  "You mean a straight razor? No."

  "I mean a man's razor."

  "Yeah, he had an electric. Why the hell don't you forget about the razor? You know what those fucking autopsies are like. I had one a couple years ago, the asshole in the medical examiner's office said the victim had been killed with a hatchet. We already caught the bastard on the premises with a croquet mallet in his hand. Anybody who could mistake the damage done by splitting someone's skull with a hatchet and beating it in with a mallet couldn't tell a razor slash from a cunt."

  I nodded. I said, "I wonder why he did it."

  "Because he was out of his fucking mind, that's why he did it. He ran up and down the street covered with her blood, screaming his head off and waving his cock at the world. Ask him why he did it and he wouldn't know himself."

  "What a world."

  "Jesus, don't let me get started on that. This neighborhood gets worse and worse. Don't get me started." He gave me a nod, and we walked together out of his office and out through the squad room. Men in plainclothes and men in uniforms sat at typewriters, laboriously pounding out stories about presumed miscreants and alleged perpetrators. A woman was making a report in Spanish to a uniformed officer, pausing intermittently to weep. I wondered what she had done or what had been done to her.

  I didn't see anybody in the squad room that I recognized.

  Koehler said, "You hear about Barney Segal? They made it permanent. He's head of the Seventeenth."

  "Well, he's a good man."

  "One of the best. How long you been off the force, Matt?"

  "Couple of years, I guess."

  "Yeah. How're Anita and the boys? Doing okay?"

  "They're fine."

  "You keep in touch, then."

  "From time to time."

  As we neared the front desk he stopped, cleared his throat. "You ever think about putting the badge back on, Matt?"

  "No way, Eddie."

  "That's a goddam shame, you know that?"

  "You do what you have to do."

  "Yeah." He drew himself up and got back to business. "I set it with Pankow so he'll be looking for you around nine tonight. He'll be at a bar called Johnny Joyce's. It's on Second Avenue, I forget the cross street."

  "I know the place."

  "They know him there, so just ask the bartender to point him out to you. He's on his own time tonight, so I told him you'd make it worth his while."

  And told him to make sure a piece of it came back to the lieutenant, no doubt.

  "Matt?" I turned. "What the hell are you gonna ask him, anyway?"

  "I want to know what obscene language Vanderpoel was using."

  "Seriously?" I nodded. "I think you're as crazy as Vanderpoel," he told me. "For the price of a hat you can hear all the dirty words in the world."

  Chapter 3

  Bethune Street runs west from Hudson toward the river. It is narrow and residential. Some trees had been recently planted. Their bases were guarded by little picket fences hung with signs imploring dog owners to thwart their pets' natural instincts. WE LOVE OUR TREE/PLEASE CURB YOUR DOG. Number 194 was a renovated brownstone with a front door the color of Astroturf. There were five apartments, one to a floor. A sixth bell in the vestibule was marked SUPERINTENDENT. I
rang it and waited.

  The woman who opened the door was around thirty-five. She wore a man's white shirt with the top two buttons open and a pair of stained and faded jeans. She was built like a fireplug. Her hair was short and seemed to have been hacked at randomly with a pair of dull shears. The effect was not displeasing, though. She stood in the doorway and looked up at me and decided within five seconds that I was a cop. I gave her my name and learned that hers was Elizabeth Antonelli. I told her I wanted to talk to her.

  "What about?"

  "Your third-floor tenants."

  "Shit. I thought that was over and done with. I'm still waiting for you guys to unlock the door and clear their stuff out. The landlord wants me to show the apartment, and I can't even get into it."