Sins of the Fathers

by Lawrence Block

  "This evening would be fine."

  "You have the address of the church? The rectory is adjacent to it. I will be waiting for you at-shall we say eight o'clock?"

  I said eight would be fine. I found another dime and looked up another number and made a call, and the man I spoke to was a good deal less reticent to talk about Richard Vanderpoel. In fact he seemed relieved that I'd called him and told me to come right on up.

  HIS name was George Topakian, and he and his brother constituted Topakian and Topakian, Attorneys-at-Law. His office was on Madison Avenue in the low Forties. Framed diplomas on the wall testified that he had graduated from City College twenty-two years ago and had then gone on to Fordham Law.

  He was a small man, trimly built, dark complected. He seated me in a red leather tub chair and asked me if I wanted coffee. I said coffee would be fine. He buzzed his secretary on the intercom and had her bring a cup for each of us. While she was doing this, he told me he and his brother had a general practice with an emphasis on estate work. The only criminal cases he'd handled, aside from minor work for regular clients, had come as a result of court assignments. Most of these had involved minor offenses-purse snatching, low-level assault, possession of narcotics-until the court had appointed him as counsel to Richard Vanderpoel.

  "I expected to be relieved," he said. "His father was a clergyman and would almost certainly have arranged my replacement by a criminal lawyer. But I did see Vanderpoel."

  "When did you see him?"

  "Late Friday afternoon." He scratched the side of his nose with his index finger. "I could have gotten to him earlier, I guess."

  "But you didn't."

  "No. I stalled." He looked at me levelly. "I was anticipating being replaced," he said. "And if replacement was imminent, I thought I could save myself the time I'd spend seeing him. And my time wasn't the half of it."

  "How do you mean?"

  "I didn't want to see the son of a bitch."

  He got up from behind his desk and walked over to the window. He toyed with the cord of the venetian blinds, raising and lowering them a few inches. I waited him out. He sighed and turned to face me.

  "Here was a guy who committed a horrible murder, slashed a young woman to death. I didn't want to set eyes on him. Do you find that hard to understand?"

  "Not at all."

  "It bothered me. I'm an attorney, I'm supposed to represent people without regard to what they have or haven't done. I should have thrown myself right into it, finding the best defense for him. I certainly shouldn't have presumed my own client guilty as charged without even talking to him." He came back to his desk and sat down again. "But of course I did. The police picked him up right on the scene of the crime. I might have challenged their case if I saw it all the way into court, but in my own mind I had already tried the bastard and found him guilty as charged. And since I had every expectation that I would be taken off the case, I found ways to avoid seeing Vanderpoel."

  "But you eventually went that Friday afternoon."

  "Uh-huh. He was in his cell in the Tombs."

  "You saw him in his cell, then."

  "Yes. I didn't pay much attention to the surroundings. They've finally torn down the Women's House of Detention. I used to walk past it all the time years ago when my wife and I lived in the Village. A horrible place."

  "I know."

  "I wish they'd do the same for the Tombs." He touched the side of his nose again. "I suppose I saw the very steam pipe that poor bastard hanged himself from. And the bedsheet he used to do the job. He sat on his bed while we talked. He let me have the chair."

  "How long were you with him?"

  "I don't think it was more than half an hour. It seemed considerably longer."

  "Did he talk?"

  "Not at first. He was off somewhere with his own thoughts. I tried to get through to him but didn't have very much luck. He had a look in his eyes as if he was having some intense wordless dialogue with himself. I tried to open him up, and at the same time I began planning the defense I would use if I had the chance. I didn't expect to have the chance, understand. It was a hypothetical exercise as far as I was concerned. But I had more or less decided to try for an insanity plea."

  "Everyone seems to agree he was crazy."

  "There's a difference between that and legal insanity. It becomes a battle of experts-you line up your witnesses, and the prosecution lines up theirs. Well, I went on talking to him, just trying to get him to open up a little, and then he turned to me and looked at me as if wondering where I had come from, as if he hadn't known I was in the room before. He asked me who I was, and I went over everything I had said to him the first time around."

  "Did he seem rational?"

  Topakian considered the question. "I don't know that he seemed to be rational," he said. "He seemed to be acting rationally at that moment."

  "What did he say?"

  "I wish I could remember it exactly. I asked him if he had killed the Hanniford girl. He said, now let me think, he said, `She couldn't have done it herself.' "

  " `She couldn't have done it herself.' "

  "I think that's the way he put it. I asked if he remembered killing her. He claimed that he didn't. He said his stomach ached, and at first I thought he meant he had a stomachache at the time of our conversation, but I gathered that he had had a stomachache on the day of the murder."

  "He left work early because of indigestion."

  "Well, he remembered the stomachache. He said his stomach ached and he went to the apartment. Then he kept talking about blood. `She was in the bathtub and there was blood all over.' I understand they found her in bed."

  "Yes."

  "She hadn't been in the tub or anything?"

  "She was killed in bed, according to police reports."

  He shook his head. "He was a very confused young man. He said that she had been in the tub with blood everywhere. I asked him if he had killed her, I asked him several times, and he never really gave me an answer. Sometimes he said that he didn't remember killing her. Other times he said that he must have killed her because she couldn't have done it herself."

  "He said that more than once, then."

  "Quite a few times."

  "That's interesting."

  "Is it?" Topakian shrugged. "I don't think he ever lied to me. I mean, I don't believe he remembered killing the girl. Because he admitted something, oh, worse."

  "What?"

  "Having sex with her."

  "That's worse than killing her?"

  "Having sex with her afterward."

  "Oh."

  "He didn't make any attempt to conceal it. He said he found her lying in her blood and he had sex with her."

  "What words did he use?"

  "I don't know exactly. You mean for the sex act? He said he fucked her."

  "After she was dead."

  "Evidently."

  "And he had no trouble remembering that?"

  "None. I don't know whether he had sex with her before or after the murder. Did the autopsy indicate anything one way or the other?"

  "If it did, it wasn't in the report. I'm not sure they can tell if the two acts are close together in time. Why?"

  "I don't know. He kept saying, `I fucked her and she's dead.' As if his having had sex with her was the chief cause of her death."

  "But he never remembered killing her. I suppose he could have blocked it out easily enough. I wonder why he didn't block out the whole thing. The sex act. Let me go over this once more. He said he walked in and found her like that?"

  "I can't remember everything all that clearly myself, Scudder. He walked in and she was dead in the tub, that's what he said. He didn't even say specifically that she was dead, just that she was in a tub full of blood."

  "Did you ask him about the murder weapon?"

  "I asked him what he did with it."

  "And?"

  "He didn't know."

  "Did you ask him what the murder weapon was?"

 
; "No. I didn't have to. He said, `I don't know what happened to the razor.' "

  "He knew it was a razor?"

  "Evidently. Why wouldn't he know?"

  "Well, if he didn't remember having it in his hand, why should he remember what it was?"

  "Maybe he heard someone talk about the murder weapon and speak of it as a razor."

  "Maybe," I said.

  I walked for a while, heading generally south and west. I stopped for a drink on Sixth Avenue around Thirty-seventh Street. A man a couple of stools down was telling the bartender that he was sick of working his ass off to buy Cadillacs for niggers on welfare. The bartender said, "You? Chrissake, you're in here eight hours a day. The taxes you pay, they don't get more'n a hubcap out of you."

  A little farther south and west I went into a church and sat for a while. St. John's, I think it was. I sat near the front and watched people go in and out of the confessional. They didn't look any different coming out than they had going in. I thought how nice it might be to be able to leave your sins in a little curtained booth.

  Richie Vanderpoel and Wendy Hanniford, and I kept picking at threads and trying to find a pattern to them. There was a conclusion I kept feeling myself drawn toward, and I didn't want to take hold of it. It was wrong, it had to be wrong, and as long as it reached out, tantalizing me, it kept me from doing the job I had signed on for.

  I knew what had to come next. I had been ducking it, but it kept waving at me and I couldn't duck it forever. And now was the best time of day for it. Much better than trying it in the middle of the night.

  I hung around long enough to light a couple of candles and stuff a few bills in the offerings slot. Then I caught a cab in front of Penn Station and told the driver how to get to Bethune Street.

  The first-floor tenants were out. A Mrs. Hacker on the second floor said she had had very little contact with Wendy and Richard. She remembered that Wendy's former roommate had had dark hair. Sometimes, she said, they had played their radio or stereo loud at night, but it had never been bad enough to complain about. She liked music, she said. She liked all kinds of music, classical, semiclassical, popular-all kinds of music.

  The door to the third-floor apartment had a padlock on it. It would have been easy enough to crack it but impossible to do so unobtrusively.

  There was nobody home on the fourth floor. I was very glad of that. I went on up to the fifth floor. Elizabeth Antonelli had said the tenants wouldn't be back until March. I rang their bell and listened carefully for sounds within the apartment. I didn't hear any.

  There were four locks on the door, including a Taylor that is as close as you can come to pickproof. I knocked off the other three with a celluloid strip, an old oil-company credit card that is otherwise useless since I no longer own a car. Then I kicked the Taylor in. I had to kick it twice before the door flew inward.

  I locked the other three locks after me. The tenants would have a lot of fun trying to figure out what had happened to the Taylor, but that was their problem, and it wouldn't come up until sometime in March. I poked until I found the window that fed onto the fire escape, opened it, and climbed down two stories to the Hanniford-Vanderpoel apartment.

  The window wasn't locked. I opened it, let myself in, closed it after me.

  An hour later I went out the window and back up the fire escape. There were lights on in the fourth-floor apartment by now, but the shade was drawn on the window I had to pass. I reentered the fifth-floor apartment, let myself out into the hallway, locked the door behind me, and went downstairs and out of the building. I had enough time to grab a sandwich before I kept my appointment with Martin Vanderpoel.

  Chapter 7

  I got off the BMT at Sixty-second Street and New Utrecht and walked a couple of blocks through a part of Brooklyn where Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst rub shoulders with one another. A powdery rain was melting some of yesterday's snow. The weather bureau expected it to freeze sometime during the night. I was a little early and stopped at a drugstore lunch counter for a cup of coffee. Toward the rear of the counter a kid was demonstrating a gravity knife to a couple of his friends. He took a quick look at me and made the knife disappear, reminding me once again that I haven't stopped looking like a cop.

  I drank half my coffee and walked the rest of the way to the church. It was a massive edifice of white stone toned all shades of gray by the years. A cornerstone announced that the present structure had been erected in 1886 by a congregation established 220 years before that date. An illuminated bulletin board identified the church as the First Reformed Church of Bay Ridge, Reverend Martin T. Vanderpoel, Pastor. Services were held Sundays at nine thirty; this coming Sunday Reverend Vanderpoel was slated to speak on "The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions."

  I turned the corner and found the rectory immediately adjacent to the church. It was three stories tall and built of the same distinctive stone. I rang the bell and stood on the front step in the rain for a few minutes. Then a small gray-haired woman opened the door and peered up at me. I gave my name.

  "Yes," she said. "He said he was expecting you." She led me into a parlor and pointed me to an armchair. I sat down across from a fireplace with an electric fire glowing in it. The wall on either side of the fireplace was lined with bookshelves. An Oriental rug with a muted pattern covered most of the parquet floor. The room's furniture was all dark and massive. I sat there waiting for him and decided I should have stopped for a drink instead of a cup of coffee. I wasn't likely to get a drink in this cheerless house.

  He let me sit there for five minutes. Then I heard his step on the stairs. I got to my feet as he entered the room. He said, "Mr. Scudder? I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I was on the telephone. But please have a seat, won't you?"

  He was very tall and rail-thin. He wore a plain black suit, a clerical collar, and a pair of black leather bedroom slippers. His hair was white with yellow highlights here and there. It would have been considered long a few years ago, but now the abundant curls were conservative enough. His horn-rimmed glasses had thick lenses that made it difficult for me to see his eyes.

  "Coffee, Mr. Scudder?"

  "No, thank you."

  "And none for me, either. If I have more than one cup with my dinner, I'm up half the night." He sat down in a chair that was a mate to mine. He leaned toward me and placed his hands on his knees. "Well, now," he said. "I don't see how I can possibly help you, but please tell me if I can."

  I explained a little more fully the errand I was running for Cale Hanniford. When I had finished he touched his chin with his thumb and forefinger and nodded thoughtfully.

  "Mr. Hanniford has lost a daughter," he said. "And I have lost a son."

  "Yes."

  "It's so difficult to father children in today's world, Mr. Scudder. Perhaps it was always thus, but it seems to me that the times conspire against us. Oh, I can sympathize fully with Mr. Hanniford, more fully than ever since I have suffered a similar loss." He turned to gaze at the fire. "But I fear I have no sympathy for the girl."

  I didn't say anything.

  "It's a failing on my part, and I recognize it as such. Man is an imperfect creature. Sometimes it seems to me that religion has no higher function than to sharpen his awareness of the extent of his imperfection. God alone is perfect. Even Man, His greatest handiwork, is hopelessly flawed. A paradox, Mr. Scudder, don't you think?"

  "Yes."

  "Not the least of my own flaws is an inability to grieve for Wendy Hanniford. You see, her father no doubt holds my son responsible for the loss of his daughter. And I, in turn, hold his daughter responsible for the loss of my son."

  He got to his feet and approached the fireplace. He stood there for a moment, his back perfectly straight, warming his hands. He turned toward me and seemed on the point of saying something. Instead, he walked slowly to his chair and sat down again, this time crossing one leg over the other.

  He said, "Are you a Christian, Mr. Scudder?"

  "No."

&nbs
p; "A Jew?"

  "I have no religion."

  "How sad for you," he said. "I asked your religion because the nature of your own beliefs might facilitate your understanding my feelings toward the Hanniford girl. But perhaps I can approach the matter in another way. Do you believe in good and evil, Mr. Scudder?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Do you believe that there is such a thing as evil extant in the world?"

  "I know there is."

  He nodded, satisfied. "So do I," he said. "It would be difficult to believe otherwise, whatever one's religious outlook. A glance at a daily newspaper provides evidence enough of the existence of evil." He paused, and I thought he was waiting for me to say something. Then he said, "She was evil."