Sins of the Fathers

by Lawrence Block

"Uh-huh. Apartment houses in Queens. You can keep the stock market. I want something I can reach out and touch."

  "You're a landlady. That's funny."

  "Oh, I never see tenants or anything. There's a company manages it for me."

  I wondered if it was Bowdoin Management but didn't bother asking. She asked if I wanted to try the bedroom again. I said I didn't.

  "Not to rush you, but I'm expecting a friend in about forty minutes."

  "Sure."

  "Have another drink if you want."

  "No, it's time I was on my way." She walked me to the door and held my coat for me. I kissed her goodbye.

  "Don't be so long between visits next time."

  "Take care, Elaine."

  "Oh, I will."

  Chapter 10

  Friday morning came clear and crisp. I picked up an Olin rental car on Broadway and took the East Side Drive out of town. The car was a Chevrolet Malibu, a skittish little thing that had to be pampered on curves. I suppose it was economical to run.

  I caught the New England Expressway up through Pelham and Larchmont and into Mamaroneck. At an Exxon station the kid who topped up the tank didn't know where Schuyler Boulevard was. He went inside and asked the boss, who came out and gave me directions. The boss also knew the Carioca, and I had the Malibu parked in the restaurant's lot at twenty-five minutes of twelve. I went into the cocktail lounge and sat on a vinyl stool at the front end of a black Formica bar. I ordered a cup of black coffee with a shot of bourbon in it. The coffee was bitter, left over from the night before.

  The cup was still half full when I looked over and saw her standing hesitantly in the archway between the dining room and the cocktail lounge. If I hadn't known she was Wendy Hanniford's age, I would have guessed high by three or four years. Dark, shoulder-length hair framed an oval face. She wore dark plaid slacks and a pearl-gray sweater beneath which her large breasts were aggressively prominent. She had a large brown leather handbag over her shoulder and a cigarette in her right hand. She did not look happy to see me.

  I let her come to me, and after a moment's hesitation she did. I turned slowly to her.

  "Mr. Scudder?"

  "Mrs. Thal? Should we take a table?"

  "I suppose so."

  The dining room was uncrowded, and the head waitress showed us to a table in back and out of the way. It was an overdecorated room, a room that tried too hard, done in someone's idea of a flamenco motif. The color scheme involved a lot of red and black and ice blue. I had left my bitter coffee at the bar and now ordered bourbon with water back. I asked Marcia Thal if she wanted a drink.

  "No, thank you. Wait a minute. Yes, I think I will have something. Why shouldn't I?"

  "No reason that I know of."

  She looked past me at the waitress and ordered a whiskey sour on the rocks. Her eyes met mine, glanced away, came back again.

  "I can't say I'm happy to be here," she said.

  "Neither am I."

  "It was your idea. And you had me over a barrel, didn't you? You must get a kick out of making people do what you want them to do."

  "I used to pull wings off flies."

  "I wouldn't be surprised." She tried to glare, and then she lost the handle of it and grinned in spite of herself. "Oh, shit," she said.

  "You're not going to be dragged into anything, Mrs. Thal."

  "I hope not."

  "You won't be. I'm interested in learning something about Wendy Hanniford's life. I'm not interested in turning your life upside down."

  Our drinks arrived. She picked hers up and studied it as if she had never seen anything quite like it before. It seemed an ordinary enough whiskey sour. She took a sip, set it down, fished out the maraschino cherry and ate it. I swallowed a little bourbon and waited for her.

  "You can order something to eat if you want. I'm not hungry."

  "Neither am I."

  "I don't know where to start. I really don't."

  I wasn't sure myself. I said, "Wendy doesn't seem to have had a job. Was she working when you first moved in with her?"

  "No. But I didn't know that."

  "She told you she had a job?"

  She nodded. "But she was always very vague about it. I didn't pay too much attention, to tell you the truth. I was mainly interested in Wendy to the extent that she had an apartment I could share for a hundred dollars a month."

  "That's all she charged you?"

  "Yes. At the time she told me the apartment was two hundred a month and we were splitting it down the middle. I never saw the lease or anything, and I sort of assumed that I was paying a little more than half. That was all right with me. It was her furniture and everything, and it was such a bargain for me. Before that I was at the Evangeline House. Do you know what that is?"

  "On West Thirteenth?"

  "That's right. Somebody recommended it to me, it's a residence for proper young ladies on their own in the big city." She made a face. "They had curfews and things like that. It was really pretty ridiculous, and I was sharing a small room with a girl, she was some kind of a Southern Baptist and she was praying all the time, and you couldn't have male visitors, and it was all pretty lame. And it cost me almost as much as it cost to share the apartment with Wendy. So if she was making a little money on me, that was fine. It wasn't until quite a bit later that I found out the apartment was renting for a lot more than two hundred a month."

  "And she wasn't working."

  "No."

  "Did you wonder where her money came from?"

  "Not for a while. I gradually managed to realize that she never seemed to have to go to the office, and when I said something, she admitted she was between jobs at the moment. She said she had enough money so that she didn't care if she didn't find anything for a month or two. What I didn't realize was that she wasn't even looking for work. I would come home from my own job, and she would say something about employment agencies and job interviews, and I would have no way of knowing that she hadn't even been looking."

  "Was she a prositute at the time?"

  "I don't know if you would call it that."

  "How do you mean?"

  "She was taking money from men. I guess she had been doing that for as long as she was in the apartment. But I don't know if she was exactly a prostitute."

  "How did you first figure out what was going on?"

  She picked up her drink and took another sip of it. She put the glass down and worried her forehead with her fingertips. "It was gradual," she said.

  I waited.

  "She was dating a lot. Older men, but that didn't surprise me. And usually, uh, well, she and her date would go to bed." She lowered her eyes. "I wasn't snooping, but it was impossible not to notice this. The apartment, she had the bedroom and I had the living room, there was a convertible sofa in the living room-"

  "I've seen the apartment."

  "Then you know the layout. You have to go through the living room to get into the bedroom, so if I was home, she would bring her date through my room and into the bedroom, and they would be in there for half an hour or an hour, and then either Wendy would walk him to the door or he would go out by himself."

  "Did this bother you?"

  "That she was having sex with them? No, it didn't bother me. Why would it bother me?"

  "I don't know."

  "One of the reasons I moved out of Evangeline House was to live like an adult. I wasn't a virgin myself. And the fact that Wendy brought men to the apartment meant I could feel free to bring men home myself if I wanted to."

  "Did you?"

  She colored. "I wasn't seeing anyone special at the time."

  "So you knew Wendy was promiscuous, but you didn't know she was taking money."

  "Not at the time, no."

  "She was seeing a great many different men?"

  "I don't know. I saw the same men over again on several occasions, especially at first. A lot of the time I didn't meet the men she was with. I spent a lot of the time away from the apartment. Or
I would come home when she was already in the bedroom with someone, and I might go out for a drink or something and come back after he had left."

  I studied her, and she averted her eyes. I said, "You suspected something almost from the beginning, didn't you?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "There was something about the men."

  "I suppose so."

  "What was it? What were the men like?"

  "Older, of course, but that didn't surprise me. Also, they were all well dressed. They looked like, oh, I don't know. Businessmen, lawyers, professional men. And I just had the feeling that most of them were married. I couldn't tell you why I thought so, but I did. It's hard to explain."

  I ordered another round of drinks, and she started to loosen up. The picture began to fill in and take form. There were telephone calls which she answered when Wendy was out of the apartment, cryptic messages she had to relay. There was the drunk who showed up one night when Wendy wasn't home who told Marcia that she would do just fine and made a clumsy pass at her. She had managed to get rid of him, but still didn't realize that Wendy's male friends constituted a source of income to her.

  "I thought she was a tramp," she said. "I'm not a moralist, Mr. Scudder. During that time I was probably going overboard in the opposite direction. Not in terms of how I behaved, but how I felt about things. All those uptight virgins at Evangeline House, and the result was that I had sort of mixed feelings about Wendy."

  "How?"

  "I thought what she was doing was probably a bad idea. That it would be bad for her emotionally. You know, ego damage, that kind of thing. Because down underneath she was always so innocent."

  "Innocent?"

  She gnawed a fingernail. "I don't know how to explain this. There was this little girl quality to her. I had the feeling that whatever kind of sex life she led she would still be a little girl underneath it all." She thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Anyway, I thought her behavior was basically self-destructive. I thought she was going to get hurt."

  "You don't mean physically injured."

  "No, I mean emotionally. And at the same time I have to say I envied her."

  "Because she was free?"

  "Yes. She didn't seem to have any hang-ups. She was completely free of guilt as far as I could see. She did whatever she wanted to do. I envied that because I believed in that kind of freedom, or thought I did, and yet my own life didn't reflect it." She grinned suddenly. "I also envied her life because it was so much more exciting than mine. I had some dates but nothing very interesting, and the boys I went out with were around my own age and didn't have much money. Wendy was going out for dinners at places like Barbetta's and the Forum, and I was seeing the inside of a lot of Orange Julius's. So I couldn't help envying her a little."

  She excused herself and went to the ladies room. While she was gone I asked the waitress if there was any fresh coffee. She said there was, and I asked her to bring a couple of cups. I sat there waiting for Marcia Thal and wondering why Wendy had wanted a roommate in the first place, especially one who was ignorant of how she earned her keep. The hundred dollars a month seemed insufficient motive, and the inconvenience of functioning as a prostitute under the conditions Marcia had described would have greatly outweighed the small source of income Marcia represented.

  She returned to the table just as the waitress was bringing the coffee. "Thanks," she said. "I was just starting to feel those drinks. I can use this."

  "So can I. I've got a long drive back."

  She took a cigarette. I picked up a pack of matches and lit it for her. I asked how she had found out that Wendy was taking money for her favors.

  "She told me."

  "Why?"

  "Hell," she said. She blew out smoke in a long, thin column. "She just told me, okay? Let's leave it at that."

  "It's a lot easier if you just tell me everything, Marcia."

  "What makes you think there's anything more to tell?"

  "What did she do, pass on one of her dates to you?"

  Her eyes flared. She closed them briefly, drew on her cigarette. "It was almost like that," she said. "Not quite, but that's pretty close. She told me a friend of hers had a business associate in from out of town and asked if I'd like to date the guy, to double with her and her friend. I said I didn't think so, and she talked about how we would see a good show and have a good dinner and everything. And then she said, `Be sensible, Marcia. You'll have a good time, and you'll make a few dollars out of it.' "

  "How did you react?"

  "Well, I wasn't shocked. So I must have suspected all along that she was getting money. I asked her what she meant, which was a pretty stupid question at that point, and she said that the men she dated all had plenty of money, and they realized it was tough for a young woman to earn a decent living, and at the end of the evening they would generally give you something. I said something about wasn't that prostitution, and she said she never asked men for money, nothing like that, but they always gave her something. I wanted to ask how much but I didn't and then she told me anyway. She said they always gave at least twenty dollars and sometimes a man would give her as much as a hundred. The man she was going to be seeing always gave her fifty dollars, she said, so if I went along it would mean that his friend would be almost certain to give me fifty dollars, and she asked if I didn't think that was a good return on an evening that involved nothing but eating a great dinner and seeing a good show and then spending a half hour or so in bed with a nice, dignified gentleman. That was her phrase. `A nice, dignified gentleman.' "

  "How did the date go?"

  "What makes you so sure I went?"

  "You did, didn't you?"

  "I was earning eighty dollars a week. Nobody was taking me to great dinners or Broadway shows. And I hadn't even met anyone I wanted to sleep with."

  "Did you enjoy the evening?"

  "No. All I could think about was that I was going to have to sleep with this man. And he was old."

  "How old?"

  "I don't know. Fifty-five, sixty. I'm never good at guessing how old people are. He was too old for me, that's all I knew."

  "But you went along with it."

  "Yes. I had agreed to go, and I didn't want to spoil the party. Dinner was good, and my date was charming enough. I didn't pay much attention to the show. I couldn't. I was too anxious about the rest of the evening." She paused, focused her eyes over my shoulder. "Yes, I slept with him. And yes, he gave me fifty dollars. And yes, I took it."

  I drank some coffee.

  "Aren't you going to ask me why I took the money?"

  "Should I?"

  "I wanted the damned money. And I wanted to know how it felt. Being a whore."

  "Did you feel that you were a whore?"

  "Well, that's what I was, isn't it? I let a man fuck me, and I took money for it."

  I didn't say anything. After a few moments she said, "Oh, the hell with it. I took a few more dates. Maybe one a week on the average. I don't know why. It wasn't the money. Not exactly. It was, I don't know. Call it an experiment. I wanted to know how I felt about it. I wanted to... learn certain things about myself."

  "What did you learn?"

  "That I'm a little squarer than I thought. That I didn't care for the things I kept finding hiding in corners of my mind. That I wanted, oh, a cleaner life. That I wanted to fall in love with somebody. Get married, make babies, that whole trip. It turned out to be what I wanted. When I realized that, I knew I had to move out on my own. I couldn't go on rooming with Wendy."

  "How did she react?"

  "She was very upset." Her eyes widened at the recollection. "I hadn't expected that. We weren't terribly close. At least I never thought we were terribly close. I never showed her the inside of my head, and she never showed me what was going on inside hers. We were together a lot, especially once I started taking dates, and we talked a great deal, but it was always about superficial things. I didn't think my presence was especially important
to her. I told her I had to move out, and I told her why, and she was really shook. She actually begged me to stay."

  "That's interesting."

  "She told me she'd pay a larger share of the rent. That was when I found out she'd actually been paying twice as much as I was all along. I think she would have let me stay there rent-free if I wanted. And of course she insisted I didn't have to take any dates, that she wouldn't want me to do it if it was putting me uptight. She even suggested that she would limit her activities to times when I was at work-actually a lot of her dates were during the afternoon, businessmen who couldn't get away from their wives during the evening, which was one reason why it took me as long as it did to realize how she was making her living. She said evening dates would have to take her to a hotel or something, that the place would be just for us when I was around. But that wasn't it, I had to get away from the life entirely. Because it was too much of a temptation for me, see. I was making eighty dollars a week and working hard for it, and there was an enormous temptation to quit work, which is something I never did, but I recognized the temptation for what it was. And it scared me."