Sins of the Fathers

by Lawrence Block

  "So you moved out."

  "Yes. Wendy cried when I packed my stuff and left. She kept saying she didn't know what she would do without me. I told her she could get another roommate without any trouble, someone who would fit in with her life better. She said she didn't want anyone who fit in too well because she was more than one kind of person. I didn't know what she meant at the time."

  "Do you know now?"

  "I think so. I think she wanted someone who was a little straighter than she was, someone who was not a part of the sexual scene she was involved in. I think now that she was a little disappointed when I took that first double date with her. She did her best to talk me into it, but she was disappointed that she was successful. Do you know what I mean?"

  "I think so. It fits in with some other things." There was something she had said earlier that had been bothering me, and I poked around in my memory, looking for it. "You said you weren't surprised that she was seeing older men."

  "No, that didn't surprise me."

  "Why not?"

  "Well, because of what happened at school."

  "What happened at school?"

  She frowned. She didn't say anything, and I repeated the question.

  "I don't want to get anybody in trouble."

  "She was involved with someone at school? An older man?"

  "You have to remember I didn't know her very well. I knew who she was to say hello to, and maybe I was in a class or two with her at one time or another, but I barely knew her."

  "Was it tied in with her leaving school just a few months shy of graduation?"

  "I don't really know that much about it."

  I said, "Marcia, look at me. Anything you tell me about what happened at college will be something I would otherwise find out, anyway. You'll just save me a great deal of time and travel. I'd rather not have to make a trip out to Indiana to ask a lot of people some embarrassing questions. I-"

  "Oh, don't do that!"

  "I'd rather not. But it's up to you."

  She told it in bits and pieces, largely because she didn't know too much of it. There had been a scandal shortly before Wendy's departure from campus. It seemed that she had been having an affair with a professor of art history, a middle-aged man with children Wendy's age or older. The man had wanted to leave his wife and marry Wendy, the wife had swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, was rushed to the hospital, had her stomach pumped, and survived. In the course of the ensuing debacle, Wendy packed a suitcase and disappeared.

  And according to campus gossip this was not the first time she had been involved with an older man. Her name had been linked with several professors, all of them considerably older than she was.

  "I'm sure a lot of it was just talk," Marcia Thal told me. "I don't think she could have had affairs with that many men without more people knowing about it, but when the whole thing blew up, people were really talking about her. I guess some of it must have been true."

  "Then you knew when you first roomed with her that she was unconventional."

  "I told you. I didn't care about her morals. I didn't see anything wrong with sleeping with a lot of men. Not if that was what she wanted to do." She considered this for a moment. "I guess I've changed since then."

  "This professor, the art historian. What was his name?"

  "I'm not going to tell you his name. It's not important. Maybe you can find out yourself. I'm sure you can, but I'm not going to tell you."

  "Was it Cottrell?"

  "No. Why?"

  "Did she know anyone named Cottrell? In New York?"

  "I don't think so. The name doesn't ring a bell or anything."

  "Was there anyone she was seeing regularly? More than the others?"

  "Not really. Of course she could have had someone who came over a lot during the afternoons and I wouldn't have known it."

  "How much money do you suppose she was making?"

  "I don't know. That wasn't really something we talked about. I suppose her average price was thirty dollars. On the average. No more than that. A lot of men gave twenty. She talked about men who would give her a hundred, but I think they were pretty rare."

  "How many tricks a week do you think she turned?"

  "I honestly don't know. Maybe she had someone over three nights a week, maybe four nights a week. But she was also seeing people in the daytime. She wasn't trying to make a fortune, just enough to live the way she wanted to live. A lot of the time she would turn down dates. She never saw more than one person a night. It wasn't always a full date with dinner and everything. Sometimes a man would just come over, and she would go straight to bed with him. But she turned down a lot of dates, and if she went with a man and she didn't like him she wouldn't see him again. Also, when she was seeing someone she had never met before, if she didn't like him she wouldn't go to bed with him, and then of course he wouldn't give her any money. There would be men who would get her number from other men, see, and she would go out with them, but if they weren't her type or something, well, she'd say she had a headache and go home. She wasn't trying to make a million dollars."

  "So she must have earned a couple hundred dollars a week."

  "That sounds about right. It was a fortune compared to what I was earning, but in the long run it wasn't a tremendous amount of money. I don't think she did it for the money, if you know what I mean."

  "I'm not sure I do."

  "I think she was, you know, a happy hooker?" She flushed as she said the phrase. "I think she enjoyed what she was doing. I really do. The life and the men and everything, I think she got a kick out of it."

  I had obtained more from Marcia Thal than I'd expected. Maybe it was as much as I needed.

  You have to know when to stop. You can never find out everything, but you can almost always find out more than you already know, and there is a point at which the additional data you discover is irrelevant and time you spend on it wasted.

  I could fly out to Indiana. I would learn more, certainly. But when I was done I didn't think I would necessarily know more than I did now. I could fill in names and dates. I could talk to people who had memories of their own of Wendy Hanniford. But what would I get for my client?

  I signaled for the check. While the waitress was adding things up, I thought of Cale Hanniford and asked Marcia Thal if Wendy had spoken often of her parents.

  "Sometimes she talked about her father."

  "What did she say about him?"

  "Oh, wondering what he was like."

  "She felt she didn't know him?"

  "Well, of course not. I mean, I gather he died before she was born, or just about. How could she have known him?"

  "I meant her stepfather."

  "Oh. No, she never talked about him that I remember, except to say vaguely that she ought to write them and let them know everything was all right. She said that several times, so I got the impression it was something she kept not getting around to."

  I nodded. "What did she say about her father?"

  "I don't remember, except I guess she idolized him a lot. One time I remember we were talking about Vietnam, and she said something about how whether the war was bad or not, the men who were fighting it were still good men, and she talked about how her father was killed in Korea. And one time she said, `If he had lived, I guess everything would be different.' "

  "Different how?"

  "She didn't say."

  Chapter 11

  I gave the car back to the Olin people a little after two. I stopped for a sandwich and a piece of pie and went through my notebook, trying to find a way that everything would connect with everything else.

  Wendy Hanniford. She had a thing for older men, and if you wanted to you could run a trace on it all the way back to unresolved feelings for the father she never saw. At college she realized her own power and had affairs with professors. Then one of them fell too hard for her and a wheel came off, and by the time it was over she was out of school and on her own in New York.

  Ther
e were plenty of older men in New York. One of them took her to Miami Beach. The same one, or another, provided her with a job reference when she rented her apartment. And all along the line there must have been plenty of older men to take her to dinner, to slip her twenty dollars for taxi fare, to leave twenty or thirty or fifty dollars on the bureau.

  She had never needed a roommate. She had subsidized Marcia Maisel, asking considerably less than half the rent. It was likely she had subsidized Richie Vanderpoel as well, and it was just as likely she had taken him as a roommate for the same reason she'd taken Marcia in, the same reason she had wanted Marcia to stick around.

  Because it was a lonely world, and she had always lived alone in it with only her father's ghost for company. The men she got, the men she was drawn to, were men who belonged to other women and who went home to them when they were through with her. She wanted someone in that Bethune Street apartment who didn't want to take her to bed. Someone who would just be good company. First Marcia-and hadn't Wendy perhaps been a little disappointed when Marcia agreed to go along on dates with her? I guessed that she had, because at the same time that she gained a companion on dates she lost a companion who had been not of that brittle world but of a piece with the innocence Marcia had sensed in Wendy herself.

  Then Richie, who had probably made an even better companion. Richie, a timid and reticent homosexual, who had improved the decor and cooked the gourmet meals and made a home for her while he kept his clothes in the living room and spent his nights on the convertible couch. And she in turn had provided Richie with a home. She'd given him a woman's companionship without posing the sexual challenge another woman might have constituted. He moved in with her and out of the gay bars.

  I paid the check and left, heading down Broadway and back to the hotel. A panhandler, red-eyed and ragged, blocked my path. He wanted to know if I had any spare change. I shook my head and kept walking at him, and he scuttled out of the way. He looked as though he wanted to tell me to fuck myself if only he had the nerve.

  How much deeper did I want to go with it? I could fly to Indiana and make a nuisance of myself on the campus where Wendy had learned to define her role in life. I could easily enough learn the name of the professor whose affair with her had had such dramatic results. I could find that professor, whether he was still at that school or not. He would talk to me. I could make him talk to me. I could track down other professors who had slept with her, other students who had known her.

  But what could they tell me that I didn't know? I was not writing her biography. I was trying to capture enough of the essence of her so that I could go to Cale Hanniford and tell him who she was and how she got that way. I probably had enough to do a fair job of that already. I wouldn't find out much more in Indiana.

  There was only one problem. In a very real sense, my arrangement with Hanniford was more than a dodge around the detective licensing laws and the income tax. The money he gave me was a gift, just as the money I'd given Koehler and Pankow and the postal clerk had been. And in return I was doing him a favor, just as they had done me favors. I was not working for him.

  So I couldn't call it quits just because I had the answers to Cale Hanniford's questions. I had a question or two of my own, and I didn't have all the answers nailed down yet. I had most of it, or thought I did, but there were still a few blank spaces and I wanted to fill them in.

  VINCENT was at the desk when I walked in. He had given me a hard time awhile back, and he still wasn't sure how I felt about him. I'd just given him a ten for Christmas, which should have clued him in that I harbored no ill feelings, but he still had a tendency to cringe when I approached. He cringed a little now, then handed me my room key and a slip of paper that informed me Kenny had called. There was a number where I could reach him.

  I called it from my room. "Ah, Matthew," he said. "How nice of you to call."

  "What's the problem?"

  "There is no problem. I'm just busy enjoying a day off. It was that or go to jail, and I'm none too fond of jails. I'm sure they would bring back unpleasant memories."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Am I being terribly oblique? I talked to the good Lieutenant Koehler, just as you suggested. Sinthia's is scheduled to be raided sometime this evening. Forewarned is forearmed, to coin a phrase, so I took the precaution of engaging one of my bartenders to mind the store this afternoon and evening."

  "Does he know what's coming?"

  "I'm not diabolical, Matthew. He knows he'll be locked up. He also knows that he'll be bailed out in nothing flat and charges will be dropped in short order. And he knows he'll be fifty dollars richer for the experience. Personally, I wouldn't suffer the indignity of an arrest for ten times that sum, but different strokes for different folks, to coin another phrase. Your Lieutenant Koehler was most cooperative, I might add, except he wanted a hundred dollars instead of the fifty you suggested. I don't suppose I ought to have tried bargaining with him?"

  "Probably not."

  "That's what I thought. Well, if it works out, the price is a pittance. I hope you don't mind that I mentioned your name?"

  "Not at all."

  "It seemed to afford me a certain degree of entr‚e. But it leaves me owing you a favor, and I'm delighted to be able to discharge my obligation forthwith."

  "You got a line on Richie Vanderpoel?"

  "I did indeed. I devoted quite a few hours to asking pertinent questions at an after-hours place. The one on Houston Street?"

  "I don't know it."

  "Quite my favorite blind pig. I'll take you there some night if you'd like."

  "We'll see. What did you find out?"

  "Ah, let me see. What did I find out? I talked to three gentlemen who were willing to remember taking our bright-eyed boy home for milk and cookies. I also talked to a few others who I would happily swear did the same, but their memories were clouded, sad to say. It seems I was quite right in thinking that he hadn't been hustling a buck. He never asked anyone for money, and one chap said he'd tried to press a few bob on Richie for cabfare home and the lad wouldn't take it. Sterling character, wouldn't you say?"

  "I would."

  "And all too rare in this day and age. That's it in the hard-fact department. The rest is impressions, but I gather that's what you're most interested in."

  "Yes."

  "Well, it seems Richard wasn't terribly sexy."

  "Huh?"

  He sighed. "The dear boy didn't like it much and wasn't terribly good at it. I gather it wasn't just a matter of nerves, although he does seem to have been a nervous and apprehensive sort. It was more a matter of being uncomfortable with the whole thing and getting blessed little pleasure out of sex itself. And he retreated from intimacy. He'd perform the dirty deed willingly enough, but he didn't want to have his hand held or his shoulder stroked. That's not unheard of, you know. There's a species of faggot that craves the sex but can't stand the closeness. All their friends are doomed to stay strangers. But he didn't seem to enjoy the sex all that much, either."

  "Interesting."

  "I thought you'd say so. Also, once it was over, Richie was ever so anxious to be on his way. Not the sort to stay the night. Didn't even care to linger for coffee and brandy. Just wham-bam-thank-you-sir. And no interest in a repeat performance at a later date. One chap really wanted to see the boy again, not because the sex was good, as it wasn't, but because he was intrigued. Thought he might pierce that grim exterior given another opportunity. Richie would have none of it. Didn't even want to speak to anyone once he'd shared a pillow with him."

  "These three men-"

  "No names, Matthew. I has me code of ethics, I does."

  "I'm not interested in their names. I just wondered if they ran to type."

  "In what way?"

  "Age. Are they all about the same age?"

  "More or less."

  "All fifty or more?"

  "How did you know?"

  "Just a guess."

  "Well, it's a good o
ne. I'd place them all between fifty or sixty. And they look their years, poor devils, unlike those of us who have bathed in the fountain of youth."