Lawrence Block - Scudder 1979 - Sins of the Fathers

by Sins of the Fathers(lit)

  "You wouldn't do a thing like that."

  "I don't know. I might have gone along with it. See, he did it, he killed that girl, and he was an odds-on candidate to do it again sooner or later. Oh, hell, that wasn't all of it. Knowing he did it, knowing he knew we knew he did it, and sending the bastard home. Putting him in the river started sounding like a hell of a good idea, and I might have done it if I hadn't thought of something better."

  "What?"

  "I had this friend on the narcotics squad. I told him I needed some heroin, a lot of it, and I told him he would be getting every bit of it back. Then one afternoon when Ruddle and his wife were both out of the apartment I let myself in, and I flaked that place as well as it's ever been done. I stuffed smack inside the towel bar, I stuck a can of it in the ball float of his toilet, I put the shit in every really obvious hiding place I could find.

  "Then I got back to my friend in narcotics, and I told him I knew where he could make himself a hell of a haul. And he did it right, with a warrant and everything, and Ruddle was upstate in Dannemora before he knew what hit him." I smiled suddenly. "I went to see him between the trial and the sentencing date. His whole defense was that he had no idea how that heroin got there, and not too surprisingly the jury didn't sit up all night worrying about that one. I went to see him and I said, `You know, Ruddle, it's a shame you couldn't take a lie-detector test. It might make people believe you didn't know where that smack came from.' And he just looked at me because he knew just how it had been done to him and for a change there was nothing he could do about it."

  "God."

  "He drew ten-to-twenty for possession with intent to sell. About three years into his sentence he got in a grudge fight with another inmate and got stabbed to death."

  "God."

  "The thing is, you wonder just how far you have a right to turn things around like that. Did we have a right to set him up? I couldn't see letting him walk around free, and what other way was there to nail him? But if we couldn't do that, did we have a right to put him in the river? That's a harder one for me to answer. I have a lot of trouble with that one. There must be a line there somewhere, and it's hard to know just where to draw it."

  A LITTLE while later she said it was getting to be her bedtime.

  "I'll go," I said.

  "Unless you'd rather stay."

  We turned out to be good for each other. For a stitch of time all the hard questions went away and hid in dark places.

  Afterward she said that I should stay. "I'll make us breakfast in the morning."

  "Okay."

  And, sleepily, "Matt? That story you were telling before. About Ruddle?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "What made you think of it?"

  I sort of wanted to tell her, probably for the same reason I'd told her the story in the first place. But part of what I had to do was not tell her, just as I had avoided telling Cale Hanniford.

  "Just the similarities in the cases," I said. "Just that it was another case of a girl raped and murdered in the Village, and the one case put me in mind of the other."

  She murmured something I couldn't catch. When I was sure she was sleeping soundly, I slipped out of bed and got into my clothes. I walked the couple of blocks to my hotel and went to my room.

  I thought I would have trouble sleeping, but it came easier than I expected.

  Chapter 15

  The service had just gotten under way when I arrived. I slipped into a rear pew, took a small black book from the rack, and found the place. I'd missed the invocation and the first hymn, but I was in time for the reading of the Law.

  He seemed taller than I remembered. Perhaps the pulpit added an impression of height. His voice was rich and commanding, and he spoke the Law with absolute certainty.

  "God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

  "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.

  "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love Me, and keep My commandments...."

  The room was not crowded. There were perhaps eighty persons present, most of them my age or older, with only a few family groups with children. The church could have accommodated four or five times the number in attendance. I guessed most of the congregation had made the pilgrimage to the suburbs in the past twenty years, their places taken by Irish and Italians whose former neighborhoods were now black and Puerto Rican.

  "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."

  Were there more people in attendance today than normally? Their minister had experienced great personal tragedy. He had not conducted the service the preceding Sunday. This would be their first official glimpse of him since the murder and suicide. Would curiosity bring more of them out? Or would restraint and embarrassment-and the cold air of morning-keep many at home?

  "Thou shalt not kill."

  Unequivocal statements, these commandments. They brooked no argument. Not Thou shalt not kill except in special circumstances.

  "Thou shalt not commit adultery.... Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor...."

  I rubbed at a pulse point in my temple. Could he see me? I remembered his thick glasses and decided he could not. And I was far in the back, and off to the side.

  "Hear also what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

  We stood up and sang a psalm.

  THE service took a little over an hour. The Old Testament reading was from Isaiah, the New Testament reading from Mark. There was another hymn, a prayer, still another hymn. The offering was taken and consecrated. I put a five on the plate.

  The sermon, as promised, dealt with the proposition that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions. It was not enough for us to act with the best and most righteous goals in mind, Martin Vanderpoel told us, because the highest purpose could be betrayed if it were advanced by actions which were not good and righteous in and of themselves.

  I didn't pay too much attention to how he elaborated on this because my mind got caught up in the central thesis of the argument and played with it. I wondered whether it was worse for men to do the wrong things for the right reason or the right things for the wrong reason. It wasn't the first time I wondered, or the last.

  Then we were standing, and his arms were spread, his robed draping like the wings of an enormous bird, his voice vibrant and resonant.

  "The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be amongst you, and remain with you always. Amen."

  Amen.

  A few people slipped out of the church without stopping for a few words with Reverend Vanderpoel. The rest lined up for a handshake. I managed to be at the end of the line. When it was finally my turn Vanderpoel blinked at me. He knew my face was familiar, but he couldn't figure out why.

  Then he said, "Why, it's Mr. Scudder! I certainly never expected to see you at our services."

  "It was enjoyable."

  "I'm pleased to hear you say that. I hardly anticipated seeing you again, and I didn't dream of hoping that our incidental meeting might lead you to search for the presence of God." He looked past my shoulder, a half-smile on his lips. "He does work in mysterious ways, does He not?"

&n
bsp; "So it seems."

  "That a particular tragedy could have this effect upon a person like yourself. I imagine I might find myself using that as a theme for a sermon at some later date."

  "I'd like to talk to you, Reverend Vanderpoel. In private, I think."

  "Oh, dear," he said. "I'm quite pressed for time today, I'm afraid. I'm sure you have a great many questions about religion, one is always filled with questions that seem to have a great need for immediate answers, but-"

  "I don't want to talk about religion, sir."

  "Oh?"

  "It's about your son and Wendy Hanniford."

  "I already told you all that I know."

  "I'm afraid I have to tell you some things, sir. And we'd better have that conversation now, and it really will have to be private."

  "Oh?" He looked at me intently, and I watched the play of emotions on his face. "Very well," he said. "I do have a few tasks that need to be attended to. I'll just be a moment."

  I waited, and he wasn't more than ten minutes. Then he took me companionably by the arm and led me through the back of the church and through a door into the rectory. We wound up in the room we had been in before. The electric fire glowed on the hearth, and again he stood in front of it and warmed his long-fingered hands.

  "I like a cup of coffee after morning services," he said. "You'll join me?"

  "No, thank you."

  He left the room and came back with coffee. "Well, Mr. Scudder? What's so urgent?" His tone was deliberately light, but there was tension underneath it.

  "I enjoyed the services this morning," I said.

  "Yes, so you said, and I'm pleased to hear it. However-"

  "I was hoping for a different Old Testament text."

  "Isaiah is difficult to grasp, I agree. A poet and a man of vision. There are some interesting commentaries on today's reading if you're interested."

  "I was hoping the reading might be from Genesis."

  "Oh, we don't start over until Whitsunday, you know. But why Genesis?"

  "A particular portion of Genesis, actually."

  "Oh?"

  "The Twenty-second Chapter."

  He closed his eyes for a moment and frowned in concentration. He opened them and shrugged apologetically. "I used to have a fair memory for chapter and verse. It's been one of the casualties of the aging process, I'm afraid. Shall I look it up?"

  I said, " `And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham; and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.' "

  "The temptation of Abraham. `God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.' A very beautiful passage." His eyes fixed on me. "It's unusual that you can quote Scripture, Mr. Scudder."

  "I had reason to read that passage the other day. It stayed with me."

  "Oh?"

  "I thought you might care to explain the chapter to me."

  "At some other time, certainly, but I scarcely see the urgency of-"

  "Don't you?"

  He looked at me. I got to my feet and took a step toward him. I said, "I think you do. I think you could explain to me the interesting parallels between Abraham and yourself. You could tell me what happens when God doesn't oblige by providing a lamb for the burnt offering. You could tell me more about how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

  "Mr. Scudder-"

  "You could tell me why you were able to murder Wendy Hanniford. And why you let Richie die in your place."

  Chapter 16

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I think you do, sir."

  "My son committed a horrible murder. I'm sure he did not know what he was doing at the moment of his act. I forgive him for what he did, I pray God forgives him-"

  "I'm not a congregation, sir. I'm a man who knows all the things you thought no one would ever be able to figure out. Your son never killed anybody until he killed himself."

  He sat there for a long moment, taking it all in. He bowed his head a little. His pose was an attitude of prayer, but I don't think he was praying. When he spoke his tone was not defensive so much as it was curious, the words very nearly an admission of guilt.

  "What makes you... believe this, Mr. Scudder?"

  "A lot of things I learned. And the way they all fit together."

  "Tell me."

  I nodded. I wanted to tell him because I had been feeling the need to tell someone all along. I hadn't told Cale Hanniford. I had come close to telling Trina, had begun hinting at it, but in the end I had not told her, either.

  Vanderpoel was the only person I could tell.

  I said, "The case was open-and-shut. That's how the police saw it, and it was the only way to see it. But I didn't start out looking for a murderer. I started out trying to learn something about Wendy and your son, and the more I learned, the harder it was for me to buy the idea that he had killed her.

  "What nailed him was turning up on the sidewalk covered with blood and behaving hysterically. But if you began to dismiss that from your mind, the whole idea of him being the killer began to break down. He left his job suddenly in the middle of the afternoon. He hadn't planned on leaving. That could have been staged. But instead he came down with a case of indigestion and his employer finally managed to talk him into leaving.

  "Then he got home with barely enough time to rape her and kill her and run out into the street. He hadn't been acting oddly during the day. The only thing evidently wrong with him was a stomachache. Theoretically he walked in on her and something about her provoked him into flipping out completely.

  "But what was it? A rush of sexual desire? He lived with the girl, and it was a reasonable assumption that he could make love to her any time he wanted to. And the more I learned about him, the more certain I became that he never made love to her. They lived together, but they didn't sleep together."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Your son was homosexual."

  "That is not true."

  "I'm afraid it is."

  "Relations between men are an abomination in the eyes of God."

  "That may be. I'm no authority. Richie was homosexual. He wasn't comfortable with it. I gather it was impossible for him to be comfortable with any kind of sexuality. He had very mixed-up feelings about you, about his mother, and they made any real sexual relationship impossible."

  I walked over to the fake fire. I wondered if the fireplace was fake, too. I turned and looked at Martin Vanderpoel. He had not changed position. He was still sitting in his chair with his hands on his knees, his eyes on the patch of rug between his feet.

  I said, "Richie seems to have been stabilized by his relationship with Wendy Hanniford. He was able to regulate his life, and I'd guess he was relatively happy. Then he came home one afternoon, and something set him reeling. Now what would do that?"

  He didn't say anything.

  "He might have walked in and found her with another man. But that didn't add up because why would it upset him that much? He must have known how she supported herself, that she saw other men during the afternoons while he was at work. Besides, there would have to be some trace of that other man. He wouldn't just run off when Richie started slicing with a razor.

  "And where would Richie get a razor? He used an electric. Nobody twenty years old shaves with a straight razor anymore. Some kids carry razors the way other kids carry knives, but Richie wasn't that kind of kid.

  "And what did he do with the razor afterward? The cops decided he flipped it out the window or dropped it somewhere and somebody picked it up and walked off with it."

  "Isn't that plausible, Mr. Scudder?"

  "Uh-huh. If he had a razor in the first place. And it was also possible he'd used a knife instead of a razor. There were plenty of knives in the kitchen. But I was in that kitchen, and all the cupboards
and drawers were neatly closed, and you don't grab up a knife to slaughter someone in a fit of passion and remember to close the drawer carefully behind you. No, there was only one way it made sense to me. Richie came home and found Wendy already dead or dying, and that knocked him for a loop. He couldn't handle it."

  My headache was coming back again. I rubbed at my temple with a knuckle. It didn't do much good.

  "You told me Richie's mother died when he was quite young."

  "Yes."

  "You didn't tell me she killed herself."