Lawrence Block: Sins of the Fathers

And then nothing until the telephone rang and they learned she was dead. She was seventeen when she finished high school, twenty-one when she dropped out of college, twenty-four when Richard Vanderpoel cut her up. That was as old as she was ever going to get.

He began telling me things I would learn over again in more detail from Koehler. Names, addresses, dates, times. I let him talk. Something bothered me, and I let it sort itself out in my mind.

He said, “The boy who killed her. Richard Vanderpoel. He was younger than she was. He was only twenty.” He frowned at a memory. “When I heard what happened, what he had done, I wanted to kill that boy. I wanted to put him to death with my hands.” His hands tightened into fists at the recollection, then opened slowly. “But after he committed suicide, I don’t know, something changed inside me. It struck me that he was a victim, too. His father is a minister.”

“Yes, I know.”

“A church in Brooklyn somewhere. I had an impulse. I wanted to talk to the man. I don’t know what I thought I might want to say to him. Whatever it was, after a moment’s reflection I realized I could never have that conversation. And yet—”

“You want to know the boy. In order to know your daughter.”

He nodded.

I said, “Do you know what an Identikit portrait is, Mr. Hanniford? You’ve probably seen them in newspaper stories. When the police have an eyewitness, they use this kit of transparent overlays to piece together a composite picture of a suspect. ‘Is this nose like this? Or is this one more like it? Bigger? Wider? How about the ears? Which set of ears comes the closest?’ And so on until the features add up to a face.”

“Yes, I’ve seen how that works.”

“Then you’ve probably also seen actual photographs of the suspect side by side with the Identikit portraits. They never seem to resemble one another, especially to the untrained eye. But there is a factual resemblance, and a trained officer can often make very good use of it. Do you see what I’m getting at? You want photographs of your daughter and the boy who killed her. I’m not equipped to offer you that. No one is. I can dig up enough facts and impressions to make composite Identikit portraits for you, but the result may not be all that close to what you really want.”

“I understand.”

“You want me to go ahead?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“I’m probably more expensive than one of the big agencies. They’d work for you either per diem or on an hourly basis. Plus expenses. I take a certain amount of money and pay my own expenses out of it. I don’t like keeping records. I also don’t like writing reports, or checking in periodically when there’s nothing to say for the sake of keeping a client contented.”

“How much money do you want?”

I never know how to set prices. How do you put a value on your time when its only value is personal? And when your life has been deliberately restructured to minimize involvement in the lives of others, how much do you charge the man who forces you to involve yourself?

“I want two thousand dollars from you now. I don’t know how long this will take or when you’ll decide you’ve seen enough of the dark room. I may ask you for more money somewhere along the way, or after it’s over. Of course you always have the option of not paying me.”

He smiled suddenly. “You’re a very unorthodox businessman.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’ve never had occasion to hire a detective, so I don’t really know how this is usually done. Do you mind a check?”

I told him a check was fine, and while he was writing it out, I figured out what had been bothering me earlier. I said, “You never hired detectives after Wendy disappeared from college?”

“No.” He looked up. “It wasn’t that long before we received the first of the two postcards. I’d considered hiring detectives, of course, but once we knew she was all right I dropped the idea.”

“But you still didn’t know where she was, or how she was living.”

“No.” He lowered his eyes. “That’s part of it, of course. Why I’m busy now, locking up the empty stable.” His eyes returned to mine, and there was something in them that I wanted to turn from, and couldn’t. “I have to know how much to blame myself.”

Did he really think he would ever have the answer to that one? Oh, he might find himself an answer, but it would not be the right answer. There is never a right answer to that inescapable question.

He finished writing the check and passed it to me. He had left space blank where my name belonged. He told me he thought I might like it made out to Cash . I said payable to me was fine, and he uncapped his pen again and wrote Matthew Scudder on the right line. I folded it and put it in my wallet.

I said, “Mr. Hanniford, there’s something you left out. You don’t think it’s important, but it might be, and you think it might be.”

“How do you know that?”

“Instinct, I suppose. I spent a lot of years watching people decide how close they cared to come to the truth. There’s nothing you have to tell me, but—”

“Oh, it’s extraneous, Scudder. I left it out because I didn’t think it fit in, but — Oh, the hell with it. Wendy’s not my biological daughter.”

“She was adopted?”

“I adopted her. My wife is Wendy’s mother. Wendy’s father was killed before Wendy was born, he was a Marine, he died in the landing at Inchon.” He looked away again. “I married Wendy’s mother three years after that. From the beginning I loved her as much as any real father could have. When I found out that I was… unable to father children myself, I was even more grateful for her existence. Well? Is it important?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not.” But of course it was important to me. It told me something more about Hanniford’s load of guilt.

“Scudder? You’re not married, are you?”

“Divorced.”

“Any children?”

I nodded. He started to say something, and didn’t. I began wanting him to leave.

He said, “You must have been a very good policeman.”

“I wasn’t bad. I had cop instincts, and I learned the moves. That’s at least ninety percent of it.”

“How long were you on the force?”

“Fifteen years. Almost sixteen.”

“Isn’t there a pension or something if you stay twenty?”

“That’s right.”

He didn’t ask the question, and that was strangely more annoying than if he had.

I said, “I lost the faith.”

“Like a priest?”

“Something like that. Not exactly, because it’s not rare for a cop to lose the faith and go on being a cop. He may never have had it in the first place. What it amounted to was that I found out I didn’t want to be a cop anymore.” Or a husband, or a father. Or a productive member of society.

“All the corruption in the department? That sort of thing?”

“No, no.” The corruption had never bothered me. I would have found it hard to support a family without it. “No, it was something else.”

“I see.”

“You do? Hell, it’s not a secret. I was off duty one night in the summer. I was in a bar in Washington Heights where cops didn’t have to pay for their drinks. Two kids held up the place. On their way out they shot the bartender in the heart. I chased them into the street. I shot one of them dead and caught the other in the thigh. He’s never going to walk right again.”

“I see.”

“No, I don’t think you do. That wasn’t the first time I ever killed anyone. I was glad the one died and sorry the other recovered.”

“Then—”

“One shot went wide and ricocheted. It hit a seven-year-old girl in the eye. The ricochet took most of the steam off the bullet. An inch higher and it probably would have glanced off her forehead. Would have left a nasty scar but nothing much worse than that. This way, though, nothing but soft tissue, and it went right on into her brain. They tell me she died instantly.” I looked at my hands. The tremor was barely visible. I picked up my cup and drained it. I said, “There was no question of culpability. As a matter of fact, I got a departmental commendation. Then I resigned. I just didn’t want to be a cop anymore.”