Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

“Hey.”

“Hey?”

“Hey, you’re in a bad way. Troubles?”

“I had a rotten day. I flew upstate and had a conversation that wasn’t much fun.”

“The business you were telling me about the other night?”

“Was I talking about it with you? Yes, I guess I was.”

“Feel like talking about it now?”

“Maybe a little later.”

“Sure.”

We sat for a while, not saying much. The place was quiet as it often is on Saturdays. At one point two kids came in and walked over to the bar. I didn’t recognize them.

“Matt, is something wrong?”

I didn’t answer her. The bartender sold them a couple of six-packs and they left. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Matt?”

“Just a reflex. I thought the place was about to be held up. Put it down to nerves.”

“Sure.” Her hand covered mine. “Getting late,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Kind of. Would you walk me home? It’s just a couple of blocks.”

She lived on the tenth floor of a new building on Fifty-sixth between Ninth and Tenth. The doorman roused himself enough to flash her a smile. “There’s some booze,” she told me, “and I can make better coffee than Jimmie can. Want to come up?”

“I’d like to.”

Her apartment was a studio, one large room with an alcove that held a narrow bed. She showed me where to hang my coat and put on a stack of records. She said she’d put on some coffee, and I told her to forget about the coffee. She made drinks for both of us. She curled up on a red plush sofa and I sat in a frayed gray armchair.

“Nice place,” I said.

“It’s getting there. I want pictures for the walls and some of the furniture will have to be replaced eventually, but in the meantime it suits me.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since October. I lived uptown, and I hated taking cabs to and from work.”

“Were you ever married, Trina?”

“For three years, almost. I’ve been divorced for four.”

“Ever see your ex?”

“I don’t even know what state he lives in. I think he’s out on the Coast, but I’m not sure. Why?”

“No reason. You didn’t have any kids?”

“No. He didn’t want to. Then when things fell apart I was glad we didn’t. You?”

“Two boys.”

“That must be rough.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess.”

“Matt? What would you have done if there was a holdup tonight?”

I thought it over. “Nothing, probably. Nothing I could do, really. Why?”

“You didn’t see yourself when it was going on. You looked like a cat getting ready to spring.”

“Reflexes.”

“All those years being a cop.”

“Something like that.”

She lit a cigarette. I got the bottle and freshened our drinks. Then I was sitting on the couch next to her and telling her about Wendy and Richard, telling her just about all of it. I don’t know whether it was her or the booze or a combination of the two, but it was suddenly very easy to talk about it, very important that I talk about it.

And I said, “The impossible thing was knowing how much to tell the man. He was afraid of what he might have done to her, either by limiting his affection for her or by behaving seductively toward her without knowing it himself. I can’t find those answers any better than he can. But other things. The murder, the way his daughter died. How much of that was I supposed to tell him?”

“Well, he already knew all that, didn’t he, Matt?”

“I guess he knew what he had to know.”

“I don’t follow you.”

I started to say something, then let it go. I poured more booze in both our glasses. She looked at me. “Trying to get me drunk?”

“Trying to get us both drunk.”

“Well, I think it’s working. Matt—”

I said, “It’s hard to know just how much a person has any right to do. I suppose I was on the force too long. Maybe I never should have left. Do you know about that?”

She averted her eyes. “Somebody said something once.”

“Well, if that hadn’t happened, would I have left anyway sooner or later? I always wonder about that. There was a great security in being a cop. I don’t mean the job security, I mean the emotional security. There weren’t as many questions, and the ones that came up were likely to have obvious answers, or at least they seemed obvious at the time.

“Let me tell you a story. This happened maybe ten years ago. Maybe twelve. It also happened in the Village and it involved a girl in her twenties. She was raped and murdered in her own apartment. Nylon stocking wrapped around her neck.” Trina shuddered. “Now this one wasn’t open-and-shut, there was nobody running around the streets with her blood on him. It was one of those cases where you just keep digging, you check out everybody who ever said boo to the girl, everybody in the building, everybody who knew her at work, every man who played any role whatsoever in her life. Christ, we must have talked to a couple of hundred people.

“Well, there was one guy I liked for it from the start. Big brawny son of a bitch, he was the super in the building she lived in. Ex-Navy man, got out on a bad-conduct discharge. We had a sheet on him. Two arrests for assault, both dropped when the complainants refused to press charges. Complainants in both cases were women.

“All that is enough reason to check him out down to the ground. Which we did. And the more I talked to him the more I knew the son of a bitch did it. Sometimes you just plain know.

“But he had himself covered. We had the time of death pinpointed to within an hour, and his wife was prepared to swear on a stack of bibles that he’d spent the entire day never out of her sight. And we had nothing on the other side of it, not one scrap of anything to place him in the girl’s apartment at the time of the murder. Nothing at all. Not even a lousy fingerprint, and even if we did, it meant nothing because he was the super and he could have put his prints there fixing the plumbing or something. We had nothing, not a smell of anything, and the only reason we knew he did it was we simply knew, and no district attorney would dream of trying to run that by a grand jury.

“So we checked out everybody else who was vaguely possible. And of course we didn’t get anywhere because there was nowhere to get, and the case wound up in the open file, which meant we knew it was never going to be closed out, which meant to all intents and purposes it was closed already because nobody would bother to look at it anymore.”

I got to my feet, walked across the room. I said, “But we knew he did it, see, and it was driving us crazy. I don’t know how many people get away with murder every year. A lot more than anyone realizes. This Ruddle, though, we knew he was our boy, and we still couldn’t do anything about it. That was his name, Jacob Ruddle.

“So after the case was marked open, my partner and I, we couldn’t get it out of our heads. Just couldn’t get it out of our heads, there wasn’t a day one of us didn’t bring it up. So eventually we went to this Ruddle and asked him if he’d take a polygraph test. You know what that is?”

“A lie detector?”

“A lie detector. We were completely straight with him, we told him he could refuse to take the test, and we also told him it couldn’t be entered in evidence against him, which it can’t. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, incidentally, but that’s the law.

“He agreed to take the test. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he thought it would look suspicious of him to refuse, although he must have known we damn well knew he killed her and nothing was going to make him stop looking suspicious to us. Or maybe he honestly thought he could beat the machine. Well, he took the test, and I made sure we had the best operator available to administer the test, and the results were just what we expected.”