Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

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.”

“How did you learn that?”

“When something’s a matter of record, sir, anyone can find out about it if he takes the trouble to look for it. I didn’t have to dig for that information. All I had to do was think of looking for it. Your wife killed herself in the bathtub by slashing her wrists. Did she use a razor?”

He looked at me.

“Your razor, sir?”

“I don’t see that it matters.”

“Don’t you?” I shrugged. “Richie walked in and found his mother dead in a pool of blood. Then, fourteen years later, he walked into an apartment on Bethune Street and found the woman he was living with dead in her bed. Also slashed with a razor, and also lying in a pool of blood.

“I suppose Wendy Hanniford was a mother to him in certain ways. They must have played a lot of different surrogate roles in each other’s lives. But all of a sudden Wendy became his dead mother, and Richie couldn’t handle it, and he wound up doing something I guess he’d never been able to do before.”

“What?”

“He had intercourse with her. It was a pure, uncontrollable reaction. He didn’t even take time to take his clothes off. He fell on her and he had intercourse with her, and when it was over he ran out into the streets and started screaming his lungs out because his head was full of the fact that he had had intercourse with his mother and now she was dead. You can see what he thought, sir. He thought he fucked her to death.”

“God,” he said.

I wondered if he’d ever pronounced it quite that way before.

My headache was getting worse. I asked him if I could have some aspirins. He told me how to find the first-floor lavatory. There were aspirin tablets in the medicine cabinet. I took two and drank half a glass of water.

When I went back into the living room he hadn’t changed position. I sat down in my chair and looked at him. There was a lot more and we would get to it, but I wanted to wait for him to pick it up.

He said, “This is extraordinary, Mr. Scudder.”

“Yes.”

“I never even considered the possibility that Richard was innocent. I just assumed he had done it. If what you think is true—”

“It’s true.”

“Then he died for nothing.”

“He died for you, sir. He was the lamb for the burnt offering.”

“You can’t seriously believe I killed that girl.”

“I know you did, sir.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“You met Wendy in the spring.”

“Yes. I believe I told you that the last time you were here.”

“You picked a time when you knew Richie would be at work. You wanted to meet this girl because you were bothered at the idea of Richie living in sin with her.”

“I already told you as much.”

“Yes, you did.” I took a breath. “Wendy Hanniford was very strongly drawn to older men, men who functioned as father figures for her. She was aggressive in situations involving a man who attracted her. She managed to seduce several of her professors at college.

“She met you, and she was attracted to you. It’s not hard to imagine why. You’re a very commanding figure of a man. Very stern and forbidding. And on top of everything you were Richie’s actual father, and she and Richie were living like brother and sister.

“So she made a play for you. I gather she was very good at getting her point across. And you were very vulnerable. You’d been a widower for a good many years. Your housekeeper may have been very efficient at her appointed tasks, but you certainly couldn’t have picked her as a potential sexual outlet. The last time I was here you told me you felt in retrospect that you should have remarried for Richie’s sake. I think you were really saying that you should have remarried for your own sake, so that you wouldn’t have been vulnerable to Wendy Hanniford.”

“This is all guesswork on your part, Mr. Scudder.”

“You went to bed with her. Maybe that was the first time you went to bed with anybody since your wife died. I wouldn’t know, and it doesn’t much matter. But you went to bed with her and I guess you liked it because you kept going back. You thought it was a sin, but that didn’t change things much because you went right on sinning.

“You certainly hated her. Even after she was dead you made it a point to tell me how evil she was. I thought at the time you were justifying your son’s act. I didn’t believe then that he did it, but I believed you thought so.

“Then you told me he admitted his guilt.”

He didn’t say anything. I watched him wipe perspiration from his forehead, then wipe his hand on his robe.

“That didn’t have to mean anything. You might have been talking yourself into the belief that Richie died penitent. Or he could well have admitted it to you because he could have become sufficiently confused after the fact. Everything was jumbled up for him. He told his lawyer he found Wendy dead in the bathtub. A little more reflection and he must have decided that he had killed her even if he couldn’t remember it.

“But the more I found out about Wendy, the harder it was to picture her as evil. I don’t doubt she had an evil effect on the lives of certain other people. But why would she seem evil to you? There was really only one explanation for that, sir. She made you want to do something you were ashamed of. And that made you do something more shameful. You killed her.

“You planned it. You took your razor along. And you had sex with her one final time before you murdered her.”

“That’s a lie.”

“It’s not. I can even tell you what you did. The autopsy showed that she had had both oral and vaginal intercourse shortly before death. Richie would have had genital intercourse with her, so what you did, sir, was take off all your clothes and let her perform fellatio upon you, and then you whipped out your razor and slashed her to death, and then you went home and let your son hang himself for it.”