Lawrence Block: Sins of the Fathers

There was no telling what she might have looked like alive. She had died from loss of blood, and Lady Macbeth was right about that; no one would guess how much blood a body can lose in the process of dying. You can put an ice pick in a man’s heart and barely a drop of blood will show on his shirtfront, but Vanderpoel had cut her breasts and thighs and belly and throat, and the whole bed was an ocean of blood.

After they’d photographed the body, they removed it for autopsy. A Dr. Jainchill of the medical examiner’s office had done the full postmortem. He stated that the victim was a Caucasian female in her twenties, that she had had recent sexual intercourse, both oral and genital, that she had been slashed twenty-three times with a sharp instrument, most probably a razor, that there were no stab wounds (which might have been why he was opting for the razor), that various veins and arteries, which he conscientiously named, had been wholly or partially severed in the course of this mistreatment, that death had occurred at approximately four o’clock that afternoon, give or take twenty minutes, and that there was in his opinion no possibility whatsoever that the wounds had been self-inflicted.

I was proud of him for taking such a firm stand on the last point.

The rest of the folder consisted of bits of information which would ultimately be supplemented by copies of formal reports filed by other branches of the machine. There was a note to the effect that the prisoner had been brought before a magistrate and formally charged with homicide the day after his arrest. Another memo gave the name of the court-appointed attorney. Another noted that Richard Vanderpoel had been found dead in his cell shortly before six Saturday morning.

The folder would grow fatter in time to come. The case was closed, but the Sixth’s file would go on growing like a corpse’s hair and fingernails. The guard who looked in and saw Richard Vanderpoel hanging from the steam pipe would write up his findings. So would the physician who pronounced him dead and the physician who established beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the strips of bedclothing tied together and knotted around his neck that had done him in. Ultimately a coroner’s inquest would conclude that Wendy Hanniford had been murdered by Richard Vanderpoel and that Richard Vanderpoel had in turn taken his own life. The Sixth Precinct, and everyone else connected with the case, had already reached this conclusion. They had reached the first part of it well before Vanderpoel had been booked. The case was closed.

I went back and read through some of the material again. I studied the photos in turn. The apartment itself didn’t look to be greatly disturbed, which suggested the killer had been someone known to her. I went back to the autopsy. No skin under Wendy’s fingernails, no obvious signs of a struggle. Facial contusions? Yes, so she could have been unconscious while he cut her up.

She had probably been awhile dying. If he’d cut the throat first, and got the jugular right, she would have gone fast. But she had lost a lot of blood from the wounds on the torso.

I picked out one print and tucked it inside my shirt. I wasn’t sure why I wanted it but knew it would never be missed. I knew a desk cop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn who used to take home a copy of every grisly picture he could get his hands on. I never asked why.

I had everything back in order and returned to the file folder by the time Koehler came back. He had a fresh cigar going. I got out from behind his desk. He asked me if I was satisfied.

“I’d still like to talk to Pankow.”

“I already set it up. I figured you’re too fucking stubborn to change your mind. You find a single damn thing in that mess?”

“How do I know? I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I understand she was hooking. Any evidence of that?”

“Nothing hard. There would be if we looked. Good wardrobe, couple hundred in her handbag, no visible means of support. What’s that add up to?”

“Why was she living with Vanderpoel?”

“He had a twelve-inch tongue.”

“Seriously. Was he pimping for her?”

“Probably.”

“You didn’t have a sheet on either of them, though.”

“No. No arrest. They didn’t exist officially for us until he decided to cut her up.”

I closed my eyes for a minute. Koehler said my name. I looked up. I said, “Just a thought. Something you said before about time putting Hanniford on the spot. It’s true in a way besides the one you mentioned. If she was killed by person or persons unknown, you’d have put the past two years of her life on slides and run them through a microscope. But it was over before it started, and it’s not your job to do that now.”

“Right. So it’s your job instead.”

“Uh-huh. What did he kill her with?”

“Doc says a razor.” He shrugged. “Good a guess as any.”

“What happened to the murder weapon?”

“Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t miss that. We didn’t turn it up. You can’t make much out of that. There was a window open, he could have pitched it out.”

“What’s outside of the window?”

“Airshaft.”

“You checked it?”

“Uh-huh. Anybody coulda picked it up, any kid passing through.”

“Check for blood spots in the airshaft?”

“Are you kidding? An airshaft in the Village? People piss out windows, they throw Tampax out, garbage, everything. Nine out of ten airshafts you’ll find blood spots. Would you have checked? With the killer already wrapped up?”

“No.”

“Anyway, forget the airshaft. He bolts out of the apartment with the knife in his hand. Or the razor, whatever the fuck it was. He drops it on the staircase. He runs out in the street and drops it on the sidewalk. He puts it in an open garbage can. He drops it down a sewer. Matt, we don’t have an eyewitness who saw him come out of the building. We woulda turned one up if we needed one, but the son of a bitch was dead thirty-six hours after he cooled the girl.”

It kept coming back to that. I was doing a job the police would have done if they had had to do it. But Richard Vanderpoel had saved them the trouble.

“So we don’t know when he hit the street,” Koehler was saying. “Two minutes before Pankow got to him? Ten minutes? He coulda chewed up the knife and ate it in that amount of time. Christ knows he was crazy enough.”

“Was there a razor in the apartment?”

“You mean a straight razor? No.”

“I mean a man’s razor.”

“Yeah, he had an electric. Why the hell don’t you forget about the razor? You know what those fucking autopsies are like. I had one a couple years ago, the asshole in the medical examiner’s office said the victim had been killed with a hatchet. We already caught the bastard on the premises with a croquet mallet in his hand. Anybody who could mistake the damage done by splitting someone’s skull with a hatchet and beating it in with a mallet couldn’t tell a razor slash from a cunt.”

I nodded. I said, “I wonder why he did it.”

“Because he was out of his fucking mind, that’s why he did it. He ran up and down the street covered with her blood, screaming his head off and waving his cock at the world. Ask him why he did it and he wouldn’t know himself.”

“What a world.”

“Jesus, don’t let me get started on that. This neighborhood gets worse and worse. Don’t get me started.” He gave me a nod, and we walked together out of his office and out through the squad room. Men in plainclothes and men in uniforms sat at typewriters, laboriously pounding out stories about presumed miscreants and alleged perpetrators. A woman was making a report in Spanish to a uniformed officer, pausing intermittently to weep. I wondered what she had done or what had been done to her.