Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

“Brother and sister?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

She closed her eyes, frowned. “I can’t say exactly,” she said. “Maybe the way they acted when they were together. Not anything they did. Just the vibrations they gave off, the sense you got of them when they were walking along. The sense of how they related to each other.”

I waited.

“Another thing. I didn’t dwell on this, I mean I didn’t give it any thought to speak of, but I sort of took it for granted that he was gay.”

“Why?”

She had been sitting. She got up now and walked to one of her creations, a gunmetal-colored mound of convex planes taller and wider than herself. She faced away from me, tracing a curved surface with her stubby fingers.

“Physical type, I suppose. Mannerisms. He was tall and slender, he had a way of speaking. You’d think I would know better than to think in those terms. With my figure and short hair, and working with my hands, and being good with electrical and mechanical things. People generally assume I’m a lesbian.” She turned around, and her eyes challenged me. “I’m not,” she said.

“Was Wendy Hanniford?”

“How would I know?”

“You guessed Vanderpoel might be gay. Did you make the same guess about her?”

“Oh. I thought— No, I’m sure she wasn’t. I generally know if a woman is gay by the way she relates to me. No, I assumed she was straight.”

“And you assumed he wasn’t.”

“Right.” She looked up at me. “You want to know something? I still think he was a faggot.”

I had some dinner in an Italian place on Greenwich Avenue, then hit a couple of bars before I took a cab over to Johnny Joyce’s. I told the bartender I was looking for Lewis Pankow, and he pointed me toward a booth in the back.

I could have found him without help. He was tall and rangy and towheaded, with an open face and a recent shave. He stood up when I approached him. He was in civilian clothes, a gray glen-plaid suit that couldn’t have cost him much, a pale blue shirt, a striped tie. I said I was Scudder, and he said he was Pankow, and he put out his hand, so I shook it. I sat down opposite him and ordered a double bourbon when the waiter came around. Pankow still had half a beer left in front of him.

He said, “The lieutenant said you wanted to see me. I guess it’s about the Hanniford murder?”

I nodded. “Hell of a good collar for you.”

“I was lucky. The right place at the right time.”

“It’ll look good on your record.”

He flushed.

“Probably get a commendation out of it, too.”

The flush deepened. I wondered how old he was. Say twenty-two at the outside. I thought about his report and decided he’d make detective third in a year or so.

I said, “I read your report. There was a lot of detail, but there were some things that you didn’t have room for. When you got to the scene, Vanderpoel was standing about two doors from the building where the murder took place. Now what was he doing exactly? Dancing around? Running?”

“More or less standing in one place. But moving around wildly. Like he had a lot of energy he had to work off. Like when you drink too much coffee and your hands get shaky, but his whole body was like that.”

“You said his clothing was disarrayed. How?”

“His shirttail was out of his pants. His belt was fastened, but his pants were unbuttoned and unzipped and his thing was hanging out.”

“His penis?”

“Right, his penis.”

“Was he exposing himself deliberately?”

“Well, it was hanging right out. He must of known about it.”

“But he wasn’t handling himself or thrusting out with his hips or anything like that?”

“No.”

“Did he have an erection?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“You saw his cock and didn’t notice if he had a hard-on or not?”

He flushed again. “He didn’t have one.”

The waiter brought my drink. I picked it up and looked into the glass. I said, “You put down that he was uttering obscenities.”

“Shouting them. I heard him shouting before I even turned the corner.”

“What was he saying?”

“You know.”

He embarrassed easy, this one. I kept myself from snapping at him. “The words he used,” I said.

“I don’t like to use them.”

“Force yourself.”

He asked if it was important, and I said it might be. He leaned forward and pitched his voice low. “Motherfucker,” he said.

“He just kept yelling motherfucker?”

“Not exactly.”

“I want the words he used.”

“Yeah, okay. What he said was, he kept yelling, ‘I’m a motherfucker, I’m a motherfucker, I fucked my mother.’ He kept shouting this over and over.”

“He said he was a motherfucker and he fucked his mother.”

“Right, that’s what he said.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought he was crazy.”

“Did you think he killed someone?”

“Oh. No, the first thing I thought was he was hurt. He had blood all over him.”

“His hands?”

“Everywhere. His hands, his shirt, his pants, his face, he was all covered with blood. I thought he was cut, but then I saw he was all right and the blood must of come from somebody else.”

“How could you tell?”

“I just knew. He was all right, it wasn’t his blood, so it was somebody else’s.” He hoisted his glass and drained it. I motioned for the waiter and ordered another beer for Pankow and a cup of coffee for myself. We sat there looking at the table until the waiter brought the order. Pankow was remembering things he’d spent the past few days trying to forget, and he wasn’t enjoying it much.

I said, “So you expected to find a body in the apartment.”

“I knew I would, yeah.”

“Who did you think it would be?”

“Hell, I thought it would be his mother. From what he was saying, motherfucker, I fucked my mother, I thought he went nuts or something and killed his mother. I even thought that’s who it was when I went in there, you know, on account of you couldn’t tell age or anything at first, just this naked woman with blood everywhere, the sheets soaked, the blanket, all this very dark blood—”

His face was white tinged with green. I said, “Easy, Lew.”

“I’m all right.”

“I know you are. Put your head down between your knees. C’mon, swing out from behind the table and put your head down. You’re all right.”

“I know.”

I thought he might faint, but he got hold of himself. He kept his head lowered for a minute or two, then sat up straight again. He had some color in his face now. He took a couple of deep breaths and a long swig of beer.

He said, “Jesus Christ.”

“You’re okay now.”

“Yeah, right. I took one look at her lying there and I had to puke. I seen dead people before. My old man, he had a heart attack in his sleep, and I was the one walked in and found him. And since I joined the force, you know. But I never seen one like this and I hadda puke and I’m handcuffed to this asshole and he’s still got his dick hanging out. I dragged the stupid bastard over to the corner and I just puked in the corner of the room, just like that, and what I did next, I had a fit of the giggles. I just couldn’t help it, I stood there giggling like an idiot, and this guy cuffed to me, so help me God, he stops all this yelling of his and he asks me, ‘What’s so funny?’ Can you believe it? Like he wants me to explain the joke to him so he can laugh, too. ‘What’s so funny?’ ”

I poured the rest of my bourbon into my coffee and stirred it with a spoon. I was getting bits and pieces of Richard Vanderpoel. So far they didn’t begin to fit together, but they were fragments of what might ultimately be a full picture. Or they might never add up to anything real. Sometimes the whole is a lot less than the sum of its parts.