Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

“How long had he been working for you?”

“Just about a year and a half. He went to work for me a year ago last July.”

“He moved in with Wendy Hanniford the following December. Did you have a previous address for him?”

“The YMCA on Twenty-third Street. That’s where he was living when he came to work for me. Then he moved a few times. I don’t have the addresses, and then I guess it was in December when he moved to Bethune Street.”

“Did you know anything about Wendy Hanniford?”

He shook his head. “Never met her. Never knew her name.”

“You knew he was rooming with a girl?”

“I knew he said he was.”

“Oh?”

Burghash shrugged. “I figured he was rooming with somebody, and if he wanted me to think it was a girl, I was willing to go along with it.”

“You thought he was homosexual.”

“Uh-huh. It’s not exactly unheard of in this business. I don’t care if my employees go to bed with orangutans. What they do on their own time is their own business.”

“Did he have any friends that you knew of?”

“Not that I knew of, no. He kept to himself most of the time.”

“And he was a good worker.”

“Very good. Very conscientious, and he had a feeling for the business.” He fixed his eyes on the ceiling. “I sensed that he had personal problems. He never talked about them, but he was, oh, how shall I put it? High-strung.”

“Nervous? Touchy?”

“No, not that, exactly. High-strung is the best adjective I can think of to describe him. You sensed that he had things weighing him down, keying him up. But you know, that was more noticeable when he first started here. For the past year he seemed more settled, as if he had managed to come to terms with himself.”

“The past year. Since he moved in with the Hanniford girl, in other words.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I guess that’s right.”

“You were surprised when he killed her.”

“I was astonished. I simply could not believe it. And I’m still astonished. You see someone five days a week for a year and a half, and you think you know them. Then you find out you don’t know them at all.”

On my way out the young man in the turtleneck stopped me. He asked me if I had learned anything useful. I told him I didn’t know.

“But it’s all over,” he said. “Isn’t it? They’re both dead.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the point in poking around in corners?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Why do you suppose he was living with her?”

“Why does anybody live with anybody else?”

“Let’s assume he was gay. Why would he live with a woman?”

“Maybe he got tired of dusting and cleaning. Sick of doing his own laundry.”

“I don’t know that she was that domestic. It seems likely that she was a prostitute.”

“So I understand.”

“Why would a homosexual live with a prostitute?”

“Gawd, I don’t know. Maybe she let him take care of her overflow. Maybe he was a closet heterosexual. For my own part, I’d never live with anyone, male or female. I have trouble enough living with myself.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I started toward the door, then turned around again. There were too many things that didn’t fit together, and they were scraping against each other like chalk on a blackboard. “I just want to make sense out of this,” I said, to myself as much as to him. “Why in hell would he kill her? He raped her and he killed her. Why?”

“Well, he was a minister’s son.”

“So?”

“They’re all crazy,” he said. “Aren’t they?”

The Reverend Martin Vanderpoel didn’t want to see me. “I have spoken with enough reporters,” he told me. “I can spare no time for you, Mr. Scudder. I have my responsibilities to my congregation. What time remains, I feel the need to devote to prayer and meditation.”

I knew the feeling. I explained that I wasn’t a reporter, that I was representing Cole Hanniford, the father of the murdered girl.

“I see,” he said.

“I wouldn’t need much of your time, Reverend Vanderpoel. Mr. Hanniford has suffered a loss, even as you have. In a sense, he lost his daughter before she was killed. Now he wants to learn more about her.”

“I’d be a poor source of information, I’m afraid.”

“He told me he wanted to see you himself, sir.”

There was a long pause. I thought for a moment that the phone had gone dead. Then he said, “It is a difficult request to refuse. I will be occupied with church affairs this afternoon, I’m afraid. Perhaps this evening?”

“This evening would be fine.”

“You have the address of the church? The rectory is adjacent to it. I will be waiting for you at — shall we say eight o’clock?”

I said eight would be fine. I found another dime and looked up another number and made a call, and the man I spoke to was a good deal less reticent to talk about Richard Vanderpoel. In fact he seemed relieved that I’d called him and told me to come right on up.

His name was George Topakian, and he and his brother constituted Topakian and Topakian, Attorneys-at-Law. His office was on Madison Avenue in the low Forties. Framed diplomas on the wall testified that he had graduated from City College twenty-two years ago and had then gone on to Fordham Law.

He was a small man, trimly built, dark complected. He seated me in a red leather tub chair and asked me if I wanted coffee. I said coffee would be fine. He buzzed his secretary on the intercom and had her bring a cup for each of us. While she was doing this, he told me he and his brother had a general practice with an emphasis on estate work. The only criminal cases he’d handled, aside from minor work for regular clients, had come as a result of court assignments. Most of these had involved minor offenses — purse snatching, low-level assault, possession of narcotics — until the court had appointed him as counsel to Richard Vanderpoel.

“I expected to be relieved,” he said. “His father was a clergyman and would almost certainly have arranged my replacement by a criminal lawyer. But I did see Vanderpoel.”

“When did you see him?”

“Late Friday afternoon.” He scratched the side of his nose with his index finger. “I could have gotten to him earlier, I guess.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I stalled.” He looked at me levelly. “I was anticipating being replaced,” he said. “And if replacement was imminent, I thought I could save myself the time I’d spend seeing him. And my time wasn’t the half of it.”

“How do you mean?”

“I didn’t want to see the son of a bitch.”

He got up from behind his desk and walked over to the window. He toyed with the cord of the venetian blinds, raising and lowering them a few inches. I waited him out. He sighed and turned to face me.

“Here was a guy who committed a horrible murder, slashed a young woman to death. I didn’t want to set eyes on him. Do you find that hard to understand?”

“Not at all.”

“It bothered me. I’m an attorney, I’m supposed to represent people without regard to what they have or haven’t done. I should have thrown myself right into it, finding the best defense for him. I certainly shouldn’t have presumed my own client guilty as charged without even talking to him.” He came back to his desk and sat down again. “But of course I did. The police picked him up right on the scene of the crime. I might have challenged their case if I saw it all the way into court, but in my own mind I had already tried the bastard and found him guilty as charged. And since I had every expectation that I would be taken off the case, I found ways to avoid seeing Vanderpoel.”