Sins of the Fathers, Page 3

  "It's still padlocked?"

  "Don't you guys talk to each other?"

  "I'm not on the force. This is private."

  Her eyes did a number. She liked me better now that I wasn't a cop, but now she had to know what angle I was working. Also if I wasn't on official business, that meant she didn't have to feel compelled to waste her time on me.

  She said, "Listen, I'm in the middle of something. I'm an artist, I got work to do."

  "It'll take you less time to answer my questions than it will to get rid of me."

  She thought this over, then turned abruptly and walked into the building. "It's freezing out there," she said. "C'mon downstairs, we'll talk, but don't figure on taking up too much of my time, huh?"

  I followed her down a flight of stairs to the basement. She had a single large room with kitchen appliances in one corner and an army cot on the west wall. There were exposed pipes and electrical cables overhead. Her art was sculpture, and there were several examples of her work in evidence. I never saw the piece she was currently working on. A wet cloth was draped over it. The other pieces were abstract, and there was a massive quality to them, a ponderousness suggestive of sea monsters.

  "I'm not going to be able to tell you much," she said. "I'm the super because I get a deal on the rent that way. I'm handy, I can fix most things that go wrong, and I'm mean enough to yell at people when they're late with the rent. Most of the time I keep to myself. I don't pay much attention to what goes on in the building."

  "You knew Vanderpoel and Miss Hanniford?"

  "By sight."

  "When did they move in?"

  "She was here before I moved in, and I've been here two years in April. He moved in with her I guess a little over a year ago. I think just before Christmas if I remember right."

  "They didn't move in together?"

  "No. She was living with someone else before that."

  "A man?"

  "A woman."

  She didn't have any records, didn't know the name of Wendy's former roommate. She gave me the landlord's name and address. I asked her what she remembered about Wendy.

  "Not a hell of a lot. I only notice people if they make trouble. She never had loud parties or played the stereo too loud. I was in the apartment a few times. The valve was shot on the bedroom radiator, and they were getting too much heat, they couldn't regulate it. I put a new valve in. That was just a couple of months ago."

  "They kept the apartment neat?"

  "Very neat. Very attractive. They had the trim painted, and the place was furnished nice." She thought for a moment. "I think maybe that was his doing. I was in the place before he moved in, and I think I remember it wasn't as nice then. He was sort of artsy."

  "Did you know she was a prostitute?"

  "I still don't know it. I read lots of lies in the papers."

  "You don't think she was?"

  "I don't have an opinion either way. I never had any complaints about her. Then again, she could have had ten men a day up there, and I wouldn't have known about it."

  "Did she have visitors?"

  "I just told you. I wouldn't know about it. People don't have to get past me to get upstairs."

  I asked her who else lived in the building. There were five floor-through apartments, and she gave me the names of the tenants in each. I could talk to them if they were willing to talk to me, she said. But not the couple on the top floor-they were in Florida and wouldn't be back until the middle of March.

  "You got enough?" she said. "I want to get back to what I was doing." She flexed her fingers, indicating an impatience to return them to the clay.

  I told her she had been very helpful.

  "I don't see that I told you anything much."

  "There's something more you could tell me."

  "What?"

  "You didn't know them, either of them, and I realize you don't take much interest in the people in the building. But everybody invariably forms an impression of people they see frequently over an extended period of time. You must have had some sort of image of the two of them, some feeling that extended beyond your hard factual knowledge of them. That's probably been shifted out of position by what's happened in the past week, what you've learned about them, but I'd like to know what your impression of them was."

  "What good would that do you?"

  "It would tell me what they looked like to human eyes. And you're an artist, you've got sensibilities."

  She gnawed at a fingernail. "Yeah, I see what you mean," she said after a moment. "I just can't find where to pick up on it."

  "You were surprised when he killed her."

  "Anybody'd be surprised."

  "Because it changed how you saw them. How did you see them?"

  "Just as tenants, just ordinary-wait a minute. All right, you jarred something loose. I never even put words to the tune before, but you know how I thought of them? As brother and sister."

  "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."

  Chapter 4

  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 ar
ound 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.

  I spent another twenty minutes or so with Pankow, going back and forth over places we'd already been without getting anything much from him. He talked a little about his reactions to the murder scene, the nausea, the hysteria. He wanted to know if you ever got used to that sort of thing. I thought of the photograph I had taken from the file. I hadn't felt much looking at it. But if I had walked into that bedroom as Pankow had done, I might have reacted in very much the same way.

  "You get used to some of it," I told him, "but every once in a while something new comes along and knocks you on your ass."

  When I had all I was going to get, I put a five on the table for the drinks and passed him twenty-five dollars. He didn't want to take it.

  "C'mon," I said. "You did me a favor."

  "Well, that's all it was, was a favor. I feel funny taking money for it."

  "You're being stupid."

  "Huh?" The blue eyes were very wide.

  "Stupid. This isn't graft. It's clean money. You did somebody a favor and made a couple of bucks for it." I pushed the bills across the table at him. "Listen to me," I said. "You just made a good collar. You wrote a decent report, and you handle yourself well, and pretty soon you'll be in line to get off the beat and into a prowl car. But nobody's going to want you in a car with him if you've got the wrong kind of reputation."

  "I don't get you."

  "Think about it. If you don't take money when somebody puts it in your hand, you're going to make a lot of people very nervous. You don't have to be a crook. Certain kinds of money you can turn down. And you don't have to walk the streets with your hand out. But you've got to play the game with the cards they give you. Take the money."

  "Jesus."

  "Didn't Koehler tell you there would be something in it for you?"

  "Sure. But that's not why I came here. Hell, I generally drop in for a couple of beers when my shift ends. I usually meet my girl here around ten thirty. It's not like-"

  "Koehler's going to expect a five-dollar bill for steering twenty-five your way. You want to pay him out of your own pocket?"

  "Jesus. What do I do, just walk into his office and hand him five dollars?"

  "That's the idea. You can say something like, `Here's that five you loaned me.' Something like that."

  "I guess I got a lot to learn," he said. He didn't sound delighted at the prospect.

  "You don't have to worry about it," I said. "You've got plenty to learn, but they make it easy for you. The system takes you through it a step at a time. That's what makes it such a good system."

  * * *

  HE insisted on buying me a drink out of his new-found wealth. I sat there and drank it while he told me what it meant to him to be a police officer. I nodded at the right times without paying very much attention to what he was saying. I couldn't keep my mind on his words.

  I got out of there and walked crosstown on Fifty-seventh to my hotel. The early edition of the Times was just in at the newsstand on Eighth Avenue. I bought it and took it home with me.

  There were no messages for me at the desk. I went up to my room and took my shoes off and stretched out on the bed with the paper. It turned out to be about as gripping as Lewis Pankow's conversation.

  I got undressed. When I took off m
y shirt, the photo of Wendy Hanniford's dead body fell onto the floor. I picked it up and looked at it and imagined myself as Lewis Pankow, walking in on a scene like that with the killer manacled to my wrist, then hauling him across the room so that I could vomit in the corner, then giggling hysterically until Richard Vanderpoel quite reasonably asked the cause of my mirth.