The Sins of the Fathers - Page 5/23

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 my 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.

"What's so funny?"

I took a shower and put my clothes back on again. It had been snowing hesitantly earlier, and now it was beginning to accumulate. I walked around the corner to Armstrong's and took a stool at the bar.

He lived with her like brother and sister. He killed her and shrieked that he had fucked his mother. He rushed out into the street covered with her blood.

I knew too few facts, and the ones I did know did not seem to fit together.

I drank a few drinks and sidestepped a few conversations. I looked around for Trina, but she had left when her shift ended. I let the bartender tell me what was the matter with the Knicks this year. I don't remember what he said, just that he felt very strongly about it.

Chapter 5

Gordon Kalish had an old-fashioned pendulum clock on his wall, the kind that used to hang in railway stations. He kept glancing at it and checking the time against his wristwatch. At first I thought he was trying to tell me something. Later I realized it was a habit. Early in life someone must have told him his time was valuable. He had never forgotten, but he still couldn't entirely make himself believe it.

He was a partner in Bowdoin Realty Management. I had arrived at the company's offices in the Flatiron Building a few minutes after ten and waited for about twenty minutes until Kalish could give me a chunk of his time. Now he had papers and ledgers spread out on his desk and was apologetic that he couldn't be more helpful.

"We rented the apartment to Miss Hanniford herself," he said. "She may have had a roommate from the beginning. If so, she didn't tell us about it. She was the tenant of record. She could have had anyone living with her, man or woman, and we wouldn't have known about it. Or cared."

"She had a female roommate when Miss Antonelli moved in as superintendent. I'd like to contact that woman."

"I have no way of knowing who she was. Or when she moved in or out. As long as Miss Hanniford came up with the rent the first of every month, and as long as she didn't create a nuisance, we had no reason to take any further interest." He scratched his head. "If there was another woman and she moved out, wouldn't the post office have a forwarding address?"

"I'd need her name to get it."

"Oh, of course." His eyes went to the clock, then to his watch, then again to me. "It was a very different matter when my father first got into the business. He ran things on a much more personal basis. He was a plumber originally. He saved his money and bought property, a building at a time. Did all his own repair work, put the profits from one building into the acquisition of another. And he knew his tenants. He went around to collect the rent in person. The first of the month, or once a week in some of the buildings. He would carry certain tenants for months if they were going through hard times. Others he had out on the street if they were five days late. He said you had to be a good judge of people."

"He must have been quite a man."

"He still is. He's retired now, of course. He's been living down in Florida for five or six years now. Picks oranges off his own trees. And still pays his dues in the plumbers union every year." He clasped his hands together. "It's a different business now. We've sold off most of the buildings he bought. Ownership is too much of a headache. It's a lot less grief to manage property for somebody else. The building where Miss Hanniford lived, 194 Bethune, the owner is a housewife in a suburb of Chicago who inherited the property from an uncle. She's never seen it, just gets her check from us four times a year."

I said, "Miss Hanniford was a model tenant, then?"

"In that she never did anything to draw our attention. The papers say she was a prostitute. Could be, I suppose. We never had any complaints."

"You never met her?"

"No."

"She was always on time with the rent?"

"She was a week late now and then, just like everybody. No more than that."

"She paid by check?"

"Yes."

"When did she sign the lease?"

"What did I do with the lease? Here it is. Let's see, now. October 23, 1970. Standard two-year lease, renewing automatically."

"And the monthly rent was four hundred dollars?"

"It's three eighty-five now. It was lower then, there've been some allowable increases since then. It was three forty-two fifty when she signed it."

"You wouldn't rent to someone with no visible means of support."

"Of course not."

"Then she must have claimed to be working. She must have provided references."

"I should have thought of that," he said. He shuffled more papers and came up with the application she had filled out. I looked at it. She had claimed to be employed as an industrial systems analyst at a salary of seventeen thousand dollars a year. Her employer was one J.J. Cottrell, Inc. There was a telephone number listed, and I copied it down.

I asked if the references had been checked.

"They must have been," Kalish said. "But it doesn't amount to anything. It's simple enough to fake. All she needs is someone at that number to back up her story. We make the calls automatically, but I sometimes wonder if it's worth the trouble."

"Then someone must have called this number. And someone answered the phone and swore to her lies."

"Evidently."

I thanked him for his time. In the lobby downstairs I put a dime in a pay phone and dialed the number Wendy had given. A recording informed me that the number I had dialed was no longer in service.

I put my dime back in the phone and called the Carlyle. I asked the desk for Cale Hanniford's room. A woman answered the phone on the second ring. I gave my name and asked to speak to Mr. Hanniford. He asked me if I was making any progress.

"I don't know," I said. "Those postcards you received from Wendy. Do you still have them?"

"It's possible. Is it important?"

"It would help me get the chronology in order. She signed the lease on her apartment three years ago in October. You said she dropped out of college in the spring."

"I believe it was in March."

"When did you get the first postcard?"

"Within two or three months, as I remember it. Let me ask my wife." He was back a moment later. "My wife says the first card arrived in June. I would have said late May. The second card, the one from Florida, was a few months after that. I'm sorry I can't make it more specific than that. My wife says she thinks she remembers where she put the cards. We'll be returning to Utica tomorrow morning. I gather you want to know whether Wendy went to Florida before or after she took the apartment."