The Sins of the Fathers

He left the room and came back with coffee. "Well, Mr. Scudder? What's so urgent?" His tone was deliberately light, but there was tension underneath it.

"I enjoyed the services this morning," I said.

"Yes, so you said, and I'm pleased to hear it. However-"

"I was hoping for a different Old Testament text."

"Isaiah is difficult to grasp, I agree. A poet and a man of vision. There are some interesting commentaries on today's reading if you're interested."

"I was hoping the reading might be from Genesis."

"Oh, we don't start over until Whitsunday, you know. But why Genesis?"

"A particular portion of Genesis, actually."

"Oh?"

"The Twenty-second Chapter."

He closed his eyes for a moment and frowned in concentration. He opened them and shrugged apologetically. "I used to have a fair memory for chapter and verse. It's been one of the casualties of the aging process, I'm afraid. Shall I look it up?"

I said, " 'And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham; and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.' "

"The temptation of Abraham. 'God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.' A very beautiful passage." His eyes fixed on me. "It's unusual that you can quote Scripture, Mr. Scudder."

"I had reason to read that passage the other day. It stayed with me."

"Oh?"

"I thought you might care to explain the chapter to me."

"At some other time, certainly, but I scarcely see the urgency of-"

"Don't you?"

He looked at me. I got to my feet and took a step toward him. I said, "I think you do. I think you could explain to me the interesting parallels between Abraham and yourself. You could tell me what happens when God doesn't oblige by providing a lamb for the burnt offering. You could tell me more about how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

"Mr. Scudder-"

"You could tell me why you were able to murder Wendy Hanniford. And why you let Richie die in your place."

Chapter 16

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I think you do, sir."

"My son committed a horrible murder. I'm sure he did not know what he was doing at the moment of his act. I forgive him for what he did, I pray God forgives him-"

"I'm not a congregation, sir. I'm a man who knows all the things you thought no one would ever be able to figure out. Your son never killed anybody until he killed himself."

He sat there for a long moment, taking it all in. He bowed his head a little. His pose was an attitude of prayer, but I don't think he was praying. When he spoke his tone was not defensive so much as it was curious, the words very nearly an admission of guilt.

"What makes you… believe this, Mr. Scudder?"

"A lot of things I learned. And the way they all fit together."

"Tell me."

I nodded. I wanted to tell him because I had been feeling the need to tell someone all along. I hadn't told Cale Hanniford. I had come close to telling Trina, had begun hinting at it, but in the end I had not told her, either.

Vanderpoel was the only person I could tell.

I said, "The case was open-and-shut. That's how the police saw it, and it was the only way to see it. But I didn't start out looking for a murderer. I started out trying to learn something about Wendy and your son, and the more I learned, the harder it was for me to buy the idea that he had killed her.

"What nailed him was turning up on the sidewalk covered with blood and behaving hysterically. But if you began to dismiss that from your mind, the whole idea of him being the killer began to break down. He left his job suddenly in the middle of the afternoon. He hadn't planned on leaving. That could have been staged. But instead he came down with a case of indigestion and his employer finally managed to talk him into leaving.

"Then he got home with barely enough time to rape her and kill her and run out into the street. He hadn't been acting oddly during the day. The only thing evidently wrong with him was a stomachache. Theoretically he walked in on her and something about her provoked him into flipping out completely.

"But what was it? A rush of sexual desire? He lived with the girl, and it was a reasonable assumption that he could make love to her any time he wanted to. And the more I learned about him, the more certain I became that he never made love to her. They lived together, but they didn't sleep together."

"What makes you say that?"

"Your son was homosexual."

"That is not true."

"I'm afraid it is."

"Relations between men are an abomination in the eyes of God."

"That may be. I'm no authority. Richie was homosexual. He wasn't comfortable with it. I gather it was impossible for him to be comfortable with any kind of sexuality. He had very mixed-up feelings about you, about his mother, and they made any real sexual relationship impossible."

I walked over to the fake fire. I wondered if the fireplace was fake, too. I turned and looked at Martin Vanderpoel. He had not changed position. He was still sitting in his chair with his hands on his knees, his eyes on the patch of rug between his feet.

I said, "Richie seems to have been stabilized by his relationship with Wendy Hanniford. He was able to regulate his life, and I'd guess he was relatively happy. Then he came home one afternoon, and something set him reeling. Now what would do that?"

He didn't say anything.

"He might have walked in and found her with another man. But that didn't add up because why would it upset him that much? He must have known how she supported herself, that she saw other men during the afternoons while he was at work. Besides, there would have to be some trace of that other man. He wouldn't just run off when Richie started slicing with a razor.

"And where would Richie get a razor? He used an electric. Nobody twenty years old shaves with a straight razor anymore. Some kids carry razors the way other kids carry knives, but Richie wasn't that kind of kid.

"And what did he do with the razor afterward? The cops decided he flipped it out the window or dropped it somewhere and somebody picked it up and walked off with it."

"Isn't that plausible, Mr. Scudder?"

"Uh-huh. If he had a razor in the first place. And it was also possible he'd used a knife instead of a razor. There were plenty of knives in the kitchen. But I was in that kitchen, and all the cupboards and drawers were neatly closed, and you don't grab up a knife to slaughter someone in a fit of passion and remember to close the drawer carefully behind you. No, there was only one way it made sense to me. Richie came home and found Wendy already dead or dying, and that knocked him for a loop. He couldn't handle it."

My headache was coming back again. I rubbed at my temple with a knuckle. It didn't do much good.

"You told me Richie's mother died when he was quite young."

"Yes."

"You didn't tell me she killed herself."

"How did you learn that?"

"When something's a matter of record, sir, anyone can find out about it if he takes the trouble to look for it. I didn't have to dig for that information. All I had to do was think of looking for it. Your wife killed herself in the bathtub by slashing her wrists. Did she use a razor?"

He looked at me.

"Your razor, sir?"

"I don't see that it matters."

"Don't you?" I shrugged. "Richie walked in and found his mother dead in a pool of blood. Then, fourteen years later, he walked into an apartment on Bethune Street and found the woman he was living with dead in her bed. Also slashed with a razor, and also lying in a pool of blood.

"I suppose Wendy Hanniford was a mother to him in certain ways. They must have played a lot of different surrogate roles in each other's lives. But all of a sudden Wendy became his dead mother, and Richie couldn't handle it, and he wound up doing something I guess he'd never been able to do before."

"What?"

"He had intercourse with her. It was a pure, uncontrollable reaction. He didn't even take time to take his clothes off. He fell on her and he had intercourse with her, and when it was over he ran out into the streets and started screaming his lungs out because his head was full of the fact that he had had intercourse with his mother and now she was dead. You can see what he thought, sir. He thought he fucked her to death."

"God," he said.

I wondered if he'd ever pronounced it quite that way before.

* * *

MY headache was getting worse. I asked him if I could have some aspirins. He told me how to find the first-floor lavatory. There were aspirin tablets in the medicine cabinet. I took two and drank half a glass of water.

When I went back into the living room he hadn't changed position. I sat down in my chair and looked at him. There was a lot more and we would get to it, but I wanted to wait for him to pick it up.

He said, "This is extraordinary, Mr. Scudder."

"Yes."

"I never even considered the possibility that Richard was innocent. I just assumed he had done it. If what you think is true-"

"It's true."

"Then he died for nothing."

"He died for you, sir. He was the lamb for the burnt offering."

"You can't seriously believe I killed that girl."

"I know you did, sir."

"How can you possibly know that?"

"You met Wendy in the spring."

"Yes. I believe I told you that the last time you were here."

"You picked a time when you knew Richie would be at work. You wanted to meet this girl because you were bothered at the idea of Richie living in sin with her."

"I already told you as much."

"Yes, you did." I took a breath. "Wendy Hanniford was very strongly drawn to older men, men who functioned as father figures for her. She was aggressive in situations involving a man who attracted her. She managed to seduce several of her professors at college.

"She met you, and she was attracted to you. It's not hard to imagine why. You're a very commanding figure of a man. Very stern and forbidding. And on top of everything you were Richie's actual father, and she and Richie were living like brother and sister.

"So she made a play for you. I gather she was very good at getting her point across. And you were very vulnerable. You'd been a widower for a good many years. Your housekeeper may have been very efficient at her appointed tasks, but you certainly couldn't have picked her as a potential sexual outlet. The last time I was here you told me you felt in retrospect that you should have remarried for Richie's sake. I think you were really saying that you should have remarried for your own sake, so that you wouldn't have been vulnerable to Wendy Hanniford."

"This is all guesswork on your part, Mr. Scudder."

"You went to bed with her. Maybe that was the first time you went to bed with anybody since your wife died. I wouldn't know, and it doesn't much matter. But you went to bed with her and I guess you liked it because you kept going back. You thought it was a sin, but that didn't change things much because you went right on sinning.