The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

use?"
    "I don't know exactly. You mean for the sex act? He said he fucked her."
    "After she was dead."
    "Evidently."
    "And he had no trouble remembering that?"
    "None. I don't know whether he had sex with her before or after the murder.
    Did the autopsy indicate anything one way or the other?"
    "If it did, it wasn't in the report. I'm not sure they can tell if the two acts are close together in time.
    Why?"
    "I don't know. He kept saying, I fucked her and she's dead.' As if his having had sex with her was the chief cause of her death."
    "But he never remembered killing her. I suppose he could have blocked it out easily enough. I wonder why he didn't block out the whole thing. The sex act.
    Let me go over this once more. He said he walked in and found her like that?"
    "I can't remember everything all that clearly myself, Scudder. He walked in and she was dead in the tub, that's what he said. He didn't even say specifically that she was dead, just that she was in a tub full of blood."
    "Did you ask him about the murder weapon?"
    "I asked him what he did with it."
    "And?"
    "He didn't know."
    "Did you ask him what the murder weapon was?"
    "No. I didn't have to. He said, I don't know what happened to the razor.' "
    "He knew it was a razor?"
    "Evidently. Why wouldn't he know?"
    "Well, if he didn't remember having it in his hand, why should he remember what it was?"
    "Maybe he heard someone talk about the murder weapon and speak of it as a razor."
    "Maybe," I said.
    I walked for a while, heading generally south and west. I stopped for a drink on Sixth Avenue around Thirty-seventh Street. A man a couple of stools down was telling the bartender that he was sick of working his ass off to buy Cadillacs for niggers on welfare. The bartender said, "You? Chrissake, you're in here eight hours a day. The taxes you pay, they don't get more'n a hubcap out of you."
    A little farther south and west I went into a church and sat for a while. St.
    John's, I think it was. I sat near the front and watched people go in and out of the confessional. They didn't look any different coming out than they had going in. I thought how nice it might be to be able to leave your sins in a little curtained booth.
    Richie Vanderpoel and Wendy Hanniford, and I kept picking at threads and trying to find a pattern to them. There was a conclusion I kept feeling myself drawn toward, and I didn't want to take hold of it. It was wrong, it had to be wrong, and as long as it reached out, tantalizing me, it kept me from doing the job I had signed on for.
    I knew what had to come next. I had been ducking it, but it kept waving at me and I couldn't duck it forever. And now was the best time of day for it. Much better than trying it in the middle of the night.
    I hung around long enough to light a couple of candles and stuff a few bills in the offerings slot. Then I caught a cab in front of Penn Station and told the driver how to get to Bethune Street.
    The first-floor tenants were out. A Mrs. Hacker on the second floor said she had had very little contact with Wendy and Richard. She remembered that Wendy's former roommate had had dark hair.
    Sometimes, she said, they had played their radio or stereo loud at night, but it had never been bad enough to complain about. She liked music, she said. She liked all kinds of music, classical, semiclassical, popular-all kinds of music.
    The door to the third-floor apartment had a padlock on it. It would have been easy enough to crack it but impossible to do so unobtrusively.
    There was nobody home on the fourth floor. I was very glad of that. I went on up to the fifth floor.
    Elizabeth Antonelli had said the tenants wouldn't be back until March. I rang their bell and listened carefully for sounds within the apartment. I didn't hear any.
    There were four locks on the door, including a Taylor that is as close as you can come to pickproof. I knocked off the other three with a celluloid strip, an old oil-company credit card that is otherwise