The Sins of the Fathers (14 page)

So I ran the shower as hot as it gets and stood by the side of the tub with the bathroom door closed to create an improvised steam bath. I sweated exhaustion and alcohol out of my system for half an hour or so. Then I lowered the temperature of the shower enough to make it bearable and stood under it. I finished with a minute under an ice-cold spray. I don't know if it's really good for you. I think it's just Spartan.

I dried off and put on a clean suit. I sat on the bed and picked up the telephone. Allegheny turned out to have the flight I wanted. It was leaving LaGuardia at five forty-five and would get me where I was going a little after seven. I booked a round-trip ticket, return open.

The Childs' at Fifty-eighth and Eighth stays open all night. I had corned beef hash and eggs and a lot of black coffee.

It was very close to five o'clock when I got into the back of a Checker cab and told the driver to take me to the airport.

THE flight had a stop in Albany. That's what took it so long. It touched down there on schedule. A few people got off, and a few other people got on, and the pilot put us into the air again. We never had time to level off on the second lap; we began our descent as soon as we stopped climbing. He bounced us around a little on the Utica runway, but it was nothing to complain about.

"Have a good day," the stewardess said. "Take care now."

Take care.

It seems to me that people have only been saying that phrase on parting for the past few years or so. All of a sudden everyone started to say it, as if the whole country abruptly recognized that ours is a world which demands caution.

I intended to take care. I wasn't too sure about having a good day.

By the time I got from the airport into Utica itself, it was around seven thirty. A few minutes of twelve I called Cale Hanniford at his office. No one answered.

I tried his home and his wife answered. I gave my name and she told me hers. "Mr. Scudder," she said tentatively. "Are you, uh, making any progress?"

"Things are coming along," I said.

"I'll get Cale for you."

When he came on the line I told him I wanted to see him.

"I see. Something you don't want to go into over the telephone?"

"Something like that."

"Well, can you come to Utica? It would be inconvenient for me to come to New York unless it's absolutely necessary, but you could fly up this afternoon or possibly tomorrow. It's not a long flight."

"I know. I'm in Utica right now."

"Oh?"

"I'm in a Rexall drugstore at the corner of Jefferson and Mohawk. You could pick me up and we could go over to your office."

"Certainly. Fifteen minutes?"

"Fine."

I recognized his Lincoln and was crossing the sidewalk to it as he pulled up in front of the drugstore. I opened the door and got in next to him. Either he wore a suit around the house as a matter of course or he had taken the trouble to put one on for the occasion. The suit was dark blue with an unobtrusive stripe.

"You should have let me know you were coming," he said. "I could have picked you up at the airport."

"This way I had a chance to see something of your city."

"It's not a bad place. Probably very quiet by New York standards. Though that's not necessarily a bad thing."

"No, it's not."

"Ever been here before?"

"Once, and that was years ago. The local police had picked up someone we wanted, so I came up to take him back to New York with me. I took the train that trip."

"How was your flight today?"

"All right."

He was dying to ask me why I had dropped in on him like this, but he had manners. You didn't discuss business at lunch until the coffee was poured, and we wouldn't discuss our business until we were in his office. The Hanniford Drugs warehouse was on the western edge of town, and he had picked me up right in the heart of the downtown area. We managed small talk on the ride out. He pointed out things he thought might interest me, and I put on a show of being mildly interested.

Then we were at the warehouse. They worked a five-day week and there were no other cars around, just a couple of idle trucks. He pulled the Lincoln to a stop next to a loading dock and led me up a ramp and inside. We walked down a hallway to his office. He turned on the overhead lights, pointed me to a chair, and seated himself behind his desk.

"Well," he said.

I didn't feel tired. It occurred to me that I ought to, no sleep, a lot of booze the night before. But I didn't feel tired. Not eager, either, but not tired.

I said, "I came to report. I know as much about your daughter as I'll ever know, and it's as much as you need to know. I could spend more of my time and your money, but I don't see the point."

"It didn't take you very long."

His tone was neutral, and I wondered how he meant it. Was he admiring my efficiency or annoyed that his two thousand dollars had only purchased five days of my time?

I said, "It took long enough. I don't know that it would have taken any less time if you had given me everything in the beginning. Probably not. It would have made things a little easier for me, though."

"I don't understand."

"I can understand why you didn't. You felt I had all I needed to know. If I had just been looking for facts you might have been right, but I was looking for facts that would make up a picture, and I'd have done better knowing everything in front." He was puzzled, and the heavy dark eyebrows were elevated above the top rims of his glasses. I said, "The reason I didn't let you know I was coming was that I had some things to do in Utica. I caught a dawn flight up here, Mr. Hanniford. I spent about five hours learning things you could have told me five days ago."

"What sort of things?"

"I went to a few places. The Bureau of Vital Statistics in City Hall. The Times-Sentinel offices. The police station."

"I didn't hire you to ask questions here in Utica."

"You didn't hire me at all, Mr. Hanniford. You married your wife on-well, I don't have to tell you the date. It was a first marriage for both of you."

He didn't say anything. He took his glasses off and put them on the desk in front of him.

"You might have told me Wendy was illegitimate."

"Why? She didn't know it herself."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Yes."

"I'm not." I drew a breath. "There were two U.S. Marines from the Utica area killed in the Inchon landing. One of them was black, so I ruled him out. The other was named Robert Blohr. He was married. Was he also Wendy's father?"

"Yes."

"I'm not trying to pick scabs, Mr. Hanniford. I think Wendy knew she was illegitimate. And it's possible that it doesn't matter whether she did or not."

He stood up and walked to the window. I sat there wondering whether Wendy had known about her father and decided it was ten-to-one that she had. He was the chief character in her personal mythology, and she had spent all her life looking for an incarnation of him. The ambivalence of her feelings about the man seemed to derive from some knowledge over and above what she had been told by Hanniford and her mother.

He stayed at the window for a time. Then he turned and looked thoughtfully at me. "Perhaps I should have told you," he said finally. "I didn't conceal it on purpose. That is, I gave little thought at the time to Wendy's... illegitimacy. That's been a completely closed chapter for so many years that it never occurred to me to mention it."

"I can understand that."

"You said you had a report to make," he said. He returned to his chair and sat down. "Go ahead, Scudder."

I started all the way back in Indiana. Wendy at college, not interested in boys her own age, interested always in older men. She had had affairs with her professors, most of them probably casual liaisons, one at least other than casual, at least on the man's part. He had wanted to leave his wife. The wife had taken pills, perhaps in a genuine suicide attempt, perhaps as a grandstand play to save her marriage.

And perhaps she herself hadn't known which.

"At any rate, there was a scandal of sorts. The whole campus was aware of it, whether or not it became officially a matter of record. That explains why Wendy dropped out of school a couple of months short of graduation. There was really no way she could stay there."

"Of course not."

"It also explains why the school wasn't desperately concerned that she had disappeared. I'd wondered about that. From what you said, their attitude was fairly casual. Evidently they wanted to let you know she was gone but weren't prepared to tell you why she had left, but they knew she had good reasons to leave and weren't concerned about her physical well-being."

"I see."

"She went to New York, as you know. She became involved with older men almost immediately. One of them took her to Miami. I could give you his name, but it doesn't matter. He died a couple of years ago. It's hard to tell now just how big a role he played in Wendy's life, but in addition to taking her to Miami he let her use his name when she applied for her apartment. She put his firm down as her employer, and he backed her up when the rental agent called."

"Did he pay her rent?"

"It's possible. Whether he paid all or part of her support at the time is something only he could tell you, and there's no way to ask him. If you want my guess, her involvement with him was not an exclusive one."

"There were other men in her life at the same time?"

"I think so. This particular man was married and lived in the suburbs with his family. I doubt that he could have spent all that much time with her even if either of them wanted it that way. And I have a feeling she was leery of getting too involved with one man. It must have shaken her a great deal when the professor's wife took the pills. If he was sufficiently infatuated with her to leave his wife for her, she was probably committed to him herself, or at least thought she was. After that fell apart she was careful not to invest too much of herself in any one man."

"So she saw a lot of men."

"Yes."

"And took money from them."

"Yes."

"You know that for a fact? Or is it conjecture?"

"It's fact." I told him a little about Marcia Maisel and how she had gradually become aware of the manner in which Wendy was supporting herself. I didn't add that Marcia had tried the profession on for size.

He lowered his head, and a little of the starch went out of his shoulders. "So the newspapers were accurate," he said. "She was a prostitute."

"A kind of prostitute."

"What does that mean? It's like pregnancy, isn't it? Either you are or you aren't."

"I think it's more like honesty."

"Oh?"

"Some people are more honest than others."

"I always thought honesty was unequivocal, too."

"Maybe it is. I think there are different levels."

"And there are different levels of prostitution?"

"I'd say so. Wendy wasn't walking the streets. She wasn't turning one trick after another, wasn't handing her money over to a pimp."

"Isn't that what the Vanderpoel boy was?"

"No. I'll get to him." I closed my eyes for a moment. I opened them and said,

"There's no way to know this for certain, but I doubt that Wendy set out to be a prostitute. She probably took money from quite a few men before she could pin that label on herself."

"I don't follow you."

"Let's say a man took her out to dinner, brought her home, wound up going to bed with her. On his way out the door he might hand her a twenty-dollar bill.

He'd say something like, I'd like to send you a big bouquet of flowers or buy you a present, but why not take the money and pick out something you like?'

Maybe she tried not to take the money the first few times this happened.

Later on she'd learn to expect it."

"I see."

"It wouldn't be long before she would start getting telephone calls from men she hadn't met. A lot of men like to pass girls' phone numbers around. Sometimes it's an act of charity. Other times they think they enhance their own image this way.

`She's a great kid, she's not exactly a hooker, but slip her a few bucks afterward because she doesn't have a job, you know, and it's tough for a girl to make it in the big city.' So you wake up one morning and realize that you're a prostitute, at least according to the dictionary definition of the term, but by then you're used to the way you're living and it doesn't seem unnatural to you. As far as I can determine, she never asked for money. She never saw more than one man during an evening.

She turned down dates if she didn't like the man involved. She would even plead a fake headache if she met a man for dinner and decided she didn't want to sleep with him. So she earned her money that way, but she wasn't in it for the money."

"You mean she enjoyed it."

"She certainly found it tolerable. She wasn't kidnapped by white slavers. She could have found a job if she wanted one. She could have come home to Utica, or called up and asked for money. Are you asking if she was a nymphomaniac? I don't know the answer to that, but I'd be inclined to doubt it. I think she was compelled."

"How?"

I stood up and moved closer to his desk. It was dark mahogany and looked at least fifty years old. Its top was orderly. There was a blotter in a tooled leather holder, a two-tiered in-and-out box, a spindle, a pair of framed photographs. He watched me pick up both photographs and look at them. One showed a woman about forty, her eyes out of focus, an uncertain smile on her face. I sensed that the expression was not uncharacteristic. The other photo was of Wendy, her hair medium in length, her eyes bright, and her teeth shiny enough to sell toothpaste.

"When was this taken?"