I like reading books, especially novels. Now I live in an English country, but my English is not good enough, even though I have studied English for a very long time. Two years ago, I began to read and listen to English novels, and I hope my English could be improved. I could understand the outline of those novels. Here I'll try to give a brief narrative of those books I've read.
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The first novel I read this year is “ The Sins of the Fathers” (1976) by Lawrence Block. This is the first novel in the explosive Matthew Scudder Series. Matthew Scudder, an excellent former policeman, was a private detector without a license. Sometimes he did favors for people. They give him gifts.
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A young girl had been murdered, the murderer had been captured at the crime scene. Several days later, the criminal—a minister's son—hanged himself in his jail cell. The case was closed. According to newspapers, the young girl had been a pretty prostitute, the murderer a pimp. They had lived together.
One day, Matthew Scudder was drinking his coffee spiked with bourbon in a restaurant, the father of the dead girl, a rich businessman, came to ask him for help. The father wanted to know something detailed about his daughter. He wanted to know why his daughter had been a hooker, why she had been killed. He said: “I want to know who she was.” Scudder accepted this job.
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-Chapter 1
Scudder said:
Do you know what an Identikit portrait is? You've probably seen them in newspaper stories. When the police have an eyewitness, they use this kit of transparent overlays to piece together a composite picture of a suspect.
You want photographs of your daughter and the boy who killed her. I'm not equipped to offer you that. No one is. I can dig up enough facts and impressions to make composite Identikit portraits for you, but the result may not be all that close to what you really want.
The father said:
Wendy's not my biological daughter. I adopted her. My wife is Wendy's mother. Wendy's father was killed before Wendy was born, he was a Marine, he died in the landing at Inchon. I married Wendy's mother three years after that. From the beginning I loved her as much as any real father could have. When I found out that I was... unable to father children myself, I was even more grateful for her existence.
I have to know how much to blame myself.
Why did Scudder leave the force? He replied:
I lost the faith. I found out I didn't want to be a cop anymore.
I was off duty one night in the summer. I was in a bar in Washington Heights. Two kids held up the place. On their way out they shot the bartender in the heart. I chased them into the street. I shot one of them dead and caught the other in the thigh. He's never going to walk right again.
One shot went wide and ricocheted. It hit a seven-year-old girl in the eye. The ricochet took most of the steam off the bullet. An inch higher and it probably would have glanced off her forehead. Would have left a nasty scar but nothing much worse than that. This way, though, nothing but soft tissue, and it went right on into her brain. They tell me she died instantly. There was no question of culpability. As a matter of fact, I got a departmental commendation.
Then I resigned. I just didn't want to be a cop anymore.
A waitress Trina said:
You'd rather just sit here and get drunk. Coffee and booze. It's a very weird combination. Booze to get you drunk, and coffee to keep you sober.
Scudder shook his head:
Coffee never sobered anybody. It just keeps you awake. Give a drunk plenty of coffee and you've got a wide-awake drunk on your hands.
Scudder withdrew some money, went to a church, slipped one-tenth of his rewards into the poor box. Then he lit three candles on the way out. For Wendy Hanniford (the murdered young girl ), who would never get to be twenty-five, and for Richard Vanderpoel (that self-hanged young man) , who would never get to be twenty-one. And, of course, for Estrellita Rivera ( that little girl), who would never get to be eight.
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phrases or sentences:
I dropped the idea.
I'll give it a shot.
I had an impulse
Some people reach for a cigarette when they're tense, others when the tension passes.
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-Chapter 2
Matthew Scudder，the detector without a license, went to the Sixth Precinct to find his former colleague Lieutenant Eddie Koehler. Scudder reached over to shake hands with him and said: "You look like you need a new hat." Two tens and a five passed smoothly from his hand to Koehler’s.
Evidently, “new hat” was jargon about police bribery. As far as Scudder was concerned, the corruption had never bothered him. He thought that a policeman would have found it hard to support a family without it.
Scudder wanted to have a look at the police file on that murder case.
Lieutenant said: Why go through the motions? You're not gonna find anything there.
Twenty minutes later, Scudder had another twenty-five dollars less in his wallet and a manila folder on the desk in front of him
After reading those files, Scudder wanted to talk to the arresting officer, patrolman Lewis Pankow.
Lieutenant Koehler agreed to set that up, arrange an introduction in a bar. Lieutenant asked: "What the hell are you gonna ask him, anyway?”
"I want to know what obscene language Vanderpoel was using."
Lieutenant Koehler said in surprise: "Seriously? I think you're as crazy as Vanderpoel. For the price of a hat, you can hear all the dirty words in the world."
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-Chapter 3
Detector Matthew Scudder went to the building the victim and murderer had lived in，talked with the super of the building---a female artist.
Detector asked the super: "Did you know she was a prostitute?"
She said: "I still don't know it. I read lots of lies in the papers."
Detector said: ” I'd like to know what your impression of them was.”
“you know how I thought of them? As brother and sister."
"Why?"
"I can't say exactly," she said. " 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."
She added: "Another thing. I sort of took it for granted that he was gay."
"Why?"
"Physical type, I suppose. Mannerisms.”
The super told him that the victim had been living with someone else before, that was a woman.
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-Chapter 4
Detector Scudder met the arresting officer, patrolman Lewis Pankow in a bar.
Pankow described the situation at that time:
Vanderpoel was standing about two doors from the building where the murder took place. He had blood all over him. His clothing was disarrayed, his pants were unbuttoned and unzipped and his thing was hanging out. He was uttering obscenities, kept yelling, 'I'm a mother fu**er, I'm a mother f**ker, I f**ked my mother.' He kept shouting this over and over. Evidently, he went nuts.
When detector had all he was going to get, he put a five on the table for the drinks and passed twenty-five dollars to the patrolman. He didn't want to take it.
"Stupid. This isn't graft. It's clean money. You did somebody a favor and made a couple of bucks for it," said detector, “If you don't take money when somebody puts it in your hand, you're going to make a lot of people very nervous. Besides, Lieutenant 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."
Detector Scudder 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."
phrases or sentences:
Sometimes the whole is a lot less than the sum of its parts.
every once in a while something new comes along and knocks you on your ass
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-Chapter 5
It was said that the murderer of the case had worked for an antique importer. Detector Scudder went to the Antiques Imports Shop to talk with someone.
A clerk told him: “I hardly knew him at all. My boss Mr. Burghash could tell you.”
Scudder asked: "Was he homosexual?"
"Well, I always assumed it, for heaven's sake. He certainly seemed gay."
Mr. Burghash met Scudder in his office.
“He was a good worker. Very good. Very conscientious, and he had a feeling for the business."
"He went home early that day."
"That's right. He didn't feel well when he came back from lunch. He had some curry at the Indian place around the corner, and it didn't agree with him. I was always telling him to stay with bland food, He had a sensitive digestive system, and he was always trying exotic foods that didn't agree with him. He came back from lunch feeling lousy. I told him right away to take the rest of the day off. You can't work with your guts on fire. He wanted to tough it out, though. He was an ambitious kid, a hard worker. "
"You were surprised when he killed her."
"I was astonished. I simply could not believe it. And I'm still astonished. "
On his way out, Detector Scudder ran into that young clerk.
“They're both dead. So what's the point in poking around in corners?"
Scudder answered with a question:
"Why would a homosexual live with a prostitute?"
"Gawd, I don't know. Maybe she let him take care of her overflow."
"Why in hell would he kill her? He raped her and he killed her. Why?"
"Well, he was a minister's son."
"So?"
"They're all crazy," he said. "Aren't they?"
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-Chapter 6
The murder’s father Reverend Martin Vanderpoel didn't want to see Detector Scudder, "I have spoken with enough reporters, I can spare no time for you.”
Scudder said: ”I was representing the father of the murdered girl. He told me he wanted to see you himself, sir."
There was a long pause. Then Reverend said, "It is a difficult request to refuse. Perhaps this evening?"
"This evening would be fine."
Detector Scudder called the murder’s lawyer George Topakian, found surprisingly that he was eager to talk to someone. "I expected to be relieved.”
Mr. Topakian had been talked with the suspect in the cell before the poor bastard hanged himself. The lawyer said:
I asked him several times if he had killed the Hanniford girl. He said he didn't remember killing her. Other times he said that he must have killed her because she couldn't have done it herself.
The young man remembered he had had a stomachache on the day of the murder. Then he kept talking about blood. `She was in the bathtub and there was blood all over.' I know she was killed in bed, according to police reports.
I don't think he ever lied to me. I mean, I don't believe he remembered killing the girl. Because he admitted something, oh, worse. Having sex with her. Having sex with her afterward.
He kept saying, ‘I f**ked 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.
Afterwards, Detector Scudder went to the crime scene, sneaked into the apartment of the young girl and her killer. An hour later he went out, went to the Reverend's appointment.
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-Chapter 7
Reverend Martin Vanderpoel said:
Mr. Hanniford has lost a daughter. And I have lost a son. It's so difficult to father children in today's world. I can sympathize fully with Mr. Hanniford, but I fear I have no sympathy for the girl.
Wendy Hanniford’s father no doubt holds my son responsible for the loss of his daughter. And I, in turn, hold his daughter responsible for the loss of my son.
She was evil.
Yes. An evil, Devil-ridden woman. She took my son away from me, away from his religion, away
from God. She led him away from good paths and unto the paths of evil.
It was my son who killed her. But it was she who killed something within him, who made it possible for him to kill.
My son left home, he met Wendy Hanniford. He lived in sin with her. He became corrupted by her. She led him astray.
Detector Scudder asked: Did you ever actually meet her?
I met her once. Once was enough. I went to the apartment where they were living. I wanted her to end her relationship with my son. And she refused.
She was foul-mouthed and abusive. She taunted me.
I tried to talk to my son about that woman. He was utterly infatuated with her. Man is a weakling, he is so often powerless to cope with the awful force of an evil woman's sexuality.
Detector Scudder said: I understand you saw your son once after the killing. In his cell.
Yes. Richard told me he had killed her. He said he did not know what had come over him. He told me that there was a sudden moment of awful clarity when he saw her face. He said it was as if he had been given a glimpse of the Devil and knew only that he must destroy, destroy.
Detector Scudder asked: What did you say to Richard?
My son asked my forgiveness. I gave him my blessing. I told him he should look to the Lord for forgiveness.
I only hope he did, I only hope he did.
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-Chapter 8
During the illegal entry the night before, Detector Scudder searched the crime scene. He watched carefully the bathtub but there was nothing to suggest that anyone had been killed in it.
The living-room couch was a convertible. Obviously, Richard Vanderpoel slept on it.
Detector Scudder found the name of Wendy’s former roommate was Marcia Maisel.
After careful inspection, Detector Scudder thought that the whole apartment had such an air of placid domesticity to it, a comfortable domesticity that all the blood in the bedroom could not entirely drown.
He thought of his impressions of that apartment and tried to match them up with Reverend Martin Vanderpoel's portrait of Wendy as evil incarnate. If she had trapped him with sex, why did he sleep on a folding bed in the living room?
Soon afterward, Detector Scudder managed to find the phone number of Marcia Maisel, then dialed it and made an appointment with threads to talk to her husband.
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-Chapter 9
Detector Scudder went to a gay bar. He had the newspaper photo of Richie, showed it around a lot to whoever was willing to look at it. Almost everyone recognized the photo because they had seen it in the paper. But no one could give useful recollections.
The bartender recognized Scudder, he was willing to talk more and trying to recall what went with the face. He said:
I haven't seen it in a long time. At least a year. There was a period of a couple of weeks when he was in here almost every night. Then I never saw him again.
when they're young and gorgeous you don't care whether they spend much. They're window dressing, you know. They bring others in. From window shopping to window dressing
Scudder said:
And then he stopped coming in here. I wonder why.
The bartender said:
Maybe he got allergic to the decor. I would guess that he came around over a period of three weeks, and maybe he paid us fifteen or eighteen visits in all, and I never saw him repeat.
Scudder answered the question himself: He started living with Wendy Hanniford around the time he stopped coming here. But why would he live with a woman?
I'm not a psychiatrist. I had a psychiatrist, but that wasn't one of the topics we got around to discussing.
Why would any homosexual live with a woman?
God knows.
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-Chapter 10
After hours' drive, Scudder went into the cocktail lounge and sat on a vinyl stool at the front end of a bar.
Wendy’s former roommate Marcia Maisel, married name Marcia Thal, came as promised.
Marcia knew Wendy at college. But she said: I didn't know her well. She had an apartment that was too big for her, and I needed a place to stay. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Scudder asked Marcia: Was Wendy a prostitute at the time?
Marcia said:
I don't know if you would call it that. She was taking money from men. I guess she had been doing that for as long as she was in the apartment. But I don't know if she was exactly a prostitute.
She was dating a lot. Older men, but that didn't surprise me. And usually, uh, well, she and her date would go to bed.
Marcia thought what Wendy was doing was a bad idea. That it would be bad for her emotionally. Because down underneath she was always so innocent. Whatever kind of sex life she led she would still be a little girl underneath it all.
Surprisingly, Marcia said: I have to say I envied her. She didn't seem to have any hang-ups. She was completely free of guilt as far as I could see. She did whatever she wanted to do. I also envied her life because it was so much more exciting than mine.
One day, Wendy told Marcia she would introduce a friend of hers and asked if Marcia would like to date the guy. Wendy said, `Be sensible, Marcia. You'll have a good time, and you'll make a few dollars out of it.'
Marcia said: I was earning eighty dollars a week. Nobody was taking me to great dinners or Broadway shows. And I hadn't even met anyone I wanted to sleep with.
Scudder asked: Did you enjoy the evening?
No. All I could think about was that I was going to have to sleep with this man. And he was old. He was too old for me. Yes, I slept with him. And yes, he gave me fifty dollars. And yes, I took it.
I wanted the damned money. And I wanted to know how it felt. Being a whore.
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After the first date, Marcia took a few more dates. Maybe one a week on the average.
Marcia said:
I don't know why. It wasn't the money. Not exactly. It was, I don't know. Call it an experiment. I wanted to know how I felt about it. I wanted to... learn certain things about myself. That I'm a little squarer than I thought. That I wanted to fall in love with somebody. Get married, make babies, that whole trip. It turned out to be what I wanted.
When I realized that, I knew I had to move out on my own. I couldn't go on rooming with Wendy.
On hearing that, Wendy was very upset. She would have let Marcia stay there rent-free and didn't have to take any dates. Wendy even suggested that she would limit her activities.
Marcia said: I told her I had to move out and she was really shook. She actually begged me to stay. But I had to get away from the life entirely. Because it was too much of a temptation for me. Wendy cried when I packed my stuff and left.
I think she wanted someone who was a little straighter than she was, someone who was
not a part of the sexual scene she was involved in. I think now that she was a little disappointed when I took that first double date with her.
Scudder asked: How much money do you suppose she was making?
I don't know. That wasn't really something we talked about. I suppose her average price was thirty dollars. On the average. I don't think she did it for the money. I think she was, you know, a happy hooker? I think she enjoyed what she was doing. I really do. The life and the men and everything, I think she got a kick out of it.
Scudder asked Marcia if Wendy had spoken often of her parents.
Sometimes she talked about her father, wondering what he was like. Because he died before she was born.
Scudder surprisingly asked: not her stepfather? .
No, she never talked about him that I remember, except to say vaguely that she ought to write them and let them know everything was all right.
She talked about how her father was killed in Korea. And one time she said, ’If he had lived, I guess everything would be different.'
Different how?
She didn't say.
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-Chapter 11
From the conversation with Marcia, Scudder got a preliminary view of Wendy.
Wendy had a thing for older men. We could run a trace on it all the way back to unresolved feelings for the father she never saw.
She needed a roommate. Because it was a lonely world, and she had always lived alone in it with only her father's ghost for company. Those old men she was drawn to were men who belonged to other women. She wanted someone in the apartment who didn't want to take her to bed. Someone who would just be good company. First, Marcia, then Richie, who had improved the decor and cooked the gourmet meals and made a home for her. She'd given him a woman's companionship without posing the sexual challenge another woman might have constituted.
The bartender of the gay bar told Scudder after the interview with someone who had taken the boy home:
The dear boy didn't like it much and wasn't terribly good at it. I gather it wasn't just a matter of nerves, although he does seem to have been a nervous and apprehensive sort. It was more a matter of being uncomfortable with the whole thing and getting blessed little pleasure out of sex itself. And he retreated from intimacy.
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-Chapter 12
Scudder went to a library to look up some past news of a man who ever helped Wendy to live in that apartment. Unintentionally, he came across a piece of news about the suicide of Mrs. Martin Vanderpoel.
From the conversation with Reverend Martin Vanderpoel, Scudder learned Richard Vanderpoel’s mother died when he was six or seven years old. In this past news, she had slashed her wrists in the bathroom of the rectory, and she had been discovered dead in the bathtub by her young son, Richard.
-Chapter 13
Scudder booked a round-trip ticket, return open. He would fly to Utica and report his investigation to Wendy’s father Cale Hanniford.
Scudder told Cale he had gone to a few places this morning. The Bureau of Vital Statistics in City Hall. The Times-Sentinel offices. The police station.
Scudder said:
You might have told me Wendy was illegitimate. I think Wendy knew she was illegitimate.
Cale Hanniford admitted that he should have explained it first.
Then, Scudder gave his investigation report, 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.
The whole campus was aware of it. That explains why Wendy dropped out of school a couple of months short of graduation. There was really no way she could stay there.
She went to New York. She became involved with older men almost immediately. 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.
So the newspapers were accurate, Cale said. She was a prostitute.
A kind of prostitute. Wendy wasn't walking the streets. She wasn't turning one trick after another, wasn't handing her money over to a pimp. She's not exactly a hooker, but slip her a few bucks afterward because she doesn't have a job. As far as I can determine, she never asked for money. She never saw more than one man during an evening.
I can make guesses. I'd guess she could never stop looking for Daddy. She wanted to be somebody's daughter, and they kept wanting to f**k her. And that was all right with her because that was what Daddy was, he was a man who took Mommy to bed and got her pregnant and then went away to Korea and was never heard from again. He was somebody who was married to somebody else, and that was all right, because the men she was attracted to were always married to somebody else.
As for her roommate Richie Vanderpoel, his father is a very uptight type. Stern, cold. I doubt that he ever showed the boy much in the way of warmth. Richie's mother killed herself when he was six years old. He grew up with mixed-up feelings about both of his parents. His feelings in that area complemented Wendy's pretty closely. That's why they were so good for each other.
She was a woman he wasn't afraid of, and he was a man she couldn't mistake for her father. They were able to have a domestic life together that gave them both a measure of security they hadn't had before. And there was no sexual relationship to complicate things. I'd take the guess a little further. I think they would have gotten married eventually, and they might even have made it work.
Cale said, Then why did he kill her?
No way to answer that. He didn't have any memory of the act, and the whole scene got mixed up with memories of his mother's death. Anyway, that's not your question. What you want to know is how much of it was your fault.
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Something happened the last time you saw your daughter. Do you want to tell me about it?
When she was, it's hard to remember, but I think she must have been eight years old. Eight or nine. She would always sit on my lap and give me hugs and... hugs and kisses, and she would squirm around a little, and –
One day, I don't know why it happened, but one day she was on my lap, and I-oh, Christ. I got excited. Physically excited. I was so disgusted with myself. I loved her the way you love a daughter, at least I had always thought that was what I felt for her, and to find myself responding to her sexually- I was terrified. And so I made a conscious decision that day. I stopped being so close to her.
What happened the last time you saw Wendy?
She was home from college. She came home late one night. I was awake when she came home.
She'd been drinking. I saw a side of her I had never seen before. She... she propositioned me.
She asked me if I wanted to f**k. She said... obscene things. Described acts she wanted to perform with me. She tried to grab me.
I slapped her. I told her she was drunk. I told her to go upstairs and get to bed.
And in the morning we both pretended nothing had happened. Neither of us ever referred to the incident again.
Scudder said,
I don't think you have much to blame yourself for. It seems to me that everything was already set in motion before you were in a position to do anything about it.
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-Chapter 15
In a church, Scudder slipped into a rear pew and listened to the reading of the Law by Reverend Vanderpoel. After that, congregations stood up and sang a psalm, then lined up for a handshake. Scudder managed to be at the end of the line.
When it was finally his turn, Scudder said: I'd like to talk to you, Reverend Vanderpoel. In private, I think.
In the rectory, after a plain chat, Scudder said: You could tell me why you were able to murder Wendy Hanniford. And why you let Richie die in your place.
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LZ,好棒哦！ 我要看懂了这样水平的小说， 我就很满足了。
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-Chapter 16
I don't know what you're talking about. 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 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.
Vanderpoel sat there for a long moment, taking it all in. then he said: What makes you... believe this, Mr. Scudder?
Scudder said.
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. They lived together, but they didn't sleep together.
Vanderpoel said.
I never even considered the possibility that Richard was innocent. I just assumed he had done it. If what you think is true-. Then he died for nothing.
He died for you, sir. He was the lamb for the burnt offering.
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. And you were very vulnerable. You'd been a widower for a good many years.
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.
You certainly hated her. Even after she was dead you made it a point to tell me how evil she was.
She made you want to do something you were ashamed of.
And that made you do something more shameful. You killed her.
You planned it. You took your razor along. And you had sex with her one final time before you murdered her. The autopsy showed that she had had both oral and vaginal intercourse shortly before death. what you did, sir, was take off all your clothes and let her perform fellatio upon you, and then you whipped out your razor and slashed her to death, and then you went home and let your son hang himself for it.
You knew Richie would be home from work in another couple of hours. You knew he'd discover the body. You didn't necessarily know he'd go nuts, but you knew the cops would grab him and lean on him hard.
You set him up for it.
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No!
I was going to... to call the police. I was going to report the crime anonymously. They would have found the body while he was still at work. They would have known he had nothing to do with it, they would have blamed it on some anonymous sex partner of hers. They never would have thought-
I left the apartment. My head was reeling, I was... badly shaken by what I had done. And then I saw Richie on his way home. He didn't see me. I saw him mount the stairs, and I knew... I knew it was too late. He was already on the scene.
So you let him go upstairs. And when you went to see him in jail?
I wanted to tell him. I wanted to... to say something to him. I... I couldn't.
But...
You can't prove any of this. I'll deny having said any such thing to you. You haven't the slightest bit of truth
I can't prove anything. The cops will be able to, though, when I go to them.
They never had any reason to dig before. But they'll start digging, and they'll turn something up. They'll start by asking you to account for your movements on the day of the murder. You won't be able to. That's nothing in and of itself, but it's enough to encourage them to keep looking. They've still got that apartment sealed off.
They never had a reason to dust it for prints. They'll have a reason now, and they'll find your prints somewhere. I'm sure you didn't run around wiping surfaces.
They'll ask to see your razor. If you bought a new one since then, they'll wonder why. They'll go through all your wardrobe, looking for bloodstains. I guess you had your clothes off when you killed her, but you'll have gotten traces of blood on something or other and it won't all wash out.
They'll put a case together a piece at a time, and they won't even need a full case because you'll crack under questioning in no time at all. You'll crack wide open.
You're not strong so much as you're rigid. You'll break. I couldn't tell you how many suspects I've questioned. It gives you a pretty good idea of who's going to crack easy. You'd be a cinch.
But it doesn't matter whether you crack or not, and it doesn't matter whether they put a solid case together or not, because all they have to do is start looking and you've had it. Take a look at your life, Reverend Vanderpoel. Once they start, you're finished. You won't be up there on the pulpit Sunday mornings reading the Law to your congregation. You'll be disgraced.
Vanderpoel sat for a few minutes in silence.
What do you want, Mr. Scudder? I have to tell you that I'm not a rich man. I suppose I could arrange regular payments. I couldn't afford very much, but I could-
I don't want money.
Scudder took a small vial of pills from a pocket. That was Seconal, sleeping pills.
There are enough there, if a person were to take them all and go to bed, he wouldn't wake up.
You expect me to end my life.
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Your life is over, sir. It's just a question of how it finishes up. You leave a note. You're despondent over the death of your son, and you can't find it within yourself to go on living. It won't be that far from the truth, will it?
And if I refuse?
I go to the police Tuesday morning.
Do you honestly think it would be so bad to let me go on living my life, Mr. Scudder? I perform a valuable function, you know. I'm a good minister.
Perhaps you are.
I honestly think I do some good in this world. Not a great deal, but some. Is it illogical for me to want to go on doing good?
No.
And I am not a criminal, you know. I did kill... that girl.
I killed her. Oh, you're so quick to see it as a calculated, cold-blooded act, aren't you? Do you know how many times I swore not to see her again? Do you know how many nights I lay awake, wrestling with demons? Do you even know how many times I went to her apartment with my razor in my pocket, torn between the desire to slay her and the fear of committing such a monstrous sin? Do you know any of that?
I killed her. Whatever happens, I will never kill anyone again. Can you honestly say I constitute a danger to society?
Yes.
How?
It's bad for society when murders remain unpunished.
But if I do as you suggest, no one will know I've taken my life for that reason. No one will know I was punished for murder.
I'll know.
You'd be judge and jury, then. Is that right?
No. You will, sir.
I regard suicide as a sin, Mr. Scudder.
So do I. There are worse sins. Murder.
Do you think I am an evil man, Mr. Scudder?
I think you've had good intentions. You were talking about that earlier: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
And I've paved a road to Hell?
Well, I don't know where the road leads, but there are a lot of wrecks along the highway, aren't
there?
Your wife committed suicide. Your mistress got slashed to death. Your son went crazy and hanged himself for something he didn't do. Does that make you good or evil? You'll have to work that one out for yourself.
You intend to go to the police Tuesday morning.
If I have to.
And otherwise, you'll keep your silence.
Yes.
Ah, and what about you, Mr. Scudder? Are you a force for good or evil? I'm sure you've asked yourself the question.
Now and then.
How do you answer it?
Ambivalently.
And now, in this act? Forcing me to kill myself?
That's not what I'm doing.
Isn't it?
No. I'm allowing you to kill yourself. I think you're a damned fool if you don't, but I'm not forcing you to do anything.
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-Chapter 17
It wasn't in the early Post, but around two in the afternoon Scudder had the radio on to one of the all-news stations and they had it.
The Reverend Martin Vanderpoel, minister of the First Reformed Church of Bay Ridge, had been found dead in his bedroom by his housekeeper. The death had been tentatively attributed, pending autopsy, to the voluntary ingestion of an overdose of barbiturates. Reverend Vanderpoel was identified as the father of Richard Vanderpoel, who had recently hanged himself after having been arrested for the murder of Wendy Hanniford in the apartment the two had shared in Greenwich Village. Reverend Vanderpoel was reported to have been profoundly despondent over his son's death, and this despondency had evidently led him to take his own life.
Scudder walked around the block to St. Paul's and sat near the back for a while, thinking about a lot of things.
Before he left he lit four candles. One for Wendy, one for Richie, the usual one for Estrellita Rivera.
And one for Martin Vanderpoel, of course.
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The End
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