The Sins of the Fathers

"There's a difference between that and legal insanity. It becomes a battle of experts-you line up your witnesses, and the prosecution lines up theirs. Well, I went on talking to him, just trying to get him to open up a little, and then he turned to me and looked at me as if wondering where I had come from, as if he hadn't known I was in the room before. He asked me who I was, and I went over everything I had said to him the first time around."

"Did he seem rational?"

Topakian considered the question. "I don't know that he seemed to be rational," he said. "He seemed to be acting rationally at that moment."

"What did he say?"

"I wish I could remember it exactly. I asked him if he had killed the Hanniford girl. He said, now let me think, he said, `She couldn't have done it herself.' "

" `She couldn't have done it herself.' "

"I think that's the way he put it. I asked if he remembered killing her. He claimed that he didn't. He said his stomach ached, and at first I thought he meant he had a stomachache at the time of our conversation, but I gathered that he had had a stomachache on the day of the murder."

"He left work early because of indigestion."

"Well, he remembered the stomachache. He said his stomach ached and he went to the apartment. Then he kept talking about blood. `She was in the bathtub and there was blood all over.' I understand they found her in bed."

"Yes."

"She hadn't been in the tub or anything?"

"She was killed in bed, according to police reports."

He shook his head. "He was a very confused young man. He said that she had been in the tub with blood everywhere. I asked him if he had killed her, I asked him several times, and he never really gave me an answer. Sometimes he said that he didn't remember killing her. Other times he said that he must have killed her because she couldn't have done it herself."

"He said that more than once, then."

"Quite a few times."

"That's interesting."

"Is it?" Topakian shrugged. "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."

"What?"

"Having sex with her."

"That's worse than killing her?"

"Having sex with her afterward."

"Oh."

"He didn't make any attempt to conceal it. He said he found her lying in her blood and he had sex with her."

"What words did he 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, Ì 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, Ì 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.