The Sins of the Fathers

There would be men who would get her number from other men, see, and she would go out with them, but if they weren't her type or something, well, she'd say she had a headache and go home. She wasn't trying to make a million dollars."

"So she must have earned a couple hundred dollars a week."

"That sounds about right. It was a fortune compared to what I was earning, but in the long run it wasn't a tremendous amount of money. I don't think she did it for the money, if you know what I mean."

"I'm not sure I do."

"I think she was, you know, a happy hooker?" She flushed as she said the phrase. "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."

I had obtained more from Marcia Thal than I'd expected. Maybe it was as much as I needed.

You have to know when to stop. You can never find out everything, but you can almost always find out more than you already know, and there is a point at which the additional data you discover is irrelevant and time you spend on it wasted.

I could fly out to Indiana. I would learn more, certainly. But when I was done I didn't think I would necessarily know more than I did now. I could fill in names and dates. I could talk to people who had memories of their own of Wendy Hanniford. But what would I get for my client?

I signaled for the check. While the waitress was adding things up, I thought of Cale Hanniford and asked Marcia Thal if Wendy had spoken often of her parents.

"Sometimes she talked about her father."

"What did she say about him?"

"Oh, wondering what he was like."

"She felt she didn't know him?"

"Well, of course not. I mean, I gather he died before she was born, or just about. How could she have known him?"

"I meant her stepfather."

"Oh. 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 said that several times, so I got the impression it was something she kept not getting around to."

I nodded. "What did she say about her father?"

"I don't remember, except I guess she idolized him a lot. One time I remember we were talking about Vietnam, and she said something about how whether the war was bad or not, the men who were fighting it were still good men, and she talked about how her father was killed in Korea. And one time she said, Ìf he had lived, I guess everything would be different.' "

"Different how?"

"She didn't say."

Chapter 11

I gave the car back to the Olin people a little after two. I stopped for a sandwich and a piece of pie and went through my notebook, trying to find a way that everything would connect with everything else.

Wendy Hanniford. She had a thing for older men, and if you wanted to you could run a trace on it all the way back to unresolved feelings for the father she never saw. At college she realized her own power and had affairs with professors.

Then one of them fell too hard for her and a wheel came off, and by the time it was over she was out of school and on her own in New York.

There were plenty of older men in New York. One of them took her to Miami Beach. The same one, or another, provided her with a job reference when she rented her apartment. And all along the line there must have been plenty of older men to take her to dinner, to slip her twenty dollars for taxi fare, to leave twenty or thirty or fifty dollars on the bureau.

She had never needed a roommate. She had subsidized Marcia Maisel, asking considerably less than half the rent. It was likely she had subsidized Richie Vanderpoel as well, and it was just as likely she had taken him as a roommate for the same reason she'd taken Marcia in, the same reason she had wanted Marcia to stick around.

Because it was a lonely world, and she had always lived alone in it with only her father's ghost for company. The men she got, the men she was drawn to, were men who belonged to other women and who went home to them when they were through with her. She wanted someone in that Bethune Street apartment who didn't want to take her to bed. Someone who would just be good company. First Marcia-and hadn't Wendy perhaps been a little disappointed when Marcia agreed to go along on dates with her? I guessed that she had, because at the same time that she gained a companion on dates she lost a companion who had been not of that brittle world but of a piece with the innocence Marcia had sensed in Wendy herself.

Then Richie, who had probably made an even better companion. Richie, a timid and reticent homosexual, who had improved the decor and cooked the gourmet meals and made a home for her while he kept his clothes in the living room and spent his nights on the convertible couch. And she in turn had provided Richie with a home. She'd given him a woman's companionship without posing the sexual challenge another woman might have constituted. He moved in with her and out of the gay bars.