The Sins of the Fathers

It wasn't in the early Post, but around two in the afternoon I 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.

I turned off the radio and sat around for half an hour or so. Then I walked around the block to St. Paul's and put a hundred dollars in the poor box, a tenth of what I'd received as a bonus from Cale Hanniford.

I sat near the back for a while, thinking about a lot of things.

Before I left I lit four candles. One for Wendy, one for Richie, the usual one for Estrellita Rivera.

And one for Martin Vanderpoel, of course.

The End

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17