The Sins of the Fathers

When I went back into the living room he hadn't changed position. I sat down in my chair and looked at him. There was a lot more and we would get to it, but I wanted to wait for him to pick it up.

He said, "This is extraordinary, Mr. Scudder."

"Yes."

"I never even considered the possibility that Richard was innocent. I just assumed he had done it. If what you think is true-"

"It's true."

"Then he died for nothing."

"He died for you, sir. He was the lamb for the burnt offering."

"You can't seriously believe I killed that girl."

"I know you did, sir."

"How can you possibly know that?"

"You met Wendy in the spring."

"Yes. I believe I told you that the last time you were here."

"You picked a time when you knew Richie would be at work. You wanted to meet this girl because you were bothered at the idea of Richie living in sin with her."

"I already told you as much."

"Yes, you did." I took a breath. "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.

You're a very commanding figure of a man. Very stern and forbidding. And on top of everything you were Richie's actual father, and she and Richie were living like brother and sister.

"So she made a play for you. I gather she was very good at getting her point across. And you were very vulnerable. You'd been a widower for a good many years. Your housekeeper may have been very efficient at her appointed tasks, but you certainly couldn't have picked her as a potential sexual outlet.

The last time I was here you told me you felt in retrospect that you should have remarried for Richie's sake. I think you were really saying that you should have remarried for your own sake, so that you wouldn't have been vulnerable to Wendy Hanniford."

"This is all guesswork on your part, Mr. Scudder."

"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. I thought at the time you were justifying your son's act. I didn't believe then that he did it, but I believed you thought so.

"Then you told me he admitted his guilt."

He didn't say anything. I watched him wipe perspiration from his forehead, then wipe his hand on his robe.

"That didn't have to mean anything. You might have been talking yourself into the belief that Richie died penitent. Or he could well have admitted it to you because he could have become sufficiently confused after the fact. Everything was jumbled up for him. He told his lawyer he found Wendy dead in the bathtub. A little more reflection and he must have decided that he had killed her even if he couldn't remember it.

"But the more I found out about Wendy, the harder it was to picture her as evil. I don't doubt she had an evil effect on the lives of certain other people. But why would she seem evil to you? There was really only one explanation for that, sir. 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."

"That's a lie."

"It's not. I can even tell you what you did. The autopsy showed that she had had both oral and vaginal intercourse shortly before death. Richie would have had genital intercourse with her, so 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."

I stood up and planted my feet in front of his chair. "I'll tell you what I think.

I think you're a son of a bitch. 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."

"No!"

"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-"

"Why didn't you follow through?"

He fought to catch his breath. He said, "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."

"Yes."