“How do you mean?”
“I didn’t want to see the son of a bitch.”
He got up from behind his desk and walked over to the window. He toyed with the cord of the venetian blinds, raising and lowering them a few inches. I waited him out. He sighed and turned to face me.
“Here was a guy who committed a horrible murder, slashed a young woman to death. I didn’t want to set eyes on him. Do you find that hard to understand?”
“Not at all.”
“It bothered me. I’m an attorney, I’m supposed to represent people without regard to what they have or haven’t done. I should have thrown myself right into it, finding the best defense for him. I certainly shouldn’t have presumed my own client guilty as charged without even talking to him.” He came back to his desk and sat down again. “But of course I did. The police picked him up right on the scene of the crime. I might have challenged their case if I saw it all the way into court, but in my own mind I had already tried the bastard and found him guilty as charged. And since I had every expectation that I would be taken off the case, I found ways to avoid seeing Vanderpoel.”
“But you eventually went that Friday afternoon.”
“Uh-huh. He was in his cell in the Tombs.”
“You saw him in his cell, then.”
“Yes. I didn’t pay much attention to the surroundings. They’ve finally torn down the Women’s House of Detention. I used to walk past it all the time years ago when my wife and I lived in the Village. A horrible place.”
“I know.”
“I wish they’d do the same for the Tombs.” He touched the side of his nose again. “I suppose I saw the very steam pipe that poor bastard hanged himself from. And the bedsheet he used to do the job. He sat on his bed while we talked. He let me have the chair.”
“How long were you with him?”
“I don’t think it was more than half an hour. It seemed considerably longer.”
“Did he talk?”
“Not at first. He was off somewhere with his own thoughts. I tried to get through to him but didn’t have very much luck. He had a look in his eyes as if he was having some intense wordless dialogue with himself. I tried to open him up, and at the same time I began planning the defense I would use if I had the chance. I didn’t expect to have the chance, understand. It was a hypothetical exercise as far as I was concerned. But I had more or less decided to try for an insanity plea.”
“Everyone seems to agree he was crazy.”
“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, ‘I 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, ‘I 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.