Sins of the Fathers

Chapter 3

Bethune Street runs west from Hudson toward the river. It is narrow and residential. Some trees had been recently planted. Their bases were guarded by little picket fences hung with signs imploring dog owners to thwart their pets’ natural instincts. WE LOVE OUR TREE/PLEASE CURB YOUR DOG. Number 194 was a renovated brownstone with a front door the color of Astroturf. There were five apartments, one to a floor. A sixth bell in the vestibule was marked SUPERINTENDENT. I rang it and waited.

The woman who opened the door was around thirty-five. She wore a man’s white shirt with the top two buttons open and a pair of stained and faded jeans. She was built like a fireplug. Her hair was short and seemed to have been hacked at randomly with a pair of dull shears. The effect was not displeasing, though. She stood in the doorway and looked up at me and decided within five seconds that I was a cop. I gave her my name and learned that hers was Elizabeth Antonelli. I told her I wanted to talk to her.

“What about?”

“Your third-floor tenants.”

“Shit. I thought that was over and done with. I’m still waiting for you guys to unlock the door and clear their stuff out. The landlord wants me to show the apartment, and I can’t even get into it.”

“It’s still padlocked?”

“Don’t you guys talk to each other?”

“I’m not on the force. This is private.”

Her eyes did a number. She liked me better now that I wasn’t a cop, but now she had to know what angle I was working. Also if I wasn’t on official business, that meant she didn’t have to feel compelled to waste her time on me.

She said, “Listen, I’m in the middle of something. I’m an artist, I got work to do.”

“It’ll take you less time to answer my questions than it will to get rid of me.”

She thought this over, then turned abruptly and walked into the building. “It’s freezing out there,” she said. “C’mon downstairs, we’ll talk, but don’t figure on taking up too much of my time, huh?”

I followed her down a flight of stairs to the basement. She had a single large room with kitchen appliances in one corner and an army cot on the west wall. There were exposed pipes and electrical cables overhead. Her art was sculpture, and there were several examples of her work in evidence. I never saw the piece she was currently working on. A wet cloth was draped over it. The other pieces were abstract, and there was a massive quality to them, a ponderousness suggestive of sea monsters.

“I’m not going to be able to tell you much,” she said. “I’m the super because I get a deal on the rent that way. I’m handy, I can fix most things that go wrong, and I’m mean enough to yell at people when they’re late with the rent. Most of the time I keep to myself. I don’t pay much attention to what goes on in the building.”

“You knew Vanderpoel and Miss Hanniford?”

“By sight.”

“When did they move in?”

“She was here before I moved in, and I’ve been here two years in April. He moved in with her I guess a little over a year ago. I think just before Christmas if I remember right.”

“They didn’t move in together?”

“No. She was living with someone else before that.”

“A man?”

“A woman.”

She didn’t have any records, didn’t know the name of Wendy’s former roommate. She gave me the landlord’s name and address. I asked her what she remembered about Wendy.

“Not a hell of a lot. I only notice people if they make trouble. She never had loud parties or played the stereo too loud. I was in the apartment a few times. The valve was shot on the bedroom radiator, and they were getting too much heat, they couldn’t regulate it. I put a new valve in. That was just a couple of months ago.”

“They kept the apartment neat?”

“Very neat. Very attractive. They had the trim painted, and the place was furnished nice.” She thought for a moment. “I think maybe that was his doing. I was in the place before he moved in, and I think I remember it wasn’t as nice then. He was sort of artsy.”

“Did you know she was a prostitute?”

“I still don’t know it. I read lots of lies in the papers.”

“You don’t think she was?”

“I don’t have an opinion either way. I never had any complaints about her. Then again, she could have had ten men a day up there, and I wouldn’t have known about it.”

“Did she have visitors?”

“I just told you. I wouldn’t know about it. People don’t have to get past me to get upstairs.”

I asked her who else lived in the building. There were five floor-through apartments, and she gave me the names of the tenants in each. I could talk to them if they were willing to talk to me, she said. But not the couple on the top floor — they were in Florida and wouldn’t be back until the middle of March.

“You got enough?” she said. “I want to get back to what I was doing.” She flexed her fingers, indicating an impatience to return them to the clay.

I told her she had been very helpful.

“I don’t see that I told you anything much.”

“There’s something more you could tell me.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know them, either of them, and I realize you don’t take much interest in the people in the building. But everybody invariably forms an impression of people they see frequently over an extended period of time. You must have had some sort of image of the two of them, some feeling that extended beyond your hard factual knowledge of them. That’s probably been shifted out of position by what’s happened in the past week, what you’ve learned about them, but I’d like to know what your impression of them was.”

“What good would that do you?”

“It would tell me what they looked like to human eyes. And you’re an artist, you’ve got sensibilities.”

She gnawed at a fingernail. “Yeah, I see what you mean,” she said after a moment. “I just can’t find where to pick up on it.”

“You were surprised when he killed her.”

“Anybody’d be surprised.”

“Because it changed how you saw them. How did you see them?”

“Just as tenants, just ordinary — wait a minute. All right, you jarred something loose. I never even put words to the tune before, but you know how I thought of them? As brother and sister.”

“Brother and sister?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

She closed her eyes, frowned. “I can’t say exactly,” she said. “Maybe the way they acted when they were together. Not anything they did. Just the vibrations they gave off, the sense you got of them when they were walking along. The sense of how they related to each other.”

I waited.

“Another thing. I didn’t dwell on this, I mean I didn’t give it any thought to speak of, but I sort of took it for granted that he was gay.”

“Why?”

She had been sitting. She got up now and walked to one of her creations, a gunmetal-colored mound of convex planes taller and wider than herself. She faced away from me, tracing a curved surface with her stubby fingers.

“Physical type, I suppose. Mannerisms. He was tall and slender, he had a way of speaking. You’d think I would know better than to think in those terms. With my figure and short hair, and working with my hands, and being good with electrical and mechanical things. People generally assume I’m a lesbian.” She turned around, and her eyes challenged me. “I’m not,” she said.

“Was Wendy Hanniford?”

“How would I know?”

“You guessed Vanderpoel might be gay. Did you make the same guess about her?”

“Oh. I thought— No, I’m sure she wasn’t. I generally know if a woman is gay by the way she relates to me. No, I assumed she was straight.”

“And you assumed he wasn’t.”

“Right.” She looked up at me. “You want to know something? I still think he was a faggot.”