Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself (4 page)

Please God, he kept praying silently, help me, please dear Jesus help me.

But at some point he stopped. For he began picturing that girl on Jesus’s lap and him holding her tight and rocking back and forth. And for the first time, his hands on either side of his head, he stopped thinking only of himself.

Oh little girl I’m sorry, I’m sorry!

Just as, earlier, there had been times when he wished the trip was already over, times when he didn’t feel like being closed in with his parents anymore, now he found himself wishing it would last forever. The motor home had become a fortress for him. Even when hundreds of miles away from South Minton, he dreaded stepping out of the trailer to go on a beach or have dinner or sightsee. And he was afraid of the end of the trip, was terrified of what he would find at home: a police car parked at the curb.

To his dismay his father broke the trip off after only another five days: Something had come up and he had to get back to the office. But as they turned into their street and headed toward their house, Alan almost let out a sob of relief. No police car was waiting. Only the quiet, cool brightness of the house.

As Alan drove on to South Minton, he found himself thinking that the weather was like the workings of his own head in that it didn’t seem to know what to do. He had driven only about fifteen miles from the service station when it began snowing again: Gray bulbous clouds had moved in swiftly and covered the sky. It was a heavy snow this time but a wet one, the kind his wipers cleared away easily.

After about forty more miles he pulled into a truck stop for lunch, the only decent-looking place to eat for the past several miles. Actually he wasn’t hungry at all; this was, he was aware at the time, a way of slowing up the ride, of giving himself more of a chance to really decide, perhaps to change his mind.

The parking lot held a scattering of eighteen-wheelers. For a few moments their large cabs, most of them with an overhead bunk, seemed to hold a kind of security; it gave him something of the feeling he’d had as a small kid when, while looking at certain picture books, he would envy the squirrels and rabbits the warmth and coziness of their little homes in tree trunks.

Sitting at one of two fairly crowded semi-circular counters, he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee. While he was waiting, the man next to him, a big fellow, a driver, glanced over from his platter of veal and French fries. “You won’t believe this but I’ve only had one heartburn in my life.”

Alan was hardly in a mood to talk. But he said, trying hard to be polite, “Really. You’re lucky.”

“And I’ve never gotten rid of it,” he grinned.

“Well, you got me.”

“Sorry, but that was just pulled on me.”

The fellow began telling him how he drove all over the country, almost always with another guy, though not this time, and it was really a good life for the most part. Then soon after the man returned to his meal, he looked over at the next counter where another man, a woman and a boy of about four had just sat down.

“Stu,” he called. “Marie.”

“Hey there,” Stu called back, and Marie, a husky woman, gave him a big smile.

“I forget the little fellow’s name,” he apologized.

“Billy,” she said.

“Hi, Billy, how are you?” Then, after not even getting a look from the boy, he said to them, “Where you heading?”

“Albuquerque,” the man answered, “You?”

“Detroit, then Chicago.”

Soon afterward he said to Alan in a low voice, “They own their own rig. She started sharing the driving when they got married, and they’ve been taking the kid since he was born.”

Alan looked at them, the father holding a menu to his face, the mother talking to the boy who was playing with a little fire engine on the counter.

Finished with lunch, Alan stalled a little more, began looking around the place. It had just about everything an overnight trucker would need, including a food and toiletries market and, in the back, showers and some bunks. But there was no way of stalling any more, and he went out to his car and pulled out on the road fast, only to slow to the speed limit almost immediately. He always tried to go under the speed limit, which used to give his friends a big laugh. But he didn’t ever want to be stopped by a cop.

Soon his thoughts began drifting back to the couple and their son at the counter. How he envied them having each other.

A wife, a family — if he didn’t turn back he could be giving up even a hope of that, forever.

He couldn’t remember exactly when he began thinking that he might not have killed her. But it had to have started after the first few months, when not only didn’t the police show up but he saw nothing in the news about any crime in or around South Minton. Still, he was always anxious when he read or watched the news and, much later, when he watched, whenever he dared to, one TV show in particular about unsolved crimes, always wondering with a fast-beating heart would her face appear, and then afterward feeling great waves of relief when it didn’t.

“What’re you watching that junk for?” his mother asked him once.

He said something quickly like, “It’s interesting.” But it was as if he’d been caught at something.

Gradually, whenever he summoned up the courage to think back and try to pick apart that horror, he became almost sure that he couldn’t have killed her, that his arm had never been hooked that tight around her neck. In fact, as he’d pulled her back among the trees, he’d loosened his grip, and his other hand had taken hold of her swimsuit strap and shoulder. And so he might have only stunned her or knocked her unconscious when he threw her to the ground.

The day before he’d had to go back to school after the trip — he was a junior in high school — his father came into his room, where he was trying to win a game of chess against the computer. He looked so solemn that Alan’s heart leaped. His father sat down on a chair facing him.

“Alan, I want to talk to you about something. And I hope it doesn’t get you angry.”

Alan just stared at him.

“I should have talked to you about this before but I was really afraid you’d get angry. And I didn’t think you needed it. In fact I still don’t. But your mother and I, you know, feel I should. It’s about drugs.”

Alan almost sighed.

“I’m sure you’re not involved in anything like that,” his father hurried on, “but I just wanted to say it. It’s more, you know, it’s more for me than you.” And he smiled, waiting for Alan to say something.

“I haven’t taken any drugs,” he said, “and I don’t intend to.”

“Look,” his father smiled, and Alan could feel his relief, “I said I didn’t think you did, I was positive of it, but — you know — right?”

Alan nodded.

“Good.” He stood up. “Well, you sleep well.”

Alan looked at the door as he closed it. And thought with a silent cry: Oh Dad! Oh Daddy!

Indeed, not only was he was never to smoke pot, he never drank alcohol until he was in his twenties, and then barely at all. But this had nothing to do with anything his father had said. He was afraid if he got high he might blurt out his crime.

He’d been a good student up until that terrible summer. In fact he was skipped ahead a class in elementary school, which put him in his friend Will Jansen’s grade; the day he found out was the most joyous day of his boyhood. But although he always tried hard, his marks fell after that summer. Not that he was ever a bad student, but he hovered just below the excellent ones, where he was sure he actually belonged. And while he fought it, he was still obsessed with sex, though he was afraid of girls. He never went to a dance in high school or even to his senior prom, wriggling out of it when a girl he secretly loved put her leg around his in one of their classes and, leaning sideways toward him, whispered would he take her to it.

He didn’t know if this had any part in it but he couldn’t shake the fear that he would hurt — kill? — another girl.

He didn’t even bother applying to Harvard, where his father had gone, but he was accepted by several colleges, including Penn State, where he went. He had no idea what he wanted to be and so had no major the first couple of years; he couldn’t see himself as a lawyer anymore, certainly not a criminal lawyer: Saving the innocent had turned in his mind into freeing the guilty. All he knew was that he wanted to do “good,” to make up for his sins, his crime; do something as amorphous and juvenile as saving the world.

He made friends at State and began dating a little. One of the first girls he took out was Sarah, a freshman like him. She had a bright face and short blond hair, and her own car. Their first date, they began kissing in the front seat in some dark park, and he loved kissing her, his hands under her hair at the back of her head. And when he started to open her blouse and their legs got entangled with the steering wheel, she said, “In back. Can we?”

And he went back there with her and they kissed again and he held her breasts, but when she waited for him, skirt high on her white thighs and legs apart, he suddenly realized in shock that he had nothing there. And it was later, in his room, that he thought, face in his hands, that this was to be his punishment.

Unlike Alan, I used to smoke more than an occasional joint, though I stopped after college, often had too many beers, dated girls without commitment. I also did well enough in college to get into law school, where I stayed just one year. I had met a man who said he’d been a freelance writer for a couple of true detective magazines for years but was giving it up for health reasons. For a long time I’d had what I thought was a fantasy of being a writer, and I took a chance and went to New York to meet the editor, Sam Haggerty, a white-haired man in his sixties, a chain-smoker who ran two magazines, Detective Eye and Crime Central, in a small office with one other editor and an artist.

I’m sure he looked at my college writing samples with a skeptical eye, but there must have been something about them and me he liked. He explained to me the types of articles he wanted and was honest enough to say that the heyday of these magazines was long over. Then he tried me out on a murder in Philadelphia, which involved my interviewing a couple of detectives. I wrote it well enough that I was promised other assignments — and that was the end of law school. In the following years I not only covered crimes for him in New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware but I also contributed to some national magazines and published four books on true crime.

I had a girlfriend once who asked me if all this writing about crime didn’t keep me up at night. I said no, which was true. Actually the only crimes that really affected me, and affected me deeply, were those against children. I’d always been against the death penalty, but that was the one exception: I wanted those monsters dead.

Alan finally did decide to go to law school, for pretty much the same reason I did: It wasn’t that he wanted to be a lawyer but he saw it as a good background for whatever he eventually decided to do. Again he didn’t go to the school, Yale, his father did — he didn’t even apply, to his father’s dismay. My uncle was sure he could have gotten in as the son of an alumnus, which is what Alan would have always felt and didn’t want. The two law schools he did apply to accepted him and he chose Temple, in Philly, and took a studio apartment downtown.

It was in his second year that he got a call there from his mother, in a voice that told him, with just her first word, “Alan,” that something was wrong. His father had died at his desk in his office, probably, as we were to learn later, of an aortic aneurysm.

The viewing was the first I’d seen Alan and my aunt in several months. I went up to my aunt first, who smiled sadly at me through the several people who were around her. Then she put her arms around me, and when I said something about him being a wonderful man she said, “Colin, everyone loved him. He was such a good person.” Then, referring to the swift passing of their years together, “It was only like a walk around the block.” When I went over to Alan, we held each other too, briefly, and after I said the usual things, I remember him saying, “I know how you felt about him.” And I also remember thinking: No, you don’t. For as I looked at my uncle lying there, face strong even in death, one of the many thoughts I had, strangely enough — but perhaps not — was of him at the wheel of that motor home as he was about to drive off: all that I would have wanted!

His funeral was the first time I’d been in church in years — and Alan’s first since before South Minton. He hadn’t been able to face going and his parents had eventually stopped pushing him. Now, as he was to tell me, he felt as though God and all of the angels and half the dead were looking down at him.

As he kept staring at the coffin, one thought began running through his mind:
Dad, what were your problems that I will never know about — just as you never knew mine?
And then at the cemetery, where the sun even came out after a morning of gray drizzle, another thought raced through him:
Now that he’s with the dead, perhaps even with that little girl, he knows what I have done.

Alan called me on his cell phone a couple of weeks after the funeral. I had told him that I’d moved into a new apartment and he said he was driving through the neighborhood, did I mind if he stopped by.

I said, “Are you kidding? Of course I mind.”

He laughed. “I’m going to cry.”

“In that case, hurry.”

I had moved to a much larger apartment, this one on the second floor of an artsy gift shop in the Chestnut Hill section of the city. It was early April and still quite chilly, but he was wearing only a thin tan sweater, chinos and Docksiders. He had nice things to say about the place, the prints on the walls, the fireplace, the two walls lined with books, and after a while said, “You must work very closely with the police.”

“Oh yeah. That’s part of it.”

“Do you get real friendly with them?”

“Just with a couple of them. The rest I pretty much just know.”

“Tell me, how do you keep up to date on crimes?”