Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself (7 page)

“You helped out here?”

“Sure, all through high school. I love it. In fact at one time I only wanted to be on a Nascar crew.”

“And what happened?”

“Dreams change.” And she smiled, as if that were enough.

Her house was a two-story frame building with a small open porch. It was darkly Victorian inside; the furniture had a heavy look; a small crucifix hung in the dining room. For some reason, he had had the feeling that her mother might be grossly fat. She wasn’t: She looked amazingly like Anna, with a nice warm smile. Her father was a husky man with thinning black hair, who looked expressionless except when he was frowning. He had a large tattoo on each forearm. Her sister, thin and with dyed orangey hair and large eyes that always seemed focused on Alan, wasn’t showing her pregnancy yet and looked as if she wasn’t concerned about a thing.

Her mother spoke almost incessantly, including about her two sisters whose husbands died years ago and her rich older brother, who was selling his paint manufacturing business. But for a long time Anna’s father remained silent, though the few times Alan looked at him he was staring back.

It was shortly before dinner that her father began asking him questions, as though he’d been storing them up.

“Your mother and father living?”

“Just my mother. My father died.”

“Did I hear you’re not Catholic?”

“I’m not, no.”

“You’re what?”

“My religion? I was raised Lutheran.”

“You believe in God.” He said it as a statement.

“Yes.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Anna says you’re a lawyer.”

“Yes.”

“They’re not my favorite people, you know.” He did smile slightly at this.

“Oh Dad,” Anna spoke up.

“It’s true.” This time even that little smile was gone.

“Well, they’re not always mine either,” Alan said.

Her father seemed to like that. “Do you ever hunt?”

“No.”

He pondered over this for a moment. “Did Anna ever tell you she’s a natural at fixing cars?”

“Yes, she told me she loves it.”

“Let me tell you something about this girl. She fixed a transmission — let’s see, how old were you? Twelve?”

“You helped,” she said. “You know you helped.”

“Twelve. Fixed a transmission.”

“Let’s,” her mother spoke up, “have dinner.”

Dinner was roast beef, baked potatoes and string beans, with applesauce and iced tea. It was good, and they ate with a minimum of talk, with nothing at all that whole afternoon from the sister. Afterward, in the bathroom, Alan saw that the toilet seat was made of clear plastic, suspended inside which was a scattering of United States coins.

As he told Anna on the way home, “I think I sat on fifty dollars.”

She seemed puzzled, then laughed. “Oh that.”

“Don’t laugh. That’s part of your inheritance.”

She laughed again; and looking at her, he became aware of how much he loved making her laugh.

A little while later it struck him that she hadn’t brought anything back with her, the supposed reason she’d wanted to go there. It also struck him, even harder, that while he had been judging her family, they’d had no way of knowing the depths to which they’d have to go to even begin to judge him.

It was soon after this that his career began to take a different direction. He had made a good friend of Elsa Tomlinson, of the renowned Elsa and Jonathan Tomlinson Foundation, the national charity that provided grants in many fields including the arts and education. He had been called in by one of his firm’s law partners to help her, a recent widow, reconstruct her will. And she had given him particular credit for it, to the point of having him do an increasing amount of the Foundation’s legal work.

She called him at the office about a week after he’d met Anna’s family.

“When can you have lunch with me?”

“Whenever you say.”

“Wrong. You’ve got to sound busier if you’re going to continue to work for me.”

“You just reminded me. I’m tied up all this month.”

“Good. One o’clock today at my club?”

She was a woman in her late sixties, with a narrow, handsome face, bright blue eyes, and pulled-back white hair. She and her husband had had no children. Although she never said anything to indicate it, certain movements of her hands seemed to indicate she missed the cigarettes she used to smoke.

“I’m having a martini,” she said. “And you?”

“A scotch and soda.”

“You don’t like brands?”

Actually it didn’t make any difference; he still didn’t trust drinking. “A Dewar’s will be fine.”

With the waiter gone, she looked at him in a slightly arched way, as if examining him for the first time.

“I would like you to be on our board of directors.” “Oh?”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“No, but I’m gulping.”

“Well, when you’re finished tell me what you think.”

“I’m delighted, of course. Thank you.”

“Now stop gushing. And I will want you to come work for us. Not at this moment but quite soon, once I figure things out.”

He said nothing, nor did she apparently expect him to.

“Are you a softie?” she asked. “In charity work you obviously have to be sort of a softie.”

“I think I am.”

“But you also have to be something else. If things work out the way I want them to, you might be the object of some jealousy. Can you also be a killer?”

He didn’t answer. Her words came as kind of a shock.

“You can’t?” She tilted her head.

“Yes,” he said, “I can be a killer.”

As for me, I had gotten married a couple of months before Alan was tapped for the board of directors. My wife, Patty, was someone I’d been seeing for about a year. She was a librarian, a gently attractive and wise young woman of twenty-six. I’d first met her at the branch library she ran, where I’d gone to give a talk to one of their book groups, and I almost immediately stopped dating anyone else. She had met Alan once, for maybe a half hour, so perhaps it hadn’t been long enough for her to sense something about him the way she did at our wedding, where as I’ve mentioned he was my best man.

It was a small wedding, which was what both of us wanted, with about twenty-five people, held at a chapel and culminating in a quiet side room of a fine restaurant near the suburbs. Alan looked fine to me, smiling, talking to people, and telling some jokes about me as he stood up from his table and gave a toast to us. So it came as a surprise to me when Patty and I were at the airport, waiting for a flight that would take us on a week’s honeymoon to a couple of islands in Greece, and she said, “Your cousin Alan, I was just thinking. He’s a great guy, but he has the saddest eyes.”

“Really? I never noticed that. I think he can be very funny — well, not funny-funny but witty.”

“Yes, but his eyes struck me as so sad.”

I shrugged. She was a very perceptive person, I thought, but sometimes you can take that too far.

After all, what did Alan have to be sad about?

My work, it’s important to mention, wasn’t going well at this time. My last book wasn’t doing what the publisher — or I — had hoped for, and though I’d had one bestseller, nothing can sour a publisher more on your next book than poor sales of your previous one. So I knew I had to come up with a super idea for a new one; but not only didn’t I have anything that I thought would please them, I had no ideas that pleased me. I was also having trouble with the national magazines: Ideas I pitched to them kept bouncing back. I’d continued writing for the two true detective magazines out of loyalty to Sam Haggerty; and now the only one I kept selling to was Detective Eye — his other magazine had folded — though I was wishing I could finally give it up.

At least once or twice a week I’d get a call from Haggerty, whom I could picture lighting one cigarette with the butt of another as he held the phone to his ear.

“Anything new in the hopper? How about that case.”

And he’d rattle off a crime that he’d read about or heard of on TV. Or I would call him about a murder, either a new one or one that had just been tried in court, and after I’d interviewed the main detectives who’d handled it, it would take me three days at most to write the 5,000-word story. Then it would carry one of my several pen names, under which would be a Sam Haggerty invention:

SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR FOR
Detective Eye.

A sign on the highway to South Minton said
FOOD LODGING GAS
1 mi at the next turnoff. He didn’t plan to take it but when he had about a quarter-mile to go he made a fast decision to do it, then pulled into the parking lot of a hotel, the
STEPHAN HOUSE
. It was only about three and the snow had stopped again, so there was nothing to stop him from just driving on. But he was only about a hundred miles from the town and he still didn’t know what he was going to do.

The lobby was empty, the only person there the clerk behind the counter. He checked in and took the elevator to the fourth floor. The room looked gray when he walked in; was gray, until he opened the blinds and the sunlight poured in. He put his attaché case on a chair; it held a change of clothing. Although he hadn’t expected to sleep over on his way to South Minton, he had thought he might on the drive home.

He sat down on the side of the bed, then leaned back against a pillow. His mind couldn’t stop racing, questioning everything he must have already asked himself a thousand times. Like, let’s say he did go through with it, what’s the first thing he would do when he got there? He would have to find a copy of the
Breeze
or any other newspaper for July 8, of course — but no, that was wrong: It would have to be the next day’s paper, that’s the one that would have carried the story if there was a story to carry. Also, he still hadn’t decided whether he should go to the
Breeze’s
office for back copies or to the library. In either case, how could he do it without stirring up suspicion, without some giveaway look on his face, perhaps a quiver in his voice or of his hands?

Although he wasn’t hungry, he forced himself to go downstairs for some dinner. Afterward he looked around the lobby to see if they had a shop that sold newspapers or paperbacks but though there was one that displayed gift items it was closed. He went over to the desk to see if they at least had some booklets, perhaps describing the area, and was a little surprised to see two or three newspapers on the far side of the counter. They were copies of that morning’s local paper, free for guests.

Back in the room, he started to look through the paper but his mind began to drift. Almost without being aware of it, he began thinking of that long-ago little girl, trying again to assure himself that she was alive, that she was a grown woman now, married perhaps and with children. What always amazed him when he thought of her was that there were long periods of time when he
didn’t
think of her. Once again he found himself wondering who and what she was, whether Indian or Pakistani or an Arab or a gypsy or maybe a Latino. And who had been with her out on the beach, waiting for her return — parents, guardians, brothers and sisters?

He turned on the TV to the dumbest show he could find, but nothing could quite relax him. He opened the newspaper to the sports section and read about teams and games he had no interest in. Then, as he turned the pages, his eyes settled on one small news story, not so much because of the heading
GIRL’S BODY IDENTIFIED IN PARK
, but because its dateline read “Philadelphia, PA.”

He had made it a practice never to read any story about a murder. Never a complete story, that is; no more than the first paragraph. So though he did know that a girl, an eleven-year-old middle-school student in Philadelphia named Elizabeth Harmann, had been missing for several days, this was the first he knew that her body had been found. She had been raped and strangled.

He threw the paper to the side.

For moments it was as if the police would be coming to question him.

Alan had been out jogging the afternoon he heard from my mother about his mother.

“Alan,” she said, and she began crying. “It’s terrible, it’s gotten worse. I can’t handle it any more. She just threw something at me. It didn’t hit me but she threw something. And she’s in one of those periods where she doesn’t recognize me.”

“I’ll be right over.”

His mother and my mother were living together in a pleasant apartment in the suburbs. His mother had started deteriorating mentally within months after his father’s death, and Alan had been paying a woman to help my mother take care of her. But the woman had recently quit.

Not surprisingly, his mother seemed somewhat herself by the time he got there; this happened often. She not only smiled as he kissed her but she said, “Alan,” and afterward, “Lawyer.”

“How are you, mom?”

“Good.” But then she started slipping away again. “It’s just night. Nobody.”

Kneeling in front of her, he looked over at my mother. She shrugged her shoulders. Then his mother said, clearly, something she had said to me and surely to him at his father’s funeral:

“It was just like a walk around the block.”

Only this time, instead of saying it to him, she seemed to be saying it to his father.

He looked at her as she was sitting in a living room chair, a little smile on her lips. He couldn’t help think of the times when he was a kid that she wanted him to wear rubbers in the rain. And wouldn’t let him go outside when he had all of a ninety-nine degree temperature, which she and his father must have thought was like a two-hundred degree fever. And the creek that ran through the woods near our houses, only a foot or two at its deepest, how it was the curse of her life in that she was always warning him against falling in and drowning.

Mom, he thought now, you worried about the wrong things.

A couple of weeks later, I helped him move his mother, who had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, into a nursing home. Anna had suggested that she should come to her place, but though Alan was tempted he didn’t want to put a special burden on Anna. After tours of several places he’d selected the one he considered the best. His mother put up no fuss when he and my mother and I took her there.