Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself (11 page)

But she wasn’t out of it that day. That was the weird part. At least she wasn’t out of it for a few minutes.

She had aged terribly in just a few years. She still had a broad face but it was sunken between the bones. And her hair was almost white. She looked at him from her wheelchair with clear blue eyes as he approached her in the lounge, then, recognizing him, she said with a smile, “Alan.” And then nodded when he asked how she was.

He’d brought her two new nightgowns, and a nurse took one of them from the box and held it up for her.

“Isn’t this lovely what your son brought you?”

His mother looked at it with that same smile, and then at the other nightgown, which the nurse also held up. Then she looked at him.

“You were always a good boy.”

“Oh, Mom.” He was holding her hand.

A minute or two passed, during which her look gradually became a stare that was now focused on her lap.

He said, “Mom?” But she didn’t look at him or, a little later, seem to notice when he kissed her goodbye.

As he walked away, he thought of what she’d said about his always having been “good boy.” And how her being alert for a time had scared him.

That evening he took Anna to dinner, and afterward they came back to his place. They were there no more than ten minutes when the phone rang. A young voice, a girl’s, immediately said, “Hi lover. I really want you.”

He could also hear another girl’s voice, though unintelligible, in the background.

He started to hang up but then glanced quickly at the little panel on his phone. It listed an area code and phone number.

“I would love to fuck you,” the first girl said. “Would you like to fuck me? And I’m good at sucking too. Do you have a large dick?”

He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver. The area code was the same as Anna’s parents’, but not the number.

He didn’t know what to say, whether to tell her.

“Honey” — Anna stood up from the sofa and came over —” is something wrong?”

“Look, do you recognize this area code?”

She looked, then said, puzzled, “Yes. But I don’t know the number. Who is it?”

He heard a click as the girls on the other end hung up. He set the receiver down. Anna’s eyes widened as he told her the kind of call it was. Her hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh God. My sister, oh that bitch!”

“I don’t think it was your sister. She didn’t talk to me when I was up there but I remember her talking to your mother. And I don’t think this was her voice.”

“Oh, it was her and her friend. She put her friend up to it. I know that bitch, I know that stupid bitch.”

“Why would she do it?” But it was such a foolish question he instantly regretted asking it. He could picture that orange-haired girl he’d met, pregnant, playing kids’ stupid games.

“Did she ever do this before?”

“Yes!”

“Did you ever tell your parents?”

“Yes!”

“What did they do?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. Nothing. She doesn’t listen anyway.”

She began to cry.

“Look, don’t,” he said.

“She’s such a bitch. And she’s a liar, she makes up stories. She tries to spoil everything for me.”

He led her back to the sofa and put his arm around her. After a few moments she leaned forward, her forehead against the fingers of one hand.

“I don’t deserve you,” she said against her hand.

“Oh, stop it. Because your sister’s a nut? A kid?”

“I’ve tried hard to break away from there. How I’ve tried.”

“Honey.” He brought her close. “Honey, you have. Now let’s forget this, can we? I know I have.”

She pressed her cheek against his shoulder.

“I’m scared,” she said.

He didn’t want to say it but he did. “Of what?”

“That I’m going to lose you. I don’t want to lose you. I love you so much.”

“Oh, I love you too.” It was the first time he’d ever said it to her.

“You didn’t have to say that.” She didn’t look up.

“Then I’ll take it back.”

“No. No.” She looked at him quickly, then put her forefinger to his lips. “Don’t. Let it stay said.”

Tuesday night he turned on the channel at least ten minutes before the program was to go on. When it did, he saw that Mack McKinney was not the only guest. It was a new show, only a month or so old, and was hosted by a former prosecutor, an attractive youngish-looking woman named Tess Antoni. Her first two guests were a defense attorney and a retired D.A., and they differed strongly about the pardoning of sex offenders. Alan barely listened; he was too intent on what McKinney would be there to talk about.

When McKinney came on Alan was a little surprised by his reaction to how the retired officer looked. He had seen him as a terribly stern man, even when his eyes had teared up when he spoke about his daughter. Now, his was rather a gentle face, his voice soft, his eyes sad.

And somehow, amazingly, though Alan felt startled to his bones, he even saw him that way when, for the first time, he heard him speak the name Susheela Kapasi.

“She was a beautiful girl. Beautiful. I’ve looked at her picture so many times.”

“I understand,” Antoni asked, “you weren’t there at the beginning of the investigation, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right. I’m from New Jersey and when I retired from the force my wife and I moved to Cape Cod, right near South Minton. That was about two years after her body was found. I’ve never been officially involved in the investigation but it’s one of the cases — and I do hate to call these tragedies ‘cases’ — it’s one of the cases our foundation and I strongly support.”

“What about the motive for the murder? There has been some speculation about this, I understand.”

“Well, not really. It’s believed the intent was sexual assault, but that the killer ran away when her father came looking for her and calling her name.”

“It’s fifteen years now. Have the police made any progress toward solving it?”

“Let’s put it this way. It’s still an active case. And now and then leads do come in and every one of them is followed. For instance...”

And then he told of a “stranger” — tall, white, dark hair, perhaps between thirty-two and thirty-five — who had showed up recently in the South Minton public library.

“He asked to see old newspapers. He seemed quite nervous and even dropped some, and after he left, the librarian saw that the latest papers he asked for carried the first stories of the murder. So she very alertly called the police...”

McKinney was going on but for a few moments Alan was still caught up in what he’d just said, that it was only after he returned the papers, not before, that she’d called the police.

“Now this fellow might have absolutely nothing to do with it,” McKinney was saying, “but he would be doing the investigation a big favor if he contacted the police and cleared his name.”

McKinney then gave a telephone number, which was printed out on the screen.

And then, following this, and as large as the screen itself, was a composite sketch of Alan’s face.

He stared at it in shock, then tried telling himself it didn’t look like him, not at all, that this was too long and that too wide. Then he went to a mirror and stared at himself, turning his face in different ways, telling himself the nose in the picture was all wrong, he didn’t have that kind of chin, that wasn’t the way he combed his hair; and yet he didn’t know, he didn’t know. And the age wasn’t exact; he jumped on the fact that he was thirty, not thirty-two to thirty-five, trying to look on it as all the difference in the world.

He went back to his computer. That morning he had checked with the Breeze and had seen nothing about the crime. Now he went back to scour it again. But still nothing. The following morning, though, was different.

First, there was a two-column headline: library visitor sought in kapasi murder. And then, underneath, was the sketch.

He read on through wavering vision.

It repeated what McKinney had said about the librarian noticing his “unusual behavior” and “nervousness” and then seeing that the last newspapers he’d been given were from a few days after the murder. The police hadn’t revealed at the time that they were interested in speaking to the “stranger,” in the hope that he would return. The story emphasized that he still might have a perfectly good explanation for wanting to see the papers.

Alan printed out the sketch and went with it to the mirror, hoping to confirm close up that it didn’t really look like him. He kept looking back and forth from the mirror to the picture, from the picture to the mirror, and it did seem to him, with drumming heart, that there was really no similarity. Still, he began playing with the idea of going up to South Minton and saying yes I was here, here I am, I was looking through those papers for this, that. How could they prove otherwise? After all, no one had seen him with her, no one knew that their motor home had been parked a half-mile or so away: That part of the beach had been empty. But he knew almost instantly that he would fall apart under the first questioning, blurt it all out in tears.

And then something else struck him with full force.

The Philly papers! Would they carry the sketch? Would his friends, relatives — Anna! — see it? And even though he thought it didn’t look like him, was he wrong? Would they know?

He still hadn’t picked up his morning paper from outside the door. He went for it, close to panic, placed its various sections on the kitchen table and began going through them.

No.

No, but for how long?

He didn’t notice the sidebar column in the Breeze until he sat down again at the computer. The column, running alongside the story about the library, carried the small headline no dispute between us, and it had the local captain of detectives denying “rumors and more rumors” that McKinney was “interfering” with the investigation.

“We welcome,” the captain was quoted as saying, “whatever help he — or anyone — can give us.”

The story then went on to tell again, with a few details that were new for Alan, of the murder of McKinney’s daughter: How he, his wife and two children — Sharon had been the youngest — had been supposed to leave for a week’s vacation in Wildwood the day after she was killed, how she was involved in church charities and had often talked of wanting to be a nun.

Later that morning, in his office, he had the strangest thought about the Sharon McKinney Foundation. And what was even more inexplicable was that he didn’t think it was strange, at least for a little while. So when he met with Elsa Tomlinson later on some matter, he said to her before leaving her office, and almost without planning to, “Do we ever help fund police work?”

“No. But tell me, such as?”

“I mean, like giving grants to help fund investigations into old cases, particularly involving children?”

“No. But do you have anything specific in mind?”

“Well, it’s all vague at the moment.”

“Well, when you think it out let me know.”

By the time he got back to his office he was lashing himself. What was he trying to do?

It struck me as strange, after almost two weeks, that I still hadn’t heard from Alan after I’d left a message on his answering machine congratulating him on his new position and asking him to call me back. When I called him one evening at his apartment he apologized, saying he’d been so busy that he kept putting it off. Please forgive him, he said.

“Absolutely,” I said, “not. Anyway,” and I laughed, “let me congratulate you again. How’s it going?” “Great. It’s really going fine.”

“Look, we haven’t seen you for a long time. How about coming over for dinner? Patty says no, but I say yes.”

He laughed. “When do you have in mind?” “Any day I’m not here. Seriously, Saturday? Friday? Whenever’s best for you.” “Can I bring someone?”

“Of course. So, let’s make it Saturday if that’s okay.” The following morning, at about half-past eight, I got a call from Haggerty, the editor of Detective Eye. This wasn’t an unusual time for him; it meant that he’d been thinking about something half the night.

“Colin,” he said, “this Harmann murder you got down there. The Luder thing. From what I read here it’s sewed up.”