Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself (22 page)

“Well, it certainly didn’t help,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he answered slowly, “but I still have no one to blame but myself. No one.”

It was shortly after this, in the thirteenth year of his sentence, that I got a call from someone in the prison, since his mother had died and I was listed as next of kin, that Alan was dead. His throat had been cut by another prisoner.

The belief is that Alan was another victim of his own crime, that he was killed because he was a murderous pedophile. The man who killed him, though, said that Alan was the one who had provoked the fight, that he’d started punching him for no reason, even though he knew the guy had a shiv. No one else witnessed it, so who really knows? But my own belief, based in part on the fact that he was killed soon after he finished telling me all he wanted to of his life, is that he wanted to die even though he would be eligible for parole in a couple of years. Or maybe because this was coming up. Perhaps Alan, with gray in his hair now but with the same gentle and troubled way about him, didn’t want to go out into a world where the tag murderer and pedophile would be attached to him wherever he moved. But more likely, and this I do believe, he felt he hadn’t been punished enough.

I think often of what he told me about his parents being blameless. I am not, however, that easy on myself. I think of all the times when he was a kid that I could have pointed the way, perhaps helped him bear his burdens, explained something or other. In other words, really been there for him. Really been there. The big cousin. The big brother. But they’re long gone, those chances.

What I’ve often told my wife — one of our two children, incidentally, is named Alan — is that he is, in a sense, responsible for everything I write and will write. Everything. Even if Detective Eye were still around, and on the impossible chance I was still contributing to it, he would even be present as I wrote those stories, too.

As for Anna, let me say this:

“I think of her so often,” Alan told me. “So often.” And once: “I often wonder where she is, if she has a family, if she’s content. Oh, I hope so. I owe her so much — that through her I came to know the joy and richness of life.”

His regret was that he never really told her. My hope is that she will find out now.

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