Roy Bruster, too, had disappeared: He moved out of the house he’d been renting and I was never able to find him. From what I heard, he did indeed have a hard life. His father took off before Bruster was born, and his mother died when he was about four. He lived in a series of foster homes, and went for a long while to a school for disturbed children. He managed to go to college and get married, but though he taught high school math for several years, he was let go for some unrevealed reason and then held a scattering of jobs, mostly as a salesman. Then, just a year before his suicide attempt, his wife took off with their two children. And then there was the diabetes.
Alan received a stream of letters of support, of prayers for him, and a few that came close to marriage proposals. But there were many more of another type.
There was story after story about Susheela, about the brilliant student and kind and lovely young person she’d been. Her murder was blamed for the deaths of her parents: Her mother’s heart attack, of course, and it was even suggested that her father’s automobile accident might have been suicide. And something came out that the police had never revealed before, that when they’d examined the body they’d found a fresh, long scratch on her groin, which seemed to confirm that Alan had intended to rape her before either being interrupted or, if you were disposed to be charitable to him, changing his mind.
And there were other things. One was his “temper” — the fight he’d had with the fellow in the parking lot, how he was “forever” threatening his next-door neighbor for playing music above a “whisper.” A few of his neighbors and colleagues, sudden stars on TV, even spoke of things he’d never thought about himself, such as his being “aloof,” “argumentative.” Why, even his working for the Foundation came under some attack, like he’d stained it, like he was a hypocrite, had used it to try to cleanse himself. And then there was the interview with his old friend from childhood, Will Jansen.
Alan remembered him as a fairly tall, skinny kid like himself, but now in his early thirties he turned out to be only five-seven and heavy and almost completely bald.
Will told of so many good things, about them going to the woods and the creek together, building model airplanes, doing homework together, never having a quarrel. But he also told of them “kidnapping” that little boy and sending him for “pigeon milk.”
“He talked me into doing it,” Will said, “and I did. But I never felt the same about him after that.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Many if not most of you know something of what happened afterward. But certainly not all of it — far from all of it. One of the things you may know is that, since Alan was fifteen at the time of the crime, his lawyer tried but failed to have the case handled in juvenile court. At his trial he was found guilty of second-degree murder, which carried a life sentence but he would be eligible for parole after fifteen years.
Anna came to see him in prison as soon as she was allowed to after he was sentenced. They looked at each other through the glass that separated them, phones to their ears but not speaking right away. She was wearing, as he was to tell me, a light blue raincoat, and her blond hair had a faint glisten of rain to it. Her face, always pale, was never more so. Her eyes immediately filled up, and his started to also.
“How are you doing?” she managed to say.
“Okay. Just fine. I’m doing fine.”
“Are you, are you telling me the truth?”
He was sure she was referring to the hard time that sex offenders, particularly the murderers of children, go through in prison. “Yes, I’m telling the truth.”
“Do they let you see any counselors?”
“Not yet, but I think they may.”
“Do you go to church services?”
“No.” But he would soon, off and on. He then said, “Anna, this is a long trip for you.”
“I don’t mind. Alan, I love you.”
“Oh Anna.” He felt himself tearing up again. He wanted to cry out I love you too. But, he thought, how can I? How dare I?
“You try to take care of yourself,” she said. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you. I will.”
She stood up, held up her palm and smiled. And then left.
He wrote to her soon after the visit, telling her in the most painful letter he’d ever written to go on with her life, that he had too many years here ahead of him. Perhaps the letter did it. Perhaps it was pressure from her family. Perhaps she found someone else. Perhaps all of it. Anyway, he never saw or heard from her again.
I know all this because years later, after a lot of red tape was cut, I was able to meet with Alan enough times for him to tell this story. It was his idea, and once he started it just about poured out of him, as if he’d held it in too long. To be honest I must admit that I often wondered, listening to him, how much of what he was saying was self-serving, until one day he said, leaning forward, his hands clenched on his knees, that no one but himself was to blame for him committing murder.
“A lot of guys have parents who’re uptight about sex,” he said to me, “who never talk to them about it, but they don’t go on to do what I did.”
“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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Witness to Myself Page 17
