Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself Read online

  Raves for the Work of

  SEYMOUR SHUBIN!

  “First-rate writing, marvelous characterization, believable dialogue, intelligence, gripping suspense that never lets up until the thrilling denouement... A rare find that contributes to the notion that we are experiencing a new Golden Age of mystery writing.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  “Shubin understands that the recipe for good fiction is set in stone: (1) grab reader by throat; (2) squeeze till limp.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “[Shubin] has brought off a bizarre and blistering rarity. Expertly handled.”

  —Newsweek

  “A masterfully written dark crime novel... It deserves to be up there on the same shelf as James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity.”

  —Dave Zeltserman, Hardluck Stories

  “Shubin’s novel is recommended as a must for those who like their fiction with the explosive qualities of a 16-inch shell.”

  —San Francisco Call

  “A chilling work of psychological suspense.”

  —Pirate Writings

  “Heart-clutching... leaves one profoundly affected.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Shubin’s novel is simply splendid in every respect, from its ingenious plot to its complex and fully realized characters. His staccato style, deceptively simple, propels the action along at a heart-pounding pace.”

  —San Diego Union

  “Good... for readers looking for excruciating 3-D suspense.”

  —The New York Post

  “Shubin’s prose takes us first by the hand, and then by the throat.”

  —Carl Brookins

  “Shubin’s style of novel is a breakaway from the predictable... The books he writes are a genre of their own, explorations of sociopathy... Shubin, who has had many prior successes, has triumphed with this one, the pages of which the reader will scarf up like potato chips.”

  —G. Miki Hayden

  “Tight prose and a tense plot, smoothly told.”

  —Library Journal

  “The tension never lets up.”

  —Dorothy Salisbury Davis, MWA Grandmaster

  “Shubin’s terse prose lends a noirlike quality to this engaging suspense tale... A first-rate story, sharp dialogue, and a compelling lead character make this a standout.”

  —Booklist

  “A masterful job.”

  —ForeWord Magazine

  “Seymour Shubin has an enviable knack as a novelist, the ability to combine a philosophical plot with some of the finest action writing you’ll run across in American literature.”

  —Oklahoma City Oklahoman

  “[A] superb mystery.”

  —The Snooper

  “Shubin draws his characters with precision inside a tense, suspenseful plot that moves to an explosive finale. It’s a powerful story.”

  —Los Angeles Daily Breeze

  “Riveting suspense and intense human feeling. compelling and convincing.”

  —Greenwich Time & Times Mirror

  “Shubin drives home his point that only a superficial line exists between man and beast. He frightens you with his message and he tells it brilliantly.”

  —Cincinnati Enquirer

  “The horrifying air of authenticity... must be attributed entirely to the author’s skill. On turning the first page one is lost immediately in a nightmare world.”

  —Sunday London Times

  “A brilliant, poignant and terrible book. It is the story of a murder beside which the average American thriller reads like a fairy story.”

  —Montrose Review

  “When a first-class novelist equipped to the full with narrative and descriptive power, turns his attention to the plain, unvarnished presentation of a murder... the result can well be almost terrifying.”

  —Liverpool Daily Press

  “A storyteller with a terrific punch.”

  —Bethlehem PA Globe Times

  “Guaranteed to stimulate your sluggish corpuscles... Not recommended for insomnia.”

  —Salt Lake City Tribune

  The snow was beginning to come down even harder now but he could see that the sky ahead was almost a summer blue. He began looking on the weather more and more as the proper crazy setting for what he was doing. And the questions he’d been trying to suppress ever since he started this drive were coming back like hammer blows.

  What if I find out I did kill her? What then?

  He almost closed his eyes to the splattering snow and the sweeping wipers.

  But it can’t be!

  Then why are you going back there?

  To clear his head of it once and for all, he kept telling himself. To be free in a way he hadn’t been since that day.

  But then why did a part of him want to turn the car around?

  He was aware all at once of how slowly he’d begun to drive, as if to make this last hundred and fifty miles stretch on forever. And, even though reluctantly, he stepped a little harder on the gas...

  OTHER NOVELS

  BY SEYMOUR SHUBIN:

  ANYONE’S MY NAME

  MANTA

  WELLVILLE, USA

  THE CAPTAIN

  HOLY SECRETS

  VOICES

  NEVER QUITE DEAD

  REMEMBER ME ALWAYS

  FURY’S CHILDREN

  MY FACE AMONG STRANGERS

  THE GOOD AND THE DEAD

  A MATTER OF FEAR

  THE MAN FROM YESTERDAY

  WITNESS

  to MYSELF

  by Seymour Shubin

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-019)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: April 2006

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2006 by Seymour Shubin

  Cover painting copyright © 2006 by Larry Schwinger

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-376-2

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-764-7

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  For Talia Grace Levine

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter T
wenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter One

  I had no idea how tormented he was. None. And what torments me is wondering if I could have helped him. I mean, from the time he was a kid, when we were both kids.

  Alan and I were cousins, the only children of two sisters. We lived for quite a few years in the same neighborhood, in fact only four houses apart. And being five years older, I was like a big brother to him, more than just a cousin. He used to enjoy being in my company, following me around, which I took on as my role even though once in a while, like all little kids, he was a nuisance.

  Of course things changed as we grew older, as we followed separate careers, different interests. But we still called and saw each other now and then; and when I got married, he was my best man.

  So what torments me is that maybe — no, not maybe, surely — I could have helped him, starting when he was a kid, been a true big brother. And then, later on, surely there was a clue here and there to his troubles, all of which I missed not only despite our closeness but despite the books and many articles I have written on crime.

  I tell myself now that I should have done this, that, or whatever. But one of the things I’m not sure about is whether I would have advised him to make that trip to Cape Cod or just let things be.

  I do know from what he told me that for almost every mile of that trip he was torn apart by doubts.

  Turn back, he kept telling himself. Turn back, turn back.

  You don’t have to know if you killed her, he told himself. You’ve lived all these years, fifteen years, without knowing. And you’ve got a good life that you’re going to destroy, you’re only thirty, a lawyer, you have someone you love, and a new career, one where you can do so much good. You’ve never had it better. For God’s sake turn around!

  He told me that when it really hit him like this he was only about ten miles from home, had some three hundred more to go. But despite his pleas to himself he drove on, trying to assure himself that he could turn back at any point. And what’s more, even if he did go on it wasn’t as if he was going there to confess. And the point was, there might be nothing to confess. He really didn’t know if he’d killed her; hurt her, yes, he’d hurt her, but killed her? He was sure he hadn’t. He’d run from the scene in terror, falling, jumping up, running on, a kid in horror at himself, a fifteen-year-old kid who had never knowingly hurt anyone in his life, afraid at that moment that he’d killed her, but then gradually, back in his home and over the years that followed, sure he hadn’t.

  Except at those times when he wasn’t sure, and a flame would sweep through his whole body.

  It was winter, mid-February, but the highway under the bright sky was free of snow except on the shoulders and on the dark limbs of trees. And it was pretty much free of cars.

  He wasn’t even sure how he would find out. The answer lay in one of the towns on Cape Cod, South Minton. He had found out the name of the newspaper there, the Cape Cod Breeze, a daily, and had looked it up on his computer, trying to go back to July 8, 1989; but the paper’s Web site only had stories as far back as ’92. And he hadn’t seen anything about such a crime in the handful of other newspapers throughout the state he’d been able to find online. Nor had he seen it, on the several occasions he’d dared to look, on any of the “unsolved true crime” shows on television.

  So how did he expect to find out now? The newspaper office was one way, of course, and if not there, the public library, or maybe a paper in another town up there. But all of these options could be risky, might arouse suspicion, even though he would ask for papers starting way before that day and ending way after.

  He just had to know.

  He felt as if he couldn’t go on any longer with Anna, or even with his new work, if he didn’t know.

  His eyes kept checking the gas: It was getting low and he would have to stop soon. Only at that moment did something strike him, although of course he had Known it all along — that this was the same highway they had taken, his mother and father and him, in that motor home they’d rented.

  And he remembered the three of them even, yes, singing.

  Chapter Two

  Actually, it was completely out of character — both Alan and I agreed on this — for his father to rent a mobile home. His parents had moved out of Philadelphia and into the suburbs when Alan was eleven. They had also owned a summer house in the Pocono Mountains, about seventy miles away, so they used to spend most of their vacations there, sometimes with us. But then they sold it and his father came up with the idea of renting one of these mobile things for about a month, starting off by visiting a few East Coast beaches and then heading into Maine and up to Cape Cod. It was a large motor home, some thirty feet or so. My aunt was hesitant at first: He was sixty and had never driven one before except for a short practice run at the dealer’s. But as it turned out there was to be no problem with that; even she drove it a little. No, not with that.

  My uncle had been forty-five — and my aunt thirty-nine — when Alan was born, which I mention because their ages came to worry Alan as a small boy, mainly because they were much older than his friends’ parents. He had learned about death firsthand when our grandfather died, and at first it scared him that one day, without fail, he would be in a coffin. But then his Concern began to focus on them, that they would die long before him.

  My uncle was a lawyer, mostly in real estate law, and my aunt a stay-at-home mom. From what Alan used to tell me, he was sure he was going to be a lawyer too, though not in his father’s specialty — somehow it came to him that he would be a criminal lawyer. And the way he talked about it to me, it wouldn’t be about saving criminals but saving the innocent. But oh how that was to change.

  They were rich though not, except in my mind, super-rich. After leaving our neighborhood for the suburbs, they lived in an area of fairly large homes, ones with long circular driveways. Alan began going to private schools. The best friend he had as a small boy was a kid named Will Jansen; in fact, as he told me, he didn’t think he ever loved any friend more, though he was never to see him again after moving out of our neighborhood, except once, much later, on a television interview program. He remembered them doing so much together and talking about everything, except — strangely, though perhaps not — about what was happening to their changing bodies as they entered adolescence, about the strange new directions Alan found his boyish fantasies taking.

  His father — Alan didn’t even think of talking to him about sex, undoubtedly because his dad had never talked to him about the subject. Alan looked on him simply as a hardworking, brilliant man who lived for his mother and him. And his mother, in his mind, was asexual. In fact the only thing he remembered her ever saying to him that had any kind of sexual connotation was a remark she made one time when she looked up from the newspaper she was reading and, out of nowhere (though it probably had something to do with what she had been reading), said to him, “It’s important that you treat a girl like a flower. Like a flower.” And that was all; she went back to her reading, and it left Alan so uneasy, as though she’d said it to something dark inside him. Nor did I, his big-brother cousin, ever say anything to him; it was easier not to, and in a way, as I see it now, it was as if I was protecting him, the way I used to protect him, say, from crossing the street on a red light. And so when, late in grade school, a certain tall, ungainly half-idi
ot in special-ed, Henry, would come up to him and other kids in the schoolyard and grin with large teeth and make fast, long strokes of his clenched hand in the air, Alan had no idea what it meant. Until one day, alone in the gray silence of his house, he found out. It was the end of his childhood, and the start of a new phase of his life characterized by bewilderment and self-loathing.

  As I was to learn, Alan often envied me because my mother was smart-looking, “modern,” dated frequently between marriages and laughed loudly. And he couldn’t help envying me because I was allowed to do things he never could, like go to overnight camp or live with friends in Italy one summer when I was only twelve; and though I lived apart from my father it seemed in Alan’s eyes that I went to just about every kind of ballgame with him. But it was just to a few.

  Now I don’t want to give anyone the idea that Alan was some kind of creep as a kid. He was good in school, was never so much as scolded by a teacher, never lied that I knew about (his mother had an expression, “A liar and a thief are the same thing, they steal something from you”), was a decent athlete: fairly tall, skinny, he was on the soccer and tennis teams in high school. Unlike me, he didn’t smoke pot or, except for a few experiments, cigarettes; had friends, though none he felt he could really open up to about what was troubling him about sex; they all seemed so confident. By the time he was fifteen he hadn’t gone out on a one-to-one date but had been to some parties and church — Lutheran — dances, though he could never relax when he danced, was stiff and uncomfortable. He’d never kissed a girl, except when he was a kid at one of those spin-the-bottle things.