The Dead Student (20 page)

“Hey,” she said softly. “Where to today?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Then he added, “I’m not sure I’ll ever know.”

They walked. Side by side. They would have appeared to anyone to be a young couple deep in discussion, probably talking about some momentous decision, like renting an apartment together, or if this was the right time for one of them to meet the other’s parents. But a casual observer
would not have noticed that as close as they seemed pressed together, they did not touch.

Andy Candy thought Moth sounded defeated. He was glum, filled with a sudden pessimism. The energy that had characterized their first days together seemed to have fled.

“Tell me,” she said softly, using a delicate tone that a current, not former, lover would employ. “What is it?”

The sun was beating down on them, but Moth’s look was overcast. They were heading into a small park, trying to find some shade beneath trees. Children were playing on swing sets and jungle gyms in a nearby exercise area. They were loud, in that unrestrained way that children having fun have, and it only seemed to make Moth’s voice sound more discouraged than it already did.

“I’m stuck,” Moth said slowly.

She had the sense to know something else was coming and she kept quiet as they walked a few more strides. Moth kicked at a dead brown palm frond that had fallen and littered the sidewalk. Then they sat together on a small bench.

When he did speak, it was like listening to a tortured soliloquy by a new professor giving his first lecture on a subject he was uncertain about.

“When a historian looks at a murder, it’s either assessing politics—when that anarchist shot the archduke in Sarajevo and somehow managed to trigger the First World War—or it’s social, like when Robert Ford gunned down Jesse James from behind while James was hanging a picture in his home. There’s a clear-eyed, cold-blooded way of deconstructing all the factors, leading to a conclusion about the murder. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Algebra of death. Even if there are eleven thousand documents that get analyzed. But Uncle Ed’s killing, it’s all backward, although maybe that’s not the right word. I see the answer—he’s dead—but not the equation that results in that conclusion. And I don’t know where to look.”

“Yes we do,” Andy Candy said slowly. She thought she should take Moth’s hand and squeeze it, but she did not. “It’s in the past.”

“Yes. Easy to say. But where?”

“What makes sense?”

“Nothing makes sense. Everything makes sense.”

“Come on, Moth.”

He hesitated. “I don’t know where to look, or how to look.”

“Yes you do,” Andy Candy said. “We’re looking for hate. Big-time, out-of-control hate. The kind of hate that lasts for years.”
Will I have that hate?
she wondered suddenly.

“Not out of control,” Moth said. “Or sort of out of control, but out of control after years of planning, if that makes sense.” He stopped. He laughed a little. “I have to stop using that word,” he said.

“What word?”

“
Sense
.”

She smiled with him. She watched him lift his eyes and stare across the park toward the frolicking children. “I’ve been thinking about when and why I drink. It’s always moments like this, where I’m unsure what to do. If I had an assignment, a paper due, a presentation, you name it, no matter how tense or stressed, then I was always okay. It’s when I got, I don’t know, unsure about things. Then I found a drink. Or ten. Or more, because you stop counting pretty fast.”

Moth laughed, but not because anything was funny. “First filled with doubt, then filled with booze. Pretty simple, Andy, if you think about it. Uncle Ed used to tell me that there are many things people can handle in life, but uncertainty might be the hardest.”

Moth turned to Andy Candy.

“What about you, Andy,” he said slowly. “Are you unsure about what you’re doing?”

She was unsure about everything, but shook her head. “You mean helping you?”

“Yes.”

Andy Candy realized both
Yes
and
No
would be the same lie. “Moth,
there is nothing certain in my life right at this minute, except that maybe my mother’s dogs still love me. And probably she still loves me, although she’s leaving me pretty much alone right now. And my dad would still love me, but he’s dead. And so here I am. I’m still here.”

Moth nodded. “So where next?”

“Where can someone learn to hate you?”

Andy Candy thought right then about the frat boy.
Why couldn’t she have seen that smile for what it really was?
Aloud, she said, “Ed at college. Ed at medical school. Because we can’t see anyone in the present-day Ed’s life that would want to kill him except maybe his ex-wife, but she seems too tied up in Gucci to bother.”

Moth laughed. “True.” Again he paused. “Adams House,” he said. “Adams House at Harvard—that’s where he did his undergraduate work. He had two roommates. We should call them. But medical school …”

His voice trailed off, then regained strength. “I’ll have to think about that,” he said. Andy Candy stole a sideways glance at Moth. He was sitting straighter on the park bench than before and was twisting his right fist into his open left palm.

16

Susan Terry sat behind her desk tapping a pencil against a stack of files spread out in front of her. A gas station clerk shot, a pair of armed robberies, a domestic dispute homicide, and three rapes—more than enough to occupy her for weeks on end. She tossed the pencil down, watching it clatter off the desk and fall to the floor, where she left it. She stood up, went to the window, and looked out. She saw a breeze ripple palm fronds, looked up higher, eyes tracking a jumbo jet descending into Miami International Airport. She turned her gaze toward a nearby parking lot, where she hypnotically followed the route of a black Porsche making its way out to the highway. When the sports car disappeared she gripped the edge of the windowsill and began swearing under her breath—an abrupt torrential downpour of disconnected
god damn its, sonofabitches,
and
fuck fuck fucks
until she was almost out of breath.

She said out loud: “He’s got absolutely no right or reason to think the way he does.” Picturing Moth at Redeemer One made her increasingly angry. “Doesn’t he get it? Closed case. Suicide. We’re all sorry. Tough luck,
kid. Put some flowers on your fucking uncle’s grave and get on with life and sobriety.”

There is something dangerous in what he’s doing,
she insisted inwardly, but precisely what was so dangerous eluded her. Her experience with murder tended toward the explosive—the drug deal gone wrong, the husband or wife who suddenly decided they were fed up with being constantly nagged and coincidentally had a gun in their hand.

The dead uncle’s file was on top of some cabinets in a corner of the office. She had placed it on a cart that one of the secretaries rolled by every day,
files to be filed
, but for some reason had pulled it back and stuck it on top of all the homicides, robberies, and other sundry felonies crowding her schedule. Typically, hard copies of paperwork on closed cases were shredded, and electronic copies kept in some pile of bytes hidden in a computer.

For a moment, she imagined sending a homicide detective over to talk to Moth. A righteous
Come to Jesus,
one-sided, tough-edged conversation:

“Look, kid, stop fucking around with things you don’t understand. We were all over this case. And now it’s closed. Don’t make me come see you again. You getting what I’m saying, kid?”

She could do that, no problem. She also knew that this sort of minimally strong-arm tactic wouldn’t go over well at Redeemer One. And she ruefully acknowledged she needed that place as much as she needed anything in her life—because she didn’t have anything else in her life other than her job—even if she rarely spoke at the meetings, and tried to hide in the corners. She surprised herself by recognizing how much she needed to just listen.

“All right,” she said again, with a near-lecturing tone of voice to no one in the room. “No cops. Do your job, even though it sucks and this is a complete waste of time. Make yourself a hundred percent certain.”

She went over and retrieved the file and plopped down behind her desk.

Autopsy. Toxicology. Crime scene analysis.

All said the same thing.

She reread each detective’s interview report. Ex-wife. Live-in lover. Therapist. The detectives had also contacted everyone on Ed Warner’s
current patient roster. They were thorough enough to go back a few years, even speaking with some ex-patients. She herself had read through Ed Warner’s computer files and office visit notes, searching for any telltale sign that what was obvious wasn’t. There wasn’t even an abrupt termination—some patient that couldn’t be helped or failed to pay on time—and she matched everyone who was seeing or had seen Ed Warner with his carefully notated diagnoses. One upper-class neurosis after another: lots of angst; rampant depressions; some drug and alcohol abuse. But no signs of uncontrollable rage.

And absolutely no murder.

Susan Terry hunched over, looking through all the documentation, then patiently looking through it a second time.

With the last page, she leaned back, suddenly exhausted.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nada. Zilch.
Rien du tout.
”

She admonished herself: “An hour you could have spent doing something worthwhile.”

The papers were strewn about her desktop, so she began gathering them, sticking all back into an accordion-style folder with “Ed Warner—Suicide” and the date in black ink. The last item into the folder was the autopsy report. She was shoving it in, along with the rest, when she had a sudden idea.

“I wonder,” she said, speaking out loud again to no one except herself. “Did they … I bet they didn’t—Jesus …”

She removed the autopsy report and flipped through it for what had to be the millionth time. The report was a combination of entries—blanks filled in on a standardized form—alongside clipped, dictated narrative:
“Subject presents as a fifty-nine-year-old male in otherwise good condition …”

“Shit,” she blurted. What she was looking for was not there. “Shit, shit, shit.” Another torrent of obscenities clouded the room.

Simplest of tests.

Gunshot residue. GSR in prosecutor parlance.

A swab of the dead man’s hand. A quick chemical concoction. A conclusion: Yes. His hand displayed signs of a recently fired weapon.

Except they hadn’t done it.

Susan inwardly argued with herself.

Of course not. Why bother? The gun was lying on the floor right by his outstretched fingers. It was obvious. No need to work extra hard on something so clear-cut.

She stood up, paced around her desk twice, then sat down heavily.

Look,
she told herself
, it doesn’t mean anything. So they neglected one test, and not all that important a one, either. Big fuckin’ deal. Happens all the time. The preponderance of the evidence all points directly to one inescapable conclusion.

She suddenly had trouble convincing herself of this.

Susan Terry tried to make herself put the file back on the cabinet where it could wait for the secretary to take it in the morning, shred the paper, and electronically file each report away in some storage space where Susan would no longer have to think about it and it could grow whatever the modern electronic equivalent of moldy and forgotten is.

Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,
she inwardly repeated. She placed the file back on her desk.

“Someone who hated Ed back in college so much he would carry a homicidal grudge over decades? Not a chance. Larry, what do you think?”

“Ludicrous.”

Moth and Andy Candy had set up a conference call with Ed Warner’s two Harvard roommates. Frederick was an investment banker in New York and Larry was a professor of political science at Amherst College. Both claimed to be
busy men
but had agreed to speak out of respect for their dead college friend.

“But,” Moth persisted, “didn’t he have any conflicts, arguments, I don’t know …”

“Ed’s only problem stemmed from his own inner conflicts over who he was,” said the political scientist. This was a euphemism for homosexuality. “His friends all knew or suspected and frankly, even though the times were different then, didn’t much care.”

“I would concur,” said the investment banker. “Although it was clear that if there was some element of anger, you know, something that might cause a murder, that would have come from Ed’s strained relationship with his family. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. Lots of pressure to succeed and make a name for himself, that sort of distant but insistent and often crippling demands. At Harvard, that wasn’t uncommon. Saw it all the time. And, at our age then, it led to a fairly regular type of rebelliousness or a tumble into depression.”

He paused, then added. “Should have seen our hair. And the music we listened to. And the unusual substances we ingested.”

The voices on the telephone were tinny, but filled with the flush of memory.

“Ed was no different from the rest of us,” the political science professor said. “There were some undergraduates who really struggled with the pressures at Harvard. Some that dropped out, some that got strung out, some that took the saddest way out. Suicides and attempted suicides weren’t unfamiliar events. But Ed’s issues weren’t that much more profound than anyone else’s and nothing he did spilled over into some sort of grudge-type anger like you’re hunting for.”

There was some silence, while Moth tried to think of another question. He could not. Andy Candy could see the blank being drawn on Moth’s face, and so she thanked the two roommates and hung up.