The Dead Student (47 page)

Moth looked over at the desk and the two pictures. He picked up the photo of Blair Munroe on the Massachusetts license. “I know what connects me to this man,” he said quietly.

He replaced the picture on the desk surface.

Taking the other picture in his hand, he looked at it for a moment.
Stephen Lewis. Angela Street, Key West.
“But what connects me to this person?” he asked.

Susan hesitated. “Just me, and what I’ve done,” she said in a low voice.

Moth held up both pictures. “And exactly what do you suppose connects this man to this man?”

Susan inhaled sharply. It was as if in that second, she could see a murder. She didn’t know whether Moth saw it as well. “Probably nothing, if he’s as smart as we think he is.”

Moth smiled.

“Goodbye, Susan,” he said. “I think you should go to Redeemer One tonight. Yes. Absolutely. You should make one hundred percent certain you are at Redeemer One tonight
.
Make sure you testify. Talk about every one of your troubles in detail and make everything you say memorable. You wouldn’t want anyone at that meeting to forget that you were there—in case anyone should ever ask them.”

45

A one-sided conversation:

“Don’t be rash.”

“You can fuck up your entire future.”

“You will get caught.”

“You think I can protect you? Think again. I won’t.”

“Murder isn’t a game, Timothy. It isn’t some sort of academic exercise. It’s real, it’s nasty, and it takes a whole lot more toughness than you have.”

“You think you can look that man in the eye and kill him? Ask yourself that question first. It might be easy for Hollywood movie stars in fake dramas, but in real life it’s not so damn simple.”

“You think you can pull a trigger?”

Pause. No reply. Continuing:

“Cops aren’t stupid, Timothy. And they have time on their side. No statute of limitations on homicide. And they have resources you wouldn’t imagine.”

More silence. Words that exploded in the still of the apartment seemed to have no impact.

“What makes you think that when I pick up the paper tomorrow and read about a murder in Key West I won’t go walking into the Major Crimes Division of the city police and say, ‘I know who did this …’ And even if it takes them a helluva time to piece it together, they will. Count on it. And if I decide to help them, it won’t take all that long. So, kill that man and enjoy your final forty-eight hours of freedom, Timothy. Spend that time picturing what you might have done with your life.

“They will be the fastest forty-eight hours you will ever experience, waiting for that knock on your door. And don’t try to run; it won’t do you any good. And I don’t care if you use all your uncle’s money to hire the best damn criminal defense attorney in Miami—you will go to prison. You know what happens to nice white boys doing time for murder? Use your imagination, Timothy, and after you figure the worst that can happen to you up at the state prison, multiply that by about a factor of ten, because that’s the reality.”

Another wait for a response that didn’t come.

“Please, Timothy. Don’t be stupid. You’re smart and well educated. You have a world of potential. Don’t toss it because of some silly notion of revenge.”

A smile. A shake of the head. His silence built up insistently, like a siren’s wail growing in the room. Susan allowed frustrated anger to slide into her voice, and finally she came up with the best possible argument:

“And you will take down Andy, and maybe me, too, even if I cooperate and testify against you. I’ll lose my job for sure this time, and probably my entire career. I might even be looking at jail time. But that isn’t anything compared to what will happen to Andy. Do you want to see her go to prison?”

Deep breath. Moth’s answer, simple, impossible: “No.”

More silence. Susan’s last, helpless question: “Well then?”

A lie: “I won’t let that happen. Goodbye, Susan. I will see you tomorrow at Redeemer One.”

One last effort, pivoting in a different direction: “Andy, please. Don’t let him do this.”

And Andy Candy’s immediate response: “I’ve never been any good at making Moth do anything. Good or bad. Once he makes up his mind, he’s as stubborn as a mule.”

A cliché, to be certain—but accurate.

Susan eyed the two of them. They suddenly seemed very young. “Well then, fuck it,” she said. She turned to leave, but at the door tried one last time: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Selfishly, she began to calculate her own exposure. It was significant.
Conspiracy. Accessory before the fact—that was certain. Accessory after the fact—that was equally possible.
A variety of criminal charges—ones she was accustomed to filing against the guilty—flooded her. She could see the entries in the criminal statutes, probably could even quote some of them verbatim if she were pressed. The lawyer within her wondered if she should quickly write up a warning and have the two of them sign it—some sort of statement that absolved her of any criminal responsibility. This was unfeasible, she thought, especially when Moth repeated, “Goodbye, Susan,” and held the door open for her.

She wanted to strike out, slap sense into him. Grab him by the shirt and give him a jolt of reality. She did not do this. Instead she exited, and as the door closed behind her, she felt more alone than she ever had before.

Moth took the driver’s license picture for Stephen Lewis of Angela Street in Key West and went to his computer. Whatever information he could unearth about this man was a few clicks away. His fingers hovered above the keyboard, but what he said was, “She’s right, you know.”

“Right about what?” Andy Candy responded, although she knew.

“All of it,” Moth said. “The risks. The dilemma. The reality. I shouldn’t go around fooling myself.” This was said without conviction.

He paused before adding, “And us. She was right about that. Andy, I can’t ask you for anything else. You need to leave now. Whatever happens, it has to be me, alone. Susan talked about potential … the future … not throwing it all away—pretty much every argument you would expect her to make. And every argument made much more sense than what I have in
mind. Christ, I don’t even know if I
can
do it. She was right about that, too.” He shook his head. “I just have to try.”

Andy Candy realized that good sense should absolutely dictate what she did next. She also realized it would not.

“Moth,” she said in a low voice, “I’m not leaving you now.” This, she knew, was both the best and worst thing she could have decided to do.
There are all sorts of rights that are wrong and wrongs that are right,
she thought,
and this is obviously one of them.
She did not know which category she meant.

“If I had a future,” Moth said slowly, “it was because Uncle Ed provided it for me. And we turn all this over to the cops—and the killer will just disappear again. Maybe he has another identity somewhere. Maybe he has ten. And sure enough, no matter how much pressure Susan brings, and how many FBI flyers go out, they won’t find him. People disappear in the USA all the time. It’s a big headline when some guy who’s been gone for ten, twenty, thirty years accidentally gets caught. Sixties radicals disappeared for years. How about that guy, the Boston mobster? His face was on every post office wall and FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list and it was still decades before anyone found him. And that was pretty much blind luck. This guy—our guy—doesn’t seem like the sort that allows for either luck or accidents in his life.”

Andy Candy wanted to be practical.

“He will kill us, Moth. I know it. Maybe not today or tomorrow—but someday. When he feels like it.” This, she knew, was a truism. Saying it out loud added a layer of panic onto her fear. “Jesus,” she said, but this wasn’t a prayer.

Moth nodded in agreement.

“So, is there a plan?” she asked. She thought for a moment,
Maybe we’ll be lucky and he won’t be in Key West.
Then she contradicted herself:
Maybe that would be
un
lucky.

“Yes,” he replied, as he turned to the computer to do some research. Then a qualification in drawled-out slang: “Kinda.”

46

Islamorada to Tavernier, then on to Long Key, Grassy Key, touching the Everglades, all the way down to Key West, the Overseas Highway meanders through close to seventeen hundred different islands. The view is spectacular: the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other—all glistening in sunlight, a hundred separate shades of blue waters. What Moth liked was the famous Seven Mile Bridge—which actually wasn’t 7 miles long, but just shy at 6.79. It carried a name that was deceptive, that seemed both true and false at the same time. It was
nearly
seven miles, so why not call it that?

Andy Candy drove. It was late in the afternoon, but the traffic wasn’t bad. She was cautious, not only because the highway that shifted from four lanes to two and cut through shopping malls and marinas is dangerous, but because if a Monroe County sheriff’s officer were to pull them over in a routine traffic stop, it could ruin everything.

In a backpack in the backseat they had some clothes that Moth had carefully selected, along with the fully loaded .357 Magnum. They had a
battered baseball hat, some sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed straw hat favored by old ladies afraid of the sun.

It wasn’t much of a kit for murder.

They might have appeared to be a young couple heading for a snorkeling trip, maybe parasailing, or a sunset cruise. They weren’t. What they didn’t look like was a pair of killers.

They stopped near Marathon Key. While Moth went into a liquor store, Andy Candy found a damp, muddy spot in a corner of the parking lot. She took out some of the clothes Moth had packed and proceeded to rub them in dust and dirt, beating them up as much as she could. She glanced around, making sure that no one saw what she was doing. She looked a little like some ancient impoverished crone doing the wash by hand—only in reverse. She wished there were some stink—dried sweat, urine, fecal matter, maybe skunk scent—that she could add to the mix.

When she looked up, she saw Moth approaching. He had a plain brown sack, and she heard two bottles clank together.

“Never thought I’d do that again,” he said. He tried to install confidence in his voice, but Andy thought it seemed shaky. She was unsure whether this was because of the liquor Moth held in his hands and everything it promised it might do to him—or because of the plan, which seemed to promise to do something else.

It hadn’t quite worked out the way he thought it would.

Student #5 poured himself a cold beer and squeezed a freshly sliced lime into it, trying to postpone the sensation that had crept over him that morning and persisted through the day: He was suddenly bored.

Sunshine. Tourists. The laid-back, island lifestyle. He wasn’t sure at all whether he fit. “Damn it,” he said to no one.

He took his beer, a half-eaten bag of chips, and sat in his well-appointed living room. It was dark inside—Key West, which honors the sun religiously, is designed so that there are deep shadows; it keeps things cooler in the oppressive summer months. Combined with the constant soft hum
of the central air-conditioning and the cool maroon Spanish tiles, it created a subtle quiet within his home.

For the first time in years, Student #5 actually felt alone. For so long, he had lived with the people lined up to be his victims. Now they were gone. It was like losing friends and companions. He felt the urge to open a window to the heat and street noise—although any sounds would be distant. Student #5 lived directly across from the Key West cemetery. The real estate agents’ standard joke:
Quiet neighbors
. One hundred thousand people buried yards from his front door—or so the estimates went; no one was certain how many actually rested there.

He stretched out on a Haitian cotton couch and pressed the beer glass to his forehead. He felt a twinge of anger.
Should have seen this coming. What sort of psychologist are you?

He frowned. Shifted in his seat. Tried to find a comfortable position, but was unable. Berated himself. “Where were you on the first day of basic shrink training?” he said out loud. “Absent without leave? Not paying attention? Did you think there was nothing left for you to learn?”

It was the simplest of emotional equations, he thought, and one he should have anticipated. The fantasies about what he would do with his life had merely been tinder to help obsessive fire take light. The real business of his life had been revenge—years of dedication, devotion to a single ideal, perfecting his craft. And now all of that was gone, along with all the intellectual stimulation and intensity of planning that had accompanied it.

He felt a little like the old white-haired geezer on the first day of a forced retirement, after decades of going in to the same office every day, sitting at the same desk, drinking the same cup of coffee, eating the same brown-bagged lunch, same time, same job, hour after hour, year after year.

“God damn it,” he said out loud.

For him, no
Thank You
plaque, no framed picture signed by everyone, no nice but cheap retirement watch. No clap on the back from his boss, no firm handshake from the young guy who would replace him at half the cost. No tears from the more emotional of his coworkers.

“Damn,” he repeated. The geezer in his mind’s eye would shoot himself. Pronto. This he knew. “Son of a bitch,” he said. He prided himself on being a cold-eyed realist about both himself and murder, but he was depressed. And lost.

The last few weeks had been filled with energy—first as he tormented The Nephew, The Girlfriend, and The Prosecutor. That had been flat-out fun. Challenging and amusing.

Then creating his exit from one of his lives—that too had been artistry. Not only had it set him free, but it had been an exercise in imagination. And it had worked—each piece fitting together like the shuffling of a deck of cards by a professional card shark.