The Dead Student Read online

  Teddy pushed a stray lock of hair out of his eyes.

  “More than ten years,” he said, turning to Andy Candy. “We met at a meeting. He got up, said he had one day, then I got up, said I had two dozen, and afterward we went out for coffee. Not very romantic, is it, Andy?”

  “No. It doesn’t sound that way.” She nodded. “But maybe it was.”

  Teddy laughed weakly. “Yes. You’re right. Maybe it was. By the end of the evening we weren’t two drunks nursing lukewarm lattes, we were laughing at ourselves.”

  She glanced at a wall. A large black-and-white photo of Ed and Teddy, arms casually tossed across each other’s shoulders, was the only thing remaining. There were other hooks, but what photos they held had been removed.

  Moth was fidgeting slightly, shuffling his feet. He was afraid his voice would crack, especially if he allowed himself to look around again and see his uncle’s life packed into boxes.

  “Where do I look, Teddy?” Moth asked.

  Teddy turned away. He rubbed his hand across his eyes.

  “I don’t know. But I don’t exactly want to know. Maybe I did at first. But not now.”

  This surprised Andy. “You don’t want …” she started, but Moth interrupted:

  “Tell me something I don’t know about Uncle Ed.”

  His voice was edgy and demanding.

  “That you don’t know?”

  “Tell me a secret. Something he hid from me. Tell me something different from what the cops asked. Tell me something that you don’t understand, but seemed odd. Out of place. I don’t know. Something outside the understandable, ordinary world that wants Ed’s death to be a nice, neat, sorry, too bad suicide.”

  Teddy looked away, out the doors and over the expanse of blue waters. “You want answers …” he started.

  “No. It’s not answers I’m looking for,” Moth said quietly. “If it was as simple as a single answer, it would be a question already asked. What I want is a push in some direction.”

  “What sort of direction?”

  Moth hesitated, but Andy Candy jumped in: “A direction of regret.”

  Teddy looked askance. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Uncle Ed made someone angry,” Moth said. “Angry enough to kill him and stage a suicide, which I don’t think is all that hard. But it will have to be someone from some life that we don’t expect, not the life we all knew Ed was leading now. Ed had to know—on some level, somewhere, that there was someone, somewhere, out there … ,” Moth pointed beyond the picture windows, “… gunning for him.”

  Teddy paused, and Moth added, “And why would he keep a gun in his desk and then use some other gun?”

  “I knew about that gun—the one he didn’t use.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was supposed to get rid of it. I don’t know why he didn’t. He said he would, took it with him one day like years ago, and then we never spoke about it again. I just assumed he’d dumped it or sold it or even just gave it up to the police or something until the cops that came here asked me about it. I think maybe he put it in that drawer and forgot about it.”

  Moth started to ask another question, then stopped.

  Teddy made a gesture with his lips, as if Moth’s words were hot and he could feel them. Teddy was a small man with a delicacy that made talking about murder seem alien. “If someone was angry at Ed, you will have to keep going back in time to before I met him and we got together.”

  Moth nodded.

  “I wanted to help, you know. I wanted to be able to tell the cops—look at this guy, look at that guy, find me the guy who killed Ed. Bring me his damn head on a platter. But I couldn’t find anyone.”

  “Do you think—” Moth started, but was interrupted.

  “We talked,” Teddy continued. “We talked all the time. Every night. Over the fake cocktails we would mix up for each other—lime juice and bubbly water on the rocks in a highball glass with a little paper umbrella stuck in it. We talked at dinner and in bed. I’ve racked my memory, trying to remember any moment he came home scared, uneasy, even feeling threatened. Not once. Not one moment where I said to him, ‘You should be careful …’ If he were afraid, he would have said something. I know it. We shared everything.”

  Another deep sigh and long pause.

  “We had no secrets, Moth. So I can’t tell you any.”

  “Shit,” Moth blurted out.

  “Sorry,” Teddy said.

  “So, before he met you?” Andy asked.

  “I would imagine so. That’s ten years.”

  “So, we can rule out the ten years you two were together, you think?” Andy persisted.

  Teddy nodded his head. “Yes. Correct. But it will be hard,” he said. “You will have to go over the hidden parts of Ed’s life and go back and back.”

  Moth nodded. “I’m a historian. I can do that.”

  This might have been bravado. Moth considered what a historian actually does. Documents. Firsthand accounts. Eyewitness statements. All the collected information that can be pored over in quiet.

  “Did he leave notebooks, letters, anything about his life?”

  “No. And the cops took his patient files. Assholes. They said they would return them, but …”

  “Shit,” Moth repeated.

  “Have you seen his will?”

  Moth shook his head.

  Teddy laughed, not with humor, but in understanding. “You’d think that your dad, Ed’s big brother, would have filled you in. Of course, he’s probably pissed.”

  “We don’t really talk.”

  “Ed didn’t speak much to him either. They were fifteen years apart in age. Your dad was the top gun. Your dad is the big tough he-man. Full-contact sports and full-contact business. Ed was the queer.” This notion made Teddy almost giggle.

  Moth heard the rapid description of his estranged father and thought, That’s true.

  “Anyway, Ed was the accident,” Teddy continued. “Conception, birth, and every day from then on, that’s what he liked to say. Proud.”

  Andy heard the word accident and imagined that it somehow should mean something to her. I had an accident except it wasn’t an accident, it was a clumsy, stupid mistake. I let myself get raped by some guy I didn’t even know at a party I shouldn’t have been at, but then I killed it. She turned away to regain the composure that had just slid away from her.

  Moth felt himself fill with questions, but he asked only one more. “What are you going to do now, Teddy?”

  “That’s easy, Moth. Try not to fall off the wagon. Even though I might want to.”

  He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a plastic container of pills, holding them up like a sommelier examining a wine bottle label. “Antabuse,” he said. “Nasty stuff. Nasty drug. It’ll make me sick, and I mean really sick, if I start to drink. Never tried it before. Ed was always into We have the strength to do this ourselves—you know that, Moth. But now Ed’s gone, goddamn it to hell.”

  Moth pictured his uncle, still alive, seated at his desk. Moth could see a gun in front of him, and he could see Ed reaching down to the drawer where the second gun was hidden. Makes no sense. He was going to say this but as he was about to, he saw tears in Teddy’s eyes. And Moth stopped himself.

  “Sorry, Moth,” Teddy said. His voice quivered, a tuning fork reverberating with loss and sadness. “Sorry,” he said a second time. “None of this is easy for me.”

  Andy Candy thought that was a significant understatement.

  “Go away, Moth. I don’t want to speak with you.”

  “Please, Cynthia. Just give me a minute. A couple of questions.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “This is my friend Andrea.”

  “Is she a drunk, too?”

  “No. She’s helping me out a little. She does the driving.”

  “Lost your license again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pathetic. Do you like being a drunk, Moth?”

  “Please,
Cynthia.”

  “Do you have even the vaguest idea how many people you’ve hurt, Moth?”

  “Yes. I do. Please.”

  Hesitation.

  “Five minutes, Moth. No more. Inside.”

  Andy Candy was slightly taken aback by the staccato hostility in Moth’s aunt’s voice. Every word seemed spoken with black charcoal and burning cinders. She trailed a little behind Moth, who was hurrying to keep pace with his aunt, who marched through the vestibule of the house with military determination.

  It was a three-story stucco home—rare enough in Miami—in a southern part of Dade County, surrounded by tall stately palms, manicured lawns, a bougainvillea-adorned walkway, and money. The flat white interior walls were crowded with Haitian art—large, wildly colorful representations of jam-packed markets, weather-beaten fishing boats, and floral designs, all with a homespun, rustic character to them. Andy knew they were valuable; folk art that was exploited in the high-end Miami art world. There were modern sculptures—carved dark woods, mostly free-form, in every corner. The corridors of the house shouted contradictions of creativity and rigid order. Everything was carefully in place, arranged precisely to look magazine-photograph beautiful, make a statement about elegance. Cynthia was dressed to blend in with the high style. She wore a loose-fitting, off-white, silken pair of slacks and matching blouse. Her Manolo Blahnik shoes made tapping sounds against the imported gray tile floors. Andy Candy thought the jewelry around Cynthia’s neck was worth more than her mother the piano instructor made in a year.

  Moth politely asked, “How is the art business, Cynthia?”

  Andy Candy thought the answer was obvious.

  Moth’s aunt didn’t even look back as she replied. “Quite good, despite the overall economy. But Moth, don’t waste your five minutes asking me about my business.”

  There was a man seated in the living room on an expensive white, handmade cotton couch. He stood up as they entered. He was a few years younger than Moth’s aunt, but equally stylish. He was dressed in a narrow, tight, shiny sharkskin gray suit, bright purple shirt, four buttons open to a hairless chest. He wore his long blond hair slicked tightly back. Andy Candy saw that the man had put white highlights in his hair, the way a fashion model might. Aunt Cynthia walked straight to his side, slid her arm under his, and eyed Moth and Andy Candy.

  “Moth, maybe you recall my business partner?”

  “No,” Moth answered, extending his hand, even though he did. He had met the man once before, and known instantly that he handled Aunt Cynthia’s business ledgers and sexual desires, probably with the same degree of extraordinarily cool passion and competence. Moth instantly pictured the two of them together in bed. How could they fuck without mussing their hair or disrupting their carefully applied makeup?

  “Martin is here in case some legal matter should arise in the next … ,” Cynthia looked down at the Rolex on her wrist, “… four remaining minutes.”

  “Legal?” blurted Andy Candy.

  Cynthia turned coldly toward her.

  “Perhaps he didn’t bother to inform you, but Moth’s uncle and I did not split up on the best of terms. Ed was a liar, a cheat, and despite his profession, a harsh, thoughtless man.”

  Andy started to reply, but then thought better of it.

  Cynthia did not offer a seat to either Moth or Andy Candy as she slumped into a modern leather chair that Andy thought looked more uncomfortable than standing. Martin moved behind her, and placed his hands on her shoulders, either to hold her in place or give her a back rub. Either, Andy imagined, was possible.

  “Okay,” Moth said. “I’m sorry you think that. Then I’ll get right to it …”

  “Please,” his aunt said with a small, dismissive hand gesture.

  “In the years that you and Uncle Ed were together, did you ever hear him say he felt threatened, or that someone might want to hurt him, or come seeking revenge of any kind …”

  “You mean other than me,” Cynthia said. She laughed, although it wasn’t funny.

  “Yes. Other than you.”

  “I was the one hurt. I was the one he cheated on. I was the one he walked out on. If there was anyone with a reason to shoot him …”

  She stopped. Then she shrugged, as if it meant nothing.

  “The answer to your question is: No.”

  “In all those years …”

  “Let me repeat myself: No.”

  “You mean,” Moth started, but she cut him off with another wave of her hand.

  “I suspected there were people that he met in his secret life—the one he tried to hide from me—that maybe, I don’t know, hated themselves or him or whatever and might have been capable of pulling a gun out and shooting themselves in some drunken bout of self-pity. And sometimes I imagined when he was drinking hard, and disappeared for a couple of days, that maybe something awful had happened to him. But it wasn’t likely that some other repressed and closeted gay man that he met in some bar somewhere decided to stalk him years later. Of course it’s possible …” she said, shrugging once again to indicate with body language and tone of voice that it wasn’t actually possible. “But I really doubt it. And no one ever tried to blackmail him, because that sort of payment would have come up in the forensic analysis of his finances that I had done when we were divorced. And he never came on to some psychotic killer, like in Looking for Mr. Goodbar—there’s a book you’ve probably never heard of but was very popular once upon a time—you know, tried to hustle some guy who decided instead of fucking him to kill him. I worried about that for a little bit. But not really.”

  “So, no one …”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Can you think of anyone …”

  “No.”

  “In his profession or socially …”

  “No.”

  She made another dismissive wave of the hand as if she could simply sweep any uncomfortable memory aside.

  “You probably misunderstand something, Moth,” she said briskly. “I have nothing against homosexuals—indeed, many of the people in my profession are gay. What angered me was that Ed lied year in, year out, every day we were together. He cheated. He made me feel as if I was worthless.”

  Andy Candy heard this and wondered how anyone could get something so right and so wrong at the very same instant.

  Moth paused. In that brief moment, Cynthia pushed herself up out of the lounge chair.

  “So, Moth, as interesting as this little retrospective of my ex-husband’s life might be”—Andy Candy recognized this statement for the noblesse oblige sort of lie it was—“I think I’ve just about answered all your questions, or at the very least all the questions I care to answer, so it is time for you to leave. I think I’ve already been more generous than I should have been.”

  Andy Candy shuffled her feet. She did not like Moth’s aunt, and told herself to keep her mouth shut, but was unable.

  “What about before?”

  “Before when?”

  “Before you two got together …”

  “He was a resident at the university hospital here. I was a doctoral candidate in art history. Mutual friends introduced us. We dated. He told me he loved me, but of course that wasn’t true. We married. He lied and cheated for many years. We divorced. I don’t recall us speaking much about our respective pasts, although if he thought there might be someone waiting around to kill him sometime in the distant future, he would have mentioned it.”

  Andy knew this too was a lie. It was a lie designed to chop the conversation with the efficacy of a butcher’s knife.

  “Well, who might know …”

  Cynthia stared at Andy Candy.

  “You want to play at amateur detective. You figure it out.”

  There was another moment of quiet before Andy Candy let slide, “It doesn’t sound like you ever loved him.”

  “What a stupid and childish statement,” Cynthia replied brusquely. “Do you know anything about love?”

  She did not w
ait for an answer, but pointed toward the front entranceway.

  Moth spoke quickly. “Cynthia, please. Did he ever say anything, like he was guilty about something, or something happened that troubled him, or anything that you thought was out of place or unusual or wrong? Please, Cynthia—you knew him well. Help me out here.”

  She hesitated.

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly brusque. “He was troubled by many things in his past, any of which might have killed him. That’s true for all of us.”

  She waved her hand dismissively.

  “One, two, three, four, five. Your time is up, Moth. And you too, miss whatever your name is. Martin will show you out. Please don’t call me again.”

  In the car, Andy was breathing heavily, each gasp ripped from the hot air as if she’d run a race or swum underwater for a great distance. She felt as if she’d been in a fight—or, at least, what she believed a fight would feel like. She almost started to check her arms for bruises and to move her jaw as if it had absorbed a punch. She glanced toward the front of the house and saw Martin the accountant love-slave standing dutifully in the doorway to make absolutely sure they departed promptly. She resisted the temptation to give him the finger. “I wanted to slug her the whole time,” she said. “I should have slugged her.”

  “Have you ever slugged anyone?”

  “No. But she would have made a good first.”

  Moth nodded, but seemed as if a pall had fallen over him. All he could think about was how hard and sad so many years had been for his uncle.

  Andy saw the cloud gathering over Moth.

  “One more stop today,” he said. “I wished we’d learned something by now.”

  Andy Candy hesitated before replying.

  “I’m not sure we didn’t,” she said, stringing negatives together into a positive. “I’ve got to think about it a little more, but it seems to me that she told us what we needed to know.”

  Moth nodded. He stiffened in his seat.

  “Bookends,” he said abruptly. “One person who loved him. One person who hated him. And then me, the person who idealized him.”

  “So,” Andy Candy said with a wry smile. “Now we go talk to the person who understood him.”

  Andy thought about what they’d just said. Love. Hate. Idealized. Understand. A few other words would fill out the portrait of Ed Warner that they needed.