The Dead Student Read online

  She shrugged a little. “Teenage memories. And that’s all, I figured.”

  “More than teenage,” he said. “Some were pretty adult.” He smiled.

  “Yes. I remember those, too,” she said. She added a small, disarming grin.

  “And now here we are,” he said.

  “Yes. Here we are.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “I bought a little food and something to drink,” Moth said. “How about we find one of the picnic tables and talk there.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  The first thing he said when they arrived at a shaded table was, “I’m sorry I was so, I don’t know, on the phone …”

  “You were scary. I almost didn’t come.”

  “Half a sandwich,” he said. “The fizzy drink is for you.”

  She half-laughed. “You remembered that. I don’t think I’ve had one of these since …” She stopped. She didn’t have to say when we were together for him to understand it. She pushed the sandwich toward him. “I had lunch already. You eat it. You look like you could use it.” Her tone had a tinge of toughness.

  He nodded, acknowledging the accuracy in her statement. “But you’re still beautiful. Even more beautiful than …” He stopped. He did not want to remind her of their breakup, although seeing him would do little else.

  She shrugged. “Don’t feel beautiful,” she said. “Just a little older.” Again, she smiled, before adding, “We’re both older now.”

  He took a bite from the sandwich and she continued to stare at him. He thought her look was a little like a funeral parlor director eyeing a newly arrived corpse for a suit of in the coffin clothes.

  “What happened to you, Moth?” Andy Candy asked.

  “You mean …”

  “Yeah. After we broke up.”

  “I went to college. Studied hard. Got really good grades. I graduated with high honors. Wouldn’t go to law school like my dad wanted. I got started on a graduate program in American History because I didn’t know what else to do. Kind of useless, I guess from his point of view—examining past events—even if it’s something I love doing …”

  He stopped. He knew his curriculum vitae wasn’t what she was asking about. “I got into trouble with alcohol,” he said quietly. “Lots of trouble. I’m what shrinks like my uncle call a binge drinker. Started as soon as I left home. It was like walking a tightrope. Step one: keep up the grades; Step two: get drunk; Step three: write an A paper. Step four: get very drunk—you get the idea.”

  “And now?” she asked.

  “That sort of trouble never leaves you,” he said. “But it was my uncle Ed who was seeing me through. Putting me in a better place.”

  Sometimes a single piercing look is as good as a question. That was what Andy Candy used to make Moth continue.

  “And he died. I found his body.”

  “He killed himself. That’s what you said, but—”

  He interrupted her. “That’s exactly what I don’t believe. Not for one fucking instant.”

  The sudden obscenity was like a window onto some anger that Andy Candy didn’t remember in him. She saw Moth look up into the pale blue sky before continuing.

  “It’s what I told you on the phone: He wouldn’t leave me alone. Partners. That’s what we were. We had an agreement. I don’t know, maybe you could call it an arrangement. A promise. It was convenient for both of us. He’d stay sober helping me. I’d stay sober helping him by letting him help me. It’s hard to understand unless you’re a drunk. I’m sorry that doesn’t make sense, but there it is.”

  He was a little embarrassed describing himself as a drunk, no matter how accurate. He looked over at Andy Candy. She was no longer the girl from high school who had taken his virginity in losing hers. The woman in front of him seemed like the work of an artist who had taken the few lines that sketched out a teenager and added color and shape to create a full portrait.

  Andy Candy nodded. She was struck by the notion that it was altogether possible that there was no one in her life she knew better than Moth, and no one who was more a stranger.

  “And now?” she asked. “Now you want to kill some mysterious someone?”

  Moth smiled. “It does sound ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

  Andy Candy didn’t have to reply to this question, either. She was not smiling.

  “But I’m going to.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a matter of honor,” Moth said, making a small Elizabethan sweeping gesture. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “That’s stupid,” Andy Candy said. “And overly romantic. You’re not a cop. You don’t know anything about killing.”

  “I’m a fast learner,” Moth replied.

  Again there was a little bit of silence. Moth rotated slightly so he could look out over the water.

  “I didn’t expect you to understand,” he said. What he wanted to say was, This is a debt and I’m going to repay it and I don’t trust anyone else—especially not some cop or the court system. He did not say this out loud; he thought he should, then told himself he shouldn’t.

  Andy Candy looked over to the same distant blue waves. “Yes you did,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.” She started to stand up. Get out of here. Leave right now! The voices shouting within her were like a schizophrenic’s unbidden commands: powerful, undeniable. Walk away right now. The Moth you loved once is gone.

  “Andy,” he said cautiously, “I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  Andy Candy lowered herself back onto the bench. She took a long sip of the sweet fizzy lemon-flavored drink.

  “Moth, why do you think I can help you?”

  “I don’t know. I just remembered …” He stopped there. She watched him turn to the water, then to the sky. She reached out her hand, then abruptly withdrew it. He must have seen the motion, because he pivoted back toward her and put his hand on top of hers. For an instant, she looked down at their hands. She could feel electric memory right through her skin. Then she pulled her hand out of his.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, quietly, almost a whisper.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …”

  “I don’t want anyone to touch me ever again,” she said. These words spilled from her lips, half-despairing, half-angry. She was suddenly afraid that she would start crying and that everything that had happened to her would burst to the surface. She could see Moth trying to comprehend what she was saying.

  “I shouldn’t have anything to do with you,” she added. The words were harsh, but they softened as she spoke them. “You broke my heart.”

  Moth shook his head. “I broke my own heart, too. I was stupid, Andy. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want an apology,” she said. She inhaled sharply and slid into an organized, officious tone. “This is clearly, unequivocally a mistake. You hearing me, Moth? A mistake. But what is it you want me to do?”

  “I lost my license. Can you drive me a couple of places?”

  “Yes. I could do that.”

  “Come with me while I talk to a couple of people?”

  “Yes. If that’s all.”

  “No,” he said slowly, “there’s one other thing.”

  “Okay. What?”

  “The minute you think I’m completely crazy, tell me. Then walk away forever.”

  This was the only thing he knew he had to say to her and the only thing he’d practiced on the bus ride over to the park.

  She paused. A part of her insisted, Say that right now—get up and leave and don’t look back. Andy Candy felt like she was sliding down a steep shale rock slope, losing control. She looked at Moth and thought she should do this for him because once she had loved him with fervent teenage intensity and helping him now would be the only way to truly end all the leftover feelings that had lodged within her.

  “Finish your sandwich,” she said.

  4

  Eat the gun, she thought.

  Not without perm
ission.

  Hell, you don’t need anyone else to make that decision, no matter what the rules might be. Just eat the gun.

  Susan Terry looked across the table at the public defender, who was seated next to his client, a lanky, scared-looking, seventeen-year-old inner-city man-kid who had been caught with a pound of marijuana in his knapsack on his way to classes in his senior year of high school. Beneath the pound of grass was a cheap .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, of the sort that once upon a time had been called a Saturday Night Special, a phrase now in disuse because in Miami, like every other American city, every night could be a Saturday night.

  The public defender was a former nice-guy classmate from law school who had simply landed on the opposite side of the criminal justice assembly line. A decade ago, they had shared a successful moot court argument together, as well as some blow, and Susan knew he was now overworked and overwhelmed. If she were going to cut anyone a break, it would be him. And in Miami, a pound of weed really wasn’t a substantial amount, especially in a city that in its heyday had seen tons of cocaine seized.

  For a moment, she paused, her eyes scanning the arrest documents and initial court pleadings, while her ears absorbed and ignored the near-constant cacophony of angry voices and slamming metal barriers that filled the county jail. A constant music of despair.

  The kid had been riding a bicycle. The arresting cop’s lame explanation for stopping him and searching him was that he was steering the bike “erratically.” That, she thought, could accurately describe any teenager riding a bicycle. It might hold up in court. It might not.

  And the cop had made another mistake: He had pulled the kid over a block outside the “drug-free” designation of the school district. Twenty-five more yards and the kid would be destined for the state penitentiary no matter how much legal flexibility Susan Terry might have mustered.

  More likely, she thought, the cop spotted the backpack and had a bad feeling about it and didn’t want to wait. And it turned out he was pretty much right.

  She and her former classmate both knew this. In her head she was preparing a legal-search-and-seizure argument, just as she knew he was.

  The kid had a good record at school. A community college future. Maybe the state university if he just pulled up his grades in math and continued on the basketball team. He had a part-time job flipping burgers at McDonald’s and an intact family—father, mother, grandmother all living at home with him. And, most important, he had no prior arrest record—an astonishing detail growing up in the middle of Liberty City.

  But the gun—that was a real problem. And why was he taking it to school?

  Eat it, she told herself again. The kid’s got a chance.

  Eating the gun was prosecutor slang for dropping the mandatory minimum three-year sentence in Florida for anyone who used a gun in the commission of a felony. The prosecutor’s office used the requisite prison term as a cudgel to force guilty pleas, dropping this part of the charge sheet at the last possible legal minute.

  The phrase meant something very different to clinically depressed police officers and PTSD-suffering Iraq War veterans.

  “Sue, give us a break here,” the public defender said. “Look at the kid’s record. It’s real good …” She knew that her onetime classmate didn’t get many clients with actual “good” records, and he would be eager—no, probably desperate—to find a positive outcome. “… And I don’t know about that cop’s search. I can make a pretty strong case that it was a violation of my client’s rights. But anyway, he goes away now, and he’ll be right back here in four years. You know what will happen in prison. They’ll teach him how to be a real criminal, and you know what he’ll do next will be something a helluva lot worse than a half-key of low-grade dope that really ought to plead down to a misdemeanor.”

  Susan Terry ignored the public defender and stared at the teenager.

  “Why’d you have the gun?” she demanded.

  The teenager stole a sideways glance at his lawyer, who nodded to him, and whispered, “This is all off the record. You can tell her.”

  “I was scared,” he said.

  This made partial sense to Susan. Anyone who had ever driven through Liberty City after dark knew there was much to be frightened of.

  “Go on,” the public defender said. “Tell her.”

  The teenager launched into a halting story: street gangs, carrying the marijuana—one time only—for the thugs down the block so they would leave him and his little sister alone. The backpack and the gun were for the person who was supposed to move the grass.

  She wasn’t sure she believed it. There were some truths, maybe, she was sure. But in its entirety? Not damn likely.

  “You got names?”

  “I give you names, they’re going to kill me.”

  Susan shrugged. Not my problem, she thought. “So what? Tell you what: You talk to your lawyer. Listen to what he tells you, because he’s the only thing standing between you and the complete ruin of your life. I’m going to call in a detective from the urban narcotics task force. When he gets here—I’m guessing maybe about fifteen minutes—you get to make your decision. Give up all the names of the motherfuckers on your block dealing drugs and you get to walk out of here. Gun or no gun. Keep your mouth shut, and it’s see yah later, ’cause you’re going to prison. And whatever your momma was hoping you’d grow up to be simply ain’t going to happen. That’s what’s on the table in front of you right now.”

  Susan slid effortlessly into tough-girl edginess as she spoke. She particularly liked using the word motherfucker because it generally shocked defendants when it fell from the lips of someone so attractive.

  The teenager squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. The basic, routine, day-to-day inner-city existential dilemma, she thought. Fucked one way. Or fucked the other.

  Her classmate absolutely knew what her little hyper-harsh performance meant. He had his own variations on the same stage that he used from time to time. He clasped his arm around his client in a friendly, reassuring I’m the only person in the entire world you can trust grip, but at the same time he said to Susan, “Call your detective.”

  Susan pushed away from the table. “Will do,” she said. She smiled. Snake smile. “Call me later,” she told the lawyer. “I have an appointment right now I don’t want to be late for.”

  Andy Candy thought, What am I doing here? She wanted to say this out loud—maybe even scream it, high-pitched and near-panicked—but kept her mouth shut. She was seated beside Moth in the security area outside the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. He was bent forward at the waist with his hands on his knees, drumming his fingers nervously against his faded khaki pants.

  Moth had said little in the drive over to the state attorney’s office, a modern, fortress-like edifice adjacent to the Metro Miami-Dade Justice Building, a sturdy, nine-floor courthouse that was no longer modern but was too young to be antique and had many of the same qualities as a factory slaughterhouse—an endless supply of crimes and criminals on a conveyor belt. They had passed through wide doors and metal detectors, ridden escalators and finally arrived at the security area, where they waited. The comings and goings of lawyers, detectives, and court personnel kept up a steady buzzing, as sheriff’s officers behind bulletproof glass hit the electric entrance system. Most of the people arriving and departing seemed familiar with the process, and almost all seemed in an I can’t wait hurry, as if guilt or innocence had a timing clock attached.

  Both Andy Candy and Moth straightened up when a burly thick-necked guard with a holstered 9mm pistol called his name out. They produced identification.

  The cop gestured at Andy Candy. “She’s not on my list here,” he said. “She a witness?”

  “Yes. Assistant State Attorney Terry wasn’t aware that I would be able to bring her along,” Moth lied.

  The guard shrugged. He wrote down all of Andy Candy’s information—height, weight, eye color, hair color, date of birth, address, phone, Social Security n
umber, driver’s license number—searched her pocketbook thoroughly, then once again made the two of them walk through a metal detector.

  A secretary met them on the other side. “Follow me,” she said briskly, stating the obvious. She led them through a warren of desks filling a large central area. The prosecutors’ offices surrounded the desks. There were small name placards by each door.

  They each spotted “S. Terry, Major Crimes” at the same time.

  “She’s waiting,” the secretary said. “Go on in.”

  Susan looked up from behind a cheap gray steel desk cluttered with thick files and a nearly-out-of-date desktop computer. Behind her, next to a window, was a whiteboard with lists of evidence and witnesses arrayed beneath a case number written in red. On another wall there was a large calendar, updated with mandatory hearings and other court appearances underscored. A single window, which overlooked the county jail, let in a weak shaft of light. There was little in the way of decoration other than a few black-framed diplomas and a half-dozen mounted newspaper articles. Three of them were illustrated with Susan’s black-and-white picture. It was an austere place, dedicated to a single purpose: making the justice system work.

  “Hello, Timothy,” Susan said.

  “Susan,” Moth replied.

  “Who is your friend?”

  Andy Candy stepped forward. “Andrea Martine,” she said, shaking the prosecutor’s hand.

  “And why are you here?”

  “I needed some help,” Moth answered for her. “Andy is an old friend, and I hoped she could give me some perspective.”

  This, Susan immediately realized, was probably not precisely true, nor completely untrue. She didn’t think she needed to care. She fully expected a short, somewhat sad, somewhat difficult conversation, and then her involvement in the uncle’s death would be over. She gestured the couple into chairs in front of the desk.

  “I’m sorry about this,” she said. She reached down and produced a brown accordion file. “I was on duty the night your uncle died. It’s office policy that whenever feasible, an assistant state attorney be called to possible homicide scenes. This helps with the legal basis for chains of evidence. In your uncle’s case, however, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t a homicide from the get-go. Here,” she said, pushing the file toward Moth. “Read for yourself.”