The Dead Student (13 page)

“Yes. No. Close. Maybe,” Moth replied. “Long before our time.”

“But memorable,” she responded. “Stones. Beatles. The Who. Buffalo Springfield. Jimi Hendrix. All the stuff my mom and dad used to listen to. They used to dance in the kitchen …” Her voice trailed off and she
wanted to say,
And now she has to dance alone because he’s dead,
but she did not. Instead, she continued, “Now they’re just Muzak.”

The music distracted Moth. He was unsure how he would react when he saw his uncle’s longtime lover. He felt as if he’d completely let everyone down and he was about to be reminded of his inadequacies and failures. But he also didn’t know where else to begin his search.

The elevator made a swooshing sound as they reached their floor.

“Here we are,” Moth said. Except he knew it wasn’t where they needed to be. Andy had said to look where the police wouldn’t look—but the only places he could think to start were the same places the police had already considered.
Or trampled,
Moth decided.

“I’m pretty sure it was the Beatles,” Andy Candy said, stepping out. Her voice was close to fierce, although she had nothing obvious to be angry about. “ ‘Lady Madonna.’ Only screwed up completely with mushy strings and oboes and things.”

The door to Moth’s uncle’s apartment opened before they had a chance to knock. A slight man with sandy hair tinged with gray at the edges smiled at the two of them. But it wasn’t truly a smile of greeting as much as an upturn at the corners of the mouth that reflected more pain than joy.

“Hello, Teddy,” Moth said quietly.

“Ah, Moth,” the man answered. “It’s good to see you again. We missed you at the …”

He stopped there.

“This is Andrea,” Moth continued.

Teddy held out his hand. “The famous Andy Candy,” he said. “I’ve heard about you from Moth. Not much, but just enough, a few years back, and you are far more lovely than he ever let on. Moth, you should learn to be more descriptive.” He bowed slightly as he shook Andy Candy’s hand. “Come on in.” He gestured an entry. “Sorry for the mess.”

As they walked inside, they were met with a sheet of bright light. The apartment looked out over Biscayne Bay and Moth could see a huge, ungainly cruise ship slowly making its way down Government Cut like some
overweight tourist, lurching past the high-end, rich folks’ playground on Fisher Island. The pale blue of the bay seemed to blend seamlessly into the horizon. The high-rises on Miami Beach and the causeway out to Key Biscayne bracketed the water world. Fishing charters or pleasure boats cut paths through the glistening bay, leaving white foam trails that dissipated rapidly in the light chop of waves. The bright sunshine poured into the apartment through floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that led to a balcony. Moth lifted his hand to shade his eyes, almost as if someone had flashed a light in his face.

Teddy saw this.

“Yeah. Kind of drove us crazy. You desperately want the view, but you don’t want to be blinded every morning by that sun coming up in the east. Your uncle tried a bunch of different shades, I mean he must have called up a half-dozen different interior decorators. He got tired of having to re-cover the couches because they would fade like in minutes. And he had a beautiful Karel Apfel lithograph on the wall that got damaged by the sunlight. Odd, don’t you think? The thing that brings us here to Miami causes all sorts of unexpected problems. At least he didn’t have to go see a dermatologist and have skin cancers cut off his face and forearms, because for years he liked to take his coffee out onto the porch every morning before heading to work.”

Moth looked away from the view toward packing boxes half-filled with art from the walls, kitchen stuff, and books.

“Actually,
we
liked to take our morning coffee out there.” This was said with a slight quaver. “I can’t stay here any longer, Moth,” Teddy said. “Too hard. Too many memories.”

“Uncle Ed—” Moth began.

“I know what you’re going to say, Moth,” Teddy interrupted. “You don’t think he killed himself. I have trouble believing that as well. So, in a way, I’m with you, Moth. He was happy. Hell,
we
were happy. Especially in the last few years. His practice was great; I mean, he found his patients to be intriguing, interesting, and he was helping them, which is all he ever wanted. And he didn’t care who knew about me—which is a big deal for
shrinks, let me tell you. He was just so happy to be
out
, you know. We’d both known so many guys who couldn’t reconcile who they are with family, friends, their work … Those are the guys that drink themselves to death—which is what Ed was doing so many years ago—or drug themselves or shoot themselves. All the guys who get overwhelmed by a lie that becomes their life. Ed was at peace—that’s what he told me, when …”

He stopped.

“
When, when, when,
Moth. What a fucking lousy word.”

Teddy hesitated before continuing. “But then, Ed always had a mysteriousness about him, an inscrutability, as if there was something clicking and connecting behind his head and heart. I always loved that about him. And maybe that was what made him good at what he was.”

“Mystery?” Andy asked.

“It’s not uncommon for guys like us. Living unhappily for so long, hiding truths that should be obvious. Gives you a sense of depth, I think. Lots of self-flagellation. It’s sometimes worse than that. Torture, really.”

Teddy stopped to think for an instant, then said, “I always thought that was what we had in common and that’s what pushed both of us to drink. Hiding. Not being who you are. So, we got sober when we met and became who we really are. Armchair psychology, but that’s the way it was.”

Another pause.

“That wasn’t your story, was it, Moth?”

Andy Candy craned forward, waiting for the response.

“No,” Moth said. “I would get angry and drink. Or I would get sad and drink. I would do well and reward myself with a drink. Or I would fail, and punish myself with a drink. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether
I
hated me more or
others
hated me more, and so I would get drunk so I wouldn’t have to answer that question.”

“Ed said his brother put unreasonable …” Teddy started, then stopped.

Moth shook his head. “The trouble with binge drinking is that all you need is the simplest of excuses. Not the most complex. And that’s the problem. Psychologically speaking, of course. Same armchair you just mentioned.”

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.”