The Dead Student (14 page)

“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 wait 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.

She put the car in gear.

There are some people,
Moth thought,
who sit behind a desk and create an impenetrable wall of authority and there are others for whom the desk-barrier is barely there and almost invisible.

The man across from them seemed to fit in the latter category. He was an athletic man, with thinning brown hair that fell across his forehead and poked up in back in a cowlick, making him seem younger than his fifty-plus years. He had the habit of constantly adjusting his glasses on the tip of his nose. He wore a neck strap around the spectacles, so occasionally the doctor dropped them to his chest completely, made a point, then lifted them again and replaced them haphazardly, often slightly askew.

“I’m sorry, Timothy, but I don’t know how much I can help you and Miss Martine in your inquiries. Patient-physician confidentiality and all that.”

“Which doesn’t survive a patient’s death,” Moth said.

“You sound like an attorney, Timothy. That is true. But that would also mean that you had placed a subpoena on my desk, which you have not. As opposed to merely arriving here to ask questions.”

Moth realized right then he should be careful.

He also realized he had no idea what being careful would mean. So he began with the question that he’d already asked twice that day.

“Do you know of anyone, did my uncle ever mention anyone, who might hold a grudge or some sort of long-term anger—you know what I’m driving at, Doctor—that finally boiled over?”

The psychiatrist paused before answering, in much the same way that Ed Warner would.

“No. I can think of no one. Certainly not anyone that Ed mentioned in our years of therapy.”

“You would recall if …”

“Yes. Any element of a conversation that implies a threat is one that we take very good notes on, both for the obvious reason—we want to be sure of safety—and also because how people respond to either real or perceived external dangers is a crucial element of any therapeutic situation. And not to mention that we just might have an ethical obligation to inform the police authorities.”

He smiled. “Sorry. I sound like I’m giving a lecture.”

The doctor shook his head. “Let me be simpler. No. Did I imagine Ed was ever in danger? No. His risky early behavior, the drinking and anonymous, unprotected sex—that might have created something, I don’t know what. But that ended some time ago. He was here merely to understand what he’d gone through, which was a lot, as you know.”

“Do you think he killed himself?” Andy blurted.

The psychiatrist shook his head. “I have not seen him in years. But when he completed therapy, there were no suicidal indications whatsoever. Of
course, as the police who came to speak with me so quickly pointed out, he would have been more than capable of concealing his emotions, even from me, although I don’t like to think so.”

This was
cover your ass
talk from the doctor, Moth thought.

The doctor paused again, then added:

“You knew him well, Timothy. What do you think?”

“No fucking way,” Moth replied.

The psychiatrist grinned.

“The police like to look at facts and evidence and what will fly under oath in a court of law. That’s where they routinely find their answers. In this office, and in your uncle’s, the investigation is far different. And for a historian, Timothy?”

“Facts are facts,” Moth replied, smiling. “But they slip and slide and change over years. History is a little like wet clay.”

The doctor laughed. “Very apt,” he said. “I believe so, too. But it is not so much that the facts change as much as it is our perception of them.”