The Dead Student (43 page)

Things were moving in slow motion, and she saw the policeman stir, as if he’d been able to fight off unconsciousness. She saw him push to his knees. This was an astonishing act of strength, she thought, because she knew she couldn’t do this. She wanted to close her eyes and give in to the heat and the rising noise echoing in her ears. Freight trains and jet engines.

When he crawled toward her, she had trouble deciphering what was happening. She knew she was in shock, but what that actually meant eluded
her. She choked on smoke, coughed, thought she could no longer breathe, and wondered whether she had screamed. She could see the policeman’s lips moving, and he was clearly shouting something important, but what it was seemed impossible to figure out, as if every word was in a different language.

And then she felt herself move.

This confused her, because she knew she hadn’t been able to give her arms, legs, body any directions. None of her muscles were responding to anything. She felt limp, rubbery, as if every tendon in her body had been severed by the force of the first explosion, and she imagined that perhaps she was already dead.

It took her a moment to realize that Moth had seized the back of her shirt and was tugging her toward the entranceway. The pain in her arm was suddenly violent, as if someone was pounding her relentlessly, hammering sharpened stakes into her skin, and she howled. The sudden hurt mingled with her cries, redoubling when Donnie the policeman grabbed her shoulder. Almost like a pair of lifeguards rescuing an exhausted swimmer caught in the waves, he and Moth dragged her toward safety. Susan could not see the doorway. All she could see were red and yellow flames racing like meteor showers across the trailer ceiling, a Jackson Pollock of fire.

Death,
she thought,
can be beautiful.

She had no understanding that in that instant her life was actually being saved.

40

One of the cops called him a hero, but he didn’t think that was true.
Fool
was probably closer to the truth, although when he had a second to think about it, Moth was unable to identify the exact moment when his foolishness began. It certainly preceded running into the burning trailer and helping to haul Donnie the policeman and Susan Terry out of the flames. Perhaps, he considered, it dated to when he’d gone to see Jeremy Hogan, but that didn’t seem right, either. For a moment, Moth decided that his journey into naïveté started when he had called Andy Candy, but neither was that completely correct.

He continued to work backward through all that had happened, and he decided it must have been triggered the moment when he found his uncle’s body and immediately fell so precipitously off the wagon. This idea made him shake his head, and finally he insisted to himself that everything had begun when he broke up with Andy Candy in high school so many years earlier. That was where his foolishness had taken root and flowered—although he noted ruefully that Uncle Ed the shrink would undoubtedly
have dated its start much earlier and blamed it on demanding, absent, and unwittingly cruel parents.

A young woman EMT with a pleasant smile and confident manner bandaged his hands and told him that even though they didn’t seem that bad, he should see a doctor promptly because burns were tricky.

He doubted he would do this, except that Andy Candy, standing beside him, said, “I’ll make sure he goes.”

“There might be some scarring,” the EMT said.

Of this, Moth was certain. But he was thinking of the sorts of scars that weren’t visible on the skin.
Ed’s kinds of scars.

Nearby, an ambulance siren started up. This vehicle held Donnie, who had been reluctant to leave the scene until ordered to by his sergeant. He had burns that would heal and smoke inhalation. Moth caught him sitting on the step to the ambulance sucking in oxygen through a mask and grinning as state troopers and his fellow local cops, EMTs, and volunteer firemen all took the time to clap him on the shoulder and tell him he’d done
goddamn
well.

Nothing,
Moth thought,
quite as delightful as being alive when you should be dead.
Susan Terry was already being transported to the ER—and then probably to surgery for her shattered arm, he realized.

Moth felt Andy put her arm loosely across his shoulders in a curiously possessive movement. He breathed in, and leaned back against the side of a patrol car. For an instant, he closed his eyes, wishing it were night and he could sleep, but it was midday and the sun was flooding the area. When he opened them, he saw three men approaching. One wore the white-brimmed helmet of a fire chief. The other was the Charlemont sergeant he’d met that morning. The third was a state trooper with a small plaque on his shirt above his name tag that read: “Homicide.”

“Mister Warner,” the trooper began slowly, “you feel up to answering a few questions?”

“Sure,” Moth said.

“You know there’s a dead body inside?”

The trooper gestured toward the smoldering shell of the trailer.

“No,” Moth said. “Who …”

“Probably Mister Munroe, the owner. But it will take the coroner and Forensics some time to make a real determination, assuming they even can. The body was burned pretty badly. And our officer says that the gunshot he heard came from inside the back room, where the fire apparently started, before all the propane and gasoline containers went up. I’ve never seen a homemade meth lab go up before. Makes a helluva mess. Anyway, that gunshot might have been a self-inflicted wound.”

“How would you know that?”

“We found a note in the guy’s truck. Autopsy will probably reveal twelve-gauge pellets.”

Moth nodded.
It’s over?
He didn’t believe it. It seemed far too simple. “Meth lab?” he asked.

The trooper ignored the question. “So, why are you here?” he asked. He looked over at Andy Candy. “So, why are
both
of you here?”

Questions. Answers. Doubts. Sworn statements. Lies and half-truths. There is a bureaucratic processing of violence that parallels the more familiar and drawn-out forensic analysis of a crime scene. It seems as if ubiquitous yellow tape marked “Police Crime Scene—Do Not Enter” encloses more than just space. It encircles a sorting through and categorizing, where what someone says is joined with what some scientist determines to create a portrait of what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. But within these pictures there are always gaps and blank spots; frequently there are mismatched colors and contradictory images. On occasion, a crime scene becomes an immense trompe l’oeil—where what seems to be something, isn’t—in which misdirection dominates.

“Hello, Stephen.”

Pause.

“Hiya, Steve.”

Hesitation. Sly smile.

“Hey, Steverino, how yah doin’?”

Not bad. Not bad at all. Thanks for asking.

Student #5 was staring at himself in a mirror above the sink in his small refurbished and remodeled house on Angela Street in Key West. The house was directly across from the cemetery—which was, at nine to eleven feet, one of the highest places in the town, affording nearby residents some modest sense of hurricane security. The house was what locals called “a cigar maker’s” home—back when it was built in the 1920s it had been occupied by Cuban refugees who had fled one of that island’s frequent upheavals, emigrated ninety miles, and perfected the art of rolling fine tobacco cigars for the Daddy Warbuckses of the state. The houses were small, single-story, narrow places, built out of the local pine that was relatively impervious to weather and termites and which had, over the decades, become wildly popular with well-heeled types looking to build vacation cottages. Their cost often exceeded seven figures—but Student #5 had astutely purchased his many years earlier and sunk money into metal roofing and central air-conditioning and granite kitchen countertops—so he knew he would double, triple his money were he to market it.

He had no intention of doing so.

He turned up the collar on his sport shirt and slipped on a pair of expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses. He wore shorts that were frayed around the edges and tattered old running shoes that had seen many better days. It would be moist and warm when he went out, and he knew he would be sticky with sweat by the time he’d traveled a single block.

“So, Stevie-boy, do you feel safe?”

“Now that you mention it, I do, indeed. Yes, I feel very safe.”

“I thought the little signs of backwoods drug manufacturing were very clever.”

“Me, too.”

“And that dead body …”

He was reminded of a line uttered by the character Winston Wolfe in
Pulp Fiction
:
“Nobody who will be missed.”

Student #5 believed he’d created a substantial number of conflicting
elements in his trailer. This would establish confusion—police would not know what sort of crime they were investigating. And, by the time they sorted any of it out—if they ever did—they would discover a ghost, a man that didn’t exist. And nothing linked the fictitious and now-dead Blair Munroe of Charlemont, Massachusetts, to retired drug dealing entrepreneur Stephen Lewis of Key West, Florida.

He had sort of hoped that the explosions at the trailer would take The Nephew, The Girlfriend, and The Prosecutor up along with Homeless Guy. He had been checking local news feeds, which still provided breathless accounts of the conflagration and reported the fact that there was at least one fatality—he knew that—and others hospitalized. So some doubt had crept in:
Too bad. Tough luck. Hurt but not dead.

That’s the trouble with using explosives. They make the requisite destruction, but they lack the necessary intimacy and certainty of a bullet.

It made no difference. He had drawn an ending. That it was the second ending he’d been forced to create was now only an irritation. He had vanished, and like a newborn, was looking at the world for the first time.

Well, if they did survive …

An inward smile.

Something to think about.

He glanced down at his watch. It would take him fifteen to twenty minutes to get out his rusty old one-speed bicycle—a preferred means of travel in Key West—and ride at a leisurely place down to the evening freak show at Mallory Square. The dramatic setting of the sun in the west was celebrated nightly by contortionists, fire-breathers, guitar players, and anyone else who figured they could make a buck off cruise ship tourists by doing something weird, like posing for pictures with an iguana perched on one shoulder and a boa constrictor wrapped around the other.

Like most Key West residents, he generally avoided this nightly ritual. A celebration of the kitsch and laissez faire that emblemized Key West: too many people jammed into a small area; traffic backed up on the side
streets. It was a moment of serenity expressed loudly. But this evening he was set to participate. It was the best spot Student #5 could think of to say goodbye to a nonexistent persona who had treated him well over many years.

Not unlike the sun setting—a huge, glowing ball of reds and yellows dropping into an expanse of shimmering blue void—Blair Munroe was disappearing.

He would have a drink. Toast the name. Then move on. Possibilities were endless. Choices were his. Horizons were clear.

Intense pain followed by a cloak of drugs to hide it. Looking up into a bright, unforgiving light. Counting backwards. Sleep. Awaken. More pain. A steady drip from an IV. Pain fading, like the volume on a stereo being turned down. Again sleep.

Then awakening to something that went beyond a mess and touched on felony. When Susan Terry emerged from her postoperative fog, she was glad to be alive. Maybe.

A nurse came into her hospital room, opened up some shades.

“What day is it?” Susan asked.

“Thursday morning. You came in on Tuesday.”

“Jesus.”

“Are you in pain?”

“I’m okay,” Susan replied. Clearly she was not.

“There are a lot of people who want to speak with you,” the nurse said. “There’s a line that starts with the state police. Then your boss back in Miami. And there’s this young couple that has been in at least a half-dozen times, but you’ve been out of it each time.”

Susan leaned back on the bed. There was a slight smell of disinfectant. She glanced over at the IV tube running into one arm. The other was encased in white wrappings. “What am I getting?” she asked.

“Demerol.”

Susan breathed in. “Great stuff,” she said. She gathered some inward strength and spat out: “But I can’t have it. I have an addiction problem.”

The nurse’s eyes opened wide. “I’ll get the attending,” she said. “Talk to him about it.”

What Susan suddenly wanted more than anything else was that drip. She wanted to luxuriate in the fog of morphine-based painkillers. She wanted to let it coax her into half-sleep and forgetfulness. She wanted it to keep all the people who wanted to talk to her at bay—maybe even prevent them from ever talking to her.

She also knew that it would kill her—probably more effectively than propane and gasoline tanks exploding in a homemade bomb could.

Susan gritted her teeth together. “Send in the attending, please,” she said. As soon as the nurse turned her back, Susan yanked the IV needle out of her arm. It was, she thought, the best she could manage right at that moment.

41

Of course, they weren’t completely believed.

In fact, they were barely believed at all. There were contradictions in their stories, aspects that raised questions instead of answering them, a few outright lies that created numerous doubts and suspicions, and, when they had each completed being interviewed, so many holes that it would have taken a grave digger with a backhoe hours to fill them all.