And absolutely no murder.
Susan Terry hunched over, looking through all the documentation, then patiently looking through it a second time.
With the last page, she leaned back, suddenly exhausted.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nada. Zilch. Rien du tout.”
She admonished herself: “An hour you could have spent doing something worthwhile.”
The papers were strewn about her desktop, so she began gathering them, sticking all back into an accordion-style folder with “Ed Warner-Suicide” and the date in black ink. The last item into the folder was the autopsy report. She was shoving it in, along with the rest, when she had a sudden idea.
“I wonder,” she said, speaking out loud again to no one except herself. “Did they… I bet they didn’t-Jesus…”
She removed the autopsy report and flipped through it for what had to be the millionth time. The report was a combination of entries-blanks filled in on a standardized form-alongside clipped, dictated narrative: “Subject presents as a fifty-nine-year-old male in otherwise good condition…”
“Shit,” she blurted. What she was looking for was not there. “Shit, shit, shit.” Another torrent of obscenities clouded the room.
Simplest of tests.
Gunshot residue. GSR in prosecutor parlance.
A swab of the dead man’s hand. A quick chemical concoction. A conclusion: Yes. His hand displayed signs of a recently fired weapon.
Except they hadn’t done it.
Susan inwardly argued with herself.
Of course not. Why bother? The gun was lying on the floor right by his outstretched fingers. It was obvious. No need to work extra hard on something so clear-cut.
She stood up, paced around her desk twice, then sat down heavily.
Look, she told herself, it doesn’t mean anything. So they neglected one test, and not all that important a one, either. Big fuckin’ deal. Happens all the time. The preponderance of the evidence all points directly to one inescapable conclusion.
She suddenly had trouble convincing herself of this.
Susan Terry tried to make herself put the file back on the cabinet where it could wait for the secretary to take it in the morning, shred the paper, and electronically file each report away in some storage space where Susan would no longer have to think about it and it could grow whatever the modern electronic equivalent of moldy and forgotten is.
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, she inwardly repeated. She placed the file back on her desk.
“Someone who hated Ed back in college so much he would carry a homicidal grudge over decades? Not a chance. Larry, what do you think?”
“Ludicrous.”
Moth and Andy Candy had set up a conference call with Ed Warner’s two Harvard roommates. Frederick was an investment banker in New York and Larry was a professor of political science at Amherst College. Both claimed to be busy men but had agreed to speak out of respect for their dead college friend.
“But,” Moth persisted, “didn’t he have any conflicts, arguments, I don’t know…”
“Ed’s only problem stemmed from his own inner conflicts over who he was,” said the political scientist. This was a euphemism for homosexuality. “His friends all knew or suspected and frankly, even though the times were different then, didn’t much care.”
“I would concur,” said the investment banker. “Although it was clear that if there was some element of anger, you know, something that might cause a murder, that would have come from Ed’s strained relationship with his family. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. Lots of pressure to succeed and make a name for himself, that sort of distant but insistent and often crippling demands. At Harvard, that wasn’t uncommon. Saw it all the time. And, at our age then, it led to a fairly regular type of rebelliousness or a tumble into depression.”
He paused, then added. “Should have seen our hair. And the music we listened to. And the unusual substances we ingested.”
The voices on the telephone were tinny, but filled with the flush of memory.
“Ed was no different from the rest of us,” the political science professor said. “There were some undergraduates who really struggled with the pressures at Harvard. Some that dropped out, some that got strung out, some that took the saddest way out. Suicides and attempted suicides weren’t unfamiliar events. But Ed’s issues weren’t that much more profound than anyone else’s and nothing he did spilled over into some sort of grudge-type anger like you’re hunting for.”
There was some silence, while Moth tried to think of another question. He could not. Andy Candy could see the blank being drawn on Moth’s face, and so she thanked the two roommates and hung up.
Can you wear discouragement like a suit of clothes? she wondered, because she could see it written all over Moth’s face. Another dead end.
The abrupt thought arrived within her unbidden: Don’t let him give up. It will kill him.
So before Moth could say anything, she said, “Okay, on to medical school. That makes more sense to me anyway.”
Moth used an efficient lie.
My uncle has passed away and I’m trying to reach out to his classmates at medical school to let them know about his death and possibly help contribute to an educational fund at the university, which he was eager to establish. It’s in his will.
Andy Candy duplicated this falsehood at the Miami hospital where Ed Warner had done his residency in psychiatry.
The dual calls resulted in a helpful list provided by an alumni office secretary of 127 names, along with e-mail addresses and some medical practice websites. Ed had subsequently joined a group of first-year psychiatry residents in Miami.
The two sat next to each other in a study carrel in the main library at Moth’s graduate school. They each had a laptop computer open and easy Internet access.
“Lots of names,” Andy Candy whispered. There were other students working nearby, and anything spoken was hushed. She grabbed a piece of scrap paper and wrote down: surgeons, internal medicine, radiologists-killers?
Moth took his pen and drew a line through each subspecialty and then wrote only shrinks. He understood this actually made no sense, from the historian’s perspective. A proper assessment of any era precludes no factors, and he guessed that an orthopedic surgeon could be a killer as readily as a dermatologist. But it made the most sense to focus on Ed’s profession. A good historian, he thought, starts close and works outward.
He wrote: Match Day.
Andy Candy nodded. The medical school had provided a list of where each graduate had been matched for their residencies. Ed’s name was near the end with the abbreviation psych following it. She went back, listed thirteen other names that were designated the same way and the hospitals they were sent to train at. Ed was the only newly minted doctor to be sent to Miami.
She took six. He took seven. They started a Google search on each name. Odd bits of information came up-practices, awards, fellowships, a driving-under-the-influence arrest, a divorce that landed in court.