The Dead Student Read Free Page A

for a man so successful in his practice.
    He walked around the back and saw his uncle’s silver Porsche convertible parked in its designated slot.
    Moth did not know what to think. Patient? Emergency?
    He hesitated before going up to the small suite. He told himself that he could simply wait by the Porsche and sooner or later his uncle would emerge.
    Something important must have come up. That appointment he said was going to make him late at Redeemer One. Something far more serious than a new prescription for Zoloft. Maybe mania. Hallucinations. Loss of control. Death threats. Hospital. Something. He wanted to believe the story he’d told a few minutes earlier to his fellow Redeemer One regulars.
    Moth took the elevator up to the top floor. It creaked and jerked a bit on the fourth-floor landing. The building was silent. He guessed that none of the dozen other therapists in the building were working late. Few of them used secretaries—their clientele knew when to arrive and when to leave.
    His uncle’s top-floor office had a small, barely comfortable waiting room with out-of-date magazines in a rack. In an adjacent larger room, Uncle Ed had space for a desk, a chair, and an analyst’s couch, which he used much less frequently than he had a dozen years earlier.
    Moth quietly entered his uncle’s office and reached for the familiar small buzzer just by the door. There was a friendly handwritten sign taped above the buzzer for patients: Ring twice nice and loud to let me know you have arrived, and take a seat.
    That was what Moth intended to do. But his finger hesitated over the ringer when he saw the door to his uncle’s office ajar.
    He moved to the door.
    “Uncle Ed?” he said out loud.
    Then he pushed the door open.
    This is what Moth managed:
    He stopped himself from screaming.
    He tried to touch the body, but the blood and greasy viscous brain matter from a gaping head wound splattered over the desk and staining his uncle’s white shirt and colorful tie made him pull his hand back. Nor did he touch the small semiautomatic pistol dropped to the floor next to the outstretched right hand. His uncle’s fingers seemed frozen into a claw.
    He knew his uncle was dead, but he couldn’t say the word dead to himself.
    He called 911. Shakily.
    He listened to his high-pitched voice asking for help and giving his uncle’s office address, each word sounding like it was some stranger speaking.
    He looked around, trying to imprint everything in his memory, until all that he absorbed exhausted him. Nothing he saw explained anything to him.
    He slumped to the floor, waiting.
    He furiously held back tears when he gave the policemen who arrived within a few minutes a statement. Then he gave a second statement an hour later, repeating everything he had already said, to first-names-only Susan, the assistant state attorney in the blue suit whom he had seen at Redeemer One that evening. She did not mention that as she passed him her business card.
    He waited until the medical examiner’s half-hearse, half-ambulance arrived and he watched as two white-suited technicians loaded his uncle’s body into a black vinyl body bag, which they placed on a stretcher. This was routine for them, and they handled the body with a practiced nonchalance. He caught a single glance at the red-tinged hole in his uncle’s temple before the body was zipped away. He knew he was not likely to ever forget this.
    He replied “I don’t know” when a tired-sounding police detective asked him, “Why would your uncle kill himself?” And he had added, “He was happy. He was okay. His problems were all behind him. Like way behind him.”
    He had abruptly asked his own question of the detectives: “What do you mean he killed himself? He wouldn’t do that. Absolutely no way.” Despite his insistence, the detective seemed unmoved, and didn’t reply. Moth had looked around wildly, knowing something was telling him he was right.
    He turned down the assistant