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.