As I watched him disappear into the kitchen, I felt puzzled but also hopeful and excited for reasons I preferred not to examine too closely.

Mrs. Chu set my lunch before me with a curious expression, but said only, “Enjoy.” I picked at my meal, occasionally glancing toward the cash register where Adam and his grandfather seemed to be going through stacks of old receipts. Once he looked up, met my eyes, and nodded. I nodded back and reluctantly turned my attention back to the Ryan case.

If, as I’d told Adam, I felt out of my depth on the case, it wasn’t because it was complex but because it seemed so simple and I was used to the complexity of criminal law. Those complexities arose not from the whodunit—more often than not, the evidence was such that the cops had my clients dead to rights—but why. Although motive was not formally an element of crime, it could be a powerful factor in aggravation or mitigation when the time came to argue moral, if not legal, responsibility for the act. Why someone broke the law could be the difference between conviction of a greater crime or a lesser one or could add to or take off years of a prison sentence. I was trained to seek out the why of my cases, but here, the why seemed both irrelevant and self-evident. While there was a death, there was no crime, and therefore no one’s motive to examine. As to why Bill Ryan died, the answer was a faulty gas line. Hence, Fleming’s curt wrap it up.

Probably, I was overthinking it, and yet, something bothered me about Bill Ryan’s death. As I put the reports into the case file and the case file into my briefcase, it occurred me that what was bothering me wasn’t so much the circumstances of the case as the victim. Bill Ryan: a thirty-something gay man, tossed out by his family, steeped in a culture hostile to his very existence who had, nonetheless, remained a basically decent human being—Bill Ryan had his troubles, but he was a good man, Mrs. Donohue had told me—and led a successful, productive life—only to die an untimely and pointless death. Who did that remind me of? Oh, right, me, and just about every gay man I knew, all of us standing at the brink of an epidemic. How many more untimely and pointless deaths lay in store for us? Would one of them be mine?