Mr. Peanut (10 page)

He picked up the phone and called Hannah, and after ten rings realized this was his chance. He was out the door in a flash, and even put his strobe on the top of his car as he raced downtown. He imagined himself storming into the apartment and surprising her—why had this never occurred to him?—but then he had another idea.

Their apartment was on West Ninth, but he parked on Eighth and entered the building directly behind his. He jimmied the lock downstairs and walked up one flight, did a little guesstimation about which apartment was the right one, knocked, then pressed the badge to the peephole. A nurse let him into the apartment. She was Jamaican, dressed in white, and was just serving lunch to an old man in a wheelchair. He wore blue pajamas and sat with his head hung between his shoulders, tortoiselike, his bald head, wrinkled neck, and mottled skin adding to his reptilian appearance, the puffed, crescent pillows beneath his eyes pulling down his lower lids so they seemed red-rimmed, as if he’d been crying. His chair faced toward the window that looked out onto the courtyard.

Hastroll walked over to stand beside him. He could see Hannah lying in bed, eating the lunch he’d prepared for her. A songbird was singing. For a moment, he wasn’t sure even of what day it was.

“Is there a problem, Detective?”

“That woman,” Hastroll said, pointing across the courtyard, “she might be in danger.”

“Oh, no,” the nurse said. “What kind?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” She clucked her tongue.

“Do you ever see her get up?” Hastroll asked. “Ever see her walk around?”

“Never,” she said. “She’s sick, I think.”

“You ever see anything suspicious?”

“No. All I see is her husband occasionally.”

“Notice anything strange about him?” Hastroll wondered if she might’ve recognized him, but it didn’t seem so.

She shook her head. “He brings her meals every day.”

“Do they seem like they love each other?” he asked.

This made the woman laugh.

“Oh come on, now, Detective, what kind of person could tell that from here?”

Detective Sheppard wanted a full report on the Pepin case.

Fastidious, arrogant, and hyperroutinized—put bluntly, a control freak—his partner gave Hastroll the creeps. Plus his voice was grating. It was high-pitched and nasal, incongruous for such a large, athletic-looking man. And when dealing with cases that involved the murder of a spouse, it made Hastroll doubly uncomfortable to talk specifics.

“Ward.”

“Sam.”

Hastroll sat across from Sheppard. Next to the man’s pipe caddy was a picture of his wife, Marilyn. If it happened that Hannah died, Hastroll wondered, would he still keep pictures of her around?

“Where are we?” Sheppard asked.

He told Sheppard about Pepin’s adulterous relationship with Georgine Darcy. He was looking into it further, but it now seemed the affair was over long before Alice’s death and had to be ruled out as a motive. He described the lab report from forensics analyzing the samples taken from under Pepin’s fingernails. There were traces of nutmeat under the nails on the ring and index fingers
only
, and the bite marks on the top and bottom of each
digit matched those of his wife, either corroborating the story that he’d tried to clear her airway or confirming that he’d shoved the nuts down her throat before she’d bitten down. She’d broken a tooth on Pepin’s finger, her right upper incisor, though the odontologists they’d consulted were at odds as to the cause: Dr. Wendell Corey thought the fracture was from blunt-force trauma—from a hand forced down the victim’s throat—while the other, Dr. Iphigenie Castiglioni, saw the wrenching force of the husband’s extricating his two fingers. Traces of salt and saliva on the palms of Alice’s hands supported the suicide claim; also, her fingerprints were on the plate itself while Pepin’s were absent. He told Sheppard that according to Alice’s psychiatrist, Dr. Fred Graham, she had a long history of depression, but during their last session four weeks before her death, she’d been happier and more stable than he’d ever seen her, which he’d attributed to her tremendous weight loss and concomitant gain in self-esteem, though she had, Hastroll noted, refilled her prescriptions afterward. Hastroll also reported that he was going over security tapes from cameras on the Henry Hudson Parkway, the West Side Highway, and the Museum of Natural History. He told Sheppard that the couple’s financials showed that in addition to their joint account, they’d secretly opened accounts in different banks, that both had rented personal PO addresses to which statements from their credit cards and checking accounts were sent, but that none of the charges on these cards seemed out of the ordinary. Alice had used hers to pay for therapy visits, medical co-pays, and prescriptions related to her diet, for workout clothes, a gym membership, and new clothing. Pepin, meanwhile, used his for costs related to his ongoing affair—hotels and gifts and the occasional sex toy. In short, the couple seemed like most married couples they’d investigated, perpetuating their relationship through games of low-grade deception, living a life of pure ambivalence, looking to all outside observers relatively happy. Pepin himself would realize no significant financial gain from his wife’s death—nor did he need it, he was such a successful game designer—so money had to be ruled out as a motive. Interestingly—Hastroll had discovered this after following up with Pepin’s next-door neighbors as well as the administration of Alice’s school—she’d just returned from a yearlong leave of absence from her job, during which she’d embarked on what appeared to be a nine-month trip around the world; she’d flown out of La Guardia on 13 September, bound for London, returning via Melbourne, Australia, on 13 June. She’d reconciled with her husband, living with him for two months, with indications of marital strife but nothing to suggest what had ultimately occurred.

What they had before them, Hastroll said, was one of those rare and horrible cases between husband and wife—an eruption of real or
emotional violence during a moment of terrible privacy—the evidence as mysterious and impenetrable as a wormhole, only the survivor knowing the truth. He didn’t look at Sheppard when he said this.

Still, there were two nagging clues. The first was the staged burglary, which Hastroll couldn’t make heads or tails of. Second: Pepin had received multiple calls on his cell phone over the period of weeks leading up to Alice’s death that Hastroll had traced to a pay phone in the Time Warner building off Columbus Circle. Pepin’s neighbor, Rand Harper, had witnessed the last call Pepin had received from this number—there was apparently a heated exchange—and the next day Alice was dead.

Sometimes, Hastroll found himself growing accustomed to this new arrangement with Hannah. It was like the perfect marriage, at least from a man’s point of view. He woke up in the mornings in his bed next to hers, usually a few minutes before she did, then went to the kitchen and made them coffee. Since her self-imposed sentence, she’d started taking milk and sugar in it, and over five months Hastroll had noticed the level of the white granules sink like sands through an hourglass and imagined all that sweetness flowing through his wife’s body. He’d bring her the mug and wait for her to sit up and arrange her pillows, just like she used to when she didn’t live in bed, and they’d lay in their separate beds and talk for a while, and after an unspecified amount of time that depended on his day ahead, he’d excuse himself to shower. And instead of the hustle and bustle of their mornings before Hannah’s domestic incarceration—vying for time on the toilet and space before the mirror to shave or pluck eyebrows—Hastroll had the shower to himself, could mess up the sink, beat off, if he felt like it, and take as long and satisfying a dump as he cared to. Before he left for the station, he’d kiss Hannah on the forehead, bring her some breakfast and a pitcher of water and a ham and cheese sandwich for later. Then he’d leave for work. And when he came home, there she’d be with the TV on, her sandwich eaten, the water pitcher half-empty, the plates on the floor, Hannah still in bed.

He grew accustomed. And in fact there were many good things about the arrangement. Even Hannah would admit she had odd rules about things, certain kinds of personal limits that for years Hastroll had unconsciously worked around. Hannah needed her sleep—eight solid hours—and she protected it fiercely, was in a bad, bad way if it was interfered with; if she stayed up too late the deprivation wrote a check that irritability cashed the next day. So he took advantage and went to late showings of first-run films; Hannah only liked weekend matinees and insisted on pictures that weren’t violent.
Now Hastroll saw
everything
and felt the satisfaction of having seen
all
the films on his list and a bevy of independents and even a few remastered classics to boot, so for the first time in his life he felt culturally up to speed. And if perchance at the bar of the Soho Grand, where he made it a habit to have a cocktail after these dates with himself, a lovely young woman happened to engage him in conversation (such as Irene Winston, the cocktail waitress there, who was herself a shapelier, sexier double of Hannah from before Hannah-in-bed), he would be able to speak her language, for movies were the lingua franca of the young. And if after their talk she offered to, say, take the place of his wife, letting him ravish her at least, or after some time together suggest that he maybe kill his wife in a way that would cause him no guilt (impossible, of course) and then start life all over again, he might consider that too … that is, if his feelings for other women weren’t so obviously entangled with his feelings for Hannah. Therefore his infidelities, imagined as opposed to real, were really a guilty brand of ménage à trois, sins of omission rather than commission, not to mention that Hastroll wouldn’t start this affair unless he knew for
sure
(via a written, preaffair guarantee) that this younger, sexier, and shapelier version of Hannah would never go to bed as Hannah had (also, of course, impossible). Besides, all this was irrelevant, since every one of these fantasies was predicated on his getting up the nerve to talk with the other Hannah first—which he never did.

He grew accustomed. Hannah, usually a very finicky eater, ate whatever he made her, even broccoli, which she loathed but he loved, as it was loaded with antioxidants. Ditto wheat germ, which she’d resisted putting on her yogurt or cereal in the past, despite his pointing out that it was full of folic acid and helped prevent deformities in infants, should they ever decide to have any. “Children?” Hannah had said. “Hah!” But now, like a good girl, she ate every last bite.

He grew accustomed. He had total control of the television when he came home. So if she might say, “Ward, could I have the remote, please?” and then, when he held it out, “I can’t reach it,” he’d shrug and keep watching the Tennis Channel.

He grew accustomed. He didn’t have to dust the baseboards or vacuum behind the sofa. If the spirit moved him, he could piss in the shower or with the toilet seat down, which he often did. He could load the dishwasher with a few plates and cups and run it anyway. He could mix colors with whites. He could buy a dog, a cat, a parrot, a parakeet, a fish. An aquarium with snakes. Gerbils, hamsters, or mice. Once he got bored with the rodents, he’d feed them to the snakes. And if he didn’t like the snakes, he’d let them go free and turn into giants in New York’s sewers. He could turn
their apartment into Noah’s ark. What the fuck was Hannah going to say? She was in bed, where what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. But he did nothing. He reveled
only
in his freedom. In bed, she was his sick sister/mother who’d taken the place of his wife.

He grew accustomed. In fact he enjoyed how routine their sex life had become. It was sex without expectation of mutuality, sex just for him; hooker sex. He liked to get into her bed after she’d been sleeping for a while. He liked it especially after she’d been drinking. While it was perverted—sick, in fact—when she was deep into REM, drunk on dreams and wine, he began to feel her breasts. She mumbled his name or, sometimes, someone else’s, and odd things rooted in memories and phantasmagoria. She moaned as he felt her up, though she might have moaned anyway. He took off his pajama bottoms and put her hand on Mr. Penis, which she stroked attentively, automatically, like an infant when a nipple’s placed in its mouth. He spread her legs, put his hands on her ass, stretched her wide—she was always perfectly wet—and humped his half-asleep wife to his satisfaction. And after he came, she sometimes continued to mumble her gibberish; other times, her dreams only briefly interrupted, she went right back to sleep as if nothing had happened. Occasionally she woke demanding more, to which he’d say, “Go to sleep,” and she would. Or she’d simply seem confused. “Did we have sex last night?” she asked the next morning, more than once. He’d either tell the truth and say yes or lie and say no, just to test if she’d been awake. And if he’d had a lot to drink too, he’d say he couldn’t remember either, which was often the truth as well.

He did what he wanted. If he needed time out of the apartment, he went down to the courtyard and tended to his roses. He kept a bed of them long and wide enough to bury a couple of people laid head to foot. It was therapeutic to fertilize, prune, and spray them and then be rewarded for his fidelity with such vivid color, such erect beauty. Sometimes, when he brought the cuttings up, he’d place a particularly beautiful flower on Hannah’s breakfast or dinner tray. But this of all things seemed to enrage her the most, and she’d throw the flower at him, cursing him with all her might—another thing he liked about the new arrangement. Because when she yelled at him her words somehow lost their sting—an invalid’s complaint, since she wouldn’t get up—and he’d simply turn, walk out of the room, and close the door.

He missed her when he was out in the world, true, remembering how she once took his hand or arm without asking, or slid up behind him and held him around his waist, or whispered in his ear things they might do
later, but now he always knew where she was, at home and in bed. Yet after the “I’m home” and the dinner making, the eating and the “How was it?,” the dishes, the trip to the freezer, and the sound of whiskey tinkling over the ice cubes, a longing sometimes came over him as he sat there in his favorite chair, a longing for Hannah that he didn’t completely understand, a longing not just for the woman he’d married but also for a time when the present didn’t press down on him, hunching his shoulders and tightening his back. A longing, he surmised, for youth, though it was more complex than that and involved a state of mind he could no longer remember—an Alzheimer’s longing, disorienting, ephemeral, irretrievable. The feeling, as when someone bumped into you in a packed subway car, was completely new, unexpected, and uniquely terrible.