Mr. Peanut (4 page)

“Did you go to work this morning?” Sheppard asked.

“I was going to, but then I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see my wife. I had a surprise for her.”

“And what was that?”

“A present for her birthday,” Pepin said. “I’d bought us a trip.”

“To where?”

“Australia.”

Sheppard raised his eyebrows. “How long were you going away for?”

“Indefinitely.”

“You mean weeks? Months?”

Pepin shrugged. “I mean we didn’t have a return date.”

It took all of Sheppard’s willpower at this revelation not to turn around and stare at the one-way glass. “And had you been planning this for a while?”

“No,” Pepin said, “not exactly.”

“Well, yes or no?”

“We’d talked about it last year. Alice mentioned that she’d always wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef. But I hadn’t planned it or anything.
We
hadn’t.”

“So it was a spur of the moment sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

“That’s quite a trip for the spur of the moment.”

Pepin shrugged.

“It’s not even really a trip,” Sheppard said. “It’s more like a permanent vacation.”

“We didn’t talk about it like that.”

“When did you buy the tickets?”

Pepin sat back, looking away sheepishly. “This morning.”

For the first time since they’d talked, Sheppard’s gut tingled. “And when was Alice’s birthday?”

“Next week.”

“But you had to give her the gift today?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t contain yourself? Couldn’t wait until she got home?”

“No.”

Sheppard considered this. “When were you leaving?”

“Tonight.”

Sheppard nodded. He picked up his pencil and tapped it against the table. He could feel his pipe in his jacket pocket and desperately wanted to smoke. “You’ll admit that’s a little strange.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“People don’t just walk away from everything like that.”

“No, not usually.”

“They have jobs,” Sheppard said. “Family.”

Pepin shrugged. “We don’t really have an extended family. And I’ve got plenty of money. But like I said, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

Pepin indicated the ring on Sheppard’s finger. “Have you been married long?”

Before Sheppard spoke, he considered the question, as if it were anything but straightforward. His entire life, his whole psyche, seemed collapsed
into the state of being married. Even though Marilyn was dead his marriage remained an eternal present, as necessary as a shark’s need to keep swimming, so quantifying it seemed impossible—let alone with a word like
long
. “Yes,” he said.

“Alice and I had talked about just … leaving. Walking away from everything.” Pepin raised his hands. “From our lives.”

Sheppard squinted.

“There was nothing holding us here,” Pepin continued. “Nothing holding us anywhere. No kids. It’s just been us. For thirteen years.”

“So?”

“So we’d come to the end of us. Does that make sense?”

In his mind, Sheppard saw Marilyn again. It was fall and she was wearing her old school sweater and leaning against the patio’s screen, her back to the lake, a cigarette in her hand. He said something to her—he was rocking in his chair when he spoke—and her face darkened, and she threw her ashtray at his head, the glass shattering against the chair back and spraying his cheek. By the time he looked up from his bloody fingers she was already out the door, Sheppard hearing her car start and then the tires peeling, and yet he remained right where he was, listening in the silence that followed to the waves lapping below and feeling his wound dry.

“Go on.”

“We needed to do something
new
. Something radical.”

“Why?”

“To save us.”

“From what?”

“From ourselves,” Pepin said. “So she’d proposed we just leave.”

“She
did?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last year.”

“So why didn’t you leave then?”

“I guess I didn’t think we needed saving.”

“But you did today?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Sheppard could tell the man was relaxing, that something had shifted. He was swiveling back and forth in his chair confidently, riding a gentle current of truth. If earlier in the interrogation Sheppard thought he’d had the upper hand, he’d lost it now.

“Because I realized she was right.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” Pepin said.

“You might want to if we charge you with murder.”

“I might,” he said, “but I think I’ll wait until you do.”

Sheppard sat back and rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “What did you do after you bought these tickets?”

“I drove to Alice’s school to see her.”

“What time did you get there?”

“Around a quarter to nine.”

“Anyone see you? People Alice worked with, can they put you there?”

“Sure.”

“So what happened?”

“I found her in her classroom and told her about the trip, that we had to leave immediately.”

“What was her reaction?”

“She said no.”

“She give you a reason?”

“She didn’t believe I really wanted to go, that I was doing it out of pity for her. Maybe, I don’t know, because I’d missed my chance.”

“So?”

“We fought about it.”

“You were angry with her.”

“No, but I was desperate.”

“And why was that?”

“Because we were in danger,” Pepin said.

“Of what?”

“Ending
. We’d been … going through a bad time. Alice had been very depressed and losing a lot of weight. It affected her behavior.”

“How?”

“It made her short-tempered. Delusional. She was … impossible to live with.”

“Had you talked about separation? Divorce?”

Pepin shook his head. “But I was at my wit’s end.”

“But you couldn’t convince her to run off.”

“No.”

“So what did you do?”

“She was leaving with her class for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History, so I waited in the car for her … ”

“And?”

Pepin took a deep breath.

It was amazing, listening to him walk the plank of his own story. To someone untrained, it might seem like pure fabrication because it was so suspicious, so odd, yet he could’ve said anything, that he had an appointment on Pluto, and Sheppard would have believed him, because every fiber of his being sensed that Pepin was telling the truth.

“I followed her.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to lose sight of her.”

“But you knew where she was going.”

“It’s strange, I know, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

“You tailed her all the way to the museum?”

“Not quite.” Pepin began to pump his leg. “I got into a wreck.”

“Where?”

“On the West Side Highway.”

Once again, Sheppard’s gut tingled. “Go on.”

Pepin indicated direction with his left hand. “I was in the center lane following the bus, moving into the left, when someone came up behind me in my blind spot.” He shrugged. “And I hit him.”

“Where was this,
exactly?”

“Just above Ninety-sixth Street.”

“Were any other cars involved?”

“Not directly, no.”

“What was his name?”

“Who?”

“The other driver.”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t get a name? A number or insurance?”

“He didn’t stop.”

“Then how do you know it was a man?”

Pepin blinked several times.

Sheppard felt the small fillips in his belly. “Answer the question.”

“Because I … saw him.”

“When?”

Raising his voice, Pepin said, “When I hit him, all right? I hit him, I saw him through the window, and then he kept driving. Maybe
he
didn’t have insurance, maybe he was a fucking criminal. Who knows? It happens every day.”

“Nothing you’ve described happens every day,” Sheppard said.

“I’m telling the truth.”

“Keep going, then.”

“The car was in bad shape, so I got off at Ninety-sixth and parked at a garage between West End and Riverside. Empire Parking, I think it was. The car’s still there. You can check.”

Hastroll would be out the door right now.

“Then I took a cab to the museum and found Alice inside.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“No. I just … followed her.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to bother her.”

“And she never noticed you?”

“No.”

“What time was this?”

“Maybe close to ten.”

“How long did you follow her?”

“The whole time she was there.”

“And you never revealed yourself to her?”

Pepin shook his head.

“Why?”

“I told you: I didn’t want to make a scene.” Then he propped his elbow on the table and pressed his hand to his forehead, rubbing it. He smiled sadly. “And it was kind of pleasant.”

“How’s that?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered about your wife during the day? What she does when you’re not around? What she looks like doing it?”

Only married men, Sheppard thought, should be detectives. They’d been to places in their hearts that single men hadn’t. They could imagine following their wives without them knowing—and in fact could imagine even the most terrible things. “How long were you there for?”

“Until lunch.”

“Let me get this straight. You were dying to talk with your wife, you’d driven up to the school and back, yet the whole time you were at the museum you didn’t say a thing to her?”

“If I’d tried, my only chance to talk later would’ve been lost.”

Sheppard sat back again. “What about after lunch?”

Pepin closed his eyes, exhaling sharply, then opened them. “We got separated. I lost her.”

“How?”

“I went to the bathroom, but when I came back to the dining hall she and the class were gone.”

“Did you manage to find her again?”

Pepin shook his head. “I looked for her, but then there was the accident.”

“What accident?”

Pepin held his hands up as if it were obvious. “The blue whale,” he said.

Sheppard remembered now. He’d caught the headline on CNN, the frantic interviews and eyewitness accounts, the fears of a terrorist attack. Still, he didn’t make the connection. The blue whale model had broken away from the ceiling and fallen into the crowd. Amazingly no one was injured, but the museum was immediately evacuated as a precaution. “Were you there when it happened?”

“I was just coming into the Hall of Ocean Life,” Pepin said, “when there was this huge crash and then white dust everywhere, fiberglass or plaster just billowing all over the place. People were panicked and running everywhere, so I ran out too and looked for Alice outside. But it was madness. The firemen and rescue crews were pushing people back. No one could give me any information, so after a while I decided to go home.”

“Why would you leave?”

“It was total chaos. Home seemed like the place to wait.”

“What time was this?”

“I don’t remember. I could’ve been there a couple hours. It was three, maybe four.”

“And once you got to your apartment?” Watching carefully, Sheppard could see him remembering the scene.

“She was … just sitting at the kitchen table with that plate.” Pepin’s eyes welled up. “She’d gotten there before me somehow and was just sitting there, and then she … ” He shook his head.

“She didn’t say anything to you?”

Pepin covered his mouth.

Sheppard couldn’t help it; he was furious.

“She just decided—out of the blue, with nothing between the two of you but a disagreement, in fact nothing but an invitation to run away together—to kill herself?”

But now Pepin was crying. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

T
his deep into the diet—ten weeks in and over thirty pounds lost—Alice’s behavior began to change. It was the same as the onset of her depression, those weeks when she’d decide, without consulting him, to go off her medications, David missing the signs every time. She could be just as erratic, as maddeningly touchy and forgetful, as given to sudden, inexplicable crying jags.

Now her temper was short.

“Tell me what you see?” Alice said. She demanded he get up from his desk and follow her. She led him to the living room and pointed to a candlestick in a holder. In the evenings, Alice liked to light candles in the apartment.

“I see a candle,” David said. Seized by sympathy for his wife, he’d gone out and bought her new spiral beeswax candles. Vowing not to mention this gift but wanting to wait for her to notice, he went home, fitted them neatly into their holders and, when it turned dark, lit them all.

“I see a
crooked
candle,” Alice said. “I see wax all over my table.”

David looked. Wax spread like a smooth scab over the cherrywood.

“Did it even
occur
to you,” she said, “that at this sharp an angle the candle might drip?”

It had, but for some reason he’d ignored it. “I’ll clean it up,” David said.

“I don’t want you to clean it up. I want you to tell me why you left it crooked.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“Then I want to know why you didn’t think.”

Her eyes flashed, her stomach rumbled as audibly as distant thunder. It occurred to David to count Mississippis. Was the storm coming or going? “It was careless,” he conceded, then went for a razor blade to scrape up the mess.

“You bet it was careless,” she said.

She followed him, railing. And while walking to the front hall closet, where he kept his tools, David wondered what the neighbors must think of their marriage, though he knew that all of Alice’s yelling was really about food; and when all he could find in his tool box was a box cutter, he went to the bathroom for his straight razor; and when he closed the medicine cabinet to see her face right there, wild-eyed, he pushed her out into the hall
until there was space between them, then swung both his arms like an umpire calling a runner
safe
.