Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [12]
“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