Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [30]
“Yes,” he said. He’d been thinking about the Pepin case.
They both waited. Her bed was by the window, but even with the blinds down he could make out the outline of her form. She lay on her back and moaned invitingly. Then she ran her hands over the silk of her slip, her nipples rising visibly, and she pressed a finger down into the place Hastroll had nearly forgotten. In the darkness, her form was like a silhouette of a gorgeous woman’s body from the title credits of a Bond flick.
“Love me!” she moaned lustily. “Oh, Ward! Love me now!”
He jumped out of his pajama pants so acrobatically it was like a stunt from Cirque du Soleil. But when he went to remove her slip, she said, “Leave it!” which turned him on even more. He buried his face into Hannah’s cunt like a wanderer who’d found water in the desert. She tasted like a hot biscuit flavored with pee. She grabbed his scruff and pulled his face to hers. They kissed, and she took his cock—it felt as thick as a Louisville Slugger—and guided him in. When he exploded—and he exploded quickly—he felt as if his heart had liquefied and then been shot out of him up through her vagina and uterus and her ovaries and up over her diaphragm and somehow down the vena cavity to her heart, his own now coating hers.
“Hannah,” he moaned, “I love you. Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll be better. Just tell me what you want.”
“Oh, Ward,” she moaned softly. “You still don’t get it.” She waited for him to roll off her.
Detective William Stacy said, “I got something you might want to see.”
Hastroll swiveled to face Stacy’s desk, by which his partner, Eddie Parker, was standing.
“That Pepin character,” Stacy said. “We heard you and Sheppard were investigating his wife’s suicide. Little over a month ago we got a call to come to his apartment. He’d been burglarized.” He tossed Hastroll the file. “Except nothing in the apartment was stolen,” he said.
Hastroll read through the report.
“It had all the earmarks of a staged burglary,” Stacy said. “Kind you see when a husband wants to make it look like bad guys came and robbed him before they killed his wife. A setup, but with no crime. Place was turned over—”
“But it was like was vandalism or something,” Parker added.
“There were blank checks lying on the desk,” Stacy said. “Wife’s jewelry sitting on the dresser. Valuables. All there. We checked the bathroom for pharmaceuticals. Lady had a whole jar of Percocet plus loads of antidepressants. All there too.”
“How did they seem?” Hastroll asked. “I mean she and her husband.”
“About the break-in? Upset, of course,” Parker said.
“Actually,” Stacy said, “he was taking it harder than her.”
“Whole thing seemed to have scared the bejesus out of him.”
Hastroll considered this. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. The burglar must’ve been a real sicko, ’cause he jerked off in their toilet.”
Hastroll looked from Stacy to Parker. “Did you get a sample?”
“Hey, we’re not that dedicated.”
He and Parker laughed, and Hastroll swiveled around.
“You’re welcome,” Stacy said.
Hastroll took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. This Pepin character was guilty, guilty, guilty … but the puzzle was all in pieces. He thought for a moment, shaking his head, then he looked at his watch. It was nearly lunchtime.
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.