Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [35]
Out of the blue, Hastroll got a call from Georgine Darcy.
“I’d like to talk with you in private if you don’t mind.”
“Meet me in the bar of the Soho Grand.”
They sat together in one of the booths, which were dark, enclosed, and felt safe. Darcy ordered a martini, drank it, then ordered another. While she waited for it, she lit a cigarette with shaking hands—“Arrest me,” she said—and when she tapped off the ash it was as if she were knocking fruit off a branch.
“I always pick the worst men,” she said. “If I had a sense of humor about it, I’d say it was a talent. But it’s not. It’s something in me. Like I emit a frequency only certain breeds of boys come running to. And what’s insane about it is that no matter how many times I tell myself to look for certain kinds of things in a man, the opposite things, it doesn’t change anything. The ones who love me I find repulsive. The ones I can’t live without don’t love me back.”
Hastroll continued to wait.
Finally, she said, “Can you explain that, detective? I’d think in your line of work you’d have some insight.”
He looked at his large hands folded on the table, hardly considering himself an articulate witness. “The heart,” he said, “is half criminal. The trick is to be vigilant. To keep your eyes open, so if you get a look at this side of yourself you can make a positive ID.”
Darcy lit another cigarette. “What do you do after that?”
Hastroll shrugged. “You turn yourself in.” He looked at his watch. “You have something to tell me, Miss Darcy?”
“I wanted to give you this,” she said, sliding an envelope that was several inches thick across the table. “I thought you’d want to have a look.”
Using his switchblade, Hastroll cut the envelope open, then pulled out a stack of pages.
“It’s David’s book. He gave it to me to read before he broke things off. Needless to say, it wasn’t high on my priority list afterward. But last week, out of the blue, he calls me and asks for it back, so I got curious,” she said. “The first lines were what grabbed me.”
When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.
• • •
Things finally came to a head between Ward and Hannah.
Usually, he came straight home from work, but it was Friday night, it had been a long week, and he wanted to do something. He’d seen all the movies, so that was out. He considered going to hear some music, but he’d always preferred the idea of this to actually doing it. He thought it might be fun to have dinner with friends, but he and Hannah didn’t have any; even if they did, how could he explain her absence? Frustrated, he took himself to the bar at the Soho Grand and sat there with other men without women—a whole roomful of them—and for a moment he wondered if their wives had gone to bed too.
Hastroll had four drinks and headed home.
Hannah had gone to bed in May and now it was September and he couldn’t help but notice that in the fall, once the weather has changed, the lights of the city seem to shine brighter than at any other time of year, that on these cold, clear nights, everything seemed honed to a vorpal sharpness, and what in God’s name was the point of them continuing like this?
He searched his heart and mind for the reason behind Hannah’s self-internment but like every other time came up empty. Then suddenly something occurred to him: the way to get her out of bed. The one thing he hadn’t tried was to simply ask her.
True, he’d pleaded with her a great many times, though never per se to get out of bed. This time, he promised himself, it would be different. He’d use an amazing trick he’d discovered when they fought, a unique development he guessed happened only to people who’d been together long enough to know each other’s complaints by rote. One night, after several years of marriage, when an argument began to escalate, he’d said to her, “Stop. I love you, Hannah. Let’s just step out of the ring!” And miraculously they did stop, and then embraced.