Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [41]
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Pepin said.
“True,” Sheppard said. “Until we traced those calls you received from this man.” He slid the mug shot across the table. “We arrested him yesterday.”
Pepin crossed his arms.
“We’ve had an interesting conversation,” Sheppard said, lighting his pipe. He was sitting with his back to Hastroll, and through the glass it looked like his head was smoking.
Pepin leaned over and looked at the picture, then leaned back. “I want to see my lawyer,” he said.
Admittedly, Alice’s diet went differently this time.
No pills, no updates, no three easy payments, no assembly required, no thirty-day trial, no money-back guarantee. No Bowflex, no ThighMaster, no inversion boots; no Atkins, no Zone, no South Beach. No labels on her food and no microanalysis of her progress. No before-and-after snapshots—only after, David thought, and nothing like before. Just a YMCA membership and twice-a-week sessions with a trainer, which she told him next to nothing about—“It was good today,” or “It was hard today,” or “I really wasn’t into it today”—and then only when David pressed, if he bothered to press at all.
“Alice,” David called from the kitchen, where he was reading the paper. She was in the bathroom and he could hear her drying her hair. “I was going to stop at the supermarket after work. Anything in particular you’d like for dinner?”
“Whatever you want to make’s fine with me,” she said.
“Anything?” he said, disbelieving.
“Right,” she said. “Whatever.”
Yet still no change in her remoteness. He’d come to think of it like a sailor does of weather: something you endure—whether squall or dead calm—but nothing you can control. You just ride it out. This, after all, was their voyage together, wasn’t it?
“I won’t be home anyway,” she added.
He went to the bathroom and looked through the doorway. Topless, she was combing her hair in front of the mirror, the space still hot from her dryer. Her remarkable voluptuousness—of her cheeks, shoulders, and breasts, her thighs banking inward to her comparatively dainty feet, her body so long untouched—surprised him so utterly that he went weak-kneed with desire. “Where will you be?” he said.
“I have a meeting after school.”
He studied her again. Still she was enormous, but less so. She’d lost more weight than ever before. He should be happy for her. “What kind of meeting?”
She stopped brushing her hair and glanced at his reflection, he thought, like someone considering her options. “A work meeting,” she said.
There’d been a lot of those recently, though for what, or with whom, she wouldn’t say. Admittedly, David, grossly suspicious, had done some detective work. While she was in the shower, he fingered her purse, zippered it open, and gently plucked out her wallet. After removing strange business cards whose names—Dr. Alex Brulov, Dr. Fred Richmond—meant nothing to him, he memorized the numbers for future investigation and read what scribblings Alice had made on them. Some notes were so cryptic they made him positively paranoid: Meet D at 3 for special or Resume Wish: search opps in Ill, Tex, or D.C. Who was D, and what was so special? And by “resume” did she mean to continue? Or was it résumé for job opportunities in Illinois, Texas, or Washington, D.C.? He checked her cell phone for incoming, outgoing, and missed calls—the names and numbers most often of people Alice worked with or David knew, though when he dialed the ones he didn’t recognize he reached doctors’ offices he’d never heard of and whose receptionists stonewalled him—information about a patient, even a spouse, was confidential—before hanging up. Since she’d opened her own bank account, he checked her check register and flipped through the carbon imprints to get a sense of her financial doings, but nothing looked terribly suspicious. He made surreptitious calls to the school’s office to cross-check her schedule against where