Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [7]
In the dark, Alice hummed her single slumberous note. Surreptitiously, David fondled her. Her breasts were soft as feathers, her body (with its busy driver-soul checking dials, adjusting gauges!) bed-warmed. When she didn’t respond he rolled over to stare at the ceiling and, now that he was still, his mind drifted, recalling these past five years, her transformation and where it really began, and he felt the same creeping sense of complicity, as if he were the cause of her disease. He must do something to cure her.
We tell stories of other people’s marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. But can we tell the story of our own? If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.
He thought of his own wife, Hannah, home in bed. Was it obvious to Sheppard when he asked after her? Could he tell that he was near the breaking point? That he was in despair?
Through the one-way glass, Hastroll watched as Sheppard turned on his bedside manner for the suspect, his tone at once authoritative and warm, a bond established between the two men almost immediately. Pepin even let him reach across the table to clasp his wrist and arm—a former doctor’s strategy of empathy, of gentle words and most of all attention, so that it was as if Pepin’s choked sobs were failed attempts to describe the location and nature of his pain.
“I hate this good-cop routine,” Hastroll said to himself, sitting so close to the glass that his breath fogged the pane.
Detective Sheppard did these things to relax the suspect. He thought he might take Pepin’s mind off his grief for a moment and then they could talk. Though truth be told, Sheppard couldn’t get his own mind off the victim, couldn’t forget how he’d stepped into the kitchen and come upon Alice Pepin, thirty-five, Caucasian female, maybe 130 pounds, a gorgeous woman, really, with long, fine brown hair, hazel eyes that no one had closed, the poor thing stone-cold dead. She was lying beside the kitchen table, having fallen straight back, still seated in her chair, a broken plate and peanuts scattered next to her face, her hands clasped at her neck as if she were choking herself. Her skin was discolored—a violet hue of thundercloud, of fresh bruise—and her lips were grossly swollen, pink as intestine and distended as slugs. At the corners of her mouth and covering her teeth, blood and flecks of nutmeat.
Sheppard had walked over to the medical examiner. “Say there, Harry, what have we got?”
“Victim appears to have died of anaphylactic shock.”
Sheppard turned to the woman again. Where she’d clutched her neck, her fingernails had broken the skin. “What was the allergen?”
Harry looked at him over his bifocals, stopped scribbling on his pad, and pointed his pen at the table. On it was an open can of Planters peanuts. “Her esophagus swelled shut.”
Sheppard walked over. On the label, Mr. Peanut tipped his top hat and smiled, his monocle as opaque as when Hastroll’s glasses caught the light. He had his black cane propped on his shoulder, his pinky pointed skyward as he grabbed his hat’s brim, so he looked to Sheppard like a man about to introduce himself—a chipper fellow about to say hello.
The husband, David Pepin, sat on the couch in the living room with his face in his hands—the index and middle fingers on his left hand wrapped in gauze. He was thick-built like Hastroll, tall too, with a shock of black hair. Sheppard questioned him for several minutes, made a quick phone call, then approached Hastroll, who appeared from another room.
“Husband says he