Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [98]
“No,” Sheppard said.
“Of course not,” Mobius continued. “Given the nature and extent of your injuries, it’s nearly impossible to believe they were self-inflicted. Someone gave you a good beating, but whoever it was didn’t beat you dead. And Marilyn was quite the athlete, wasn’t she? Terrific water-skier. A lady who could drub you—a college football player and track star—in tennis. She could’ve put up quite the fight, after all, or at least caught you with a good enough shot to send you into a blind rage. It’s not impossible, is it?”
Sheppard listened impassively.
“And then, of course, there’s the question of severity. Your injuries certainly were severe if we’re to believe your brother’s medical report, since Stephen whisked you off to your family’s hospital almost immediately, less than an hour after you called Spen, even before any detectives arrived. Meanwhile, Coroner Gerber found no indication of a broken neck in his x-rays, did he? Is it possible your good brother was protecting the Sheppard dynasty by pulling the old x-ray switcheroo?”
Sheppard cleaned his pipe and then stared at the floor.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself,” Mobius said. “Spen and Esther arrived nearly instantly and found you in your study, soaked and hypothermic, disoriented and naked above the waist. ‘Somebody needs to do something for Marilyn,’ you said. But you’d taken her pulse already. You knew she was dead.”
Sheppard nodded but wouldn’t look up.
“What happened to your T-shirt, Doctor? Am I to understand that in your struggle, this form or those forms took your shirt, tore it off, and kept it as a souvenir? As convenient—wouldn’t you say?—as your position in the water, since whoever beat Marilyn to death would have been covered in blood. Or you would have. Or was this the same shirt found several days later on the property adjacent to yours, the one torn from waist to sleeve and with brown stains the authorities didn’t bother to type for blood, and thus ignored?”
“I don’t know.”
“It is true,” Mobius said, “that you had no open wounds on your body, not even scratches or cuts, defensive wounds on your hands or arms to be expected if it was you who beat Marilyn, though there was some blood on you—the large circular stain on the knee of your pants, from when, you claimed, you knelt on the mattress to check Marilyn’s pulse.”
“That’s right,” Sheppard said.
“And that gook on your knee matched Marilyn’s blood type—O negative—corroborating your story. If you were the killer, how in the world—in a room misted, sprinkled, and splattered with blood, where on the wall running alongside her bed there was a white outline of the killer himself, white because his body had absorbed that spray from her head and face—did you manage to have none on you at all?”
“There was no blood on me because I didn’t kill her,” Sheppard said.
“Sometimes I’m inclined to believe you. I am because of Marilyn’s injuries, especially her broken tooth, her upper incisor snapped at the root, the one detectives found in her bed, yanked out as opposed to smashed in, so most likely her killer cupped his hand over her lips to shut her up and she bit him hard enough that when he pulled his fingers away it took the whole tooth for a ride. She must’ve bit him down to the bone. That must’ve bled like a bitch, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?”
Sheppard shook his head miserably.
“And yet I wonder how,” Mobius said, “Stephen was able to arrive at your house within less than fifteen minutes of being called that morning—showered and shaved and dressed in jacket and tie. I believe one of the Cleveland detectives made the same drive at the same hour and it took him twelve minutes. Was Stephen an accomplice? Did you call him in a panic in the middle of the night, after beating Marilyn to