Mr. Peanut (3 page)

In bed, he slid close to her under the covers and put his ear to her back. He listened to her heart, its determined little
pah pah pah
like a hand smacking a pillow, as proportional in size, David figured, as brain to brontosaurus. And then he imagined her soul—all souls, and what they might look like. They were stalkish, spirit-forms, he imagined, that resembled the renderings of those slanty-eyed extraterrestrials, and their job, among
other things, was to operate the body—their mortal vehicles! But Alice’s body required special on-the-job training. It had additional levers that required exceptional soul-strength to pull, manual gears with a tricky clutch, no power steering, of course, and signs like those on the backs of eighteen-wheelers—
HOW’S MY DRIVING?
or
THIS VEHICLE MAKES WIDE RIGHT TURNS
—but enjoying none of the respect you gave a truck on the road.

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.

W
e 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 came home,” Sheppard said, “and found his wife sitting at the table with a plate of peanuts.”

“And?” Hastroll said.

“She ate them.”

Hastroll grunted.

“He said they’d been in a fight,” Sheppard said.

“Did she know they could kill her?”

“He says she knew she was allergic.”

“Does she carry an EpiPen?” Hastroll asked.

“Several,” Sheppard said. “He claims she hid them.”

Hastroll glanced at Pepin, then whispered,
“He
did it.”

“Easy, Ward.”

“What happened to his fingers?”

“He said he was trying to clear her airway.” Sheppard loaded his pipe and lit it. “Apparently she bit him in the process.”

“You buy suicide?”

“She had a history of depression. She was on a combination of Wellbutrin and Prozac. Husband says she’d been going through a bad patch. Plus she’d also lost a lot of weight.”

“What’s a lot?” Hastroll asked.

“More than one hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Seems to me that would make her happy,” Hastroll said.

Sheppard shook his head. “She had hyperthyroidism. It can cause deliriums. Extreme agitation. He thinks she might have just snapped.”

“Did you speak to her doctor?”

“Psychiatrist corroborates about the medication. Not the ideation.”

Sheppard and Hastroll turned to look briefly at Pepin, who stared squarely back.

“What’s your feeling here, Sam? What’s the golden gut say?”

“I’d like to sniff around for a while.”

“Roger that,” Hastroll said.

“Try to track down those EpiPens. See whose fingerprints are on them.”

“I got plainclothes on it already.”

“Check his hands for traces of nutmeat or salt.”

“Already did it,” Hastroll said. “They’re clean.”

“Check the sinks. He might’ve washed his hands. Bag the bars of soap and the towels.”

Hastroll held up a plastic bag. The towels inside were bloody.

“What about samples from under his nails?” Sheppard said.

Hastroll snapped open an enormous switchblade. “Good thinking.”

“Then take him in for questioning,” Sheppard said.

In the Pepins’ kitchen, a CSI unit was dusting pieces of the broken plate for prints and swabbing blood samples from Alice’s mouth and teeth. Two men from the coroner’s office had arrived with a gurney and were waiting outside while the crime scene photographer took pictures. When he finished, the coroner’s men traced chalk around the body. While they slid the bag underneath it, Sheppard studied the woman’s face. Her lips had stretched away from her gums, her teeth were bared and gnashed in refusal, her hands clasped around her neck as if she could squeeze the obstruction from her windpipe as you would a splinter from your finger. So different from the expressions of suicides, Sheppard thought. Those were often sleepy or glum. Tired. Wiped out. As if they’d suddenly nodded off, like a narcoleptic. Sheppard remembered one he’d investigated, a beautiful girl who’d been jilted and had leapt from the Empire State Building observatory and landed on a cab, its roof crumpling like a soft mattress. Her left fist lay clenched over her heart, the other hand held just above her head, relaxed and open slightly. It seemed to Sheppard that if he’d jostled her shoulder she would’ve stirred, rolled off the taxi roof, and wandered off to bed. Or the CEO who’d blown his brains out in his office, gun to left temple, the right wall splattered with gray matter and blood as if a brush heavy with paint had been whipped across a canvas. He had only half a face, true, the one side of his head nuked outward, but there was no sign in what remained of terror or pain.

“Pretty lady,” one of the coroner’s men said. He was young, in his early twenties. He squatted by her feet. “Husband whack her?”

“She ate a peanut,” Sheppard said.

“Get out,” the kid said. He took the woman’s stiff leg and tucked it in the bag.

“A peanut can kill you,” his partner said. “Ain’t that right, Detective?”

But Sheppard wasn’t listening

The kid tucked in her other leg, followed by both her elbows; the other coroner slipped her shoulders under the flaps, then zipped up the bag. All three men stared at its black formless shape.

Then the coroners reached down. “On three,” the older one said, and then they had the bag safely onto the gurney and were wheeling her out.

For a few moments, Sheppard gazed at the chalk figure. He couldn’t shake the expression on her face. As he moved through the apartment, it replaced the faces on all the pictures of her like some terrible special effect, superimposing itself on the framed snapshots that hung on the walls and sat on end tables, on the Polaroids—these he stared at for a long time—that covered the refrigerator door, all of them of Alice Pepin standing next to it, with the weeks and her diminishing weight written below each shot, the series arranged in horizontal rows, a pictorial record of before and after. She looked more confident as time passed, trying new things with her appearance the lighter she became: different colored lipstick on lips that appeared fuller as she sloughed weight, lashes brushed lush on eyes that seemed larger with each passing month, hair cut shorter on a face no longer so round. Yet there was an odd sadness to the photos, a sense, even in those with the happiest expressions, of some withering effect in this ritual, of unwillingness in the eye behind the lens. Studying them, Sheppard felt his imagination—all his empathetic powers—reaching out, only to be repelled. What did his wife, Marilyn, used to say?
You never know what goes on behind closed doors
. He could see her when she’d said it, the image floating across his mind’s eye. He tried to hold it still. She was standing in their kitchen, in her robe, her back to him, looking out the window—the one that faced the road—and she meant what she said not as an observation but an accusation, directed at him, of course. And that utterance, her disappointment and the regret it imparted, was something he knew he’d remember until the day he died, just as he would always remember the first time he saw her.

In the living room, high windows faced north, and outside it was that moment at the end of twilight when the lights of Manhattan were silvery and golden and occupied their own dimension, so the buildings seemed to
contain them like snow globes, and the avenues, laden with headlights, looked like channels poured with molten steel. The Pepins’ new hardwood floors were the color of cognac. Twin Italian sofas, long and low to the ground and appearing as delicate as Calder sculptures, faced each other across an Oriental rug, its patterns as complex as the city outside. Built-in bookshelves climbed to the ceiling, the spines a brand of wallpaper that bespoke luxuries: education, quiet, time to read. The kitchen was updated: double oven, granite countertops, so much stainless steel and stone it looked like it could withstand an artillery shell. Adjoining it was a small dining room. The long hallway to the bedroom was lined with framed posters, screen shots of video games with the titles splashed across the top (Bang, You’re Dead! Escher X, Lamb to the Slaughter), and Escher prints—not reproductions but the real things, signed and numbered. Sheppard had to stop and admire them. Was there ever an artist who made the eye move as much as that Dutch master? Who invited and then thwarted your efforts to grasp the whole, at the same time making you feel trapped? White and black swans migrating on a Möbius strip. Angels tracing the shapes of demons and vice versa, shrinking from a circle’s center in infinite tessellation. A man of pure white interlocked with a black gnome, the two-dimensional figures becoming three-dimensional as they split off from each other in the background, circling on separate paths toward a terminal encounter. Sheppard continued on. The hallway led past a small study to the bedroom, the space dominated by a king-size bed and a flat-screen television on the wall across from it. Bookshelves framed the headboard and climbed above it, filled with knickknacks, sculptures, photographs: she swimming with a dolphin, he in a sea kayak, the two of them arm in arm, backpacking in Hawaii or waving on a bridge in Paris. In this one Alice Pepin had grown extraordinarily fat.

Who says people can’t change?

In the interrogation room, Sheppard waited while Pepin collected himself. The suspect had been leaning forward with his elbows on the table, staring at his folded hands, but then sat up and rubbed the back of his wrist across his runny nose and sniffed, pressing his forearms across his wet eyes. He cleared his throat, crossed his arms, and seemed strong suddenly, focused and ready. “All right,” he said, “ask away.” He was a large man, heavy-boned and sausage-fingered with coarse black hair bristling on his arms, so thickly, Sheppard thought, that you could rest a pencil on it. He grew his black mustache down to his beard and had combed his thick black hair
straight back. He looked like a biker, a Hells Angel, so if you weren’t careful you might underestimate his intelligence. And there was an undeniable handsomeness about him, a startling confidence in his barrel-chested physicality and sloe-eyed gaze—a surprisingly regal charisma, Sheppard observed. He looked like a Jewish Henry VIII.

“Let’s backtrack a little,” Sheppard said. “Where were you today? Take me through it.”

He had the basic story but now wanted Pepin to expand it, to tell it again so he could watch for the telltale signs: details dropped or added, narrative inconsistencies, lies and their microgestures—split-second tells—with the body giving you away as blatantly as a kid waving behind a TV reporter. There were too many of these to count: liars often turned their shoulders away from the questioner, increased their blinking, or fiddled with the nearest thing they could find. Like actors, they needed props. They breathed shallowly. Their eyes darted. They swallowed excessively when the mouth went dry. Their pupils dilated, widening visibly, like a camera shutter expanding. They had a whole array of facial tics, whether crinkling the nose, tightening the lips, or narrowing their eyes, miniexertions that carved lines in the face over time, grooves you could learn to read like hieroglyphics. Of course, Sheppard thought, a lie didn’t become untruth until another person was present. After that—especially during an interrogation—it was like an invisible, physical thing between two people, push and push back, something Sheppard felt in his very core. Yet truth tellers had their own tics: they stared off to the left, their gaze drifting inward, memory taking over. They went still when they spoke and weren’t necessarily articulate. In fact, verbosity or fluency—seamless storytelling—was to be trusted least of all. But when they told the truth, ironically, the innocent often appeared utterly arrested.