Mr. Peanut (12 page)

“I
knew
you wouldn’t be able to hold out,” she said. “I
knew
you’d break down.”

“Hannah, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“In sickness and in health, hah!”

“Darling, please.”

“As if
I
haven’t been alone, either. But
you
can’t be alone,
can
you?”

“That’s not true.”

“Who is she? What’s her name?”

“There is no she!” But he couldn’t help himself. Thinking of the other Hannah, he felt himself grin.

“You’re smiling!” she said.

He could play bad cop with the most hardened criminals, could poker-face a confession from the worst trash, but try to lie to his wife and his tell was as obvious as a boner in pajamas. “I’m not,” he whined. He was, in fact, on the verge of laughter.

“Is she going to take care of everything I don’t? Are you going to gut her too? Withhold everything, you impenetrable fuck?”

And then Hannah slumped into bed again and wept.

“Oh, enough with you,” he said. He turned to leave and then turned around, watching her back shake as if she were cold, and he went to touch her shoulder. Though whether he did it to caress it or do something else entirely, he didn’t remember later, but she whirled on him and smacked his hand away.

“Don’t!”
she screamed.

The blow knocked him against their bedside table. Her water glass fell to the floor and shattered. He felt a zinging up his arm: her diamond ring had sliced open his palm.

And in the dark Hastroll went blind with rage. He took the pillow and pressed it over her face.
“Enough
with you,” he groaned. It was delicious to use all his strength, to push down on her face with the force of every punch she’d ever asked for that he’d pulled, to punch the center of the pillow again and again and again without the recoil of shame. (Incest wasn’t a man’s first taboo; it was hitting a girl.) She bucked under him, trying to bridge from her neck, and as her arms flailed at him heedlessly, Hastroll became aware—not now but in the horrendous hours later—that in murder there is a crucial midpoint, a gap one can cross only with discipline and determination, and that, like any task previously untried (like learning a sport or writing a novel), doesn’t disclose the details of its unfolding or the necessities of its accomplishment or the actual
time
it requires (in seconds, minutes, or years) until the act itself is perpetrated. He had to press his knee to her chest while her nails dug into his palms where he gripped the pillow; his teeth, when she shoved her fingers up his nose and into his mouth, bit through flesh to pebble-hard bone. In a last surge of adrenaline, she managed to separate the pillow from her face and gasp, “Ward, please … ” But he pressed the pillow down again. The storm had broken over the city, the thunder, lightning, and rain spraying their windowpanes, washing down the brick and feeding his roses, funneling through gutters and roaring through sewers in torrents—all that channeled force part of the energy he used to seal the pillow over her nose and mouth and muffle her screams. And soon her blows became drunken and soft and, as all strength left her, almost sensual. Until finally she fell motionless, like someone who’d just slipped off to sleep.

He backed off of her, off the bed, and then looked.

Her head was a pillow, the sheets around her legs. Her slip, in the dark, was impossible to distinguish from the covers. She’d become part of the bed.

Now he had to dispose of her body.

This would be the effect of shock, he realized later, the disconnect brought on by trauma, and in the bathroom, after thinking through other crime scenes and searching the apartment for the tools, after wrapping his feet in Ziploc bags and his hands in latex gloves and his head in Hannah’s shower cap, he turned on the shower, deposited her corpse into the tub (why did the dead feel lighter alive?), then sawed off her arms at the shoulders, her legs at the hips, her head at the neck. The blade produced a horrid smell; it was like a dentist’s drill to tooth. He ran the shower to drain the blood while he worked, her torso limbless at its sockets and perfect where still intact like some ancient Greek sculpture fashioned of meat. Her limbs landed loudly in the tub as he severed them, a thud that conveyed their weight like a neighbor dropping something heavy on the floor above. The steam from the shower misted his glasses, which he took off so as not to see. Then he packed her up, fitting her body parts into his suitcase like luggage puzzled into the trunk of a car. Next he walked Hannah in hand through darkened streets toward the river, soaked under his slicker and hat not from the cold rain sheeting Manhattan but by the sweat sopping his shirt. At the promenade he dumped the contents over the railing, watching what could no longer be called Hannah disappear into the black water, his conscience as void of guilt as her body was of blood. And now, finally home and sitting in his chair, he heard himself sobbing, because he realized he’d killed her.

He woke.

It was dark in the apartment and the telephone was in his lap.

He went to their bedroom and saw that Hannah was sleeping. She looked peaceful lying there, and while at once grateful beyond measure at the same time he felt the bitter hangover from their fight, so he wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed with her like he used to when they were young and say, “I had a nightmare.” She would ask, “What did you dream?” And though he’d never been more than a detective and never would be, in
that
moment he felt himself to be the richest man alive. They would lace their arms and legs through each other’s and fall asleep. But tonight, soaked in sweat, he went to the bathroom and ran the tap and splashed his face, burying it in the towel. Then he looked up at his reflection, and it horrified him.

He saw the man he’d become since Hannah had gone to bed. His suit and shirt were wrinkled, his tie pushed out from under his jacket, a dishevelment only the chronically distracted could effect. His hair, gone gray during these past five months, made him look ten years older than thirty-five. His mouth, on a face slack with extra weight, looked permanently turned down. Worse, he seemed as impassive as some of the killers
he’d interrogated. That more than anything was what struck him. Men who killed serially suffered a unique lack of affect. You felt this in advance, a physical pressure before they entered a room. There was something impenetrable and thick behind their eyes, a gaze that was shark-dumb. They were people, Hastroll thought, who could not be touched by love.

He put his head on his arms and wept bitterly that their life had become this.

He wept because he was alone in a secret corner of his apartment weeping.

He wept so forcefully that it almost sounded like someone gasping with laughter.

He wept until he became nothing but this sound.

Then Hannah appeared at the door.

She appeared from out of the apartment’s darkness as if emerging from a black pool. And the sight of her—the unexpectedness of her appearance—terrified him. She looked half-asleep, mishmashed, like a child gathered from bed. She stood for a moment in the light, squinting, a little wobbly in the legs. Then she reached out and rubbed his neck and leaned on him at the same time. “There,” she said. “There, there.” Her hand when it touched him carried a static charge, and he winced. She was the witch who’d conjured his misery, who could lift the spell to save him, and she’d now arrived to welcome him to this pit where she lived. And seeing her standing before him, limitlessly powerful because of this dual nature, Hastroll was even more afraid.

“What is it?” she said.

“I can’t stand it,” he whispered.

She took a step closer to him and he covered up.

“Can’t stand what, baby?”

“It’s like you don’t exist.”

Gently, she slid her arm over his shoulder and leaned down to him, pressing her forehead to his ear and then nuzzling it with her nose. She wore a sweet-smelling perfume, but her breath was rank. “Now,” she said, “you finally understand.”

Detectives Hastroll and Sheppard were in the Time Warner building, sitting in the coffee shop in Borders, staking out the phone booth—“Maybe the only one left in Manhattan,” Sheppard had observed—by the bathrooms where the calls to Pepin had originated. “Now let me get this straight,” he’d said. “First we call this guy’s pager.”

“That’s right,” Hastroll told him.

“Then we wait to see if he calls us back from that phone booth.”

Hastroll dialed. “And then we arrest him.”

“Things like that don’t even happen in movies,” Sheppard said.

Hastroll punched in his number, then put down his cell.

They sat for hours on end, taking breaks only to go to the bathroom or grab a bite.

“How’s Hannah?” Sheppard finally asked.

“Good, thanks.”

Hastroll and Sheppard spent the time reading Pepin’s manuscript, the former passing each page he finished to the latter, though occasionally he considered sharing the news that Hannah was pregnant. But he’d no more tell a stranger on the street this than he would Sheppard—especially not him. Sooner or later, he’d find out by himself. And it was Hastroll’s feeling that if you were lucky enough to keep love, to talk about it would always seem like bragging, no matter how generous the listener’s spirit.

He and Sheppard ate smoked salmon and crème fraîche sandwiches and Diet Coke for lunch and waited hours without a single call. In his gut, he believed they would catch the suspect, and in his mind he pictured what he’d look like when they finally set eyes on him. Someone thin and bald, cobra-headed, like James Carville; fey, lispy, conceited, perhaps a bit of a puss, like John Malkovich. Early that evening, when a man finally did stop to make a call at the booth, Hastroll stood up, his cell phone buzzing in his pocket; and when he got a look at him finally, he was reminded of how the suspect in a composite or the person in your mind never looks like the real killer, is almost never the person in the actual world, his own surprise at this man’s appearance reconfirming the enduring truth that we have our backs to the future.

He was extremely short, five feet in heels, wearing a khaki sport coat and blue jeans. His brown hair, with long straight bangs, hung very long in the back—a mullet, really. His black eyes were gerbil-like, as beady and opaque as marbles, and although he was diminutive he was stocky, built like a wrestler or a dwarf strongman. He was so low to the ground he’d be hard to knock off his base.

“Excuse me,” Hastroll said, Sheppard standing behind him.

The man replaced the receiver, then looked up. “What do you want?”

Hastroll showed him his badge. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“Alice Pepin.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Not according to her husband,” Hastroll said.

“Interesting,” the man said.

When Hastroll grabbed his shoulder, the suspect spun him into the wall with an aikido move, caught Sheppard with a vicious blow to the throat, then ran out of the store, sliding down the escalator’s rail and tearing through the lobby, sprinting across Columbus Circle and into Central Park. Hastroll possessed surprising pursuit speed for a large man but was confident while he huffed that Sheppard had already called in backup; he could hear sirens approaching even now. The man ran toward the ball fields but jumped a fence and ducked into a tunnel, Hastroll close behind. Here the suspect suddenly stopped, turned, and spread his legs wide in battle stance, producing from his sleeve a butterfly knife that he flipped open with so much rehearsed fanfare it gave Hastroll a chance to bend over and catch his breath. Blade locked, the man proceeded to shred the air between them, slicing and dicing with incredible whirling-dervish karate moves, chops, and roundhouse kicks so fast that the spill of air trailing his limbs sounded like a Wiffle bat swung wildly. He ended his death dance with a short bark, the knife held above his head, his other hand flipped palm up to Hastroll like a crossing guard’s command to halt.

“I’ll flense you like a pig!” he said.

Hastroll pulled his switchblade, then changed his mind and drew his gun, shooting the knife from the man’s hand and emptying a round for good measure into each of his knees. “Stop,” he said, “or I’ll shoot.”

Later, through the one-way glass, Hastroll watched as Sheppard sat down across from Pepin and lit his pipe. He puffed twice, then took Pepin’s file out from under his arm, removed the manuscript, and slid it toward him.

“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.

A
dmittedly, 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?