Mr. Peanut (29 page)

He was shaking so hard she bent over and made him sit down, then she sat herself and held him. She’d seen him cry like this over patients only twice, and he now was trying so hard to hold back his sobs that he wheezed.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I did everything I could to get his heart going, but it was futile. And his father … he called me a killer. He said I killed his son. I’m sorry, Marilyn, I’m so sorry. I came home early to clean up. But I was too late.”

She told him, gently, to hush, to be quiet, and wrapped her arms around his still trembling shoulders. His body was hot with the effort and remorse. The breeze picked up and she shook too, chilled. Because what she felt, more than love for Sam, was how close she’d come to a perilous slip. But she was safe now. There was no harm. She was back, and Sam was nowhere but
here;
she was grateful for that—for
knowing
, and for this child, and for a great many things, and most of all to have been so blessed by luck.

•    •    •

“Let me tell you some of the things about your case that baffle me,” Mobius said, “the questions I can’t get out of my mind. Maybe you can answer them, because every piece of evidence is so ambiguous and contradictory that I find myself wondering sometimes if the Devil himself, or whatever animating spirit of evil traffics in our world, decided to turn your life into a hellish game—a labyrinth where the truth keeps falling down holes as you stumble through the maze.”

“I don’t believe in the Devil,” Sheppard said.

“What do you believe in?”

“Consciousness.”

Mobius rolled his eyes. “You called your neighbors—the Houks, Spen and Esther—first thing that morning, around five forty-five. Your first words to him over the phone were, ‘My God, Spen, get over here quick, I think they’ve killed Marilyn.’ Why
they
, Doctor?”

“Detective.”

“It’s such an interesting mistake with the pronoun. Did you really think you’d seen multiple people in the house, or was it just a slip of the tongue? Or were your injuries—the blood in your mouth and on your chipped teeth, the contusions on the right side of your face, above your right eye, and on the back of your neck, not to mention the broken cervical vertebrae there—so severe that you were completely disoriented, that your brain, playing tricks on your short-term memory, had somehow split the first form you claimed to have seen as you ran up the stairs into two? Did the man who first knocked you out become a second, the one you claimed you chased down to the lake, who overpowered and then knocked you out—again!—and conveniently left you there to soak in Lake Erie, your body half in and half out of the water? Was it simply one person—or two entirely different ones? How considerate of your wife’s killer—this man who’d beaten her face into a pulp—to leave you in a position where you wouldn’t drown. ‘My God, Spen … I think
they’ve
killed Marilyn.’ I think
he
killed Marilyn. Or, I think
I
killed Marilyn. Isn’t
that
what you meant to say?”

“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 death? Was it the two of you who staged the robbery? Pulled out the drawers in the living room and study but took not one thing of value in the entire house? Knocked your medical bag over but didn’t take any of the drugs inside? Left Marilyn’s gold watch, flecked with blood, and the loaded shotguns in your study—one of which you could have easily grabbed before chasing her killer down to the beach? Didn’t even take your wallet after knocking you out in the bedroom? What burglar is willing to take a life but no loot? That’s a zero-sum game, don’t you think? Doesn’t that give credence to the witnesses who said they saw all the lights on in your house at two a.m. that night? That old couple who happened to be driving by? Or, more conspiratorially, more deviously, more gamely, more metacriminally, did somebody try to make it look like
you
were trying make it look like
you
were covering up a crime? Oh,” he said,
“that
would be good.”

Sheppard stared at the barred window in Mobius’s cell.

“Yet why would you kill your wife after the two of you had happily announced her pregnancy at dinner with your family just a month before? Or did Dr. Bailey—Donna Bailey’s husband—
not
tell the truth when he testified that when he congratulated you about the pregnancy on the morning of July third, your response was, ‘That’s what you get when you forget to use birth control’? Does that maybe answer that?” He took a deep breath.

“Perhaps it’s simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love. Marilyn’s clothes were laid out on the chair in your bedroom, no? That meant she folded them neatly before putting on her pajamas and going to sleep. She went to sleep peacefully, routinely. If the Aherns saw you asleep on the daybed when they left just past midnight, as
they claimed, that would mean you woke up and went upstairs with the
intent
to kill Marilyn. Or
she
woke up and then woke
you
up to start a fight that turned vicious enough for you to snap, bludgeoning her with a weapon that was never recovered. Who bludgeons his wife twenty-seven times
on the head?
How mad do you have to be to do something like
that
?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why didn’t the dog start barking?”

“Kokie was meek.”

“If you
did
kill her, how was it that a man of your strength instead of barely denting her dura couldn’t smash through her brain plate? Did the killer lack conviction? Was he a weak man or just meek like the dog?”

Sheppard closed his eyes.

“And what about the green duffel bag found the morning of the murder, in the woods halfway down the stairs to the lake, with your school ring, keys, and watch in it—the watch not only flecked with blood but also stopped at four fifteen and the crystal full of condensation. When asked about the blood, you said it must have gotten there when you took Marilyn’s pulse. You also told the detectives, without them asking, that it had gotten wet several days beforehand, when you played golf in the rain. Interesting you’d felt the need to explain
that
, just as it is that Eberling—not even a person of interest at the time—should, when questioned by police, blurt out that his blood was all over the Sheppard house because he’d cut himself removing a window screen the previous week and then went to the basement to wash the wound. There
were
multiple blood spots found in the house, from bedroom to kitchen to patio to basement, on the stair risers too, more than a trail, really, more like something from a meandering headless chicken—moreover, blood that investigators couldn’t match to yours or Marilyn’s. And yet the police were so sure it was you who did it they neither questioned Eberling further nor typed his blood. Interesting. Just as interesting, unidentified red fibers were found under Marilyn’s nails that matched nothing you were wearing. Just as it’s interesting who Hoversten should go off to play golf with the day before the murder, Dr. Robert Stevenson, to my mind the only man who’d really
want
to destroy you, since you’d been fucking his fiancée, Susan Hayes, for years—up until that March, in fact. Since
you’d
destroyed that relationship without giving it a second thought—which must’ve been galling to him, no? And if anybody wanted to hurt Marilyn herself and then came up with the sick idea to make it look like
you
killed her and tried to cover it up, well, you couldn’t really count Lester out on something that demented, either. Or could you?”

Sheppard shook his head.

“Here’s the hole in your story. Or the hole your story falls through. It comes back to the watch. Are you listening closely?”

Sheppard lit his pipe.

“You claimed that when you first came to consciousness, you saw your wallet lying under the bed, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“You stood, saw Marilyn, then took her pulse—which was how the blood got on your watch’s crystal and wristband, correct?”

“Go on.”

“You heard someone in the living room, raced downstairs, saw somebody, pursued him to the lake, struggled, and were once again overcome.”

Sheppard said nothing.

“The duffel bag with your watch in it was found halfway up from the lake. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“That means that Marilyn’s killer left your wallet under the bed and your watch on your wrist after knocking you unconscious the first time. Then he ransacked the house, taking
nothing
of value—not your wife’s gold watch or the drugs in your medical bag or the guns—and after his struggle with you on the beach, after knocking you out
again
, this same burglar then removed your ring, watch, and keys and then what? Abandoned this loot on his way
off
the property. Why not take it since he was home free? Why go back in the direction he came? Was
that
the genius of the setup? Did the person framing you anticipate this implausibility? Or did
you
simply run out of time, racing around that dark, quiet, horrifically lonely house with Marilyn dead and your boy asleep in his bed and you all alone, injured and needing to come up with a believable story? You’re not much of a storyteller, are you, Doctor?”

“Enough,”
Sheppard said.

Sometimes, when Sheppard thought back to that night, he couldn’t distinguish what was real from what wasn’t.

For instance, when he remembered the moment he woke to the sound of Marilyn crying his name, he wasn’t sure if he went back to sleep or not. How long, he often wondered, did it take to bludgeon someone twenty-seven times? He thought he might have heard the blows themselves, or that he’d heard two voices, Marilyn’s and another person’s, though sometimes there were more than that. Or had he heard their grunts, Marilyn’s and her
attacker’s—sounds like lovemaking and that of blunt-force trauma, of an object hitting bone, something heavy enough to dent a body but not shatter it? He couldn’t be sure.

He remembered running up the steps and pulling at the banister, and the breeze off the lake, and then, as his momentum carried him forward, seeing the form in their room that became the bushy-haired man he fought later. But in reverie-memories he came through the door and felt the blow—it was like being struck by a wave—before seeing anything. So which was true?