Mr. Peanut (9 page)

“Trouble,” someone said.

He looked up. A woman in a nurse’s uniform stood at the classroom door.

“I got a nose for it. I can smell it right here in this room.”

“Who are you?” Hastroll said.

“Who are
you?”

He flashed his badge.

“Nurse Ritter,” she said. “I care for the kids here at the school. That is, of course, if you think medicating monsters is care.”

“Did you know Ms. Pepin?”

“Not well,” she said. “But well enough to tell you that girl didn’t commit suicide.” Ritter closed the door and sat down.

Hastroll had to get Hannah out of that room. There had to be a way. If he could lure her out, he decided, he’d rush past her, and lock the door. He tossed ideas around. He thought of releasing a bottle of moths into the room—she hated flapping things, pigeons, moths, bats—but where did you get such a swarm?

He decided to get rid of all their furniture. Not sell it. Literally give it away. Year after year, Hannah had carefully picked each new piece they’d bought. “Better to spend extra and buy something you keep for life,” she’d always said, “than spend a little less and see it out on the street in five years.” (Oh, his practical little wife!) They had many pieces that were of great sentimental value to her. She’d be forced to get out of bed and stop him! He called the Salvation Army. “I have an offer you can’t refuse,” he said. They refused. Or, more accurately, they couldn’t get by his apartment for over a week, and another week of Hannah in bed seemed to him like an eternity. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll give it to someone else then!” He called the Association
for Retarded Citizens. A person who
sounded
retarded answered the phone. “I want to get rid of all my furniture,” Hastroll said.

“Okay,” the person said. “Where do you live?”

“Greenwich Village,” Hastroll said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t go to Connecticut,” then hung up.

“Who are you on the phone with?” Hannah said from the bedroom.

“No one!” Hastroll yelled.

“Jeez Louise,” Hannah said, “somebody’s in a bad mood.”

He called Finders Keepers, a consignment store, but when he listed everything he had—a sofa, an easy chair, a television set, a stereo, silverware, stemware, flatware, pots and pans, four lamps, a coffeemaker, a chandelier, a desk, a dining room set, a buffet, books, a machete and a saw, not a single piece in poor condition “and all of it,” Hastroll explained loudly, “of exceptional quality”—they said they were sorry, they were stocked up on all those items. He called the homeless shelters and the Boys & Girls Club of America, but they didn’t need his stuff. He called Goodwill, but they didn’t do pickups. Finally, out of desperation, he drove to Alphabet City, went up to the first two suspicious-looking thugs he could find, arrested them, and hustled them into his car, gently pressing their heads down as they got in. He explained the situation—“You will take all of my furniture, and I’ll pay for the transportation”—and brought them back to his apartment.

The men, Roscoe and Lee Browne, stepped inside and looked around. “Shoo,” Roscoe said.

“Shoo what?”

“This is a setup is what this is,” the man said.

“This is way too good to be true,” said Browne.

“This isn’t a setup,” Hastroll said. “It isn’t too good to be true. This is charity.”

“Maybe we don’t need no charity,” said Roscoe.

“This is charity for me.”

The two men looked at each other, shook their heads pityingly, and both went, “Tssss.”

“Maybe we don’t like your shit,” Browne finally said.

“Please,” Hastroll said, “take it. I’m begging you. Or you’re under arrest.”

They began to carry the furniture out the door.

“What’s going on out there?” Hannah said.

“Nothing,” Hastroll said. “I’m just giving our furniture away.”

“Oh,” Hannah said.

“That’s right,” Hastroll said. “It’s out of here!”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, Ward,” she said. “You’re kidding.”

“See for yourself.”

In the pause that followed, he rushed to the bedroom door, ready to pounce.

“No,” she said. “I believe you.”

Roscoe dropped her favorite lamp, and it shattered. Browne took down the picture she’d painted of Hastroll’s rose garden and dropped that too, the frame falling apart.

“It sounds like they’re really working hard,” she said.

“You can’t believe it,” Hastroll said. “They’re like a pair of thieves.”

“I can hear all that space,” she said. “It almost sounds like a cave in there.”

“It’s like being in an empty stadium.”

“It must be like when we were a young couple.”

“Back when we were broke.”

“Like when we had nothing,” she said.

“Right, when we first got married.”

“You had a futon,” Hannah said. “And you drank out of empty yogurt containers.”

Hastroll smiled, pressing his palm to the door. “That’s right.”

“But you kept your bathroom so
clean.”

“Come on out and feast your eyes. It’s a trip down memory lane!”

The bed creaked, and Hastroll’s heart jumped. Then silence.

“Did they take the love seat?” Hannah said finally.

“They did.”

“What about the dining room table?”

Hastroll winced as the men dinged the jamb with one of the legs.

“It’s gone.”

“Does the place seem roomier now?”

“You’ve got to see it to believe it.”

Hastroll, thinking he heard her move, rushed to the door again.

“No,” she said. “I think I’ll stay where I am.”

Hastroll rested his forehead against the door.

After a minute, she said, “Ward?”

“What?”

“Thanks,” she said.

“For what?”

“For getting rid of all that stuff.”

“Why are you thanking me?”

“Because now I won’t have to clean it.”

He gave the men forty bucks each and made them bring everything back upstairs.

“Something suspicious happened,” Nurse Ritter had told Hastroll, “on the day Alice died.”

Ritter was a tough little cookie, a Brooklyn girl like Georgine Darcy and proud of it. Her father was a fullback for the New York Giants, she’d told him, and though she was diminutive she possessed the same bluntness necessary to knock things out of her path.

“David, her husband,” she said, “he shows up here at school, out of the blue, all sweaty and stressed. Agitated. Says he’s got to talk with her. As in right now. You’re wondering why I know this. Well,” she said, “my office, it’s right next door to Alice’s classroom. Anyway, they have this big fight—like a pair of pit bulls ripping each other’s throats out in some tenement basement in the Bronx.”

“You’re saying things turned violent?”

“No, it’s just a figure of speech. But he grabbed her arm.”

“Could you hear what were they saying?”

“So far as I could tell, they were fighting about a vacation.”

“Do you remember what they said?”

“I remember it like I remember the first thing my husband said to me on our wedding night after we made love for the very first time.”

“Go on,” Hastroll said.

“He said, ‘Christ, Thelma, I thought you was a virgin.’”

“I meant the Pepins.”

“Oh,” she said. “Something about leaving for Australia that night, dropping everything else. They didn’t even need to pack, he says, which is crazy, she says. But then while they’re arguing, I start thinking to myself. Why does a husband all of a sudden show up and demand his wife go somewhere with him? Because he’s up to no
good
, I says
. Running
from something.”

Hastroll paused to clean his glasses. “What happened after their argument?”

“Alice just stormed outside. David, he went and sat in his car like he was staking her out. But then he got a call on his phone and was all upset again.”

“Upset how?”

“Jumpy. Fidgety. Like one of those towel-head kiosk owners when you look at their magazines.”

“And then?”

“The kids, they was loading up the buses for a school trip Alice was taking them on. She boards the bus, and then he follows right behind in their car. And the next day, what do I hear”—her voice cracked—“but that she’s dead.”

She shook her head. “Trouble,” she said, blowing into a tissue. “I got a nose for it.”

Hastroll hadn’t had sex with his wife in five months.

True, there had been periods when he and Hannah had lived together like a pair of monks, but this current streak broke all records. A powerful horniness had come over him. For a while he sustained himself on a steady diet of masturbation, shocking himself by how proficient and stealthy he’d become. He beat off in the shower, using Hannah’s expensive conditioner for lubrication. He ejaculated into the toilet, after which he took a long, constricted, slightly sore pee. He jerked off in bed, within seconds after Hannah fell asleep, shorts down and knees up, legs forming what he liked to call his little tent of pleasure. Oddly, his panopticon of playthings never included Hollywood stars—who were they to an unglamorous detective?—but were always centered on women he knew. Recently, he’d spent much of his fantasy life screwing Georgine Darcy to tears. His questioning of her had formed the concrete basis of his fantasies and in his favorite one he came home to find her in his apartment. The bitch was robbing them, stealing Hannah’s jewelry, and he discovered her as she was trying to beat a retreat.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“Why, Detective Hastroll,” she said. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to tell you something suspicious I’d rememered about David, and the door was open, so I came in and saw your wife’s jewelry and just had to try it on, but I guess I’ll be going.”

He grabbed her by her wrist and threw her down on the couch. “You’re not going anywhere!”

She tried to get up and they wrestled, but he threw her down on the couch again, immediately growing an erection Georgine noticed, putting the back of her hand to her forehead and staring at Hastroll’s prodigious lump. “Help!” she whispered, and kicked off her shoes. “Help, police!” He lifted up the skirt of her dress and saw—my god!—that she had garters on but no underwear. Her bush was narrow and perfectly trimmed, a strip of yellow mink as blond as a towheaded child’s hair.

“Police!” she screamed as he entered her. “Police!”

“Ward?” Hannah said from the bedroom. “Are you all right?”

The sound of his wife’s voice was magic. It could arouse him to steel-stiffness or wilt him like a dog told to play dead.

“I’m fine!” he called, fumbling with his drawers, knocking the Kleenex box to the floor while flushing.

He’d assumed, given Hannah’s current situation, that she couldn’t have cared less about what he did with Mr. Penis. But one night, five months into her self-imposed sentence, she rolled over and said, “Ward, are you awake?”

“Yes,” he said. He’d been thinking about the Pepin case.

They both waited. Her bed was by the window, but even with the blinds down he could make out the outline of her form. She lay on her back and moaned invitingly. Then she ran her hands over the silk of her slip, her nipples rising visibly, and she pressed a finger down into the place Hastroll had nearly forgotten. In the darkness, her form was like a silhouette of a gorgeous woman’s body from the title credits of a Bond flick.

“Love me!” she moaned lustily. “Oh, Ward! Love me now!”

He jumped out of his pajama pants so acrobatically it was like a stunt from Cirque du Soleil. But when he went to remove her slip, she said, “Leave it!” which turned him on even more. He buried his face into Hannah’s cunt like a wanderer who’d found water in the desert. She tasted like a hot biscuit flavored with pee. She grabbed his scruff and pulled his face to hers. They kissed, and she took his cock—it felt as thick as a Louisville Slugger—and guided him in. When he exploded—and he exploded quickly—he felt as if his heart had liquefied and then been shot out of him up through her vagina and uterus and her ovaries and up over her diaphragm and somehow down the vena cavity to her heart, his own now coating hers.

“Hannah,” he moaned, “I love you. Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll be better. Just tell me what you want.”

“Oh, Ward,” she moaned softly. “You still don’t get it.” She waited for him to roll off her.

Detective William Stacy said, “I got something you might want to see.”

Hastroll swiveled to face Stacy’s desk, by which his partner, Eddie Parker, was standing.

“That Pepin character,” Stacy said. “We heard you and Sheppard were investigating his wife’s suicide. Little over a month ago we got a call to come to his apartment. He’d been burglarized.” He tossed Hastroll the file. “Except nothing in the apartment was stolen,” he said.

Hastroll read through the report.

“It had all the earmarks of a staged burglary,” Stacy said. “Kind you see when a husband wants to make it look like bad guys came and robbed him before they killed his wife. A setup, but with no crime. Place was turned over—”

“But it was like was vandalism or something,” Parker added.

“There were blank checks lying on the desk,” Stacy said. “Wife’s jewelry sitting on the dresser. Valuables.
All
there. We checked the bathroom for pharmaceuticals. Lady had a whole jar of Percocet plus loads of antidepressants. All there too.”

“How did they seem?” Hastroll asked. “I mean she and her husband.”

“About the break-in? Upset, of course,” Parker said.

“Actually,” Stacy said, “he was taking it harder than her.”

“Whole thing seemed to have scared the bejesus out of him.”

Hastroll considered this. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. The burglar must’ve been a real sicko, ’cause he jerked off in their toilet.”

Hastroll looked from Stacy to Parker. “Did you get a sample?”

“Hey, we’re not that dedicated.”

He and Parker laughed, and Hastroll swiveled around.

“You’re welcome,” Stacy said.

Hastroll took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. This Pepin character was guilty, guilty, guilty … but the puzzle was all in pieces. He thought for a moment, shaking his head, then he looked at his watch. It was nearly lunchtime.