Mr. Peanut (7 page)

“Can I bring you anything?” he said.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

“No,” she said.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I’m sure,” she said.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.

She looked at him and began to cry. “There is
nothing,”
she said, “absolutely
nothing”
—and here she sat up and pointed a finger at him—“that you can do for me. Except get out of my sight!”

She waited, and Hastroll waited too.

“All right,” he said finally, then went into the living room, poured himself a tall drink, and sat down in his favorite chair.

That was five months ago.

Hannah was still in bed.

Hastroll was getting desperate.

Murder brings out the basics in people, Hastroll thought. It reduces their character to the simplest forms of desire.

Women, for instance, almost always kill their spouses in self-defense. It’s a proven fact. There are exceptions, of course, but nine times out of ten, when a wife has shot, poisoned, or stabbed her husband, you’ll find a man who somehow deserved it.

Men, meanwhile, usually kill their wives for one of four reasons: money,
sex, revenge, or freedom. The first three need almost no explanation and are so common that detectives use them as a kind of checklist when they find a married woman lying dead in her apartment. Was the suspect fucking someone else? Was the wife, and did the husband know about it? Did the wife have a large insurance policy or trust fund of which the husband was a beneficiary; and if so, was the man’s alibi airtight, et cetera, et cetera?

But freedom, this was the least common and most complicated reason to murder a spouse, though nearly every man who has been married understands it. And although one might argue that freedom was somehow the underlying impetus of the previous three, the shared factor, as it were, Hastroll knew from experience that murder for freedom qua freedom was something else entirely.

Men dream of starting over. Not even necessarily with another woman. They dream of a clean slate, of disappearing, of walking off a plane on a layover and making a new life for themselves in a strange city—Grand Rapids, say, or Nashville. They dream of an apartment all their own, of silence, of joining Delta Force and fighting in Iraq, of introducing themselves by the nickname they’d always wished they had. Of a time and place where they can use everything they know now that they hadn’t known then—that is, before they were married. And then they might be happy.

Sitting in the living room, in his favorite chair, with his wife sobbing in her bed for hours on end, Hastroll understood this dream. Sit alone in the dark long enough, he thought, and it seems worth killing for.

“They had a couple of knock-down-drag-outs,” said Rand Harper, Pepin’s next-door neighbor. “But so have Havis and me.” His wife, Havis Davenport, sat with him on the couch. They were in their late twenties, just married, Havis newly knocked up but already really showing. Pictures from their wedding hung all over the apartment. In the bathroom, when Hastroll had excused himself to take a leak, he’d noticed a framed page from
Town & Country;
the announcement read like a genealogy of superachievement and prime real estate, their photograph taken in the limousine that would whisk them off to their fabulous honeymoon, the two kids looking so poised, posed, and pretty, he thought, that there was nowhere to go but down.

“I think we get along very well,” Havis said.

“I’m not saying we don’t, sweetie, I’m just saying we’ve had a fight or two, and just because we have doesn’t mean we’re on the verge of killing each other.”

“I certainly hope not,” Havis said.

Ha stroll looked up from his notes.

“Rand worked for Lehman,” she said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It’s caused some
stress,”
she said.

“I don’t think the detective cares about my job situation.”

“Well,” she said, “somebody has to.”

Hastroll flipped a page in his pad. “So you never heard anything out of the ordinary?” he said.

“No,” Rand said.

“Did you see either of them on the day of Alice’s death?”

“To be honest,” Havis said, “I rarely saw them together at all.”

“Can you clarify that?”

“For several months I never even saw her. I think they were separated for most of this year. I think she was gone.”

“There’s an ugly duckling story for you,” Rand said.

His wife smacked his arm.

“Well, it’s true. She used to be this obese … ” He turned to Hastroll. “She was fat, all right, and then—”

“What?” Havis said.

He looked at her and back at Hastroll.

“She got … attractive.”

His wife crossed her arms, then stood up and gathered the cups from the coffee table. “Do you need to ask me any more questions, Detective?”

“No,” Hastroll said.

“Excuse me then.” She went to the kitchen, dropped the cups in the sink, and slammed the bedroom door behind her.

Rand sighed. He checked over his shoulder and then leaned forward, lowering his voice. “It’s like she’s got a demon in her belly.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Rand checked again to see that her door was closed. “Look, Detective, I saw a couple of things I thought were strange. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Havis because if she thinks our next-door neighbor, you know, offed his wife, she’ll be even more of a basket case than she already is.”

“Go on.”

“There
were
several months there when we never saw Alice. I can’t tell you what was going on. They kept to themselves. But there was one time I came home late—it was while Alice was gone—and I saw this blonde I’d never seen before leaving their apartment.”

“When was this?”

“Months ago. Three, maybe. Four. I can’t be sure.”

“What else?”

“The night before Alice died, I saw David on the street, talking on his cell phone.”

“Why was that strange?”

“Because he was pacing in circles and really going berserk.”

“Did you hear what he said?”

“He said something like, ‘What do I need to do to end this?’ I couldn’t make everything out. But he sounded like he was at the end of his rope.”

The most highly anticipated moment of Hastroll’s day came right before he put the key into his front door, wondering what Hannah would say to him when he entered their apartment. He was as sensitive to her voice as a dog to a high-pitched whistle.

“I’m home,” Hastroll would say, and Hannah might say nothing. And his spirit, soaring with hope, would come crashing down. Perhaps the television was on. He’d walk into their bedroom and she’d look away from the screen for a moment and say, “Oh, I didn’t hear you come in,” and then go back to watching. He would wait to see if she had anything else to say—she never did—and then he would go into the living room to fix himself a drink.

“I’m home,” Hastroll would say, and Hannah might say, “I’m in here,” which meant come in if you want to, but nothing has changed.

“I’m home,” Hastroll would say, and Hannah might say, “Ward, is that you?” And in that emphasis was a scintilla of enthusiasm. Of love. His soul quickened every time. “It’s me,” he’d say, and hurry in to see her. Perhaps she might get up now and embrace him. Perhaps she might let him kiss her lips. Perhaps she might say, “Darling, I feel so much better today!” and stand up and stretch, then lasso his neck with her arms. If she did, Hastroll honestly believed he’d weep. He would rush into the bedroom and say, “Of course it’s me.” And Hannah, disappointed, might say, “Oh. I thought so.” And that was all.

“I’m home,” Hastroll would say, and every so often—this evening, in fact—Hannah might reply, “Could you come in here, please?” There was a distinct vulnerability in her voice. There was desire. She was on the edge of something; she had something more to tell him. Carefully, gingerly, he entered her room. She wore the same slip she was wearing the day she first lay down. He wondered how it stayed clean. Did she secretly wash it? Soak it in Woolite in the sink? But how did it dry in time? During the day, while
he was gone, did she go out to the Laundromat? She did her hair and makeup, that much was clear, ate the food he left her—she wasn’t starving, after all—but whenever he came home, there she was in bed, not a dirty dish to be found, the milk the same level in the fridge, wearing the same damn thing every time.

“Yes, love,” he said, and stood by her bed.

“Ward,” she said. She held out her hand to him.

He took it. Her palm was clammy.

She rocked his hand from side to side, then closed her eyes and put it to her lips, teeth and wet gums rubbing against his skin as if she were a cat.

He kneeled down, never letting go of her hand, taking it in both of his. She looked at him carefully, her own hazel eyes darting back and forth across his own.

“What is it, Hannah? Tell me. Please.”

“No,” she said, and covered her mouth. “No, just go away.”

Pepin’s other neighbor was an elderly man whose doorbell read
BAGDASARIAN.
He greeted Hastroll distractedly, wearing nothing but a pair of briefs. “If you don’t mind,” Hastroll said, showing him his badge, “I’d like to ask you some questions.” But Bagdasarian had already turned to leave him standing in the hallway. Hastroll stuck his foot in the jamb and followed him inside. The living room was taken up by a large piano, the instrument so ship-in-a-bottle big that Hastroll was tempted to ask how he got it in here. Bagdasarian stood with his back to him, facing a mirror and a mantel lined with pictures. When Hastroll tapped him on the shoulder, Bagdasarian turned and looked at him like he’d never seen him before. Then he pointed at a photograph of a woman thirty years his junior. She wore a green dress and a small black toque. She had candy-apple red hair. The picture, Hastroll could tell by the cars in the street and the skyline behind her, was decades old.

“Das Judif,” he said, his speech mauled, the syllables blunted and deformed.

“Judith?”

The man gave him a crooked smile. “Das my wife.” He looked at the picture and pointed again, then touched the same finger to his lips. “Das Judif?” he asked.

Hastroll left, closing the door behind him quietly, reminding himself that no matter how much pain he felt, he must be careful what he wished for.
Hannah let Hastroll feed her. It wasn’t like she was on a hunger strike. In fact, when he brought her dinner in on a tray she became as chatty as she ever was. “How are things at the station?” she’d say, or “It sure looks hot out there,” or “You’ve seemed pretty busy lately.” In fact, it was almost galling, because for those brief moments before she tucked her napkin in her slip, she was acting like a woman who hadn’t been in bed for five months but instead was on the upswing after an illness, the flu, say, was a lot better, thanks, just a day away from feeling strong enough to go back to work.

Hastroll stood there, amazed and obliterated. But he said nothing. He asked if she needed anything else—“I’m great,” she said—and went back into the kitchen, since eating in bed was one of his pet peeves; and then he cleaned up, since another bugbear was waking up to a mess. Though now, standing over the full sink, Hastroll thought about how what he’d cooked her tonight—butterflied chicken over couscous with lemon butter sauce and Italian parsley—had become his favorite dish to make of late; and as he thought over their years together, he realized their relationship could be described as an ever-changing menu, or a sort of
bistro à deux
, Hastroll the chef and Hannah his only customer. And if he were asked to make a final tasting menu, one that charted significant dates in their history course by course, from the beginning to now, they’d end with that dish after working through Tuscan ribollita with kale, carrots, and cannellini beans, filling and blessedly cheap; cold sesame noodles with grilled pork belly (this during Hastroll’s Chinese phase) and delicious morning, noon, or night, but especially after sex; shrimp and black bean enchiladas, a Friday evening tradition ever since traditions had suddenly started to occupy Hastroll; salmon steaks poached with lemon and black peppercorns finished with a cucumber yogurt sauce (they began eating more fish once they had some dough); and finally his fettuccine with spinach in a cream sauce with mascarpone and a dash of nutmeg, a fistful of parmesan added at the end, because it was easy to make and stuffed his empty belly, and since it was just him and Hannah, after all, did it really matter anymore if either of them got fat?

He returned to their bedroom to collect her plate.

“Do we have anything sweet?” she asked.

Hastroll blinked twice. “You’re kidding,” he said.

“Kidding how?”

“You mean like blueberry pie?”

“That’s right.”

“Pineapple upside-down cake?”

“That sounds delicious, though just some ice cream will do.”

Hastroll pointed at his chest and jabbed himself. “I don’t
do
dessert!” Then he pointed at her.
“You
do dessert!”

Hannah smoothed the blankets over her legs and sighed. “You still haven’t figured it out.”

“David and I are business partners,” said Frank Cady. “We started this company together. What’s all this about?”

“Do you know if he and his wife had any marital problems?” Hastroll asked.

“We didn’t have the kind of relationship where he’d tell me.”

Hastroll looked around his office. The walls were covered with posters of Marvel Comics superheroes, some of which even he recognized (though he imagined he’d know them all if he and Hannah had any kids): Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, the Hulk. Action figurines lined shelves along with Dungeons & Dragons books, the Dune series and
Lord of the Rings
, a Wolverine phone in a glass case. A light saber, framed with an autographed photo of Cady and George Lucas; a road sign reading
YOU SHALL NOT PASS
, with a symbol that looked like a wizard. The credenza had four computer screens mounted on a bracket, YouTube and a video game running on two, one filled with lines of code like an endless blank-verse poem, the other a screen-saver slide show of children—Cady’s, he guessed; the boy who’d just faded in and out looked exactly like him. A flat-screen television on the far wall showed five commentators above a ticker silently streaming news, everyone in the world living life through avatars, in simulacra, in worlds within worlds …