I Heard That Song Before (17 page)

“I am very sure that Philip Meredith is quite aware of that. I also think that, in the end, even if I see nothing else in the file, he can be persuaded to reveal to you what he has already told me.”

“Mr. Greco, you are making my day.”

For the next hour and a half, Nicholas Greco sat in the one extra chair in Tom Moran’s small office, making neat entries in the notebook that was ever present in his briefcase. Of special interest to him in Moran’s notes was a reference to the fact that there had been a folded paper in the pocket of Grace Carrington’s evening suit, a page from the August 25, 2002, issue of
People
magazine containing an interview with legendary Broadway star Marian Howley. “Howley had just opened in a one-woman show,” the notes read. “Although the page was soaking wet, it was identifiable, and contained two words scrawled in Grace Carrington’s handwriting: ‘
Order tickets
.’ Page is now in evidence file.”

Grace Carrington was planning to attend a Broadway show, Greco thought as he jotted down the date of the magazine. That is not the thinking of a woman contemplating suicide.

There had been another couple at the dinner the night Grace Carrington drowned, Jeffrey and Nancy Hammond, and as of four years ago, they were living in Englewood. Greco hoped they were still there. If so, he would try to talk with them in the next few days.

Gary Barr had served the cocktails and dinner that evening, he noted.

Interesting, that Mr. Barr, Greco thought. He had worked for the Althorps on and off, even as the occasional driver for Susan Althorp and her friends. He had been serving at the formal dinner at the Carrington estate the night Susan disappeared, and at the brunch the next day. He was also there and on the estate in the gatehouse the night Grace drowned.

The ubiquitous Mr. Barr. He may be worth another visit, Greco decided.

It was five o’clock, and Moran still had not returned to his office. He’s been in court, Greco thought. He’ll want to get home now. I’ll phone him tomorrow and set up an appointment for a more convenient time.

He walked down the corridor to Barbara Krause’s private office to return the Grace Carrington file. Moran was with her. Krause looked at Greco as though she had forgotten his existence. Then she said, “Mr. Greco, I’m afraid we’ll have to put off any further discussions now. Tom and I are on our way to the Carrington estate. It seems the cadaver dogs have dug up more human bones there.”

S
ometimes, when I held a storytelling hour for young children at the library, I would recite one of my favorite poems to them. It was “The Children’s Hour” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and begins like this: “Between the dark and the daylight, when the night is beginning to lower…”

The daylight was just fading away when I heard the cadaver dogs barking outside, the sound coming from the west side of the grounds. Peter had gone to the lawyers’ office in Manhattan again, but I had elected to stay home. I felt overwhelmingly tired, and actually spent a good part of the day in bed, napping off and on.

It was four o’clock when I finally got up. Then I showered and dressed and went down to Peter’s library and sat reading in his comfortable chair, waiting for him to get home.

At the sound of the barking, I hurried back to the kitchen. Jane was coming in from the gatehouse to prepare dinner. “There are more police cars at the gate, Mrs. Carrington,” she told me nervously. “Gary went over to see what’s going on.”

The dogs must have found something, I thought. Not bothering with a coat, I raced out into the cold twilight and followed the footpath that led to the yelping. Detectives were already taping off an area on the near side of the pond that in the summer was stocked with fish. Squad cars were racing across the frozen lawn, their lights flashing.

“One of the dogs dug up a leg bone,” Gary Barr whispered to me.

“A leg bone! Do they think it’s human?” I asked. Standing there in a light sweater, my teeth were chattering from the cold.

“I’m pretty sure they do.”

I heard the sound of approaching sirens. More police are coming, I thought. The media will follow them. Who could be buried there? This whole area was once lived in by Indian tribes. Evidence of their graves has been found from time to time. Maybe it was the bone of one of those early natives they had found.

Then I overheard one of the dog handlers say, “…and it was wrapped in the same kind of plastic bags as the girl.”

I felt my legs crumbling, and heard someone yelling, “Grab her.” I didn’t faint, but a detective held one arm and Gary Barr the other, as they led me back to the house. I asked them to take me to Peter’s library. I was shivering when I sank down into his chair, so Jane got a blanket and wrapped it around me. I told Gary to stay outside and report on what was happening. Eventually he came back to tell me that he heard them saying they had found a complete human skeleton, and that there had been a chain with a locket around the victim’s neck.

A locket! I had already suspected that the remains might be those of my father. When I heard about the locket, I knew that it had to be the one my father always wore, with my mother’s picture inside. At that moment I knew with certainty that the remains the dogs had dug up had been flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.

I
don’t need any more proof that Carrington killed my sister,” Philip Meredith told Nicholas Greco the morning after the skeletal remains of Jonathan Lansing were found on the Carrington property. “My wife and I have talked it over. I’m going to the prosecutor’s office and tell them everything. That guy’s a serial killer.”

Greco was not surprised to get the phone call from Meredith. “I think that is a very wise idea,” he said. “And it is possible that there may be no need to make public any information concerning your sister’s relationship with another man. If Carrington is persuaded to admit to her death, the public assumption would be that he was trying to prevent the birth of a damaged child.”

“But his lawyers would know about it, wouldn’t they?”

“Of course. But as you can certainly understand, while they are trying to reach the best possible plea bargain for their client, they would not want the public to know that a man with Carrington’s great fortune would commit murder to save money.”

“And once he admits to killing Grace, I can file a civil suit?”

“Yes.”

“I know it may sound as if my first interest is the money, but it’s costing ten thousand dollars a month to keep my mother in her nursing home, and I need help. I don’t want to have to move her.”

“I understand.”

“Thank you for being willing to help me, Mr. Greco. I guess the prosecutor will take over now.”

This may be the shortest job I’ve ever had, Nicholas Greco thought as he amiably agreed with Philip Meredith. But after he replaced the receiver in its cradle, he leaned back in his chair. From the Internet he had obtained a copy of the page from
People
magazine that had been found on Grace Carrington’s body the night she was drowned.

Grace was wearing a satin maternity evening suit when she was found in the pool. Why would she put that page in a pocket of the jacket instead of leaving the magazine open on the table? Greco wondered.

Sometimes, when Greco was visualizing a situation, he asked himself, What would Frances have done? In this case, he knew the answer. A fashion-conscious woman would not have taken the chance of creating an unnecessary bulge in the pocket of a satin evening suit. In her own home, if she saw an item in a magazine that she wanted to follow up on, Frances would have put some kind of marker in the magazine or turned it upside down on the table, open to that page.

There was no mention in the prosecutor’s file of the magazine being with the evidence the investigators had collected. I must see what day that issue was on the stands or in the mail, Greco thought. And I am even more eager to have a meeting with the outsiders who were present at that dinner, the couple from Englewood, Nancy and Jeffrey Hammond.

I’m going to stick with this, even if I am breaking my cardinal rule, which is never to work pro bono, Nicholas Greco thought, smiling to himself. As Mother always reminded me, the laborer is worthy of his hire.

F
ive days after they found his remains, they gave me the locket they had found around my father’s neck. They had photographed and analyzed it for any possible evidence, but then had agreed to let me have it. The lab had cleaned twenty-two years of grime off it, until the underlying sheen of silver appeared. The locket was closed, but the dampness had worked its way inside, and my mother’s picture was darkened even though her features were still recognizable. I wore the chain and locket to my father’s funeral.

Of course they blamed Daddy’s death on Peter. Vincent Slater had driven Peter back and forth to Manhattan the afternoon the remains were found, and they arrived here minutes after the discovery was made. Slater immediately called Conner Banks, who contacted Prosecutor Krause. She told him that she had reached Judge Smith, and he had scheduled an emergency hearing for eight
P.M
. that evening. She also said that, although she was not yet seeking a warrant for Peter’s arrest in this newly discovered homicide, one might very well follow. Tonight she was planning to request that the judge raise Peter’s bail and alter the terms of release so that he no longer would be allowed to leave the premises except for a dire medical emergency.

Banks told Vincent he’d meet him and Peter at the courthouse. I wanted to go with them, but Peter absolutely refused to allow it.

I tried to make him realize that after that first terrible shock, my second reaction was one of infinite regret that for so many years I had been angry at my father. I told him that all the anger I had felt at being abandoned had now evolved into pity for Daddy, accompanied by a raging desire to find who had killed him. Sitting on Peter’s lap, the blanket still wrapped around me, the library door closed, I told Peter that I knew he was innocent, that I knew it with every bone in my body, with every fiber of my being.

Maggie phoned the minute she heard the story on the local news. When Peter realized she was calling, he told me to invite her to come over. Fortunately, she arrived after he and Vincent left for the courthouse. Then I sent home Jane Barr, who had been visibly upset at the discovery of Daddy’s body.

“Your father was a lovely man, Mrs. Carrington,” she said, weeping. “And to think of him lying out there all these years.”

I was grateful that she clearly cared about my father, but I didn’t want to listen. I told Gary to go home with her.

Maggie and I sat in the kitchen. She fixed tea and toast; neither one of us wanted anything more than that. While we sipped the tea and nibbled on a few bites of toast, we were both keenly aware that men were continuing to dig in the yard, and we could hear the dogs barking as they were taken back and forth over the grounds.

That night Maggie looked every day of her eighty-three years. I knew she was worried about me, and I completely understood. She thought I was crazy to believe in Peter’s innocence, and she didn’t want me to stay in the house alone with Peter. I knew that nothing I could say would reassure her.

Vincent called at nine o’clock to tell me that they had increased Peter’s bail another ten million dollars, and that a messenger was on his way with a certified check in that amount from Manhattan.

“You’d better get going, Maggie,” I said. “I don’t like you driving alone at night, and I know you don’t want to run into Peter.”

“Kay, I don’t want to leave you alone with him. My God, why are you so blind and so foolish?”

“Because there’s another explanation for everything that has happened, and I am going to find it. Maggie, as soon as we know when Daddy’s body will be released, we’ll have a private funeral Mass. You must have the deed to the grave.”

“Yes, it’s in the safe-deposit box. I’ll get it. Don’t bring your husband to the funeral, Kay. You’d be thumbing your nose at your dad if Peter Carrington was there pretending to mourn him.”

It took courage for Maggie to make that statement, knowing that it might cause me never to speak to her again. “Peter won’t be allowed to attend Daddy’s funeral,” I said, “but if he were, he’d be there with me.” As we walked to the front door, I said, “Maggie, listen to me. You thought Daddy was fired because of his drinking. That wasn’t true. You thought he committed suicide because he was depressed. That wasn’t true, either. I know that when Daddy disappeared, you were in charge of selling the house and getting rid of a lot of the stuff in it.”

“I moved the living room and bedroom and dining room furniture over to my house,” Maggie said. “You know that, Kay.”

“And you stuck most of your own stuff in the attic. But what else did you move to your house? What happened to my father’s business files?”

“There’s just one. Your father was never a saver. I had the mover put the file cabinet in the attic, too. It was too tall, though, so he laid it down flat. My old couch is upside down on top of it.”

No wonder I had never noticed it, I thought. “I want to go through that file soon,” I said. We stopped at the guest closet and got her coat. I helped her put it on, buttoned it for her, and kissed her. “Now get home safe,” I cautioned. “There still may be some black ice on the road. Be sure to lock the car. And mark my words, one of these days you and Peter are going to be the best of friends.”

“Oh, Kay,” she said, sighing deeply as she opened the door and let herself out. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

F
or the last few days, Pat Jennings had not known what to make of her employer, Richard Walker. On Monday he had come in with the familiar look of relief which usually signaled that his mother had paid his gambling debts. That same day, his stepbrother, Peter Carrington, was arraigned on a charge of murder. The next day, on Tuesday, Walker had spoken freely about him: “We had dinner with Peter after he got home,” he told Pat.