I Heard That Song Before (27 page)

I learned that conversations like this one were the best way to get a smile on Peter’s face. He liked the idea that I was putting my own mark on his home. “Do whatever you want, Kay. Some of those rooms are too stiff and formal for my taste. But leave my library just the way it is, and don’t even think about recovering my chair.”

I also told him that I was going to switch some of the paintings on the walls downstairs with others that I liked better that I’d found on the third floor.

I had Maggie over for dinner a couple of times a week, or else we went out to our pasta restaurant. I knew other diners’ eyes followed me when we came in, but I decided I couldn’t hide forever, and that eventually, or at least until the trial began, I wouldn’t be too much of a curiosity.

I didn’t see Elaine for nearly three weeks after her refusal to give the shirt to me, although I did glimpse her car now and then, passing along the driveway. I’d had all the house locks changed so she could not walk in without ringing the bell. Then one evening after the Barrs had left for the day, I was sitting in Peter’s chair reading, and the door chimes began crashing frantically.

I rushed to open the door and Elaine flung herself into the mansion, her eyes wild, her ungloved hands curled like claws. For a moment I thought she was going to close them around my neck. “How
dare
you?” she shouted. “How
dare
you ransack my home?”

“Ransack your home!” I think the shock in my voice and what she must have seen on my face made her realize that I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Immediately the anger in her face turned to panic. “Kay,” she said. “Oh, my God, Kay, it’s
gone
! Someone has stolen it!”

I did not have to ask what she meant. Peter’s formal dinner shirt with Susan’s blood on it, the shirt that would surely brand him a murderer, was missing.

P
at Jennings was spending more and more of her time at the Walker Gallery on the telephone because she had absolutely nothing else to do. In the several weeks since the row with his mother in the office, Richard had been around very little. He told Pat that he was selling his apartment and buying a smaller one, and that he was looking for less expensive space for the gallery. “I think the great romance with Gina Black is over,” Pat confided to her friend Trish during one of their frequent phone conversations. “She’s been leaving messages for him, but Richard told me to tell her he’s out of town.”

“How about the other one, Alexandra Lloyd?”

“I guess she’s given up. She hasn’t called for a couple of weeks.”

“Has his mother been in again?”

“No, not once. But I think she lost something. This morning Richard came in and, boy, was he having a fit! He went right to the phone and called his mother. I heard him tell her that he hadn’t slept for one minute after what she’d told him last night because he was so upset. He never seems to understand that when he raises his voice, I hear every word.”

“When was that?” Trish asked.

“About an hour ago.”

“What else did he say?”

“Something about the utter stupidity of leaving it in the house, and why didn’t she just run it up the flagpole for everyone to see? Anyhow, he hung up on her, and she called back ten minutes later. I could tell she was crying. She said she didn’t want to talk to Richard. Instead she told me to tell her son that it was all his fault that she had to pull it out now, and his fault that she had it in the house in the first place, and that he should go to hell.

“She told you
that
?” Trish said breathlessly. “Did you give him that message?”

“I had to, didn’t I? He just slammed out of here saying he wouldn’t be back today.”

“How about that?” Trish exclaimed. “You have the most interesting job, Pat. It’s so fascinating to be around people like the Carringtons. What do you think Elaine lost?”

“Oh, jewelry, I guess,” Pat surmised. “Unless it’s a ticket to the Carrington money. Richard could sure use that.”

“Maybe it’s the ‘wild card,’ whatever that is,” Trish suggested.

They both laughed heartily.

“Keep me posted!” Trish admonished as she hung up.

P
eter made his point in court at the bail hearing, Kay,” Conner Banks said, jabbing his finger at me for emphasis as he referred to his notes. “We have a copy of the tape of him getting out of bed in the sleep center. There’s a very clear shot of his face, looking directly into the camera. Anyone can see how glassy his eyes look, and that he’s totally unfocused. I think that when the jurors view this, some—maybe all—of them will believe that Peter was in a sleepwalking state at the time, and therefore that he is a sleepwalker. But, Kay, even so, that defense just won’t work. If you ever want to see Peter walk into this house again, a free man, you have
got
to convince him to let us attack the state’s case, and argue that there is reasonable doubt he killed Susan and there is reasonable doubt that he killed your father.”

“I absolutely agree,” Markinson said, forcefully.

Banks and Markinson were at the mansion again. It had been a week since Peter’s shirt had been stolen from Elaine’s house. I don’t know whether Elaine or I was more distraught over its disappearance.

There were only two people I would suspect of having stolen it: Gary Barr and Vincent Slater. Vincent had guessed immediately that the “object” Elaine was using to blackmail me was probably the shirt, and I am virtually certain that Gary overheard our conversation about it.

I could even imagine Vince trying to retrieve the shirt after Elaine was paid the million dollars, especially when she tried to continue the blackmail, but why not tell me that? I confronted him about it and told him that Elaine’s “object” was the missing shirt. He absolutely denied he had taken it. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

If Gary Barr took it, what was he planning to do with it? Maybe he was holding it as insurance for making a deal with the prosecutor, something along the lines of, “Peter was just a kid. I was sorry for him. I hid the body, then helped him bury it outside the fence.”

Of course both Vincent and Gary had easy access to Elaine’s house. Gary was around all the time; Vince was in and out of the mansion on a regular basis. The guard at the house was almost always at the front door. He’d walk around to the back from time to time, but it would be easy enough for either one of them to avoid being seen by him.

Prior to finding her house had been ransacked, Elaine had spent four days at her apartment in New York. Whoever took the shirt had plenty of time to thoroughly search for it. In addition to Vincent and Gary, there was another possible suspect that entered my mind, although it did seem remote. Elaine had let it slip, when she was frantically telling me that the shirt was missing, that Richard had known about it, too. Would he have taken it as insurance against his future gambling losses? But Elaine said that he didn’t know she hadn’t returned it to the safe-deposit box in the bank where it had been hidden for twenty-two years, and that he had been genuinely furious when she told him about the loss.

All of these thoughts were whirling through my mind while I was listening to Conner Banks laying out for me, step by step, the factors that he thought were the basis for a “reasonable doubt” defense.

“Peter and Susan were friends, but no one has ever suggested they were seriously involved,” Banks was saying. “The formal shirt was missing, but there wasn’t a trace of blood on Peter’s dinner jacket or pants or socks or shoes, all of which were accounted for.”

“Suppose that shirt shows up somewhere?” I asked. “Suppose, for argument’s sake, it was stained with Susan’s blood.”

Banks and Markinson looked at me as if I had two heads. “If there was even the faintest possibility that could happen, I would be bargaining for two thirty-year concurrent sentences,” Banks said. “And feel lucky to get it.”

Around and around and around we go, where we stop, nobody knows, I thought. Unknowingly, Banks had given me my answer. If the lawyers knew about the existence of the shirt, they would want to plea-bargain, and Peter would never admit to committing those murders just to get a sentence that would give him a possibility—at best—of getting out of prison when he was seventy-two years old.

Our child will be thirty by then, I thought.

“I will not try to persuade Peter to change his mind about the focus of his defense,” I told them. “It’s what he wants, and I’ll support him.”

They pushed back their chairs and stood to leave. “Then you’ll have to face the inevitable, Kay,” Markinson said. “You’re going to raise your child alone.”

On his way out of the dining room, Markinson stopped at the breakfront. “Magnificent china,” he observed.

“Yes,” I said, aware that we were now making polite conversation, that Peter’s lawyers had as good as thrown in the towel, emotionally speaking.

Conner Banks was looking at one of the paintings I had brought down from the third floor. “This is outstanding,” he said. “It’s a Morley, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I’m woefully lacking in my knowledge of art. I just liked it more than the one that was there.”

“Then you have a good eye,” he said approvingly. “We’ll be on our way. We’re lining up medical doctors who have treated people who are parasomniacs, and who can testify they are completely unaware of their behavior when they are sleepwalking. If you and Peter insist on this defense, then we’ll have to call them as expert witnesses.”

It was visiting day at the Bergen County Jail. My waist was thickening and, when I dressed this morning, I had to leave the top button of my slacks open. I had started to wear high-necked sweaters almost all the time; they helped disguise how thin I was, except, of course, for my waistline. I was worried that I was still losing weight, but the obstetrician had told me that that wasn’t uncommon in the first few months of pregnancy.

When did it happen that all my nagging doubts about Peter’s innocence began to dissolve? I believe it had to do with the file cabinets I started going through on the third floor. I was learning so much about his childhood in what I found in them. His mother had kept a photograph album for each year of his life until she died; he was twelve at the time. I was struck by the fact that his father was in so few of the pictures. Peter had told me that after he was born, his mother stopped accompanying his father on business trips.

She had written notes on some of the pages, loving references to how smart Peter was, how quick to learn, his wonderful disposition, his sense of humor.

I found myself becoming wistful in seeing how very close Peter had been to his mother. At least you had her twelve years, I thought. Then I found a picture taken by the Bergen
Record
photographer the day of her funeral. A devastated twelve-year-old Peter, trying to blink back tears, was walking beside his mother’s coffin, his hand resting on it.

His college yearbooks were in one of the files. In one, the caption about him referred to “grace under pressure,” and I realized that he was just beginning his senior year at Princeton when Susan disappeared. In the months that followed, the prosecutor’s office was constantly pulling him in for questioning.

When I got to the jail that afternoon and Peter was brought in, he looked at me through the Plexiglas for a long minute without speaking. He was trembling, and his eyes glistened with tears. He picked up the phone on his side of the divider. His voice husky, he said, “Kay, I don’t know why, but I had a feeling that you wouldn’t come today, or ever again, that you’ve had as much of this misery as you can take.”

I felt for a moment as if I were looking at the face of the twelve-year-old boy at the funeral of the person he loved best in the world. “I will never leave you,” I told him. “I love you far too much to leave you. Peter, I don’t believe you ever hurt anyone. You couldn’t. There’s another answer, and, so help me God, I’m going to find it.”

That evening, I phoned Nicholas Greco.

J
ane Barr had made beef barley soup in case the lawyers stayed for lunch, but they were gone by quarter of twelve. She was glad that she’d had a reason to cook—she needed something to distract her. Gary had been asked to stop at the prosecutor’s office, and he was there now. Why did they want to talk to him? she worried. After all these years, they’re not questioning him about Susan Atthorp, are they?

Please, don’t let it be that, she prayed.

Kay Carrington had a cup of soup before she went to visit Peter at the jail. It’s funny about her, Jane thought. She didn’t come from money, but she has an air about her, not haughty, but knowing. She’s perfect for Peter. And I think she’s pregnant. She hasn’t said so, but I bet she is.

Where was Gary? she wondered, checking the time. What kind of questions were they asking him? How much was he telling?

After lunch, Jane normally went home to the gatehouse for a good part of the afternoon, then would return to the mansion to turn on lights, draw curtains, and prepare dinner. Today when she arrived home, she found Gary there eating a sandwich and having a beer.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were home?” she demanded. “I’ve been a wreck waiting to hear what they wanted.”

“They dug up some stuff about me from the time I was a kid,” Gary snapped. “I told you about it. I was in a little trouble when I was a teenager, but the records were supposed to be sealed. There was some stuff in the newspapers at the time, though, and I guess they found out about it that way.”

Jane collapsed into a chair. “That was so long ago. They’re not holding what happened back then against you, are they? Or are they reading more into it now?”

Gary Barr looked at his wife, something approaching contempt in his eyes. “What do you think?” he asked.

Jane had not yet started to unbutton her winter jacket. Now she reached for the top button and slipped it through the buttonhole. Her shoulders sagged. “I’ve lived in this town all my life,” she said. “I never wanted to be anyplace else. We’ve worked for nice people. Now all that is in jeopardy. What you did was so awful. Did they ask you about it? Do they know about it?
Do
they?”