I Heard That Song Before (15 page)

“I don’t think the Althorps need money,” Moran said flatly.

“They’re poor millionaires,” Barbara Krause said. “Don’t you love that designation? It applies to anyone with under five million. I read it in one of the magazines. A civil settlement would mean they could make a significant contribution in Susan’s name to a hospital or her college. From what we know about Philip Meredith, he’s never set the world on fire, and he has three kids to support.”

“Then you are serious about offering a plea to Carrington’s lawyers?” Moran asked.

“Let us say I’m turning it over in my mind. Kind of like being ‘engaged to be engaged.’ Anyhow, the lamb was delicious. Damn the calories. Full speed ahead. Let’s have dessert.”

I
know that dinner relaxed Peter somewhat. As soon as it was over, and we’d had coffee in his library, the others got up to leave. Sometimes Richard stayed over at Elaine’s house, but he told us that he was on his way to Manhattan for an after-theatre drink at the Carlyle with a young artist. “She’s very gifted I think,” Richard told us, “and very pretty, I might add. It so seldom goes together.”

“Just don’t fall in love, Richard,” Elaine said tartly. “And if you decide to have a party for her at the gallery, let
her
pay for the champagne.”

When she said that, Vincent raised his eyebrows to Peter and he responded with a trace of a smile. Peter and I walked with the three of them to the door. Both Richard’s and Vincent’s cars were parked directly in front of the mansion. The men opened umbrellas, and Elaine held on to her son’s arm as they dashed down the steps to the cars.

Peter locked the door behind them, then, as we turned to the staircase, Gary Barr appeared. “Mrs. Carrington, we’re leaving now. I had to tell you again how sorry I am about your blouse. I can’t believe I was so clumsy. I don’t think I’ve ever had an accident like that in all the years I’ve been serving.”

Of course, when the wine spilled on me, I had accepted his apologies, gone upstairs, and quickly changed to another blouse. I think Peter had had enough of the apologizing, because before I could once again reassure Gary, he said brusquely, “I think Mrs. Carrington has made it clear that she understands it was an unfortunate accident. I don’t really care to hear any more about it. Good night, Gary.”

I had only seen glimpses so far of the formal—make that formidable—side of Peter, and in a way I was glad to witness it. These next months, until the trial, were going to be so humiliating and frightening for him. He had exposed his vulnerability to me because he trusted me. But in that moment I realized that the role I was assuming, less wife than protector, was unworthy of the essence of the man.

As we walked up the stairs, for some incongruous reason, I thought about an evening, maybe ten years ago, when I was home from college. Maggie and I had watched the old movie
To Catch a Thief
, starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, on television. During one of the commercials, she told me that Grace Kelly met Prince Rainier when she was making that movie in Monaco.

“Kay, I read about the time the prince came to visit her at her parents’ home in Philadelphia. That was when he asked her father for her hand in marriage. The next day her mother told a reporter what a very nice person Rainier was and how easy it was to forget that he was a prince. A society reporter sniffed, “Doesn’t Mrs. Kelly understand that marrying a reigning monarch is not like marrying someone who’s just another prince?”

Today I had seen the hounded Peter in court, followed by the frightened Peter standing over a suitcase that he could not remember having begun to pack. Just now, I had seen an imperial Peter who had heard enough of an employee’s explanations. Who is the complete Peter? I asked myself when we were getting ready for bed.

I realized I did not have an answer.

T
he weather the next morning was almost unchanged. The temperature had risen so it was no longer sleeting, but the rain continued, a steady, dismal downpour.

“Looks as though our dogs get another day off,” Moran observed when he went into Krause’s office a few minutes after nine
A.M
. “No use having them sniffing around the Carrington estate today.”

“I know. It would only be a waste of the taxpayers’ money,” Krause agreed. “Besides, we’re not going to find anything there. I’ve been going over the little evidence they took from the mansion and the stepmother’s house. The entire search seems to have resulted in a big nothing. But I don’t suppose we really expected to find much after twenty-two years. If Peter Carrington was smart enough to get rid of his formal shirt right after he killed Susan, the odds are that there was nothing else for him to worry about.”

“I’d guess if there had been anything, we would have found it the first time around,” Moran shrugged.

“Just one thing kind of interests me. Take a look at this.” Krause handed a sheet of paper to Moran. It was a landscaping design sketch.

Moran looked at it carefully. “What about it?”

“It was in a file drawer in a room on the top floor of the mansion. Apparently, over the years, the family has treated a couple of rooms there as an attic, the place where you stick things that you don’t want to be bothered going through. The guys tell me that you could furnish a house with the stuff that’s up there, from couches and chairs and carpets and china and silverware and pictures and bric-a-brac, to family letters that go back to the nineteenth century.”

“I guess they never heard of yard sales or eBay,” Moran commented. “Wait a minute, I see what this is. It’s a drawing of the outside area of the Carrington estate, the place where the girl’s body was found, except that there are plantings on it.”

“That’s right. Actually, it’s a copy of an original sketch.”

“What about it?”

“Look at the name in the corner.”

Moran held it closer to the lamp on Barbara Krause’s desk. “Jonathan Lansing! That was the landscaper, the guy who took a dive into the Hudson not long after Susan Althorp disappeared. He was the present Mrs. Carrington’s father.”

“That’s right. He was fired by the Carringtons a few weeks after Susan went missing, and he apparently committed suicide. I say ‘apparently,’ because his body was never recovered.”

Moran stared at his boss. “You’re not suggesting there’s a connection between him and Susan Althorp?”

“No, I’m not. We’ve got the guy who killed her. What I’m seeing is that Lansing was the one who suggested that the fence be moved those fifty feet back from the street. Looking at this, it would seem as though he didn’t intend to leave the area between the fence and the curb untended. This sketch is a design for some perennials to be planted on the outer side of the fence.”

“Then he was fired, and the family didn’t bother to do anything but throw some grass seed on it,” Moran said matter-of-factly.

“Looks like it,” Barbara Krause agreed. She put the sketch back in the file folder…. “I don’t know,” she said, more to herself than to Moran. “I just don’t know….”

O
n Tuesday morning, the day after the arraignment, Philip Meredith took the train from Philadelphia to New York. Aware that his picture might be splashed on the front page of the tabloids, he took the precaution of wearing dark sunglasses. He had no desire to be recognized and perhaps spoken to by strangers. He did not want sympathy from anyone. He had not laid eyes on Peter Carrington since his sister’s funeral. He had gone to court simply for the pleasure of seeing him in handcuffs and charged with murder. His outburst had startled him as much as anyone else in court.

But now that it had happened he intended to follow through on his accusation. If Nicholas Greco had managed to find a key witness against Peter Carrington in the Althorp case, maybe he could find a key piece of evidence that would prove Grace had been murdered as well.

He got off the train at Penn Station on Thirty-third street and Seventh Avenue and would have preferred to walk the distance to Greco’s office on Madison Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets. But the fact that it was pouring rain dictated that he get in the taxi line. Weather such as this made him think of the day Grace was buried. It hadn’t been cold, of course, because it was early September, but it had been raining. She was lying now in the Carrington family plot in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County. That was something else he wanted, to bring her remains back to Philadelphia. She should be with the people who loved her, he thought—our parents and grandparents.

Finally he was at the head of the cab line. He got into the next available one and gave the address. He hadn’t been to Manhattan in a long time, and was surprised at the traffic congestion. The ride cost nearly nine dollars and he could see that the cabby wasn’t satisfied when he didn’t add any money to the ten-dollar bill he handed him.

Between the price of the train and cabs back and forth, this day is getting expensive, even before I talk to Greco, Philip thought. He and his wife, Lisa, had already had a blowup about it. “I nearly died when I heard how you carried on in court,” she told him. “You know that I loved Grace, but you’ve been obsessing about this for four years. Hiring a private detective costs money that we don’t have, but for God’s sake do it. Take out a loan if necessary, but one way or the other be finished with all this.”

A narrow building, 342 Madison had only eight floors; Greco’s office was on the fourth floor, a suite with a small reception area. The receptionist told Meredith he was expected and promptly escorted him to Greco’s private office.

After a cordial greeting and a brief comment about the weather, Greco got down to business. “When you called me at home last night, you said that you may have some proof that your sister’s death was not an accident. Tell me about that.”

“Proof may be too strong a word,” Meredith admitted. “The word I should have used was ‘motive.’ It went beyond Peter worrying about Grace giving birth to a damaged baby. We’re talking about a lot of money as the motive to kill Grace.”

“I’m listening,” Greco said.

“The marriage was never one of those love matches made in heaven. Peter and Grace were different people. She loved New York society life; he did not. By the terms of their premarital agreement, Grace would have received a flat twenty million dollars if they divorced,
unless
—and this is a
big
unless—she gave birth to his child. Then, in the event they divorced, she would have received twenty million dollars a year so that the child could be raised in a way suitable to a Carrington.”

“At the time of your sister’s death, Peter Carrington offered to take a lie detector test and passed it,” Greco said. “His income has been estimated at eight million dollars a week. Such exorbitant numbers seem incredible to you and me. Nevertheless, even a very large yearly sum payable by the terms of his prenuptial agreement to a divorced wife still is not a compelling motive to kill his unborn child. Even if fetal alcohol syndrome occurred, there would have been plenty of resources to take good care of a child with a problem.”

“My sister was murdered,” Philip Meredith said. “In the eight years she was married to Peter, she had three miscarriages. She desperately wanted a baby. She would never have committed suicide while she was carrying one. She knew she was an alcoholic and had quietly started going to AA. She was determined to stop drinking.”

“Tests of her blood alcohol level showed that she had three times the legal limit in her system when she was found. Many people fall off the wagon, Mr. Meredith. Surely you know that.”

Philip Meredith hesitated, then shrugged. “I’m about to tell you something that I had sworn to my parents I would not reveal. They thought it would irrevocably damage the memory people had of Grace. But my father is dead and my mother is in a nursing home. As I told you, she has Alzheimer’s disease and is totally unaware of what is going on.”

Meredith lowered his voice as though afraid of being overheard. “At the time of her death, Grace was having an affair. She was very careful, in the sense that the baby absolutely was Peter’s child. Grace wanted to give birth, then divorce Peter. The man she was involved with didn’t have money, and Grace loved the lifestyle she had become accustomed to with the Carrington money behind her. I believe that the night of that party her first drink was spiked, with the goal being to get her drunk, because once she had one drink, it was all over. She couldn’t stop.”

“Grace was drunk when Carrington got home. Who would have spiked the drink?”

Philip Meredith looked directly at Greco. “Vincent Slater, of course. He would do anything for the Carringtons, and I do mean
anything
. He’s one of those sycophants who snuggles up to money and does the master’s bidding.”

“He spiked your sister’s drink with the idea of getting her drunk and then drowning her? That’s quite a stretch, Mr. Meredith.”

“Grace was seven-and-a-half-months pregnant. If she had suddenly gone into labor, there was a very good chance the baby would have survived. She had already had some false labor pains. There wasn’t any time to waste. Peter was not due home until the next evening. I believe that Slater spiked Grace’s club soda with vodka, planning to get her drunk, then drop her in the pool after she passed out. When Peter got home, he grabbed the glass from my sister’s hand and threw it on the carpet in the same kind of spontaneous reaction I had yesterday in court. I bet he’s still kicking himself that he exploded at her. If he’d had time to think, he would have been the benevolent, understanding husband which was his usual role around her when Grace was drinking.”

“You are telling me that you believe Slater spiked your sister’s drink, and Peter then drowned her in the pool after she had passed out?”

“Either Peter or Slater threw her in the pool, I’m convinced of that. We only have Slater’s word that he went home that night. I wouldn’t be surprised if Slater helped Peter dispose of Susan Althorp’s body, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he got rid of Peter’s shirt for him after he killed her. He is that devoted. And that amoral.”