I 've Heard That Song Before

61

Peter 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.