Mary Clark - I 've Heard That Song Before

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.

Pat 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.

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.