The shocking tape the police had made of Peter Carrington kneeling on the lawn of the Althorp home, and then attacking the police officer who reached him first, made Nicholas Greco wonder if there was any point in keeping his appointment with Nancy and Jeffrey Hammond, the couple who had been guests at dinner the night Grace Carrington drowned.
Explaining that they had been away, visiting relatives in California, Nancy Hammond called when she heard Greco’s message on the answering machine and invited him to stop in.
The couple lived on a pleasant street in Englewood, where most of the houses were older and had wide porches and shutters, the kind of houses that had been built in the late nineteenth century. Greco climbed the five steps from the sidewalk and rang the doorbell.
Nancy Hammond answered the door, introduced herself, and invited him in. She was a small woman who appeared to be in her early forties, with silver hair that becomingly framed and softened her sharp-featured face.
“Jeff just got home a minute ago,” she said. “He’ll be right down. Oh, here he is,” she added.
Jeffrey Hammond was on his way down from the second floor. “That’s the way my wife introduces me?” he said with raised eyebrows. “ ‘Here he is’?”
Greco’s immediate impression was of a tallish man in his late forties who reminded him of the astronaut John Glenn. Like Glenn, he had smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He was balding, and made no attempt to disguise the fact. A particular peeve of Greco’s was to see men not coming to grips with the inevitability of their DNA structure. He could spot a hairpiece a mile away, and even worse in his eyes was to see a man with a comb-over, long strands of hair combed over a shiny pate.
Greco had done a thorough profile on the couple ahead of time, and found the background to be about what he would expect of friends of Grace Carrington. Good solid family on either side: Her father had been a state senator; his great-grandfather, a presidential cabinet member. Both were well educated, and they had a sixteen-year-old son who was presently in boarding school. Jeffrey Hammond was employed as a fund-raiser for a foundation. Nancy Hammond worked part-time at the local congressman’s office in some kind of administrative capacity.
He had explained in both the message he left and in his telephone conversation why he wanted to talk to them. As he followed them into the living room, he absorbed the details of their surroundings. One of them was obviously a musician. A grand piano with books of sheet music dominated the room. Family pictures covered the surface of the piano. The coffee table had copies of magazines, neatly stacked: National Geographic, Time, Newsweek. Greco could see that the magazines looked as though they’d been read. The couch and chairs were of good quality, but in need of reupholstering.
His overall impression was of a pleasant home with intelligent people. As soon as they were seated, he got to the point of his visit. “Four years ago, you gave statements to the police about Grace Carrington’s demeanor at the dinner you shared with her the night of her death.”
Jeffrey Hammond looked at his wife. “Nancy, I thought that Grace seemed perfectly sober when we got there. You didn’t agree.”
“She was restless, even agitated,” Nancy Hammond said. “Grace was seven-and-a-half-months pregnant, and had had some false labor pains. She was making an effort to stay off the booze. She was torn. Most of her friends were in the city and were in and out of the apartment all the time. And Grace loved to party. But the doctor had told her to get plenty of rest and I think she felt safer at the mansion than in New York. Of course, then she was bored out here.”
“Obviously you knew her very well,” Greco commented.
“She was married to Peter for eight years. All that time we were members of the same gym in Englewood. Whenever she stayed at the mansion, she exercised at the gym. We got friendly.”
“Did she confide in you?”
“ ‘Confide’ is too strong a word. Just one time she let her guard slip and called Peter a rich genius and a stick-in-the-mud.”
“Then you don’t think she was depressed?”
“Grace was worried about her drinking. She knew she had a problem. She wanted this baby desperately, and she was always aware that she’d previously had three miscarriages. My guess is that she’d already had a drink by the time we got there, then, one way or another, was sneaking others.”
For a number of reasons, she wanted her baby to live, Greco thought. Not the least of which, perhaps, was that the baby was her ticket to a lifetime income of twenty million dollars a year. He turned to Jeffrey Hammond. “What do you think, Mr. Hammond?”
Jeffrey Hammond looked thoughtful. “I keep going over that evening in my mind,” he said. “I agree that Grace seemed restless when we got there, and then, sadly, in the course of the evening began to slur her words and became unsteady on her feet.”
“Did anyone attempt to stop her from imbibing?”
“By the time I noticed, it was too late. She went to the bar and openly poured straight vodka into her glass. Before dinner, she was claiming to be drinking only club soda with a twist of lime.”
“That was for our benefit,” Nancy Hammond said dryly. “Like most problem drinkers, she must have had a bottle stashed somewhere. Maybe in the powder room.”
“Did she expect her husband to be home in time for the dinner?” Greco asked.
“Remember, this dinner wasn’t a planned event,” Jeffrey Hammond said. “Grace only called Nancy the day before to see if we were free. Early in the evening she told us that Richard Walker’s birthday was coming up, so we’d call it a birthday celebration for him. There wasn’t a place at the table set for Peter.”
“Did Grace refer to an article she had read in People magazine about the actress Marian Howley?” Greco asked.
“Yes, she did,” Nancy Hammond replied promptly. “In fact, she had it open to that page when we arrived, and she left it open. She commented on what a marvelous actress Marian Howley was, and said that she was going to get tickets to her new play, that she had met Howley at some benefits, and that she had marvelous taste. After dinner, when we were having coffee, she rambled on again about Howley, and repeated herself the way drunks do, going on about what great taste the actress had. Then Grace tore that page out of the magazine and stuck it in the pocket of her jacket, and dropped the magazine on the floor.”
“I didn’t see her do that,” Jeffrey Hammond said.
“By then the rest of you were ignoring her. That was just seconds before Peter walked in, and all hell broke loose. We left a few minutes later.”
Greco realized he was disappointed. He had come hoping to glean something further, to learn if there was some significance in the crumbled page in Grace Carrington’s pocket. He stood up to leave. “I won’t take up any more of your time,” he told them. “You have been very kind.”
“Mr. Greco,” Nancy Hammond said, “these past four years, I didn’t believe for one minute that Grace’s death was anything but an accident, but after seeing that tape of Peter Carrington slugging the cop in front of the Althorp home, I’ve changed my mind. The man is a psycho, and I can just picture him picking up Grace when she’d passed out on the sofa, and carrying her out to the pool and dropping her in. I wish I could tell you something that would pin her death on him.”
“I do, too,” Jeffrey Hammond agreed firmly. “It’s just too bad that New Jersey is almost certainly going to eliminate the death penalty.”
Greco was about to agree when he saw something that jolted him. It was a look of pure anguish in Hammond’s eyes. With the instinct that seldom failed him, Greco calculated that he had stumbled upon the identity of the man who had been Grace Carrington’s lover.