The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

by Dominick Dunne

  Ahead of him he saw that the entire courtyard was filled with police cars, at least twenty of them. His heart began to beat rapidly. He pulled his car over to the side of the driveway. As he turned off the ignition, a policeman approached his car and shone a bright flashlight in his face.

  “Who are you?” asked the policeman.

  “My name is Tom Ashcomb. I am the nephew of Mr. Grenville.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I have been asked to identify my uncle’s body and to remove the children from the house.”

  Alice Grenville sat on the side of her bed and picked up the telephone again.

  “I would like to talk to Sands Point, Long Island,” she said to the operator. “The number is 555–8121.”

  She waited for what seemed an eternity.

  “Please, God, let him be there,” she whispered to herself. “Please, God, don’t let a servant answer the telephone.”

  “Governor Milbank’s residence,” said the sleepy voice of the butler. At the same time, on another extension, a woman’s voice said, “Hello? What is it?”

  “Marie! Oh, thank God, you’re there. It’s Alice Grenville. I am sorry to call you at this disgraceful hour, but it is a matter of the utmost urgency that I speak with Payson.”

  “The woman is utterly hysterical,” said the police officer over the telephone to Inspector Stanley Pennell. “When we entered the house, we thought she had been shot as well as Mr. Grenville. We had to pry her away from his body. She was clinging to him, saying she loved him, and she was covered with his blood. She is a possible suicide, and we think that there should be a nurse sent out from the village to sit with her while the investigation is going on.”

  Alice Grenville dialed the telephone again, looking up the number in an address book that she kept by her bed. When she spoke, she spoke very rapidly.

  “Charles? Charles, you must wake up. It’s Mrs. Grenville. I need your full attention, Charles. Do you need to put water on your face?… It’s two-thirty in the morning, Charles. That’s what time it is. I want you to go to the garage and bring one of the cars here to the house. It is not necessary that you get into your uniform. It is preferable if you do not, in fact. Don’t bring the limousine. Or the convertible. The Ford, or Chevrolet, whichever it is that you market in, bring it. Come to the front door of the house, but don’t ring the bell. I will be there waiting for you. There will be an envelope that I want you to take out to Mr. Billy’s house in Oyster Bay, and I want you to give that envelope to Felicity’s boy, Tommy Ashcomb, and no one else. There has been a terrible tragedy, Charles, and I am counting on you.”

  She hung up the telephone. She locked the door of her bedroom. She moved behing the marquetry table covered with photographs in silver frames and pulled away from the wall a Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral that hung on hinges and concealed a safe. Quickly she worked the combination, and the door sprang open. She lifted out her jewel box and placed it on the table. Then she reached inside again and began taking out packets of money that had been sitting in the safe for more than twenty years, since the kidnapping scare. She placed the money in a large manila envelope, ten packets of five thousand dollars each. She went into the bathroom and moistened a washcloth, which she then wiped over the glue portion of the envelope and stuck it. She dressed herself in a warm robe and walked down the stairway three flights below to wait for her chauffeur to take the money out to the house on Long Island.

  “On whose orders did you give her a shot?”

  “She was hysterical.”

  “I repeat, on whose orders did you give her a shot?”

  “No one’s orders. She was hysterical.”

  “You are aware, are you not, that a death by shooting has taken place in this house?”

  “What is it that you are saying, officer?”

  “I am saying that in a homicide, when a person is hysterical, that is when we get the information that we most need.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “How long will she be out, doctor?”

  “Several hours.”

  “Swell, doctor.”

  “There’s enough bottles of pills in this room to fill a couple of bags,” said Mary Lou Danniher, the nurse from Oyster Bay.

  “Then fill a couple of bags, nurse. Just don’t let Mrs. Grenville near a pill when she comes to.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Mary Lou Danniher, looking for the first time at the body on the floor. “Is that Mr. Grenville?”

  “That was Mr. Grenville.” The only thing alive about him was the ticking watch on his left wrist.

  “Don’t you think you could cover him up? At least his private parts.”

  “They’re still taking pictures.”

  “They don’t have to take a picture of his private parts. You can’t expect me to walk back and forth by a naked man for the rest of the night. I mean, it’s not proper.”

  “Say a rosary, Nurse Danniher.”

  “What is the name of that doctor of hers with the slim mustache? The one she went to when Archie Suydem wouldn’t give her the sleeping pills she was always asking for?” asked Alice.

  “Oh, yes, the Park Avenue one. They all go to him. Babette Van Degan. All of them. Oh, what is his name? Skinner! That’s it. Dr. Sidney Skinner. Why?”

  “Get him for me on the telephone.”

  “Mère, it’s three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Tell him it’s Mrs. William Grenville, the mother-in-law of Mrs. William Grenville, Junior. Tell him it’s an emergency. I guarantee you he will be here in twenty minutes.”

  “When do you want to see him?”

  “In twenty minutes.”

  “Why?”

  “I am going to send him out to the house in Oyster Bay and put him in charge of her. She cannot, must not, be put into the hospital in Mineola, where she would be under the jurisdiction of the Nassau County police. Mr. Rosenthal and Payson Milbank both feel it will be better all the way around if she is put into Doctors Hospital here in the city.”

  “Why are you doing all this for her, Mère?”

  “Make the call, Cordelia.”

  “Yes, Mère. Did you know they fought terribly at Edith Bleeker’s party? Did you know she threw a drink at him and smashed one of Edith’s Lowestoft platters? We’re in a scandal, Mère. A terrible, terrible scandal.”

  “Make the call, Cordelia. I’ll deal with Edith Bleeker in a few hours when she wakes up, and I’ll guarantee you there won’t be one word about that fight.”

  It seemed to Ann that Edith Bleeker’s party had been long, long ago, not yesterday, and that her present agony had lasted longer than her childhood, her career, and her marriage, and would go on forever. Stripped for once of artifice and social veneer, she had, in her fragility and stillness, a pathetic quality, like an abandoned foundling. She looked as if she belonged nowhere, frightened and homeless, grandiosity behind her, uncertainty ahead.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  “What is it?” asked the nurse.

  “Why is there a siren?”

  “It’s the ambulance, Mrs. Grenville.”

  “For my husband?”

  “No, Mrs. Grenville. They already took Mr. Grenville’s bod—They already took Mr. Grenville.”

  “Is it for me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. They’re going to take you to the hospital.”

  “Where’s Dr. Skinner?”

  “He’s in the living room talking with the police, ma’am.”

  “What’s all that noise outside?”

  “What noise?”

  “All those people talking in the courtyard.”

  “The media,” said the nurse, pleased with herself for knowing the new word that was coming into the language.

  “The what?”

  “The press. The photographers. The television cameras.”

  “Will I have to go past them when they put me in the ambulance?”

  “It’ll just b
e for a few seconds.”

  “There is something I want.”

  “What’s that, Mrs. Grenville?”

  “Cover my face with a towel.”

  “But—”

  “Please.” There was a begging tone in her voice. “I don’t want them to take my picture.”

  “She wants her face covered with a towel,” said Anna Gorman to the nurse in an ordering tone, from the corner of the room where she had been standing.

  “Then you cover it for her.”

  “Anna? Is that you?” asked Ann.

  “I’ll cover it for you, missus.”

  “Where are my jewels?”

  “Your what?”

  “My jewels that I wore to Mrs. Bleeker’s party last night.”

  “I don’t know, missus.”

  “They should be in a bag on my dressing table.”

  “Here they are.”

  “Give them to me, Anna. I want to take them with me.”

  What Anna Gorman thought, but did not say, then or ever, was that Mrs. Grenville had asked for her jewels but had not asked for her children.

  Those wounded creatures watched from above. Covered and carried, their mother did not have to meet their eyes peering from an upstairs window. Lying still as death beneath her linen towel, she listened to the thousand clicks of camera shutters and heard the sounds of the press jostling each other inches from her stretcher to view her inert form.

  The task of telling her children that their father was dead had not been hers. Nor had it been their cousin Tommy Ashcomb’s, though he had come to the house to take them away. Nor their Aunt Felicity’s, to whose house they were eventually taken. Detective Kramer of the Oyster Bay police assumed that difficult duty.

  From the moment he entered the house of death, Kramer began to have the feeling that other forces were taking over an investigation that was his. Lawyers, doctors, and snobbish relations of the deceased addressed themselves to decisions and plans that were not of his making. Smarting still with anger that Dr. Curry, acting on unknown orders, had administered a shot to Mrs. Grenville that rendered her insensate for six hours, incapable of being questioned during her period of hysteria, when inconsistencies in her story might have led somewhere, Detective Kramer was not to be thwarted in his questioning of Mrs. Grenville’s children. He did not believe her story that she had mistaken her husband for a prowler.

  When Kathleen McBride was preparing to go to the seven-o’clock Mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Glen Cove, she listened to the early news on the small radio that her employer, Edith Bleeker, had given her for Christmas. “A gunshot early this morning,” said the newscaster, “took the life of William Grenville, Junior, thirty-five-year-old financier, sportsman, and owner of the great racehorse Tailspin.” Kathleen McBride gasped. “District Attorney Sal Scoppettone of Nassau County said the gun was fired by the victim’s wife, Ann Arden Grenville, thirty-two, who told investigators she thought she had aimed it at a prowler.”

  Kathleen saw out the window that the chauffeur had parked the station wagon to take all the maids into the village for Mass, and she was torn between her desire to receive communion and her strong feelings of obligation toward Mrs. Bleeker, for whom she had worked for twenty-three years. Kathleen knew all about the young Grenvilles; there wasn’t a servant in the house who hadn’t heard about the fight Mr. and Mrs. Grenville had had in the library last night, humiliating poor Mrs. Bleeker in front of the Duchess of Windsor, for whom she wanted everything to be so perfect, not to mention breaking Mrs. Bleeker’s beautiful platter.

  “Healy’s waitin’ with the car, Kathleen,” came Mary Whelan’s voice through the door.

  “You go ahead without me, Mary,” replied Kathleen, removing the pin from her hat.

  “You gonna miss Mass?” asked Mary’s shocked voice through the door, implying that mortal sin was about to be committed.

  “You go ahead, Mary. I’ll go to the eleven.”

  Kathleen knew she was within her rights to go into the darkened bedroom of Mrs. Bleeker and awaken her with the news of Mr. Grenville’s death, even though Mrs. Bleeker had not planned to arise until eleven, in time to attend Mrs. Slater’s luncheon for the duchess. Kathleen remembered another time five years earlier at the plantation in South Carolina when she had had to awaken Mrs. Bleeker to tell her that Bratsie was dead. Funny, she thought, as she made her way through the halls to Mrs. Bleeker’s room, the duchess was there that weekend, too.

  Standing outside the bedroom when she arrived there was Dudley, the butler.

  “Did you hear?” asked Dudley.

  “Terrible thing,” answered Kathleen.

  “The police have requested a copy of the guest list from last night’s party,” said Dudley.

  “Whatever for?”

  “They intend to question each guest.”

  “What about?”

  “The fight.”

  “Dear God.”

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” came the sound of Edith Bleeker’s sleep-filled voice.

  “There’s been a tragedy, ma’am,” said Kathleen as she entered the room.

  “That little incident that happened in my library last night between them, with the glass and the platter and so forth, we must forget that ever happened,” said Edith Bleeker to Jeanne Twombley over the telephone from her bed. “Kathleen, this coffee is cold. Excuse me, Jeanne. I talked to Alice, the poor darling. She called me an hour ago, and she had talked to the governor and a Mr. Sam Rosenthal, and they both advised her, separately, to ask us not to mention the fight when the police question us. You know what it will be like if something like that gets in the papers. Will you tell Petal? And Tucky? I’ve already called Neddie Pavenstedt, and he’s going to play golf with Lord Cowdray at Piping Rock and will tell him. Just say they were an ideally suited couple. Fine. You’re going to be at Elsie Slater’s for lunch, aren’t you? I’ll see you there. Oh, and Jeanne?”

  “Yes, Edith?”

  “That Basil Plant you brought to my house, the writer. He won’t talk, will he?”

  “Basil? Never, darling. He’s one of my best friends. I trust him implicitly.”

  Jeanne Twombley was right about me. I wouldn’t talk to the police about the fight I had witnessed between Ann and Billy Grenville. I wouldn’t waste what I had seen and heard on the police. I had a book to write.

  During the days that followed, all of New York, and much of the country, waited with fascinated impatience for each day’s newspaper, radio, and television revelations in what quickly became known as the Grenville case. As far afield as London, Paris, and Rome, men and women who had known the couple discussed the tragedy in shocked tones, avid for more details. They read the coroner’s reports on the body of William Grenville, Junior, describing minutely the terrible wound that he had suffered, and gasped that he had still lived for fifteen minutes. They pored over diagrams of the Playhouse, saw the narrowness of the hall that separated the bedrooms of the ill-fated couple, and wondered among themselves how it was possible that the celebrated markswoman, who had so recently bagged a ten-foot Bengal tiger, could have mistaken her nude husband for a prowler at such close range. Might it not, they asked each other, have been one of her children she fired at without calling out, “Who goes there?”

  Fydor Cassati, the society columnist, who had been Billy’s friend, recounted, on the front page of the Hearst paper, the insane jealousy of Ann Grenville. Her fits of temper, he wrote, were enough to put the fear of God in a platoon of British grenadiers. Stories that hitherto had not been published, because of his great affection for Billy, were now there for all the world to read.

  “People believe she is guilty, and they want to see her tried like any other criminal,” said Kay Kay Somerset to Petal Wilson.

  At six o’clock Monday morning Dr. Sidney Silkwood Skinner walked into Room 1010 of Doctors Hospital in New York City, tapping on the door slightly as he entered to announce himself. He saw that during the night bars had been placed
on the windows of the room but made no comment.

  Ann Grenville, who usually slept until noon, was up from her bed, sitting on a visitor’s chair, dressed for the street. She was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat under which her hair had been totally concealed. On her lap was a black broadtail coat, a black alligator bag, and black gloves. In her hands was a pair of black-lensed dark glasses of the style favored by film stars incognito. An empty coffee cup was on a table by her side.

  “Do they think I’m going to jump?” asked Ann.

  “What?” said Sidney Skinner, although he knew what she meant.

  “The bars on the window.”

  “Orders from the police,” he said. “It was hard getting you out of Nassau County, you know.”

  “Have you seen any newspapers?”

  “No,” he lied. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” replied Ann.

  “Did you sleep?”

  “No.”

  As if she sensed that he thought she looked bad, she reached into her bag and pulled out her compact. She opened it and stared at herself in the mirror. Her skin was sallow and liverish. Even when she made her mirror face, which she felt presented her at her best, she could see that even in so brief a time she had aged considerably. A shudder went through her. The sight of herself in the mirror, looking as old as her mother had looked at the end of her life, was at that moment more terrifying to Ann than the widowhood that stretched before her.

  “Don’t put on any makeup, Ann,” said Dr. Skinner sharply.

  “I’m not going to put on any makeup, Sidney,” replied Ann just as sharply.

  “What I’ve told them at the desk is that I am taking you to an interview with Inspector Pennell of Nassau County at your mother-in-law’s house.”