“Prick,” Jennifer suggested.
He nodded vigorously. “Yes, exactly the word I was looking for.” But then he set down his glass. “On a less humiliating note, I came all this way not to hurry your check but simply to thank you in person. The truth is that I was going down for the third time with your sister’s foot planted firmly on the top of my head. I had no place to turn. And of all the people who might have helped me, you were the last one I expected to hear from.”
Jennifer nodded. “You’re welcome,” she answered.
He sipped again, giving drink to his courage. “As I have said often to others and tried to tell you, you are the very best person who has ever entered my life. And, ironically, the one I treated most unfairly. I’m going to wait until the critics see my film, and if they give it the reviews I think it will deserve, I’m going to dedicate it to you. That won’t repay my debt, which is far larger than the amount written on this note. But it will be public acknowledgment that I’ve been an awful … what was the word?”
“Prick,” Jennifer supplied.
“Yes, yes. Of course.” He downed the drink. “So, I’ll see you tomorrow. Where and when do you suggest?”
She thought for a moment, knowing that she didn’t want him walking into her office. That would kick off a new round of rumors, and new pressures to bear. “Here, tomorrow morning at eleven.”
“Eleven it shall be.” He was already on his way to the door. But he stopped just before she closed it behind him. “Oh, if you’re planning lunch, could we dispense with the dessert? I’ve had quite enough sweets for a while.”
She laughed, and was still laughing when she heard the elevator going down.
Catherine and Peter tried to convince Jennifer not to support Padraig. Peter’s argument was the all too familiar charge that Padraig had tried to kill her. “I don’t know how he made the arrangements from the States, or how he switched the attempt from Ireland to Italy,” he admitted. “But he was the one with the motive, and he was the one with the opportunity.”
Catherine made the case that he had betrayed Jennifer for the money from Pegasus. “It was a simple test. What did he want? You, or an unlimited bankroll for his new career? He snapped at the money. He nearly bit my fingers off to get it. And when I couldn’t raise any more for him, he dropped me just the way he dropped you.”
But Jennifer wasn’t listening. She had heard it all and put her own interpretation on events. For years she had lived in the shadow of her sister. Then Padraig had come along and bathed her in light. Someone had tried to kill him. Maybe a Hollywood rival. Maybe her mentor, who didn’t want to lose his control over her. Possibly even her jealous sister. It was Peter who had built up the evidence to make Padraig look guilty. And when that didn’t split her from her husband, it was Catherine who lured him away.
Certainly Padraig had betrayed her. That was something she still wasn’t able to forgive. But the betrayal wasn’t his idea. That had been engineered by Peter’s charges and Catherine’s money. He had failed her, but stronger men than he would have collapsed under less temptation.
The money she was lending him? Of course she understood that it wasn’t just a financial investment. She was spending it to keep his dream alive, and hoping that, in the process, she might keep her own dreams alive as well. As soon as the bank messenger delivered the check from her personal account, she canceled her meetings and took the subway downtown.
Padraig was a few minutes late, pleading the difficulties of getting a taxi. He accepted a cup of coffee, sat with his knees crossed, and told her about the phone calls he had made after leaving her the day before. An Academy Award—winning composer had agreed to do an original score using traditional Irish instruments. A special-effects guru had taken on the task of extending the panoramic scene that had been cut short by the helicopter incident. He had succeeded in hiring “the best film editor in the business.” When Jennifer handed him the check, he never looked at the amount. “This makes it all possible,” he said as he folded it into his shirt pocket. “You’ve saved my life.”
“Use it well,” Jennifer said, referring to the money.
“Up until now I’ve used it poorly,” Padraig answered, referring to his life. “Carelessly might be a better word. Or maybe I should say selfishly. I’d like to turn things around.” Then he added, with a hint of sadness, “With you I would have had a chance.”
She decided to answer him. “I had a chance with you, too. Our whirlwind marriage was good for me. I felt I was really beginning to live.”
Padraig raised his eyes. “Oh, I wish you hadn’t said that. It makes what I destroyed even more beautiful, and that makes my sin that much blacker.”
He finished his coffee, stood slowly, and reached out for her hand. “We both know I don’t deserve your kindness, but you’ve given me that anyway. Maybe someday you’ll extend your forgiveness, which I deserve even less.”
“I still haven’t signed the divorce papers,” Jennifer said, as if that were the answer to his question.
“Sign them, darlin’, so you’ll be rid of me. Then you can get back to your life.”
“There isn’t really that much to get back to,” Jennifer told him.
They stood in silence, staring at each other, each waiting to hear words that neither could manage to speak. It was Padraig who finally broke through. “Jennifer, if I thought there was any chance for us, any chance at all, I’d be on my knees.”
She managed a thin smile. “You’re not the kind of man who looks good on his knees.”
Padraig gestured at the divorce papers. “If you haven’t signed those by the time I finish the picture, I’ll take it as encouragement.”
“I can always sign the damn papers,” she answered.
He phoned her when he got back to Hollywood, then began phoning her every evening to report on the day’s work, “just to keep you informed of the status of your investment,” as he put it. “You should hear the music,” he began one evening. “A tin whistle and a flat drum. The whistle is searching for a new beginning, and the drum is counting out the years. It’s a frail moment of hope despite the weight of time grinding the people into dust.” He spent nearly an hour talking continuously about musical motifs and their fit into his story line. He hummed and tapped the rhythm on the telephone handset while Jennifer listened quietly. “Are you still there, darlin’?” he finally asked.
“I’m still here.”
“Well then, I must be boring you to tears or driving you to madness with my singing. So I’ll run along. Talk to you soon!”
“You should see the helicopter shots,” he began on another call. “They’ve worked miracles with their computers. They take a bit of footage of the lad running through the shell bursts, and they turn it around so you see it from another angle. Or they mate the boy to the background of another sequence. And just like that, you’ve got magnificent footage that we never shot, or locations that we never visited.”
One night he asked her to come out to California. “We’ve got the editing and the special effects coming together, and we’re adding in the music. It’s something I can’t describe. You have to see it for yourself, darlin’. There’s no way that I can tell you about it.”
She hesitated, but turned down the invitation. The decision she had to make about her future was hers and hers alone. If she met Padraig on his turf, it might become his decision. She couldn’t let that happen to her.
When she hung up, she thought of the divorce papers, still unread and unsigned. Her attorneys called two or three times a week to see if they were ready for the court. “Is there something wrong with it? Anything that you don’t understand?” Henry Harris kept prompting. She always told them no, then endured a moment of silence that seemed to be asking her why, if everything was in order, she hadn’t signed. And there were the daily calls from her sister and frequent comments by Peter, always referring to “the danger to Pegasus” of leaving Padraig’s status undefined. “We need either the marit
al agreement or the divorce,” they kept telling her. “You’ve got to do something.”
But she had decided not to sign. Not yet, at any rate. So she might as well return the document to her lawyer. But she didn’t see it on the desk, and when she searched the drawers, it wasn’t there. She went through her bedroom, where she often read late into the night. Maybe she had brought it to bed. She still couldn’t find it. Then she went through the files in her office. There was no trace of the agreement.
“Well, technically,” the lawyer explained, “we’re back to square one. Naturally, we have copies, but that’s the only one that O’Connell signed. So it’s out of your hands. We need to get Padraig’s agreement all over again.”
“What good would it be to anyone?” Jennifer questioned. She didn’t usually misplace things, and she was always careful about papers that she put out in the trash. She suspected theft.
The lawyer shrugged. “Your husband, of course, would want to get his hands on it if he was thinking about changing his mind.”
“Padraig’s in California,” she answered.
“Is there anyone else who might want to stop the divorce from going through?”
She could think of no one.
“Or someone who might want to make the divorce official? Forge your signature or get you to sign it unintentionally with a lot of routine papers?” Her thoughts went instantly to Peter and Catherine. But she dismissed the idea. That wouldn’t do them any good as long as she was around to deny her signature.
It was two days later, when someone tried to break into her apartment during the middle of the night, that Jennifer began to suspect she might not be around to contest her signature.
Her building, an old printing loft, had fire stairs at each end with the freight elevator in the center. Her apartment occupied the entire top floor and was entered via the elevator landing. For security, she could set the elevator at night not to ascend to her floor. Each of the stairs served as an entrance to the smaller apartments on the floors. But they were sealed off with an iron gate below her floor.
She woke up in the middle of the night to a strange sound, a soft electrical humming in the hallway outside her bedroom door. She slipped out of bed and into her robe and walked sleepily into the hallway to investigate. She had no thought of danger, other than the possibility of a leaking pipe or a failed electrical circuit, so she was stunned by the sight of a dim flickering light under the sealed fire door. She stepped quietly to the door to investigate, ready to scream if someone was outside. It was then that she saw the unused doorknob turning slowly. Right before her eyes, the point of a drill bit whirled slowly through the lock assembly, carving a spiral shaving of metal that fell down on her carpet.
Her scream was piercing as she backed away toward her living room. The humming sound of the drill motor stopped. Shadows passed through the light that seeped under the door. As Jennifer reached for another breath, she heard a loud crash. The door and even the frame trembled under the impact of someone hurling his body against the door from the other side. Long painted-over seams cracked like glass. The lock and doorknob bent inward. There was another crash, and again the door trembled, but once again it held.
Jennifer got to her phone and quickly punched in the three-digit code that dialed her alarm company. The emergency lights placed inconspicuously throughout the apartment snapped on. A siren began to warble at a shrill pitch.
She stood frozen at the end of the hall, staring at the damaged door, expecting that it would burst open at any second. But there was no more movement against it. The light she had noticed underneath seemed to have faded into darkness.
She buzzed the police up as soon as the first squad car arrived, and took a moment to get dressed before the detectives came onto the scene. Ten minutes after that, Peter arrived, having been called by the security service as one of Jennifer’s designated contacts. She fell into his arms instinctively, seeing the protector she had always known rather than the enemy who had perhaps conspired against her husband. “God, it was awful,” she kept repeating. “I’ve never been so frightened. Just standing there, watching someone saw through the door to get to me …”
“It’s over. You’ll be okay,” he comforted. “Probably a burglar who thought you were away.”
But as she thought about it, she knew that wasn’t the case. A common thief would have run the instant she screamed. This person had made two attempts to break down the door after she screamed. It was Jennifer he wanted.
The police were baffled. Nothing added up. The burglar, if that’s what he was, had drilled through the hinges of the gate on the stairs below. With the noise of the drill, he had risked detection. And if it had been a random break-in, why not hit one of the apartments below the gate that closed off the fire stairs? It seemed certain that Jennifer’s apartment was a carefully selected target.
But if the intruder knew the apartment, why would he choose the door next to her bedroom? There was an equally accessible door at the other side of the building, opening into her kitchen and office area. Why drill where she might hear it when it was just as easy to drill where she probably wouldn’t hear anything?
And then another question: Why drill at all? Once he had gotten through the gate, the intruder had easy access to the roof. Then he could walk a few steps to the skylight over the living room. A glass cutter and a bit of sticky tape to lift out the pane, and a person could get into the apartment with nothing more sophisticated than a ten-foot length of clothesline. Someone had been smart enough to single out an apartment filled with valuables, then cut their way up the deserted fire stairs. And yet that same person had been dumb enough to try drilling through a metal door that was right outside her bedroom.
There was one more factor that aroused police suspicions. Jennifer’s name and address turned up a still active file that connected her with the attempted murder of her sister. She was the one who lived in the same building with her sister’s assailant and frequented at least two of his workplaces. It seemed strange that a potential perpetrator had suddenly become a victim; or that two sisters living in different parts of the city would be victimized in roughly the same way within a few months. Of course it could be a coincidence. But it was just as likely that there was some connection.
The next morning, Catherine rushed into Jennifer’s office with a shower of sympathy. “How awful … how terrifying! Did you have any idea? Do the police have any clues?”
Jennifer mentioned that she suspected someone had been in her apartment before. She told Catherine about the missing divorce document.
Catherine saw the same possibilities that the attorneys had raised. Could someone have stolen the document to delay the divorce? And if that same person had succeeded in killing her before she was divorced, then the beneficiary would obviously be—
“Padraig,” Jennifer said, finishing her sister’s thought. “Peter was hinting at the same thing. Who benefits if I die while I’m still married to Padraig O’Connell? It’s the same conclusion the two of you jumped to when I had the auto accident. It has to be Padraig, that conscienceless, moneygrubbing monster who’s making a fool out of Jennifer. Why else would he be paying any attention to her if he wasn’t after her money?”
Catherine was offended. “I wasn’t thinking anything like that. It’s just that it certainly would be convenient for him. But of course it could be someone else.” Then she asked the question that Jennifer had been struggling with: “Who else might it be?”
That was where Jennifer’s theories fell apart. Peter and Catherine were the last people who would want her to die before the divorce went through. Nothing would frighten them more than the prospect of Padraig O’Connell in their boardroom. So, who else was there? One of the legion of Padraig’s enemies? Not likely. He was highly visible in Hollywood, where he was completing his film. Anyone with a score to settle would take care of it out on the Coast. And why would one of his enemies want to harm her? She and Padraig hadn’t been together in month
s. Who could possibly know that she had lent him a bit of money or that she was still hesitating over their divorce?
Padraig called her seconds after Catherine had left her office. “Jesus, but someone has it in for you girls.”
“It may just be a coincidence,” she tried, but he would hear none of it.
“Coincidence, my arse! Someone broke in on your sister a few months ago, and now this. There’s a lunatic out there somewhere with a terrible grudge against the two of you.”
“If you try to tell me that it’s Peter Barnes—” she started, but he interrupted.
“I’m not trying to tell you anything, although I wouldn’t mind stretching that bastard on the rack or holding his feet into a fire. I’ll bet he could tell a story or two. But I don’t care about him. It’s you that worries me. Why don’t you come out here where you can see the results of your loan? You’d love the movie that’s coming together, and while you’re here, I could keep an eye on you.”
“Not yet, Padraig. I’m not ready to spend that much time together.”
“Look, I’ll move out of the beach house so you can move in. And I’ll hire round-the-clock security people. When you come to Hollywood to see the film, you’ll be in a dark theater. You won’t even know I’m there.”
She had to laugh at the outrageous offer. Then she realized that she hadn’t laughed at anything since the last time he was in her apartment. “Tempting,” she said, “but I’m busy here. And I won’t let myself be driven off. There are decisions I have to make, and I want to be sure I make them for the right reasons.”
“Well, if you can’t come here, then I’ll go there. I’ll sleep outside your door.”
“You have a picture to finish. I have all the security I need.”
He started back into his argument for her to come to California. He promised to get Sylvester Stallone as her bodyguard.
“Goodbye, Padraig,” she said to cut him off, and hung up.
Good Sister, The Page 22