Good Sister, The

by Diana Diamond

  “Did you want him to die?” Jennifer asked after a long silence.

  “No, but I wanted to get away from him. And the fire made it easy.”

  Neither sister seemed to understand, so Peter Barnes went back to the beginning and tried to put some soul into the body of the investigators’ report.

  In the seventies, some of the teenagers in California had stopped hopping up their automobiles in favor of building computers. The internal combustion engine was reaching its physical limitations no matter how they bored the chambers or tricked the valves. The computer, on the other hand, had just reached day one. The integrated circuit had arrived, and solidstate memory was replacing wire and iron cores. String a few components together and find an old television set and you could play Ping-Pong on the screen. Or, if you could write a few lines of code, you might be able to create a database for your baseball cards.

  Within a few months, high school kids could do more with a circuit board than the engineers at IBM. They were meeting at clubs, swapping ideas, and then building crude computers with names like Apple, and Apricot, and Acorn in their garages. Soon Wall Street investment bankers were standing around the garages trying to buy in on some of the better ideas.

  “Dan Holland and I had a desktop computer with a built-in tape drive that took tiny tape cartridges,” Peter told them, smiling at the memory of their impractical idea. “The programming language was impossible, and the hardware clinked and clunked like a record changer. But still, we got seed money. The bankers were covering the table.”

  Peter had tried to make the machine work, but his partner had found a new love even more exotic than the computer. The laser had been invented, and Dan Holland had immersed himself in the wonders of coded light. Peter had argued with him, pleading for him to throw his efforts into saving their computer. Instead, Holland had built a system to bounce light beams around inside the garage. “Cool, huh?” he had said to Peter, smiling. Peter had screamed in frustration.

  “He was right, of course. We were hopelessly behind any number of people with our computer. There was no sense in killing ourselves over a second-rate concept. But still, it galled me to see him putting on light shows while I was busting my butt. I knew I needed to find another partner, but Dan and I had been friends since grade school. I couldn’t just cut him out.”

  Then, one day, Dan had wrapped the entire garage in pencil-thin beams of blue light. “How many damned lasers did you buy?” Peter had demanded, and had been stunned when his friend explained that it was all the same laser. What he had done was dope a few filters so that when one laser beam went in, two came out.

  “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Peter told the sisters. “The color of the light wasn’t changed, and as far as we could tell, there was no dropoff in energy. You could split one beam into two, and then two into four, and four into eight. It was like the loaves and the fishes. We could take one optical signal and send it to eight users.”

  Peter had put the computer aside to work with Dan on the light-wave splitters. In less than a month they had made a dozen eight-to-one multipliers and figured out exactly how to make them in quantity. Peter had filed for the patent in their company’s name. They had shown the concept to investment bankers who were positively salivating.

  “Then,” Peter went on, “Dan came up with another brainstorm. ‘Who wants to do business with telephone companies? We can take our equipment and do light shows for rock groups. We can go on tour. Know the stars. Have our picks of the groupies.’ We had a billion-dollar business right in our hands, and Dan wanted to drive around the country in an old Volks bus setting up light shows! I needed technical proposals for bankers, and Dan wanted to light the stages for rock bands.”

  They had come to a parting and pretty much decided to break up their company. But there was one problem. Bankers wouldn’t invest in a technology unless they controlled the patents, and Peter couldn’t deliver on Dan’s rights. They couldn’t buy him out because Dan didn’t care about the money. He wanted patent protection to keep someone else from doing the lighting for tour groups.

  “That’s where we were at the time of the fire,” Peter continued. “At an impasse. I was dealing with investors who had cash in their hands, and Dan was wiring the garage for ‘the most spectacular laser demonstration of all time.’ He dragged me over to the garage to see it. ‘Sit right here,’ he told me, and he set up a beach chair in the middle of the doorway. Then he went into the back of the garage behind a black curtain he had hung floor to ceiling. Here we were on the verge of owning the market for an important technology, and Dan was all excited about a light show in a garage.”

  He shook his head at the absurdity. How could you explain such things? The bonds of a lifelong friendship had tied him to a boy who refused to grow up.

  “‘Are you ready?’ he called from behind the curtain. ‘Yeah, I’m ready,’ I answered, determined not to show any enthusiasm. I heard a click. A second later, the curtain turned into a wall of fire. I jumped up and started into the garage. ‘Dan, what happened? Are you all right?’ He never answered, and I never got any further. All of a sudden the rat’s nest of wires that he had tacked along the walls and the rafters began hissing and burst into flames. Smoke was billowing, and the temperature shot up until it felt like an oven. I turned and ran, tripping over the beach chair on my way out. And then I just sat there on the ground, watching the place burn until the heat drove me back. It took only a few minutes—ten at the most—for the garage to collapse and the roaring fire to settle down into tiny flames flaring up out of the ashes. There was no sign of Dan, or of the equipment. They couldn’t even identify the body. They had to take my word that Dan was the only one inside.”

  Barnes looked up sadly at his riveted audience.

  “It was an accident,” Jennifer said, conviction obvious in her voice.

  “The fire? Absolutely! Probably one of the transformers he used to raise the voltage exploded. My guess is that he threw the power switch and was instantly engulfed in the flames. Or maybe he was electrocuted before the fire hit him. That might explain why I didn’t hear him scream. Why he never made a sound. It was an accident, pure and simple, at least as far as it goes.”

  “What more is there?” Catherine asked him.

  He slipped off his glasses and, in a familiar gesture, pinched the bridge of his nose. They had seen him do it many times before, always when he was about to announce a decision in some matter.

  “What more is there? Well, there’s the question of whether or not I could have saved him. I was less than twenty feet away from him when the fire started. So you could make a case that I might have gotten burned but I certainly could have gotten him out the door. Even if he had been on fire, I might have been able to roll him on the ground, smother the flames, and save his life.”

  “And you might have been trapped inside with him,” Jennifer pointed out. “No one can blame you for not running into a roaring fire.”

  “No one has blamed me. At least not officially. But there’s another question that’s even harder to answer: Did I want to rescue my best friend? Because, you see, in less than a week I had all the capital I needed. And within a year I was on the cover of Information Week. But if Dan had survived, who knows. I might be doing laser shows for the Rolling Stones.”

  “Did you want to rescue him?” Catherine asked.

  He held up his hands helplessly. “A hundred things may have gone through my mind in the ten minutes it took the garage to burn to the ground. One of them was certainly the realization that I now had complete control over the most valuable patent in telecommunications. But the fact speaks for itself. I made no effort to get back inside the garage.”

  He stood slowly, as if exhausted by the tale he had just told. The weight of his guilt was visible. “So, that’s it. Don’t rush to judgment. I like working with you and I very much like what we’ve built together. I’m not anxious to leave. But if you’re uncomfortable trusting your future to
someone with a track record of failing his friends, I’ll understand. There are times when I find it hard to trust myself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Catherine snapped. “Our father trusted you completely, and Jennifer and I owe you more than we could ever repay.”

  He gave a brief nod of gratitude and glanced at Jennifer.

  “This changes nothing, as far as I’m concerned. I agree completely with Catherine.”

  They heard him sigh, a gasp of weakness that they had never seen in Peter before. “I think,” he said, “that we each get one chance at greatness: one clear-cut opportunity to show someone that we care more about him than we do about ourselves. That fire was my opportunity, and I have to live with the knowledge that I fucked up. I keep hoping that I’ll have another chance.”

  He was standing by his window while Catherine and Jennifer moved quietly out of his office. It was Catherine who turned at the last minute.

  “Peter, who was it that was trying to blackmail you?”

  He met her eyes from across his office. “I’d rather not say.”

  “It was Padraig, wasn’t it?” Jennifer followed.

  He thought for an instant and then decided, “I’d rather not say.”

  Jennifer couldn’t find peace with the idea that her husband may have been trying to blackmail her mentor. For years Peter had been the man in her life, the big brother who had guided her into adulthood and launched her career.

  But then he had become something more. She had gone through romantic fascination, and then into a full-scale crush. He was older than she, of course, and it seemed nearly obscene to be fantasizing about someone who had only recently been her teacher and protector. She should have come straight out and told him her feelings. But the bottom line was that she was his boss, and she didn’t want to put him in the awkward situation of explaining why he wasn’t interested. So she had taken a much more subtle approach, hinting that she might welcome his advances.

  She had edged into his road-rallying, learning the right-seat navigator’s role. They had scored well in two or three events and he had seemed delighted with her company. Or was he just paying deference to a major stockholder? He had invited her aboard his boat for the racing season, and if she hadn’t become a competent yachtsman, she had at least served as a decent deckhand. While riding at the mooring one night, after a twilight race, she had given him his opportunity. “Do you ever sleep aboard?” she had asked.

  “Sure. In the summer months it beats an air-conditioned apartment. Open a hatch and let the wind rush through. The rocking motion. And then the tinkling of the rigging. It’s a great night’s sleep.”

  Was he going to invite her to stay aboard? She had actually thought she could see him framing the invitation. But he had decided that he needed to get work done for a morning meeting and had picked up the radio to call for the yacht-club launch.

  On another occasion he had driven her home after a regatta on the New Jersey shore. “Come up. I’ll make you a cup of coffee,” Jennifer had offered. He had gone as far as her doorway but then had turned back. Reluctantly, she had finally admitted that he didn’t share her interest. Or, if he did, his concern for the company was much stronger than his passion for her. She had given up trying, although she still wondered if he ever thought about her.

  But she had been enraged when he had tried to implicate Padraig in her accident. And now she was equally enraged by the thought that her husband had threatened to destroy Peter.

  She challenged Padraig when he came east for a weekend. They were having breakfast at her loft, each involved with a cup of black coffee at the butcher-block kitchen table. “Padraig, did you threaten Peter with things from his past?”

  He looked up uncertainly. “Did I what?”

  “Did you threaten to tell Catherine and me about the death of his partner in a fire?”

  “Certainly not!” He seemed hurt by the suggestion.

  “Well, did you know about his partner? And about the fire?”

  He paused uneasily. Then, “Yes, I knew about it. It’s no great secret.”

  Jennifer answered, “It’s been a secret as far as I’m concerned. I’ve known Peter for ten years and I never heard about it.”

  “His partner had a lot of friends in the entertainment business,” Padraig explained. “I suppose that’s why the story made the rounds out on the Coast.”

  “When did you first hear it?” Jennifer persisted.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think I remember it from way back. And then someone brought it up when I first began mentioning your name and praising your virtues.” He had recovered from his initial shock. The brogue was creeping back into his voice.

  “But you never told Peter that you knew?”

  “Not in so many words. But I must admit that I was dearly pissed off when I found that he had put his detectives on me. And I may have said something about people in glass houses. Intemperate, perhaps, but certainly not threatening. I’m really not one to dredge up someone’s past, what with all the skeletons trying to kick their way out of my closets.”

  He seemed not to give the issue another thought during the day. They went down to the seaport and joined lines of tourists, lunched on clam chowder and crackers, and then took a cab to a showing of an artist Jennifer liked. They dined in the backyard garden of a small Italian restaurant while the owner’s wife paraded the neighbors by so they could sigh over the movie star. And finally, they went back to her apartment, where they sipped wine in the bathtub and made love while their bodies were still wet.

  But on Sunday, while he was packing for his trip back to California, he returned to the charges of blackmail. “Now remember, darlin’, don’t believe everything that your dear friend Peter says about me. And I’ll give no mind to the rumors about you luring Boy Scouts into your bedroom.”

  “What would Peter say about you?”

  “Well, so far only that I’m a murderer and a blackmailer. There are any number of felonies left that he can choose from.”

  “Peter didn’t say that you tried to kill me. That’s what the company’s security people implied. And he didn’t call you a blackmailer. He said someone was blackmailing him about his past, and I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t you.”

  He closed the suitcase and snapped the latches ceremoniously. “I suppose he doesn’t hate me. After all, he’s given me a very generous business deal, even though I’m a bargain at any price. But he sees me as unworthy of your affections. And that, I think, is because he’d like to have you for himself.”

  “Peter?” She hadn’t entertained the notion of Peter wanting her for quite some time. “He’s never even shown an interest in Catherine, much less me. He’s never been interested in any woman for more than a few months.”

  She put him in a cab at her front door, then walked to the subway for her trip to the Upper East Side, where she was joining Catherine for dinner. Catherine had set the café table on her balcony with a view of the East River.

  “The good silver,” Jennifer teased, “and on the maid’s night out.”

  “I see you dressed for sandwiches in the kitchen,” Catherine countered. They both laughed at the contrast, Jennifer in jeans and a sweater while Catherine was in her basic black with a knotted string of pearls. They worked together in the kitchen, Jennifer tossing the salad while Catherine sautéed the fish, then they carried their plates to the balcony.

  “Padraig was the one who threatened Peter,” Jennifer said as soon as they had begun eating. Catherine looked up abruptly but said nothing.

  “He didn’t make a big deal out of it. Just tit for tat because Peter was making insinuations about him. But I think Padraig was lying when he said he just happened to come across the information. I think he’s been digging.”

  Catherine’s fork dangled in midair. Jennifer gave up all pretense of eating. “I suppose I knew that he was a braggart and a philanderer. In a crazy way, that’s part of his appeal. But I never guessed how much it would hurt. I know
he’s lying about the blackmail. And I’m tired of his explaining everything away with his damn phony blarney. I’m not casting a movie. I’m trying to put together a life.”

  Now Catherine set down her fork. “There was something I was going to get into later. But we’re talking about it now, and I don’t think either of us is very hungry.”

  “Oh God, is it bad?”

  “It’s about your husband, and it isn’t good. I’m afraid you’re going to hate me.”

  “You? You’re involved?”

  “We’ve both been taken in,” Catherine said, “by the same damn phony blarney.”

  They left the balcony and went inside to the den that was a cross between an art gallery and a library.

  “I’ll fix a drink,” Catherine offered as they passed the bar.

  Jennifer shook her head. “No thanks.”

  “You’re going to need it.”

  “Scotch, then,” Jennifer decided.

  Catherine laughed. “We’ve both picked up your husband’s lousy habits.”

  She began by explaining her plan. She had become convinced that O’Connell was a schemer, desperate for money, and that he had married Jennifer with money in mind. Jennifer bristled but continued to listen while her sister once again linked Padraig to the auto accident. “It was inescapable to Peter and obvious to me. We both felt you were in real danger. That’s why we stopped pressing for the marital agreement, and why we decided to give Padraig another source of revenue. We put up the money he needed so he wouldn’t have to get it from you.”

  “Did it ever cross your mind that I might want to share my money with my husband?” Jennifer interrupted.

  “It crossed my mind every day. And I kept telling myself that it wasn’t my business. But we weren’t going to let him break the company, and we didn’t want him to end up breaking your heart. It seemed like something we had to do.”

  “You and Peter?”

  “No. It was my plan. Peter didn’t agree with it. He didn’t want you hurt, but he thought our butting in might hurt you even more.”