Good Sister, The

by Diana Diamond

  “Not that I remember,” Catherine said.

  One detective scribbled notes. The other went on with the questioning. “Will Ferris is his name. Does that ring any bells?”

  Catherine was still examining the photo. She shook her head.

  “He’s an actor. Song-and-dance man. You’re involved with the theater, aren’t you, Miss Pegan?”

  “Yes. Legitimate theater and movies.”

  “And you never came across him in casting calls?”

  She refocused on the photo and again shook her head.

  The detective turned to Jennifer. “Does he look familiar to you, ma’am?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Well, vaguely familiar. But I don’t know where I would have seen him.”

  “How about the downtown rehab center?” the policeman went on.

  Jennifer recoiled. “The rehab center? I went there after my accident. To swim and exercise my leg.”

  He handed her the picture. “Take your time. Did you know him?”

  Jennifer studied the picture. The detectives studied Jennifer. Catherine looked from one side to the other.

  Jennifer shook her head. “Maybe, but I can’t be sure. There are a lot of temps down there. He certainly wasn’t one of my trainers.”

  “How about the Peachtree Restaurant?” the detective pressed. “It’s near the rehab center. He was a waiter there.” He centered the picture directly in front of her.

  “I had coffee there in the mornings. But I don’t think I ever saw him there. As I said, he’s familiar, but I can’t place him. I’m positive I never spoke to him.”

  The detective leaned in closer. “Not even in your elevator?”

  Jennifer was startled.

  “He lived in your building. He had an apartment on the second floor.”

  Her hand went to her mouth. She looked from the detective back to the picture and then turned her eyes to her sister. “I can’t believe it. Honestly, I don’t know this person.”

  The detective kept his eyes riveted on Jennifer. Then he nodded and put the picture back into the envelope. “Look, there were a lot of places where you could have seen this guy. If you remember anything specific, give me a call, okay?”

  She nodded.

  He turned back to Catherine. “We’re pretty well convinced he was hired. He put ten thousand dollars into his checking account two weeks ago. He had no acting jobs, and he was working for tips at the restaurant and at the rehab center. So he came into some quick money.”

  “Ten thousand dollars? He would have killed me for ten thousand dollars?” Catherine was insulted that her life could be bought for such a paltry sum.

  “His balance had been bouncing around between a hundred dollars and one-fifty. Ten thousand dollars would have looked like a fortune.”

  Peter arrived shortly after the detectives left, expecting to find Catherine in a fog from her sedatives. Instead, he found her angry that someone had hired an amateur to kill her. She and Jennifer explained the evidence pointing to a hired killer. Jennifer was still flabbergasted by the fact that the assassin had lived in her building. As he listened, Peter’s mood grew darker. He was snarling by the time the women ran out of information.

  “Have they figured out who’s responsible?” His tone indicated that it was no mystery to him.

  Catherine shook her head and shrugged. Jennifer said, “Right now I think I’m the prime suspect.”

  “No one has mentioned Padraig O’Connell?” There was disgust in his voice.

  “Padraig? He’s in California,” Catherine said.

  Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “Peter, what is it with you and O’Connell? He’s a bastard, but he doesn’t have the courage to kill anyone.”

  Peter walked around the bed, spent a moment at the window, and then turned back to the sisters. “Doesn’t it seem odd that whenever one of you gets involved with him, something dangerous happens? Jennifer has a one-in-a-million accident, and then an amateur hit man turns up in Catherine’s apartment.” He looked at Jennifer. “He wanted your money.” He shifted to Catherine. “And he wants you out of his production company. O’Connell would have been the beneficiary in each case.”

  The sisters glanced at each other and then back to Peter. “I don’t buy it,” Jennifer said. “I think”—she looked at Catherine—“I hope that I know him better than either of you. He never walks on the lawn, because he’s afraid to kill the grass.”

  “And the man has style,” Catherine joined in. “If he were hiring a hit man, he’d hire the best.”

  “So this is just coincidence,” Peter said sarcastically. “Two sisters. Two near tragedies.” They both looked back at him blankly.

  “Okay, I’ll see you back at our office. But do me a favor, Jennie, and get your divorce finalized. Every day that he’s your heir is frightening. And as for you, Catherine, my original idea stands. Let’s buy him out and be rid of him.” Peter left and closed the door carefully behind him.

  He was surprised when he reached his apartment late that night and found an urgent call from Catherine. He called her back at the hospital and heard her whispering into the telephone.

  “Can you hear me, Peter?”

  “I’ll hear better if you speak louder.”

  “I don’t want the nurses to hear me. I’m under the covers. Try to listen.”

  Catherine told him all the details of the interview with the detectives. She emphasized how evasive Jennifer had been when viewing pictures of her assailant. And then she laid out the improbable coincidences of the man having worked at Jennifer’s gym, waited tables at her coffee shop, and lived in her building. “How could she not have recognized the picture?”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “You know damn well what I’m suggesting. Didn’t you tell me that she said I had stolen her husband? Didn’t she think I was rubbing her nose in it? And she told me she’d get back at me. She said I had gone too far.”

  “Catherine, your sister doesn’t hate you.”

  “Damn it, Peter, we go back a long way before you were part of the family. She’s always been jealous. Always hateful. I could tell you some of the truly terrible things that she’s done to me. Remind me to tell you about field hockey.”

  Peter sighed. “I don’t want to hear about field hockey. And I don’t want to hear any more accusations against Jennifer.”

  “You asked me about those pictures. The ones Jennifer mentioned. She kept the most revealing one to send to Padraig, but I have the others. They’re in my desk file drawer. The key is in the wine chiller. Peter, you have to look at them. They show me in bed with Padraig. I think they might have made her mad enough to have me killed.”

  “Jesus.” Peter’s voice sagged. “You and Padraig?”

  “Someone sent them to her. I didn’t know they existed until she showed them to me.”

  “Catherine, I don’t want to see the pictures, and I think it was a terrible mistake for you to let yourself get involved with her husband.”

  “Maybe it was. But that’s not the point. If she tried to kill me once, what’s to stop her from trying again?”

  Peter’s patience was breaking. “I’m going to hang up now, Catherine. I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about Jennifer trying to kill you.” He hung up, leaving Catherine to reach out from under the covers and tap the hook switch.

  Peter visited Catherine early the next morning and again refused her request to look at the photos. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “They’re inflammatory. But they wouldn’t change my mind. Jennifer never hired the man in your apartment.”

  “Then who did?” she demanded. “For God’s sake, Peter, the guy lived in her building. He managed her gym.”

  “I’m not saying that he didn’t learn about you from Jennifer, or that he might not have picked your key off Jennifer’s key ring. I’m just saying that he acted on his own. I won’t believe that she hired him.”

  “And where did he get the ten thousand dollars, out of
her wallet? It’s obvious, Peter. Someone paid him to kill me, and Jennifer was the only one who knew him.”

  When he reached Pegasus, Peter went straight to Catherine’s office, retrieved the key from the wine chiller, and opened her file drawer. He took the photos back to his desk. He had a prurient moment when he saw Catherine naked and followed her through the sequence of sex. But his real focus was on how the pictures would have struck Jennifer. He remembered that at the time Jennifer had been deeply committed to Padraig still, and that she had been spending weekends with her husband. Realistically she might have wondered about his fidelity, but romantically she probably visualized him ignoring the advances of ambitious women and working late hours to get his struggling business off the ground. She knew that he had “run into” Catherine out on the Coast, and knew that Catherine had decided to invest in his business. Nothing in that scenario would have prepared her for the photos. An ambitious tart she might have gotten over. Her own sister straddling her husband was certainly cause for murder.

  Most women probably would have turned their gun on the husband. But Jennifer knew Padraig’s vulnerabilities and certainly understood Catherine’s domineering personality. It was far more likely that her sister had offered the apple than that her husband had come up with the idea. Certainly she had gone into near shock, as evidenced by her withdrawal from her friends and her career. Was it unthinkable, then, that in her rage and humiliation, Jennifer might have thought of the fledgling actor who was desperate for a payday?

  Peter could visualize the meeting. The key. The layout of the penthouse. Catherine’s schedule. The housekeeper’s night off. The money in untraceable cash. Perhaps even the promise of a screen test with Padraig O’Connell. Padraig wouldn’t refuse, with two thirds of his company in the hands of Pegasus Satellite Services. For a rejected actor, the price was probably more than generous.

  He checked the backs of the photos. As he suspected, there were no print numbers or studio identification that might lead to the photographer. Even the paper manufacturer’s logo was missing. Just cheap prints that could have been processed in a closet.

  Certainly they had been taken in Hollywood, where Catherine and Padraig were alone together. But the envelope had been mailed from New York’s largest and most anonymous post office. Either the photographer was from New York or the person who ordered the photos had a contact in New York. There certainly wasn’t much to go on.

  And yet this was a career-making assignment. This wasn’t just some bored husband having an affair with his secretary or a housewife cheating on a traveling husband. This was a Hollywood leading man whose physical prowess had been vastly enlarged by special effects. Everything the man did was industry gossip and a news feature on the television tabloid shows. A photographer or a detective hired to photograph Padraig O’Connell in sexual ecstasy probably would have made a few extra prints for bragging rights. He might not be able to let such a special assignment go unnoticed.

  Peter would get his security people working on it. They had failed Jennifer and had fallen down on the job of protecting Catherine. But they had contacts and could quickly cover the less artistic photographers on both coasts. If he could find out who had ordered the pictures, then he could either prove his case against Padraig or learn who was really destroying the Pegasus heiresses.

  Padraig phoned Catherine with expressions of concern. He pleaded the press of critical negotiations as the reason for not rushing to her bedside. But in fact he was afraid of coming face-to-face with Jennifer. He had crushed her, he knew, beyond forgiveness. The only caring gesture he could offer would be to vanish from her sight.

  “I can’t understand how it could happen,” he said. “A penthouse with more security than Fort Knox. How did the bastard even get into the building, much less into your apartment?”

  “It was someone who knew me. The police think he was hired to kill me.”

  “What?” he screamed, forcing Catherine to pull back from the handset. “That’s deplorable. Much as I’d enjoy boiling you in oil, I can’t imagine anyone hiring a killer. Do you have any enemies who happen to be Italian?”

  “This isn’t a joke, Padraig. Someone paid him ten thousand dollars to throw me off my balcony.”

  A pause, and then O’Connell burst out laughing. “Only ten thousand dollars? Your pride must be hurting more than your head.”

  “Padraig …”

  He was laughing uncontrollably. “Jesus, but I never knew that hit men held sales. What do you think, darlin’? Weekend rates?”

  She slammed down the phone.

  Catherine left the hospital that evening. She couldn’t return to her penthouse because the police still had rooms cordoned off with orange tape, and the painted outline of Will Ferris’s crumpled body still decorated the kitchen floor. Jennifer volunteered her loft, offering to move out so that her sister could bring in her housekeeper and nurse. But Catherine refused, claiming she didn’t want to be a bother. She knew she could never fall asleep in a place where Jennifer had the key to the front door. Instead, she took a suite at a Trump hotel and had Peter hire a security officer who sat outside in the hallway.

  She kept the nurse nearby when Jennifer came to visit and received her in the living room, where there would be a constant flow of traffic.

  “You’re looking better,” Jennifer told her. Catherine’s hand went up to her face. “I mean, it’s still discolored and swollen, but your eye is open. At the hospital I could hardly recognize you.”

  “I look like a Star Trek alien,” Catherine answered. “That bastard friend of yours nearly beat me to death.”

  Jennifer smiled and shook her head. “He wasn’t a friend of mine. I may have seen him a couple of times, but I don’t think we ever exchanged a word.”

  There was a long, awkward pause. Catherine finally spoke. “Have you forgiven me for … Padraig?”

  “No. In all our years, that was the hardest you ever hit me. But now I’m just as mad at him. So maybe you opened my eyes. Maybe you showed me that I don’t really have a husband.”

  “I swear, that’s what I wanted to do. I just couldn’t let you throw your life at a man who was using you.”

  Jennifer turned away. “That doesn’t make me feel any better, Catherine. I enjoy pretending that he cared for me at least a little, even if it’s obvious that he didn’t.”

  “My God, you aren’t still in love with him.”

  Jennifer smiled ironically. “No, not in love. Not after what he did to us.”

  “Us?” Catherine was stunned by the thought that Padraig O’Connell had done something to her.

  “Who do you think hired the man who attacked you?”

  “Padraig? You think Padraig hired him?”

  “Well, he tried to kill me, didn’t he?” Jennifer reasoned. “Isn’t that what the investigators said? I keep thinking of Peter’s comment. Each of us almost got killed as soon as we got involved with him. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  “Padraig?” Catherine asked again. The thought seemed too difficult to comprehend. Then she said, as if to dismiss the notion, “He wasn’t using me. I was using him.”

  “Maybe that’s what you thought. Maybe the great screen hero is smarter than either of us gave him credit for being. He used both of us. If Peter is right, he tried to kill me for the money, and when that didn’t work, he got you to put up the money. And when you moved into his limelight, he decided to get rid of you.”

  “That’s asinine!” But even as she said it, Catherine realized that it might be true. Padraig O’Connell had an expansive self-image, and she had been less than genteel in walking on his turf. He needed her, and he had clearly paid deference to her. But had she come on too fast in trying to establish her own credentials in Hollywood? Still, it didn’t make sense. Why would he try to destroy his best source of funding? Certainly he wouldn’t want Peter taking over her role in his production company.

  When her sister left, Catherine felt exhausted and returned to her
bed. But she tossed and turned sleeplessly. She had been so sure that Jennifer had finally come unstrung. Their rivalry was lifelong, always spiteful, at times fierce. She had always sensed her sister’s jealousy and been careful never to push it too far. But this time she might have erred. Exposing Jennifer’s husband was one thing, but injecting herself into their marriage had been a dangerous way to prove Padraig’s infidelity. Until an hour before, she had been nearly convinced that Jennifer had tried to kill her.

  But now she had to consider the possibility that it might have been Padraig. Peter, whose judgment she had always trusted, had no doubts. Two near deaths of the women O’Connell was involved with only confirmed the implications of the investigators’ report on the auto accident. Now Jennifer had advanced the same conclusion, for different reasons. She had based her judgment on O’Connell’s fierce pride. Catherine knew that she had abused that pride.

  The difference, Catherine thought, was that the assailant had ties to her sister. Padraig, she reasoned, had no way of knowing a part-time actor, waiter, and gym rat who lived on the other side of the continent. How could he have hired Will Ferris? But then she remembered that O’Connell had, for a time, lived in Jennifer’s apartment. Maybe he was the one who had met Ferris in the elevator. Or chatted with him in the lobby while Jennifer was busy swimming laps.

  TWELVE

  PADRAIG CAME east the following week when the police lines were down and Catherine was able to get back into her apartment.

  “Jay-sus,” he announced when he saw her face. “You look as if you’re made up to play one of Macbeth’s witches. Was it a baseball bat he took to you?”

  She wasn’t entertained. “I thought I was looking better,” she said. And she was. She had the remnants of a black eye and a purple cast to her cheekbone. But the swelling was gone, and the awful green bruises had vanished completely.

  He took her in his arms, hugged her, and rocked her gently. “You’re a bossy lady,” he whispered, “but I must say I’ve grown fond of you. Like a man who loves his dog even though it pees on the rug.”