Good Sister, The

by Diana Diamond

  Catherine pushed him away, but when she saw the wide grin of his perfect teeth, she had to laugh. “I have been awful, haven’t I.”

  “Oh, no! Don’t be talking that way, lass. You’re like butter melting in my mouth.”

  “I’ve been a perfect bitch!”

  “That’s the word I was looking for.”

  She pushed him into a chair, kissed his forehead, and then sat next to him. “Padraig, who could have done such a thing? It’s so cold-blooded. So ghastly.”

  “Oh, darlin’, from what I understand, all the hit men were getting offers. Everyone wanted to see you go over the balcony rail.”

  “Damn it,” she snapped. “Stop playing the fool. I’m frightened. Someone is trying to kill me.”

  He took her hand. “Sorry, love. I was just trying to cheer you up. But I’m frightened myself. All I’ve been thinking about is who might be behind it. And I haven’t any answers. Lots of people have made my bile boil, but I never could kill anyone. I have no idea what it takes to pull a trigger.”

  “Or to cut a brake line?” she asked directly.

  He was stunned into a rare moment of silence. Then, in a very soft voice with no trace of his brogue, “Is that what you think? That I tried for your sister and then settled for you?”

  She looked away.

  Padraig reached out and turned her chin roughly until she was facing him. “Don’t turn away from me, Catherine, not after accusing me of murder. Put it straight. Do you really think I tried to kill Jennifer? Do you think I could ever have hired some loser to throw you off your balcony? Because, by God, if that’s what you think, then there isn’t enough money in the whole damn family to keep us together.”

  Catherine pulled her face out of his grasp. “I just don’t know—”

  “That’s not good enough,” he said, his voice hard as stone. “I’ve put up with your love of the limelight, and I’ve taken insults that I have never taken from any living person. Money, to be sure! Your damn money has made it all possible. But I’ve never sold out for money. The fact is that in my own perverse way, I love you. I love your talent, and I love your daring. And that buys a lot of patience, dear girl.”

  “Padraig …” She was unsure what she should say.

  “Don’t talk!” he ordered. “Just listen. Whatever it is that I feel for you, I know it isn’t murder. So if you have any doubts, let’s hear them. I’ll catch the first plane out of here and the ripped-up pieces of our agreement will come to you in the next mail.”

  Catherine’s eyes were filling, a sight Padraig had never witnessed. “Padraig, it’s been awful … so confusing. Peter said that something terrible happened to each of us when we were involved with you. Jennifer said—”

  “Peter!” He cut her off abruptly, nearly screaming the name. “That sycophant son of a bitch. What kind of spell does he hold over you and your sister?”

  “He’s been our friend for as long as—”

  “Your friend? He’s been living fat off the two of you since you were children, and you still haven’t figured him out!”

  “We trust him. He’s looking after our interests.”

  “Catherine, my love, can you imagine a cozier deal than dear Peter has made for himself? He runs your company like a private fiefdom. He pays himself handsomely, and he never has to answer to the shareholders. He got his start stealing his partner’s patent and made himself a big man by using your father’s ideas and your money. You don’t really think he wants to share all that with a scoundrel like me, do you?”

  “Peter couldn’t do this to me …”

  “He could if it meant getting rid of me. Don’t you see? I’ve become a rival to a man who allows no rivals. When Jennifer brought me into the family, her car went over a cliff. And when you bring me into the business, you nearly go over the balcony railing.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  He pointed his finger at her forehead. “Think, for God’s sake. What could I possibly gain by killing you? With Jennifer, it was easy to show that I had a motive. But you’re the one who’s been financing me and bringing in the material and the talent. If something happens to you, then I’m partners with a man who hates me. And he and a woman I wronged are holding the purse strings. The fact is that it’s in my best interests to take a bullet for you, not to drop you into the East River.”

  She took his hand. “Padraig, I really didn’t think it was you. I thought that maybe Jennifer hated me so much …”

  “Jennifer? Catherine, how can you think that? The woman is afraid of the sound of her own voice.”

  “You don’t really know her. All our lives she’s been jealous of me. She’s done terrible things without ever losing her angelic smile.”

  “You’re daft. If she hates anyone, it’s me, and with good reason. I’m the one Jennifer would love to see come to a ghastly end, not you.”

  “But—”

  Padraig put his finger to her lips. “Just let me finish. You and Jennifer are big girls now. You’re both well educated, very experienced, and bright as hell. Neither of you needs a full-time baby-sitter, which is the only service that Peter Barnes provides. You’d both be a lot safer if you gave him a nice retirement package and sent him packing. Let Jennifer run the satellite business. And you keep finding new customers that need satellite service. Maybe then you and your sister will be able to find a way to get back together.”

  He stayed the night with her, and Catherine enjoyed both the security and the affection. In the morning she found him standing in the kitchen, staring down at the floor. “Can you get someone in here to scrub this place down?” he asked her. “There’s still blood between the tiles.” He crossed to the service door and scratched the paint adjacent to the doorjamb. “Here, too,” he said. Then he turned to her. “God, but it must have been awful.” He made some calls to New York agents and spoke at length with a writer that he hoped to attach to one of his projects. Then he left for the airport and caught the late flight back to Los Angeles.

  Jennifer’s recovery ran parallel to Catherine’s. Gradually she emerged from her dark shell of silence, began spending more time with her staff, and returned Peter’s phone calls. When Catherine came back to the office, wearing a scarf over her hair and dark sunglasses to hide her nearly invisible wounds, Jennifer joined her in meetings. At the regular meetings in Peter’s office, she chatted over a late-day glass of wine.

  Catherine brought studies that showed the increases in traffic on Pegasus III and, as a result of wider coverage, on all the company’s satellites. Just handling movie reruns for cable service was filling the available channels. “If we’re going to handle new film distribution,” she told her sister, “we better begin planning another satellite.”

  She had not yet ventured back to Hollywood. She had no intention of showing her face until the last traces of her beating had vanished. But she had been in daily contact with Padraig and his staff. “We’ve greenlighted two films,” she reported, “without any distribution agreements. We’re talking to screen owners about picking them off our satellites at about half the cost they usually front to the studios.”

  The two sisters talked about production schedules, and when channels would have to be cleared to handle the broadcasts. Peter sat back, listened, and raised a few questions. But it was clear that Catherine and Jennifer had matters firmly in hand.

  When they finished, he shrugged, indicating that he had no questions. “That’s it, then.” He smiled. “You have everything covered. Maybe it’s time for me to take a vacation. A long vacation.” Catherine remembered Padraig’s diatribe against the man who had shown them how to build their business. Maybe they didn’t really need him anymore. Was that what Peter was telling them?

  Padraig plunged into production of the two films, laboring over the locations, set designs, costumes, and special effects, assigning the myriad of production details to his underlings. As the location for the dark drama of the man obsessed with the young girl, they chose a struggli
ng private college in Pennsylvania, and the small backwater town that served it. The budget was minimal and the shooting schedule rushed. It wouldn’t make much money, but Padraig promised that it would earn critical acclaim. “We’ll be able to sell it for a song,” he told Catherine. “I think we’ll bring some of the independent screens and art theaters into the fold.”

  The boy and his dog, on the other hand, had grown wildly from the first concept. It was to be shot in Ireland against the background of the Irish civil war. Padraig had taken over an entire village in the rolling green country of Kilkenny and was in the process of returning it to its original 1920s character. He had also leased a landmark castle to serve as the decaying manor house of the former English landowner, and bought a herd of sheep to wander over the pastures. His budget was out of control from the first moment.

  Then the director had decided that any tale of Ireland had to include the land and the Church. For the land he planned overhead shots, following the hunt through valleys and across streams. “Three helicopters?” Catherine had howled when she saw the costs. “I didn’t know they had helicopters in the Irish civil war.” The shots of the Church had to show its intimacy with the life of the tenants, which meant that a church far removed from the village wouldn’t do. “You want to move a church?” Catherine had demanded. “Don’t we need some sort of permission from Rome?”

  “A small stipend,” Padraig had answered. “My God, woman, we can’t have a proper Irish village without the goddamned church!”

  As the principal photography began, a new list of expenses arrived. The stream that the horses jumped had run dry. They had to bring in water and a pump. Sheep were hard to see from the air, so cattle had to be substituted. And the dog had turned out to be less heroic than the script called for. He wouldn’t run into the burning barn, so they were investigating the use of a mechanical dog, which involved engineering and programming costs.

  “Jesus, Padraig, this is going to cost more than the real Irish civil war,” Catherine complained. She summoned him from California to New York and suggested that he pack his bags for Ireland.

  “Do we need to bring Peter back from his vacation?” Jennifer asked.

  Catherine bristled at the suggestion. “Padraig and I can handle this part of the business. What’s Peter going to do? Double for the dog?”

  Padraig arrived in Kilkenny with a new budget and the threat of a new director if the budget was overspent. He threw himself into every detail of the shooting, amending schedules, suggesting alternatives, and trying to get the production back on track. Catherine flew over frequently for business meetings that turned into shouting matches. Sometimes she won the point, dashing one of the director’s dreams. But more often Padraig was able to hold his own. “It’s a moment of beauty,” he said of one terribly complex landscape. “It will pay for itself in promotion stills.”

  When all else failed, he took Catherine to the castle and to a bedroom where he told her Edward and Mrs. Simpson had slept. “You told me it was Oliver Cromwell,” she reminded him. “I never said that,” he answered. “How could Oliver Cromwell have slept with Mrs. Simpson?” In the stone turret, furnished with a four-poster bed and tapestries and lighted by enormous candles, it was hard for Catherine not to believe that she was truly a princess. Padraig squeezed a few million dollars out of her by pressing her into the goosedown mattress.

  Jennifer, alarmed at the overruns, found Peter sailing in the Mediterranean. “We’re in trouble with the boy and his dog,” she said. “It’s beginning to look like the biggest overrun since Apocalypse Now.”

  “What does Catherine say?” he asked over the satellite telephone circuit.

  “That epics tend to be expensive. I think she knows they’re in trouble, but she hasn’t figured out how to reign in Padraig.”

  “I can’t stop them. They have two votes to my one.”

  “You and I can close the pipeline from the satellite company to the production company.”

  He hesitated. “Give me a few days to get back to you. I think I should meet with Catherine before we do anything.”

  After a night in the castle with Catherine, Padraig returned to the site and gave the go-ahead for a three-helicopter panorama shot. The boy would be carrying a message from one rebel leader to another and would race across a field that was to become the no-man’s-land between two banks of artillery. The concept was awesome, with Great War artillery pieces belching flame and smoke while preset explosive charges tore up the meadow. There would be many cuts to the boy’s face and to the barking dog, which could be staged with simulated blasts throwing mud in their faces. But for the aerial panorama, a stuntman double and a stand-in dog would run a precise path amid real explosions while the helicopters would capture the scene from different angles and altitudes.

  Padraig and Catherine spent the morning in walk-through rehearsals, making certain that the stuntman hit each of his marks and that the cameras were able to follow him. They were getting ready for their airborne run-through when a rental car rolled up to the site and Peter Barnes stepped out.

  Padraig nearly went into shock. “What’s that bastard doing here?” he demanded of Catherine.

  “He’s our partner,” she answered. “Don’t get excited. I’ll take care of him.” She rushed from the rehearsal conference down to the parking area and threw her arms around Peter. “What a surprise. I thought you were in a sailboat, out of touch with the world.”

  “I had enough sailing,” he lied. “I couldn’t figure what to do, and then I heard we were making a movie.”

  Catherine forced a smile. “From Jennifer, I suppose.”

  He nodded.

  “And I suppose she told you that we were overbudget?”

  “She did. But she didn’t seem concerned. Why do you ask? Have you spent everything we own?”

  They laughed as if the money were insignificant. Catherine took his arm and led him up the slope to where the helicopters were waiting. “You’re just in time,” she said. “We were about to take off for a run-through on a spectacular scene.” She filled him in on the details of the shot.

  “Live explosives?” he asked with a hint of apprehension.

  “Not now. We have to simulate the shot and see if we run into any problems. It’s a final rehearsal. But you can ride in one of the helicopters. It should be exciting.” They reached the gathering where Padraig was presiding. “Padraig, look who’s come to join us!”

  Only years of training enabled Padraig to form a genuine-looking smile. “Peter, what brings you here? Have your detectives turned up some new dirt?”

  “Just looking after my money,” Peter said, offering a handshake that lacked enthusiasm.

  Catherine jumped in. “I told him he was about to get an aerial view of what we were doing. Can he ride in one of the helicopters?”

  “Sure,” Padraig allowed. There was an empty seat next to the pilot in each of the choppers. Certainly there was room for the biggest backer.

  They gave Peter a windbreaker and strapped him into one of the photo helicopters. Padraig gave him a quick rundown on the setting, and what it was that they hoped to accomplish in the shot. Peter seemed more concerned with the latch on the seat belt. Then the photo crew took to their helicopters.

  Padraig lifted off first, sitting right behind the director. The helicopters took their positions on each side of the long meadow. “Action,” the director called into his microphone, and the stuntman broke out of a small thatched cottage and began running, pumping furiously to imitate the untrained gait of a young boy. Trailing behind him, fastened by a thin wire to his belt, came the dog.

  They ran in a zigzag pattern, avoiding the lights that flared up as they approached. “Those will be explosive charges tomorrow,” the cameraman explained without lifting his face from the viewer. “Wow!” Peter said in acknowledgment.

  “They’ll look like artillery blasts,” the cameraman went on. “You see those cannons in the woods right under us. Tomorrow they�
�ll be firing. Blanks, of course, but what you’ve got are the cannons firing and then the shells exploding. All hell will be breaking loose.”

  Peter could see the cannons, outdated artillery pieces with oversize wheels. He could imagine the close-ups that would be cut into the sequence. Men ramming in shells, then turning away as the cannon fired and recoiled. The gritty details would complement the explosive puffs and the floating smoke rings from the helicopter shots.

  The running boy was exciting even in rehearsal. He had to move quickly to keep up with the pattern of the lights. When he was close to a light, he hurled himself sideways, sprawling out on the ground. The dog pulled up next to him and raced to the figure, struggling to his feet in a show of concern. It all seemed very realistic. It was easy to fill in the violent explosions that would replace the lights, and the hundreds of tight shots that would show the terror on the boy’s face. Peter’s only problem was imagining how they were going to get close-ups of the dog.

  He also wondered about the obvious dangers. The stuntman would be running within a few feet of the explosions. A false step and he might be blown to pieces. Then there were the blank artillery rounds. His understanding was that even blank rounds fired pieces of the wax plug and hot chars from the burning powder. Was it safe to fly helicopters through a cloud of this kind of debris? And there were the maneuvers of the choppers. At the director’s orders, they were dropping suddenly to ground level and then climbing rapidly. They were touching the treetops and turning sharply to soar out over the field. The possibilities of a miscalculation seemed obvious, and he could imagine what would happen to a helicopter if it lost a rotor against the top of a tree.

  “Spectacular,” he said to Catherine as she was helping him out of his seat belt. “This is going to be fantastic.” He went directly to Padraig. “It’s marvelous! I can really picture it. How can you see all this in your imagination?”