“WHY?” PETER Barnes asked Catherine.
“Because we should be making an investment in a production company. It will give us a way to develop and test services.”
He cocked his head skeptically. “And why O’Connell’s company, which as far as we know doesn’t even exist?”
“Because it won’t take a very big investment. We can own the lion’s share for just a bit of seed money.”
“You’re suggesting that we go into business with a man who may have tried to murder your sister.”
“So he won’t need any of Jennifer’s money. Or her stock.”
“Hoping that if he doesn’t need her, he’ll leave her alone?”
Catherine sagged into a chair in Peter’s office. “It’s one way to protect her. We have to do something. She won’t face the facts. She won’t even look at the evidence. And the more desperate O’Connell gets, the more dangerous he’ll become.”
“You think he’s going to try again?” Peter questioned. It was his way of working to question every suggestion and expose it from every angle.
“If he tried once, why wouldn’t he?”
“Because he knows that there’s a pretty good case against him. He can guess that we’re watching him and that another ‘accident’ would get thoroughly investigated.”
“But he could romance her into putting up her money. He might even get her to put up some of her stock.”
Peter nodded. “That makes sense. We put up a little money
so that he isn’t scheming for a lot of money. But that won’t buy him off. That will only buy us a little time.”
“And with a little time, Jennifer might begin to see the light. At a minimum, she might press him to sign the agreement. By now she should have figured out that he was bluffing when he promised he’d sign anything.”
“And when will we get your sister back in her office?”
Catherine shook her head. “Not while that Irish con man has his arms around her. Maybe if she sees him snatch up the money, she’ll come to her senses and realize what he’s after.”
“You want me to call him?” Peter asked.
“First call Jennifer and tell her you need her back here. I’ll get to O’Connell and tell him we have a proposition to discuss. I bet he’ll bring her back on the first flight.”
It worked the way Catherine had envisioned. Within hours Jennifer called to say that she was returning and that her husband would accompany her back to New York. Peter met privately with Padraig, handing him a check for $2 million and promising him a call on $10 million more.
“A fifty-one-percent share of the production company you open,” Peter said of the contract that had been under the check. “You run it any way you want. The only stipulation is that you distribute electronically through Pegasus Satellite Services.”
“The only stipulation?” Padraig asked with narrowed eyes. “Nothing about the peace and order of my household?”
“What you and Jennifer decide is entirely up to you. Personally, I think you’re a conniving snake, maybe even a cold-blooded murderer. But I think we need an early stake in a business like yours. And I think having a chain around your finances may prove good for Jennifer’s health.”
O’Connell took the contract and the pen that went with it. “I’d think, with your past, you’d be a little slow to make charges of cold-blooded murder.” He looked up in time to see Peter stiffen. He smiled. “Oh, I see you haven’t told the good sisters all the grizzly details of your youth.” He signed with a flourish.
“Probably smart,” he allowed. “Wouldn’t want them wondering exactly what befell your partner. Especially if there might be a killer in our midst.”
Peter never glanced at the contract that was pushed back to him. His eyes stayed locked on Padraig O’Connell until the actor left the room. He rose and paced around his desk for just a minute. Then he picked up his phone, keyed in to his private line, and dialed the number of his detective agency. He arranged for an off-site meeting later that day with the firm’s owner, a National Security Agency investigator who had gone into business for himself.
O’Connell stayed at Jennifer’s loft apartment for the next few days, spending most of his time on the telephone. Even when she arrived home in the evening, he waved away her attempts at conversation as he continued his deal-making well into the Hollywood evening. Jennifer noticed a change in his attitude. Padraig was strident and at times even arrogant. Before he had been asking. Now he was telling. Instead of trying to talk his way in, he now sounded as if he were in charge.
“Get it for me, dammit,” she heard him shout angrily during one call. “I don’t care how high you have to go.” And, during another call, “No, not him. I don’t want to work with that little prick!”
“Is everything all right?” she asked after listening to his side of the conversations for three straight evenings.
“Splendid, darlin’. Couldn’t be better. People are finally coming to their senses. But I will have to get back out there next week. At least for a few days. Some of these things can’t be done over a telephone.”
They spent a pleasant weekend together, with Padraig joining her on the walks that were part of her therapy and waiting in the gym where she was swimming. Jennifer teased him about the attention he was getting from all the women going in and
out of the gym. “I’ve never seen such raw lust in women’s eyes,” she told him.
“A burden I’ve been living with for years, darlin’,” he answered. “And if I may say so, some of the young men seemed to be taking a shine to me as well.”
He kissed her goodbye on Sunday afternoon and taxied out to La Guardia Airport in order to be in Hollywood Monday morning. In his film roles as a spy, O’Connell was always aware of the things happening around him. But he never noticed the man in a casual windbreaker who had followed him from the loft and was seated on the plane two rows behind him.
Catherine called Padraig at his Malibu apartment on Monday and left word that she was arriving on Tuesday. “I could help you,” she said, “deal with any problems about the source and reliability of your financing. Besides,” Catherine added, “I want to keep track of my investment.”
Padraig had thought of Catherine as a society-page poster girl who served her company best by mingling with celebrities, garnering publicity, and bringing in well-heeled customers. He assumed that the inner workings of Pegasus were as foreign to her as they were to the original winged horse. So he began with a condescending greeting when he met her in the lobby of her hotel.
“Come to mix with the glamorous folks, have you?” he said.
She steered him to a corner table, ordered his single malt and her dry martini, and said little until the drinks had been delivered and the toast exchanged.
“Your eyes have a color similar to your sister’s,” he said, “which makes them particularly lovely.”
“It’s the
same
color,” she answered, “only mine are a bit nearsighted. Now, can we dispense with the happy horse shit and get down to business. You bought two scripts today, one at an outlandish price. I’d like you to tell me about them.”
He leaned back from the table. “I thought there was to be no interference.”
“None at all,” Catherine said, “but as our money flows out, we’d like some information coming in. Like why we’re buying a script that has been passed on by all the majors. And who in hell is this Tommy Devlin you’re promoting for one of the leading roles?”
“The majors,” he responded slowly, “would pass over the story of Jesus Christ because it doesn’t have enough helicopters in it. And they’d want him to die in a slow-motion fall from the top of the Empire State Building rather than on a cross.
“As for Tommy Devlin, he’s an eighty-year-old gentleman with yellow teeth and a twitch in his eye who just happens to be the best character actor since Olivier. The man can make you laugh and cry your heart out at the same time. And that, dear lady, is the end of my report to management.”
Catherine sipped her martini. Then she said, “Your artistic preferences are noted. But I really wanted to talk about money. The studios loved one script that you bought. They just said it couldn’t make any money. Expensive to produce with very limited audience appeal. And Tommy Devlin hasn’t made a movie in six years. His last picture was about an Irish sheepherder, and according to the critics, the sheep stole the show.”
“My, but we’ve been doing our homework, haven’t we,” he said.
“That’s only the first page of my information. There are twelve more pages that I’d like to review.”
He stood up and stayed standing as he finished his drink. “I have taken a small office in West Hollywood,” he said. “I’ll phone the desk and leave you the address. Be there at nine. We’ll go over the rest of your pages, and then a few pages of mine.” He stormed out, leaving her to finish her martini.
The next day was all business. O’Connell began with a spirited defense of his decisions and let Catherine listen in as he began pulling together the pieces of his company. “A production company isn’t a fixture, like the gas company. It doesn’t come into existence until it has something to produce and talent to do the producing. For the past year, the only place that your
company existed was right here.” He pointed at the side of his head. “It was born when we acquired a promising script, but it will die if we don’t attach talent.”
“It will die if it doesn’t make money,” Catherine countered.
“It will make money,” he fired back, “because with your satellites, we won’t be paying a studio its usual obscene cut from the top, nor will we be paying millions for prints. That’s when you’ll get rich, when the industry catches on to how easy it will be to get from an idea to a theater.”
She noticed that Padraig’s signature lilting brogue had vanished. He was talking the West Coast version of English. And he wasn’t sprinkling his conversation with references to fairies and leprechauns. He was talking dollars and cents like an accountant.
“I think we’ve stumbled into a very promising investment,” she reported to Peter Barnes at the end of her first day with O’Connell. “This guy is anything but the lyric poet he pretends to be. He has a very calculating side.”
“I know,” Peter said, thinking of Jennifer’s accident and the blackmail insinuated against himself. “A darlin’ fellow.”
O’Connell told Jennifer only that he had “run into Catherine out here on the coast.”
Jennifer’s surprise sounded genuine. “What’s she doing out there?”
“Oh, lining up movie business for your satellites, I suppose.”
“Did you get along?”
“If you mean did she scratch my eyes out, she did no such thing. Very polite. Even took an interest in what I’m up to. Just her charming self, she was.”
“Oh, Padraig, I want so much for everything to work out.” Somehow, she hoped, the suspicions against her husband could be dismissed, and his charges against Peter and her sister put to rest. “It was only an accident. All these accusations and insinuations are ridiculous.”
That night, when Catherine and Padraig settled down for their drinks, there was a newfound respect between them. He knew
that she was much more than a glamorous front for the company, and she no longer considered him a rogue and a braggart. Their dinner conversation was about the business and the prospects that were looking much brighter than they had only hours earlier.
The next day Catherine traveled with him on his rounds of talent agencies, where doors were flung open now that he was funded. She followed with great interest the conversations about matching talent to story lines, and enjoyed the inside gossip about who had proven to be too difficult on the set of a recent picture, who was dangerously involved with drugs, and whose talents fell short of the demands of the script.
For his part, O’Connell was delighted to have Catherine on his arm. She was, as always, dazzling, instantly recognized, and at ease with the fawning that her wealth provoked. People who might not have considered working with Padraig found ways to get into the meetings so they could spend a few moments with Catherine. People who wouldn’t have crossed the street to meet Jennifer broke appointments to be with Catherine.
“I thought I was the celebrity,” Padraig said after one meeting.
“No, you’re the actor,” Catherine answered. “I’m the real thing.”
The talent and the agents were also impressed with her savvy. There were legions of beautiful women in Hollywood, on the arms of executives in public places and on the peripheries of meetings. But no one expected them to intrude into conversations. As one producer had said of a starlet’s lips, “They’re for pouting, not for talking.” But it was obvious to all, and increasingly so to Padraig, that Catherine had done her homework. She knew their concerns and spoke directly to them. They appreciated that she advanced no opinions into film arts but had focused strictly on the return on investment.
At the end of the day, when she kicked off her heels in the sitting room of her suite, she knew she had done a good day’s work. Padraig was simply in awe.
“If you’re not careful, you might end up owning this town,” he told her. “That would make you responsible for all its sewage problems.”