“We’re going to make money on the films,” she predicted, “and then more money on the satellite services. A year from now you’ll be the toast of Tinseltown.” She accepted the glass of bottled water he brought from the bar, then gave a sigh. “Let’s not do dinner tonight, Padraig. I’ve got an early flight in the morning.”
He recognized his dismissal but stayed in his chair. “Do you still think I had anything to do with your sister’s accident?”
“That’s in the past,” she answered. “Just so long as there are no more accidents in the future. I think you can see that there are many ways I can help you. I have a lot more to offer than Jennifer’s money.”
He whistled softly. “Jay-sus. You’re as hard as a diamond and just as cold.”
“As attractive as a diamond, too. I’m very good currency. Better than paper, and maybe even better than gold. And Padraig, be very straight with me. Don’t ever give me reason to turn against you.”
When she returned to New York, Catherine made a point of telling Jennifer that she had struck up a business relationship with Padraig. But her explanation was not entirely honest. “We need a stake in a business like his, and I suppose we might as well keep it in the family.”
Jennifer showed suspicion, so Catherine elaborated. “Not that I’d trust him for a minute, if I were you. But with Pegasus money, he won’t have to dip into yours.”
When Padraig called, he told Jennifer that he had persuaded Catherine and Peter to lend their full backing. He made it sound as though it was their apology for having suspected him. “It’s all working out fine, darlin’ girl.” And then he promised that within a week or so, he’d be able to handle most of his business out of New York. Jennifer was overjoyed. But she had to swallow
hard to take in her sister’s repeated trips to Hollywood, and the gossip speculations that Padraig was wooing the more glamorous sister.
“They’re all liars,” he told her when she flew out to spend a weekend with him. “Catherine and I are doing business deals and nothing more. But here in Gomorrah, everyone kisses everyone. At least before they plunge the knife into the back. And the journalists are like whores making up stories. They’ll have me sleeping with her next, and then with both of you at the same time.”
“I couldn’t stand that,” Jennifer said.
Padraig rubbed his neck. “I’ve heard good things about a ménage à trois.”
“I mean you sleeping with her. If that ever happened, your brakes would fail with her in the passenger seat.”
“Not to fear, darlin’. She’s not my type. Too busty. And I don’t care for her tattoos.”
“Tattoos?” Jennifer screamed.
He covered his mouth. “Did I let the cat out of the bag?”
She began pounding him with a pillow. “You’re just damn lucky I know she doesn’t have any tattoos.”
En route to New York, her flight path crossed Catherine’s, headed for Los Angeles.
“Am I never to be rid of the Pegan sisters,” O’Connell complained in mock grief when Catherine appeared at his office.
“I can’t speak for Jennifer,” Catherine answered, “but I’m going to stick to you like your hairpiece. We’re in business together, and I try to stay close to my money. Even more so now.”
“Now? Has something changed?”
“For the better,” Catherine answered. “Peter wants to raise the stakes. We want to put up more money, and we want to set this company up on its own, as an independent corporation. Peter, you, and I are the directors. We each own a third of the stock. I’m chairman and you’re CEO.”
Padraig smiled suspiciously. “And you’ve come to ask my opinion.”
“No, I’ve come to get your signature. This is the way we want to invest our money. And we thought you wouldn’t mind owning a smaller piece of a bigger operation, particularly with all the perks.”
“What perks?”
Catherine tipped her head and studied him carefully. “I thought you would have figured it out by now, Padraig. I’m the star in this family. I’m the one who belongs in Hollywood. You’re married to the wrong sister.”
They finished the day dining with agents who brought new projects for their consideration and suggested casts and directors. “This is
Private Ryan
meets the army air force,” a reptilian promoter whispered as he pushed a paper-bound screenplay around the wineglasses. He turned his head to check the room, implying that it would be dangerous if word got out that such a treasure existed. “George Clooney is dying to do the colonel, and we’re thinking of Russell Crowe for the squadron commander.”
“Is there a part for me?” Padraig asked with feigned seriousness.
“Fantastic,” the promoter said as if God’s hand had just reached down to touch his finger. He consulted with his young associate. “Why not? Maybe an RAF general who pulls their asses out of the fire.” His eyes flicked from Padraig to Catherine. “And we could give the guy a back story. Like he turned back from a mission once, so no one takes him seriously. But in the end he’s aboard one of the bombers and has to take over.”
“From Russell Crowe?” Catherine asked innocently.
“No, no, from one of the other pilots. But can’t you see it? Their planes come together, and Crowe tips his cap in recognition. Sort of redeeming Padraig’s character.”
They bid their hosts good night at the door to the restaurant and watched them walk to a big Mercedes. “How does such a pathetic fool get a car like that?” Catherine asked.
“Out here you rent them by the hour,” Padraig said. “It shows that you’re to be taken seriously. He probably has to have it back by midnight. And then he’ll call Visa and claim that the card he
used to pay for dinner was stolen this afternoon.”
The attendant drove up in Padraig’s roadster and ran around to open the door for Catherine. “Do we have to drop this off someplace?” she asked about the car.
“Not until after I drop you off,” he deadpanned. He started the engine and reached for the shift lever. Catherine’s hand settled on his.
“I’m not in a hotel mood,” she said. “I’m leaning more toward skinny-dipping in the Pacific. Do you know anyone who has a beach house?”
He slipped his hand from under hers and then moved his on top. “Would it be my place you’re thinking of?”
“I was thinking of
The Quiet Man
meets
From Here to Eternity.”
“And would there be a part for me?”
“Oh, you’d have the lead.”
He shifted and peeled out of the parking lot, his head thrown back in his theater-poster smile. Once again the great secret agent failed to notice that he was being followed. A Ford Taurus had to run a light to keep up with him.
They kept up a light banter as they drove out to the beach house, Catherine reading lines from the script they had been given and Padraig improvising the responses. “But what will I do if something happens to you?” she read, the line of a young woman whose lover was about to take off on a dangerous mission. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” he answered in his best Clark Gable drawl. They were giggling like children when they left the car by the road and walked down the steps to his house.
But the mood changed once they were inside. Catherine waited out on the deck while Padraig fixed each of them a dash of his favorite Scotch. Then she moved easily against him while they listened to the surf that was barely visible in the darkness. In a second, she was in his arms and their lips were just touching,
and then they were rocking in passionate embrace.
“We don’t really have to do this in the surf like
From Here to Eternity,”
he told her. “I have a very comfortable bed inside.”
“I hate it when sand sticks to me,” she answered.
They shed clothes on the way to the bedroom, somehow managing to keep their faces pressed together in the process. As he was easing her onto the bed, he asked, “Have you given any thought to what I should tell your sister?”
“Tell her you’re a heel. She’ll believe that.”
They made love, sipped their Scotch, and then started over again, this time lying across the bed. They ended locked in each other’s arms, breathing heavily, their feet hanging over the side. There was light in the sky and birds singing when Catherine heard soft snoring deep in his throat.
She was surprised to find him sitting out on a deck chair when she awoke. “Either you’re in fantastic shape or I’m slipping,” she said as she walked up behind him. She tousled his hair. “Wow, you really could use a hairpiece.”
“Fix us some coffee,” he told her, “and then come out and sit with me. I think we have to talk.”
She returned a few minutes later, a steaming mug in each hand. “This will test your courage. I haven’t made coffee since college.”
He tasted. “Dreadful,” he decided. “Worse than your sister’s. Hasn’t either of you ever kept house? I had hoped that at least one of you could do windows.”
“If that’s what you want, then Jennifer would be your best bet. She has high-tech experience.” She settled into the chair next to him, and they spent the next few minutes staring out at the surf. Padraig finally raised the obvious issue.
“Have you given any thought to how I stay married to your sister and in business partnership with you? The reason I ask is that I’m not sure I’m up to flying cross-country from bed to bed with any regularity.”
“It didn’t seem to be a problem last night.”
“No, and it wasn’t a problem over the weekend when your
sister—my wife, as you may remember—was out here for a visit. An occasional indiscretion is important to my fans. But now I have long-term agreements with both of you. And while you and I seem comfortable with the arrangement, I’m not sure what Jennifer’s reaction will be.”
“She’ll put out a contract on the two of us.”
“That would be my guess as well. So perhaps you and I should limit our relationship to just business.”
Catherine looked mock-aghast. “You mean I do all the work and she has all the fun?”
He stood and dumped the dregs of his coffee over the side. “Do you have another suggestion?”
“I’ll have to tell her.”
He was too stunned to think of a glib remark.
“Padraig, you and I are going to be a great team. This business venture is going to succeed wildly because both of us are at home in the limelight. We’ve got these people falling at our feet. As for our personal relationship, last night was only the beginning. I don’t want to feed your ego, but you’re better than your press notices. And you seemed to find me interesting as well.”
“Indeed I did,” he allowed. “But from a long-term perspective—”
She cut him off. “I am looking long-term. I set up our company independently so that no one could ever cut it off except you and me. And I don’t plan to cheat on my sister for the rest of my life, either. I see the future very clearly, Padraig, and I’m not going to lose it just because Jennifer saw you first.”
“But she’s my wife—”
“You’ve had others. And you’ve dropped them for a lot less than you’ll be dropping her for.”
He whistled softly. “It’s the devil I’m hearing.”
“Cut the blarney, Padraig. You know your choices. You can have Jennifer or you can have everything. Since you married her in order to get everything, I don’t see why it should be such a difficult choice.”
WHEN SHE entered Peter’s office, Catherine found Jennifer waiting.
“Did you read it?” Jennifer asked without a word of greeting. She held up the document that had been resting on the conference table in front of her.
Catherine nodded as she took a seat across from her sister.
“Kind of shocking,” Jennifer offered.
“Surprising. But no big deal.”
The door from Peter’s washroom opened and he came out, trying to button down one of his collar tabs.
“Hi, Peter,” Jennifer tried in greeting. Her voice trailed off. This wasn’t going to be business as usual. Catherine looked up but broke eye contact instantly.
He sat at the head of the table and reached down for the document that Jennifer had brought to the meeting. “I had this prepared by our investigators because I wanted it to be completely objective. I’ve read it, and it seems to cover everything, at least as far as I remember. It was over twenty years ago.”
“Why?” Catherine asked, and when Peter seemed puzzled, she added, “Why did you have them dig all this stuff up?”
He nodded. “Because someone else seemed to know about it, and I detected an implied threat of blackmail. The only way I could make the information useless was to bring it out into the open.”
“Blackmail?” Jennifer was horrified.
“Not specifically,” Peter answered. “Just the implication that
if I didn’t try to be more … cooperative, you two might get to hear the whole lurid story. So, I thought it was best if you heard it from me.”
“Is it true?” Catherine asked.
“It’s factually accurate.”
“That wasn’t my question. There’s an implication here that Dan Holland’s death was very convenient for you—”
“It was. It launched my career.”
Catherine stared at him, waiting for the rest of the answer. Peter didn’t seem anxious to elaborate.
Jennifer finally took up the issue. “Peter,” she asked, “were you in any way involved with your partner’s death?”
He looked at her directly. “That’s the question I’ve been asking myself all my adult life. You’ve read what the investigators have to say. What do you think?”
Jennifer’s eyes lowered. She didn’t want to say what she thought. The report pulled no punches. There was motive and there was opportunity. If she looked at the scenario dispassionately, she saw Peter as a prime suspect in his partner’s death. But she had known Peter for ten years, and the person she knew simply didn’t fit the crime.
Catherine spoke up. “You can’t do that now, Peter. You always turn our questions back on us, but not this time. I think we’re entitled to an answer.”
He dropped his chin and pursed his lips. “Of course you’re entitled to an answer. But there just isn’t one. I didn’t start the fire. But then again, I didn’t put it out.”
“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.