“We’d have to work on that. I was thinking of funding a new romance for him with some glamour girl. So he could tell Jennifer that it was fun while it lasted.”
“You think that would be easier on Jennifer?”
Peter took off his glasses and pinched some blood back into the bridge of his nose. “No, I’m sure it wouldn’t be. I was really hoping that you might know a better way to handle it. Woman to woman? Sister to sister?”
Afterward, Catherine couldn’t get back to work. All she could think about was the high probability that her sister’s first adult lover had tried to murder her and come within inches of succeeding. Her head filled with images of how happy Jennifer was in her new marriage, and how she looked forward to O’Connell’s calls and visits. Catherine wondered if there were any words to convince her sister that the joy the actor had brought her might have been part of his scheme.
Jennifer’s recovery moved quickly. Within a month of her arrival in New York, she was out of her neck and shoulder casts and wearing only a light strap-on leg cast. She was then moved to a rehabilitation center in western New Jersey, where she set about regaining strength and her full range of motion. She was in the swimming pool immediately, at first with a flotilla of concerned attendants. But within a few days she was exercising her upper-body injuries with countless laps, and the staff had decided she needed no help in the water. The leg injury proved more difficult, but her determination was boundless. Jennifer hobbled on treadmills by the hour and had to be put out of the weight room at nights. Catherine, who visited almost daily, was amazed by her sister’s progress, knew that she would soon release herself from the facility, and realized that she had to face up to telling Jennifer about the investigators’ case against her husband.
That prospect seemed easier because of O’Connell’s long absences.
At first he had called nightly, complaining of the ongoing negotiations and wheeling and dealing that kept him in Hollywood. Then there were fewer calls, each apologizing for the phone calls that were missed. During the last week there had been one bouquet of flowers delivered with a simple “Love, Padraig,” and one phone call squeezed in, as he claimed, between “horse-shit meetings.”
“He’s in some sort of crisis,” Jennifer told Catherine, “and I should be there with him. I’m ready to travel, and everything I do here, I can do in a gym out there.”
Catherine and Peter had been keeping close watch on O’Connell’s affairs through their banking connections, and through a few of the top film executives they had met in Cannes. There was no interest in another picture in his adventure series, particularly with him in a starring role. There was no financial backing for his production scheme. Two scripts he had gone after had been lost to higher bidders. He was keeping up pretenses by dipping into a joint account Jennifer had set up with her own money, and if he was planning to keep up his efforts, he would soon have to ask her for a sizable deposit. Catherine knew she had to talk to her sister before she rushed out to California or poured more of her money into Padraig’s pocket.
She took the cowardly approach of letting the detectives’ report speak for her. “You have to read this,” she told Jennifer, producing the papers at the end of a visit.
“What is it?” Jennifer demanded suspiciously.
“Something you don’t want to hear and you won’t want to believe. But you have to know about it, and you have to decide what you’re going to do about it.”
Jennifer never considered that it might be a company affair. “It’s about Padraig, isn’t it?”
There was a pause before Catherine answered, “Yes, it is.”
“Then take it with you. I don’t want to see it.”
Catherine dropped it on her dresser. “Get mad at me. Hate me if you want to. I wish I didn’t have to show you this, but I do.”
“I won’t look at it.”
“That would be foolish, Jennifer, and you’re nobody’s fool.” Catherine turned and left her sister’s room.
Jennifer stared at the document. Then, with a grunt of contempt, she picked it up and carried it to her bed. She left it resting across her legs for a full minute before she sighed, picked it up, and began reading.
Catherine brought Peter with her the next day and found Jennifer sitting quietly in the garden between two of the buildings. She didn’t greet them or even speak when they sat down next to her. It fell to Peter to break the silence.
“I’m sorry” was the best he could muster.
Jennifer ignored him, turning to her sister. “I am mad, and I do hate you!” she said. “You know, every time in our lives when I thought I was happy, you were always there to destroy my happiness. Every time! Why won’t you let me have a life?”
“Jennifer, I never wanted to see you unhappy. I wanted Padraig to be real—”
“Then why detectives? Why bankers snooping into our affairs?”
Peter spoke. “I’m to blame for that.”
“I’ll get to you,” Jennifer snapped with a viciousness he had never seen before. Then she jammed a finger into Catherine’s face. “You just stay out of my life. And that’s not a request. That’s a warning. Padraig and I are in love, and I hope to God that we stay in love. I’m checking out of here today, and I’m already booked on a flight to Los Angeles. You’ve stopped me before, but I swear that if you try to stop me now …” She began to shake in her rage.
Catherine held out a hand. Jennifer slapped it away. She jumped up and broke for the door, hobbling slightly on her bad leg. Before she closed the door on the garden, she called back, “If you want your damn report back, you’ll find it in the trash can. That’s where it belongs.”
Jennifer had the facility’s limo drive her to Newark Airport, and then she settled into her first-class seat. She seethed during the first hour, waving away the flight attendant’s attempts to deliver cocktails. The bastards, she said over and over again to herself. How could they possibly have turned their detectives loose on her husband? But somewhere over the Midwest, she began thinking more rationally. Of course Peter had to protect the interests of the company, and that had to involve her sister. And they had to find some way to tell her about the reports. Catherine certainly wouldn’t have wanted a confrontation.
They were crossing the Rockies when she began analyzing the information she had read. Why had Padraig wanted the car checked over, and why hadn’t he mentioned it to her? Was it just a coincidence that minutes later the brakes had failed? There was no disputing the evidence that he was in desperate financial shape. Why hadn’t he mentioned that to her? She had no objection to his dipping into their joint account, but certainly he should have told her.
By the time she landed in Los Angeles, Jennifer had come to grips with the fact that her death would have solved all her husband’s financial concerns and that, armed with Pegasus stock, he could have bought any studio he wanted. So he definitely had a motive for her accident and was probably the only one who had an opportunity.
She taxied from Los Angeles to Padraig’s beach house in Malibu. He was waiting on the steps to gather her into his arms, smother her with kisses, and then joke that she must have been drinking on the plane because she walked crooked. Her doubts about him didn’t stand a chance. They picked at a frozen dinner, drank a bottle of wine, made love, and then fell asleep in each other’s arms, where she felt absolutely secure. How could I feel this way, she wondered, if he wanted me dead?
But in the fresh light of morning, she felt troubled again. Troubled enough to ask him, “Why did you have the car checked that morning?”
He seemed surprised. “Checked? There was nothing to check. All I did was ask them to wash it.”
“But you phoned down to the garage,” Jennifer reminded him, and when he denied it, she mentioned the testimony in the report.
“Ahh,” Padraig said. “So I’m being investigated.”
“Not by me.”
“No, but by your sister and her hirelings.”
She looked away in embarrassment.
“You know, darlin’, when I went into your display at Cannes, I heard your voice before I even saw you. Smart and sexy, that’s how it hit me. I had to get a look at you. And when I saw you, I thought, Smart, sexy, and honest. The streets of the festival were littered with phonies, so ‘honest’ had a certain appeal to me. My lust simply boiled over, I admit, and I thought that I simply had to have you. At least for an hour, maybe even a whole day. But the fact is that I had no idea who you were, and I certainly wasn’t planning on marrying you for your money.”
“I know that,” Jennifer assured him, trying to close the issues she had raised.
But he put a finger to her lips and went on. “I found out who you were when I saw your picture in the handouts. Oh, I read all your propaganda, but I couldn’t stop thinking of you. As you know, I went back for another look, and when we sat together, I listened carefully to all your damn explanations about footprints and frequencies. But all the time I was thinking about this lovely woman who seemed to be exactly what I needed at this stage of my miserable career. So you see, darlin’, when I went aboard your yacht, I had no intention of robbing you. I went there hoping to seduce you. Just for a day, mind you. I still fancied my freedom.
“It was in the car that I fell in love. Maybe a deathbed panic, because there were a few moments when I thought you were going to get us killed. But from that day on, you’ve been my life. Nothing frightens me more than the thought of losing you.”
“You’re so dear,” Jennifer whispered.
“No I’m not. At this moment I’m a terrible bastard. I’m going to share with you my darkest thoughts on who might have sent the mechanic to tamper with our brakes. The first one to come to mind is your dear sister, who’s having a devil of a time playing second fiddle to your newfound celebrity.”
“Catherine—”
“Hear me out, darlin’, because now that I’m started, I don’t want to stop. You’ve told me more than once that you and your sister were always rivals. And I think she was pretty sure that she had won the contest hands down with her playing in Cannes while you were lighting rockets in some South American jungle. But now you’re in the limelight, and I don’t think she can stand it.”
“Please, Padraig—”
Again his finger was on her lips. “My second candidate is that stuffed-shirt baron of finance, your dear friend Peter. The prig enjoys playing puppeteer with Catherine and you, and you can just imagine how he feels about being replaced by an aging actor. The thought of another man in his personal financial harem would be cause for jihad. And if you don’t think he’s capable of things like murder, I’d suggest that you and your sister take a good look into his background. There’s a skeleton in his closet just screaming to get out.”
“Peter?” It was a breathless question.
“Good old reliable Peter. I’ve looked into a few things myself, and you may be surprised to know that Peter wasn’t always a loner. He used to have a partner who was really the technical genius of the two.”
“But try to murder me? Peter? Catherine?”
“You? Oh, for God’s sake, woman, have a bit of sense. No one wanted to kill you. You weren’t the threat to Catherine’s self-importance or Peter’s mastery of outer space. I’m the threat. I was the one they wanted dead. Don’t you remember? I was the one with the lunch date. I was the one who was supposed to be
taking the car. And with everything else their damn detectives have come up with, finding out that I’d be the one to start down the hill was probably child’s play.”
“Oh my God,” Jennifer managed.
“My God, indeed. And lucky for me that you decided to go shopping, darlin’, because the one thing you did that I never would have done was unbuckle that seat belt. If I’d been in that car, I would have ridden it all the way to the bottom, with no stuntman and no Hollywood escape.”
She pushed out of her chair and fell into his arms. “Oh, Padraig …”
He let her kiss him, and then he said, “You know, now that we’re friends, you could really call me Patty!”
Did I want her dead? I suppose that’s the bottom-line question, isn’t it? But I’m not sure I know how to answer it.
I know I never could have killed her. Held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger or tied a noose around her neck. I couldn’t do that to anyone. Not even an animal.
When we were still in high school, we had this dog. “Inky,” we called him, because he was jet-black. He wasn’t pedigreed. Just a mutt. My sister used to hug him and nuzzle him and let him lick her face. He even slept in her bed. I liked the dog, of course, but I’d never let him that close to me. I didn’t want dog hair on my clothes, and certainly not in my bed, so whenever Inky came close, I’d push him away. I suppose he really was her dog.
But when Inky got old and sick and it was obvious that it was time to put him to sleep, she couldn’t do it. The dog was good for nothing and probably in pain, but my sister wouldn’t face up to it. So when I came home from college on a weekend, my father gave me the job of taking Inky to the vet. “Your sister can’t,” my father told me, “and it has to be done.” See what I mean. He just assumed that I had nothing better to do than pick up after her. So I took the dog to the vet. But I couldn’t be part of it. I couldn’t even wait around while the vet was doing it. I didn’t even like the damn dog, but I couldn’t have killed it.
No, I don’t think I ever wanted my sister dead. I just wanted her out of my life. Whenever the two of us were together, she always got the attention, so it was better if we went our separate ways. Like when we went to two different colleges. For the first time in my life,
I had room to breathe. I was the one pledged into the sorority. I was the one elected sophomore homecoming queen. There was another girl who tried to beat me out, but she was caught with crib notes in an exam. She tried to blame it on me, but the notes were in the pocket of her blazer. Now, if that had been my sister, you just know that everyone would have believed her. So I was really better off without her.
Of course we still chafed when we were home on vacations. We had moved by then to Hilltop, which was some railroad baron’s old estate, so we should have had plenty of room to avoid each other. But she kept the household staff so busy with her stupid errands that I couldn’t even get a blouse ironed. She used to eat her breakfast in the kitchen so the maid didn’t have to set up a decent breakfast in the dining room. It was as if she owned the place and I was only a guest.
Then there was the country club. Wherever I went, around the pool or down at the tennis courts, she would show up. Sometimes she would even find out where I was going so that she could be there first. She’d say, “What do you mean, following you? I’ve been here all morning.” But you don’t have to be behind someone to follow them, if you know what I mean. If you know where they’re going, all you have to do is hang around until they get there.
It was just like when we were kids. If I was in the pool, she’d bring all our friends up to the sundeck. If I was up sunning, she’d organize some sort of water game. Anything to be the center of attention.
The club had a members’ tennis tournament that I entered, and of course, my sister signed up an hour later. Neither of us was really a good player. We were okay, but not club champions. So we both wound up in the second flight. We each had a good run and ended up meeting in one of the semifinals. I beat her in straight sets, and she came jumping over the net like a wonderful sportsman and shook my hand. But then, behind my back, she joined the mixed-doubles matches with a guy who later turned pro. So while I was losing the singles final to a girl who got all the breaks, there was my sister hugging the doubles trophy with this stud’s cheek pressed
to the other side of the loving cup. You can see what I mean. I beat her easily, and yet she ended up getting all the attention. For the whole month of August, I had to look at her photo on the clubhouse wall.
Then, after our junior year, we went to Europe for the summer. I really wanted each of us to go our separate ways. I mean, why couldn’t I have gone to France while she went to Italy? It’s a big continent. We could have spent the summer without ever coming across each other. But we must have hidden our feelings pretty well. We never argued in public, and we were always smiling and being very solicitous. I don’t think anyone ever guessed how jealous she was of me.
It should have been a great summer. Daddy arranged one of those tours where we flew over on British Airways and then came back on the
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. We went from England to Holland, to Germany and Austria, and finally to Greece. Then we came back through Italy, Spain, and France. We saw everything worth seeing and were in and out of a hundred museums. For the most part we got along fine. After all, we’re sisters. It’s not as if we’re always fighting.
But there were still times when she pushed me aside so she could be the center of attraction. There was something about her. She simply had to do me one better no matter what the occasion. Right off the bat, she started after the English tour guide, an Oxford student who did tours of London as a part-time job. He was quite handsome, and I made it pretty obvious that I was interested in him. But she moved right in. All of a sudden she developed a passion for history. You should have seen her pretending to be breathless over the crown jewels, dropping names and dates as if she’d been living in England since William the Conqueror. Before you knew it, my sister was getting a personal tour of the country. The rest of us were only tagging along. Someone must have complained to the tour company, because the guide was replaced by a woman in a wool suit and tennis shoes. As it turned out, she was a better guide anyway.
In Germany, my sister suddenly developed a taste for classical music. We had both taken piano lessons and played flute in the
school orchestra. She was no more into music than I was. But she put a move on one of the German teachers who was lecturing us on Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart – the big three, he called them. Our last night in Munich, they sat together at a chamber-music recital, her head on his shoulder, completely ignoring the rest of the group. She didn’t come home until early in the morning, then had a fit when I told her she was an embarrassment.
In the Greek Isles, the whole tour group went to a topless beach. I found a spot with a bit of privacy, but not her. She was topless in a second right in front of the others, and then all the other women joined in. And then she acted as if there was something wrong with me because I didn’t want to be part of their tasteless display. “It’s just for laughs,” she said, but I knew she was doing it to embarrass me. It was her way of getting back at me for the things I said to her in Germany.
There was no stopping her. In Italy she was an opera lover; she even sang with one of the gondoliers in Venice. In Spain she used her high school Spanish to flirt with the men. I know as much Spanish as she does. I think I even got better grades. But I wouldn’t stumble through someone else’s language simply to try and make an impression. And in France it was impressionist painting. She actually missed two days of touring to spend the time with some French sidewalk painter at the d’Orsey. I didn’t mind, because at least she wasn’t bothering me on the bus. But it was hard to explain to the others where she was without making her look cheap.
I finally got rid of her on the way home. The night before we were supposed to board the
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, I dumped her passport down the hotel incinerator chute. There was a big row at the pier in Southampton, but no matter how we pleaded, they wouldn’t let her board. She missed the ship while she went back to the American embassy, so I enjoyed the cruise without having to put up with her little tricks. She ended up flying home.
So, yes, to answer your question, I did think I was better off without her. She was always spoiling things for me. Maybe she didn’t mean to all of the time. Like when she entered the tennis tournament, I’m sure that wasn’t just to ruin things for me. She
enjoyed tennis, too. But there were times when she very intentionally rained on my parade.
I brought a boyfriend home from college for one of the vacation weekends. There was nothing serious between us, but we had gone out together a few times. Then he invited me to a fraternity party, which was exciting because this particular frat had great affairs and it wasn’t easy to get invited. When a three-day holiday came up, a lot of people were going home, but he lived too far, down in Texas or someplace. So I felt sort of obligated to invite him home with me, and he jumped at the opportunity. I don’t know how my sister found out, but when we walked in the door, there she was, waiting to be introduced.
For the whole weekend we couldn’t get away from her. If we put on the television, she would sit down to watch. When I had lunch brought out, she came right out and joined us. Of course we invited her. We had to be polite. But she certainly knew that she was barging in. And then, when we came back home from our evening out, she and her date were already in the family room, curled up on the sofa. “Oh,” she said, like the most gracious person in the world, “come in and join us. We’re just watching an old horror flick.” “Come in and join us,” like she owned the place. You see what I mean. She knew it was my weekend home.
I could go on and on with one story after another. But that wouldn’t answer the question. It’s obvious that I wanted room to breathe. I have no doubt that I wished she weren’t in the picture. But that doesn’t make me some sort of a homicidal maniac. There was nothing unreasonable about wanting her out of my life.
But wanting her dead? I think that’s pushing things too far. I would have wished her a long and happy life if I’d just known that she would lead it someplace else. In a different family, with a different house. Or maybe the same family but during alternating months. I was fed up with the rivalry. I was sick and tired of being second chair. I was entitled to my own space and my own successes. It wasn’t right that I had to share everything with her, and it certainly wasn’t right that she could take from me whenever she wanted to.
As for actually killing her, I certainly couldn’t have done that. I know I couldn’t, because I often had the opportunity. If I had wanted to kill her, I would have done it in a way that no one ever would have suspected. For instance, we used to dive together. While we were in college, we took a family vacation to the Caribbean, and my father had arranged for us to take scuba lessons. We both got certified, and then every winter we would go off to Tortola or Belize or some other diving mecca. You always dive with a buddy, so she and I would often go together. There would be just the two of us, all alone in this underwater world that was filled with all kinds of dangers. I mean, a shark or a moray could attack you. Or you might slice your leg open on a sharp piece of coral. Maybe your breathing system would fail and you’d suffocate before you could get back to the surface. It wasn’t something that you worried about. Diving is pretty safe if you know what you’re doing. But there were always dangers.
Once, I think it was in Belize, I thought of a way to get her. She had charmed our boat captain, a big lanky guy who was kind of a dropout. I certainly had no real interest in him, except maybe as a one-night drinking partner. I don’t think I would have risked bringing him back to the hotel. But before I could even get close to him, she had him up and dancing to reggae music. And she wouldn’t leave even when I wanted to leave. I was really furious. I had just about had enough of my dear sister.
I was still burning the next day when we were down about sixty feet, only the two of us. She was swimming ahead of me, swinging her ass the same way she had been swinging it on the dance floor. I should have been concentrating on the dive, but all I could think of was what a sneaky little bitch she was and how glad I’d be to be rid of her. And I saw how easy it would be. Just pull off her air hose so that she got a faceful of water instead of air, then sit on her shoulders so she wouldn’t shoot back up to the top. Once she was out of air, with her weighted belt, she’d sink to the bottom, and then I could go up and act as if I expected her to be up there waiting for me.
What would they find? A diver who had drowned because her
air line had separated from the tank. Tragic, but certainly not suspicious. We were both pretty much novices. All they would think was that she had breathed in water, panicked, and kept trying to suck in air when there wasn’t any. All I had to say was that she was behind me, and when I turned around I couldn’t find her. Naturally, I had come right up to investigate.
I swam right up to her. I was inches above her, and I actually had my hand on her air line. But she must have felt me, because she turned her head to look up. I got a glimpse of her face. And then I couldn’t do it. Maybe if she hadn’t looked at me, if she had been just a diver in a wetsuit, I could have done it. But when I saw her face, I couldn’t. I smiled and pretended to be pointing out something I had seen. We both looked around for a few seconds, and I sort of signaled that it must have gone away, so we got back to our diving. I didn’t think about it again.
But my point is that I couldn’t kill her, any more than I could have killed Inky. I’m not that kind of person.
So, what am I saying? That I wanted to be rid of her, and with very good reason. But I didn’t really want her dead, just gone. And that I don’t think I ever could have actually killed her, although it might not have bothered me if someone else had.