Good Sister, The (14 page)

Read Good Sister, The Online

Authors: Diana Diamond

BOOK: Good Sister, The
10.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
He stopped dead, as much from shock as from the impact of the wound, and stood with his one clear eye wide in amazement. In that instant, Catherine hurled herself against him. His muscles resisted, but once the point of the knife broke through, the blade slid in easily, all the way to the hilt. They stood chest to chest, almost in an embrace, a river of warm blood running down between them. Catherine didn’t let go of the handle until her attacker was slumping to the floor.
She stood over him, her bloody slip plastered against her body, suddenly disinterested in the man who was dying at her feet. It was several seconds before she heard that the telephone was still ringing. She stepped over the body and took the handset from the kitchen wall phone.
“Yes …” She breathed.
“Miss Pegan?
“Yes …”
“This is security, ma’am. We have a signal that someone opened one of your locks. Is everything all right there?”
She felt the blood running down her arm from the handset to her elbow. She saw her own handprint in bright crimson. And then her violent world went peacefully blank.
Catherine awoke in her bedroom, staring up at faces she didn’t recognize. She jumped with a start.
“Easy … easy …” a black man’s voice soothed. “You’re doing fine. just fine.”
She sat up. The man speaking to her was one of three white
coats. There was also a policeman wearing a uniform cap. Two men in suits were conversing in her doorway.
“Take it easy, now,” the black man said in a singsong cadence. “We’re going to take good care of you.”
Catherine liked him. She lay back and closed her eyes.
“Thatta girl! It’s just routine. Everything’s fine.”
She trusted him completely.
Her hospital room was chaotic. Jennifer and Peter were at the bedside, both trying to assure her comfort. Jennifer held a cup of ginger ale, slipping the straw into Catherine’s mouth at every opportunity. Peter had the bed control and kept raising the head and adjusting the knee level. There were two detectives at the foot of the bed, waiting for permission to pounce with questions. Next to them were two doctors who were debating the entries in her chart. A nurse on her left was pumping air into a cuff that was squeezing her arm. In the background, uniformed policemen were milling about. They were checking everyone coming in and out of the room, even the candy stripers who were trying to deliver magazines.
Catherine was badly battered. Her right eye was black and squeezed shut. Her cheekbone was swollen so that one side of her face was twice as big as the other. There were contusions at the back of her head, wrapped in a bandage that wound around her forehead. But the injuries were superficial, at least as far as the X rays showed. What she badly needed was a sedative to help her recover from the shock of the ordeal, and ice packs to stop the swelling in her face.
Her vague recollection was that she had surprised a burglar. She remembered that the security alarm inside the front door had been tripped. She guessed the intruder had fled upstairs to the bedroom when he heard her opening the door. She had gone upstairs immediately, probably following him into her bedroom so that he had no choice but to try to eliminate her.
“You never saw the guy before?” one of the detectives asked.
“I never saw him at all,” Catherine answered. “Just his eyes looking out through the ski mask.”
Peter objected that she was in no condition to answer questions. Then the doctor stepped in with a hypodermic, promising it would help her relax. She fell asleep within a few seconds.
The next day was more orderly. She awoke at noon to find her sister still sitting by her bedside. There was a nurse at the foot of her bed, and through the glass door she could see a policeman outside in the corridor.
“Am I going to be all right?” she asked.
Jennifer bolted up from her chair, startled by the question. “You’re fine. Nothing is broken. No internal injuries. They just want to keep an eye on you for a few days, and then they’ll be sending you home.”
“Where’s Peter?”
“At the office. He wants to be called as soon as you’re awake.”
Jennifer picked up the phone. The nurse came around the bed with a thermometer in her hand. The two detectives opened the door slowly and stepped in quietly.
The first shock to Catherine was that the intruder hadn’t been a burglar, at least not according to the police investigation.
“He came through the front door and turned off the alarm fifty minutes before you arrived,” one of the detectives told her. “But he never opened a drawer or looked for a safe. Burglars with enough experience to get through your lock and disarm the security system are usually in and out in five minutes.”
“So?” Jennifer asked on behalf of her sister.
“So, it’s most likely that this guy was waiting for you.”
“Why?” Catherine asked.
The detectives looked to each other and then one of them volunteered an answer. “We think he came to kill you. The physical evidence shows he was waiting in your room. And you told us he dragged you out onto the balcony. If he was just trying to escape, all he had to do was hit you over the head.”
Catherine was bewildered and looked to her sister for support.
“Have you ever seen this man?” When Catherine turned back to the detectives, one of them was holding a copy of a photograph. The man, leaning into the camera like an actor’s photo
in a theater lobby, was strikingly good-looking. Blond hair brushed softly back from his forehead. Piercing, animated eyes. A smile that was both serious and frivolous. Perfect teeth, each one precisely capped by a master.
“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.”

Other books

The Traitor by Grace Burrowes
A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable
Al Filo de las Sombras by Brent Weeks
Lakeshore Christmas by Susan Wiggs