Paradise Read online

  “Okay. I phoned ahead and the limo will be waitin’ for us on the runway at Midway. But that’s not what I came in here to tell you,” O’Hara continued, walking over to the window and parting the draperies. Gesturing for Matt to join him, he pointed toward the wide, curving drive that wound through the cypress trees at the front of the house. His weathered face softened and his voice became low, lustful. “Take a look at that sleek sweetheart out there,” he said as Matt walked over to the window. Someone else would have expected the sweetheart to be a woman, but Matt knew better. After O’Hara’s wife died, cars became his only remaining love. “She belongs to one of the cameramen who came out here with the Walters broad.”

  The sweetheart was a 1959 red Cadillac convertible in mint condition.

  “Will you look at them globes,” O’Hara said, referring to the car’s headlights in the awed, lascivious voice of an adolescent looking at a Playboy centerfold. “And those curves! Sleek, Matt, real sleek. Makes you want to run yer hands across ’em, don’t it?” He nudged the silent man beside him with an elbow. “Have you ever seen anything prettier than that?”

  Matt was spared the need to reply by the arrival of the script girl, who politely said they were finished setting up in the living room.

  The interview had been proceeding along predictable lines for nearly an hour, when the door suddenly opened and a woman hurried into the room, her lovely, unsuspecting face wreathed in a smile. “Matt, darling, you’re back! I—” Every head in the room swiveled, the ABC crew gaped, the taping session forgotten as Meryl Saunders rushed forward wearing a red negligee so transparent, so suggestive, that it would have made the lingerie buyer at Frederick’s of Hollywood blush.

  But it was not Meryl’s body the ABC group was staring at, it was her face—a face that graced movie and television screens all over the world; a face whose girlish sweetness and outspoken religious beliefs had made her America’s darling. Adolescents liked her because she was so pretty and looked so young; parents liked her because she set a wholesome image for their teenagers; and producers liked her because she was one hell of an actress and because any movie she was in was guaranteed to gross in the mega-millions. Never mind that she was twenty-three years old with a strong sexual appetite—in the pulse beat of shocked silence that greeted Meryl’s arrival, Matt felt as if he’d been caught in the act of seducing Alice in Wonderland.

  Like the valiant little trooper she was on the movie set, Meryl smiled politely at the speechless group, made a pretty apology to Matt for interrupting him, then turned and walked out with all the modest dignity of a pinafore-clad student in a girls’ convent school—which was a true tribute to her acting skills, since the little red G-string and the cheeks of her fanny were clearly visible beneath the fiery red negligee draping her lithesome body.

  Barbara Walters’s face was a mirror of conflicting reactions, and Matt braced himself for the inevitable barrage of prying questions about Meryl, sorry that her carefully constructed public image was about to be demolished. But Ms. Walters merely asked if Meryl Saunders was a frequent houseguest of his. Matt replied that she enjoyed staying at his house whenever it was unoccupied, as it often was.

  To his surprise, the journalist accepted his evasive answer and returned to the topic she’d been discussing before Meryl’s arrival. Leaning slightly forward in her chair, she asked, “How do you feel about the growing number of hostile corporate takeovers?”

  “I think it’s a trend that’s bound to continue until such time as guidelines are set up to control it,” Matt replied.

  “Is Intercorp planning to swallow up any more?”

  A leading question, but not unexpected, and he sidestepped it smoothly. “Intercorp is always interested in acquiring good companies in order to further our own growth and theirs.”

  “Even if the company doesn’t wish to be acquired?”

  “It’s a risk we all run, even Intercorp,” he replied, smiling politely.

  “But it would take another giant the size of Intercorp to swallow you up. Is anyone immune to a forced merger with you—friends, and so forth? I mean,” she teased, “is it possible our very own ABC could find itself your next prey?”

  “The object of a takeover attempt is called the target,” he said dryly, “not the prey. However,” he joked, “if it will set your mind at rest, I can assure you that Intercorp does not have an acquisitive eye on ABC at this time.”

  She laughed and then gave him her best professional media journalist smile. “Can we talk a little about your private life now?”

  Carefully concealing his irritation behind a bland smile, he asked, “Could I prevent you?”

  Her smile widening, she shook her head and began. “During the past few years you’ve reportedly had torrid love affairs with several movie stars, a princess, and most recently with Maria Calvaris, the Greek shipping heiress. Were these widely publicized love affairs real, or were they invented by the gossip columnists?”

  “Yes,” Matt replied unanswerably.

  Barbara Walters laughed at his deliberate evasion, then she sobered. “What about your marriage? Can we talk about that?”

  Matt was taken so off guard that he was momentarily speechless. “My what?” he said, unable to believe he’d heard her correctly. Unwilling to believe it. No one had ever discovered his brief, misbegotten marriage to Meredith Bancroft eleven years ago.

  “You’ve never married,” she clarified, “and I was wondering if you have any plans to marry in the future.”

  Matt relaxed and uninformatively replied, “It’s not out of the question.”

  13

  Crowds of Chicagoans strolled along Michigan Avenue, their unhurried pace due partly to the unseasonably mild November day and partly to the jam of shoppers gathered at the windows of Bancroft & Company, which were already spectacularly decked out for Christmas.

  In the years since the store’s opening in 1891, Bancroft’s had evolved from a quaint two-story brick building with dome-shaped yellow awnings at its windows into a fourteen-story glass-and-marble structure that covered an entire city block. But regardless of the many alterations that Bancroft’s had undergone, one thing had not changed: A pair of doormen attired in maroon and gold livery still stood formal sentinel at the store’s main entrance. This small touch of stately elegance remained—a visible statement of Bancroft’s continued insistence on dignity and graciousness.

  The two elderly doormen, who were so fiercely competitive that they’d rarely spoken to each other in the thirty years they’d worked together, surreptitiously watched the arrival of a black BMW, and each doorman silently willed the driver to draw up on his side of the doors.

  The car pulled up to the curb, and Leon, on one side of the doors, held his breath, then expelled it in an irritated sigh as the car glided past him and halted directly in front of his adversary’s territory. “Miserable old coot!” Leon muttered at his counterpart as Ernest hurried forward. “Good morning, Miss Bancroft,” Ernest said as he opened Meredith’s door with a flourish. Twenty-five years ago, he’d opened the door of her father’s car, taken his first look at Meredith, and said exactly the same thing in exactly the same reverent tone.

  “Good morning, Ernest,” Meredith replied, smiling and handing him her keys as she got out of the car. “Will you ask Carl to park my car for me? I had a lot to carry this morning, and I didn’t want to have to bring it all the way from the parking garage.” Valet parking was another elegant convenience that Bancroft’s offered to its customers.

  “Certainly, Miss Bancroft.”

  “Tell Amelia I said hello,” she added, referring to his wife. Meredith was on familiar terms with many of the store’s longtime employees; they were like family to her now, and this store—the main store of a growing chain that today had seven stores in various cities—was as much a home to her as the mansion she’d grown up in or her own apartment.

  Pausing on the sidewalk, she watched the crowds gathered in front of the store windo