Legacy of Secrets (6 page)

Buffy put a restraining hand on her arm. “Be quiet, Shannon,” she whispered coldly. “The man is only doing his job. And you are only giving the reporters more ammunition for their scandal sheets.”

Her hyacinth eyes commanded Shannon to follow, as she swept from the room without a glance to left or right. Her face was cold and calm, but inside she was boiling with anger at Bob Keeffe for dragging her good name and her
reputation through the tabloids and leaving her to sort out the mess. Because there was no doubt it was a mess.

The truth had started to emerge the very day after his death. About the troubles his businesses were in. The banks were rumored to be on the verge of calling in their massive loans: They said Keeffe was overextended; there had been a dip in the property market; they had lost confidence in his dealings. G
OTTEN TOO BIG FOR HIS OWN GOOD,
the newspapers had said in bold black headlines.

Bob Keeffe was buried the day after the inquest. Buffy was the perfect widow, beautiful and veiled in black at the graveside. It was a dark, dripping wet day and Shannon thought desolately that even God had deserted her father in his final moment. Like the courtroom, the graveyard was filled with reporters and TV cameras, but the ceremony was private. Just Buffy and Shannon. No one else was permitted. And when it was over she and Buffy rode silently back home in the limousine.

Their footsteps rang hollowly in the black-and-white tiled hall. It was as though with Big Bob gone the house was completely empty.

Flinging her hat and gloves onto a pretty French Proven-gal loveseat, Buffy strode into the little morning room. As Shannon followed her it occurred to her that though Buffy had been married to her father for sixteen years, she had no idea of her true feelings about his death.

A fire had been lit in the grate and Buffy went to stand in front of it. She leaned her arm along the marble chimneypiece, staring at herself in the beautiful Venetian mirror. “My God, I look awful,” she said disgustedly, touching the faint lines under her eyes with a careful finger. “Not surprising, after what your father has just put me through. And it’s not over yet. Oh, no, not by a long shot.”

Shannon sat on the edge of the squishy floral sofa, her hands clasped tightly together, looking anxiously up at her.

“I should have known when I met him,” Buffy said viciously. “People warned me. But I took no heed. ‘An upstart Irishman,’ they said, ‘stay with your own sort, Buffy.
Leave the likes of him alone.’ But I was stupid, I admired his get-up-and-go. I liked the fact that he made his money instead of inheriting it. What I should have known is it was ‘easy come, easy go.’” She turned and glared at Shannon, her hyacinth eyes wild with anger. “Goddam it, it’s all
his
fault.”

Shannon pushed her hands nervously through her hair. “But it’s not his fault that he died, Buffy. He didn’t kill himself. I’m sure of it. Dad would never do that. He would never shirk his responsibilities. If the business was in trouble he would have found a way to get it out again.”

“Oh, don’t be so stupidly naive. He
had
no other way out.” Buffy turned from the fireplace and flung herself into a chair. Shannon stared worriedly at her. She had never seen her like this before; she was always so controlled and in charge. Buffy’s eyes were hard and her face was tight with anger. Suddenly, she looked her age.

“I had a meeting with the attorneys yesterday,” she said, taking a cigarette from a silver box and tapping it thoughtfully against the edge of the table before lighting it. Flinging her blond head back against the cushions, she drew smoke luxuriously into her lungs, staring at the ceiling, noticing even as she spoke that the paint on the plaster cornices needed retouching. She shrugged. That was no longer her concern.

“Everything has to go,” she said abruptly. “This house, the penthouse, the antiques, the paintings. The attorneys have been working day and night to see what they could salvage for us personally, but it will all have to be sold to repay the banks and the creditors.” She turned her head and stared at Shannon. Her pale hair gleamed in the lamplight as she tapped ash from her cigarette with an immaculately manicured fingernail. Her voice was level and calm and she might have been discussing the menu for the next dinner party with the cook.

Shannon watched numbly as she went on. “Thank God I had the sense to protect myself with my marriage settlement. At least they can’t take that,” she said, satisfaction
creeping into her voice. “And my jewelry, of course. That was always put into my trust.”

Shannon knew all about the marriage settlement, her father had always considered it a good joke. With a million each year, plus the first million, and all of it invested well, Buffy was probably sitting on a lot more than fifty million dollars now, as well as jewelry worth several more. Buffy was a very rich woman.

The maid came in with coffee, depositing it on the small table next to her mistress. Buffy picked up the silver pot and poured two cups, handing one to Shannon, who placed it quickly on the floor by her feet. Her hands were still shaking and she felt as though a deep well had opened up inside her, a yawning gap where there used to be a heart and warmth and love. She was sitting here with the woman who had been her stepmother for sixteen years. Her father’s wife. And she was talking as though their lives together amounted to a bunch of dollars.

“You’ll have more than enough to live on, Buffy,” she said worriedly. “You could even buy back this house, and the penthouses, then nothing will change.”

Buffy laughed, a small, tinkling, mirthless sound. “Shannon, when will you realize that
everything
has changed? Your father is dead. His business is in ruins and he has left us to pick up the pieces. Well, I, for one, refuse to do that. I’m leaving tomorrow for Barbados. I’m going to stay with Janet Rossmore until all this dies down. And then maybe I can get on with my life again.”

“But what about me?” As soon as she said it, Shannon wished she hadn’t. The childish words hung in the silence between them and her stepmother turned her head away, avoiding her anxious gray eyes.

Buffy shrugged, a delicate movement that barely lifted her thin shoulders. “I scarcely think that is my problem now, Shannon. After all, you are a big, grown-up girl. You should be grateful for all I’ve done for you. I saw you through school and college. I made sure you met the right
people. And now you are engaged to Wil, I consider you his responsibility.”

She stood up, straightening her skirt. “Quite honestly, Shannon,” she said, allowing the anger to flood her voice again, “your father has turned out to be nothing but a cheap thief. After what he’s done to me, I’m finished with the Keeffe family. For good.”

Viciously stubbing her cigarette in a large crystal ashtray, she turned on her heel and walked briskly to the door. Shannon’s stunned eyes followed her but Buffy did not turn to look back. “I’m going to pack,” she called over her shoulder, her voice growing fainter as she strode, high heels clicking, across the marble-tiled hall. “I suggest you do the same, Shannon. The bailiffs will be in here before you know it.”

Shannon stared uncomprehendingly after her. The scent of Gauloises Blonde cigarettes mingled with Shalimar perfume trailed in her wake. And though Buffy had not yet actually departed, Shannon knew she was as good as gone. And she was on her own.

S
IXTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD
Brad Jeffries had been Bob’s partner and president of Keeffe Holdings for seventeen years. He had started as an on-the-line construction supervisor and worked his way up.

He was addressing a meeting of the representatives of five major American banks and four international ones. He coughed and straightened his tie nervously. Fiddling with his reading glasses, he read the prepared statement, asking that they give Keeffe Holdings more time to sort out the tangled corporate and financial web Bob Keeffe had left behind him, before they called in their loans and the FBI.

“Let us, the remaining partners, who have been left this legacy of trickery, do our honorable best to get you back your money, gentlemen,” he said finally, staring expectantly around his stony-faced audience.

A derisive smile crossed J.K.’s face. If ever a man looked guilty, Brad did. Though as far as he knew there was nothing they could pin on the old fool; nothing at all. Now it was Jack Wexler’s turn. Jack was an architect; he was a forty-five-year-old bachelor, good-looking in a smooth, strong-jawed Dick Tracy kind of way, with a powerful sense of his own importance and his talent
and
his attraction for women. He had designed several award-winning buildings for Bob and he had been his partner for ten years. Now J.K. watched him beg for the financing to finish Keeffe Tower.

“Put this building in my hands, gentlemen,” Wexler said, “and I promise to bring it in under the projected final budget. As you know, the top twenty office floors were already leased preconstruction to EuroNational Insurance as their new corporate headquarters, and the rest of the building is seventy percent leased, including the atrium shops. If we do not meet the projected completion date, then these companies have the right to void those contracts and demand the return of their money. As you also know this amounts to a very large sum—money that at this moment we do not have.” He didn’t say “thanks to that crooked bastard Bob Keeffe,” but he allowed his angry face to say it for him.

“If you pull out of the deal now, Keeffe Holdings loses every cent it put into the building of Keeffe Tower, and you gentlemen lose all your money. Of course, you can take the property and sell it, but it will be bargain day on Park Avenue. A half-finished one hundred and twenty-five story skyscraper everyone knows has been plagued with problems will not be an easy sale in today’s disturbed economic climate. What I’m asking for is time, gentlemen, so that we all stand a chance of recouping our money. If you choose not to stay with us on this, then we all lose everything, because there is not another cent in Keeffe Holdings to pay the construction workers their next week’s salaries.”

J.K. watched the bankers’ impassive faces as they scribbled notes on yellow legal pads. Now it was his turn. He straightened his jacket and glanced commandingly around the table, enjoying the feeling of power as they stared back at him, waiting for him to tell them how they were going to get their money back.

“Gentlemen,” he said in the same smooth, assured tones he had learned from his boss. “Bob Keeffe was my friend. My mentor. I came to him as a boy straight out of college and everything I know about business I learned from him. But he couldn’t teach me about finance because that was not what he was good at.

“Everybody knows Bob enjoyed being a rich man. That’s
understandable because, like myself, he came from a poor background. He worked his way up, and his was a quick ascent because he was a clever man and he was damned good at what he did. He built no-nonsense housing and office blocks; he gave folks what they wanted at the right price, and that’s always a sound cornerstone for any business. But Bob also had that wonderful Irish silver tongue that could tell you what he wanted and why it was exactly right that he should have it, and within half an hour he would have you believing the most impossible schemes.

“I think we all fell prey to that silver tongue, gentlemen, and in the end so did Bob himself. His dreams became too big, but when he told them to you, you believed him because he had never been wrong before. He had proved himself right time after time. He was successful. Or at least it seemed that way, because even those closest to him, his business partners, only knew what he chose to tell us.

“In fact Bob Keeffe was a man who never told his right hand what his left hand was doing. His grandiose schemes grew bigger and so did his borrowings. In the end he was forced to resort to trickery to cover his tracks and his repayments. Bob offered you stocks and bonds as collateral and on the basis of your handshake dealings he was never asked to produce those stocks and bonds. Ostensibly they remained in the safe of Keeffe Holdings, to be called on by you if necessary.

“In fact I now know he had disposed of half that nine hundred million dollars’ worth of stock two years before he offered it as collateral. It belonged to Keeffe Holdings and he had a right to sell, but not without our knowledge. And he certainly had no right to offer something he no longer possessed.”

He glanced down at his notes. “Fifty million to Switzerland, two hundred million to French banks, one hundred million to the British banks, and a lot more to the Americans. On the face of it, these were ironclad loans; nothing could go wrong, and if it did your money was secured. But
Bob Keeffe took your money and he poured it into a dozen different projects, as well as into his own pockets.

“The company’s monthly meetings, at which Jeffries and Wexler, and myself as secretary of the company, were present, and at which we discussed the work in progress and projected schemes as well as the use of financing, are all documented in the minutes, signed by Bob and myself. He was an old-fashioned man who kept a lot of information in his own head. We were often puzzled, but in the past couple of years when we asked questions we were met by silence. There were too many projects we didn’t all know about and only one man running the lot.