Authors: Elizabeth Adler
She had read every word about Bob in the newspapers. She knew they were calling him a crook and that he was being investigated for fraud and she didn’t believe any of it. She remembered watching the FBI agents and the representatives of the SEC and the IRS on television, removing all the documents and files from Keeffe Holdings’s offices. Except the ones in the attaché case sitting right here in her closet.
Picking up the case, she carried it into the room Bob had always called the den. She sat on the white sofa, clutching the attaché case to her chest, staring out of the window at the circling pigeons, thinking. She had never pried into Bob’s business world, though she had always listened when he wanted to talk about things. He was excited about his new skyscraper, and he had talked about every phase of the construction. She knew it wasn’t the monument to his ego that the media were making it out to be. Bob was a man who had found success the hard way, and Keeffe Tower was meant to be the pinnacle of his successful career. Instead, it had become his epitaph.
She thought about their conversation the night before the night he died, when he had asked her to marry him, remembering how exhausted he had seemed. “I’m getting too old,” he had said bitterly. “Too old to keep my dreams and illusions. Suddenly they are all fading away.”
She remembered him handing her his attaché case and asking her to keep it somewhere safe for him, and the sad, wistful look in his eyes as he had returned to kiss her a second time before taking the elevator and leaving her forever. And she knew without a shadow of doubt that Bob had not killed himself. Someone had stolen those missing millions, and Bob had found out about it. And the thief, whoever he was, had killed him.
She thought of the papers in the attaché case he had
asked her to keep safely for him, and she knew Bob must have found some evidence of the fraud, and that she must be holding it.
She opened the case and studied the documents. They were all contracts for the purchase by Keeffe Holdings of building plots in a dozen major American cities. They were all exactly the same legal format, with the name of the vendor and the purchaser, the description of the plot of land with attached maps and diagrams, the purchase price, and lots of legal clauses. The name of the vendor was different on each one, but she noticed that written in small type underneath it was “a subsidiary of the ExWyZe Fund,” and that each was signed for the vendor by a man with a foreign name, Jean Michel Zymatt, and for the purchaser, Keeffe Holdings, by two of the partners, Brad Jeffries and Jack Wexler. Not one of them was signed by Bob.
People never expected it of an actress, but Joanna was good at math. She quickly added the purchase prices in her head and knew in an instant that she was looking at over four hundred million dollars’ worth of contracts.
She put the documents carefully back in the case and closed it. She stared at it, wondering if this was what all those fraud-squad guys were looking for. But they were talking about much more than four hundred million. Nine hundred they said, maybe over a billion dollars, and share manipulation and false collateral. She thought of all those bankers waiting for their money. Well, she could certainly tell them where some of it was. In M. Jean Michel Zymatt and the ExWyZe Fund’s bank account, that’s where.
She wondered what Bob had meant about keeping his illusions. Was it because Brad and Jack had been cheating him all these years? But
four hundred million dollars’ worth?
She shook her head; it was hard to believe. As far as she knew, Brad lived a simple life in a nice redbrick house on a few acres at Kings Point, Long Island. He drove a Mercedes and he spent his vacations alone, fishing in Canada. Wexler was flashy, it was true, but he had owned the Sutton Place house for a long time. Sure, he drove an
Aston-Martin, but Bob said it was all for show, and that Jack needed to impress the girls, and anyway the man was a bachelor and what else was he going to spend his money on?
Maybe they had both acted in good faith and it was the ExWyZe Fund that was crooked. Joanna sighed as she carried the attaché case back in to the dressing room and tucked it safely into a drawer and locked it. She put the key in the pocket of her robe and began to get dressed. She didn’t know what had been going on, but she was afraid to go to the police because of the scandal, and she was afraid to confront the partners and demand the truth because … her knees suddenly turned to jelly … because maybe Brad Jeffries and Jack Wexler had murdered Bob.
She pulled herself together quickly, and put on a black dress and did her face. Because she was tall and striking people always assumed she wore a lot of makeup, but in fact she was strictly a touch of powder, a brush of mascara, and a hint of lipstick person, and she had never bought anything other than dime store cosmetics. A legacy of her poorer days as a struggling actress. But now, thanks to Bob, she was a comparatively rich woman. He had bought her this apartment, he had put money regularly into her bank accounts and paid all her bills. “You need never work again,” he had told her cheerfully, because he knew she wasn’t even trying to get work because of him. She wanted to be free whenever he could manage to see her.
She thought of the four hundred million paid over to Jean Michel Zymatt and the ExWyZe Fund for all those plots of land, wondering if they even existed. There was only one way to find out.
She took two contracts out of the case: one for a property in New York, and one in Boston. She put on a black-and-white houndstooth jacket, a large black straw hat with a wide brim, and tucked the contracts safely in her purse. The doorman handed her her mail on the way out and she pushed the letters into her purse and took a cab to Second Avenue.
It was an area of shabby buildings that looked as though no one had touched them since the day they were jerry-built in the early nineteen hundreds. There was a minimarket on the ground floor and next to it a Laundromat and a dry cleaner. Telling the driver to wait, Joanna stepped inside and asked to speak to the manager or the owner.
The Haitian youth behind the counter of the minimarket gazed at her like she was visiting from the starship
Enterprise,
and she said briskly, “Be quick, young man, I’m in a hurry.”
He wandered into the back regions and returned with an old man with greasy hair and hostile eyes. “Waddya want?” he snarled.
“I want to know who owns this building,” she said as he stepped intimidatingly closer.
“Waddya wanna know for?”
“I might be interested in buying.”
“Huh?” He walked around her, looking her up and down, and she thought about running for the cab, but she had to know. Her eyes followed him as he came back and stood in front of her again. “He’s a landlord,” he said indifferently. “I dunno his name. I just pay my rent lady, thatzall.”
She thanked him hurriedly and went to the Laundromat next door. The African-American girl behind the counter was pretty and bright and she told her the landlord’s name was Marks and that he sent a man to collect the rent every Friday. And no, she had not heard of any plans to develop the site. “Who’d want to build anything here?” she asked with a mocking laugh. “We’re all just trying to get out.”
Joanna told the cabdriver to take her to La Guardia Airport and she caught the shuttle to Boston. The cab-driver at Logan Airport looked oddly at her when she gave him the address and asked her if she was sure. And when they arrived she knew why. The area was a grim slum of semiderelict buildings and she didn’t even bother to get out to inspect the boarded-up old warehouse that Keeffe
Holdings had paid thirty-two million dollars for. She just told the cabdriver to take her back to Logan and caught the next shuttle back to New York.
On the flight she reread the contracts for the two sites she had just seen and she knew she was looking at fraud. But something told her this was just the tip of the iceberg. There was more, lots more. Bob had found out what was going on and he knew who had done it. And that’s what he had meant by “losing his dreams and his illusions.” Whoever it was, it was somebody close to him, and when he had confronted them, the same person or persons had killed him. She looked at the two signatures again, Brad’s and Jack’s, and asked herself the question. She shook her head; they just didn’t look like murderers. But how was a murderer supposed to look? Like a gorilla with staring eyes and a menacing smile? My God, she thought, shocked, it might even have been Buffy for all she knew.
She stuffed the documents securely back in her purse and looked through the letters the doorman had given her on the way out. One was postmarked Nantucket and she glanced curiously at it. No one she knew ever went to Nantucket. She opened it and glanced, astonished, at the signature,
Shannon Keeffe,
and when she read the sympathetic message, tears came to her eyes.
When she glanced at the address, Sea Mist Cottage in Nantucket, she wanted to ask the pilot to turn the plane around and go right back to Boston so she could go and thank this lovely girl for even thinking about her. For even caring that her father’s mistress might be grieving her heart out more than his wife was. She remembered what she had read in the newspapers about Buffy leaving for Barbados where she was staying incommunicado, waiting for the scandal to subside, leaving her stepdaughter alone to face whatever mud was thrown at her.
“The bitch,” she said vehemently, and the woman in the next seat glanced at her, startled. Joanna apologized and put the letter back in her purse, thinking about what to do.
When she got back home, she flung off her shoes and
paced the floor of her apartment, wondering whether she should tell Shannon Keeffe her suspicions that her father was murdered, and show her the fraudulent documents? Then she told herself Shannon had been through so much, she had probably just accepted her father’s suicide, and to tell her would be like rubbing salt into an open wound. She wondered about telling her best friend, but she didn’t want to involve her: this was too dangerous a game. She was talking
murder
here.
She prowled around a bit more and then she went to the phone and dialed a number. When they answered she ordered a mozzarella and tomato pizza with extra cheese and went and sat in front of the TV. When the pizza arrived she ate one slice, staring at the news on CNN, relieved that for once there was no mention of Bob.
She pushed the rest of the pizza into the box and shoved it into the garbage and took a shower. Then she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. “What shall I do, Bob darling?” she asked, and clear as a bell the answer came into her mind, as though he were speaking to her. “Tell Shannon.” Joanna sighed with relief. She would do just that.
J
OANNA FINISHED HER STORY
and looked expectantly at us. “So here I am,” she said in a small, apologetic voice, in case we wished she were not. She pushed the case with the documents across to Shannon. “I thought about going to the police, but then I reminded myself who I was. I knew the media would have had a second field day if Bob Keeffe’s mistress had showed up with an attaché case full of documents left in her closet, which she claimed was proof his partners had murdered him.” She gave us a wry little smile and I admired her courage for admitting that she was only “a mistress,” even though she knew she had been much more than that.
“It’s up to you, Shannon, to decide what must be done,” she said quietly.
Shannon stared helplessly at Eddie and then at me. We
took out the documents and passed them around, inspecting the partners’ signatures, and staring puzzled at the name of the vendor, ExWyZe Fund, and the man with the foreign name who had signed on its behalf.
“Maybe it’s one of those fancy foreign tax-dodge companies, in Switzerland, or Liechtenstein, or somewhere,” Eddie said thoughtfully.
“If that’s true, then there will be no way we can check it,” I said. “They’re always confidential and I doubt we would even be able to find out exactly who ExWyZe’s proprietor is.”
“But Mr. ExWyZe is sitting on at least four hundred million dollars of Bob Keeffe’s money. Surely, if it’s stolen, they have to tell.”
Remembering recent similar cases that had hit the headlines, I shook my head. “We shall have to find out another way.”
Shannon ran her hands distractedly through her long copper hair as she thanked Joanna for bringing her the documents and for not going to the police. “I don’t know what to do,” she said soberly. “How can I believe they would steal all this from my father? How can I believe they would kill him? And yet …” She looked at us with frightened gray eyes. “And yet, they were both at the party that night. And they were both behaving strangely. They were very subdued—I mean they didn’t dance or come over to talk to me, not even to wish me happy birthday. I noticed Brad was drinking a lot, and Jack looked sort of dark and moody, and I remember his girlfriend looked bored. But they had been close to my father for years. How could they kill him? And besides, what did they have to do with the past?”
“Maybe they didn’t kill him,” Eddie said, more to calm her than because he believed it. “And maybe when we get back to Nantucket, we shall find the vital clue that will point the way to the criminal.”
Joanna looked mystified at them, and I patted her hand. “You’ll hear all about Bob’s past before too long,” I told
her. “Meanwhile, I insist that you stay here at Ardnavarna with us. There’s a farewell party Saturday night you just won’t want to miss.”
N
OW, THE
M
OLYNEUXES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN GREAT
party-givers and I intended Shannon and Eddie’s farewell bash to be one of the best. I had invited everybody I knew, old and young, and we all helped to decorate the house, robbing the garden for flowers and plants, ferns and boughs until we had turned the ballroom into a leafy bower. A band arrived from Dublin and set themselves up on the little podium at one end, and Brigid tore around like a tinker’s coat, setting out an amazing buffet of smoked salmon and trout, oysters and mussels, shrimp and lobsters, and a seafood bisque that made your mouth water just to smell it. There were hams and turkeys and loins of pork, smoked chicken and wild duck, glistening fresh salads and vegetable souffles, and cakes and desserts that she had spent hours decorating with filigree spun sugar and a feather-light touch, until they resembled miniature works of art.