Legacy of Secrets (81 page)

“I even took a summer job in Boston so I could find out more about Lily. I delved into the city’s archives, the records of births, marriages, deaths, names, dates, places. I found out about Lily’s other son, Liam Porter Adams. And, just like Bob did, I tracked them down, and I guessed that Bob Keeffe was Lily’s grandson. And that burned me deeper than any wound I’d suffered before. We were both descended from Lily’s sons, but Bob was still the legitimate heir. And he was so rich he didn’t even want to claim Lily’s money. Bob had everything and, as always, I had nothing.

“I pinned his picture on my wall at college and every night as I ground through the long, hard hours of study and loneliness, I told myself that one day I would have everything he had gotten, everything that should, by rights, be mine. One day I would be Bob Keeffe. I would become him.”

He paused and I could tell he was looking at me, though I couldn’t see his face, and I said, “And now you think you have succeeded?”

“Almost. There was just one thing left.”

I knew in a flash what he meant. “Shannon,” I said, and he nodded.

“I have everything to offer her, everything her father had. She wouldn’t even look at me before, but now I know she will. I was going to ask her to marry me tonight.”

“And then it would be complete. You would have everything you considered legitimately yours. Everything Bob Keeffe had, including his daughter.”

“Right, Maudie, that’s exactly the way it’s going to be. Only now you’ve come along, asking questions and interfering, just when everything was going so smoothly.” He sighed deeply. “I really wish you hadn’t.”

I smiled at him, summoning up a modicum of the old charm. I glanced apprehensively at my watch and saw it was still only a quarter of eleven. Shannon wouldn’t be here for another fifteen minutes and I had to stall him.
“Before I go,” I said, trying not to think how ambiguous that word “go” might turn out to be, “Before I go, why don’t you tell me how you stole Bob’s money?”

He laughed as he told me. “I’m a clever man, and Brad and Jack were easy pawns to manipulate. I knew what they wanted, and I offered it to them, and then more. Much more. And they couldn’t resist the bait.

“For ten years I worked hard. I began as Bob’s protégé and I became his right-hand man. I took care of everything he didn’t want to, and then more. There was nothing I didn’t know about the Keeffe business and Bob would have trusted me with his life.”

I thought how ironic that statement was, but he seemed to see nothing strange in it and he went on. “In order to manipulate a man, to bend him to your will, you have to really understand him. You have to know what he wants, what he longs for, what he would die or kill for.”

“His Achilles heel,” I said helpfully.

“Exactly. Jack Wexler was not a talented architect, he was just darn lucky to find himself in an easy job. Bob trusted everybody and Jack took full advantage of
it
He had a big ego, he wanted to be the rich successful playboy bachelor, but without money he would have ended up a suburban husband, commuting to Westchester with a middle-class house and a pretty blond wife with an expensive taste in clothes and two-point-four children needing braces and college tuition fees. He had been helping himself from Keeffe Holdings for years before I joined the company. He took kickbacks on every contract for every item that went into a Keeffe construction, and he made himself a nice few bucks in the process.

“And Brad was the same; he had had his hand in the Keeffe till right from day one, starting with a little here and a little there. But it wasn’t until he met Fedora Lee at a country club polo match that he really needed more. There’s nothing like a woman to fuel a man’s ambitions, and Fedora was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted.

“So, once I knew about them, it was a fait accompli. I just showed them how easy it would be to make big bucks instead of little ones. I told them that grand larceny was just as easy as minor theft, except you make a lot more money. Millions of dollars more. And when I explained to them that you went to the same jail whether you stole five thousand or five million, and that I had the power to turn them both in and send them to that jail, they came to heel like a pair of eager dogs, ready to do their master’s bidding.

“I had already formed ExWyZe Fund in Liechtenstein with money from the sale of stocks and bonds Bob kept as collateral for the bank loans, and now I used a little of it to buy up cheap worthless properties across the States. Without Bob’s complete trust, and because he was so wrapped up in what he was doing, this would never have been possible, but he did trust me and he was busy and I kept him happy, and it was all simple. ExWyZe Fund bought the properties and then sold them at a vastly inflated price to Keeffe Holdings, who bought them with more money from the sale of collateral.

“Brad and Jack took care of the contracts and the money was paid to Liechtenstein and their share went into secret numbered Swiss bank accounts. I never signed anything, so nothing could be pinned on me. Brad bought his farm and his woman; Jack bought his Rothkos and paid for his house and his flashy life-style; and I sat on my millions and waited for the ax to fall, because I knew one day it had to, and that when it did I would have to kill Bob Keeffe. And that was exactly the way it happened.”

He emerged from his hooded chair like a snake from its lair and walked back to the sideboard and poured himself another brandy. “Sure you won’t have one, Maudie?” he asked, like the perfect host.

I said, “That wasn’t the first time you killed, though, was it J.K.?”

“You mean my mother?” He dismissed her with a shrug. “She didn’t deserve to live. She was a blot on the landscape
of my youth, a cheap woman who made a mockery of my grandmother’s dignity. And she stood in the way of the future I was planning for myself. Besides, if I hadn’t done it one of her pickups would have before too long.”

He came and stood over me and I looked up at him and for the first time I was afraid. He took a sip of his brandy and said thoughtfully, “And now there’s you, Maudie.”

He was too close for comfort and I glanced under my lashes at my watch, hoping he wouldn’t notice, but he missed nothing. “It’s five minutes before eleven,” he said calmly. “There’s just time before Shannon gets here. You will be gone, and then I shall be here to help her get over her grief.”

“Just the way you were when Bob died,” I reminded him, and he smiled.

“I really wish I didn’t have to do this, Maudie,” he said as I eyed him warily. “You should never have interfered. Everything was so neat and tidy, there were no flaws. No one need ever have known.”

“You’ll never get away with it, not a second time,” I said, standing up and gripping Pa’s hazelwood stick tightly as he walked away from me again to the sideboard. He opened the drawer and took out a gun. “Shannon will never believe I killed myself,” I warned him, wishing my silly old voice didn’t sound so high-pitched. After all, we Molyneuxes had always had a reputation for being brave in battle. But this wasn’t a battle I was facing, this was a psychopath.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” he explained, smoothing back his hair with one hand and adjusting his gold-rimmed spectacles. “I’m just going to escort you down to the next floor.”

“Why not just do it here in comfort,” I said, thinking of the bleak concrete spaces and steel girders and the windowless walls shrouded in plastic sheets. It was no place to spend my final moments and I would have preferred the soft silky Persian rug.
Whatever are you thinking of, woman?
I asked myself.
Choosing a place to die, like a sick old dog,
when there’s fight left in ye yet? The fightin’ Irish, that’s what Bob used to call us, and dammit, he was right.
Besides, I knew Shannon would be here any minute and I thought that maybe with the diversion, I would be able to turn the tables on J.K.

And then the phone rang. J.K. turned and picked it up and I was across the room and out the door in an instant, just as I heard him say, “Shannon!”

She was on the phone and I thought, gosh darn it, she’s not coming because I told her not to and now I’m on my own and it’s up to me. I pushed the elevator button but no little lights flashed on and I guessed J.K. had switched off the current, and then I heard his footsteps on the parquet and I pushed open the door to the stairway and fled downward.

My heart was pounding as I reached the next floor and then I heard the door slam and his footsteps as he hurried after me.
Jayzus,
I thought,
you had better get a move on, Maudie,
and I fled down another flight.

It was hard going for a woman my age. The stairs were only dimly lit and I was afraid of breaking my leg or my neck, though I don’t know why, since J.K. was about to do it for me. If he could catch me, that is.

I dodged sideways into the dark morass of girders and struts and plastic sheeting, stumbling over cables and coils of metal and stray buckets, and almost falling. I found a concrete pillar and hid behind it, listening to the silence, hoping he hadn’t seen me, and that he could not hear my silly old heart pounding away like a teenager’s, as loud as an express train.

I looked around me and realized I was on one of the empty unfinished floors I had seen from the elevator on my way up, and that my only way out was down those long flights of stairs, all the way to the street, a hundred floors below. I could hear the sound of traffic wafting faintly upward, and where the wind had caught a piece of the plastic I saw black emptiness and the lights of the building across the street. I shivered. The place was freezing, and the wind
whipped gustily through the unfinished walls, then over the noise I heard the sound of a soft footfall.

“Maudie,” J.K. said calmly. “I know you’re here. Don’t make this hard on yourself. After all, you’re an old woman. It’s time for you to go.”

I felt a flash of heat and adrenaline and I grasped my hazelwood stick angrily. How dare he call me an old woman, and how dare he decide when I should depart this world. I was damned if I was going to let him. I had my stick and I was a black belt at karate, and we’d see who won if it came to a fight—though I rather hoped Shannon and Eddie might arrive, like the cavalry, just in the nick of time.

My hope faded fast as a shot rang out. It whistled past my pillar in a quick flicker of orange and I gasped and shut my eyes, telling myself he wouldn’t dare to shoot me because then he would be stuck with my body with a bullet in it, and there was no way he could get away with that because too many people knew about Bob Keeffe now.

“Gotcha,” he said, grabbing me from behind, and I jumped like a surprised eel in his arms, whacking him backward with my finest elbow chop and giving him a firm crack with my stick. I ran, tripping and stumbling, back toward the door and the stairs, but he caught me again. And then the lights flickered as the current was switched back on and I heard the sound of the elevator thundering upward toward us.

Help at last, I thought, just as J.K. realized he had no time to lose. Gripping me in a headlock, he dragged me, kicking like a mad thing, toward the yawning windows and the abyss outside, and I knew what he meant to do.

I whacked him with my stick, yelling as loudly as I could, and he tightened his grip on my neck. There was a whooshing sound in my ears as my air was being choked off. In the distance I thought I heard the elevator stop, but I was fading and I told myself it was already too late. I kicked feebly backward but there were purple patches floating in front of my closed eyes and I feared I was losing the battle.

“Maudie,” I heard Shannon scream, and then J.K. dropped me and I fell all in a heap, like a bag of old bones, to the hard cement floor. There was the sound of running footsteps and a scuffle and then a shot rang out. And, as they say, I knew no more.

T
HEY WANTED TO KEEP ME IN THE HOSPITAL,
but I wasn’t having it. “If I have to lie in bed all day, then I’m going to do it in luxury,” I said, and, as you know, when I make up my mind there’s no moving me.

Back at the Ritz-Carlton, I lay there in my splendid super-king-size bed in blissful comfort, waited on hand and foot; with flowers and presents, and everyone from the chambermaid to the waiters and the concierge as well as the manager popping in for a cup of tea and a gossip.

Joanna came to see me every day, bearing gifts of books and magazines and pretty bed jackets, smiling her lovely Doris Day smile that makes her look like a very glamorous girl-next-door. And now that her mind was at rest about Bob I hoped for her happiness in the future.

Later, Eddie told me what had happened, and poor Shannon was so distraught I felt tears of sympathy in my own eyes as she wailed, “It’s all my fault. I should have realized earlier that it was J. K. It’s all so obvious when you think about it.”

“Nonsense, dear girl,” I replied soothingly. “It was my own curiosity that got me into it, and my own silliness that got me a few cuts and bruises. And I’m only glad you both showed up when you did.”

“In the nick of time,” Eddie said with an affectionate grin. He was holding one of my hands and Shannon the
other, and I laughed and said to the hovering Brigid, “What about a glass of champagne, Brigid?”