Legacy of Secrets (78 page)

“At a guess, yes,” I said, standing up and drawing myself to my full height. “That is if you are Fedora Lee?”

“I am,” she said, pulling off her riding gloves and throwing them and her riding crop onto a chair. “And who might you be?”

“This is Mrs. Molyneux,” Eddie said, making the introductions. He put an arm around Shannon. “And this is Shannon Keeffe.”

“Keeffe? Oh, I get it.” She shrugged dismissively. “That’s pretty good, the daughter of one of the country’s biggest thieves coming here and accusing Brad of stealing.” She laughed, a short, brittle sound as she went to sit next to Brad. I saw him glance helplessly at her and I knew instantly that she was at the bottom of things, or at least of his stealing. Brad Was a weak man. He had never had what Bob Keeffe had; the get-up-and-go that makes a man a winner. And it had taken someone like Fedora Lee, a tough pill in a glossy sugar coating, to set him up and encourage him to cross the border from minor treachery to
major fraud. And I would be willing to bet that most of what he had stolen was now in her neatly numbered little bank account in Switzerland. Or else in Liechtenstein with the ExWyZe Fund.

The man was a fool but I knew he was no murderer. I quickly pushed the contracts back into the attaché case and saw Brad glance wildly at Fedora. She leapt across and grabbed the case from my hands, staring triumphantly at me. “I think these belong to Brad,” she said silkily. Enraged, I stared at her, and then I gave her a swift karate chop just below her elbow. She screamed with pain and dropped the case and Eddie leapt to pick it up.

“You bitch,” she snarled at me, and I smiled.

“Just a little something I learned at karate class of a winter’s evening in the village hall,” I said in explanation. “And now we shall say good-bye. But you have not heard the last of us, Miss Fedora Lee.”

J
ACK
W
EXLER DID NOT LOOK SURPRISED
to see us, standing on the doorstep of his smart East Side brownstone. “Shannon,” he said, nodding coolly in our direction as she introduced us. He didn’t invite us in, he just turned and walked back into the house. We glanced questioningly at one other and then followed him in.

I couldn’t say the house was beautiful with the all-embracing, protective intimacy that I expect from a home, the way Ardnavarna is for instance. But I suppose it had a sort of bleak architectural grandeur. Walls and floors had been ripped out to create new volumes and spaces, and winding staircases linked the different galleried levels where splashy, colorful works of art were displayed. I stared around me interestedly. I’m not one to dismiss anything new simply because I am old and do not understand it, and I would have enjoyed spending some time studying his collection in more detail. But that was not what we were there for.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning and I watched Jack refill his glass with whiskey. He slumped into a hard-looking black leather sofa, staring at us, and I knew this was not his first drink of the morning. I was looking at a worried man, maybe even a frantic man.

He did not offer us a drink, he just sat there silently. Shannon said coldly, “Do you know why we are here?”

“Brad called,” he said sullenly.

“Then you know we have the contracts that you and Brad signed, for the purchase of the worthless properties. Dozens of them …”

“Those properties were all hand-picked by your own father, probably to bury tax money he didn’t want to disclose. He bought those properties and then he had us do the dirty work and sign the documents. There’s no way you can pin anything on me.”

I wandered around the large room, peering at the signatures on the paintings, though even I knew that the series of three immense abstracts were Rothkos. And even in the wilds of Connemara we know what sort of price a Rothko commands.

“Very nice,” I said crisply, sitting myself down next to Jack on the hard leather sofa. I winced and wondered why it is that architects always choose such bleak furnishings. Is there no softness in their souls? Looking into Jack Wexler’s eyes I knew there was certainly no softness in this particular architect’s soul. Nor in his heart. My gut instinct told me I was looking at a bitter, frustrated man. It showed in his disillusioned eyes, in the tight lines around his mouth and the flicker of apprehension, or even fear, that passed across his face as he watched me, wondering what I was going to say next.

“Such museum quality art must cost a great deal of money,” I said pleasantly. “Shannon was able to tell me exactly what your yearly salary was with Keeffe Holdings, and I doubt it would buy one of these masterpieces, let alone three. As well as all the rest of your wonderful collection. And this very smart town house. To say nothing of the Aston-Martin and the other ‘toys’ you own, Mr. Wexler.”

He tossed the remainder of his drink down his throat and slammed the glass down on the minimalist glass coffee table. “It’s none of your business, you interfering old busybody,” he snarled.

Quite suddenly that smooth, handsome man had disappeared and Jack Wexler’s background was showing. The
tough street fighter who had learned to cover his cheap soul—and his tracks—using his smooth, easy good looks and practiced charm. I felt I was looking at a man who rehearsed his lines and his smile in the bathroom mirror every morning, a man who had learned to use people, who knew how to tell them what they wanted to hear and how to take what he wanted. And I pitied any woman foolish enough to get involved with him.

Jack was a user and now the whole self-centered glossy world he had created for himself was about to fall around his ears, and he was panicked. I could almost smell the scent of it on him, the way dogs can, and I smiled my most guileless smile and said, “Mr. Wexler, did you murder Bob Keeffe?”

“Are you out of your mind?” he yelled, leaping agitatedly to his feet. He strode across to Shannon and put his arm protectively around her shoulders.

“How can you accuse me of killing him?” he yelled, red-faced with fear and anger. Then, pulling himself together with an effort, he said more calmly, “I’m not perfect, I admit, but goddam it, I’m no killer.”

He turned abruptly away and went and poured himself another drink. He hands were shaking and I wondered how much he had been drinking these months since Bob died. But I knew he was speaking the truth because Jack’s only concern was the way he seemed to other people; his “presentation” was everything. He was a show-off. Hence his smart town house in the grand neighborhood, the expensive art collection and the flashy cars. Jack was all facade and no content. For some reason I didn’t yet understand, he had thought he could steal from the company without being caught. He had done it to fuel his extravagances and bolster his ego and his image, but I didn’t think he had killed for it. We were looking at a man who was worried about going to jail for fraud, not murder, and I sighed regretfully as I stood up to leave.

“Of course, you are a thief, Mr. Wexler,” I said pleasantly, because I hate being rude when I am a guest in
someone’s house. “And now, as you look around your grand house and grand possessions, you must ask yourself if it was worth it. I wonder just how many years a man gets for grand larceny. Or will it be considered fraud?” I shrugged, smiling. “But that’s for the judge to decide. And we must say good morning and be on our way.”

Jack glared at me and then said appealingly to Shannon, “Honey, I know how you’re feeling. Believe me, I’ve shed my own tears for your dad. We worked together all those years. He was my friend. How could you believe that I would steal from him? I promise you it’s not true.”

He was using all his smooth charm on her. He even looked like himself again: a lean, attractive, expensively dressed man, with just a hint of a little-boy-lost that some women are such suckers for. Not Shannon.

He put his hands on her shoulders, pulling her closer, staring deep into her eyes, and I saw Eddie bristle and gather himself together, ready to punch him if he made one wrong move. “Don’t touch me,” Shannon said in a voice so tipped with ice it made him shudder. “Don’t even talk to me. You cheated my father and for all I know you shot him when he found out. You ruined that fine man, and even if you didn’t kill him, you killed everything he had worked for. His company and his good name.”

We walked from the room without saying good-bye, leaving Jack staring after us with the panic in his eyes.

“T
HERE’S ONLY ONE PERSON LEFT,”
Eddie said. “J. K. Brennan.”

Shannon sighed as we drove back to the Ritz-Carlton. “He’s the only one I believed when he said he was sorry. He was the only one who helped me. I still have his credit line of fifty thousand dollars at the bank. I just can’t believe he was stealing. Of all of them, he was the one who owed most to my dad, and from what he told me he felt it right to the heart.”

We located J.K. out at his farm in Montauk, and Shannon phoned him to say we were coming to visit. I’ve found
that surprise is always a good weapon and I didn’t approve, but she said it was a long way to go and then not find him there.

I had thought we would be taking a commercial airliner, but Shannon had other ideas. “Dad gave me flying lessons for my twenty-first birthday,” she said with a confident grin. “I shall be your pilot today.”

The rented plane was a sweet little red-and-white fourseater Cessna and Shannon handled it expertly. Eddie sat up front next to her and I sat behind them, staring excitedly out of the windows at the green-and-blue landscape dotted with sunshine and cloud-shadows drifting away beneath us. I was glad Brigid had decided to spend the day in Bloomingdale’s and not come with us, because she would have had the rosary beads out and been crossing herself and making us all nervous. I just hoped she wouldn’t squander her life savings in one gigantic shopping spree.

J.K. was waiting for us at the little airfield and he was exactly as Shannon had described: middle height and stocky with smooth brown hair brushed straight back and mild brown eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He was wearing well-pressed jeans and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but even at the wheel of his white Range Rover, he looked uncomfortably like a man who should be sitting behind a desk. “Casual” was not a word that could ever be used to describe J. K. Brennan. My guess was that he was a man who lived by his own set of daily rules and regulations, and it’s my experience with people of that sort, who operate within a restrictive little framework, that whenever they step out of it they are likely to fall to pieces.

He was more than pleasant, he was welcoming. And deferential toward Shannon. There was none of the familiarity I had expected, since he had been the one to comfort her and help her out by lending her money. He shook hands with her as formally as he did with Eddie and me, and he pointed out the places of interest like a good host as he drove us to his “farm” on the shores of Long Island Sound.

I smiled when I saw it—it was more like an Irish farm
than an American one; a couple of fields fenced in, a carefully tended vegetable plot, a few token flowers and a low white house clinging to the landscape in perpetual fear of being blown away by the fierce Atlantic gales.

“It’s nothing much,” J.K. said apologetically, “but it’s a great place to get away from the rat race.”

“A refuge,” Shannon said quietly, and they smiled at each other, remembering when he had offered it to her for just that reason.

I thought it was odd that a man like that should want to get away from the rat race, but Shannon had told me about his early life on the farmstead in South Carolina and I thought maybe he was just going back to his roots, with his neat little “play farm” that didn’t have to work for a living, the way the farm in his youth had.

It was decorated in a charmingly casual fashion, easy and comfortable with green-shaded lamps and masculine plaid throws on the old sofas, and logs piled to one side of the big stone fireplace, and you could just imagine cozying up at night in front of the glow. My estimation of him went up, and then he told us he had bought it complete with furnishings from a writer who couldn’t stand the solitude. I laughed. It was hard to get a fix on a man who seemed to be wearing another man’s clothes and living in another man’s house.

He said he hoped we would stay for lunch but I quickly declined, knowing that the real reason we were there was not social.

Shannon took the initiative this time. She said firmly, “Maudie and Eddie and I,
and
Joanna Belmont, think my dad was murdered. No, let me correct that. We
know
he was. And we are determined to find out who did it.”

“I thought you had gotten over that idea,” he said, looking puzzled.

She shook her head. “Now I’m even more sure. Especially as we have evidence that Brad and Jack were stealing from him.”

She took out the contracts and handed them to J.K.
“Have you ever seen these before?” she asked, and he scanned them quickly and shook his head.

“Nope. But that doesn’t mean they are not legit. The partners often signed contracts, even major ones, though with Jack it was usually with the suppliers and contractors —you know, for the girders and the marble and the elevators. But Shannon, you know your dad hated what he called ‘office work.’ That was one of the reasons he hired me, to take all that day-to-day grind of contract reading and letter writing and following up, off his hands. He was an engineer and that’s what he liked doing. He spent three quarters of his time at the building sites, and the other quarter wining and dining bankers and talking them into giving him more money. And he was damned good at it too.”