Legacy of Secrets by Elizabeth Adler Read Free Book Online Page B

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’sunderstandable 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