Legacy of Secrets by Elizabeth Adler

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. ButBob 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.
    “Gentlemen, Bob Keeffe was an adventurer. He was a showman. He enjoyed his role as a larger-than-life public figure. He liked the recognition and the respect and the glamour. It made up for all the rejection he got as an orphan kid who had to make it the hard way. He loved music and art and beautiful women, and all those things cost money. And he spent it like water on all three.
    “If it had not been for his love of art, maybe this tangled web might never have been uncovered, or at least not for some years, and I truly believe that Bob himself believed that he could sort it all out. That one day he could stop robbing Peter to pay Paul, that this new skyscraper, and then the next, would be sold for the millions he owed and then he could sleep nights again. But Bob coveted a second van Gogh to hang on the wall of the new Keeffe Tower. It would be a tangible symbol, like the other he owned, of his dreams come true.”
    They stared at him: they all knew the story of Bob Keeffe’s proposed bid of sixteen million dollars for van Gogh’s “Garden of the Asylum,” which had been painted in St. Remy. The Keeffe Tower was the jewel in the crown of his career. He had wanted the world to see what he had created from nothing. He had wanted to show them how rich and powerful he and his company were. And how splendid a Park Avenue building Keeffe Tower would be with a famous van Gogh hanging in its atrium.
    “Every tourist—every
person
—in New York will pass through Keeffe Tower’s atrium just to look at that van Gogh,” he had told them. “And each one of them will stop for a cup of coffee in the cafe, or a drink in the bar, or to buy a book or scarf, or a jewel in the boutiques. It will bring in a hundred times more business than it cost. And it will make the Keeffe name famous throughout the world. You’ll see, before you know it, we shall be building Keeffe Towers in Sydney, in Tokyo, in Hong Kong. This is only the first of many.”
    That van Gogh, symbol of Keeffe’s young dreams, had brought about his downfall. The banks were suddenly cautious, they were no longer rushing to lend him money. One by one they had turned him down. His credit had run out. Somehow the news filtered out that Keeffe was in trouble, confidence in his companies melted like frost in the sun, and Keeffe