The Stars Shine Down

A day after they returned, Keller walked into Lara's office. "We had some bad luck on the Atlanta project," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Someone beat us to it."

Lara looked at him, surprised. "How could they? Those properties weren't even on the market."

"I know. Word must have leaked out."

Lara shrugged. "I guess you can't win them all."

That afternoon Keller had more bad news. "We lost the Lake Pontchartrain deal."

The following week they flew to Seattle and explored Mercer Island and Kirkland. There was one site that interested Lara, and when they returned to New York, she said to Keller, "Let's go after it. I think it could be a money-maker."

"Right."

At a meeting the next day Lara asked, "Did you put in the bid on Kirkland?"

Keller shook his head. "Someone got there ahead of us."

Lara was thoughtful. "Oh. Howard, see if you can find out who's jumping the gun on us."

It took him less than twenty-four hours. "Steve Murchison."

"Did he get all those deals?"

"Yes."

"So someone in this office has a big mouth."

"It looks that way."

Her face was grim. The next morning she hired a detective agency to find the culprit. They had no success.

"As far as we can tell, all your employees are clean, Miss Cameron. None of the offices is bugged, and your phones haven't been tapped."

They had reached a dead end.

Maybe they were just coincidences, Lara thought. She did not believe it.

The sixty-eight-story residential tower in Queens was half completed, and Lara had invited the bankers to come and inspect its progress. The higher the number of floors, the more expensive the unit. Lara's sixty-eight stories had only fifty-seven actual floors. It was a trick she had learned from Paul Martin.

"Everybody does it," Paul had laughed. "All you do is change the floor numbers."

"How do you do that?"

"It's very simple. Your first bank of elevators is from the lobby to the twenty-fourth floor. The second bank of elevators is from the thirty-fourth floor to the sixty-eighth. It's done all the time."

Because of the unions, the construction jobs had half a dozen phantoms on salary - people who did not exist. There was a Director of Safety Practices, the Coordinator of Construction, the Supervisor of Materials, and others with impressive-sounding titles. In the beginning Lara had questioned it.

"Don't worry about it," Paul had told her. "It's all part of the CDB - the cost of doing business."

Howard Keller had been living in a small apartment in Washington Square, and when Lara had visited him one evening, she had looked around the tiny apartment and said, "This is a rattrap. You've got to move out of here." At Lara's urging, he had moved into a condominium uptown.

One night Lara and Keller were working late, and when they finally finished, Lara said, "You look exhausted. Why don't you go home and get some sleep, Howard?"

"Good idea," Keller yawned. "See you in the morning."

"Come in late," Lara told him.

Keller got into his car and started driving home. He was thinking about a deal they had just closed and how well Lara had handled it. It was exciting working with her. Exciting and frustrating. Somehow, in the back of his mind, he kept hoping that a miracle would happen. / was blind not to have seen it before, Howard darling. I'm not interested in Paul Martin or Philip Adler. It's you I've loved all along.

Fat chance.

When Keller reached his apartment, he took out his key and put it in the lock. It did not fit. Puzzled, he tried again. Suddenly the door flew open from the inside, and a stranger was standing there. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" the man asked.

Keller looked at him, bewildered. "I live here."

"The hell you do."

"But I..." Realization suddenly hit him. "I...I'm sorry," he stammered, red-faced. "I used to live here. I..."

The door was slammed in his face. Keller stood there, disconcerted. How could I have forgotten that I moved? I've been working too hard.

Lara was in the middle of a conference when her private phone rang. "You've been pretty busy lately, baby. I've missed you."

"I've been traveling a lot, Paul." She couldn't bring herself to say that she had missed him.

"Let's have lunch today."

Lara thought about all he had done for her.

"I'd like that," she said. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was to hurt him.

They had lunch at Mr. Chow's.

"You're looking great," Paul said. "Whatever you've been doing agrees with you. How's the Reno hotel coming?"

"It's coming along beautifully," Lara said enthusiastically. She spent the next fifteen minutes describing how the work was progressing. "We should be ready to open in two months."

A man and woman across the room were just leaving. The man's back was to Lara, but he looked familiar. When he turned for an instant, she caught a glimpse of his face. Steve Murchison. The woman with him looked familiar also. She stooped to pick up her purse, and Lara's heart skipped a beat. Gertrude Meeks, my secretary. "Bingo," Lara said softly.

"Is anything wrong?" Paul asked.

"No. Everything's fine."

Lara went on describing the hotel.

When Lara returned from lunch, she sent for Keller.

"Do you remember the property in Phoenix we looked at a few months ago?"

"Yeah, we turned it down. You said it was a dog."