Hot Money (3 page)

“Michael!”

“Molly!”

“Oh, never mind,” she grumbled. “I’ll wait right over there.”

He grinned. “No. You’ll wait right here, with me.”

If she’d been five years old, she would have sulked. As it was, she stuck with what she hoped would appear to be nothing more than mild disappointment.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” Michael added.

She regarded him doubtfully. “How?”

He touched one finger to her chin, tilted it up, and covered her mouth with his. The kiss—or maybe it was simply shock—took her breath away. Michael was not prone to public displays of affection, unless she counted the one time she’d seen him patting his ex-lover’s fanny in parting. As a result, she wasn’t wild about the intent behind the kiss. She had a feeling it had less to do with seduction than it did with distraction. Whatever the dubious intention, however, it momentarily wiped the murder out of her mind. Right at the moment, she couldn’t ask for more than that.

“Isn’t this a conflict of interest or something?” she murmured eventually, her back pressed against wallpaper that the guidebook she’d picked up indicated was some nineteenth-century French woodblock pattern.

“Not that I know of,” he said. “For once we’re both on the same side and operating in the same official, or should I say unofficial, capacity.”

“But you are a policeman, despite the fact that you aren’t on duty, and you did discover the body.”

“You discovered the body,” he corrected. “I just happened to be around at the time.”

“A technicality. Michael, aren’t you the least bit curious about what’s happened here tonight?”

“Curious, yes. Anxious to get involved, no. You seem to forget I have a caseload as tall as the Freedom Tower as it is. I don’t need to chase ambulances, like some starving attorney. You also seem to forget that every time
you
stick
your
nose into one of these incidents, your ex-husband and your boss go through the roof. Do you enjoy taunting them?”

“Hal DeWitt and Vincent Gates have absolutely nothing to do with this. Liza is my friend and I want to help her solve this thing quickly so she can minimize the damage to the cause. It’s rare to get a coalition of environmentalists all working together this way and I want it to be successful for Liza’s sake. Maybe I even owe it to Tessa Lafferty, too,” she said, warming to the noble sound of that.

“Why? Because you didn’t contradict Liza when she described the woman as an idiot, a statement, I might add, that could put your friend on the short list of suspects? I read all the time about the nasty, vicious competitiveness that fund-raising spawns. Vizcaya itself got its share of headlines just a year or so ago because two groups of supporters couldn’t agree on anything. You’re not on this committee. You’re not responsible for your friend’s actions. Therefore, as far as I can see, Tessa Lafferty’s death has nothing to do with you. Play it smart for once and keep it that way.”

Molly realized she couldn’t very well tell him she was feeling guilty because she herself had coveted that diamond ring Tessa was wearing. She vaguely recalled from long ago Sunday school lessons that coveting what your neighbor had was a significant sin. It was probably not one that a man who dealt in homicides could relate to very easily. Admittedly, it was also a pretty flimsy excuse for involvement in a murder investigation. Protecting Liza was another matter altogether. Liza had stood by her when she’d been under suspicion in the murder of their condo president. Molly owed it to Liza to do the same for her now.

Momentarily thwarted from doing any significant, obvious sleuthing, however, she gazed around the central courtyard where the police had gathered everyone who fit into the open space. Others were crammed into the surrounding rooms, much to the distress of the museum’s curator. A few guests had been allowed onto the terrace under the watchful eye of two policemen.

With Michael looking on, Molly moved through the crowd, conducting what she hoped was a casual search for Liza. When she finally spotted her across the terrace going over the guest list with a uniformed officer, Molly sighed. “Thank God,” she murmured.

“You didn’t really think she’d skipped, did you?” Michael asked, clearly surprised by her apparent lack of faith.

“No, of course not,” she said loyally.

He regarded her intently. “Molly, was something going on between Liza and the Lafferty woman that the police should know about?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Molly?”

“You already know Liza detested her. Isn’t that enough?”

“I suppose,” he said skeptically.

Desperate to change the subject, Molly pointed out Tessa’s husband to Michael. “See. He’s right over there. Isn’t the husband always the prime suspect in a case like this?”

Sixty-year-old Roger Lafferty didn’t look like a man who’d just committed a murder. He looked stunned. He was sitting on a stone bench, surrounded by friends. His normally jovial, round face looked suddenly tired and crumpled, as if all of the air had been squeezed out of him.

“How was the marriage?” Michael asked.

“Okay as far as I know, though how he managed to stay married to her is beyond me. From what I’ve heard, Tessa was not easy to live with even before she turned menopausal. Since then, she’s been a holy terror.”

“What about the other guests? Was she feuding with any of them?”

Molly was thrilled with the question, not because of the content but because it was proof that he was getting hooked after all. It was possible to take the cop out of his uniform, but obviously he couldn’t shut off his analytical mind.

“Jason Jeffries,” she said at once, seizing the first name that popped into her mind. She wondered why. She barely knew the philanthropist, though she certainly knew his reputation for largess. Lines from needy organizations practically formed outside his office, like starving ants parading toward a bowl of sugar.

“The man Liza expects to hand over big bucks to save the manatees?” Michael said.

“That’s the one.”

“He’s here tonight?”

“Right over there,” she said.

Jason Jeffries had pinned the detective in charge of the investigation against a pillar. That was no mean feat, given Detective Larry Abrams’s impressive stature and the fierce gleam in his eyes. Jeffries had him cornered all the same and was demanding that everyone there be released immediately.

“Not bloody damn likely,” one policeman just behind Molly muttered wearily when he overheard the demand. “We’ll be lucky if we get out of here by dawn.”

Thank God she’d had the foresight to arrange for Brian to stay overnight with a friend, Molly thought. There would be no need for her son to know about the murder before morning when she could tell him herself. Relieved on that point, and before Michael could stop her, she turned to the officer.

“So,” she began as casually as if she were merely inquiring about the weather. “What’s the cause of death? Has the medical examiner determined that yet?”

“You’ll have to wait for that information, just like everyone else,” he said stiffly.

Molly interpreted that to mean he didn’t know.

“I heard she was strangled,” a woman standing just behind Molly said in a conspiratorial whisper. Though she was a tiny, birdlike woman, she cast a defiant look at her scowling husband, a man Molly recognized as the chief financial officer for one of the remaining solvent banks in town.

“Shut up, Jane,” Harley Newcombe snapped. “I doubt whatever you overheard in the ladies’ room came from the medical examiner.

“Women are nothing but a damn bunch of gossips,” he added, looking to Michael for sympathetic support. He glared at the hapless Jane again. “I told you we had no business coming tonight. These people all hate each other. There was bound to be trouble of one sort or another.”

Michael’s gaze narrowed. “What do you mean, they all hate each other?”

“The infighting in this crowd, especially among the wives, makes one of those high-profile family feuds over money look like sandbox bickering. I never saw anything like it before in my life. You think men play down and dirty in business? That’s nothing compared to the way these women go at it.”

He shook his head in obvious male bemusement at women’s ways. Molly was tempted to point out that at least half of the people at this affair and on the board of the charitable organizations involved were men, but Michael had latched on to a skimpy clue and clearly intended to shake it until it yielded real evidence. She was so grateful for that she kept her mouth clamped firmly shut.

“Was Tessa Lafferty involved in the feuding?” he asked.

“Hell, she’s the one who started it from what I’ve heard,” Newcombe said, his disgust evident. “Typical catfighting when you get a bunch of women together.”

“Harley Newcombe, that is not so,” his wife retorted with unexpected spunk, saving Molly the trouble. “It’s the men who stuck their noses into things and made everything complicated. That horrible, overbearing Jason Jeffries has to control everything he’s involved with. He treated Tessa like she didn’t have a brain in her head.”

“Why shouldn’t he treat her any way he damned well pleases? He’s coughing up most of the money.”

“He gave a single donation—” she began.

“For a hundred thousand.”

“And that entitles him to run things? This coalition had raised three times that before he ever got involved. If you ask me, that awful man is trying to buy his way to sainthood. It’s probably penance for some horrible sin he’s committed in the name of the almighty dollar.”

“Just drop it, Jane. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If you could manage money, I wouldn’t be covering all those bounced checks of yours every month.”

Since it was clear that the conversation was rapidly disintegrating into a familiar family squabble, Molly again turned her attention to the generous, if difficult, Jason Jeffries. She spotted him lurking in the shadows near the buffet table, apparently consoling himself with food after his failure to get his way with the detective.

Obviously a man who’d ignored physicians’ warnings about obesity, cholesterol, and smoking, he stood with a cigar in one hand and a croissant mounded with rare roast beef in the other. His expression couldn’t have been described as content, but it was darned close to it.

Molly slipped away from Michael’s side while he continued to cross-examine Harley Newcombe. She approached the robust philanthropist, whose old family money came from paper goods or adhesive bandages or a combination of all those indispensable items that survived economic blips, recessions, and even the occasional full-blown depression. His bushy black brows, which almost met in the middle above dark, piercing eyes, rose slightly at her intrusion.

“You after my money, too?” he groused.

A puff of tobacco smoke hit Molly square in the face. She barely resisted the urge to snatch the offending cigar out of his hand and stomp on it. She settled for saying, “You don’t have enough to make me put up with your smoking.”

A chuckle rumbled through him. He tapped off the embers and put the cigar aside. “You’re a sassy little thing. I like that. Half the people in this place are scared to death of me.”

“That’s because they want something from you and I don’t.”

“You sure about that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Not even a hint about the way Tessa and I have been fussing and feuding for the past couple of years?”

Molly caught the unexpectedly mischievous twinkle in his eyes and grinned. She had a hunch she could get to like Jason Jeffries. She hoped like hell he wasn’t the murderer. “Okay. You caught me,” she admitted. “I would like to know more about that.”

“You interested just for the sake of gossip or you have a better reason?”

“I’m interested because my friend cares about every single environmental cause that stands to benefit from tonight’s event and this murder could put her and her causes in jeopardy.”

“Loyalty, huh? Can’t remember the last time I saw much evidence of that in this crowd,” he said, echoing Harley Newcombe’s opinion. “Most of ‘em would sooner stab each other in the back than lend a helping hand.”

Even though she’d heard the complaint before and seen evidence of it herself, she didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe that everyone was like Liza, who was totally committed and honestly believed it was her obligation to make the world a better place. Surely others who signed up for one of these charitable boards or committees felt the same way.

“Don’t you think you’re just a little bit cynical?” she said hopefully.

“A little bit? Hell, girl, I’ve lived a long time and I’m damned cynical. I have cause to be. Human beings have a tremendous capacity for hurting their fellow man, to say nothing of God’s creatures. What they’ll do to them is a crying shame.”

“Didn’t you and Tessa agree on that much at least?”

“Sure we did.”

“Then what was the problem between you?”

“To understand the answer to that you’d have to go back thirty years or so, before your time, I suspect.”

“Barely,” Molly admitted with great reluctance. Her thirtieth birthday was less than two weeks away. She was not looking forward to it. Too much of her life was not the way she’d planned for it to be. “So what happened between you and Tessa thirty years ago?”

Jason Jeffries knew how to draw out suspense. He ate the last bite of his sandwich, wiped his pudgy fingers delicately on a pristine white handkerchief he drew from an inner pocket, folded it neatly, and put it away. Then, with an air of nonchalance that had Molly gnashing her teeth, he took her arm and led her deep into the shadows on the terrace.

Considering that Jason Jeffries might very well be a suspect in Tessa’s murder, Molly knew she should have been terrified at being lured farther away from the crowd. A distant rumble of thunder and the dimming of the outdoor lights emphasized the warning. Instead of being frightened, however, her anticipation soared the way it always did when she knew some major clue was about to be revealed.

Only when they were alone and the bay was spread before them did he speak.