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