Hot Money (17 page)

The guard, the same one who’d been on duty on her last visit, waved—either in recognition or as a signal of general apathy, then went back to the magazine he’d been reading. Apparently it was absorbing enough or he was so unobservant that he didn’t notice her odd route straight past the front door and around to the side of the house.

If Josie was surprised to see her at the kitchen door, she hid it well. Maybe she’d just been around so long that nothing much struck her as peculiar. She waved Molly into the kitchen.

“I’ve been baking a bit,” she announced unnecessarily. The huge room with its restaurant-sized stove and ovens was fragrant with the sweet aroma of fruit pies and the nutty, cinnamon scent of coffee cakes. The results of her labors were lined up along one tiled counter. If she did many more, she’d have to open a bakery to get rid of them all.

“Can’t seem to keep my mind on anything else,” she explained with a shrug. “I figure we’ll be needing these before things are done. If not, they freeze up right well. You want to try a piece of my strawberry pie? Ain’t nothing like it in any of those fancy restaurants around town.” She chuckled. “I know that ‘cause I’ve had a couple of big-time caterers beg me to turn over that recipe.”

“Neville Foster was one of them, I’ll bet,” Molly said as she took the first mouth-watering bite of the sweet concoction with a crust so flaky it melted. “Josie, you deserve a place of honor in heaven for your baking. Neville’s customers have probably had this pie here and dreamed of serving it in their own homes.”

“Wouldn’t give it to the likes of him,” she said with an indignant huff.

There was so much derision in her tone that Molly regarded her in astonishment. “You don’t like him?”

“He’s a sneaky little so-and-so. Wouldn’t put it past him to snoop through my cupboards trying to steal my recipes. Caught him at it once, in fact. He claimed he was looking for the rest of the champagne glasses, but he couldn’t fool me.” She winked at Molly. “Lot of good it did him. I got my recipes hidden where no one can get at ‘em.” She tapped her head. “Every one of ‘em is right up here.”

Molly nearly moaned at the thought of losing all those old-fashioned recipes if Josie didn’t pass them on before she died. Obviously, for the moment though, the tough old bird had no intention of dying or giving away her secrets. Molly ate the last crumb of her pie and drank some of the herbal iced tea Josie had poured for her. The housekeeper was regarding her speculatively.

“I suppose you got a reason for dropping by to see old Josie?”

Molly considered trying to finesse her way around the old woman’s sharp intuition, but opted for being straightforward instead.

“I’m trying to figure some things out,” she said candidly. “I’ve got all these questions going around in my head. I thought maybe you could help me fill in some of the blanks.”

“About Miz Tessa?” Josie said, losing some of her vim and vigor. She suddenly looked her age.

“That’s right.”

“It surely doesn’t make a bit of sense to me either,” she said, sitting down heavily. “Why would someone go killing a lady like her?”

“You said yourself that she had her flaws.”

“She did that, but not the sort of things to go getting killed over,” she declared indignantly. “She made Mr. Roger madder than a wet hen sometimes, but I never heard him say a mean word to her.”

“They didn’t argue?”

“No more than most married folks.”

“I’d heard he was thinking of divorcing her.”

Josie looked convincingly shocked. “Never! Not Mr. Roger. He didn’t believe in divorce.”

“I thought she’d been divorced before.”

“That was all in the past. Had nothing to do with the two of them. Besides, he adored that woman, no matter what. He turned a blind eye to her faults. Now if her own husband could put up with all her craziness, who else would have reason to hurt her?”

“By all her craziness, I assume you mean the other men,” Molly said carefully.

Josie hesitated, clearly uncertain over whether an admission could be considered disloyal. Apparently she decided it was too late to worry about such things. She nodded. “It puzzles me why a high-class woman would behave like that. It just wasn’t right and I told her so more than once. She had everything she could ever need or want. Mr. Roger saw to that. She said to me herself that he was a saint.” Josie shook her head sorrowfully. “Didn’t make no difference. There was always some other man waiting in the wings.”

“Any particular man lately?”

“She never told me their names ‘cause she knew I disapproved. I could just tell when there was a new one on the horizon.” She regarded Molly confidingly. “You know what the problem was? Low self-esteem. I saw that on Oprah or Geraldo, one of them shows. It was all about women who need a new man all the time to prove how desirable they are. If I’d been able to figure out that fancy VCR machine in the other room, I’d have put that on tape and made Miz Tessa watch it a time or two till she saw things right again.” She shook her head. “Low self-esteem. Who would have thought it?”

The concept clearly bemused her almost as much as it distressed her that Tessa might have been a victim of the syndrome.

“But why would Tessa have low self-esteem?” Molly asked, trying to reconcile that with the image of arrogance she presented to the world.

“Now that’s a question you’d have to be asking one of them fancy head doctors.”

“Are you sure about that? Low self-esteem usually begins in childhood. You said you were hired by her family when she was still a girl. What were her parents like?”

“They were fine people,” Josie insisted. “Helped me educate my brothers and sisters. Got ‘em all through high school. Two of my brothers even went on to college, thanks to her daddy’s help. Same college Miz Tessa’s brother went to.”

“What about Tessa? Did she go to college?”

Josie looked perplexed by the question. “Now, why would she need to do that? She had her path in life all cut out for her. She had plenty of money to see that she made the right kind of marriage. Wasn’t no need for her to get some fancy education that would just be wasted.”

“Is that what her father said?” Molly asked, beginning to get the picture.

“Told her that time and again,” Josie confirmed.

“So she wanted to go to college?”

“Had some crazy fool notion about becoming a business tycoon. She wanted to run her daddy’s company someday, but everybody knew her brother was going to do that, so what was the point? If you ask me, she should have been satisfied with the way things were.”

Maybe so, Molly thought as she drove off a short time later. Maybe Tessa should have played by the rules of the day and been satisfied, but obviously that niche envisioned by her shortsighted father hadn’t been enough for her. No wonder she’d constantly sought the approval of powerful, successful men. She’d wanted to prove she could hold her own with any one of them.

For the first time since the investigation had begun, Molly began to feel desperately sorry for the pathetic life Tessa had led in her ill-fated quest for proof that she was somebody important. She couldn’t help wondering if that same quest wasn’t in some obscure way responsible for her murder.

Molly was so intent on learning all she could about Tessa’s need for approval and yearning for business success, she didn’t notice at first that Vince had finally wandered back to the office.

“Where have you been?” her boss demanded, glancing pointedly at the oversized clock on the wall. The look was mostly for effect. The clock hadn’t been right for months now.

“You’re in a charming mood,” she observed. “What happened? Did you double bogey on the eighteenth hole?”

“The game isn’t everything,” he shot back, scowling ferociously. “I conduct business on the golf course. I was trying to close a deal out there.”

“Oh?”

“I might have done it if I’d been able to reach anyone in this office for some information. Instead, all I got was a recording. Why the hell should I have a staff, if no one’s ever here?”

Molly took the attack in stride. Naturally, now that Vince was off the golf course, he wanted everyone to be as miserable and put-upon as he was. It was Vincent Gates’s nature to present a long-suffering facade to the world. He thought it would keep his job secure if his superiors thought he was dreadfully overburdened with work.

“What information did you need?” she inquired sweetly. “I’ll be happy to get it and follow up with a phone call to the producer.”

“Never mind,” he grumbled, clearly happy sulking. “I’ve taken care of it. Where’s Jeannette?” He gave a furtive glance around as if to assure himself she wasn’t lurking in the vicinity ready to cast some evil spell over him.

“On location. When are you going to admit that she’s the best clerk we’ve ever had in here and put in for a promotion for her?”

“Don’t start on me again.”

“You’re hoping she’ll just give up and go away, aren’t you? I’ve told her she ought to do just that. She’s overqualified for this job. Any other boss would appreciate her.”

“I do appreciate her. She just makes me nervous. You’ve seen the way she looks at me.”

Molly bit back a grin. Jeannette’s cool, superior looks embodied disdain, not malevolence, but Vince would never believe that. It was probably best not to explain either. He was already regarding her suspiciously.

“I suppose you were on location, too?”

“Nope. I had some personal business to take care of.”

Vince didn’t have to ponder that more than a heartbeat before he caught on. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Not again. Tell me you were not out snooping around on that murder investigation.”

She remained stoically silent.

He watched her intently. “You were, weren’t you? That’s exactly what you were doing. When will you ever learn?” He held up his hands in a gesture of resignation. “I give up. The next time I get called on the carpet by some county official because you can’t stay out of things that are none of your concern, you are out of here. Adios. Good-bye. Is that clear?”

Molly nodded obediently, which usually made Vince feel powerful again. “Must have been a triple bogey,” she muttered under her breath as she returned to her desk.

“I heard that,” he shouted after her.

Hopefully he wouldn’t hear her conversation with Jason Jeffries, she thought as she dialed the philanthropist’s office. She had to check out this one last thing while it was on her mind. Then she vowed to get busy and actually do some film office business. It would pacify Vince if he ended the day with a stack of folders on prospective productions sitting on his desk. He could complain to his date all evening about how backed up he was at work.

“What sort of information are you after this time, young lady?” the old man said, an affectionate note behind the cranky question.

“I want to talk about Tessa a minute.”

“What about her?”

“Josie …”

“Her housekeeper? I didn’t even know she was still alive. She must be a hundred, if she’s a day.”

“She says she’s seventy. She also told me that Tessa had some crazy notion of becoming a business tycoon and that her father thwarted her because he didn’t see any need to educate a woman.”

“Never heard it told quite that way, but I suppose it’s true enough,” he conceded. “Tessa envied that brother of hers. She resented the fact that he was destined to inherit the business, while all she got was some trust fund. She’d been daddy’s little darling all her life until the time came to divvy up the estate. Then he put her in her place. Wasn’t all that unusual given the way things worked in those days.”

“Could she have run the business?”

Jason gave a snort of derision. “I told you about the books on those fund-raisers. Does that sound like the kind of woman who could manage a big corporation? Tessa had grandiose ideas, but not an ounce of sense when it came to carrying them out. If you ask me, her daddy knew exactly what he was doing. Hell, I doled out her alimony payments a little at a time, because I knew damned well she’d throw it all away and come begging for more if I didn’t.”

“Thanks,” Molly said, unwilling to get into a debate over whether Tessa might have learned to handle money if she’d been given a little responsibility and education. It was too late for such a discussion to do the woman a bit of good, and she doubted if Jason was likely to change his sexist ways at this late date either.

Unless Liza could turn him around. The thought of the struggle brought a smile to her lips.

“I don’t know why any of that’s important, but you’re welcome,” he said. His tone sobered. “You watch where you go sniffing around, young lady. Whoever killed Tessa might see a need to get rid of you, too, if you start getting too close to the truth.”

Coming from any of the other principal suspects, Molly might have considered that a mild threat. Coming from Jason Jeffries, it seemed no more than a friendly, concerned warning. She took it to heart.

That didn’t stop her from trying to add things up one more time. What if Tessa, in her zeal to prove that she was capable of handling business as well as any man, had gotten herself in over her head? They’d assumed all along that Roger was responsible for whatever financial difficulties he was having, but what if it had been Tessa’s foolish decisions that had been their downfall?

Perhaps that had been the one thing Roger couldn’t forgive, despite Josie’s faith that he would tolerate any of Tessa’s myriad sins. Not all that long ago there had been stories in Japan about wives who’d lost the family savings in the stock market and were so terrified of their husbands’ wrath that they committed suicide or begged their brokers to hide the truth. Maybe Tessa had suffered a similar humiliation and had infuriated Roger in the process.

Molly decided she needed to see all the suspects together if she was ever going to fully understand the dynamics of the group. For that, she needed Liza’s help. If Vince’s menacing scowl was anything to go by, however, she figured she’d better wait to ask her.

•   •   •

“Liza, why don’t you organize that emergency coalition meeting you’ve been talking about?” Molly suggested later that night after concluding a reasonably productive afternoon at the office under Vince’s watchful eye. “I suppose we could wait for the memorial service, but I heard it’s been delayed until late next week. I don’t want to put this off that long. I think it would be fascinating to see what the primary topic of conversation is about now, don’t you?”