L.A. Kornetsky - Gin & Tonic 03 - Doghouse

by L. A. Kornetsky

  Teddy tensed: last time he’d just been waved on through to the back. Then again, last time he immediately established himself as one of the guys, with a connection to an old-timer. Ginny was going to get a different reception.

  “Think they’re going to check my bona fides?” Ginny sounded casually worried, like it was nothing more than waiting for a credit card to be authorized.

  “Probably going to tell them they have a fresh, flush fish on the line,” Teddy said just as quietly as they sat down where indicated. The chairs were metal, and uncomfortable, but he stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed his arms across his chest, and tried hard to look like a bored but professional driver/bodyguard/purse-holder. “This place may not be gentrifying, but they’re not going to risk offending a possible high-interest member, not if it’s their ticket to being trendy.”

  “Unless something really is going on here, and they don’t want high interest.”

  “Then they’ll say they don’t have someone to show you around right now and put you off politely. Relax.” That was easier to say than do: he could feel the strain in his shoulders as he tried to look casual.

  “Uh-huh.” But she looked a little more at ease. “So what are you going to do while I’m getting the Sucker’s Tour?”

  “Talk to some people,” he said, letting his gaze rest on one person, then slip on to the next. He could tell who had something they didn’t want anyone else to know. They were the ones really interested in the newcomers, while at the same time trying hard not to look interesting themselves. He’d already found a few of the gym’s clientele that might fit that bill. “You know, schmoozing, the thing you haul me around for.”

  “Technically, you haul me. Although it’s nice that you acknowledge who’s the brains of this operation.”

  Teddy was trying to come up with a comeback when they were interrupted.

  “Ms. Mallard?” The kid was standing now, and there was an older white guy next to him. He was wearing dress slacks and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbow, but somehow managed to look right at home in the gym atmosphere, like a boxer who’d gone into management rather than a manager who did some recreational boxing. Teddy was pretty sure the guy’s nose had been broken at least once, and reset professionally. “This is Alan, head of our sales team. He’ll show you around.”

  Ginny stood up and walked over to shake the man’s hand. “Thank you for accommodating me on such short notice,” she said.

  “Not at all, my pleasure,” Alan said. He took out a business card and presented it to her with both hands. She took it with both hands as well, bowing slightly as she did so. “Will your companion be joining us?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” Teddy said, waving at them without disturbing his slouch.

  Alan gave him a once-over—a professional one, if Teddy was any judge—and nodded. “If you need anything, just ask Clarence.”

  Teddy nodded in return and watched them walk away, and then returned to idly observing the activity in the gym until the kid at the front desk—Clarence, he presumed—lost interest in him. It took about five minutes. Thank God for cell phones and texting, Teddy thought as he stretched his arms out in front of him, and then stood up. Clarence didn’t even look up, having relegated Teddy to background noise. He suspected that the only thing that would make the kid look up would be a yell from the back office, or the front door opening. That was a point against him: working in a bar, you had to constantly be aware of what was going on around you, sensing problems before they happened, not after.

  The gym seemed to fall into three sections. Up front, there were the guys jumping rope or doing floor work. It was serious stuff, requiring a lot of inward-focusing expressions. Teddy didn’t bother to approach anyone there: interrupting one of them wouldn’t be productive, and might get him punched. The other two areas were the raised rings, two small ones and a larger one in the center of the space, and the double rows of punching bags toward the back, their images reflected by a wall of mirrors.

  He wandered around the raised rings, pausing to watch a trainer coaching two young fighters in one. Teddy had no interest in boxing as either a sport or a science, but he had to admit that they were definitely athletes: the teens were breaking enough sweat to make him feel like he needed a shower, too.

  But the fighters in the ring weren’t his target, either. Teddy kept moving, skirting the larger ring, toward the first individual he’d picked out, working one of the bags toward the back. As he did so, he caught sight of Ginny’s curls across the gym, the blond noticeable where so many heads were either bald or wrapped in bandannas against the sweat. The guy she was with held open a door, and they disappeared behind it. The sign over the door said LOCKER ROOMS. Teddy assumed they were coed, since women were working out here, although not many, and if not, he hoped they knocked before poking their noses in. Guys caught with their shorts down could take crude shots, and Ginny wouldn’t let that go unanswered.

  He almost wished he’d gone with them, just for that. But he had his own job to do. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” the other man grunted, catching the bag he’d been hitting and letting it still. The guy was built like a brick shithouse, square and ugly, and nothing you wanted to mess with, but the eyes that met Teddy’s were filled with curiosity, not challenge. When you looked like you could take all comers, you probably didn’t have to, so much. Even in testosterone palaces like this place.

  “Got a question, and you seem like the guy who could answer it.”

  “Try and you’ll get your ass thrown out.”

  “What?” He hadn’t expected that, nor the matter-of-fact tone the warning was delivered in.

  “This is a clean shop. Owners don’t allow drugs. Only stuff here’s the aspirin, and you gotta get that out of the medicine kit they keep in the back. He don’t have no truck with drugs, and if he finds you with it you’ll get your ass thrown out—and mine, too, for talking with you.”

  “Oh God, no, I wasn’t… I have no interest in drugs.” He could see where the guy had made that assumption: he didn’t know much about gyms, being more of a runner for his exercise, but yeah, these places were sort of designed for a low-end trade in whatever they were trading these days. He’d seen enough of that happening in the skeevier bars he’d worked at to not be surprised it happened here, too.

  “So?” The guy paused, one hand resting on the bag, keeping it in place, the other on his hip. The smell of sweat and stale smoke wafted off him, making Teddy’s nose itch. He turned away, just a little, and something caught his eye: a younger man, not so heavily built, was watching them. Teddy let his gaze linger, challenging the kid to join the conversation. Instead he broke eye contact and turned away, picking up a jump rope as though that was what he’d been meaning to do all along.

  Teddy turned back to the first guy. “Dogs.”

  “What?” And now they were even in the caught-off-guard sweepstakes.

  “My question’s about dogs. I’m looking for a dog to train for, you know,” and Teddy moved his hand in what he hoped looked like a convincingly casual-secret-code manner. “Something reasonably fierce, that would make a good guard dog.”

  “And you thought I could help you with that?”

  “I did.” And Teddy waited. Finally, after a few deep breaths, the guy let go of the bag and started stripping off his gloves and unwrapping the tape, shaking his fingers out, not looking at Teddy.

  “Clarence sent you?”

  The kid was immediately knocked off Teddy’s list of potential hires.

  “Okay, yeah. I might know someone who knows something about dogs,” he said, finally, when Teddy just looked at him. “What you looking for?”

  Not why, Teddy noted, but what. “The woman I came in with, she owns a shar-pei. I like the way it moves, but it’s too… It’s a really sweet dog. I don’t want sweet.”

  “Hu
h.” The fighter studied him, taking in Teddy’s clothing, his military-style haircut, the paper-thin scars across his knuckles, old but not entirely faded. “Okay. Yeah. Gimme your number and I’ll see what my friend has to offer. But his dogs don’t come cheap.”

  “I understand.” Teddy found a scrap of paper in his wallet that didn’t have anything written on it, and jotted down the number for the phone behind the bar at Mary’s. Anyone did any digging, they could connect him to Mary’s and figure it out, but if they just looked it up in the directory, it would be reasonably anonymous. In that vein, he wrote “Theo” on the sheet, not Teddy.

  “Great. Now beat it.”

  Teddy nodded, moving on as though he’d just stopped to pass the time with a random fighter, wending his way to the back wall. The guy who’d been watching them was jumping rope now, his attention focused on the wall of mirrors. He might have been watching his form—or watching Teddy without having to look directly at him.

  Ironic, that the more threatening-looking fighter hadn’t given him the creeps like this guy did.

  The door he’d gone through in his last visit was on the far side of the building, the plate glass window between him and it. But he wasn’t interested in the back offices right now. That was Ginny’s job.

  The other man he’d noted as a possible source had paused for a break. He was sitting on the bench with a woman who looked tiny in comparison, until you noticed that every inch of her sweat-covered skin was impressively muscled as well. Teddy normally had no complaints about his body: he was in good shape and everything worked. But this place could give him a complex if he wasn’t careful.

  “Hey,” he said, figuring what worked once might work again.

  The woman eyed him, then looked sideways at her companion, who rested his head against the wall behind them and didn’t say anything.

  Teddy started to think maybe he’d picked the wrong person.

  Ginny had been on enough facility tours, often with jittery brides and grooms in tow, to know when she was being shined on, or redirected. So far, her guide—Alan Black, according to his business card—had seemed utterly on the up-and-up, answering every question without suspicious hesitation, and allowing her to poke her nose in anywhere she asked.

  Every single alarm in her head was going off. Nobody, in her experience, was that open, especially not when they had city permits and inspectors to worry about. Especially-especially not when they were trying to hook new money.

  “And you can see that our facilities are both clean and surprisingly private,” Alan said now, showing off the shower stalls. “Our members are not bashful flowers, but there are times when you want a little privacy.”

  “But there are separate locker areas?” Because that was a lawsuit just waiting to happen.

  “Oh yes. Although in practice they are mostly coed… .” He shrugged. “As I said, our members tend to be practical about exposed flesh. In all our time we’ve only had one locker room incident, and that was settled by the participants themselves before we had time to act on it.” He smiled, warmer than the usual tour-guide professional-grade affability. “Creepers tend to back off when they realize their potential victim can land a solid punch. It makes us… self-regulating.”

  “I bet.” Ginny thought about pursuing that, then decided that it was self-explanatory enough and instead made a show of looking around. “This is a conversion building? It must have cost a great deal to bring it up to code.”

  Alan took the bait, determined to prove that everything in the building was perfectly legal and acceptable. “The original owner had the structure gutted down to studs, and installed a state-of-the-art HEPA air filtration system.”

  “The original owner?”

  “Yes, he renovated, and opened the gym, but sold it a few years later due to health issues. Ken, the current owner, bought it in 2007.”

  The year after the gym had been cited for the illegal fights, according to Tonica’s contact. Health issues her sweet ass. “It seems like an odd thing to buy. Did he have a connection previously, or…”

  “Yes, he was the night manager. We’re lucky he decided to buy; otherwise, well, we might have been turned into a hipster yoga factory.” Alan gave a delicate shudder, but it was, like his earlier smiles, too calculated. The guy was good, but there was definitely something under the surface, and she didn’t think it was nervousness about screwing up his sales pitch.

  “You certainly would be able to charge more, if that had happened. This may not be the most expensive piece of real estate in the city, but taxes aren’t cheap, and then there’s the maintenance, and, well, I’m a businesswoman. I understand how these things add up.”

  “We manage. It’s important to us to keep things… accessible. You never know where the next hot contender will come from, after all. Plus, there are a number of people who enjoy the more blue-collar feel we offer, even as the neighborhood gentrifies around us.”

  “The lack of frills and publicity could certainly be a draw to a certain low-media type,” Ginny agreed, reinforcing the idea that her client was someone who wanted to stay out of the spotlight and was willing to pay good money to ensure it. Although Alan’s words implied that they had a respectable revenue stream going… at blue-collar-reasonable membership fees, she wasn’t sure how that was working out. Were the backroom fights still going on? Was dogfighting that big—and steady—a moneymaker?

  They didn’t seem to care if her nonexistent client was a movie star or a crime lord, either. Ginny didn’t want to judge people by looks, especially not when they were stripped down for sweating, but she’d bet her next retainer that there were more ex-cons than CEOs out front.

  “I can only imagine that there have been people who thought that blue-collar meant,” and she waved her hand airily, “not respectable?”

  Alan’s smile suddenly looked like it hurt. Good, now they were getting somewhere. “I assure you, this facility is clean. We have a zero-tolerance policy for drugs and harassment. Anyone caught violating the rules is evicted immediately.”

  “That is reassuring,” Ginny said, with her best professional smile in return. “My client will be glad to hear it.”

  No drugs, no sexual harassment, but no disclaimer of any other illegal activity. The gym might be totally legit these days, and Alan might be the most honest man in Seattle, but after discovering embezzlement and murder in an animal shelter, of all places, Ginny was pretty sure she would assume there was at least an off-the-books poker game at a nunnery, especially if the nuns insisted everything was on the up-and-up.

  “So there’s never been any police difficulty?”

  That smile of his definitely hurt now. “The previous owner… had been allowing private fights to occur in the back, after hours. Those involved were fired immediately, or lost their memberships, of course, once it was discovered, and that is now strictly forbidden.”

  All right, when pushed he came clean. Alan was an honest man, or at least playing one on TV. Ginny was almost impressed. Take that, Tonica, she thought, for all your snarks about how she couldn’t schmooze!

  “And that’s the back-office tour. Let’s move on to the truly important area, the workout spaces, shall we?” Her host turned them around and ushered her through a side door into the main room again, his hand flat between her shoulder blades. It should have been an impartial, if unwanted touch, but Ginny felt her skin prickle uneasily under his palm.

  Ginny had no interest in boxing, but she could see that yes, everything was in good repair, the floors were kept clear, the equipment maintained, the safety features all in place, including an upgraded sprinkler system.

  “As you can see, even at peak hours we have capacity to handle everyone. In fact, our membership is capped to ensure that.”

  “So you know all of your members personally?”

  “Not me, myself, no. But our managers make an effort to
learn the names of our regulars. And the trainers, of course. We have four who work during the week, and another two come in on the weekends, when we’re busiest. Although some members do without, or bring their own. We do not charge visitor fees for trainers; it’s just a courtesy to our members.”

  “Of course.” Her hopes—lifted when she heard the membership was capped—fell again. More people they’d have to consider. Although she supposed a visitor wouldn’t have the same level of comfort with a place, that they’d use it to score illegal deals… right? Most likely they were looking for a regular—or an employee.

  “Your trainers—they’re all licensed, of course. I can imagine that liability insurance in a gym could become problematic, and the insurance companies bury you under paperwork in regard to that. Especially after the previous owner’s… side venue.”

  He pressed his lips together, and a faint flush showed on his face, but other than that, he showed no sign of having heard her. “There are, occasionally, waits for the preferred rings, but no one is left without a station for their workout. If you would like to speak with any of our members, or examine the equipment yourself, please feel free. And if you have further questions, or wish to set up a member account, please contact me.”

  Ginny started to ask another question, but he looked at his watch with a practiced obviousness, and then said, “Good day, Ms. Mallard. I hope to hear from you soon.”

  Ginny chewed on her lip, going over the entire interview in her head. She’d screwed up at the end, she’d pushed too hard with the comment about the previous owner, but he hadn’t thrown her out or asked why she was really there, so she was going to take it as a win. Her only question was if it was the insurance angle that had spooked him, or her circling around the previous owner. Or possibly both?

  “Just once, I’d like to get a neon sign saying, ‘Oh, hey, this is your smoking gun right here.’ Only, not having it actually be a smoking gun.”