Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  “Night,” the desk clerk called to them, and Ginny raised her hand in acknowledgment, herding Georgie back into the elevator. “Wonder if he’s a cop,” she said to the dog as the doors closed in front of them. “Or a snitch. More likely a snitch, supplementing his salary with payoffs when someone suspicious checks in. Because this is a very shady place full of suspected criminals, don’t you think?”

  Georgie had no opinion on the subject, sitting down and waiting patiently the way she’d been trained to do when in moving boxes. “Good girl,” Ginny said.

  Ron had said—trying to be reassuring—that as seriously as he wanted her to take the situation, it was probably nothing, that it was the kind of thing cops were trained to sort out, especially since she did have an alibi for where she was and what she was doing for twenty-four hours beforehand, thanks to security cameras and tolls. Even if they couldn’t figure out how her details got into the dead guy’s pocket, if it didn’t lead anywhere useful, they’d probably just put her in a back drawer, evidentially speaking.

  But being put in the back drawer wasn’t the same as not being under suspicion.

  Ginny realized that she was clenching her jaw, and sucked her cheeks in to force her jaw to relax. The expression that reflected back at her from the elevator’s control panel made her sigh instead of laugh, though. Then she felt forty-plus pounds of solid muscle lean against her leg as the elevator took them back to their floor, and some of the tension faded. “I’m glad you’re here with me, too, kid,” she said, reaching down to ruffle Georgie’s ears affectionately.

  Back inside, Georgie went into her crate, turning around several times until the bedding was to her comfort, and then settling in for the night. Ginny moved her laptop from the desk back to the bed, and leaned against the headrest, then opened the Skype program to wait for Tonica’s call.

  * * *

  When Ginny finished recounting the day’s misadventures, Teddy shook his head, although he wasn’t sure if it was in disbelief or awe. Or both. Only Ginny Mallard could get into that much of a mess in less than twelve hours, without doing a thing. “That’s either the most massive coincidence in the history or, or somebody’s set you up, Gin.”

  Ginny nodded, moving slightly out of frame, then moving back in as she readjusted the laptop. He could see the beige-on-beige wallpaper behind her, and what looked like a modernish padded headboard behind her, so he assumed that she was sitting on the bed, not at the hotel room’s desk. He didn’t see Georgie so he assumed she was, as usual, sleeping at her owner’s feet.

  “Yeah. You know how I feel about coincidences,” Ginny was saying. “And the fact that my alleged client doesn’t actually exist, far as I can tell, prior to this year . . .” She made a face. “But even so, a coincidence makes more sense than someone trying to set me up for murder, doesn’t it?”

  “There’s coincidence, and then there’s whole lotta coincidence, Gin. A client accidentally giving you the address of a house where there just happened to be a murder, okay, wild but potentially a coincidence. That, plus your client going AWOL and probably being bogus? Shades of a made-for-TV Lifetime mystery. The dead body having your contact info?” He shook his head. “You probably should be bracing yourself for Bogart to show up in a sharp-cut suit.”

  He could hear Ginny’s sigh all the way back in Seattle, even without the connection. “Bogie wasn’t the one in the—okay, noir movie education can wait. And yeah, all right. You’re right, Ron’s right, my gut instinct is right, we’re all right: something is rotten in the state of Denmark. But, I mean . . . why? Why me, why this, why drag me all the way down here just to find a body? I’m pretty sure I haven’t pissed anyone off that much.”

  But she stopped to think about it. So did Teddy: they’d been sticking their noses into some dangerous things lately—as Seth never tired of reminding them—and maybe someone had decided to stick back?

  “No, you’re right,” he said, “that doesn’t make sense. It’s too . . . lumpy.”

  “Lumpy?”

  “Badly designed. Not smooth.” It had made more sense in his head. “Like the entire thing was stitched together out of a bunch of separate parts, by someone who couldn’t actually sew?”

  “Like Frankenstein’s monster? A Frankenstein frame-up?”

  “Yes. Kinda. Maybe?” He shook his head and tried to vocalize his thoughts better. “Okay, let’s look at this logically, from the start.” That was usually Ginny’s job; he was the one who worked with hunches and people-reading. “You got called down for a consult with a client in another city. Which, yay, good on you, expanding the base, all that. But where did she hear about you?”

  Ginny looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “She said she’d gotten my name from a relative of Mrs. Kern. The one with the twins’ birthday parties?”

  “Right.” He had a vague memory of horror stories about that client. “But not directly from the client herself?”

  “No. And I didn’t call to confirm, because there was no way in hell I wanted to talk to Mrs. Kern again. She—the alleged Mrs. Adaowsky—said in her original email that a relative had raved about how smoothly everything had gone off, and how calm Mrs. Kern had been. Mainly because she was tipped up with Xanax the entire time, but anyway, Mrs. Adaowsky—the alleged Mrs. Adaowsky,” she repeated, “said that she wanted someone who could keep their cool no matter what happened, because, and I quote this, ‘I love my friends but they’re prone to hysterics if someone uses the wrong fork.’ ”

  “Huh. And she couldn’t have found someone a little more local who came as highly recommended?”

  Ginny made That Face at him, clear even through the webcam. She had that expression down cold: Are you implying that I am not as awesome as my credentials suggest?

  He kept his expression serious, but he was pretty sure she knew he was holding back a snicker. He didn’t think needling her would ever get old, although they’d stopped keeping track of points awhile ago. Triple-digit numbers got unwieldy without an actual scorecard. “Cool your jets, woman. I’m just saying. Bringing someone down from another city? That’s expense above and beyond, isn’t it?” Mallard’s services didn’t come cheaply, he knew that.

  “Maybe she could have hired a party planner,” Ginny said. “But there’s a difference between party planning and what I do. A personal concierge handles everything, even the unexpected bumps and disasters. Which means we have a lot more control over the situation, without having to get everything okayed on a micromanager scale. They hire me because they trust me. It’s like having a personal assistant, for a set time, the length of the project.”

  He knew that, mostly, but talking it out, or hearing it talked out, helped him think.

  “And, let’s be honest, there aren’t that many people doing this—and most of them prefer long-term clients, not one-offs.”

  “So for an older woman who didn’t want the bother, only the result, and probably prefers personal recommendations rather than doing an Internet search, you’d be the perfect choice.”

  “Exactly.”

  And, he thought but knew better than to say out loud, Ginny’s ego would assume that of course her reputation was spreading, and not look too much further. “So you get a call from this woman, haul down there, and oh, hey, no woman but a dead body?”

  She sighed. “Dead body, in a house that didn’t look like it belonged to an older woman, and what looked like the setup of a small, probably illegal business,” she said. “Unless the local DMV is seriously outsourcing their workload . . .”

  “Yeah, no. Oregon’s a little crunchy-granola, but I don’t think so.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “So yeah, this is either the world’s largest convocation of coincidences, and cause for a hairy eyeball if you ask me—which you did—but then the dead guy’s got your contact info on him? Sorry, Gin. At the risk of repeating myself, that’s not coinciden
ce. Either the dead guy was the one who contacted you, pretending to be an old lady, or someone stashed the paper in his pocket, probably after killing him. Either way, it’s not good.”

  “Yes, but why? I mean, either scenario? It’s one thing to build a conspiracy theory, but why would there even be a conspiracy? Why would someone want me involved in this? Let’s not forget that she—someone—paid my retainer to start. So they were willing to sink a thousand dollars into this, plus the cost of my rental car and hotel. And yes, the check cleared,” she said before he could ask. “It was PayPal, though, so tough to look into that without a court order.”

  “And the possibility of that happening would be . . . ?”

  “Low to none,” she said. “The cops didn’t seem interested in anything other than why I was in the house, and if I touched anything or saw anything—they’re treating my mystery nonclient as irrelevant.”

  “Or they don’t believe there was a client at all.”

  They looked at each other through the screen, both frowning.

  “I told them. I showed them the email. I told them I’d gotten a retainer.” And they’d written it all down, and then asked her again, as though they were expecting her answer to change. “Shit.”

  “You need to pass on that bit about the PayPal, so they can establish someone did pay you to come down there. Pronto. Just, you know, in case.” He was being paranoid, but he wasn’t going to apologize for it.

  “Right.” She leaned out of frame to do something—probably, if he knew her, to start a list of things to do on her tablet.

  Teddy leaned back in his chair, trying to think of what else Ginny should do, to keep her nose clean, and looked up to see Penny on the shelf over the desk, washing her paw calmly, as though she’d been there all night. “And when did you come in, missy?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, just Penny escaping the noise out front. Look, the not-a-client is a mystery, yeah, but in and of itself we could assume someone was pranking you, maybe. Even the dead guy—that could just be bad luck he got dead, maybe someone else he’d pranked having no sense of humor. Or, hell, maybe the guy is your client’s nephew and he was trying to do something nice for his auntie, or maybe he was there to meet you because auntie was in the hospital.”

  “And auntie doesn’t seem to exist, online?”

  “I know this will come as a shock to you, Mallard, but some people don’t. Especially older people.” He’d only started paying bills online recently himself, mainly because Ginny had gotten on his case about it.

  “But with your contact info in his pocket and him dead by violence, and you being the one to find him dead by violence? Your friend’s right, that’s when it gets serious.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious,” she said.

  “I’m just laying the pieces out on the board, Mallard; don’t snipe at me.”

  She made another face, then nodded once. “Yeah, sorry. Go on.”

  “Your friend’s also right that the cops might dismiss it out of hand because like you said, you’ve got an alibi, and odds are he was dead before you even hit town. But they might not—especially if they don’t have anyone else to look at. Unexplained murders in quiet neighborhoods, especially white neighborhoods, makes for a really bad time in the mayor’s office.”

  She laughed at that, a little. “And you call me the cynic?”

  “I only wish that were cynicism. The most obvious thing could be, he’s the guy who called you down there, for whatever arcane reason, and someone killed him before you got there. It’s bad timing all around, but if the cops find another lead, you’re in the clear, and worst-case ending is that we’ll never know why he pulled the scam.”

  “When that’s the simple answer, my life has taken a seriously wrong turn,” she said dryly.

  “Oh, a long time ago,” he agreed. “But there’s also the chance that the cops can’t pin it on someone else, and you’re not in the clear, not immediately, anyway. I wish we knew who the dead guy was. Any chance of getting that information out of the cops?”

  Ginny tilted her head at him, her expression slipping from irritated to curious. “Tonica . . . are we investigating this? Officially?”

  He stared back at her. “Um.”

  “Because that would be really, really dumb.”

  “It’s a fool who has himself for a client.” He thought Abraham Lincoln had said that, but college was far back enough that he wasn’t going to cite it, in case he was wrong. Not that Ginny would correct him—who was he kidding, of course she would.

  But she didn’t counter-quote, proof that she was a lot more distressed about this than she was letting on.

  “Right. Investigating this ourselves would be stupid. We’re just trying to get perspective on what might happen.” That almost sounded believable.

  “I think—” There was a noise, and Ginny shifted, then suddenly Georgie’s head filled the screen. “Georgie!” her owner yelped, and there was a slight tussle as Ginny tried to reclaim control of the laptop from the curious canine.

  “Having some technical difficulties there, Mallard?”

  Her hand, one finger upraised, filled the screen, and he laughed, the tension not gone, but broken a little. He felt something nudge his elbow and looked down to see Penny’s head shoving her way through, coming to settle on his lap. “Well, hello there,” he said in surprise. Penny wasn’t an unaffectionate cat, but she was more of the “pause for petting” type than prone to laps or snuggling. Now she seemed intent on sniffing the computer monitor, as though trying to tell who was on the other side.

  “Hey there, Mistress Penny,” Ginny said, reappearing in front of the screen, having apparently come to a compromise with her dog. “Come to join the discussion, or did you just want to say hi to Georgie?”

  The cat let out a faint mrrowr—also unusual for her, since she wasn’t much of a talker—and settled back into Teddy’s lap, her tail curled primly around her hindquarters, her gaze on the screen, as though to say that the conference could now proceed. Despite the seriousness of the matter, Teddy had to chuckle. Well, every PI had a sidekick, right? They had two. And Georgie at least earned her keep, playing guard dog and conversation starter, as needed.

  “So we’re not going to investigate this ourselves,” Ginny said, going back to their pre-interruption discussion. “Not in any kind of official or semi-official capacity. Because that would be foolish. And also dumb, getting in the cops’ way. Right?”

  “Right. We’re just . . . looking into things, in case there’s something we can figure out, that we can pass along to help clear you of suspicion. Then the cops can go do their part of the job, and catch the actual killer instead of side-eyeing you, and you can get back to work without this hanging over your shoulder annoyingly.”

  “Right.” Ginny nodded again. They were in complete agreement. “So, first step is . . . what? Find out who actually owned the house, and if the dead guy was the owner, or renter, or happened to be passing through in time to get killed?”

  Penny mrrowed, louder this time, and Georgie answered her with a snort, settling back down into Ginny’s lap. “Shush, kids,” Ginny said, knuckling the top of the dog’s head affectionately.

  “Finding the owners will take you ten minutes of digging, and you’ll do it before you go to bed,” Teddy said. He was actually surprised she hadn’t done it already, but being side-eyed for a murder could throw anyone off their game, even Ginny. “I think the first thing you need to do tomorrow is Operation Neighborhood Walk.”

  “I suck at Operation Neighborhood Walk,” she said glumly. “You’re better at it.”

  “Yah well, I’m here and you’re there. Suck it up, Gin. It’s not like you’re doing the hard work, anyway. Georgie is.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, then made a “yeah, you’re right” face, and nodded.

 
* * *

  Penny purred, gently kneading her front claws into Theodore’s leg, while her ears twitched back and forth, picking up Georgie’s voice under the humans’ speaking.

  “She didn’t let me go with her,” Georgie was complaining. “I had to stay in this room all day!”

  “Make her take you tomorrow,” Penny said. “Soil the carpet if you have to.”

  “I couldn’t do that!”

  “You’d rather be left behind?”

  Georgie grumbled, and licked Ginny’s hand as though to apologize ahead of time.

  “Just . . . She likes taking you places. Be enthusiastic. Suck up to her, make her think you don’t like being left alone.”

  “I don’t!”

  Penny sighed. She was fond of Georgie, but some days she just wanted to bat the dog’s ears, hard. “Then it should be easy, right? You need to do this, Georgie. I’m here; I can’t do everything this time.”

  Georgie settled back into her human’s lap and rested her nose on the edge of the keyboard, so all Penny could see was the top of her head. “All right. But I don’t like it. And if she’s mad at me, I’m blaming you.”

  Penny’s tail twitched, the only sign she gave that she was amused. “Fair enough.”

  5

  She was chasing after a large orange bird with plastic wings that couldn’t quite get it off the ground but kept it just out of reach, and Georgie was no help, sitting on the sideline with her tongue hanging out, laughing at her owner’s efforts.

  “Don’t use your hands, use your nose,” the dog suggested, and Ginny has just enough time to consider that before she realized how absurd the whole thing was, and the alarm on her phone went off.

  Ginny managed to grab at the offending noise without having to look. Turning it off, though, required actually opening her eyes. When the alarm shut off, she closed her eyes again and took internal inventory. Still incredibly tired, check. Body aching from a too-soft bed, check. In dire need of caffeine, double check. She opened her eyes again, and the brown-eyed, wrinkled face peering over the edge of the bed at her held a familiar expression: Georgie needed to be walked, check.