“Not that there’s much to tell Max, even,” she said to Georgie, who flicked her upright ear at her mistress as though to say “But I’m interested! Tell me!” Ginny smiled at the whimsy, but complied. “See, Georgie, first dates are one thing, because you’re both on your best behavior. It’s like a job interview, or when you were waiting on that sidewalk for someone to come along and see what a cutie you were. Second dates are where you see a little below the surface, and third dates, that’s when you find out the scary stuff. Huh. Maybe I should have told Tonica, so he could call me with an emergency if things get awkward… .”
Georgie’s tail wagged, but Ginny couldn’t tell if it was in approval of the plan or just because they were almost home.
* * *
When he pulled out of the shelter’s parking lot, Tonica had first thought that he’d head home for a nap, since he didn’t have to work until the evening shift. He quickly realized that driving all the way back to his apartment—through Friday afternoon traffic—when he was already in town didn’t make much sense either. Stacy was working the afternoon shift; she wouldn’t mind if he showed up early. And that would let him keep an eye on her without being obvious about it. He thought about it, and amended that to too obvious.
Not that he didn’t think she could handle the work: if he did, he wouldn’t have given her even the afternoon slot. But having backup was never a bad idea, even at Mary’s.
It was barely a ten-minute drive from the shelter, even dealing with in-town traffic, so he got there before Mary’s had officially opened. He pulled into the parking lot at back, slotting his car into his usual space, and got out just as Seth rode up in his beat-up old CB750. Tonica loved his coupe, but he had to admit the bike was sweet.
“You look suspiciously awake,” the older man said, removing his helmet and peering at Teddy.
“I had some stuff to take care of this morning,” he said, well aware that, even leaving his jacket in the car, he was better dressed than usual. Mary’s dress code ran more to jeans and workboots, considering the messes that could happen, especially on weekends.
“Uh-huh.” Seth looked dubious, and Teddy suddenly realized that the old man thought that he had been out on a job interview.
He started to explain, and then stopped. None of the old man’s business anyway, and he shouldn’t be talking about this job until it was done. It just wasn’t smart, when you didn’t know who might be involved, locally. And Seth was a gossip who saw no reason not to talk to everyone—and anyone.
With that in mind, all he said as he followed Seth into the bar was “shaving and showering won’t kill you,” getting a hrmph! in return.
Stacy was already there, shouting orders at Clive while she set up the bar. Since she was barely four years older than he was, that went over about as expected. Teddy leaned against the door and watched.
For all the chaos and petty annoyances, opening shift was actually Teddy’s favorite. Most bartenders loved having people three-deep, raking in tips and keeping busy. He liked that, too—you didn’t survive in this gig unless you were a people person—but there was something that soothed his soul in prep work. Getting the previous night’s glassware out of the steamer, setting up the speed rail just so, even arguments with Seth over what he’d be putting on the limited menu that day…
All the things that Stacy was throwing herself into, with gusto. He grinned, still unnoticed in the doorway. Yeah, she’d do just fine.
Having competent people to work with was nice; it gave him time to think, rather than just reacting to crisis.
Picking a table in the back where he’d be mostly out of the way, he settled in, resting the back of his chair against the wall so that he had a view of the main room, the bar to his left. Clive and Seth disappeared into the back, and he could hear the sounds that suggested cardboard boxes were being broken down for recycling. They must have gotten a new delivery. Stacy, at the bar, raised a mug as though to ask if he wanted coffee, and when he shook his head, she simply went back to work.
Bartending was a good job, one he enjoyed. But the work with Mallard certainly gave him new and more difficult things to think about. That was half the reason she kept being able to talk him into it in the first place. She was right; he’d been bored.
And if he didn’t have this, he’d be wondering what insanity Patrick was going to pull on them next, and that wasn’t useful, at all. Without more information, anything he did or said there would be pointless. Focus on the things he did have information about.
Money, missing. Suspects and alibis and motivations, laid out on the table.
“So, oh brain trust, why do people steal?” he asked out loud when Seth came out of the back room again. Seth might be a gossip, but he also had a damn good read on people, and Stacy, well, his barback had surprised him before.
Need is usually the motive, yeah. Either that, or envy or jealousy, but they were talking cash, here. And cash shoved in a drawer somewhere could be serious temptation. If so, then their job was easy: find out who had money problems, and shake them down—discreetly. “Money problems. Right. Who doesn’t have money problems, these days?”
“I got no money problems,” Seth said, predictably ignoring the first question and going for the second. “I get it, I spend it, no problem.”
“You probably have a mattress stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, you old faker.” There was no way Seth survived on what Patrick paid him, and he didn’t seem to have another job, working a full forty at Mary’s already.
He didn’t get paid enough himself, either, especially not for the amount of work he did, for the crap Patrick was currently handing out. But he didn’t need much, and the share he got from the occasional job with Mallard made a nice little extra, if he was feeling spendy.
“I got nothing boss, sorry,” Stacy said. “I mean, other than I was starving, or was a greedy ass. Or a banker. Was that redundant?”
“We need to find out if any other cash was kept in the office,” he said, ignoring Stacy’s usual snark and wishing for Ginny’s ever-present tablet and her detailed notes. Not that he’d ever admit to that. “Stacy, toss me the notebook under the bar, willya?”
She disappeared under the bar, and then tossed him the notebook, and a pen without being asked. In the back room, Seth was now yelling something at Clive that was, mercifully, muffled.
The top sheet of the notebook had “buy more cherries” written in Stacy’s slanted script. He tucked that sheet over and started on a new sheet.
“There were credit card decals at the front desk, so people probably pay that way—the adoption fees aren’t pocket change.” Fifty dollars for a cat, seventy-five for a dog, the sign had said, which was probably a good deal, he didn’t know. The sign had said that all shelter adoptions included nail clipping and de-fleaing. Did Miss Penny have fleas? If so, she’d never shared them. And he had never even thought to clip her claws. Did cats need that?
“Hey, Stacy!” he called. “Do cats need their claws clipped?”
“You’re asking me? Do I look like Dr. Doolittle?”
“Yeah, they do.” Clive had overheard the question and leaned his head out to answer. Useless Boy wasn’t so useless at all. “I’ve been doing Penny’s.”
“Oh. Thanks, I guess.” She wasn’t his cat. There was no reason why he should feel uncomfortable about Clive doing that—or annoyed that she apparently would let him do that.
“Tonica,” a deep male voice called out from the front door, full of confidence that it would be heeded.
“Oh shit,” he heard, and the sound of Clive decamping for the back rooms in the hope that Patrick wouldn’t follow him. Stacy had frozen behind the bar and then, when Patrick didn’t seem inclined to say anything to her, kept setting up. He knew that at least half of what she was doing now was busywork, designed to keep her looking busy while she eavesdropped, mainly because he’d taught her the moves himself.
“Afternoon, boss,” he said, sliding the pad and pen to one
side and leaning forward on his elbows in movie-perfect bartender pose, even sitting at the table. “What can I do for ya?” Patrick never showed up before open, unless the cops had shown up in response to a break-in—once, since Teddy had started working at Mary’s. Then again, Patrick had never tried micromanaging before, either.
Like dealing with Mallard wasn’t enough, now Patrick had to get bossy? Someone had it in for him.
“These gentlemen are going to take a look around,” Patrick said, practically strutting across the bar to where Teddy was sitting. “They have my authorization to poke their noses into anything that catches their interest.”
Patrick was somewhere in his fifties, bulk gone to seed and trying to hide it behind bluster and rough charm. The two men with him, trailing several steps behind, were younger, clearly more in touch with current style, and spent money on their clothing and haircuts. He would have pegged them for bankers, except for the shoes. The shoes, although expensive and polished, were designed for men who spent a lot of time on their feet, and not in an office.
He took the card one of them handed him and glanced down at it. Architects.
“Sure. What’s up, boss?” He had a cold feeling in his gut that he knew exactly what was up, but it didn’t pay to make assumptions.
“Just looking around, making some notes,” the younger of the two visitors said, and Teddy nodded and smiled blandly in return.
“We’ll be opening in about half an hour,” he said. “Just try not to trip over a customer.”
After showing his guests around, introducing them genially to Stacy and Clive, Patrick gave a general wave to the room and left, leaving the two men behind. Teddy had gone back to his note-taking, but everyone in the bar was intensely aware of the strangers, disrupting the previously content mood simply by being there. Finally they took their inspection outside, peering at the storefront and making notes. Seth came out of hiding then and stared out the window at them unabashedly. “Who the hell are they and what are they doing?”
“I think Patrick wants to expand,” Teddy said glumly, when Stacy just shrugged. “Or at least, renovate.”
“What th—why? Everything’s fine the way it is. And he won’t even let me use more expensive cheese, but he wants to rip the place apart? Insane, I told you, damn it, he’s gone insane. Teddy, you gotta talk to him. Tell him this is foolishness.”
Teddy shook his head, something he felt like he was doing a lot of lately. “He doesn’t listen to me any more than he listens to you, Seth. I’m just the bartender.”
The old man stomped off, muttering, and Teddy went back to his note-making until a familiar thump-thump alerted him that Miss Penny had arrived.
“Hey, cat,” Stacy said as the tabby leapt down to the bartop and stalked past the bartender, allowing a quick pet before jumping to the floor and heading toward Teddy’s table.
“Hey there, lady,” he said, and turned so that she could, as usual, jump to his shoulder.
But when the small tabby landed on her preferred perch, rather than curling her tail around his shoulders and kneading his arm until she was satisfied, Penny took one sniff and leapt off him, down to the floor. Once there she sat with her back to him and, pointedly, started to groom her tail.
“What’s that all about?” he asked, surprised. He went to sniff his arm to see if there was something on his shirt that put her off, and then he laughed, realizing what must have happened.
“Yeah, all right. You caught me. I’ve been consorting with other kittens. I promise, none of them meant a thing to me.”
Penny, still grooming herself, twitched an ear, but otherwise seemed unappeased.
Seth wasn’t distracted by Penny’s arrival. “I swear, if he starts changing things, Teddy, I’m gone. I mean it. I swear.”
“He hasn’t started anything yet, Seth. Relax.”
But it looked like the boss was considering it enough to bring in pros to give him costs. That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.
He looked down at the tabby. “Maybe it’s time, just in case, to reconsider the short-term game.” He worked hard at keeping his life uncomplicated, no obligations or undue stress, able to walk away if he needed to. If keeping that simplicity meant leaving Mary’s…
And the thought came to him, weirdly, considering the way she had just snubbed him: Would Mistress Penny-Drops come with him, or stay at the bar? Did he even have the right to take her, without any way to know what she wanted?
She’s a cat, Tonica, he could almost hear Ginny say. She’ll let you know what she wants.
* * *
Penny purred quietly, the tip of her tail twitching ever so gently. He smelled of other cats, and dogs, and the smell of a place where too many of them lived. She had been irritated at first, then cat-sense kicked in: that was good, that he smelled of the old place, the shelter. That meant they’d gone, and looked. But had they seen? She couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t talking about it, with his writing and his muttering she couldn’t decipher.
There were other ways to read humans, though.
She jumped back into his lap and rested her nose on the crook of his arm, lifting her lips a little to better scent him, but there were only familiar, common things. Nothing of the smells were the things the other dog had described, the smells-wrong and the sounds-wrong that so upset the rest of the kennel.
Either it was gone, or they hadn’t gone to the right place. Georgie had been with them: she could smell the other’s scent, fresh on the human. She needed to talk to Georgie, hear what the dog had found out.
But for now, she was content to sit in his arms, and let him pet her, while he talked to himself. A cat knew how and when to leap, and when and how to be patient, and let the mouse come within paw’s reach.
* * *
At the shelter, the doors officially opened to visitors at noon, a little after Ginny and Tonica left. Only a single couple with a little girl in tow came by, leaving with an orange-striped kitten clutched carefully in the little girl’s arms, and then the parking lot was quiet until around 2 p.m., when a car pulled into the lot and a man got out. The car was a Ford sedan, old enough to be nondescript but new enough to not draw attention, and still in good enough shape that it ran quietly and smoothly. The man followed a similar style: mid-thirties, hair conservatively cut, wearing jeans and a button-down Oxford, smack dab in the middle of business-casual range. Rather than going inside, he circled the building, heading for the back, and the blocked-off employee parking lot.
When he got there, though, he discovered that he wasn’t alone.
“Hey, you.” The man the younger woman had called “doc” earlier was standing there, now wearing a pale green lab coverall that was stained with darker blotches. He turned to look when the man came around the corner, and then stepped forward, getting into the newcomer’s personal space. “This entrance is closed.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
The man in the coveralls narrowed his eyes and studied the newcomer. “Hey, I know you.”
“No, I’m sure…”
“Yeah. You’re a reporter. From In and About. I’ve seen your photo on the website. Why’re you sneaking around here?” The man moved forward again, his bulk just enough to force the other man back a step, or risk an actual confrontation.
“I just wanted to get some photos…”
“No press here without permission. We don’t like getting the animals upset—or people, either. You have permission?” The tone said, quite clearly, that he knew the reporter didn’t.
“It’s not that big a deal, I just… you’re the vet for the clinic, right? What’re you doing—is that blood?” and the reporter pointed to the dark red stains, his voice quivering with manufactured excitement, trying to get a rise out of the other man.
“It’s paint,” the veterinarian said, not biting. “And the only thing you ‘just’ want to do is go ’round front and talk to our receptionist. Give her your bona fides, and she’ll set you up with a formal intervie
w and all the photos you want.” The vet kept moving forward as he spoke, forcing the other man into a backstepping dance until they were back around the corner of the building, well out of sight of what was left of the graffiti.
“Hey! The press has a right to know about events that affect them, and this shelter, and what’s going on—”
“The press has no rights on private property. This? Is private property. You want to come in, you come in during our regular hours. But you don’t snoop around and you don’t take photos that aren’t approved. That simple enough for you, Simon?”
“My name’s—” The reporter recognized the reference and shook his head. “All right, fine. But there’s going to come a day when you want my help, and boom, guess what?”
“We’ll take that risk.”
He watched as the reporter got back into his car—not, as expected, going inside to ask for an official interview—and waited until the car drove away.
“Damn it.” The fact that a reporter—even from a small-town freebie rag like that—was snooping around meant that someone had let something slip. LifeHouse wasn’t newsworthy, any other way. He looked at his hands, and then he went back inside through the front entrance, ignoring the looks that two young girls waiting in the lobby gave him, and told Margaret to call Este. They had a problem.
5
Once the two architects were gone and the first of the afternoon crowd wandered in, Teddy started to relax. The familiar noises of drinks and conversation formed a backdrop to his work, soothing without being distracting. He was trying to put together a list of reasons why people would steal cash, and matching it against what he’d seen in the staff members he’d interacted with, but it was hard. You could play with theory and psychology all you wanted, but the truth was that most people, if presented with available, theoretically untraceable cash, probably wouldn’t steal it. He wasn’t sure if they were naturally honest, or naturally afraid of being caught, or if the two were somehow actually the same thing, but the results were the same: most people, unless in dire need, or utter personal shits, wouldn’t take someone else’s money.
L.A. Kornetsky - Gin & Tonic 02 - Fixed Page 8