L.A. Kornetsky - Gin & Tonic 02 - Fixed

by L. A. Kornetsky

  “Not to mention all that’s probably illegal.” Tonica worried more about that than she did, which wasn’t to say she didn’t worry at all. Just… not as much. Especially if she had plausible deniability.

  “They’re private people, once they retired. Not much in the public eye, which supports my thought that Este, at least, got burned-out on the corporate whirligig. She’s got the shelter, and that’s about it. No other charities, no board work, no volunteering at the local playground, et cetera, et cetera.

  “Arvantis, though, keeps his hand in a couple of other concerns,” she added, “none of which seems to have anything to do with animals, or money. He’s low-key about it, too—a volunteer, not on any boards or holding an official position.”

  Tonica finally looked at the top sheet. “Huh. ‘Younger’ is an understatement; she’s almost a decade older.”

  Ginny could practically feel her shoulders go back. “Would you comment if it was the other way around?”

  “Probably not, because that’s more of a societal norm. Quit trying to push my buttons, Mallard.”

  She stared at him, silently calling him on the fact that he’d just been trying to do exactly the same thing to her. He just smirked at her, and she made a face, annoyed at being caught out.

  “Anyway, any discrepancy from the norm is something to make note of,” he said. “It can trigger people in weird ways.”

  “So noted. Then there’s Margaret, the woman who was at the front desk. She’s their only full-time paid employee. Even Roger and Este don’t take salaries.”

  “The girl with the middle-class dreadlocks? I talked with Simeon and the one thing he did say was that he thought Margaret was the boss there, the way she ordered everyone around and made decisions. How much does she make?”

  “Twenty-four K, no health care or retirement fund.”

  “Pays the bills, keeps her in granola, but not much else. So a few extra thousand could be a serious temptation for her.”

  “I suppose, yeah. Unless mom and dad are kicking in. She lives alone, so no roommates covering the rent. But her resume is solid—she has a degree in psychology and a minor in business from Seattle University. If she wanted to make more money, she could. I think she just really loves working there. You saw how she was with Georgie.”

  “She was a little scary-happy with Georgie, actually,” Tonica said, and Ginny couldn’t argue with it. “And loving animals doesn’t make you a saint. You need to remember that, Gin.”

  “I know that.” She did. She just… she didn’t want to believe that anyone who willingly took a lower salary to work with animals would then steal from them. But he was right. She chewed at her lip, and then continued reading off her tablet display.

  “There are three part-timers who keep the shelter clean and functioning on a regular basis, other than their nighttime janitor. That’s Stephen Maund, Beth Owens, whom we met, and Nora Fletcher Rees, our client. None of them has any debt that I could find on record, although off-the-book gambling debts or some terrible blackmail scandal are always possible.”

  “You need to stop watching those old detective movies, Mallard,” he said.

  “You have your hobbies, I have mine,” she shot back. “And anyway, my point is we don’t know what’s off the books, so you’re going to have to check on them. Or we sneak in and toss their apartments.”

  “Definitely need to stop watching those movies,” he muttered. “Anyway, we’ve met Beth, and she really doesn’t seem to be the type to be carrying any deep dark secrets. Unless it’s that she flunked out of cheerleader squad.”

  Ginny suppressed a grin. He probably wasn’t wrong.

  “I talked to a friend who does some sideline security work,” he went on. “Lightspeed Security supplies the overnight security. They mostly hire college students and retirees, and my friend said they don’t pay top dollar. I bet every single person who works for them is carrying debt that they’d love to get rid of. And a security guard would not only have access, but continued access, if they got the building code. It wouldn’t take even a nongenius long to figure out where the money is, and how much he could possibly skim.”

  “So, whoever has a regular detail there would be a serious contender?”

  “I’d say so, yeah. Plus, they wouldn’t have any emotional connection to the shelter, or the animals, so stealing from them would have one less barrier.”

  “So… we interview whoever that might be?”

  “On what pretext? We can’t ask to see their records, or even who was working any particular night. Not without misrepresenting ourselves significantly—and, must I add, illegally.”

  “No, not us, but Este could, right? Ask for the information, I mean, as their client-of-record? And we could go in as her authorized proxy…”

  “And by ‘we’ you mean me,” Tonica grumbled.

  “Unless you’d rather I did it?”

  “No, that’s quite all right,” he said immediately, and then shook his head ruefully. “All right, all right, button pushed, point to you.”

  “But we can’t not look at the rest of the in-house staff, too. There’s Alice Lind, who is the vet tech. The serious stuff—surgeries and any prescriptions needed—is done by one of their pro bono volunteers, one Dr. Scott Williams, who had no resume in the folder but I presume his degree is in veterinary medicine.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Hey, never assume, Tonica. Never assume.”

  “Their vet tech checks out? What’s a vet tech?”

  “Not-quite-a-vet, near as I can tell. Like a nurse practitioner, I think. Alice is a part-timer, she makes ten dollars an hour, comes in for about five hours five days a week.”

  “They’re keeping her just below full-time. Classy.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not like they have any kind of benefits she could qualify for,” Ginny retorted. “So I wouldn’t bother reporting them just yet.”

  Tonica hrmmed thoughtfully. “I wonder if she’s paid out of that grant, too?”

  “No, that’s strictly for the vet and specific to neutering.” Ginny tapped the screen of her tablet and checked something. “Yeah, Este, or maybe Nora, gave me a copy of the grant. It’s really clear about what the money can be used for, which would be travel expenses for the vet performing the neuterings, and any related supplies specifically for it. Williams doesn’t take an actual salary for this.”

  “Can he afford to work for gas money? Probably. What about Alice, maybe she thought she should be earning more? That would give us a good clean motive, case solved. Until we know, though, they’re all possibles.”

  She had just been thinking all of that, in more or less that order. For all that they had very different processes and preferences, the two of them tended to end up in the same place, conclusion-wise. That was probably why they could do this, and not kill each other. Yet, anyway.

  “So,” Tonica went on, “out of all of them, who has unsupervised access to the back office, where the money’s kept?”

  “Williams and Lind wouldn’t, I don’t think—they do all their work in the other wing, and I can’t imagine they have much reason to wander over, unless they make them come fetch their paychecks, doggie reference totally intended. But everyone else? It looks like they’d all have access, and often when there aren’t many other people around. We should check out what kind of internal security they have.” She dropped her gaze down the display and added, “Speaking of security, there was a note in the file that valerian is their safeword. I know we’re supposed to be accepting of all lifestyles, but do I want to know why an animal shelter needs a safeword?”

  Tonica made a “don’t ask me” gesture, and she went on.

  “According to the duty roster, the volunteers have a rotating schedule during the day, covering the hours the clinic’s officially open. Stephen’s a retiree, Beth has kids, so she works during school hours, and Nora has a floating schedule depending on what she’s working on—I guess the switch to grant-wrangling changed
things up, same as Roger’s illness.”

  “But they didn’t take on anyone new?”

  “Not according to their records. I guess they thought he’d be back soon?”

  “Or they didn’t want to bring anyone new into the mix, which could be indicative, or totally innocent. When was the last person hired?”

  As usual, even though he had his hand on the paperwork, he wanted her to look up the details. Ginny rolled her eyes and then tapped the screen, skimming the information. “Stephen was the last one to come on board, and that was, yeah, seven months ago. Just before Roger got sick.”

  “So Nora and Margaret have known each other for a while?”

  She had to check the data again. “Two years since Nora started volunteering there, when she was still in college. Margaret’s been there for a while before then, um, about a year. Why?”

  “They don’t like each other.”

  Ginny didn’t like to doubt him when it came to things like that, but… “You got that from a few minutes’ exchange?”

  He raised his eyebrows high. “That’s why you bring me along, isn’t it?”

  It was. Ginny knew she was a whiz with ferreting out information, and putting together pieces of data to reveal patterns. She also, without modesty, excelled at solving problems that made other people throw up their hands and take to their bed. But when it came to reading people, to taking one look at a situation and understanding where everyone stood, Teddy Tonica blew her out of the water. Well, he was a professional bartender; people-reading skills were probably more important than actually mixing drinks.

  It pissed her off, sometimes, that he was so much better at that than she was; she didn’t like coming in second to him in anything. But there it was, and she’d be an idiot if she didn’t take advantage of it.

  “So is that an issue here, or just interoffice politics?” This was going to need more than a spreadsheet. She wondered if her tablet had the ability to double as a whiteboard. Was there an app for that?

  “Don’t know. For now, it’s just a factoid of no particular relevance, I suppose. The vet doesn’t have access to the office, you said?” Tonica took a box of coasters from where Jon had put them on the counter and then apparently forgotten them, and started sorting them into the usual pile-of-five that lined the bar in the evenings, keeping his hands busy while he thought.

  “Far as I can tell from what Este gave me,” Ginny said, “Williams comes in on a regular set schedule to do the neutering, or is called in when an animal gets sick. But since he works on the clinic side, there wouldn’t be any reason for him to be in the main office. The kennels, maybe, but I’d guess that any animals that he sees come to him, not the other way around?”

  “Once in the kennel, though, people would be used to seeing both of them around, right? So they’re on the list, but lower than the others. Especially if they’re only there during the day, when there are a lot of other people around?” He made it into a question, tilting his head and scrunching his forehead at her until he looked enough like a shar-pei himself that Ginny almost laughed. He really needed to never do that again, ever.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And then there’s the night janitor, the one Nora mentioned. He’s got access, but…”

  “But?” Tonica finished lining up the piles of coasters to his satisfaction, then pushed them to the side for later, and finally flipped open the file. It didn’t take him long to skim down to the relevant information. “Oh. Yeah.”

  Guy was a former Marine.

  “That doesn’t make him a hero,” Tonica said.

  “No, I know. But… I can’t see a guy who volunteers to muck out cages, who adopted not one but two animals, as stealing from the shelter. Can you?”

  “Keep him on the list,” Tonica said. “You know anyone can get sticky-fingered. Even a Marine.”

  “And people say I’m cynical? And then there are the socializers,” Ginny added.

  “The what?”

  She tilted her head and pulled at the curls at the nape of her neck, resisting the urge to bop him one on the nose the way she would Georgie. “You know, this would be easier if you actually read—never mind. The volunteers. Socializers are volunteers who come in on a regular basis and play with the animals.”

  “Play.” He sounded dubious.

  “Yeah. To get the animals used to people, and to see if there are any quirks or stuff that might require them to be put into a specific home. But the paperwork Este gave me says they don’t have a regular cast for that—a bunch of people who got vetted to work there, but aren’t actually on a schedule. People come in for a while, then stop, then come back… .”

  “Do any of them have access to the back offices?” Tonica asked.

  “Not officially, no. The way the website describes the process, the animals are brought to them in the socialization room, which I guess are those glass-fronted rooms off the main lobby, and the work’s done there.”

  “So, unofficially, any of them could have access. Wonderful. We need to find out how decent their security is. Assuming they have any at all, that is.”

  Ginny thought about that, then thought about how many people might just walk into the clinic under the guise of looking at pets, and slip into the back room if Margaret weren’t paying attention. “Great. I think I need that gimlet, now.”

  She scowled at her tablet, and then let it go to sleep, unable to think of anything else she should call up.

  “Right. One gimlet for the frustrated lady researchtigator,” Tonica said, going back under the bar and reaching for a glass, waving off the new guy when he would have come over to take care of it.

  That was what she’d dubbed them, when Tonica had balked at signing on, originally, because they weren’t licensed, and therefore weren’t legally PIs. Researchtigators. They researched people’s problems, the same way she did as a concierge, and solved them, that was all. No official paperwork needed. It limited what they could do, sure, but she’d looked into the requirements for getting licensed here, and yeah, no. Way too much trouble for what they were actually doing. Maybe next year. Or not. Did she really want two full-time jobs?

  That thought led to others and, lacking anything else she could do just then about any of them, Ginny put down her tablet and studied Tonica while he was mixing her drink. Her earlier thoughts during Georgie’s walk, about her skills versus his, resurfaced. How did he get people to confide in him? At first glance, he didn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d rush to confess anything to. For all that he could pass for a bouncer, he wasn’t particularly menacing. Average height, with shoulders that were broader than average, a face that wasn’t particularly good-looking but gave you a sense of recognition, as though you’d always known and liked him, even though you’d never seen him before that day. The brush-cut hair gave him a vaguely military look, although she knew, now, that it was just because he didn’t have the patience to deal with styling his hair in the morning—gel-and-go, and he didn’t have to think about it again.

  She touched her own hair, pulling at a strand again, thoughtfully. Guys had it easier—they could get away with jeans and a T-shirt, and gel-and-go short hair, and nobody thought that worthy of comment. Then again, she didn’t have the body for a T-shirt and jeans. Or she did, but it would be even harder to make people look at her face, instead of her breasts. That was one of the things she’d liked about Tonica from the first: if his gaze dropped from her eyes to her chest, he did it discreetly.

  And he made the best gimlets she’d ever had.

  “You’re going to have to go back and talk to people again,” she said, accepting the glass he passed across to her. “All I’ve got is flat data, but you’re right, everyone who is on the list could have had access to the back office either honestly or by stealing a key, or sneaking in under another pretext. So you need to—”

  “Go see who sounds guilty?”

  “Actually, I was thinking you could see who rats out on whom.”

  She took a has
ty sip of her drink, trying not to look at him, in case he had that Disapproving Tonica look on his face.

  “You know we can’t actually question anyone. Not legally. We don’t have—”

  “An investigator’s license, yes, I know, you remind me enough.” No need to tell him she’d looked into it, and decided against it—for now. “But people are people. This may be an all-volunteer organization but it’s still an office. There are going to be slights and crankies and feelings of favoritism, and somebody’s going to say something because they want to say something.”

  She was speaking from experience. Her last office job had been for a start-up company that she loved, and she had enjoyed working with most of her coworkers, but there hadn’t been a larger bunch of misunderstood primadonas and cheerfully nonmalicious troublemakers in the world, and that totally included Max, much as she loved him.

  “So I should go in there and start asking who’s the one they think most likely to steal petty cash out of the cookie jar?”

  She studied the flow of liquid inside her glass, and then risked looking up at him. “Yes?”

  “Yeah. I think you’re right.”

  She blinked, but held back her surprise. Usually he made her argue a bit harder before he agreed.

  “Stir the pot a little, see what floats. I’ll go back and say I’m considering the kitten.” He frowned. “Or maybe not. Penny gave me the cold shoulder yesterday. Literally. She landed on my shoulder, took one sniff, and then disappeared. I haven’t seen her since.”

  Ginny held back a smile at his slightly put-out tone. “I thought she wasn’t your cat?”

  “She’s not.” He scowled at her. “Drink your gimlet, Mallard. Maybe it will inspire you to some kind of insane breakthrough.”

  She raised her glass in salute. “In Gin, Inspiration. At least, once the gin’s in Gin.”

  She laughed at the expression on his face, and drank.

  6

  Saturday night was usually Teddy’s main shift, with Stacy running the tables. After yesterday’s incident—specifically, after he saw how well she’d handled herself—Teddy made an executive decision to switch that around, giving Stacy her first go at being primary bartender on a Saturday night. He decided to do it then, rather than waiting a week or two, so she didn’t have time to think too much about it. Saturday was as close to crazy as it got: if she could handle that, she’d be ready to fly solo anytime.