Collared: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  Even with the stress eating at him, and only a few hours of restless sleep under his ear, as his mother used to say, the simple act of driving the coupe eased his nerves. Seattle driving was nothing compared to Boston, and he was able to take all back roads from his apartment building, so by the time he pulled into his usual parking space behind Mary’s, he had achieved an almost Zen sort of calm.

  “Once you get in deep, all you can do is swim.” Another one of his mother’s sayings. She had one for every occasion, and then another for when you didn’t listen to her.

  He missed her, still. The rest of his family, not so much. He loved them; he was just happy to have the breadth of the continent between visits. They could yank his chain like no one . . .

  Well, almost no one else.

  Ginny was waiting for him, perched on the cement stairs that led into Mary’s kitchen, half hidden by the Dumpsters. The lids were ajar—they’d been emptied that morning, then.

  He had worked in a place in Oregon, years ago, where trash day was just as likely to bring the cops, when body parts or worse were found in some restaurant or bar’s Dumpster. He didn’t miss those days, at all. Mary’s was nice, clean, mostly peaceful . . .

  And boring. Not that he wanted to break up bar fights every night, but these days, a shouting match over who was the better quarterback was about as rough as it ever got.

  And half the time, he admitted ruefully, he was one of the ones shouting.

  “I didn’t realize that car was yours,” Ginny said, when he cut the engine and extracted himself from the seat. He checked for sarcasm or a put-down, but the expression on her face was an odd mix of appreciation and suspicion. “Could you be any more of a Seattle cliché?”

  “Ow. I’ll have you know I’ve had her since I was twenty,” he said. “She was in better shape then.”

  The Volvo was a beauty, still, but she cost a small fortune to keep up, more every year. Eventually, he’d have to accept the fact that she was an indulgence a bartender couldn’t afford. Until then, they’d take the keys out of his cold, dead hands.

  “Uh-huh.” Ginny seemed oblivious to how much the coupe had cost, originally, or at least wasn’t wondering how a twentysomething could have afforded it back then. Which was just as well—explaining that the Volvo had been a graduation gift would be more than he wanted to explain. Now, or ever.

  He changed the topic, intentionally needling her as a distraction. “So. Do we have an agenda for today, or are we going to drive randomly around town, shouting his name out of the windows?”

  “Very funny. And I have a plan.” She reached into the tapestry bag at her feet and pulled out her tablet, handing it to him as she pulled herself up off the stoop. While he tried to figure out how to turn it on, she grabbed the bag from the ground at her feet, and stood up. “Did you doubt me?”

  “I wouldn’t dare.” And he wasn’t kidding. Whatever other feelings she might inspire, respect for her abilities was clearly at the top. She might be a curly-topped cookie, but she was a seriously sharp, competent cookie. And she looked it, wearing a cream-colored top that clung like silk, and dark blue pants. It was a professional look without being over the top, the kind of thing a high-level office administrator or low-level executive might wear on a casual day.

  It also emphasized the fact that she was all leg and curve. He might not be affected but—he figured out how to make the screen come on again, and checked the list quickly—yeah, there were a few guys on the list, and it might favorably influence them into talking.

  He would never accuse Ginny of playing on her sex appeal to get answers. Not unless he wanted to get taken down a few pegs, anyway. But he was also aware of the fact that he’d deliberately chosen an outfit that played up his own “tough guy” persona, too. You used the weapons you were given, and you didn’t apologize.

  That was his own motto. Although he thought that his mother would have approved.

  He leaned against his car and handed her back the tablet before she started to get tech-withdrawal shakes. “How do you want to handle this?”

  “You take the lead.”

  He hadn’t expected that. “Me? But . . .” He had thought he was there to drive, ask a few leading questions and listen to the answers, maybe give the impression of muscle, if needed. But she wanted him to start it all off? To make the decisions about what to ask?

  She gave him that Look. “Tonica, if I have to put aside my ego here, don’t you spoil things with false modesty. We’ve been over this. You know how to schmooze people, put them at ease. Just imagine you’re behind the bar, and they’re looking to get lit. I’ve never seen you shy away from chatting someone up for a better tip.”

  He’d be offended, except it was true. You worked in the service industry, you learned how to like everyone, professionally.

  “It’s not the same. I listen, as a bartender. People want to spill their guts to me. I have no idea how to get them started.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what to ask them.”

  That sounded more like the Gin he knew. And, annoyingly, it eased his uncertainty.

  “Of that, Madame, I have no doubt. And what will you be doing while I’m schmoozing?”

  “Looking harmless, and listening hard.” She opened the passenger-side door and frowned at the spotless interior, as though she’d been hoping to chew him out for leaving a mess. “Look, the people on that list, they’re all either friends or business associates of our missing guy. And I winnowed it down to exclude people with a known, presumed friendly connection to DubJay, too. If someone has seen Joe since he disappeared, or knows where he is—they’re not going to tell us. Especially not if something bad is going down, and they know or suspect he might be in trouble. So we’re going to have to work with what they don’t tell us. The non-data.”

  He hesitated, halfway down into his own seat, and looked across the front seat at her, where she was already drawing the seat belt across her lap and buckling it. “The what?”

  “Just drive. I’ll explain as we go.”

  Ginny stretched her legs out in front of her as much as she could, and admitted, to herself at least, that she was impressed, and possibly a little in lust. For all that the coupe was a boxy, old-fashioned thing, with barely enough room in the backseat for groceries, and it probably jolted like a tank on the road, she understood why Tonica had kept it all these years. There was a feeling of power and majesty to it that you didn’t get with newer, lighter-weight cars, and the feeling that, no matter what happened, the car would respond.

  And then they pulled out of the parking lot, and Ginny made a silent apology to the car for doubting its suspension.

  She looked at the first name on her list, and then said, “We’re going to Upper Queen Anne. Head down Fifteenth . . .”

  “I know how to drive.”

  “All right, fine.” When he got lost, without GPS, then she’d have directions ready.

  Ginny rested her bag on her lap and tried to fight down the flock of butterflies that had been roosting in her stomach all night, fluttering wildly whenever she thought—or tried to think—about what she was about to do.

  Or try to do, anyway.

  “I didn’t see you leave last night,” he said, breaking the brief silence.

  “I cut out around eight. It was either that, or bring a yoga mat out for Georgie. Pavement’s too hard for her to be on that long.”

  “Hmmm. I should talk Patrick into setting up a doggie care station out front, or in the parking lot. Make it a selling point—‘a pint with your pup.’ ”

  “Cute.” She wasn’t sure she’d be comfortable leaving Georgie in the parking lot, out of sight. But a pad, and maybe a water trough, would be nice, especially in the summer.

  “And shade,” she added. “A tarp, something to keep the sun off.”

  Ginny was good at making lists. That was what she had done when she went home last night: put together the list of people she thought might be useful, adding and subtract
ing based on nothing more than gut instinct. She’d ended up with five people, and a sense of satisfaction in a job well done.

  And then, at three in the morning, with Georgie snoring at the end of the bed, it had hit her, waking her up with one of those unsettling stomach-turning epiphanies. She had been treating it like just another job—meet the client’s needs, rearrange the world so that they are not inconvenienced or delayed. Only this wasn’t a party, or a vacation, or even ferrying people to and from the hospital, which she’d done once for an elderly woman facing surgery. This was someone’s life she was trying to manage. More than manage—potentially undercut. And it was the life of someone who was neither her client nor an under-age dependent of her client. Someone who might have very good reasons to not want to be found.

  She had managed to get back to sleep, after a mug of tea and a few cookies, but this morning, the thought haunted her, making her second-guess everything she had done, everything they were doing. The anonymous texter had been right: she shouldn’t be playing PI. She had no business doing this, no skills, no sense of where the moral boundaries were in something like this.

  Now, actually in Tonica’s car, the two of them en route to do this thing, Ginny struck back. Whoever the text messager was, they were trying to fake her out. Mallards did not get faked out. They occasionally screwed up, but they did not get faked out. Especially not by someone too cowardly to show their name.

  She breathed out through her nose, and wished that Georgie were with them. She could use a good hand-lick and puppy-snuggle, right now, and she didn’t think that Tonica would be so obliging.

  “That was so an image I really didn’t need.”

  “What?”

  She had almost forgotten she wasn’t alone in the car. “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.” She risked looking sideways at him, but his features wore the same even, almost placid expression as usual. She’d figured out the first week he’d started working at Mary’s that it was a mask, but she’d never been able to get a handle on what was happening beneath it.

  Hopefully, neither would anyone they talked to, today.

  “So what made you decide to become a concierge, anyway?”

  “I’m good at solving problems.” It was the quick answer, the pat answer, but last night’s uncertainty made her stop and think about it. “I’m good at making people feel that things are being handled,” she added. “It lets them get on with the other stuff they need to do, and not stress. And I’m good at follow-through and details, so things don’t get dropped.”

  “Like a personal assistant.”

  “Right. Except I work for myself, not someone else. And I don’t have to take any job I don’t want.” She made a face. “Well, there’ve been some jobs . . .”

  “Oh?”

  He actually sounded interested.

  “A woman’s mother was going in for surgery, and the timing was awkward for her to get Mom there in time—she had some kind of high-powered job. So she hired me to arrange the transport there, and a pickup after.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She bitched me out the entire way out and back: everything I’d done or arranged was wrong, etcetera, etcetera, why had her daughter hired such a clueless moron—you can imagine the rest. I thought I was going to get fired. I didn’t know until later that Mom was so unpleasant, nobody in the family wanted to deal with her, and the client’s own PA had threatened to quit, rather than deal with it.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Someone once told me that, after enough time had passed, I’d be able to laugh about the bad jobs. They either lied, or I need more time.”

  “But you like your job.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do. For every crazy client, there’s the person whose life I make easier, smoothing a chaotic day, or solving a problem they didn’t have the ability to deal with. That’s a nice feeling.”

  “All I do is pour booze.”

  She laughed. “Never say only, Tonica. Never say only.”

  The car glided down the road, Tonica managing to time the lights and traffic so they maintained a steady pace; that was a trick she’d never been able to master. There was little traffic that morning—no construction for a change—and they were soon approaching their destination. Ginny could feel something inside her tensing up, in a good way, the way she felt before a trivia game started. Not the throwing-up-sick kind of tension she’d felt that morning.

  “Almost there,” Tonica said, echoing her thoughts. “Who are we going to see?”

  Apparently, when he’d looked at her list, he hadn’t actually looked at it. Typical. She thought about throwing that at him, then remembered that he was driving—and being stranded in Queen Anne would be a pain in the ass, since she’d have to get the bus home.

  She pulled out her tablet and looked at the list again. “In no particular order, the lawyer he met with the morning before he disappeared, the cab driver who took him home the night before, the woman he had dinner with that night, and his housekeeper. She’s not a live-in, but part of the staff of the condo building he lives in. She cleans his apartment every couple of days, which means she knows his habits probably better than anyone else.”

  “A single guy in his sixties? Yeah, probably. She hot?”

  “Don’t start.”

  His low chuckle was annoying, not because he’d made a borderline sexist comment, but because he’d managed to get her to respond to it.

  “I swear, are you sure you’re not twelve?”

  “Most of the time, yeah. So what’s the story—how’re we spinning this?”

  “As close to the truth as we can stay.” She had asked him to take the lead in questioning, but he was deferring to her. She was starting to believe that he hadn’t been playing her when he hesitated yesterday. Teddy Tonica had an ego, she knew that for a fact; now she knew that he could put it aside when needed. That was . . . useful to know. “We’re looking for Joe. We know he’s gone walkabout, but we need to talk to him. It’s important.”

  “And if they assume—rightly, I might add—that we’re from his nephew, and clam up?”

  She’d thought about that, too. “Then we know that they know where he is, and push a little harder. Or rather, you do. Tell them that we know it has to do with his nephew, the reason he went least-in-sight, and we want to help.”

  “Lie, in other words.”

  “Imply knowledge we don’t have in its entirety yet,” she corrected primly, and honors were even again.

  He shook his head, his hands tapping out a rhythm on the wheel. “You really think that’s going to work?”

  “I’m counting on you to make it work.” She looked at his profile again, and was rewarded by the faintest downturn of his mouth and increased wrinkle lines around the one eye she could see. “Look, if you have something better, I’m all ears.” She wasn’t being sarcastic—not much, anyway: she really wanted a better plan. She just hadn’t been able to think of one.

  “No. It’s a good plan. Short of going in like bad cop/bad cop, it’s probably the only plan possible. So which potential mother lode of information do we start with?”

  “The housekeeping staff. I figure anyone who cleans up after a guy is going to know the dirt.”

  “Cute.” Tonica’s attention was still focused on the road, but she caught the hint of a smile on his mouth, and felt smug, the way she did when her team trumped his on trivia night. Getting approval, however grudging, from someone who could beat you, had always meant more to her than admiration from people who couldn’t.

  “So we’re heading for the apartment building?” He moved around a massive SUV that was going twenty in a forty-five zone, and slid into the right-hand lane once he was clear. “I wonder if we could get in to look at Uncle Joe’s apartment itself.”

  The small smugness bloomed into full flower, and she reached into her bag to pull out a key card. “I requested it last night, after I got home, and DubJay had one of his people drop it off first thing this morning. Twenty-fou
r/seven service, just like it says on their website. The apartment is, apparently, owned by the company, same as DubJay’s place, so he has every right to give us access.”

  “Well played, Madame. Ten points to Team Wash-and-Wear.”

  “And don’t you forget it,” she said, turning the key over in her hand. Her trivia team’s name was Wash-and-Wear, his was the Cold Ducks, for some reason she’d never understood. “There, up ahead.”

  “Huh. I’d have pegged him for more of a modern high-rise.”

  “He bought it years ago, when the building was converted from a school. He probably got a professional courtesy discount, or something.” Ginny stared at the building, wishing not for the first time that she made more money. A lot more money.

  The neighborhood was as nice as she’d always heard—it didn’t shout money, but you could tell it was there. The apartment building was a square redbrick structure with huge windows that, on the far side of the building, would have amazing water views, plus a decent view of the Needle. There was a parking garage behind, for tenants, but he pulled around the corner and—impossibly—found a parking spot on a street that wasn’t at a sixty-degree angle.

  Ginny shook her head, half-suspecting a setup, except he hadn’t known where they were going before she got in the car, and he hadn’t called anyone to clear out a space. “Seriously?”

  He grinned, not having to ask what she was talking about. “I have good parking karma.”

  “Seriously.” She extracted herself from the car—it had been easier to get in than out—and reached for her bag. The car was old enough that it had to be locked manually, rather than from the key fob.

  While Tonica slipped on his jacket—a sweet brown leather one she’d lusted after before—Ginny stared up at the building’s silhouette. “Tonica, I know I said you should take the lead, but I think you should avoid the charm, talking to her.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t try to charm her. She’s used to being an employee, working for wealthy guys, and with guys like that, charm means you’re not taking her seriously. We want to avoid anything that might set her back up, get her annoyed.”