Collared: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  Tonica let out a huff, starting toward the building at a fast-enough clip that she had to rush to catch up. “Or,” he said, not looking at her, “she might think it’s, y’know, nice to have someone be nice to her, after a long day at work, being unappreciated and invisible.”

  “Tonica, that is such a guy thing to think.”

  He stopped, and turned to her then, and for once she didn’t get the sense that it was about scoring points, or proving a point. “Look, you wanted me to take the lead because I can schmooze, right? So let me damned well schmooze. Don’t second-guess what works.”

  Apparently, she’d hit a nerve. He was right about not second-guessing. She knew he was right. But she also had the gut feeling that waltzing in and turning on the boy charm—which, based on his worn jeans and close-fitting T-shirt under that jacket, he planned to do—would be a mistake.

  Faced with a dilemma, Ginny did what she always did: she leaned back, emotionally, took a deep breath, and waited for more information. In this case, actually meeting the woman in question.

  The lobby was small but felt cozy, giving the impression of being both welcoming and well maintained. An expensive-looking navy blue rug was set under comfortable-looking brown leather chairs, perfect for checking your email while you waited for someone to join you.

  “Nice,” Tonica said, trying to be subtle about his gawking. “Next life, I’m going to try for rich instead of good-looking.”

  “Next life I want both,” Ginny said, both of them careful to keep their voices low. The front desk was low and smooth edged—dark granite and polished wood—with an equally polished guard working behind it. Politely but firmly, he asked who they were here to see.

  “We’re here to talk to Elizabeth. The service said she was working here today.” They had agreed it would be best to not mention anything that might specifically tie back to Joseph Jacobs, or DubJay, just in case.

  That, apparently, wasn’t a good enough answer, but the guard’s attitude eased a little when two folded twenties moved across the polished surface. Another pair got them the unit where the cleaning service was working.

  The elevator was just as smooth and well maintained as the lobby. When they got on, Ginny looked over at her companion and said, still in a soft voice, “What would you have done if he hadn’t been bribable?”

  “It’s not a bribe. It’s compensation for services rendered. And I haven’t met a doorman yet who wasn’t quite happy to render services.”

  She shot him a sly glance. “Much like bartenders.”

  “Those guys get paid better,” he said, again not taking the bait. She usually did better, when she wanted to get his goat. “That comes out of operating expenses, right?” The door opened onto their floor before she could answer, and he gestured for her to precede him into the hallway.

  “They’re down here,” he said, pointing to the left.

  “Yeah. But Uncle Joe’s apartment is down here.” Ginny pointed to the right, and waited until he joined her. At 7C, she used the key card to get in, and poked her head into the hallway to make sure nobody was actually there.

  “Nice,” Teddy muttered, taking a look around. The condo was large and airy, with plush carpeting in a creamy white color that suggested you’d be best off removing your shoes. The furniture—a low sectional and two armchairs—was in various darker shades and looked really comfortable. Over in the far corner, there was a desk setup, a nice wooden number with a surface too clear to actually be in use.

  Three of the walls in the main room showcased large photographs, two cityscapes Teddy didn’t recognize, and one he did—the George Washington Bridge, at night. It gave him a pang of homesickness he hadn’t been expecting. The other wall was filled with windows, the blinds tucked down at the windowsill. Expensive, probably motorized. The lighting was recessed, with a few floor lamps set in the right places to be used for reading. “Very nice,” he said again.

  Ginny had already disappeared. He wandered farther into the apartment, and checked out the linen closet—everything so neatly folded it had to be done by a professional—and the bathroom, where he spent a minute poking around the medicine cabinet.

  “No toiletry kit.” He looked around. “Either he doesn’t use cologne, or he took that, too.”

  He backed out, closing the door the way he’d found it, and joined Ginny in the bedroom.

  “This was not a man who had company often,” she said when he came in. “Two pillows, both hard. And there’s only one nightstand.”

  “So much for the swingers’ weekend theory,” he said. The bedroom had slightly more color, mostly dusty dark blues and browns. There was a small wooden box on the dresser; Teddy opened it. “Two pair of cuff links, a sports watch that looks like it’s as old as I am, and a man’s ring.” He picked it up, looked at the signet. “His college ring. Clothing?”

  She gestured to the closet door. “Hard to tell. A lot of nice suits, ironed shirts, including the stuff he picked up from the dry cleaner, still in plastic. If stuff’s missing from there, I can’t tell. The drawers look like they’ve been gone through, maybe a couple of things missing. The man folds his socks.”

  “So?” So did he. “Does he fold his underwear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, that’s a little OCD.”

  “And the kitchen’s gourmet stocked, and spotless. Not even anything in the dishwasher, much less the sink. Counters scrubbed, dish towels neatly folded.”

  “Basically, what we have is a guy who works hard, has nice but minimalist tastes, and walked out of here in a calm and orderly fashion, with nothing out of place.”

  “Or, a guy who has a cleaning staff that put everything to rights after he left,” Ginny said.

  “Yeah. Or that. Time to talk to the housekeeper.”

  They backed out of the apartment, making sure the door was securely locked, before walking back down the still-quiet hallway to 7G. That door was ajar, but Ginny knocked anyway.

  “Come in!” a man’s voice yelled. They looked at each other, then Teddy shrugged, and pushed the door all the way open, gesturing for her to precede him into the apartment.

  As they’d discussed, Tonica took the lead, Ginny a step behind him. “Hi. I’m looking to talk to Elizabeth?”

  While he waited for a response, he looked over the crew: there were three of them, and only one female, so it wasn’t hard to guess who they were looking for.

  “That’s me,” the woman said, stepping forward.

  Despite his earlier comment to Ginny, Teddy had expected a fifty-something, slightly stocky, maybe overweight woman with not much to look forward to, willing to be charmed by someone paying attention to her. Instead, they got a thirtysomething with a hard edge to her face, and better abs and arms than he could lay claim to.

  “You’re the head of housekeeping staff here, right?”

  “Yeah. The boss said you wanted to talk to me about Mr. Jacobs. You cops?” Her voice suggested that she knew damn well that they weren’t, and she had better things to do than talk to them.

  Teddy leaned forward, folding his arms across the kitchen counter. “We’re not cops, no. If we were, one of us would have flashed a badge by now, right?”

  “Uh-huh.” She looked back at her companions, who were still dusting and polishing, pretending that the two strangers weren’t there at all. In an apartment—even one as nice as this one—that was tough to do.

  Ginny had been right: she wasn’t going to take well to being charmed. Fortunately, Teddy wasn’t dumb enough to rely only on his charm with women, despite what his partner might think.

  He also didn’t think that the folded twenties trick was going to work here, not with her co-workers around. Which was just as well, since he had only one left, and the thought of waiting for Ginny to dig something out of the oversized bag slung over her shoulder would turn this entire thing into a farce, straight away.

  “So no, not cops. Not the IRS. Not even private investigators. Just two people, loo
king for some information.”

  “Uh-huh.” She matched him look for look, unconvinced.

  He abandoned the professional charm, and went for peer-to-peer exasperation, channeled entirely from some cop show he’d watched, back when he had a TV. “Look, I can’t force you to talk to us. I wouldn’t, even if I could—I look like a big, bad dude but I’m actually a nice guy who waits for pedestrians to finish crossing the street before I hit the gas.”

  Most of the time, anyway.

  “We’re worried about Joe, that’s all. We’re hoping that you can give us something—some clue, some hint—why he went away without telling anyone.”

  Her eyes narrowed at that. “You family?”

  Ouch. And there was that line they needed to walk. Ginny might not care, but he had no desire to get yanked by the cops, if she decided they’d been scamming her. A bartender had to stay clean, if he wanted to work in the nicer joints.

  “Family friends.” DubJay was Joe’s family, and he and DubJay . . . weren’t friends, actually. Not even social acquaintances. Teddy was pretty sure DubJay saw a bartender the same way he saw his mechanic—oil the machinery and doff your cap when the guy with the Beemer deigned to pay you. But they were on a first-name basis, however it happened, and that was enough to make the lie palatable.

  “Huh.”

  That seemed to be her default noise. Teddy supposed that he shouldn’t expect erudition out of someone running a cleaning crew, then reminded himself—his mother’s voice taking lead—that a man who worked as a bartender shouldn’t throw stones, no matter what his college degree said.

  She didn’t seem ready to dismiss them just yet, so he pressed on. “You were the one who handled his apartment?”

  She gave a small shrug, as though to say what the hell. “Yeah. It’s a small place, just a one-bedroom, and it’s never bad, so two people can do it. I split the team up for places like that, to move through faster.”

  “You get paid for the work, not the time?”

  “Yeah. If we’re done faster, we go home sooner. But we do good work.” She wasn’t defensive, but her voice tensed slightly, as though waiting for him to say something. “No skimping.”

  “A place like this, they wouldn’t keep you if you weren’t good.” He said it to appease her, but he meant it—one complaint from an owner in a place like this, and she’d be out on her ear. But he needed to win her trust, fast, or this wasn’t going to go anywhere useful.

  “Did you talk to Joe before he left? I know that your work overlapped with his when he was home.” He knew no such thing, but she seemed protective of the guy, which didn’t happen unless they’d actually met.

  This was harder than he’d expected, picking through the possible missteps. He could feel sweat on the back of his neck, chafing his T-shirt, and hoped none of it showed. Gin was going to have to cough up more information next time, if she wanted him to be able to schmooze properly.

  “Yeah. He liked us to come in while he was still here, so if there was anything particular, he could tell us.”

  “A tough client?” His voice was as smooth as he could manage, the same voice he used to convince a near-drunk that he didn’t need another drink, truly. “Did he make a lot of demands?”

  “No. In fact, kinda the opposite. He was always ‘don’t worry about this’ and ‘don’t worry about that.’ Sometimes he’d tell us he was going to be hosting a dinner party, and so to make sure to get the kitchen really clean. ‘Can’t have my guests accusing me of an unsafe kitchen,’ he’d say.” Her face softened when she smiled, but it only lasted a second. “He’s a nice guy. You said you’re looking for him? I hope everything’s okay.”

  “No jail, no hospitals, so I’m sure he’s fine,” Teddy tried to coax the smile back with one of his own. No dice. He went back to what she had said, searching for a hook.

  “You said he threw dinner parties. Often?”

  “No. Couple-three times a year, maybe. Usually he’d ask us special to come in the day before. Once we came in the day after, and the place was . . . not a mess, but you could tell there’d been a lot of people there. But other than that, he didn’t seem to socialize much. Everything was about work. His television was dusty, but his desk? That was always in use.”

  She frowned. Teddy could almost feel Ginny getting ready to pounce, like Miss Penny when she saw a mouse, and sent the strongest shut up vibe he could, to keep her from interrupting.

  Miracle of miracles, it worked: she held that pose, but didn’t speak.

  “You remembered something?” He leaned forward a little across the counter, just his upper body, the same way he would if he was leaning on the bar top.

  “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know, it could be nothing . . .”

  “Or it could be everything. What is it?”

  She spoke more slowly, but with confidence. Whatever she remembered, she was certain of it. “The last time we came in, he was still there, same as always . . . but his desk was cleared.”

  Teddy tilted his head. That would explain what they’d seen. “You said it was always in use, though? So . . .”

  “In use, yeah, but covered. It never got dusty because there were too many things on it, piles of papers and half-empty tea mugs, binders, and things like that. And this chunk of rock that he was always picking up, like a—what do they call them? A worry stone, yeah. That was always there. But the last morning, the last time I saw him, it was all gone. Not just straightened into piles, like some people do, but gone. Like he’d chucked it all, even the rock.”

  Chucked it, or packed it up, as if he was going somewhere. Somewhere planned.

  The woman looked over his shoulder at Ginny, then back at him, and for the first time he saw some real emotion in her eyes. “You think he’s in trouble.”

  Teddy weighed his options, considered the risks, and made a judgment call. “He might be, yeah.”

  She bit her lip, and then came to a decision of her own. “One of the things we do is clean out the trash cans. And everyone knows that, so the day before, they don’t bother to dump their trash, most of them. Not even him. But that day, the one under his desk was empty, which was weird. Usually he eats a sandwich at his desk when he’s working, and throws away the crusts, but there wasn’t anything there. So that made me curious, and I checked the recycling bin, too. We don’t handle that, residents do their own recycling, someone else comes and takes that away . . . but it was empty. Like he’d already gotten rid of everything. But it was a day early for them to’ve collected.”

  Her face went blank again, and Tony figured that he’d gotten everything he was going to out of her. If she’d had a few drinks in her, he could have pushed, maybe, but not here, not in her place of employment, in front of her co-workers. He hadn’t gotten far enough in the Morons book to know how far he could go before it became “questioning” rather than “talking.”

  “Thank you. If you remember anything else . . .” Teddy hesitated: his usual MO was to write his name on a napkin, which was just kitschy enough for a giggle, but seriously would not work here, either.

  “Please call us or email. You’ve been a great help.” And Ginny was sliding a business card across the counter like she’d been part of the conversation all along, her fingers leaving the card just in front of the woman, who stared at it, then picked it up carefully, looking intently at the lettering.

  “You’re really not cops, or PIs?”

  “Just looking for answers,” Ginny said, and touched Teddy on the shoulder, telling him she thought they were done there.

  For once, he agreed.

  “Thank you,” he said again, and threw in just a little bit of charm, to reassure himself he hadn’t lost his touch. But she had already put the card in the pocket of her company-issued smock, and turned away. Clearly, they had used up too much of her working time.

  “Tonica?” Ginny was already at the door.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.”

  Neither of them spoke until they were ou
tside of the building and back to the car. He’d parked it in the only bit of shade on the street, so the air inside wasn’t too stuffy, but they both rolled down the windows, anyway.

  “What do you think?”

  He might not know much about detection, but he did know people. “Sounds like he was going to take a runner.”

  “It sounds like he was cleaning up before he disappeared, yeah. Someone else might have tossed those things, but not so considerately. And you don’t take something like a rock, which has to be a memento, unless you’re packing up yourself.”

  “Yeah, all that would rule out foul play, right? Not that we thought there was any foul play . . .” He paused and looked at her. “Did we?”

  “No.” But she didn’t sound so sure, either.

  He leaned his head back against the headrest and stared at the roof of the car. “Did any of this help?”

  “I don’t know. He was cleaning up paperwork, not leaving anything behind. But he didn’t sound rushed—if he’d been behaving differently, she would have mentioned it. He took his car . . . somewhere. Packed up his belongings, personal stuff, threw it in his car, and then . . .”

  “And then what?”

  “If it were easy, anyone could do it?” Her attempt at levity fell flat.

  “Right. We need more information, or we’re screwed. Clock’s ticking, so who do we hit next? The lawyer?”

  “No. I thought we’d leave him for last.”

  That didn’t make sense to him. “He’d be the most likely to know something useful.”

  Ginny shook her head. “He’d also be the most likely to call our bluff and shut us down, and make sure no one else talks to us, either.”

  He winced: she’d once again out-thought him. “Good point, well made.” He tried to remember who else she’d mentioned. “Dinner companion, or the cabbie, then?”

  “Cabbie. I called the garage last night, and his shift starts soon, so he’ll either be there or showing up soon.”