Collared: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  “Right. Where are we going?”

  “The garage is down by the Pier 91. You know how to get there?”

  He gave her his best “don’t insult me” look, and pulled back out into traffic to the sound of her muffled giggle.

  He looked over, out of the corner of his eye, and saw that she had pulled out her tablet, and a stylus, and was jotting down notes. He was curious as to what she was writing, but figured she’d tell him, eventually. Or he’d ask. Later. He wasn’t going to be that easy.

  About five minutes later she put the tablet away and looked at the dashboard, then looked around, startled. “There’s no radio.”

  He laughed. Everyone said that, in that same tone of voice, eventually. “Nope.”

  “How can a car not have a radio?”

  “I took it out.”

  “You did what?” She touched the sleek dashboard as though expecting it to suddenly reveal the familiar knobs and dials.

  “I don’t like distractions when I drive. Just me, and the hum of the motor, and the shaking of the chassis, that’s all.”

  Ginny took a minute to absorb that, then leaned back into her seat and shook her head. “You’re a strange man, Mr. Tonica.”

  “Maybe so, Ms. Mallard, but I’m the one driving this here car.”

  There wasn’t much she could say in response to that, so she didn’t.

  They had timed it almost perfectly—half an hour’s wait netted them their driver, returning from a fare. Unfortunately, even with prompting, the driver was less than helpful; apparently, one fare looked just like another.

  “I dunno, he was a guy, older, dressed nice, a suit, I think. Never got a call there before. Good address; the dispatcher gave me that, I knew it wasn’t going to be some kids thinking it’s funny to prank a call, or some drunk-ass cheapskate who’d stiff me.”

  Teddy didn’t even try charm on this guy. Mid-fifties, with the look of a guy who’d tasted ambition and spat it out. Teddy knew the type—better to be blunt and not waste his time. Go for what would matter. “Did he tip? Like a guy who knew what he was doing?”

  “Yeah.” The driver thought a minute, then nodded. “Yeah, exactly. No fumbling, no trying to figure out the right amount. Decent tip, too, in cash, even though he’d paid for the ride ahead of time with his credit card, like most folks do. Like I said, the guy wasn’t a cheapskate.”

  “Was he carrying anything? Did you put anything in the trunk? A suitcase, or even a briefcase?” If Uncle Joe had packed up, where had he taken it?

  The driver tapped his fingers on the roof of his car, seemingly oblivious to the activity around him. The livery garage was remarkably clean and relatively quiet, but it still had a dozen or so cars and drivers in various stages of readiness, either going off shift or preparing to go out, plus the actual garage in the back behind them, where a car was up on struts, being worked on. Someone had a radio blaring on a rock station, but the lyrics were indecipherable. Teddy had to force himself to concentrate.

  “Nope. At least, nothing I had to pop the trunk for. He might’ve been carrying a bag or something. Like I told you, I don’t remember.”

  The guy couldn’t remember a suitcase, but he remembered a cash tip. Humans never changed.

  “So you picked him up at the apartment, and took him to the restaurant?” Ginny had her notebook out again, checking details.

  “Yeah. Place called the Table, down in the Hill. One-way drop-off, no return. I guess he figured he was going to get lucky with his dinner companion.” The driver started to grin, then looked at the two of them again and reconsidered. “Sorry, man. Ma’am. Wish I could help more. But that’s all I got.”

  Back in the car, Ginny dropped her bag on the floor by her feet, pulled out her phone and checked her messages, frowning a little at what she found. Teddy was tempted to take his phone out and do the same, but the people he’d left messages for would call him directly, not text, and he had his phone set on vibrate, so he’d know if a call came in. If anyone had sent him a text—unlikely—he knew that he’d ignore it, anyway. Which was why very few people—mainly only his youngest sister—ever sent him texts. Sometimes, he thought he was the last man standing who still preferred to actually talk to people.

  “Hey, it’s almost lunchtime. You want to grab a grinder?”

  She tapped a number into her phone, clearly not really listening. “What?”

  “A sandwich. Lunch. You know, bread and meat and maybe some lettuce? Something to wash it down with?”

  “It’s not even noon. I’m not really hungry.”

  Apparently, Ginny Mallard, when on the job, occasionally needed a sledgehammer to get a clue. He made note of that. “I am.”

  “Oh.” She looked up from her digital lifeline, and he noted that she looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah. I could use something to drink, I guess.”

  The area around the livery garage had an assortment of meh-looking diners, all of which looked like they wouldn’t pass even a half-assed health inspection, and the one food truck they saw was offering Mexican, which gave Ginny heartburn, so she pointed them in the direction of the next address on her list, and the hope that they would find somewhere decent along the way. By the time Tonica had spotted one and pulled into the parking lot, Ginny had decided that maybe she was hungry, after all.

  “Good,” he said, when she mentioned that as they were getting out of the car, “because I bet you had, what, black coffee and a celery stick for breakfast?”

  “Oh yeah, because I look like a fashion model.” Ginny might wish for ten or twenty pounds to suddenly drop off her curves, but she knew what her mother and grandmother looked like, and genetics didn’t lie, so a starvation diet wouldn’t leave her anything other than hungry. She exercised, and ate reasonably healthily, and that was going to have to do.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said tartly, “I take my coffee with cream.” She studied the exterior of the fast-food establishment with caution. “I don’t suppose there’s anything that isn’t dripping with fat and mayonnaise on this menu?”

  “Live dangerously,” he told her, pushing the glass door open. “Admit it, your taste buds are drooling.”

  She gave the menu a long once-over, her nose wrinkled, and then placed her order for a burger, no fries, a side salad, and a bottle of water.

  Tonica gave the clerk his order without having to think about it, and threw in a wink at the cashier, a young girl with a row of silver studs in her nostril and close-cropped black curls. She ignored him, and Ginny swallowed a grin.

  “A diet soda?”

  He shrugged, collecting his meal. “You save calories where you can. So, we talk to his dinner companion next?” According to his calendar, Uncle Joe had met with someone for dinner the night before he disappeared—and according to the driver, had expected her to get him home—or take him home.

  “Yes. We’ve already talked to everyone who could be considered impartial, who would have little personal reason to clam up, or warn the next person on the list, so next up is the personal. DubJay says his uncle wasn’t seeing anyone, so she’s either a friend or a business connection—”

  “Or a hookup.”

  Ginny paused, moving over to the other end of the counter to wait for her meal. “Do sixtysomethings do hookups?”

  “Based on his bedroom, I’d say not. But hell, I don’t know. He took care of himself, was good-looking, so why not? Maybe he always went to her place. Maybe he was a swinging bachelor.”

  “Okay, that’s almost as bad as thinking about my folks having sex. I don’t think I want to go there. But objection noted.” Their meals were delivered, wrapped in paper, and, she had to admit, smelling really good.

  Looking over the crowded dining area, they spotted a small empty table—right next to an overflowing table filled with energetic six-year-olds.

  “Oh God, no. Please.” Ginny knew she was pleading, and didn’t care. “Can we just eat in the car?”

  Tonica looked at her, his fac
e smoothing into a theatrical expression of shock. “Woman. Eat these? In my car?”

  “It’s not a Mercedes, Tonica. Or even a . . . all right. Point taken.” He kept the car spotless, and clearly had some serious pride-of-ownership issues. “But not here. I can’t stand it.”

  One of the kids let out a particularly piercing shriek, and they both winced. “Right. Outside.”

  They dumped the trays and got an extra paper sack from the cashier, who looked as though she were wishing that she could leap over the counter and join them in their escape.

  The area was mostly strip malls along the main road, but set back a little was a small park, barely large enough to qualify as one, and they ended up on a bench under a tree. The earlier sun had vanished, but it wasn’t raining yet. For the first few minutes, the only sounds were the rustling of paper and contented chewing.

  Ginny paused halfway through her burger, stared up at the branches, and came to a decision.

  “The email I picked up in the car. It was from DubJay.”

  He didn’t comment on how long it had taken her to tell him that, only asked, “Any new information, or just a cranky ‘have you found him yet?’ ”

  She worried at her lower lip. The email had bothered her, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on why. “It was more of a ‘keep going, but don’t forget there’s a deadline’ kind of thing. With a tone of . . . curtness.”

  “He isn’t willing to wait until Monday anymore?”

  “He didn’t say that. It felt more like, like he was checking where we were, the way someone keeps rechecking their cards, to make sure nothing’s changed. A control-freak twitch.”

  “And?”

  “And control freaks don’t hire other people to do their stuff. Especially not other people they don’t control.”

  “Yeah. You have a point. So maybe it’s just him feeling out of control and trying to hold on, without actually interfering?”

  “Maybe. Probably.” That would make sense. “I’m starting to wonder if there’s something he didn’t . . . no, I know there’s stuff he didn’t tell me, but I’m wondering if there’s something important he didn’t tell me. Something that changes the game.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. If this were a normal job, I’d have had time to do research, learn something about the situation—I don’t know a damn thing about the kind of real-estate deals they do. It’s all business to business, working with other brokers, stuff like that.” She wondered if there was a Moron’s Guide to Commercial Realtors out there, too. Probably.

  He finished his burger, and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Are you getting hinky about what’s going on between Uncle Joe and DubJay?”

  “You aren’t? You’re the one who raised these questions in the first place!”

  “Yeah, and you decided not to worry about it, right?” He shoved his legs out in front of him and stared at the toes of his work boots for a while, then shrugged. “You want to back out?”

  She thought about the text message, and about the terse note in DubJay’s message.

  “I agreed to the job. The money’s in my account. If I drop the job, half finished? He can ruin my reputation. My reputation is my business, Tonica.”

  “Yeah. And we’re both stubborn as two bulldogs, besides. Look, DubJay’s twitchy. All right. So long as he’s just leaving messages, we ignore him—we’re on the job. And the job is, we find Uncle Joe. We talk to him. Then we tell DubJay his uncle’s been found, collect our paycheck, and let them duke it out, okay?”

  Ginny scowled, not sure why having her own logic turned on her felt so wrong. “Next time I stick my nose into a bar conversation? Cut it off, okay?”

  “So noted.”

  “That’s not an agreement.”

  “Next time, I’ll sit back and let you stick it in without interfering,” he said. “If I tried to stop you, you’d chop my hand off for the effort.”

  Ginny had no legitimate comeback to that, and she wasn’t quite sure how to—or if she should—thank him for sticking around. Stubborn as two bulldogs. That about summed it up, yeah.

  Crumpling the now-empty wrappers, along with the extra napkins, into a ball, she aimed and shot the ball at the nearest trash can. It went in a nearly perfect arc, and landed squarely in the can.

  “Nice shot. For a girl.”

  “Bet you couldn’t match it.”

  Once again, he refused to take the bait. “You’d be right.” He got up and dumped his own trash in the can and brushed off his hands. “Onward?”

  Ginny looked up at the sky, the blue scattered with random clouds. An almost perfect day, and she was spending it chasing after something she wasn’t sure she wanted to find anymore. Her stomach hurt, and not from the hamburger.

  But it was about more than the money, and she could probably counter anything DubJay said, if he decided to go that route. She had said she could do this, and she was going to do it.

  Tonica was right; they could decide what to tell DubJay after they talked to Uncle Joe.

  Standing up, she turned to her partner with a determined nod. “Onward.”

  6

  Rooftops weren’t ideal when it was wet: footing was uncertain, and your fur got damp and matted. But she liked rooftops anyway. Being up high was better than being low, in her opinion. And there were fewer threats up here: the occasional other cat, or a flock of pigeons. The former she’d acknowledge and ignore, and the latter she ignored entirely.

  She’d woken up uneasy, her tail twitching hard enough that it ached. The busy place was still closed, so she’d gone to Theodore’s den first. He wasn’t there. Penny had stared in the window, her whiskers twitching, then leapt lightly back onto the roof and headed back into town.

  Georgie was asleep, sprawled in an undignified heap on the bed. Penny couldn’t hear, through the windows, but she could imagine the snore rising from the shar-pei’s chest, a steady low buzz.

  There was no sign of the human inside, though.

  Both her humans of interest were missing. Together? Penny’s tail twitched again, a full-length sweep. She hated it when something happened she didn’t know about and couldn’t keep a paw on. How could she keep track of them if they didn’t behave properly?

  Her stomach rumbled, and she contemplated the sleeping dog for a moment before turning to leave. Food first, then she’d find out what was going on.

  The address Ginny had been given for Uncle Joe’s dinner companion was out in Everest, a nice but not obviously wealthy area. The houses were all on green manicured lots, not particularly large but well maintained. Unlike downtown, there weren’t people walking—there weren’t any sidewalks, and really nowhere to walk to.

  They parked on the street. “I hate suburbia,” Tonica said, looking around. “The back of my neck’s itching. They’re watching us, from behind lace curtains.”

  “Aren’t suburbanites too busy carpooling and killing people to peep at strangers?”

  “Okay, killing people? Screw this. I’m going back to the city, where it’s safe.”

  “Big, brave, tough guy. Come on. Number seventy-three,” Ginny said, pointing toward the house midway up the street. They stared at the house. It was a cottage, really, and if she thought about it, Ginny knew she could probably identify the period during which it was built and the style they followed, but she was aware that the urge to do so was nothing but avoidance.

  “So what do we know?”

  She tapped the tablet that had been resting on her lap, and pulled up the list. “Her name’s Zara Coridan, and she’s fifty-nine. Works for a small software company, name of Branchpoint, which isn’t anywhere near getting bought out by anyone—worse luck for them—but she seems to be doing okay, no public debt or difficulties, steady work history. No connection to the real-estate field, far as I could tell. Reasonably active in community affairs: belongs to a couple of groups, was arrested once for protesting.”

  Tonica smiled. “I think I like her.”
<
br />   “Down, boy. No idea where or how they met, or how long they’ve known each other. And before you ask, he’s not signed up for any online dating sites. The only reason I know who she is is that her name was in his date book.”

  Technically, she was pretty sure that she wasn’t supposed to have access to his date book. DubJay hadn’t given her the password to that, she’d just figured it out, based on Uncle Joe’s other passwords. Like her parents, he had a touching faith in family names and birthdays.

  Ginny used a random password generator, herself, wrote them down in opposing order with the accounts they matched, and taped the list under her bed. It seemed about as safe as any system she’d ever heard of. If someone wanted to hack you, they would, but why make it easy?

  Anyway, she’d figured that his date book would give them more information, after the financial clues fizzled, and she’d been right.

  “Right. So we go in and ask her what her intentions were towards Uncle Joe? That’s going to be fun. Or we could quit, you know.” Tonica said it as casually as though asking if she wanted another drink.

  Ginny gave him her very best Look, the one that asked if he was really that wussy. She’d worked hard at perfecting it. “You go ahead and quit, if you want to.”

  He met her with an open-eyed look of his own. “I was just stating an option. There have got to be better ways to spend a nice Saturday.”

  “Yeah, what, sleeping in?”

  “Among other things, yes. Some of us have to work tonight, remember.” He cut the engine and got out of the car, not letting her get a last shot in.

  “I hate it when you do that,” she muttered, unbuckling her seat belt and following him. But the moment was lost, anything she said now would be petty, rather than clever.

  He didn’t bother to lock the car—it wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. She would have locked it, anyway.

  “Here’s hoping she’s home.”

  “Car’s here,” she pointed out. There was a nice but not brand-new sedan in the driveway. An Audi, dark blue, standard plates, not vanity ones. Between the house and the car, Ginny felt a certain sympathy for this woman. Commonsensical, the pieces said. Likes nice things, but doesn’t get owned by them.