Murder on the Rocks

by Allyson K. Abbott

  “You need to take off your rose-colored glasses, Mack.”

  “Maybe so,” I agreed sullenly. “But I’m not going to start convicting people until I have some hard evidence as opposed to a bunch of half-baked theories.” With that I headed back out to the bar and started working the tables, fighting a constant urge to look over my shoulder.

  Chapter 21

  As the evening wore on, Duncan’s prediction about cops coming into the bar continued to bear out. Whether they were coming in at Duncan’s behest or on their own I didn’t know, but most of them were dressed in casual, off-duty clothes and they ordered alcoholic drinks, making me suspect—and hope—they weren’t on the job. Despite the lack of uniform, most of them were easy for me to recognize.

  I don’t think I was the only one who could tell which customers were cops. Each time one of them came into the bar, I’d see several customers scrutinize them and then bow their heads together to share a quick chat. No one seemed upset or bothered by the cops’ presence and my fear that they might drive customers away proved unfounded.

  My theory that the cops were easily identifiable was born out when Riley came in again a little after ten. “How’s the night going?” he asked, taking a seat at the bar. He scanned the room. “It looks like you’ve been busy.” His gaze settled on three guys at one table. “And I see the cops have settled in.” He turned back to me. “Are they here on business or pleasure?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s pleasure unless they are able to drink on the job.”

  “Have they questioned anyone?”

  “Not officially. What can I get you tonight? Your usual dirty martini?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  “Not tonight. I bought the kids pizza since we were so busy at the store today and I managed to put away four slices.” He patted his stomach.

  “One dirty martini coming up.” I made his drink and served it to him, and as I turned to leave he grabbed my arm. “Your new employee watches you pretty closely,” he said. “I think he may have a crush on you.”

  “Duncan?” I turned and looked over at the other end of the bar where Duncan was chatting with a couple of women. The way they were leaning across the bar toward him told me they were flirting and I felt an unexpected twinge of jealousy. “Nah, he’s just grateful for the job,” I said, looking away. “He’s had a rough time of it lately and needed a chance to start over. Our relationship is more of a brother-sister thing.”

  Riley looked skeptical. “You may think so, but I’m not so sure he does. How is it you know him again?”

  “He’s the son of an old friend of my father’s. We used to play together back when we were kids, but his family moved away when Duncan was eight or so. I don’t remember much about his folks but I recall Duncan being a part of the group of kids I used to play with.”

  The lying was getting easier; I’d told the story about Duncan and I enough times that I almost believed it myself. And now I was embellishing beyond what we had agreed to, trying to make the story sound more believable. It worried me a little, wondering how angry and betrayed some folks might feel once the truth came out. My staff seemed to be taking it all in stride, but I could tell a couple of them—Billy and Debra mainly—were hurt by the fact that I had duped them. I knew they’d get over it—for the most part they already had—but while I understood the necessity for the deception, it still felt wrong.

  I left Riley with his martini and went back to waiting on tables. At ten-thirty, Lewis Carmichael left the table of regulars sitting with Cora and headed off to work. Half an hour later, both Kevin and Tad left as well, leaving Cora alone with her laptop. I walked over and sat in one of the just-emptied seats and asked Cora if she needed anything.

  “No, I’m going to be leaving soon, but thanks.”

  “You guys have seemed pretty intent and kind of hush-hush over here all day. What have you been working on?” I asked, nodding toward the laptop.

  “It’s quite a project,” Cora said with a wink. “One of my programmers has been working on a new computer game that’s basically a sophisticated version of the old board game Clue. But he altered it so that players can put in their own data, essentially creating a scenario for others to solve, like a role-playing game. You can create your own crimes, victims, suspects, methods, weapons, alibis . . . whatever you want. You can make it simple for young kids to play, or complicated for more adult sleuthing fans. Given that Frank, Joe, Tad, Kevin, Lewis, and I all seem to be on the list of potential suspects for Ginny’s murder, we figured anything we could do to narrow down the field or point the cops in a different direction might be helpful. Plus Billy was saying he has no alibi, and I’m sure you’re on the list, too. So we’re plugging in evidence and trying to analyze it to see if we can come up with the most likely suspect.”

  “You think you can solve Ginny’s murder by playing a computer game of Clue?” I didn’t want to kill her buzz by sounding too skeptical, but the idea seemed far out there to me. Cora, however, was not easily deterred.

  “We just might,” she said with slightly drunken optimism. Given how long she’d been at the bar today, she’d far exceeded her usual one glass of chardonnay and I could tell it was having an effect on her. “The program still needs a lot of work before it’s marketable, but Jeb, the guy who’s developing it, assures me that the bulk of the functional program is done and all he’s working on at this point is the graphics and some of the interfaces. So I’m going to give it a try and see what it comes up with. What have I got to lose?” she said with a shrug. “The biggest obstacle at this point is getting enough information. The program basically sorts the data that’s entered and runs a series of algorithms based on probabilities. But if the data is insufficient the results won’t be accurate.”

  “And you really think this thing might work?”

  Cora shrugged. “It’s based on facts and logic. It eliminates the emotions, prejudices, and assumptions we humans tend to make, although I suspect that may turn out to be one of its shortcomings. Emotions do play into murder much of the time. But emotions aside, the program will give us a list of likely suspects based on probabilities, with suggestions about other evidence or facts it would like to have. We’ve got all of our names in here as suspects and we added you and all of your staff’s names, too, some based on simple proximity. Missy and Debra both have pretty good alibis so I’m guessing they’ll be eliminated early on. Speaking of which . . .”

  She looked around the bar and then wagged a finger at me, urging me to lean in closer. I did so and she dropped her voice to just above a whisper. “Did you let Gary go because you think he might have killed Ginny? And if you did, can you tell me why you think that so I can enter the facts into my program?”

  I straightened up and frowned at her. “I don’t know, Cora.”

  “Has he been arrested?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “Not that I know of.”

  Cora gave me a frustrated look. “You know more than you’re telling, Mack. We all know that. Help us out here. Give us some info to work on.”

  I was intrigued by her idea and thinking about what I might be able to tell her when I heard Duncan’s voice behind me.

  “What are you two ladies up to?”

  “Just some girl talk,” I said quickly, hoping the guilt I felt wasn’t visible on my face. I got up from the chair and headed for the bar where I saw Riley preparing to leave. He tossed money onto the bar and I slid it back to him. “Keep it. Your drink is on me tonight.”

  “That’s very generous of you, but I insist on paying. You make a killer martini, Mack, and it’s worth every penny.” He stuffed his wallet into his pocket and said, “Since tomorrow is your late opening day, would you like me to bring you something for brunch when I come in to open the store? I can stop at that bakery you like.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet of you, but I have plans tomorrow.” That wasn’t true but I was looking forward to some quiet time alone and
figured a tiny white lie was called for.

  “No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow night.” He gave me a quick buss on the cheek and left. I looked around for Duncan and saw him heading down the back hallway, talking on his cell phone. I took advantage of his distraction to go back to Cora and her little project.

  I settled into a chair, taking the one closest to her this time, and leaned in, speaking in a low voice. “I don’t know if this game thing of yours is a smart idea, Cora,” I said, gesturing toward the laptop. “At least not as a group project. One of the people playing it with you could be the killer and what’s going to happen if your game fingers him? Are you going to turn that person over to the police?”

  Cora shook her head. “Any answer it provides is only a probability, not a certainty. You have to understand that the more information we plug in, the more accurate the game’s guess will be. In the beginning, it simply generates a list of suspects based on the information we provide about method, motives, and opportunity. Once that list is generated, we provide the program with additional evidence as it becomes available, things like fingerprints, weapons, or blood . . . that sort of stuff. We can even plug in motives if we think there are any. The program then applies the information provided by the added evidence to the list of suspects and narrows it down.”

  “And the list it generates is in order of likelihood?”

  Cora nodded.

  I had to admit, I was intrigued and I wondered whose name was currently at the top of the list? Was it Gary? Tad? Billy? I debated the question for about a nanosecond before caving, knowing I wouldn’t rest until I knew. “So who’s at the top of the list so far?

  Cora finished off her current glass of wine and smiled at me as she set down the empty glass. “You are,” Cora said. “In fact, so far you’re the most likely suspect by a rather wide margin.”

  I remember my father cautioning me when I was a little girl to make sure I really wanted to know the answers to any questions I asked before I asked them. The advice came about when I first started asking about my mother and the circumstances surrounding her death. It came back to me now for obvious reasons. Of all the names I expected Cora to spit out, mine wasn’t one of them.

  “Oh, my,” I said, feeling dizzy. My heart began to pound. My lungs felt tight and constricted, as if the air in the room was rapidly thinning. I felt the walls of the bar begin to close in on me, getting closer and closer with each passing second. Any moment now I would be trapped, unable to escape, unable to breathe.

  At first I thought I was experiencing a weird manifestation of my synesthesia, but I quickly recognized the symptoms for what they really were. I was having a panic attack. I knew this because I’d had them when I was younger, back when I first began to realize I was different from everyone else. Over time and with counseling I learned how to recognize them and talk myself through them, and I hadn’t had one since my teen years. But I remembered them well enough and it wasn’t hard for my logical mind to figure out why I was having one now. I was suspect number one amongst my own customers as well as the police. Both the evidence and the law were closing in on me.

  “Are you okay?” Cora asked, looking concerned. “Did I upset you? Because I can tell you that none of us believes for a second that you killed Ginny.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I told her, focusing on my breathing. Her reassurance helped some, and after a few seconds I felt like I had control again. “What information did you put in there to make my name come up?” I asked.

  “We put in what we knew, that you found the body, that you knew her well, that your father was murdered in the same general area, that he and Ginny were a couple, and that you are the beneficiary of Ginny’s insurance policy.”

  I gaped at her after hearing that last bit. “How the hell did you find that out?” I asked her.

  “Frank and Joe,” Cora said with a shrug. “They called some old buddy of theirs in the insurance business and he told them.”

  I shook my head and glanced around to see where Duncan was. I felt certain he’d be pissed if he knew. He was behind the bar with Billy, serving and mixing drinks. He appeared to be enjoying himself and was paying me no attention at the moment.

  “So you can see why you’re at the top of the list,” Cora went on. “The data we have is heavily skewed toward you. We need more information.”

  And I needed to get my name off the top of everyone’s suspect list. If information is what Cora needed, I’d give it to her.

  “Okay,” I said, turning back to Cora. “What is it you want to know?”

  Chapter 22

  Cora started firing questions at me, typing as I answered, both of us speaking in low, whispery voices.

  “Ginny was stabbed. Correct?” Cora asked.

  “Yes.”

  “With a knife or something else?”

  “A knife. A large one.”

  “Was the murder weapon found with the body?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know if they’ve found the murder weapon?”

  I sighed. “They not only found it, they’ve determined it came from the set in my kitchen.”

  Cora arched her eyebrows, stopped typing, and looked up at me. “That’s not good,” she said, wincing.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Do you know if they found any fingerprints on it?”

  “Just mine,” I said, thinking that so far, this clearing-my-name thing wasn’t turning out quite the way I’d hoped.

  Cora turned her attention back to her laptop and started typing again. “Was she killed in the alley, or just dumped there?”

  “Dumped, according to the cops.”

  “Do they know where she was killed?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.” I glanced over my shoulder again to make sure Duncan was still occupied, certain he would be upset by the amount of information I was divulging.

  “Do you know when she was killed?”

  “Yeah, between five and six in the morning.”

  “Did Gary have a connection to Ginny?” Cora asked.

  I nodded and looked back at Cora, debating just how far I was willing to go with this. “It turns out that Ginny gave birth to a son when she was a teenager and she gave him up for adoption.”

  “Yeah, the Signoriello brothers mentioned something about her having a son,” Cora said.

  “Apparently she reconnected with him at some point, but he was killed a few months ago.”

  “How sad for Ginny,” Cora said, looking up from her laptop again. “How did it happen?”

  “He was in prison and another inmate killed him.”

  Cora looked stricken, but also thoughtful. It didn’t take her long to ask the question I knew was coming next. “So what’s that got to do with Gary?”

  “Gary was his cellmate.”

  My heart beat three times before she said, “Gary is an ex-con? What was he in for?”

  “Robbing a store, though he said he didn’t do it, that he was wrongly convicted.”

  Cora scoffed, started typing again, and said, “I’m willing to bet most of the people in prison swear they didn’t do it.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, wondering if I was destined to become one of them. I got up from my chair, knowing I needed to get back to work.

  “Anything else you can tell me that you think might help, Mack?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if I agree but the cops seem to think that Ginny’s murder and my father’s might be connected somehow. If they are, it suggests that Ginny might have been a suspect as well as a victim.”

  Cora considered that for a few seconds. “So you’re saying she might have been in on your dad’s murder along with someone else, and that someone else killed her to keep her quiet?”

  “Something like that, yes,” I said, unsure just what I thought. The more I tried to sort it all out in my head, the more confusing it seemed to get.

  “Interesting,” Cora said, sounding excited and typing madly again. “I
need to run two scenarios, one focused on Ginny’s death alone, and a second one that includes your father and also assumes both deaths are related and may have been committed by the same person.”

  I left Cora to her devices and surveyed the bar. A couple of tables had turned over while I was chatting so I hit them up for orders and headed for the bar. Billy prepared the drinks for me—Duncan had disappeared—and I distributed them before heading into the kitchen to take care of the food orders. I was halfway done with them when Duncan poked his head in.

  “How’s it going?” I asked him.

  “Busy. But I’m having fun. I kind of like this bartending stuff.”

  “You have a knack for it, and you have the people skills, too, which I’m sure serves you well in your real job.”

  “You spent a long time talking to Cora. Did she have anything enlightening to share?”

  So much for going unnoticed. “Just some stuff that she and the others were discussing this afternoon about the case.”

  “I overheard a bit of their talk earlier. I think the group fancies themselves as some sort of amateur detective squad, which is interesting, given that they’re all suspects to some degree.”

  “I think that’s why they’re so intent on solving the crime, so they can clear their own names.”

  Duncan considered this for a few seconds and nodded. “That’s a powerful motivator, no doubt. If that’s the case, you need to be very careful. Make sure you use those new keys wisely. Don’t be handing out copies to anyone for now. Make sure everything is locked up tight all the time.”

  “I’m starting to feel like I’m in a prison,” I said with a nervous laugh.

  Duncan gave me a very serious look and said, “Hopefully you won’t have an opportunity to find out just how different prison is.”