Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  “No. I . . . I saw it, and then I came outside, and I called it in. And I waited here until you arrived.” She had told him this already, same as she’d told the dispatcher, but she knew they’d ask again, and probably again, as though she were going to change her story. At least they hadn’t made her go back inside: the sight of the body shoved under the kitchen table, its limbs curled around itself, neck at an angle that said it was broken, even though she’d never seen anything like that before . . .

  “All right, wait here.” And he walked off, she guessed to see what was going on inside, although he didn’t actually go inside the house, just checked in via radio. Was he watching her? Or keeping an eye on the people who were clumping on the sidewalk across the street? Probably both, Ginny decided.

  This made the second dead body Ginny had ever seen up close and personal, but somehow it was so much worse. Because she hadn’t been expecting it? Because it was so obviously a violent death, not prettied up to seem like natural causes, or an accident?

  Or because it was the body not of the elderly handicapped woman she’d been expecting to meet, but a man probably—from the quick look she’d had—about her own age? In the still coldly rational part of her brain that was observing everything that was going on, Ginny suspected it was the latter: that she was not shocked that there had been a dead body, but that it hadn’t been who she was expecting.

  That wasn’t a particularly good thing to realize about herself.

  She waited another fifteen minutes while things happened out of sight inside the house, resisting the urge to check her phone or tablet in case that was a no-no she hadn’t been warned about, feeling the itch for information like a thousand mosquitos all at once. The crowd across the street had grown to about fifteen people, not counting the curtain-twitchers, and she wondered if they were coming in from other neighborhoods as word spread.

  Eventually, the cop who’d been inside came out again and met up with her partner, just as an unmarked sedan that screamed “cop” pulled up to the curb. A white news van pulled up behind that. She wasn’t sure if she should be surprised someone sent a crew to cover this, or insulted that they hadn’t gotten there earlier. Wasn’t her murder important enough?

  Both cops turned and frowned at her, as though they’d heard that last thought. She lifted her hands and widened her eyes in a “what? I’m just standing here like you told me” response. Snark might not be the best response, but she was pretty sure that she hadn’t done anything wrong—other than walking in the house, but she’d thought she was meeting someone there!—and they were still giving her dirty looks.

  The cops came back to her, the woman scowling. “And what were you doing inside, again?”

  She had explained that to them already, too. Twice. So might as well go for three. “I had made an appointment to meet with a potential client.” She’d given the first cop her business card, showed him the information in her schedule, and the call log on her phone that connected to the landline inside. “When she didn’t respond, but the door was unlocked, I went inside to see if she was in need of assistance.”

  So far, nobody had mentioned illegal entry, so she was probably right about some Good Samaritan law covering her ass. Or they were waiting for her to say something incriminating. “I’ve told you three times already: I thought I was meeting a woman named Amanda Adaowsky, for a business meeting.”

  She didn’t mention poking around in the studio, was thankful that she’d had the presence of mind—or the paranoia—to wipe where she’d touched the cabinet door, hoping to make her fingerprints unreadable. Whoever that guy was, and whyever he’d been killed and shoved under the table, she just wanted to be the poor woman who’d found him, not someone of interest.

  The problem was, one of the first things she’d learned during their very first job was that if the cops were looking at you, you were already in trouble. And the fact that she claimed to be here to meet someone who—according to the first cop’s terse comment—didn’t live here? Yeah, she was already on their radar. She should just give her statement and get the hell out of Dodge. But her curiosity was warring with her desire to disappear, and curiosity was winning. As usual.

  “So what happened?”

  The second cop was still scowling, shooting a glance over to where a woman with short, graying hear, wearing a Portland Police Department windbreaker and cap, but with no obvious gun, was standing, looking at the house. She must’ve arrived in the second car. “And you have no idea who the individual inside might be?” the female cop asked again, ignoring Ginny’s question.

  Ginny shook her head, feeling the once-smooth knot of hair at the back of her head start to fall apart, curls brushing against the back of her neck. She didn’t even bother to try to tuck them back in: nobody was going to be impressed by her professional appearance at this point. “No. Mrs. Adaowsky”—except that there was no Mrs. Adaowsky here, it seemed—“didn’t mention having a son or a caretaker, so no. Is he, was he . . .”

  Of course he was: you didn’t end up shoved under the kitchen table accidentally, not like that, not without any signs of an accident, but she had to ask, anyway.

  “That’s still under investigation, ma’am.” Deadpan stonewall. “You’ll be staying locally, in case we need to speak with you again?”

  They didn’t tell her not to leave town, but it was implicit in the tone. The fact that she’d come here to see someone who didn’t seem to live here at all, and found a dead body . . . Yeah, she wouldn’t let her leave town, either. Ginny smiled politely and told them again where she was staying, and watched them write it down again. The advantage to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth was that it was a lot harder for someone to catch you out in a lie. But it got boring, repeating it over and over again.

  She glanced at the activity on the front porch of the house, then at the small crowd of rubberneckers, trying to decide if they were more interested in the activity on the porch or the two local news teams now covering the activity, then looked at her watch again.

  “May I go now? I left my dog at the hotel, and she’ll need to be walked soon. . . .” Georgie would probably be fine for another hour or two, but as reasons to go it seemed like one cops couldn’t give her grief about.

  The first cop flapped his hand at her, which she took to mean “yeah, go on, get out of my face.” They were taking the body away now, a covered gurney, and Ginny hesitated a moment, then shook her head. She wasn’t involved, she didn’t need to linger—especially since if one of the news crews saw she was off the cop’s leash, they might try to corner her for an interview. She really didn’t want to talk to anyone right then: she just wanted to get back to her hotel, walk Georgie, and let everything that had happened today shake down into some kind of sense.

  Of course, she was too flustered to pay attention to where she was going, missed a turn, and got lost on her way back to the hotel. By the time she let herself into the room, enough time had gone by that her excuse was true: Georgie was nearly frantic with the need to go for a walk, although she’d been a good girl and not done anything that would have required apologizing to the housekeeping staff.

  Despite the worry and chaos that was tangling her thinking, Ginny smiled at the dog’s exuberance, all other thoughts put aside for a few seconds. “Hey, girl, you were a good girl, weren’t you?” A blue-black tongue washed her face, paws pushing against her legs as she knelt down to say hello. “Yeah, okay, hang on a minute.”

  The act of clicking the leash onto Georgie’s collar and shoving a few poo bags into her jacket pocket was familiar enough to be soothing, as was watching her dog’s simple pleasure at the smell of the air outside, the feel of grass under her paws, and the relief of being able to pee. The shar-pei dragged her from one end of the designated dog walking area to the other, sniffing at everything, and occasionally remembering what she’d come out here to do in the first place.


  The physical act of walking the dog let Ginny’s brain focus on the day’s events with a little more composure, pushing aside the mildly emotional weebling and focusing on the facts.

  Fact one: her client had not been at the house.

  Fact two: her client did not, by all appearances, live at that house.

  Fact three: someone probably not her client had been, by all appearances, running a fake ID shop out of that house.

  Fact four: someone—probably someone who did live in that house, or maybe worked there, or was just a random stranger, although she thought that was unlikely—had been killed there.

  She had the where, and could guess at the how, but the who and the why were still unanswered. The cops would be able to get the who pretty quickly, but the why . . .

  “People are complicated, Georgie,” she said. “We lie, we cheat, we steal, we do things that require fake ID, and then we kill people and shove them under tables. What’s with that, anyway? What in that guy’s life made him worth killing? Was it the fake IDs?” She shook her head, having trouble imagining that. “Who gets murderous over fake driver’s licenses?”

  Her dog, finished with her rounds, bumped her head against Ginny’s leg and aimed deep brown eyes up at her owner with a quiet plea.

  “I’d rather be a dog, I think. You’ve got all the basics covered, don’t you?” Ginny said, giving Georgie the expected treat from her pocket. “Food, shelter, belly rubs . . .”

  Georgie took the treat gracefully, then whined as though to say, “Well, yes, and where are my belly rubs?” and flopped over on the pavement, wiggling happily against the rough surface. Ginny laughed and bent down to oblige, one hand scratching the plush fawn-colored fur on the dog’s stomach.

  “Not my circus, not my monkeys, isn’t that the saying?” She should just walk away, leave it be, leave town as soon as the cops gave her the all clear, which hopefully would be today, or tomorrow at the latest.

  “It is weird, though,” she went on, still rubbing Georgie’s belly. “Not the dead guy, because sadly that’s not weird at all, I’ve discovered.” Even before she’d started looking into people’s uglier secrets, she’d not been an idealist about human behavior—she’d worked in too many offices for that. “I mean, Mrs. Adaowsky. She contacts me, hires me, pays my retainer, which, okay, isn’t huge but it’s not chump change, either, and then gives me the wrong address, the wrong phone number? And it just happens, hey, to be a murder scene?” Ginny frowned, staring across the parking lot without really seeing anything, still petting Georgie’s belly. “Which raises the question of, if Mrs. A actually calls me back, do I want to take the call? Or do I tell her that her retainer bought my trip down here, but her games cost her the rest of me?

  “What do you think, baby? Maybe I should call Tonica, get his take on this?”

  Georgie whined again, but that could have been requesting harder scritches, not telling her to call her sometimes-partner.

  “No,” Ginny decided, pushing back to her feet. “This is weird, and my serious bad luck in getting caught up in any of it, but we’re done. Whatever the hell is going on, this one’s for the cops to figure out, not us. And Mrs. Adaowsky can whistle for me—I’m done.” Ginny worked with a wide range of divas—that being the personality type who hired private concierges, as a rule—but she wasn’t a docile lapdog they could ignore and scoop up at whim. She demanded respect from her clients, as well as a respectable fee—it was the only way to get the job done. And giving her the runaround was not respectful.

  “And neither is dumping a dead body on me,” she said out loud. “I need to add that to the website’s FAQ. If you have a dead body, you have to say that right up front.”

  So what now? The job was a bust, but she’d already paid for the night’s stay. The hotel wasn’t going to give her a refund just because her client turned out to be a no-show. And while she didn’t think the cops would really give her shit about going back to Seattle—they could find her there easily enough, and there was the technological marvel of the phone, if they had anything else they wanted to ask her—wanting her own bed didn’t trump the probable annoyance of having to call the police station and tell them she’d changed her mind, she was going home.

  But sitting in the hotel room with nothing to do except wonder about a dead body she shouldn’t even know about wasn’t going to do her any good. Might as well try to get some positive out of this trip. . . .

  Fortunately, Portland wasn’t without friendlies. She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and dialed a number from memory, waiting for the other person to pick up. “Ron, hi, it’s Ginny again. Thanks for the advice on the rental car, it’s as solid as you said. But it looks like my job fell through so I’m free for dinner tonight after all. You still—all right, yeah, that sounds good. Just tell me where.” She listened to Ron yelling to someone else, then giving her an address.

  “McMenamins Kennedy School, seven o’clock. No, s’okay, I can find it. I have been to Portland before, you know.” He said something and she made a face but, in light of her mishaps this afternoon, couldn’t really argue. “I have GPS on my tablet, thank you very much.”

  Seven o’clock. That gave her two hours to kill before she’d have to leave, even allowing time to get lost. “C’mon, Georgie, back inside. Momma needs to fire up the laptop.”

  She’d said she was done with her would-be client, but the fact that the phone had rung in the house that the woman didn’t live in bothered Ginny. And by “bothered” she meant “was starting to piss her off.”

  Once she had Georgie settled down with her dinner, Ginny sat cross-legged on the bed and flipped open her laptop. She’d almost not brought it, thinking the tablet would be enough for a two-day trip, but at the last minute she’d thrown it in the bag, mostly out of habit. She was thankful now: she could run searches on her tablet, but it was easier to work with a full keyboard.

  She flexed her fingers and called up her browser, common sense warring with curiosity. The dead body was a matter for the cops. She wasn’t going to mess with that, not when she’d been the one to find the body—she’d watched enough TV and movies to know how badly that could go. And anyway, she didn’t even have a name to start with—“random dead white guy in Portland” might be enough for professionals, but Ginny knew her limits—even if she didn’t always admit to them.

  “Pull the threads you can see first,” she told herself. “Amanda Adaowsky.”

  Ginny had done a basic search on her would-be client when the woman first approached her, but that had been an “is there something negative about this person I need to know before I accept?” search, not a “does this person even exist?” dig, because who thought to do that?

  Ginny didn’t like wasting time, but she really hated being played for an idiot.

  “Fool me once, shame on you. And I won’t get fooled twice,” she told the screen grimly, entering in the search parameters. “Every new client’s going to get a full scrub-down, from here on in.” Too late for that now, on this job. But if there was an Amanda Adaowsky anywhere in the contiguous forty-eight, the two external states, or Canada, she’d know by dinnertime. After that . . . well, she’d see where that thread led her.

  * * *

  Tuesday afternoons at Mary’s were usually quiet, as though gathering strength for the chaos that generally erupted once Trivia Night began. Once a week, people came in from all over the city, filling the bar for two hours of heated smarter-than-you gamesmanship. And drinking. Teddy both hated it and loved it. Usually more the former than the latter, by the time he kicked the last person out and could close up.

  But it was routine, honed to perfection over the past few years. He had woken up around eleven, gone for his morning run, then showered and headed into work to open the bar for Stacy before heading out again to run some errands and coming back for his own shift. A perfectly ordinary day, no urgent
phone calls or sudden disasters, nothing at all odd about it . . .

  Except there had been a niggling sense of something missing, something out of order. He gave the bar a quick once-over but found nothing that could explain it. He hadn’t turned the stove on that morning, so he couldn’t have left it on, and his coffeemaker was timed to shut off on its own.

  It wasn’t until he’d stumbled over doing his receipts that he’d realized what was missing: Ginny. And Georgie. Not that it was unusual for her to go a day or two without coming by, but Tuesdays had been sacred for as long as he’d known her. She was slightly fanatical about her team—a little competitive, was Ginny Mallard.

  Except she hadn’t been quite so into it the past few months, had she?

  Shaking his head, he told himself that he should be glad if Ginny was losing interest in trivia, because it meant his team could win more often. Not that, as manager, he played often anymore . . . When you had to keep an eye on everything both in front of and behind the bar, it was tough to focus on the questions.

  He finished pouring the current round of orders and took a thirty-second breather to check the action. Trivia Night wouldn’t start for another four hours, at nine o’clock, but someone had already pulled three of the smaller tables together, although there were only two people at it right now. He made a mental note that there would be a larger group hitting soon. Most of the other tables had bodies at them, but only half the bar stools were taken. It was normal enough business for an afternoon, not like Thursdays or Fridays, when people were starting to let off steam for the weekend.

  Not that anyone ever let off too much steam here, thankfully. He’d worked all kind of places over the years, from trendy clubs to dives, and Mary’s was his favorite—a neighborhood joint, warm but not flashy, where you took someone you’d already kissed, and liked kissing, and planned to kiss again.

  Or—he raised a hand to greet newcomers, already reaching for the pint glass, knowing what they would order—where you went and ordered the same thing every single time, and expected the bartender to know that . . . because he did.