Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  “What?” The first man seemed more surprised than shocked, shooting a look at the third figure before lowering his voice slightly, uselessly. “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “Hey, I just found out, too. Told you that little bird in the police department would come in handy.”

  The woman’s chin lifted a little, her heel stilling and her mouth tightening, but she showed no other reaction to the news. That seemed to reassure the first man, who leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. “Huh. That’s unfortunate. Still, he could have called—what?”

  The other man had made a noise that might have been a muffled protest.

  “You expect me to shed a tear? C’mon, Ben. The man might have been talented as hell, but otherwise he was a waste of blood and bone.”

  “I’m not going to argue that,” Ben said. “But he was also part of this organization.”

  “Organization.” The other man laughed. “That’s a good one. You make it sound like we have a flowchart and shareholders or something.”

  “We do have shareholders—people we are obligated to, people it’s in our best interests to keep happy.” He shot a glance at the standing woman’s back, and raised his eyebrows significantly. “And part of keeping them happy involves keeping our system humming along happily, and our noses clean. Police investigations don’t lend to either of those things.”

  His companion glanced at the woman as well, but rolled his eyes immediately afterward, as though to show that he wasn’t intimidated by her presence. “His nose, if you’re going to use that metaphor, was filthy. You want to keep our people”—and he made quote marks with his fingers around those words—“ ‘happy’? Forget about him, like he never existed. Let his waste sink to the sewer, where it belongs, and leave us alone.”

  “Christ, Dave, you’re cold.”

  “I’m practical. And no, I never liked the guy. You didn’t, either, so stop being a hypocrite. If he hadn’t been useful we’d have cut him out of the loop months ago. So now he’s dead. We’ll find someone less problematic to do the job. Okay?”

  Ben sank into his chair, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

  The woman turned and glanced from one to the other, then spoke for the first time. “While I applaud your ability to adapt to sudden changes, considering the manner of death and your known association with him, do you think that dismissing the police as a threat is all that wise?”

  “You know our structure, that’s why you liked us in the first place: everything’s compartmentalized. No links back to us—or you, which is what you’re really worried about.” The older woman raised an eyebrow, but didn’t disagree. “Ben and me, we’ve got a legit side company to run,” and he gestured at the design logos on the table in front of them, the alleged reason for their meeting. “You’re a client. That’s all anyone sees, all anyone ever will see. Besides, once Jamie’s other hobbies come to light they’re going to bark up that tree. And that’s probably why he got killed anyway, so more power to them.” Dave made an “are we done here?” gesture with his hands. “Now can we get back to business?”

  The woman studied the two of them for a long moment, causing them both to fidget slightly, then nodded. “Agreed.” She relaxed her posture, but did not take a seat at the table, instead standing in front of them like a teacher in front of a classroom. “Before we discuss any further business, where do you stand on current projects?”

  “Everything’s good,” Ben said. He didn’t seem thrilled about reporting to the woman, but Dave gave him a “go on” gesture, so he did. “We’re going to lose whatever was in the house, but the drop was made Sunday night, same as ever, so we’re talking a day, max. And it’s not like anyone’s going to come howling for a refund.”

  They didn’t hold on to the fake IDs for more than twenty-four hours, usually: quick in and quick out had been their business model from the start. The larger projects the woman dangled in front of them required that kind of agility, so he wasn’t going to admit to any slowdown, even if there was one.

  “And with Jamie out of the picture? Will there be a problem?”

  His blood ran a little cold at the lack of inflection in her voice: threats were easier to deal with than her dispassionate efficiency. “I put in a few calls when I got the news; we’ll drum up a replacement in a day or two. He might’ve been brilliant, but there are others who are nearly as good, and a lot less trouble. We won’t have any real delay to worry about.”

  “Excellent.” The woman almost smiled. “I had been concerned, during our test runs, about your partner’s potentiality as a weak link. But now that that seems to have sorted itself, if you two are interested, I have a new client for you. One that should bring you to the next rung you’ve been aiming for—an international one.”

  Ben and Dave exchanged glances across the table, a mix of guilt and relief and anticipation, then gave her their full attention.

  7

  Ginny spent her second night in Portland holed up in her hotel room, the television showing a Spanish teledrama, on mute for undistracting company, while Georgie chewed on a toy under the desk and she sat cross-legged on the bed with her laptop, debris from a local fast-food chain shoved to the side.

  Despite there being a news van on the scene, the murder hadn’t gotten any real air time, which said something about the local news. She’d had better luck with print, but only just. The only thing she’d discovered was that the dead man’s name was Jamie Penalta, and that he’d lived in the house for two years, buying it at a significant decrease from the previous sale—that last bit coming from a real estate site, not the news. He was thirty-seven, single, a graduate of the Kingsbridge School of Fine Art, and made his living as a freelance photographer, specializing in making awkward, pimply teens look less awkward and pimply. From the brief look at his portfolio, he wasn’t half bad at it. Also, it wasn’t much of a living, but he seemed to be paying his bills in a timely manner—again, that bit coming not from newspapers, but a little under-the-hood researchtigating.

  Ginny considered the cost of living out here, and the mortgage payments on that house, and thought that fake IDs must pay better than she’d thought.

  Around eleven, her eyes started to burn, so she shut down the computer, took Georgie for one last walk, and crawled into bed, hoping that tomorrow would turn up something more useful.

  The next thing she knew, there was a voice in her ear. “Gin. Gin?”

  “Mmmmm?” She had a phone in her hand. She had answered her cell phone while she was still asleep. She was awake now. The thoughts parsed themselves, slowly focusing in her brain. “Tonica?”

  “No, it’s the Easter Bunny. If I’m awake at this ungodly hour, you’d damn well better be, Mallard.”

  Her eyes opened enough to see the blurry numbers on the clock on the nightstand: 7:10. “Oh God, Georgie?”

  She sat up in bed, her eyes focusing to find the dog. Who was sitting in the corner by her crate, looking both sheepish and judgmental.

  “Oh damn. Baby, I’m sorry. No, not you, Tonica. Can I call you back? Thanks.” She hung up before he could answer, and went to clean up the mess Georgie had made—thankfully on the bathroom tile, not the carpet. “Mom’s sorry, baby, I don’t know why I overslept.”

  It was the first time since she’d brought Georgie home, an awkward bundle of fawn-colored wrinkles, that she’d not woken up in time to take the dog for her morning walk. And she had no excuse for it—she’d gone to bed at a reasonable hour, hadn’t had anything to drink, hadn’t . . .

  “Nightmares.” She remembered them vaguely now, remembered waking up in the small hours of the morning, unable to get back to sleep until, apparently, she had. And then slept like the dead.

  She winced. Bad choice of words.

  Ginny shoved her feet into her shoes, snapped Georgie’s leash to the collar
, and the two of them headed downstairs, in case Georgie had any more business to conduct.

  Slept like the dead, though, was an apt phrase, no matter how tacky. Had she dreamed about dead bodies? Death chasing her? Guilt over not being able to solve the mystery with a snap of her fingers? Ginny admitted that any of those was a possibility, but it could also have been the squirrel nightmare again.

  “Sorry, baby,” she said again to Georgie, as the shar-pei sniffed at the grass outside and left a brief message against a rock, seemingly more out of habit than any great need to relieve herself again.

  Squirrels aside, as a rule, she didn’t have nightmares—if something was bothering her, she worked it out while she was awake, unpicking the details in her psyche the same way she would a job, taking it down to basics and then figuring out how to deal with it. A dead body, by itself, wasn’t enough to jolt that. The guy under the table hadn’t been the first dead body she’d ever seen. It hadn’t even been the first dead-by-violent-causes body she’d seen.

  It had been the first one she hadn’t expected to see, though. So maybe that was why this was upsetting her.

  Or maybe, and more likely, it wasn’t the body or even finding the body that was messing with her. For all her brave words about slipping alongside the letter of the law, all her love of the hard-boiled detectives who did the right things and damn the cost, Ginny knew that she was disgustingly law-abiding. She might drive above the speed limit, and justify breaking and entering in a good cause, but that was as far as it went. And now she was a murder suspect.

  Ginny stared at the sky, the cloudy blue bright enough to remind her she was nearly an hour off schedule. “You’ve had the cops side-eye you before,” she said out loud. “Why’s it bothering you so much now?”

  She knew the answer to that the moment she asked: because Tonic wasn’t getting side-eyed with her.

  “It’s easier to get into trouble if you’ve got a partner,” she said. “Huh.” Not that it was any shocking discovery, really, but learning something new about herself was always interesting. It also explained why she was only now discovering her relatively wild side: because she had a wingman. Her mother would be so pleased.

  That reminded her that she’d promised to call Tonica back, and the question of why he was awake at seven in the morning, when he usually slept until eleven after a late-night shift, drove her to gather Georgie and head back up to the room, pausing only long enough to grab a cup of lobby coffee. It was crap, but it was free, and it was already made. Those were two strong points in its favor.

  She picked up the phone and dialed while she was getting Georgie’s breakfast ready and refilling her water bowl. “Hey. Sorry. What’s up?”

  Tonica sounded as groggy as she’d expect with only a few hours of sleep under him, but she didn’t apologize: he’d been the one to call her, after all. “Last night . . . this morning, whatever, I called in a favor on your behalf.”

  His network of contacts was equal to, if completely different from her own. That was part of what made them so effective together. She made sure Georgie was set, then sat down on the bed and reached for her laptop, opening up a new file and resting her fingers on the keyboard. “Talk to me.”

  He yawned, an audible snapping of his jaw. “Sorry. Friend of mine’s a bartender down there, hangs with a bunch of cops. So I asked him if there’d been any gossip around your dead body.”

  “Not my body,” she protested automatically, and he snorted. “Yeah, okay, sorry, the body.”

  “And?” He wouldn’t have called her if something hadn’t come up.

  “And I thought it would take him longer than a few hours to find anything out, but I guess nobody sleeps down there. Gin, word is the guy you found? Wasn’t just making fake IDs. Rumor mill has it that he was part of a national identity theft ring the cops were this close to busting.”

  She stilled her fingers on the keyboard, blinking at the screen thoughtfully. “Well, that explains how he’s making enough money to afford that house,” she said, reaching for the coffee cup. She took a sip and winced at the horribleness of it, then took another sip. “That pays a hell of a lot better than a sideline in fake driver’s licenses for underage drinkers.”

  “One would think, yes,” Tonica agreed. “And you stumbled into their investigation at a really awkward moment, when one of their targets gets knocked off. Congratulations on that, by the way.”

  “No wonder they side-eyed me,” she muttered. “Great.”

  “Yeah, but get this,” he went on. “This is why I called. Corky says they’ve already determined that the guy was dead at most six hours before you even hit town. You have proof of when you hit town, right?”

  “I checked into the hotel first, so they know when I arrived, yeah,” she said. “Although I could have—no, I stopped for coffee just after I left Seattle, and paid by debit card, so they have a record of that. And I took money out at an ATM, so their security camera would have me time-stamped.” She nodded, for once pleased by her hyperawareness of security cameras. “Proof I was a couple of hours away at the time, or near enough to make it unlikely I was also in Portland that morning.”

  “So you’re off the hook. Mostly. Or at least, no longer a prime suspect. So you can unclench everything you’ve been clenching.”

  She thought about objecting to his phrasing, thought about her unremembered nightmares, and said nothing. It was hard to argue when he was totally right.

  “So you think I’m probably off house arrest? I can come home now?”

  “I’d wait until they give you an official all clear, but yeah, I’d think so. Miss us?”

  She pursed her lips, although he couldn’t see her. “I don’t know, there’s a nice little brewpub in town. . . .”

  “Mallard. Have you been drinking around on us?”

  He managed just the right amount of horrified hurt, and she bit her lips to keep from laughing. None of this was funny, not even a little bit. “I hate this. I mean, great that they can’t try to pin the death on me, but I still don’t know why the dead guy called me down here. Or even if it was him who made up the fake name and hired me. And it’s going to bug me forever, you know that. Short of hacking into the PayPal account . . .”

  “Not recommended,” Tonica said, all humor gone from his voice.

  “I’m not even close to good enough and I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do it,” she said. “Even if it wouldn’t bring attention right back to me, where I don’t want it to be. We’re going to have to wait for the cops to untangle that, which they probably won’t bother to. But I still want to know, why me?” Her voice might have been a slight wail: across the room, Georgie lifted her head and whined, as though to ask what was wrong.

  “It’s okay, Georgie,” she reassured the dog. “Mom’s just having a slight meltdown here.”

  “Maybe we should let the cops figure that out, too?” It wasn’t a question: he was telling her to put it down and back away slowly. She felt a burn of frustration: Where was his curiosity?

  “Yeah, right. They’re going to find out who killed the guy . . . maybe. Murder gets priority, especially in a nice neighborhood like that, especially if the guy was already on their radar. But once they drop me from suspect status, hopefully right about now, they’re not going to care about a fake client where there wasn’t actually any fraud done. I mean, maybe they’ll care about the fake identity, but let’s be real: if this scam is nationwide, they’ve got bigger fish to fry. And he’s probably done worse than hire a private concierge for a party that never happened.”

  She stopped, thought for a second. “And if I go to the cops about it, if the money came from an illegal source, a made-up person’s credit card, I might have to give the retainer fee back.”

  There was silence on the other end. A very telling silence.

  “Tonica, that was two thousand dollars!” And, she realized, she couldn�
�t exactly submit the receipt for the hotel room, as planned. So if she returned the money she was seriously in the hole for all this.

  “All right, untwist your knickers, Mallard. So you want to know why you got dragged into this, but not bad enough to risk your ill-gotten paycheck?”

  “If someone demands it back, because the money was stolen or something, of course I’ll give it back.” She was offended that he thought otherwise. “But we don’t know for certain the dead guy was the one who hired me”—although that seemed the Occam’s razor reality—“and far as I know right now that was honest money, even if they did use an assumed name to hire me under.”

  “Gin . . .”

  “But yes, I would like to know why I’m here, and why someone wanted me to go to the house of some guy who was running a fake ID business out of his living room. Even if it costs me the retainer.” She hated herself for it, but there it was. “Don’t you want to know, too?”

  At the other end of the line, Tonica hrmmed, and she felt a flash of satisfaction. He did want to know, he just—still—didn’t want to admit he was hooked.

  “Maybe it wasn’t a scam so much as a roundabout?” he suggested. “Maybe the dead guy was going to blow the whistle on his coworkers, and wanted us to help him? There was that crazy-ass blog post about us last month. . . .”

  A blogger down in Vancouver had gotten hold of some press about one of their cases and gone totally off the rails with it, making them out to be the Batman and Robin of Emerald City, or something. That would just have been slightly embarrassing, but her parents had found it, somehow, and she’d had to spend an entire evening convincing them that no, she wasn’t running around righting all wrongs for free. Nor, she had added before her father could ask, was she wearing Spandex.

  Ginny rolled her eyes at the memory, and the suggestion. “Oh yeah, an identity scam in Portland needs pseudo-PIs in Seattle to help them take down their own system. That makes a lot of sense. Especially if the local cops were already breathing down their necks.”