Teddy’s thought process failed him there. All it probably meant was that DubJay didn’t want a paper trail, didn’t want anyone to know his uncle had gone walkabout. Lots of reasons for that, even in a privately held company. If you traded on your reputation . . .
Yeah. Going outside your usual circles made sense, then, if you wanted to keep gossip to a minimum. Had the two men been arguing? Was there something amiss in the company itself? Maybe they had disagreed about this deal Dub-Jay was so anxious to close, and walking off was the elder Jacobs’s way of throwing a snit. Bad form in business, but well within limits in a family scuffle.
Some tension, which he hadn’t even realized was there, eased. The job still stank like wiffy fish, but that didn’t mean anything was actually wrong. Sometimes a fish was just a fish, a perfectly edible fish. DubJay might be trying to spare his uncle any embarrassment, or maybe didn’t want to have to explain why he sicced a PI on the older man, so instead he was sending a good-looking woman after him.
“Yeah. That’s more DubJay’s style.”
The question of why they’d been hired put on the back burner, Teddy focused on the task she’d set him. “All right. Fine. Uncle Joe. Joseph Jacobs? Let’s assume so, since it’s Jacobs Realty, right? What dirt have you gotten on you, and who would know about it, Uncle Joe?”
He felt a weird surge of energy, an excitement in his gut, and mentally handed another point over to Mallard. Ginny had been right: he couldn’t resist a challenge any more than she could. He enjoyed bartending, liked managing the weekend staff, but the truth was, after three years working at Mary’s, rearranging the way the bar worked to his own satisfaction, the job had become routine. It wasn’t enough to keep his brain occupied.
He was bored.
“Dirt. Business. Ah. And I know exactly where to start digging.” He got up and dropped the dishes in the sink, and then retrieved the cell phone from his bed. It was still too early to call most of his contacts—they were night owls, the same as him—but there was one person who would be awake now. And she might even take his call.
Elizabeth wasn’t on his speed dial, but he didn’t have to look the number up. Ten digits, and the sound of a phone ringing. He scraped at a bit of wax on the table, and resisted the urge to pace.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice—yep, awake even at this hour—carefully modulated and controlled.
“It’s Teddy. I need you to do me a favor.”
A long silence, then a sigh.
“Please.”
She was probably calculating what sort of favor it was going to be. Not an illegal one—she knew him better than that. Not a massively expensive one—he would have called someone else if it had been about money. She narrowed it down in her brain, finally deciding—almost palpably, over the phone—that whatever it was, she could wing it. “Hit me.”
“Walter Jacobs. Runs a real-estate company out here, corporate space. Partnered with his uncle.”
“And?”
“I’m curious, is all. Mainly about the uncle, but anything you can get.”
He could tell that wasn’t flying, but waited, and finally got another, heavier sigh in response. That one, though, was just for show.
“All right. I’ll see what I can scare up. I can reach you at this number?”
“Yeah. And . . . we’re on the clock.”
“Jesus. Okay, how fast? Hours, days?”
“Anything you can find out in the next twenty-four?”
“Theo, if you weren’t my favorite cousin . . .”
That surprised a laugh out of him. “You mean, the only one who doesn’t give you shit for your choice of careers.”
“That, too. All right, another call’s coming in. I’ll get back to you.”
And the line at the other end went dead.
“Typical.” Elizabeth was your textbook Type A over-achiever, even for his family, and she didn’t have much use for social niceties. That was part of what made her such a good pathologist—and crap at family reunions.
Not that he was much good with those, either.
Teddy looked at the time display on his phone, and weighed his options. The desire for a run was considerably more appealing than making phone calls. Especially to the sort of people he’d have to talk to, if he wanted any real dirt.
“You promised. Why did you promise? Oh, that’s right: because you’re an idiot. An idiot who can’t back down from a challenge. How many times has that gotten you into trouble?”
There were three things Teddy Tonica hated: broken promises, people who broke promises, and the feeling he got when he let people down, no matter the cause. He’d managed to avoid responsibility for almost five years now, to avoid making promises he might have to break.
This was all Ginny Mallard’s fault. She had talked him into agreeing to help, gotten him to promise, and now was pushing him into talking to people who took questions seriously.
And would expect something in return.
He drummed his fingers on the table. “Oh, the hell with it.” The people he needed to talk to, unlike Elizabeth, wouldn’t be awake now, anyway, and this sort of thing you didn’t leave a message for—that gave them too much time to think about what they wanted in return. And if he was lucky, either Lizbet or Ginny would discover something, and he wouldn’t have to call them after all.
The idea pleased him. “Right, there ya go, a perfect reason to procrastinate. Run first. Think. Then call, if you have to.”
He wouldn’t break his promise. He’d just . . . wait a while.
3
The one unexpected thing that had changed in Ginny’s life since acquiring a dog was that she now had to be aware of her food at all times.
“No, Georgie.”
The dog lowered her head back to her paws, sighing mournfully at her owner’s unkindness. Ginny picked up the dropped scrap of chicken, and put it on the side of her plate, then took another bite of her sandwich, frowning at the notes she’d taken. The reports had, as she’d half feared, been mostly useless. In the past three months, Joseph Jacobs, age sixty-four, had stayed well within his credit limit—which was almost twice what she’d made in the past year—and stayed off the radar, except for a speeding ticket, and being named Small Businessman of the Year by not one, but two groups in the local area, mainly because of his contributions to a local community center. She’d done a quick check on the center, and it looked like a decent place for local kids, nothing even slightly shady or questionable about it. His donation, all nicely legal and documented, hadn’t been large enough to raise any alarms—he’d just been the one to put them over the top, funding-wise.
If she’d been the subject’s mother, she would have been beaming with pride. But in terms of finding a loose thread to pull at, some reason he might have disappeared, her morning’s work was an utter disappointment. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen anything this tidy, not even her own records.
“I don’t think the man’s so much as missed a credit-card payment his entire life,” she told Georgie. Not that she would know if he had—that much detail was off-limits to her. But you didn’t get that kind of a credit rating without a clear conscience. Nor was there a lien or judgment against him, pending or dismissed. No divorces, no children, legal or otherwise, of record. He owned his condo with a $300,000 mortgage on a thirty-year term that he’d refinanced in the past year, through the same general-services law firm he’d apparently been using since he started Jacobs Realty back in the early 1980s.
“Hrm. He started the company. His nephew came in after graduation, in”—and Ginny checked her notes to be sure she was right—“1991. All that time, does Uncle Joe still hold the reins? Or not?”
From the way DubJay had been talking, Uncle Joe wasn’t the main mover—that’s why she’d assumed he was close to retirement—but apparently he could still gum things up by disappearing.
“You know, Georgie, if I had to work with that guy every day, I might go AWOL, too,” she said, remembering the way she�
��d felt worked over from just that brief encounter with DubJay. Of course, Nephew might be exactly like Uncle, in which case she saved her sympathy for the people who had to work with them both.
“Either way, doesn’t matter and I don’t care. I don’t have to like him. I just have to find him.” She pursed her lips and exhaled, letting all her frustration flow out in a long breath of air. “Managing paperwork, I can do. Threading government bureaucracies, I can do. Finding people . . .”
She looked at her tablet again, trying to see something in the notes and digital Post-its that would suddenly crystallize into a clue, a lead, a chorus of angels singing hosannas.
The tablet lay on her desk, giving her only what she had put in. Nothing useful.
“I hope to heck that you’re having more luck than I am, Tonica. All right, get back to work, me. Just—”
Her phone chimed, indicating an incoming text message. Normally she would ignore it during work hours—her clients didn’t text her, and her friends knew better—but with luck it was Tonica coming back with something. So she scooped the phone up off the table, touching the screen to bring the message up, expecting to see Teddy’s response.
Dont play pi
Her brain refused to parse it for a second, reading it through a second time, and then a third before it resolved into a legible sentence: Don’t play PI.
She blinked, and her heart beat a little faster, even as she was tapping the screen to check the number the text had come from.
“Blocked? What do you mean, blocked?” That offended her, on so many levels. Why would you contact someone if you didn’t want them to know who sent the message? What was the point of that? She stared at the display for a while, annoyed, when it suddenly hit her: she had just been told to give up a job. By an anonymous caller. Texter. Whatever.
“Oh no you did not,” she said with feeling, her eyes widening in indignation. “You did not just do that, Mr. Whoever You Are.”
Her jaw set in a mulish fashion her parents would have recognized, Ginny deleted the text message, and then ran a save on her notes, transferring a copy of the file to her laptop, for safety’s sake. And then, for the hell of it, she sent a copy to herself via email, hanging it in the cloud. Nobody ran her off a job. Especially not a job paying time and a half.
Then she stopped, common sense trumping anger and stubbornness for a moment. Who would tell her to back off? “Hell, who even knew that you took this job?” She flicked them off on her fingers. “DubJay. Tonica, natch. And that’s it.” She couldn’t see either one of them texting her that kind of a warning. It just didn’t make sense.
“There could have been someone listening in at the bar, I guess. Why any of them might care . . . DubJay wasn’t the most polite guy around, maybe someone wanted him to run into problems? Or maybe they wanted me to be thrown off guard, to give up?” Ginny didn’t think she had any enemies, at least not the way the cops meant it when they asked in crime dramas, but she knew she’d pissed people off over the years. She was too blunt in her opinions not to have pissed people off.
“Maybe. Someone yanking my chain. Doesn’t matter. I took the job, and anyone who thinks they can push me around or scare me, with an anonymous text from a blocked number?” Well, they hadn’t met Virginia Louise Mallard, then.
She looked at the clock on the monitor, and decided on her next course of action. “Georgie?”
The dog raised her head inquiringly.
“Leash, Georgie.”
It was early for their afternoon walk, but the shar-pei did not hesitate, rising to her feet and trotting off to get her leash.
The walk down to Mary’s was longer than their usual “doggie business” walks, but Georgie knew where they were going, and despite the odd hour seemed pleased by the thought, her entire body radiating anticipation as she trotted along at a faster-than-usual pace.
The bar wasn’t open when they arrived, which surprised Ginny; somehow she had the sense of Mary’s opening on the dot of twelve. But here it was, almost 1:00 p.m., and they were clearly not ready for business, the heavy curtains still drawn across the front windows, and the red-painted door held open not by the usual cast-iron doorstop, but by a wooden barstool. She studied it for a minute, realizing that the barstool kept the door open enough for air and light to come in, but not so much that strangers might come up and think they were open already.
There were noises coming from within, though: the sound of the radio playing louder than normal, and someone, a man’s low voice, singing along.
Normally, she’d have Georgie wait outside, but since they weren’t open yet . . . Feeling oddly daring, Ginny tugged at the leash when the shar-pei would have taken her usual spot by the bicycle rack, and ushered them both inside.
The lights were higher than normal—Ginny hadn’t even known the overhead fixtures could illuminate that well. She was reassured by the fact that the place looked clean and not too shabby in full light, although the walls could have used fresh paint and the wooden floor was decidedly scuffed.
Seth, who usually worked the small kitchen at the back, helping to serve the limited menu and cleaning up afterward, was sweeping the floor. He had to be in his sixties, balding and wrinkled, but still had the upper-body strength of the minor prizefighter he’d been, back in his twenties. The story went that he’d been on his way to making a semi-decent living as a boxer when he saw one too many knockouts, and the aftermath, and decided that he’d rather keep his brains intact.
“Afternoon,” he said with a nod, not seeming to see anything odd in her being there, then did a double take at Georgie. “Uh . . . oh hell, the kitchen’s not open and neither are we, technically.” He mock-scowled at them both. “I’m not going to see this great hunk of skin any more than I do that devil’s beast Tonica insists on giving run of the place. But if the beasties get into a fight . . .”
His words trailed off as Miss Penny jumped down from the bar top and strolled over to stand in front of Georgie, sniffing up into the dog’s face with all the familiarity of an old friend.
“All right then,” Seth finished. “Clearly not a problem. Not seeing a thing here, nope.”
Ginny laughed, and dropped the leash, giving Georgie permission to fold her legs and collapse gently onto the floor. Penny gave the dog one delicate lick on the ear, and then sat on the floor next to her, as though they were about to have a comfortable conversation. Ginny could just imagine Penny asking, “Well, what took you so long to come inside, anyway?”
“Where’s Tonica?” she asked Seth, only just now realizing that she had expected him to be here, without knowing what hours he was working. Mary’s and Teddy Tonica just went together, in her mind. Imagining him outside, having a life . . .
“He was doing inventory in back, couple-ten minutes ago.”
Apparently, he didn’t. “Thanks. Georgie, stay.”
Her dog twitched one ear at her, but otherwise seemed perfectly content to rest her nose on her paws and not move.
The bartender was in fact in the storeroom, but not counting: he was perched on a crate, his legs crossed in front of him, reading a book.
“Ahem.”
He jumped a little, closing the book and shoving it on the shelf behind him.
“Hey. What’re you doing here? We can’t serve before opening hours.”
“Wow. Nice manners.”
“Sorry.” She noted that he looked a little flustered; Tonica was a bunch of things, but she’d never actually ever heard him be rude to anyone. Whoever his momma might be, she’d taught him manners. Especially around women. “I just wasn’t expecting to see you until we opened.”
“Saw the door was open, Seth told me you were back here. You got my text? I figured we could talk easier beforehand?”
She hated the way her voice ended on an up note, making what should have been a statement into a question.
Tonica nodded, running a hand over his flattop like it might have gotten mussed. “Yeah, right, smart. And makes as muc
h sense to meet here as anywhere else.”
She couldn’t even imagine seeing him anywhere else. Until that moment, she’d never even imagined him as being able to exist anywhere else, as though he were only real behind the bar surrounded by bottles and glassware. Now she couldn’t stop wondering.
“Do you even have an apartment?”
The look he gave her was half disbelief, half scorn. “No. I sleep under the bar. Patrick found me wrapped in swaddling in the trash out back with a note saying, ‘Please raise this baby to be a bartender.’”
“All right, I’m sorry. Okay? I just . . .” She gave up trying to explain. That stupid text message must have flustered her more than she thought. Ginny wasn’t going to give whoever it was the satisfaction, not even in her own head. She had gotten the job fair and square, if maybe a little sneakily. And she wasn’t playing PI, anyway. Just doing research, that was all. “Did you find anything?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound happy about it, though. “You?”
She thought about the notes on her tablet, shoved into her bag with printout of the same, just in case. “Find? Yeah. Get anything out of it? Not so much.”
“All right, let’s take it outside. I don’t like leaving Seth out front alone too long. Safe neighborhood or not, a bar’s always a tempting target and he’s just dumb enough to think that he can still hold off an armed punk.”
He stood up, and reached forward to grab a cardboard case of something that seemed heavy. She stepped back and gestured that he should precede her out of the room.
As he did so, curiosity took hold, and she glanced over at the book he had been reading before she came in: The Moron’s Manual for Private Investigation.
Ginny’s first instinct normally would have been to crack a joke, but she found, instead, that she was oddly pleased—and touched. She doubted he’d had the book just lying around. . . .
Then again, with Tonica, who knew?
Not that they were private investigators. Or even public ones. Concierge services, all up front and licensed. And bonded, too. She had to be, and she suspected bartenders were, too?
Collared: A Gin & Tonic Mystery Page 5
