Murder on the Rocks

by Allyson K. Abbott

  When I finished the chapter, I stuck the e-mail back in between the pages and set it on top of the table.

  Now that I’d had time to compose myself and get my temper under control, I headed back downstairs.

  I found Albright sitting at the bar, talking on his cell phone. When he saw me approaching, he disconnected the call and slid off his stool to meet me.

  “I guess what they say about redheads having a fiery temper is true,” he said.

  I analyzed both his expression and his tone, searching for some hint of anger, or sarcasm, or annoyance, but all I found was sympathy. “Yeah, sorry about going off like that but I had to go through this same crap when my father was shot and frankly I find it all a waste of time.”

  “I’m sure it seems that way to you, but understand, I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “I know.”

  “Feel better now?”

  “Some.”

  “Can we talk some more?”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling defeated and embarrassed. “What do you want to know?”

  We settled in at one of the tables while the crime scene techs continued scouring the inside of the bar and my apartment. Albright questioned me more about my activities that morning, preceding the questions with the explanation that he was simply trying to establish a timeline, not accuse me of anything. He seemed genuinely defensive and cautious with his questions, so I answered them as best as I could, trying to keep my own emotions in check.

  After questioning me about my morning, he then asked me about the night before: how busy the bar had been, who had been working, whether there had been any unusual happenings, if anyone stood out to me for any reason, that sort of stuff. He wanted the names and contact info for everyone who was working the night before, and the names and receipts for any of the patrons who’d been in. I printed off my employee roster, gathered the night’s receipts from my office, and gave it all to him. Then I did my best to recall the names of those customers who had paid in cash, but there had been a few folks in the bar I didn’t know.

  When I was done with all of that, Albright asked me about Ginny and her relationship with my father.

  “They met at some function put on by the Chamber,” I told him. “She is . . . was a local Realtor. They had been dating for around five months when he was killed.”

  “Did your father date much before her?”

  “Not really. He went out once or twice with women he met, but he didn’t have a lot of free time because of his responsibilities to the bar. Most women didn’t hang around for long.”

  “Ginny didn’t mind the hours?”

  “Apparently not,” I said with a shrug. “She would drop by fairly often in the evenings and hang out. Sometimes she stayed until closing and helped us with the cleanup. Occasionally Dad would go to her place after, but most of their free time together happened in the mornings, or on Sundays when we don’t open until five.”

  “How did she get here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what form of transportation did she use? Bus? Cab? Car?”

  “Oh, she drove. She owns a nice little silver and blue Mercedes convertible.”

  “Always?”

  “You mean was it always that car, or did she always drive?”

  “Both.”

  “Yes, and yes, as far as I know. Why?”

  “Because we show her registered to the car you mentioned but we can’t find it. It’s not parked anywhere near here and it’s not at her home or office either.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Do you think your father was in love with her?”

  His sudden shift of topic threw me for a second. “I think he was infatuated with her,” I blurted out, and as soon as the words left my mouth I wished I could take them back. Even I knew my answer had been too quick and a little harsh sounding.

  Albright stared at me for a moment. “I’m sensing some dislike on your part. Did you and Ginny get along?”

  I looked away from him, not wanting him to see the truth. Albright’s ability to read me made me wonder if he, too, had synesthetic tendencies. “Ginny kept nagging at my father to sell the place and retire.”

  “Sell it rather than hand it over to you?”

  I nodded. “She said they could use the money to travel.”

  “How did that idea set with you?”

  “It didn’t. My father and I were close. We only had each other, at least until Ginny came along.”

  “You were afraid of losing him to her.”

  It wasn’t worded as a question and I didn’t bother to answer. Albright decided to let it go and instead asked, “Did Ginny keep coming around after your father died?”

  “For a little while. She would drop in periodically, have a drink, and ask how I was doing. But we were never that close to begin with and it always felt . . . I don’t know . . . forced and awkward. Plus she kept trying to convince me I should sell the place and start over. When she realized I had no intention of putting the place up for sale, she quit coming around. I haven’t seen or talked to her in months.”

  “Is there any reason you know of that she would have come here last night or this morning?”

  I shook my head. “None that I can think of.”

  “Interesting,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “That makes me wonder if someone is trying to send you a message.”

  “A message?”

  “Why else dump the body behind your bar? Do you have any enemies, anyone you angered recently, anyone who might be interested in revenge?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. I mean, I have the occasional stupid drunk I have to toss out of the bar, or someone will get angry if I take their keys away and call a cab for them, but I’ve never known any of them to hold a grudge. Usually by the time they sober up the next morning, they realize I did them a favor.”

  “What about your father? Did he have any enemies?”

  “No,” I said without hesitation. “The cops who investigated his shooting asked me the same question and I told them no, too. My father was a kind, generous man who bent over backward to help other people. One year one of our regular patrons had a house fire the Friday before Christmas and they lost everything. Dad got on the phone and asked for donations from folks who he knew could afford to be generous. Then he spent several hundred dollars of his own money and bought gifts for the family: toys and clothes for the kids, clothes and household items for the parents, even chew toys for their pet dog. One of the wealthier patrons he hit up, a local landlord, provided an apartment for the family to move into. And on Christmas Eve Dad rented a Santa costume and delivered all the stuff himself. He made me dress up as an elf and go with him.”

  I paused, smiling at the memory. “I was pissed as hell that he made me do it but afterward I was glad he did. It felt good.”

  “Your dad sounds like he was quite a man.”

  “He was.” My throat seized up with emotion again, triggering a host of jagged lines in a blue-purple color—like a fresh bruise—that zipped across my field of vision. Fortunately one of the crime scene techs pulled Albright aside, giving me time to recover.

  When Albright returned, he settled back into his chair, leaned back with his arms folded over his chest, and eyed me with a thoughtful expression. “The techs can probably wrap up here in another three or four hours,” he said.

  “So can I reopen for business this evening?”

  “Tell you what. I still think your father’s death and Ginny’s might be related, but I also can’t help but wonder if that’s exactly what someone wants me to think.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Two deaths, both occurring in the same alley behind the same bar, though technically neither victim actually died in the alley. At the very least, I think the killer must have some connections to you, or to this bar. It might be someone who knows about your father’s murder and the fact that it’s still unsolved.”

  “Well, that doesn’t narrow t
hings down much since my father’s shooting was in the city paper.”

  “Yes, but was the fact that he was dating Ginny in the paper?”

  I thought back to the articles I’d read, articles I still had tucked away in a drawer upstairs. I hadn’t read them until weeks after my father’s death, unable to bear the unemotional, black-and-white reporting of an event that had so devastated me. But when I finally did read them, I dissected them word by word, searching for some hint or clue that might be hiding in them. There had been no mention of Ginny in any of them.

  “No,” I admitted.

  Albright looked thoughtful a moment and then said, “There are some obvious differences in the two killings. Your father was attacked in the alley and Ginny’s body was only dumped there. Ginny was stabbed and your father was shot. But he was shot with his own gun, a weapon I presume is still locked up in evidence, forcing the perpetrator to come up with a different method for killing Ginny. But planting Ginny’s body in the same alley where your father was shot creates an obvious link between the two deaths, a stronger one than just the fact that the two of them dated at one point. That suggests to me that someone wants us to connect you to both of these murders.”

  “Are you saying you believe I’m innocent?”

  Albright smiled. “You’re still on my list of suspects, but I’m leaning that way. The more I look at this, the more I think someone is trying to frame you. And if that’s the case, I’m betting it’s someone you know, someone who frequents the bar.”

  “But why would someone want to pin these murders on me?”

  “Are you sure you don’t have any enemies? Someone you angered for some reason?”

  I thought about it again. “I really can’t think of anyone,” I told him.

  “Just because you can’t figure it out now doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection somewhere. We just have to find it. I’ve got a team headed over to Ginny’s house to look around and see what they can dig up. Maybe that will help.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  “In the meantime, I have an idea. I’ll let you open up for business again at . . .” He paused and glanced at his watch. “Let’s shoot for five, okay?”

  “That would be wonderful,” I said with a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

  “The alley and the back door area will be off limits.”

  “No problem. I can work around them.” I would do just about anything if it meant I wasn’t going to lose an entire day’s receipts.

  “And I have one more caveat.”

  I raised my eyebrows and held my breath, waiting.

  “There’s a good chance that whoever killed Ginny may come in here tonight out of curiosity, to see what he or she can find out about the investigation.”

  It was a chilling thought, one that made me let my breath out hard.

  “So I’d like to hang around to observe. I’ll sit at a table like any other customer and see if anyone piques my interest.”

  Having a cop on the premises made the idea that a killer might come back a little easier to bear, but I didn’t want Albright just sitting around staring at people, or intruding on any of my patrons and making a nuisance of himself. With my parents both dead, my regular customers were like family to me. I felt protective of them.

  “Tell you what,” I said to him. “You can hang here tonight while I’m open.” I said this magnanimously, like I had a choice in the matter even though I was pretty sure I didn’t. “But if you just sit around watching people, it’s going to put them on edge. You said you were new to the area. How new?”

  “Almost a month now.”

  “So it’s unlikely anyone will know you or what you do. Why don’t I introduce you as a new employee I’m training instead? I’m down a bartender anyway, and if you appear to be working here, it will give you better access to both the employees and the clientele.”

  Albright considered the offer. “It’s not a bad idea, but I don’t know the first thing about bartending.”

  “I’ll give you a crash course and you can stick with me all night. That way I can also give you insight into the customers I know, my regulars.”

  Albright smiled in a way that made me think I’d played right into his hands. I began to suspect that despite what he said, I was still very much under suspicion and that he liked the idea of being able to keep a closer eye on me.

  That’s okay, I thought, returning his smile. I want to keep a close eye on you, too.

  Chapter 6

  A few hours and five pots of coffee later, the crime scene techs who were working upstairs came down and conferred with Albright. When they were done, Albright walked over to me and said, “Your apartment is cleared for now if you want to go back up there. We still have some work to do down here but I think we’ll be able to wrap it up in time for you to open at five as planned.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You can call your evening staff to let them know they need to come in. I’d prefer it if you kept any details you know about the crime to yourself for now, though you can tell them who the victim is once they get here. Everyone will be talking about what happened and if someone lets out a bit of knowledge they shouldn’t have, it might help us nab the killer.”

  “No problem.”

  I made the necessary calls to my cook, Helmut, my night bartender, Billy, my bouncer and backup bartender, Gary, and Missy and Debra, the two waitresses who typically worked Friday nights. Albright insisted I make the calls on speaker phone again and he listened in on each one. When I was done, he and I spent some time working up a cover story to explain his presence. With that taken care of, he got up from the table and glanced at his watch.

  “I have a few things I need to do but we’ll hook up again later,” he said.

  I escaped from the bar and headed upstairs to my apartment to gather my wits and my cell phone, which had one message on it from earlier, a sweet but slightly panicked-sounding plea from Zach to call him. The crime scene techs were done and gone. They had been thorough but not particularly neat. Almost everything was out of place or obviously disturbed, and I discovered with a little chill that my kitchen knife set was missing. It served as a sobering reminder that I might be a prime suspect in Ginny’s murder.

  I spent a few minutes straightening things but my mind was too focused on what was going on downstairs. I returned to the bar and looked for Albright, but he was nowhere to be seen, a fact that left me feeling both relieved and oddly disappointed. But if I thought his absence meant I would be left alone to prep for the evening opening, a ponytailed, female, crime scene tech who looked to be about twelve years old made it clear that wouldn’t be the case.

  “My name is Jenny and I need to fingerprint you for our files,” she said. No doubt recalling my earlier meltdown, she quickly added, “It’s standard procedure, ma’am. We need to rule your prints out from any others we find.”

  I winced at the term ma’am, which made me feel like Methuselah and wondered just how young these techs were.

  “Please, call me Mack,” I said, smiling my warmest to put her at ease. She nodded, making her ponytail swing merrily. “And let’s get this done. I have to get ready to open.”

  I was anticipating a black inky mess to be made of my fingers but instead Jenny produced a small device with a scanner pad on it.

  “We’ll start with your thumb,” she said. “Just place it on the pad here and push down.”

  I did as she said and after she rolled my thumb from side to side, we repeated the process nine more times, using a different digit each time. When we were done, she thanked me and headed off to a far corner where she had a laptop set up on one of my tables. I offer free wi-fi to my patrons because many of my day customers are folks who drop in for lunch breaks during their workday and they bring along their laptops or tablets. Was Jenny using my connection, or did she have some special access all her own? If she was using mine, I wondered if there was any way to tell what she was doing on her computer. If there was, it was
way beyond my computer abilities, though I knew of a customer who might be able to help.

  There was a lot of cleaning to do. The crime scene techs weren’t concerned with neatness, and after getting an okay from them, I started wiping down the bar area, cleaning up the fingerprint powder that seemed to cover everything in sight. I was halfway down the bar when Albright surprised me by poking his head out of the kitchen door and calling to me. I thought he’d left the premises.

  “There’s something I want you to look at,” he said, beckoning me into the kitchen with a wave of his hand and leading me over to the prep table. Sitting to one side of it was a wooden block that held a knife set. With a chill I saw that one of them was missing.

  “Do you know where this knife might be?” Albright asked.

  “No,” I said, looking around the rest of the kitchen with a sickening certainty that I wouldn’t find it elsewhere. “It was there last night. It’s the main knife I use to chop my fruit and veggies. I cleaned it after we closed last night and put it back where it belongs.”

  “Who has access to this kitchen area?” Albright asked.

  “All of my employees,” I said with a shrug. “Is it . . . was it . . .” I couldn’t manage to say the horrible thing I was thinking.

  “Was it the knife used to kill Ginny?” Albright finished for me. I nodded. “I don’t know. We didn’t find any knife at the scene but the techs are still sifting through all the trash in the alley.” With his gloved hand he pulled the other knives from the block, one at a time, examining each one. “Can you describe the missing one for me?”

  “It has a blade about eight inches long, two inches wide at the handle.”