Doghouse (3 page)

Ginny pulled her tablet out of her bag and made a note to find out if this had been an actual eviction or a termination of tenancy. She didn't think Deke was in any condition to tell the difference: she had to see the paperwork. By state regs, Deke was supposed to get twenty days' notice, not a week. But if this Cooper was claiming noncompliance with the lease, or being a nuisance . . . No actual charges had been filed or would be filed, it sounded like, no matter what Seth had said about dogfighting. Maybe he'd misunderstood, or misheard?

“Did he tell you what you had done that was so bad?” Tonica asked.

Deke shook his head. “That I'd had dogs on the property. And bad people.” His voice lowered, as though telling them a secret. “I know bad people. Very bad people. I would never let them inside the house.”

Ginny and Tonica both looked at Seth, who nodded once. Deke did know bad people, and Seth was convinced that he would refuse them entrance. Ginny suspected that Seth knew those bad people, too. Probably, from the way he wasn't meeting their gazes, they'd had something to do with the guilt he'd voiced last night, the failure he was trying to atone for.

Her fingers tapped on the edge of the tablet. She really needed to stick to white-collar crimes. Not that embezzlement had been any safer . . .

“How bad is bad? Seth, if you've gotten us tangled up in anything having to do with the mob . . .” Tonica went from
calm to seriously pissed-off without raising his voice. It was a neat trick Ginny wished that she had.

“No. Those guys he knows, they're bad news, but they pick on players their own size. They wouldn't do something like this to Deke. Whatever's going on it's not that. If it were, I wouldn't have asked you.”

Either because he knew they couldn't handle it, or because that was something he could handle himself . . . Ginny didn't know and honestly didn't want to know.

“Did he look around the house?” Ginny asked now, turning back to Deke. “Did he go into the basement, or the backyard, looking for dogs?”

“No. He just told me, and then he looked at me a long time, and then he left.” Deke hesitated, then added, “There were no dogs in the house. I don't own any dogs; there weren't any in the house.”

“And the agreement specifically says no dogs, Deke?” Tonica asked.

“I got a copy of his lease,” Seth told them, passing a manila folder across the table. “No pets, no parties, no smoking, that kind of thing. And yeah, looks like he doesn't have to prove it, just claim it, say someone objected to the barking.” Seth shrugged. “It's a crap contract, but it's not like Deke had many options. The rent was cheap, and it's a safe neighborhood. Even a crap rental is better than a men's shelter.”

There wasn't much they could say to that. Ginny took the folder, but didn't open it yet. There would be time, later, to go over the fine print. “He's gone for the court order?”

“In the folder,” Seth said. “Looks like the bastard started the paperwork before he even talked to Deke. It took Deke another day to call me.” Seth was upset about that.

“He really should have a lawyer, not us. You know that, right?” Tonica scrubbed his hand against the top of his head, exasperation coming off him in waves.

“I tried that argument already.” Seth made a face, like he'd bitten into something sour. “He said no.”

Seth had said going into court would hurt Deke, and Ginny, looking at the man, had to agree. She'd seen what could happen, when you got inside the courtroom, and a guy who'd kick an old man out into the street wasn't going to pull punches once you started costing him legal fees, too.

“No lawyers.” Deke sounded like a petulant five-year-old. “Don't want 'em, don't trust 'em. They didn't help last time, neither.”

“He's got a record?” Tonica's voice, an aside to Seth, was the kind of quiet that wasn't good, like he was trying hard not to yell.

“He spent some time in the system,” Seth said. “Nothing criminal, nothing to do with . . . those other people. He took a swing at someone in a homeless shelter, got a couple of weeks to clear his head, no big deal. But he had to stand in front of a judge, and I told you, we try to argue this in court and that will all come up in his brain, and I can't tell you how Deke'll react.” Seth's face tightened, not in anger but resignation. “You don't know what it's like, this end of things. Any more trouble attached to him, at his age? He'd never be able to live on his own again, have his own place.
Probably be stuck in a facility somewhere. You know what that would do to him?”

The object of their discussion was playing with his fork, humming under his breath as though to tune them out. Tonica looked at Ginny, who shook her head. “We need to prove that he wasn't in breach of his lease to stop the eviction.”

“Right. And we're assuming that this Cooper's going to be willing to listen to anything we find?”

“Legally . . .” Ginny let her sentence trail off. The law might, technically, be on their side, if there was no actual proof of wrongdoing, but that didn't always mean much. From the look on Seth's face, he was well aware of that. If Deke couldn't handle going to court, odds were the landlord knew that, and was using it to get rid of his tenant. But why? That was the question her instincts were telling her to follow.

“It's almost one,” Deke said, looking up at the clock, suddenly tense again. “I have to go. I can't be late for work.”

“Yeah,” Seth said. “C'mon, I'll give you a ride there, old man.”

“Who you calling old man, old man?” Deke teased Seth, getting up from the booth. Having told strangers his problems, he seemed to have shed them entirely: if Seth said these people could help, then there was no more reason to worry.

Ginny could work with that. She was used to people dropping their problems in her lap.

“Nice meeting you, Deke,” Tonica said. “Seth, we'll talk to you later, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” Unlike his friend, Seth
was still worried, but he seemed resigned to that, as well.

“Why did
we agree to this, again?” Teddy asked, watching the two men leave.

“Because Seth asked us. Because”—and she made an unhappy face—“we're both pretty sure now that he's right, that Deke wouldn't do well in a drawn-out legal process.”

“Right. Christ.” Teddy shook his head, running his hand over his hair again, letting it slide down to rest against the bunched muscles in his neck, as though the pressure would ease out the inevitable headache he could feel coming on.

“He seems like a nice guy,” Ginny said. “Sweet. Not altogether there, or even sure where there
is,
but nice.”

“But?” He waited, wondering if her take was going to the same place as his own.

“But I'm not sure we can take his version of reality as gospel.”

“Ya think?” The sarcasm came out a little heavier than he had planned. Teddy shook his head, not even trying to hold back his reaction now. “Ginny, that guy's taken more than a few hits, and I'm pretty sure the package wasn't well wrapped to begin with. Even assuming the dogfighting thing was a feint, did you listen to what Deke was saying, and how he said it? He's told himself there were no dogs
in the house, because he knows he would be in trouble if there were. That's a vastly different thing than there being no dogs in the house.”

Ginny frowned at him, but didn't challenge his evaluation. “I'd thought there was something weird about the phrasing, but if he's as messed up as you say, how do you know he's
not
telling the truth?”

The headache arrived, right on schedule. “You're doing that ‘give the world a third chance' thing again, Mallard. People are going to suspect you're actually a bleeding-heart idealist. And we don't know a damned thing except what we've been told, first by Seth, who's invested in his old buddy not being guilty, either for friendship or guilt, or maybe both, I don't know.” He'd known Seth too long to be able to read him well. “And then by a guy who not only has reason to lie, if he is guilty, but might not be able to differentiate between reality and lie.”

“Okay, even if he was housing a couple of dogs and nothing else, could we use that inability to keep him from being evicted? I mean, say that he didn't realize, or understand . . . ?”

“Doubt it. That could leave him open to claims he's not fit to sign a contract, which would mean he couldn't rent another place. That's what we're supposed to be
preventing,
remember?”

They both fell silent, and Ginny drummed her fingers against the table, her eyes unfocused in a way that told Teddy that she was thinking, hard. He waited. She might bow to his people-reading skills, and depend on him to
schmooze witnesses into giving up their secrets, but she was the one who put together the puzzle pieces, and saw the patterns. They needed a plan of action, and she was—hopefully—coming up with one.

“First things first. We really need to talk to a lawyer, someone with some experience in this, no matter what Deke thinks.”

“I know a handful of lawyers.” And he waited for Ginny to say “of course you do.”

“Of course you do.”

They'd gone beyond keeping score, but he made a mental hash mark on his side of the board, anyway. “But none of them deal with this sort of thing,” he went on. “Real estate, I mean. Still, they know people who might, and friend-of-a-friend webs occasionally catch something.” He'd owe them a favor in exchange but he was starting to get used to that. Teddy didn't like asking favors for himself, but favors on behalf of other people, that he could do. “So yeah, I'll see who I can scare up.”

“Second,” Ginny went on, “or maybe even before the lawyer because they'll want to know, we need to find some proof that nothing illegal was going on in the house. Specifically, we need to be able to say that there weren't any dogs living in the house. Which means getting inside. Preferably without Deke around to muddy the waters. But we didn't get a key.”

Teddy thought of the little house they'd looked at briefly, and rolled his eyes. “I'll lay you decent odds they locked the front door, and the back's open,” he said. “Or
a ground-floor window's been left open. As friend of a friend, I'd be perfectly justified in going in to make sure nothing's been disturbed until Deke can come by to pick his things up.” Truthfully, he suspected the cops wouldn't be impressed by that argument, but he didn't expect it to be tested. That wasn't the sort of neighborhood where the cops made regular patrols. “I've got to get to work, but I'll go over there tomorrow morning.” Two days in a row, awake at an ungodly hour. But there was no time to do it today, not the way traffic got on Friday afternoons, and he sure as hell wasn't going to do it after shift. Breaking and entering was bad enough; doing it at three in the morning was a good way to get shot. “Unless you want to go over there?”

“I can't. I've got a new client meeting this afternoon, in town. And I'm not going to rely on mass transit to get me out to that neighborhood and home again.”

She had a good point. Depending on the buses to get there would take forever. Better to leave that to the guy with the car.

“But I should be able to do some digging,” she went on. “I mean, even if Deke did something stupid, there's no way he's the ringleader or mastermind of anything; Seth was right about that. So if something was going on, I mean, more than Deke maybe having a couple of mutts in the backyard, something on the level of a dogfighting ring, there's got to be more involved—someone else pulling the strings. Right?”

Teddy nodded, following her logic. Deke was more
victim material than criminal, anyone could see that. If someone else was involved . . . They might not be able to use that fact directly, but maybe something would come out in the digging that they
could
use.

Teddy had no problem using a little careful pressure—blackmail was such an ugly word—to solve this, and from Ginny's expression, she felt the same. Deke might not be an innocent, but he was definitely being victimized.

“Be careful,” he said. “This guy Cooper sounds like a sleaze, and if there is any truth in the accusation, dogfighting isn't the kind of hobby nice people take up. Don't poke too hard, okay?”

Gin gave him a classic are-you-kidding-me face. “I know how to hide my tracks,” she said. “Go, before you're late for shift again, and have to fire yourself.”

Traffic was
actually not bad, heading north along the highway. He checked his watch and decided that he had time to swing by his apartment and change to more work-appropriate clothing before shift started, rather than having to rely on the emergency clothes he kept in the storeroom.

Teddy lived a half-hour drive from Mary's, in an older apartment building that made up in creakiness what it lacked in charm. But the space suited him: it came with a parking space, and his neighbors were quiet during the morning hours when he was asleep. When he was
supposed
to be asleep, anyway. He didn't really need much more than that.

The first thing he noted when he closed the door was that the message light on his phone was blinking. Teddy groaned. Someone had left him a message on his landline in the time between when he left the apartment to pick Ginny up and now. “Three guesses as to who it is, and it doesn't count if they're not related to me.”

He shook his head, deliberately turning his back on the phone, and went over to the area of the studio that doubled as his bedroom. He pulled a black T-shirt out of the dresser even as he was unbuttoning the shirt he'd worn to the meeting, and toed out of his dress shoes. Tossing the shirt and his slacks onto the bed, he dressed quickly in jeans and the T-shirt, then replaced his shoes with work boots. A sturdy toe box and nonslip soles were a hell of a lot more important behind the bar than looking good, and it wasn't as though his feet wouldn't hurt at the end of shift no matter what he wore.