One of the three fics I did for the Ladystuck Blind Darkfic Challenge.
When they'd first met, Jane had looked down on Roxy's drinking habit. Now she envied it. The whole case, she decided, would have been better handled by being smashed all the way through. Roxy was a goddamn genius. She gulped it down and then ordered another drink. She desperately needed to make up for lost time.
"How'd the case go?" a familiar voice slurred. Roxy poured herself into the seat next to her.
"Fuckoff!" Jane snarled.
Roxy's open, rosy-cheeked face showed nothing but confusion at getting this reaction. She was wearing one of her usual huge sweaters, the stretched neck drooping so low on her shoulders it looked like it was seconds before it ended up a second skirt. Somehow, like her outfits always did, it stayed in place, forever teetering on the brink of collapse and never quite falling.
Jane's brain grudgingly staggered back to the job, flicking the lights on and resentfully glancing through a thin file. Roxy had planned on returning from her trip tonight. The first thing Roxy would do after getting back was find a bar to take the edge off any budding sobriety. So, she concluded, anyone would've told her what happened, but Roxy hadn't talked to anyone yet.
Jane groaned and dropped her head against the counter. "It went great," she told the bar floor. "I'm here celebrating how swell it went. You want a bucket of something fancy? I can afford it. That's why I'm in this line of work, for the money. I bet I can even afford enough to forget the whole thing. That was the idea." She pulled her head up to order another drink. "You know. You don't even gotta do a good job." She grabbed Roxy's bare shoulder and leaned toward her. "The secret, the secret to getting all the nice bennies is you gotta get played like a sap, and then get paid to shut up about it so everybody can pretty up the mess without you fucking that up too. You should ask Kanaya about it. Only you can't! Ha!" She smashed her head into the counter, barely feeling it. Alcohol was finally doing something. "Or Karkat. He's not talking to me though." She groped blindly for her drink.
"This the missing wife case we're talking about?" Roxy asked. "Or did someone else come by while I was away?"
Jane let out another bitter laugh. "No, that's the one. Only it wasn't so much a wife." She laughed again. "You can't never trust a bloke, RoLa, especially not one who dresses like that. Should've known the whole thing stunk more than a pile of rotten fish. Should've known I was being played for a sucker. Should've, should've, should've." Should've known the whole thing was rotten as soon as he'd sat down in her office, shrugged off his fancy coat decked out in a city's worth of oyster fruit and crossed his gams like that. "And what sort of bereaved husband ends up climbing into your lap a couple days in, huh? Nerves, he said. You were right. So damn naïve."
Roxy waved for the bartender and told her to just leave them the bottle. "And how'd the police get involved?"
"See, I thought I'd figured the whole thing out, how whole poor distraught husband bit wasn't really on the level and the bird was really more concerned about getting his hands back on her money. But I had rent to make and anyway, what sort of woman walks out without even the decency of getting a divorce first? Didn't much matter why she'd done it. Didn't realize he was lying about the entire marriage."
"So he's got no claim to any of it."
"Ha! But he knew that. You know? The whole thing. It wasn't about finding his missing wife. Wasn't about proving she wasn't dead so he could just get some of the cake, because the courts don't split property just because you're some stalker. So. What do you do when the woman with the big money and bigger inheritance won't give you the time of day? When you don't have any legal claim on her, or the gold, or the name? You find somebody else with a claim of their own.
"Police getting involved so quick, that, that was luck. My great luck. Couldn't just be because of the murder, no. The crazy bird couldn't even stick to one plan. He wants to give her a chance to counteroffer. In case she realized she'd made a mistake not marrying some crazy gold-digging bastard, I guess. Was going to kill the husband either way. They didn't believe him. Didn't even listen until he got to the part about who he was working for, but that got them mad. See, she really had gone missing, that'd thrown me off, but it wasn't my client she'd pulled the vanishing act to get away from, it was family. She figured leaving was the best way to avoid waking up with three more holes in the chest than she'd gone to sleep with. So saying he'd gone to work for her sister, that went over even better than showing up with an ultimatum in the first place.
"Course, he'd gone and got himself a bean shooter and they weren't armed. And there's Kanaya, with the luck to be happening by while the whole thing goes down, gets shot for her trouble. So the missing heir's dead, husband's looking pretty bad, Kanaya's touch and go at the hospital. All because I figured, I had to pay the rent and it isn't like the wife's any better, leaving her husband all alone in the big bad world while she found a second guy to fool around with. And all the bigwigs were getting involved because the sordid little affair involves people of breeding and we can't have that, and no one wants to blame my missing client, since it doesn't look good for everyone for some duke or prince or whatever he is to be getting in trouble here, so now the whole police department's under pressure to find someone who isn't him to blame fast. Only normal person in the whole mess is the real husband and they'd be happy to blame him for the whole thing, only it's a bit hard to believe he could've done it, especially when he gets shot in the face first. Kind of bad for your aim, that.
"Then my client's fished out of the river in two pieces, and suddenly the heir's family decides they should just hush it all up and blame it on some theft gone wrong. Likely they offed him and Kanaya with some other patsy to make sure there weren't any loose ends. Husband's probably only still alive because he can't see a thing. Makes it hard to identify much for a jury.
"And here I am, knowing just enough to know it's all rotten and not enough to do a damn thing about it. So a bird hired me saying he was married to the woman when he really wasn't. Even if I could prove he was the killer there's nothing proving the rest of them were behind it, and I can't since Karkat's said he'll kill me himself if he sees my mug anywhere around, throw me in the river and find out if I float back up faster than Kanaya. So some servant of the heir's family dropped off a fat sack of clams for being so good at my job and finding the heir in time for the princeling to see her again before they all met a tragic end and how they wished me the best with my next case, and here I am on that." Jane gestured grandly at the dingy bar around her. "Richest screwup in the place."