Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (12 page)

“The new teacher at the high school left.” He cut his eyes at me. “Transferred. I never heard where.”

We said goodbye at 1720 2
Avenue South, where I got a degree in Criminal Justice from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Dorm life was a shock, because no one there was pregnant. Thinking things had cooled off in Pine Apple, I made my way home, hoping to go straight to work with my daddy, but all I managed to do was stoke a sleeping fire. This town wasn’t big enough for me, my mother, and Bea Crawford. Within three weeks, I was back in Birmingham, back in school, and working toward a second degree in Computer and Information Science. Two more years passed, and I dropped my bags inside the door of the police station.

“I’m back, Daddy, and I’m not leaving. This is my home, too. Mother and the Crawfords are going to have to learn to live with it.”

Daddy was propped up against several huge boxes. “Can you help me set up this computer?”

*    *    *

I believe, deep down, my mother loves me. I do think she’d turn the garden hose on me if I were on fire, and just as far down, I love her. I wish my mother nothing but good health, prosperity, and happiness. But for whatever reasons—stretch marks, maybe?—she has always refused to cut me even the smallest amount of slack, and I didn’t/wouldn’t/can’t stop pushing her buttons. (All my life: “Mother’s going to
kill
you, Davis!” Me: “She’ll get over it.”) On the flip side, Mother and Meredith are like two peas in a pod. When Mother looks at me she sees a pitchfork and dancing flames, and when she looks at Mer, wings and a halo.

It was the way things were, until I moved back home and went to work for my father, at which point, they got worse. And worse. And worse. I was young; I was busy; I mostly avoided her. After my second divorce, though, there was no dodging her utter disapproval, and the situation became unbearable for everyone. When the war between us reached an ear-splitting crescendo, Meredith cornered me and, as our Granny Dee says, read me from the Good Book.

“You’re killing Mother and Daddy, Davis.”

“
What
? Meredith. You’re so dramatic.”

“No, Davis, listen to me.”

She’d tracked me down—not hard to do in Pine Apple—at the coffee shop where I parked myself during the day so I could keep an eye on Daddy, on a Tuesday morning several months after I’d relinquished my badge. My niece Riley was having her way with a six-pack of mini powdered donuts and a tall glass of milk. After one donut, she looked like she’d been whitewashed.

“Our parents no longer speak to each other, Davis.”

I sucked in some oxygen. I did feel a stab of guilt at the pitiful state of our parents’ marriage, which wasn’t marriagey at all; it was hostile-roommate standoff. The big gridlock was ME, of course—Daddy’s “failure to allow me to suffer repercussions for any of my actions” and Mother’s “lack of human compassion for her own child.”

(Guess whose side I was on.) (Poor Meredith was on both sides.)

“Sunday,” I said, “he asked her to pass the butter beans. They’re making progress.”

“What he said was, ‘Caroline, do any of the rest of us get butter beans or are they all yours?’ and then two seconds later, ‘Powder Puff, Creamsickle, Apple Dumplin’, Froot Loop, would you please pour Daddy two drops of tea?’” Meredith drummed her fingers on the cracked Formica that separated us. “That’s not progress.”

I dove under the cracked Formica.

(No, I didn’t.)

“Davis,” Meredith’s voice softened and she reached out and hooked pinkie fingers with me. “Honey. I love you. Mother and Daddy love you.”

“I wub you, Dabis.”

Tears sprang to my eyes when my little niece threw her two-cent’s worth in.

“But you’ve got to move on,” Meredith said. “You are a wall between Mother and Daddy that they can’t see over anymore.”

Meredith passed me a wad of napkins and waited for me to stop blubbering.

“I love it here.” Meredith spoke softly. “I’m a small-town girl. I love raising Riley here, and I’ve never wanted anything but this. You, however, have got to get out if you’re ever going to be happy. I’m not suggesting you run away to the North Pole, Davie, maybe just Montgomery. Get a life,” she said. “Get out from underneath Mother and Daddy, and let them
breathe
.”

Riley panted like a puppy, her little chest rising and falling.

“Be brave, Davis. Do the brave thing. Get out of here, and maybe you’ll find a job that’s a better fit. You could, maybe, start paying a few of your bills. It’ll make you feel better to not have all that hanging over your head. Maybe you’ll meet someone, which, if nothing else, will keep you from marrying Eddie again.”

“Eddie!” Riley banged a donut on the table. “Eddie’s a ass-ho!”

“Davis!” Meredith was furious.

“
I
didn’t say it!”

It took two weeks for Meredith’s pep talk to sink in so far I was ready to jump off Pine Apple’s only bridge, a bridge I’d burned a hundred times already, and the only thing that stopped me was a well-timed job interview. In Biloxi. At the Bellissimo. And here I was. Mother and Daddy were
breathing,
and
according to Meredith,
heavily.
(Gross
.
)
I had a job that was a better fit. I did, for the first time in a long time, feel like I had a life. I liked being busy; I loved the thought of being debt free. Meredith was right about everything, even the meeting-someone thing. I hadn’t met anyone, but I was actually entertaining the idea. For the first time in a long, long time.

I was on the right road. Finally.

I think.

*    *    *

The knock on the door was a Bellissimo bellman, not the pizza I’d ordered, although the pizza guy stepped off the elevator a minute later. I tipped the bellman, paid and tipped the pizza guy, and tore into both the pizza and the bags Natalie had sent. Both were somewhat of a disappointment: the pizza had green olives, not the black I’d ordered, and another hot itchy wig popped out of the first bag from Natalie.

Beneath the mousy-blonde wig (about the color of dead grass) was a laptop. The first thing I did was grab another slice of pizza and pick off the green olives. The second thing I did was fire up both computers, inserting a blank disk into Bellissimo’s. After that, I typed this command: xcopy32 c:<*.*/s/e/r/v/k/f/c/h. (Try it. You could download the Pentagon’s files with that simple command at the set-up screen, but don’t. It’s a federal offense.) One more slice, and I’d copied the hard drive.

I loaded it onto my own computer, in the privacy of Bradley Cole’s condo with no Bellissimo eyes and no Bellissimo ears, logged onto the Internet, and with my IP address scrambled, went to the Death Master File for Clark County, Nevada. My driver George was completely off the grid, had eyes and ears everywhere, and now he was chasing the boss’s wife. He wouldn’t be the first person to be operating under the cover of dearly departed.

There were seven dead George Morgans listed, none of them my George. I needed someone born in the 1940s, or thereabouts, and these dead guys were way off in both directions. It was almost a relief. Sometimes I’m a total conspiracy theorist, and I was glad this wasn’t one of them, because I wanted and needed George to be one of the good guys.

I stood, stretched, and admired my new apartment. I eyed the wine rack. I opened and poured myself a glass of wine, holding it aloft. “Thank you, Cole Bradley, half a continent away.” I took a sip. “I mean Bradley Cole.”

Sometimes I amaze myself.

I ran back to the computer, my fingers flying across the keyboard. It wasn’t George Morgan; it was Morgan George. Not only had my personal driver been dead for many years, so had his son, Morgan George, Jr. They both died within months of Richard and Bianca Casimiro Sanders moving from Las Vegas, Nevada to Biloxi, Mississippi. I web-searched Morgan George, Sr. and there he was—one of Las Vegas’ finest. It was my George, alright.

I sank into Bradley Cole’s sofa with another glass of wine, a blank stare, and a sick heart. The simple fact was that this wasn’t a simple job. I’d been trying to convince myself I could handle it, and what I was netting from the job far outweighed the risks, but the scales were steadily tipping the other way. I peeked around the corner of possibilities, squinted, hated what I saw, so I dug through Bradley Cole’s desk (eight million printer, PC, and phone cords, eight hundred loose keys) for a calculator. If I could keep my head down and fulfill my ninety-day obligation, I could pay off my sister and grandmother, plus make a decent impression on the past-due people at Visa. There was the six-month lease I’d just signed, with a
lawyer
, no less, but he’d never find me, because I’d be in Bora Bora braiding tourists’ hair.

More wine. A pretty substantial panic attack that included some wallowing, some “Dammit, karma!”, and the bottom of the wine bottle, which led to a tropical daydream in which Bradley Cole actually did find me in Bora Bora. And we lived happily ever after. Eventually, though, I found the bottom line: if I don’t stick this out, the end result will be personal bankruptcy, moving back in with my parents (who will immediately divorce), starting a cat collection, and gaining a hundred pounds.

This job was my shot, and I had to take it.

There was a big picture and I probably should set about seeing it. These little assignments—hanging out in the casino, rubbing toothpaste off mirrors, figuring out how a married couple paid for his-and-hers Range Rovers—weren’t the real deal. They had me here for something else altogether, and the only things I knew so far were that it involved the whammy game, my ex-ex-husband, Bianca Sanders, and a cab driver from Las Vegas.

ELEVEN

“You’re late.” It was my new coworker and trainer in Casino Marketing, a girl named Heather McDonald, a tall, thin blonde with bright orange fingernails. She spoke Perfect Southern.

“Sorry,” I said. “Paperwork,” I lied. I couldn’t very well tell her the truth, which was getting supremely lost en route to buy a Taser gun. And then lost again on the way back.

Beth Dunn, like the other hosts I was introduced to, thought the place couldn’t run without her. And my new casino job teetered on boring, so boring, in fact, that I began lulling myself into a safe place. It got safer by the minute. By my fourth day, I had moments of wondering if I’d cooked it all up. These people weren’t out to get me! (Number one side effect of police work? Paranoia. Everyone’s a felon. Everyone’s after you. Everyone’s got an agenda. Which was true, of course, about Eddie Crawford. That supreme ass.)

The casino host assistant assignment was like the housekeeping assignment in that I had to please my egomaniac bosses and coworkers behind door number one, plus the demanding casino patrons behind door number two. The most I could say was that this job smelled better, but I missed having Santiago to show me the way. Heather was very little help. “Sit here. Answer the phone. Take care of the hosts and the clients. I’ll be right back.” She didn’t show up again until lunch.

I thought I would see a decidedly cleaner side of the clients from behind a desk instead of from behind a cleaning cart, but it was only an hour or two into my new position that I realized the players had dirty laundry both in the guest rooms and in the casino. Some of these gamblers were just nuts. They came busting through the double doors, scaring me to death, claiming the world was coming to an immediate end. Heather had told me, on her way out to run a quick errand (lasting two hours), that when this happened, to pull their In and Out. If they truly lost some monstrous sum (double their rating), I was to track down their host, who in turn would calm them down with surf and turf and straight shots of vodka. If that didn’t work, they called them a cab. If that didn’t work, they called security.

If I didn’t have pirated Bellissimo software, I wouldn’t even know what In and Out was, much less how to “pull” it, and Heather didn’t bother to explain. In and Out is the electronic tracking of how much money the casino’s making on a given player, gathered from the little identification cards the players carry around.

A woman from Atlanta, DeLonda Pierce, sat across from me my first morning, shell-shocked and mumbling the same words over and over, while I tried to find her host, Daniel Connolly. “He’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill me.”

I covered the mouthpiece of the phone with my hand. “He won’t!” I’d just met Mr. Connolly; he seemed like a pleasant enough fellow. “He won’t be mad.”

“I’m not talking about my
host
,” she spat. “I’m talking about my
husbin’
.”

I pulled up her In and Out. The woman had lost more than thirty thousand
dollars
playing slot machines that
morning
. I suppose a killing was in order.

“How can that even
happen
?” I asked Heather, who I found holding court with a jury of her equally deadbeat coworkers at the cappuccino machine.

“Well,” Heather said, “a pro can get seven hundred plays an hour on a machine. She plays two ten-dollars at a time. That’s,” Heather looked up to the imaginary calculator on the ceiling, “that’s twenty-eight thousand right there.”

“Holy shit.”

A half hour later, a sniffling DeLonda Pierce came out of Beth Dunn’s office.

I turned to Heather, miraculously present. “I thought Daniel Connolly was her host.”

“Yeah,” Heather whispered, “Beth’s really good with the people who’ve lost a truckload of money, and a whole lot of those get tossed to her.”

I see. (I didn’t see.) “And she doesn’t mind?”

Heather shrugged. “Hey,” she said. “I’ve got to zip to the bank. Cover for me? I won’t be gone long.”

I don’t know how much steak and lobster Beth gave DeLonda Pierce, or what price DeLonda, in turn, sold them for, but by the end of the day (Heather still at the bank), when I pulled her In and Out, DeLonda had somehow managed to break even.