Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (13 page)

I’ll be damned.

My second day on the job DeLonda stopped by our office again.

“I need to drop this off.” It was a sealed envelope, Beth Dunn’s name on the front, handwritten in block letters and underlined twice.

DeLonda looked like someone had taken her out back and beaten the tar out of her.

“So?” I asked. “Are things better?”

DeLonda chewed on the question. “Do you really want to know?”

I did.

“I came here to relax, have some fun.” Her black eyes bore into mine. “And I’m leaving here hoping I can keep my husbin’ and my house.”

What? She’d won all the money back! “Seriously?”

“It’s not as bad as it was yesterday,” she said, “but trust me, it’s still devastating.”

I wanted to ask her a million questions, but instead I smiled at her and told her to hurry back to see us.

“Oh, it’ll be awhile,” she assured me. “A good, long while.”

I checked her numbers again. For the trip, in the end, she’d actually won four thousand. Sure didn’t sound devastating to me. I held the envelope up to the light.

*    *    *

Natalie, who dresses this puppet, most definitely didn’t have me dolled up for this assignment. Not only did I have the mousy-blonde wig to contend with, I had oversized tortoise-shell glasses that slid down my nose seventeen times every single second. The clothes I had to choose from were either black or black turtlenecks and black or black long floppy skirts that didn’t touch me anywhere and smelled like roses. The shoes were black flats, more like house slippers, and I had to sidestep old women carefully, because if they got a good look at them they’d whack me over the head with their walking sticks and yank them right off my feet. I could have easily been chosen for an ambush makeover. You! Mousy-blonde girl! Get out of those baggy black clothes! This isn’t the library! All in all, I was as unmemorable a package as one could imagine. This came in handy when I inevitably screwed things up during my tenure as a Host Assistant. “Who told you that?” And the person would answer, “I don’t remember.”

The week passed with three more panicked players going behind closed doors with Beth Dunn, then later, the same three players dropped off mail for Beth. Just like DeLonda, the computer said they’d made up their huge losses, but just like DeLonda, you couldn’t tell it from looking at them.

“What’s in this, do you think?” I shook the most recent envelope. Always Bellissimo stationery and always sealed.

Heather’s computer was glued to her Facebook page and Heather was glued to her computer. “Money,” she said without a glance my way. “The hosts get tipped.”

“Seriously?”

“Big time.” Heather said. “And I’m next in line!” She updated her Facebook status. “
I’m next
!”

“Next for what?” I asked.

“To be a host!” She turned to me. “This assistant job,” her hand passed back and forth between us, “is a stepping stone to being a casino host,” she explained. “And they go by seniority. We just lost an assistant, and I took her spot. She was the only one who had more time than me.”

“Oh, the girl, Heidi Dupree? I heard about that. What happened there?” I asked innocently.

Heather shrugged. “Some kind of family emergency.” She picked up the small digital clock on her desk. “Didn’t you say you had to leave early today?”

“I did say that.” I had a date with Teeth. I was putting it off as long as possible. I’d stretched this assignment as long as I could, but it was time to move on to the next part of this gig. That meant sending Natalie an email telling her I needed a little assistance, and dammit, she sent it by way of Mr. Molars.

“Let me run to the little girl’s room before you go.”

“Sure.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

In Heather Math, that meant three to four hours. With her clear plastic crossover bag strapped on, she smiled at me and slipped out the door.

“Bye,” I waggled my fingers at the door. I hated to leave the safety of this office, but I also hated these clothes. I slipped the envelope that was supposed to go to Beth Dunn’s inbox into my purse and sent a text message to Teeth: BE THERE IN 30. I stuck my head in the back office and called out, “Can anyone watch the front until Heather gets back?” A young man raised a finger. Poor guy.

*    *    *

There were lots of reasons I’d rather not be alone in a room with Teeth. Among them: he didn’t like me a bit, I didn’t trust him a bit, his teeth scared me, and he had no sense of humor whatsoever. If that weren’t enough, I felt certain Teeth and Eddie Crawford (that no-good excuse of a human) had a little Double Whammy Deuces Wild something going on, and as soon as I could squeeze out one free moment, I planned on nosing into it. Nonetheless, Teeth (Paul Bergman, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it), and I enjoyed each other’s company watching surveillance video from five-thirty on Friday until three o’clock the next Wednesday without a break.

Kidding, but it felt that long.

Teeth was dressed in what looked like all black, until the fabric of his suit (shirt, tie, and probably boxer shorts) caught light, at which point it took on a deep purple hue.

“Where do you buy your clothes?” I asked.

“None of your business.”

I clasped my hands together to keep from going for my new Taser gun and rattling his big teeth out of his head.

It had been an incredibly long week for me. Being a nomad is taxing, and I’d climbed into ten different beds (all empty) in the past month. I didn’t have roots; I was still living out of a suitcase. Starting a new job is stressful, and I’d started four in as many weeks. If I stayed here long enough, my resume would get me into the White House. “Is there anything you
haven’t
done?” I’d answer, “Nope.” Lurking, always present, in the back of my mind was the threat of the industrial vacuum cleaner, so I didn’t want to complain too much about being tossed around lest I got tossed on it.

The thing is, I had other matters to attend to: I had developed a crush on my landlord, Bradley Cole, and wanted to keep nosing into his drawers and closets. Every day this week, after sitting behind a desk reimbursing high-rollers for the cost of the fuel their private jets gobbled to get them here (that they immediately gambled away), I’d returned to the condo to either try to find more photographs of Bradley Cole (good-looking guy, Mr. His High School type, great, normal teeth) or delve deeper into what happened to George/Morgan/my still-absent driver’s son. And what Bianca Casimiro Sanders could possibly have to do with it to the point of George dropping off the grid and following her here, and, apparently, yon. And where, exactly, did Eddie the Ass fit in?

Just as soon as I placed the tiniest piece of what promised to be a very large puzzle, I’d look at the clock and realize I had to be at my Host Assistant desk in four hours. Let’s put it this way: I’d been pulling doubles all week long, wearing a hot itchy wig for one of the shifts. If Natalie didn’t stop with the wig stuff, I’d probably be walking into work with the wrong one on my head any day. And it would be spinning, because underneath it, my brain was so busy.

“You can’t solve every crime, young lady.” My father had warned me years ago. “Focus on one thing at a time.”

“But what if they’re all connected?”

“They probably aren’t.”

“But what if they
are
?”

*    *    *

Teeth had clearance for all things and he had the Big Brother program up and running on his laptop in the dungeon he and No Hair called home. By the way, they needed a very fragrant candle in there.

I’d supplied him with the dates and times of the visits, starting with the Atlanta woman, DeLonda Pierce, which had resulted in the Envelope.

“Speaking of which,” I reached into my purse.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“What?”

“You said, ‘speaking of which.’ We weren’t speaking.”

“
What
?” I asked again.

He batted the air. “Never mind.”

I plopped the envelope with Beth Dunn’s name on it in front of the computer.

“Where you get that?” he asked.

“I took it.”

He didn’t know if he should pat me on the back or arrest me. “You’ve got some balls,” he said.

“Open it,” I said.

“I’m not opening it. You open it.”

“I stole it. Surely you can open it.”

He huffed. He reached for it. A sheet of stationery was folded in thirds, and nestled inside were four slot-machine cashout tickets in amounts ranging from eight hundred dollars up to twenty-two hundred, totaling almost five thousand. Teeth and I looked at each other, shrugged, and probably reached the same conclusion: In the privacy of her office, Beth Dunn was giving desperate players money to play with, then taking a cut on the back end. Here was the back end. Where was the front-end money coming from? Probably not her purse. I pushed them around with the eraser end of a pencil. Teeth deciphered.

“Let’s see,” he said. “This one’s this morning; the other three are this afternoon.”

“How do you know that?” I didn’t see a time stamp.

“The Julian date is right here,” he pointed, “and the time, military, is here.”

Ah-ha.

“And here’s the machine number.”

I leaned in. Get this: Teeth’s fingernails were professionally manicured.

“Let’s watch.” He was in charge of the mouse. He clicked.

I put my feet up on the desk and dug into the popcorn I’d microwaved. I slurped a Diet Coke.

“Do you mind?” Teeth asked.

“Sorry.” I held the popcorn out to him.

“I meant hold down the noise,” he said. “I don’t eat popcorn. It gets stuck in my teeth.”

Lord knows we wouldn’t want
that
. This guy probably flossed with nylon rope, and no part of me wanted to be witness. “And what about those four-pound roasted turkey legs you wolf down?” I truly did not enjoy this man’s company. “Do they get stuck in your teeth?”

He inhaled sharply. I cowered. “For your information,” he said, “I’m on Jenny Craig. I don’t eat between meals and if I did, it wouldn’t be turkey legs.” He sat back, crossing his huge arms over his purple chest. “How did you get this job?”

“Honestly?” I said through a mouthful of popcorn, “I don’t know.”

It took until midnight to watch the feed because to follow Beth we had to guess where she might go, and watch several feeds until we found her. If it were as simple as assigning surveillance to follow her, we could have finished in time to watch Funniest Home Videos at our separate residences, but me being me and this being this, we had to watch a whole lot of Funniest Davis Videos instead.

Because we were on Discretion Road, surveillance had not been following Beth Dunn’s every step, so we had to track her down. The first camera angle we watched was the only surveillance camera that would pick her up leaving her office, and that camera was in the reception area outside her office, trained directly on ME.

I’d give anything to have anticipated that. I would have sat there still as a church mouse with my hands folded on top of the desk, before Teeth got to review my every single move, laughing his Jenny Craig ass off the entire time. When Heather was there with me, or a client was standing at the counter, it was boring. I sat there and worked. It was when Heather ran off for one of her seven-hour errands that I took two cat naps, head on desk, mouth wide open, took my bra off once, working the strap off my shoulder and out one sleeve, then the other, pulling it through, then dropping it in the garbage, and one time when I was alone I plucked my eyebrows, mouth wide open again. Teeth was about to wet his purple pants. The worst was Wednesday, when for some reason, I had my undies on backwards. Before I figured it out and threw them away in the ladies room, I stood at the copier, camera zeroing in on my rear end, and adjusted. Several times.

During Funny Davis, Beth Dunn would pass the desk on her way to the casino floor, and Teeth would thankfully switch camera feeds. It took repeated attempts to follow her, your classic needle-in-a-haystack scenario, which is why we had to sit there all night, but we nailed her every time. About a half hour after the four clients left her office, she’d go straight to the slot machine they were playing. How’d she know?

Teeth and I raised our eyebrows in silent question. And each time, Teeth would grab a pen and scribble something.

Finally, there was nothing left to watch. I turned to him.

He was rubbing his eyes the relieving way men who don’t wear mascara do.

“What now?” I asked.

“We go back and do the same thing, only this time we follow the player. See how much money she’s giving them to feed into the machines.”

Oh, goody, goody. I couldn’t wait.

“Then we’ll do it again to see where the husband fits into the picture.” He pushed back from the desk. “Get ready to do a whole lot more of what you just did.”

“I wonder.” I stretched. “If the machines she sends these players to are machines her husband has worked on right before.”

Teeth’s face scrunched up.

“And the money she’s giving these clients isn’t currency, it’s tickets he’s taken out of the machines when he’s working on them.”

Teeth’s beady eyes narrowed to slits and he didn’t seem to be breathing. I knew this because the man is a mouth breather. Who complains about chewing noises.

“And the player,” I babbled on with my theory, “goes to that machine with the ticket, because it puts it back in the right place. And when they eventually win they have to give her a nice cut.”

He stared at me as if I’d just said the Earth was flat.

“Get it?” I asked. “She’s not giving them money, she’s giving them tickets.”

His nostrils flared.

“Or,” I tried to backstroke quickly. Obviously I was way off.

“That’s
exactly
it.”

He slammed a fist.

I jumped a mile.

“The tickets Beth Dunn gives the players are lifted,” Teeth said. “The tickets they give back to her,” he shook the envelope containing the evidence, “are legit. She can go cash them out.”