Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (21 page)

“I need to work on my golf game, Davis, and I’d like you to join me.”

Left field.

“Just nine,” he said.

Nine what? Lives?

“There’s a car waiting for you downstairs.”

I peeked. It was a long, black hearse. Time to panic.

*    *    *

The driver, a large man dressed in black, whom I’d never laid eyes on, didn’t say boo to me. He parked the car, then followed us from a distance the whole time.

“You’ve never played? Ever?” Mr. Sanders was studying his clubs. He chose a very largish one with a tasseled knit sweater/sock as opposed to one of the small silver naked ones.

“I’ve always liked the clothes,” I said, “but no, I’ve never played. We don’t have a golf course in Pine Apple. We don’t even have Putt-Putt.”

The sun was mercifully out, but so was an icy wind. I was about to freeze. Mr. Sanders moved so comfortably, it could have been eighty-five degrees in the middle of May. I was bundled up like a polar bear in everything Bradley Cole owned. Mr. Sanders was wearing a red v-neck sweater over a lemon-yellow golf shirt. And pants, of course.

“I enjoy it,” he said, “it’s relaxing. For the most part I only play business golf. I don’t get very many opportunities to play for fun.”

This was not my idea of fun. More chit chat: he wished his son could see the benefits of this “life sport,” his short game had been oddly off for months, then finally Natalie’s name came up (“…an instinctive, intuitive player”), which gave me my in.

“Did you hire Natalie?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “She and Paul both came with the job.”

Paul. That’s Teeth.

“She’s very good at what she does,” I offered.

“Which is one of the reasons we’re here,” Mr. Sanders said. “She’s almost too good.”

This wasn’t about me. This was about her. He had something to say he didn’t want her to overhear.

“I need to make sure we’re on the same page, Davis, and the easiest way to do that is to speak to you directly.”

Natalie was on a different page? File away for later.

“It’s Thomas.”

Thomas—gamer/son.

“I’m interested in what’s going on with the video poker,” he said, “certainly. But there’s a bigger goal, one I want to make sure you’re working toward.”

“Tell me what that goal is, Mr. Sanders,” I said, “and I’ll do everything I can.” (I meant every word of that.)

“I just did,” he said.

He did golf stuff while I drew designs in the dirt path with the toe of my right cowgirl boot and wished for hot chocolate. With whipped cream. Natalie was so adamant: the game, the game, the game. Find out how the game is won. Figure out the game. Mr. Sanders had me in the middle of nowhere, freezing, to point me in a different direction: his son. Which would be leave his son out of it. There was only one way to leave the son out, and that was to leave the mother out.

We traveled a bumpy pebble path to the next golf thing that looked just like first one. I had a feeling they all looked alike. And we were doing this nine different times? I’d have frostbite. Mr. Sanders put his golf stuff where he wanted it, shifted his weight around, tugged at his sleeves, but before he hit the ball, he looked at me from across the grass. “So?”

I took a deep, cold breath. “If you could answer a few personal questions,” the words rushed out of me, “it would help.”

I thought the driver shadowing us had taken a shot at me for the mere suggestion when Mr. Sanders smacked the ball across the wide expanse of crunchy brown grass.

“Shoot,” he said.

I didn’t know if he meant
ooops, you just got shot,
or,
ask away,
or,
rats,
there goes my ball
.

“Sliced.”

I grabbed for my neck. Maybe I’d been cut.

When I figured out I hadn’t been (shot) (because you don’t feel it at first), or had my throat slit (you don’t feel that immediately either because with both, there’s an interminable moment of disbelief, then you have to wait on your brain to send pain signals), I managed to get a question out. “Did you know what you were getting into?”

“Did I know what I was getting into with the marriage, or the gaming industry?”

“Both.”

He filled his lungs with biting winter air, focused on something in the trees beyond, pulled another golf ball from his pocket, tossed it in the air, then caught it without looking. “Yes and no.”

Another shot rang out, but I recognized it this time, so I didn’t drop and roll.

Mr. Sanders tilted his head this way and that, craning off into the distance. After the longest he turned to me. “I learned the business from the ground up,” he said, “and studied it for years before that. So I was prepared for the work.” He bent over and picked up the little stick still in the ground, then put it between his teeth. He gestured toward the golf cart, and we turned in that direction. “For the record, no one in their mid-twenties can foresee the potential problems of marrying into an institution. It looks decidedly better from the outside.” We climbed into the cart. “And, yes, Davis, I knew I wasn’t marrying a nun, if that’s where you’re going with this.”

My temperature went up several degrees. “Not at all.”

“What I didn’t know was how the family worked.”

My head jerked back uncomfortably as we shot down the path. I accidentally screamed a little bit. He slowed down.

“For all practical purposes,” he said, “everything that happens in the Casimiro casinos is on the up-and-up, because the first rule of gaming is don’t cross the Gaming Commission. Without a gaming license, you’re out of business.”

The cart came to a sudden and unexpected stop, and I grabbed for the teeny dash. Note to self: don’t ever get in a car with the boss.

“But that’s not to say an audit of all other aspects of the corporation would pass the sniff test,” he said. “The Casimiros don’t keep forty attorneys and seventy accountants on the payroll for no reason. Now the family itself, that’s a different story.”

One I wanted to hear.

“Help me look for my ball,” he said, wandering off.

He told me that he’d worked his way through school, something I already knew, and that, truth be told, he’d married for the wrong reasons, something I’d already lived.

“Salvatore,” he said, “my father-in-law, raised four entitled, self-indulgent, spoiled brats, who never lifted a finger except to call for a maid. And when Bianca set her sights on me for a weekend, he pushed us both toward a more lasting arrangement, because he already knew I would roll up my sleeves and work where his jet-setting sons wouldn’t. So the incentives were there for both of us.”

He looked at me. “For taking his daughter off the streets and out of the headlines, I received a million tax-free dollars, a position in a Fortune 500 company that was otherwise decades out of my reach, and ten percent of the division he put me to work in. I’m not sure what Bianca’s package included, but I have no doubt she was encouraged as well. Honestly, Davis, at the time there wasn’t a good reason to
not
marry Bianca and millions of reasons to. I was working a ninety-hour week, and I have no idea what she was up to those early years; I barely saw her. Thomas, our son, surprised us both. If it hadn’t been for him, I’m not sure what might have happened.”

It was several minutes before either of us spoke.

“Yes, Davis, he is my son.”

I could have died.

“And you need to know that if I divorce Bianca, I’ll lose my job, and most likely, custody of my son.”

“Is that in a prenup?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That’s common sense.”

A nice guy like Mr. Sanders spilling his guts to an almost total stranger suddenly made all sorts of sense, too. He needed some discretion. I was his discretion. Which meant the rest of his team, or somebody on it, wasn’t his discretion. File away for later.

“There was a showdown several years ago,” he picked up his own trail, “when Thomas was just a baby. I never saw it coming, because when I wasn’t behind my desk or on the casino floor, I was with my son. I remember Bianca had been in Italy for months, and Salvatore called me to his office to inform me that not only had he fired all three of his sons, he’d changed his will to preclude them, and cut out their enormous allowances.”

“Your wife’s, too?”

“Yep,” he said. “They handled it admirably, as you can well imagine.”

“What did they do?”

“They turned to their mother,” he said, “and that lasted a few years. But eventually, my three brothers-in-law went to work for different vendors that service the Casimiro casinos.”

“Like Total Gaming Corporation?”

He turned to me. “Exactly.”

I sucked in icy air. “When did you realize Bianca was supplementing her income in your casino?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Nattie was the one who caught it.”

We shared a long minute of listening to the wind whistle.

“Do you trust Natalie?”

“I couldn’t do my job without her.”

Not what I asked. “What’s your goal, Mr. Sanders? How do you want this to end?”

He turned to me. “I want you to tell me my wife isn’t responsible for anyone’s death.”

I might not be able to grant that wish. I wanted to ask him if he loved her, because I couldn’t get a feel for where this was coming from—his heart, ego, or wallet—but I couldn’t get the words out.

“I’ve known about the game for a while now,” he said, “and I can honestly say that if it weren’t for the dead bodies piling up, I’d be happy to look the other way.”

He wasn’t worried about the money.

“And Bianca’s going to do exactly what she wants to do.” He said this lightly, with a shrug and a grin, and every word on the edge of a laugh, like,
my goofy wife would sleep with the devil.

Okay, not his ego.

“It’s my son, Davis.”

Ah. The heart.

“He can’t have a murderess for a mother.”

Was Mr. Sanders asking me to dig deeper or cover up?

I wandered to a sunny spot while he did more of the golf thing, and we didn’t speak again until after we drove up and down even
more
brown hills. I needed a Dramamine.

“Do you know Morgan George, Mr. Sanders?”

“Morgan George.” He tried it on. “Morgan George,” he repeated. “I’m not sure if I recognize the name, or if it’s so common that I feel like I should,” he said. “Tell me who Morgan George is.”

“It’s Morgan George, Jr., actually. You were at UNLV at the same time he was.”

Mr. Sanders shrugged one shoulder. “That doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “Big place.”

I twisted around in the seat. “He went on to work for Total Gaming, and he wrote the software for Double Whammy Deuces Wild.”

Mr. Sanders looked off into the distance, a look of recognition playing across his face. “A black man,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I do know who he is,” Mr. Sanders said. “Make that was.”

“Did you meet him at school?”

Mr. Sanders shook his head.

“Work?”

“No.”

I waited while Mr. Sanders did more golf: surveying, posturing, adjusting the visor he wore. He smacked the ball through the air, then watched, apparently pleased with where it plopped.

He looked over to me. “I walked in on him with my wife.” He tossed the club he was holding into the air and caught it in the middle on the way down. “Six weeks later, the guy was dead.”

I steeled myself, then asked, “Is your wife sleeping with my ex-husband?”

“I believe so.”

SEVENTEEN

A day of golf, an afternoon of digging through archived news and obituaries on the Internet. A pleasant and productive phone call to the police department in Atlantic City pretending I was a reporter. Another call, this time playing the role of genealogist, with a nice woman at the
Las Vegas Sun
. The longest call to Total Gaming Technology’s twenty-four-hour troubleshooting hotline, assuming the persona of a really stupid slot machine tech, and with the most patient human on Earth. A final phone exchange, this one impersonal and netting me exactly nothing, with my mother.

An evening with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, three almost-frozen Natural Lights, and a big box I exhumed from the back of Bradley Cole’s closet. In it: handwritten letters dating back three decades, photographs, airline-ticket stubs, loose change, high school ring, buttons in teeny plastic bags, cuff links, more than twenty birthday cards from his mother, receipts for extended warranties on car things, and two old condoms. (I knew they were old because for one, they were crunchy. For two, I’ve never seen the brand behind the cashier in a checkout line.)

One last phone call to Natalie to weasel my way into yet another department of the Bellissimo I had no business being in. Two and a half hours of sleep.

The alarm screamed. I stumbled to the door to retrieve the package waiting on the welcome mat. It contained the most heinous outfit yet, much worse than the housekeeping uniform. I tugged it on in the bedroom, the copier blocking the only mirror, because I didn’t care about seeing my reflection. Natalie sent a short, dark wig and wire-rimmed eyeglasses to complete the look. I didn’t bother with makeup. I whined a lot during the process of getting dressed.

I’d arranged for George to shuttle me back and forth for this assignment, more to keep the lines of communication open between us than anything else, but when I climbed in the back seat of his cab at six in the dark morning and he started snickering at my latest costume, I decided I really didn’t have a thing to say to him other than, “Shut up, George.”

He turned around to face forward, but I could still see his shoulders rising and falling with mirth. “You’re never going to catch a man dressed like that.”

“Who says I’m trying to catch a man?”

He pulled out onto one of five empty lanes of Beach Boulevard, turning right toward the Bellissimo, several miles away, but more visible against the backdrop of the crystal night than I’d ever seen it during the day. I’d ridden away from the complex under the glow of the moon dozens of times, but never to. There had to be a million Bellissimo lights blinking against the black sky, and I was about to see the switch that turned them on. To get a glimpse of said switch, apparently you had to be head-to-toe in navy-blue canvas Dickies and wearing a boot that called itself Wolverine. I could barely move in this getup. The boots weighed about seven pounds each. The required head gear, which covered my lap, was a white hard hat.