Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (7 page)

The timeline was erratic, the first theft occurring in August of last year on the twenty-eighth floor, the second in November on sixteen, and the last two during the same week in December, the first on the twentieth floor and the follow-up break-in on floor thirteen. The victims claimed losses that totaled forty-nine thousand in cash, with the third incident on the twentieth floor including jewelry, bringing the grand total up to almost sixty-thousand dollars the guy had walked off with.

For the late-summer heist, he was decked out in golf attire, lugging a bag of clubs. For the second, he wore tennis whites, a racquet tucked under one arm, hands full of Bellissimo Café take-out. The third—this was cute—he wore a spa robe and slippers. For his final act, only two days after his lucrative spa adventure, he seemed to have run out of energy. He was dressed in nondescript street clothes: khaki pants, a V-neck sweater over a button down, and leather loafers.

How did he know there was anything in the safes worth stealing and how, once in the room, was he getting into them?

*    *    *

It was noon on a bright sunny Monday, my third on the housekeeping assignment, and I knew it was his room the second I entered it. You don’t marry someone twice and not know a bed they’ve slept in.

Sixteen hundred and twenty guest rooms, more than five hundred people issued the same black, tan, and white uniform I was sporting, and somehow I was the lucky one who knuckled the door (“Housekeeping!”), card-swiped the lock, strategically blocked the door with my cleaning cart, and entered my ex-ex-husband Eddie’s hotel room. I fell against my cart, sending a hundred tiny shampoo bottles flying off the other side.

“Okay? Okay?” Santiago, my coworker, cleaning the even-numbered rooms to my odd, raced across the hall to lasso the shampoos. “Okay?”

“I’m fine, Santiago,” I panted. I squeezed my eyes shut, pinched the bridge of my nose, and tried to concentrate on standing upright.

“Bad stinks?”

That would work, so I nodded.

“You me do?”

I shook my head. “I’m fine, Santiago. I’m going to close this door so no one walking by gets a whiff of this.” I waved my hand in front of my face.

Santiago gave me his I-have-no-idea-what-you-said smile and asked again, “You me do?” this time, pointing to me, then himself. He drew his toilet-brush sword. He tilted his head back, sniffing the air.

“No, Santiago, but thanks.” I closed the door to an urgent string of speedy Spanish. An interpreter would have come in handy just then, because what Santiago was trying to tell me was that we weren’t allowed behind closed doors in a guest room. We used two card keys: one to enter and clean the room, the other to exit and let all interested parties—our boss, the front desk, and, as it turns out, Natalie Middleton, should she want to know—that the room was ready. If the door closed between the two swipes, warning bells sounded all over the building: Someone on the housekeeping staff was locked up in a guest room. Hello, lawsuit.

Santiago was on the other side of the door hollering about piñatas, enchiladas, and conquistadors. The housekeeping supervisor was thumping down the hall, slinging Spanish curses right and left. Natalie Middleton was in action, sending an emissary to both save me and read me the riot act.

I was behind closed doors, so I didn’t know.

I fingered Eddie’s hanging shirts and poked around in his shaving kit. No surprises. I grabbed my clipboard and flipped through, wondering how I’d missed this. We’re issued our marching orders at the beginning of every shift. If almost always gives us the surname of the guest in the room and if not, it gives clues. VIPs are highlighted with a pale green stripe, which most of this floor was, and Casino Marketing guests are listed as just that. No name, just Casino Marketing Guest. You don’t know a thing about the room’s occupant other than they were there on the casino’s dime. So Eddie Crawford was a Casino Marketing guest. Which is exactly when it hit me. Buried deep in the incident files, behind the reports, profiles, photographs, claim forms, and interview transcripts, were the single-sheet housekeeping assignment charts for the day of each robbery. All four room-safe thefts had occurred in Casino Marketing guest rooms.

An urgent pounding on the door scared the very life out of me. It was most certainly Eddie.

I dropped my clipboard, clapped my hand over my mouth to muffle my screams, and wondered, wildly pacing a small circle, what to do. My eyes were drawn to the Gulf of Mexico, out the window and nineteen floors down. Suicide? This early in the morning?

He knocked again.

I jumped a mile and screamed into my hand.

“Everything okay in there?”

It wasn’t Eddie.

I stretched to the peephole, and saw a perfect set of glow-in-the-dark choppers. Their owner could have chewed through the door. Accompanying the teeth, a great big man dressed in head-to-toe white. He looked like Dr. Death.

Shit. Shit. Double shit.

SEVEN

“Is this it?” George shook a can of mixed nuts.

“It can’t be Christmas every day.” In the two weeks that George had been shuttling me back and forth to and from the lovely EconoLodge, I’d loaded him down with things I found in the guest rooms: food, candy, wine, soft drinks, bottled water, flowers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, four hundred little jars of condiments, visors, golf balls, hand lotion, and enough cell phone chargers to open his own kiosk at the mall. The first few days I simply left the loot in the car. The day he almost got us killed because he was craning into the rear-view mirror to see what I’d be leaving instead of watching the road was the day I began handing the boodle to him when I got in. For reasons I might never know, old George loved the flowers the best, although he’d be driving the governor’s limo before he’d let on. The most I ever got out of him was a grunt. The three times I’d climbed in and passed him flowers, though, he’d been speechless, which is to say he didn’t grunt. So old George did have a soft spot.

He shook the can again. “Peanuts?”

“I only cleaned two guest rooms, George. And unfortunately for you, I didn’t find a pot of gold in either.” I rubbed my temples. I needed a drink.

“You spent all day cleaning two rooms?” He waited until there wasn’t a car within five miles of us in either direction before pulling out onto Beach Boulevard. “Must have been some big rooms.”

I didn’t have the energy.

“And is that the new maid’s get-up?”

I didn’t owe George a wardrobe explanation.

“You don’t strike me as the kind who’d take the time to be good at that sort of thing.”

Was George baiting me?

“I probably would have let you go two weeks ago.”

I shot up in the seat, my energy miraculously returned. “I didn’t get
fired
, George. I’ll have you know I stared at a computer screen all day.”

George made a noise he was so good at, I think he invented it. It said,
uh-huh, sure you did
, in just one guttural syllable.

I came
this
close to bailing out of a moving vehicle, because breaking a leg or two would have been the best part of my day.

Three blocks later he asked, “What’d you find?”

“I’m not speaking to you again, George. Ever, ever.”

“Fine.”

“Nothing,” I caved. “Nothing.”

We were at a red light. He twisted in his seat. “Did you have a bad day?”

I started bawling.

Teeth had yanked me out of Eddie Crawford’s hotel room by the ear, then pulled me kicking and screaming into a stairwell where he ripped me a new one. I thought he was going to bite my head off. I’d been on the receiving end of many protocol and procedure lectures before (the circumventing of), but never across from those kind of teeth. He gave no indication that I had been in the wrong room, or that there was any connection between me and that particular room, he gave me down the road in general about being in
any
room alone with the door locked. “Were you
looking
for something?” When he’d had his say, his parting words were, “Go see Natalie.”

I wasn’t about to tell Teeth or Natalie it was the collection of my ex-ex-husband’s personal effects that had prompted the breaking of all those cardinal rules (which I knew absolutely nothing about beforehand), so bracing myself for another lashing, avoiding both the guest and employee elevators (something they had bothered to make me aware of), I hoofed it to the Executive Offices. I poked my head in Natalie’s door.

“Davis,” she smiled. “Come on in. The coast is clear.” She was refilling Mr. Sanders’ cinnamon candy bowl from a ten-pound bag of the offensive stuff, the sight of which made me a little dizzy. Natalie was crisp, cool, calm, and didn’t appear to be the least bit upset with me. She offered me a cup of coffee; she didn’t offer me a cinnamon candy. “Now, Davis,” Natalie smiled. “What can I do for you?”

I scratched at the wig a little. I thought
she
had asked to see
me
for round two of Chew Davis Out. “I need a computer,” I said, “and a desk.”

“Okay,” she said. “Why don’t you step in the back and change out of your uniform.”

Gladly. If she’d suggested I step in the back and change out of my
life
, I’d have taken her up on that too.

After fitting me with street clothes, Natalie set me up in an empty cubicle in the print shop, located several miles under the basement of this gargantuan place. “Keep your head down,” she said. “You won’t run into anyone because the print-shop employees only work graveyard. But if for some reason you do, keep quiet.”

Aye, aye, Captain.

“And don’t ever do that again.”

She said it to my back as I was making my escape. I barely turned, one foot already out the door. “Sorry.” Hand in the cookie jar. “I won’t.”

“Is there anything else, Davis?” She tapped a pen. “Anything we need to talk about?” Her expression was as blank as a Bellissimo bed sheet.

I fell against the doorjamb for support, because with her words, a ghost had snuck up from behind and knocked my knees. Then laughed. “Not that I know of, Natalie.”

I got out of there as fast as I could.

*    *    *

Not many people go into police work for the money. The ones who do aren’t protecting and serving the public, they’re protecting and serving the dark side. The most I’d ever earned in my life was peanuts, and I hadn’t saved a one of them because at the time, I had a nest egg. Today, at age early-thirties, I had no nest egg, I had no roof over my head, and I’d never work directly in law enforcement again. I could get a job as a computer programmer, but I’d probably blow my brains out by the third day.

This job had shocked me stupid three times now. The whammy-whammy game had slapped me so hard I actually quit. The severe tongue-lashings, both directly and not so directly, I’d received today set me back and gave me more to chew. But both of these events and their bright red Eddie flags paled in comparison to the shock I received when I checked my bank balance.

The Bellissimo was paying me a brain surgeon astronaut’s wages.

In all the interviews, the subject of salary never came up. Not once. I never asked; they never offered. I emailed Natalie my banking information after opening a local account, and she replied that my paycheck would be directly deposited every Friday, and instead of wondering how much it would be, I consulted a calendar, counting the number of Fridays in ninety days. (My interest was more on Visa’s behalf than my own. And I owed my sister a little. My grandmother, too. My father had paid for my car, something my mother didn’t know.)

It took every dime I had to divorce that rat-bastard Eddie Crawford, immediately followed by extreme unemployment. My finances had gone from sad to tragic until I began squirreling away Bellissimo paychecks. Things were looking up in my financial department; Visa and I were both very happy about it. My ninety-day commitment was nearing the four-week mark, but they were paying me so much I caught myself thinking if I could stick it out six months, I could be debt free both inside and outside of my family. If I could hold out an additional six months, I’d have the makings of a savings account.

I looked at myself in the reflection of the elevator doors on my way to the print shop, and gave myself this advice: “Make this work, Davis.”

*    *    *

I was certain the same Casino Marketing person booked the four guest-victims, but ten minutes after I settled in to solve this caper, I hit a wall. Four different casino hosts were assigned to the four injured parties.

If it wasn’t a casino-host culprit, who was it?

I had no choice but to hack into the mainframe, which, let me assure you, raises your blood pressure through the roof. Years ago, out of boredom, I wrote a program that would shut a system completely down the millisecond it was compromised. The only reason I hadn’t tried to sell it to Microsoft or the iPod people was because I hadn’t had time to develop Part Two, a sprinkler-system device in the monitor that blasted the hacker with tear gas. Hack
that
, buddy. (The real reason I hadn’t pursued it was is because if it did fly, my hacking hobby would be over.)

Boom. Gotcha. I was in.

I examined the four guest portfolios from their inceptions. After three hours and a headache, I found nothing but typos. No one had altered anything.

It had been a long, long day. I’d been traumatized, terrified, told off, and I’d struck out. Tears were in order.

George waited patiently until I stopped leaking. “What were you looking for?”

We were stuck at a railroad crossing while an endless succession of gang-graffitied railcars rolled by, so I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. “I’m looking into this casino host business, how it works.”

“Nothing to it.”

“How’s that, George?” My head snapped up. “What? Are you a casino expert now? I haven’t seen you in there yucking it up with the casino hosts.”