DOUBLE MINT (14 page)

I sat at the computer desk rolling my chair between four screens for the next two
hours. Searching every Bellissimo database within my reach—surveillance, accounting,
photo archives—I found nothing even halfway connecting Holder and Christopher to Magnolia
and/or Conner Hughes. If evidence existed that these people interacted, it was not
to be found in the Bellissimo system.

I did learn a few interesting things. Holder Darby, never married, originally from
Horn Hill, Alabama, was from a banking family on her mother’s side. It was when Holder’s
career Air Force father was transferred to Keesler Air Force Base in Gulfport that
the family moved to Mississippi. Holder was thirteen. She’s four years older than
Christopher Hall, who had a record before he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter
and counterfeiting: two driving under the influence charges.

Magnolia Thibodeaux, back in the day, had a Bellissimo boyfriend. A leathery-skinned
pool boy who wore his messy brown hair cut in a mullet. The grainy surveillance video
and old pictures caught him and his guitar case running in and out the Big Easy Haunted
Flea Market more than her husband Ty had.

Conner Hughes? Next to nothing, which I found in and of itself interesting. No wife
or kids, no girlfriend, no golf or tennis. He lived in a modest split-level ’70s home
in a boring neighborhood. He paid off the house twenty years ago, had no credit card
debt, and drove a dull four-door sedan. Conner Hughes might be the most uninteresting
man on Earth. The only thing I found remotely resembling a life outside the vault
business was a board seat at an organization called Greater Oakridge Animal Shelter
and another board seat at Crestview Animal Control.

I was on my way to see what manner of animal Conner Hughes was interested in controlling—termites?—when
my phone beeped with a text from my husband:
Davis. I just took a call from someone on Dionne Warwick’s team. There’s no water
next door in the Leno Suite. Do we have water?

Fifteen

The saints came marching in at 7:01 on Thursday morning. My eyes popped open and I
bolted up. In the bed: one cat, zero husbands. Neither I nor Bradley had left this
building in days, and yet we hadn’t had an actual conversation since I can’t remember
when. The moonshine, I guess, was the last time we were face to face, and that was
a blur. I fell back on my pillow, but then there were the saints again. I may be the
only person in the world with a doorbell that plays a bagpipe rendition of “When the
Saints Go Marching In.” And we couldn’t find a way to adjust the volume, which was
set at ear-splitting. I had a big note over the doorbell (NO!), but everyone could
see the flashing fleur-de-lis under my warning and rang it anyway. My feet hit the
floor jogging to make the saints stop.

I looked through the leaded glass and copper bars to see the distorted image of the
all too familiar Sears repairman uniform. I cracked the door. “Can I help you?” I
tugged at my t-shirt, hoping I was wearing something underneath.

“I’m here to replace the defrost timers on the refrigerator.”

Of course he was.

I opened the door and hid behind it. “Help yourself.”

Sadly, he knew the way. All the Sears guys knew their way around Bayou Bungalow, except
for when Sears hires a new repairman, which I hate, because I have to go through the
new guy’s shock and awe. “Cool! Awesome! There’s Jesus! Damn, lady!” On the other
hand, one day Sears might hire an appliance repairman who actually knows what he’s
doing, so there’s that.

“I came on Monday,” Sears said over his shoulder, “but the lady who was here wouldn’t
let me in.”

“What?” I used the magnolia tree for cover. “A lady was here?”

“Yes, and I told her if I didn’t replace the timers in the freezer, that big slab
of ice in the ice bin was going to thaw and the drain wouldn’t be able to handle it,
which would back that ice into the input line and freeze it, then it would thaw and
the whole thing would blow. And what happened? Exactly that.”

“What’d she look like?” Erika Cleaning Woman would have let Sears in. Erika Cleaning
Woman was very well versed in all things Sears, because she was the one who had to
clean out the refrigerator when everything turned green and grew fuzz.

“Who?” Sears asked.

“The woman who wouldn’t let you in.”

“Mean,” Sears said. “She looked mean. And she had a mean little friend.”

Magnolia. I knew it. I knew she’d been here Monday. Did I not tell everyone she was
here and no one believed me? “Hold that thought, Sears.” I got in another half mile
jogging back to the bedroom to pull on a pair of shorts. I got all the way to the
kitchen door when I decided a bra might be in order. As far as being productive today,
I was well ahead of my own game. I’d already worked out, and so had the cat, racing
back and forth with me.

“So you came Monday?” Sears had kicked the wet bedspreads out of his way and was on
the floor with a flashlight. I looked at the coffee pot. I had no coffee because I
had no water.

“The lady said come back later.”

“What was she doing when you got here?”

He looked up from the floor. “I have no idea,” he said, “but she was holding a welding
torch.”

Of course she was.

I ran to the alligator gumbo bedroom, grabbed my phone, and ran back to the kitchen,
stopping along the way at my Igloo refrigerator and grabbing three bottles of water
so I could make six cups of coffee, all of which I needed. (Two miles in. Before coffee.)
I hopped up on the counter and poked my phone to video. “Sears. If you would. Tell
me the whole story again. I’m going to record you. For the insurance people.”

Sears fluffed his hair, smoothed his moustache, sucked his teeth, then tipped his
head back and sang, “La la la la la!” He looked at me. “Warming up.”

“Let me know when you’re ready.” I’d been filming the whole time.

He cleared his throat, then held up three fingers, starting the silent countdown.
When he got to one: “Good morning!” And I still hadn’t had a single sip of coffee.

Sears told the whole story again while I recorded his testimony. I prompted him a
little. “A welder, you say?”

The cat was on the counter beside me, eating a crunchy fish-shaped breakfast Bradley
had left for it, ignoring the interview.

“All I saw was the torch,” he angled for my phone, “but I recognized it. Craftsman.
One of ours.”

“Would you recognize her again if you saw her?”

“Well,” Sears said, “maybe if you put a welding helmet on her.”

I stopped the video, thanked him, and hopped down to try to make coffee around him.
He said if I needed any additional footage to give him a call. Whatever he could do
to help.

“Now, let’s see what we got here.” Sears opened the big red freezer door and an unexpected
gush of ice water, gallon upon gallons, poured out. He danced around. “Shit! It’s
cold! Shit!” He used his wet boots to scoot one of the bedspreads back to the fridge,
while I pulled open a drawer and tossed magnolia kitchen towels at the new tidal wave.

While we were mopping up, the cat, who’d been eyeing the open freezer door, propelled
itself past us in a big yellow blur, through the air, between me and Sears, and into
the freezer. It landed in a cavernous freezer bin somewhere near the middle and let
out a yelp. Dammit.

“What the hell?”

“It’s the cat,” I told Sears. “It’s so nosy. Gets stuck everywhere. You’d better stand
back. It has a bad habit of going for your head when it’s scared.”

I don’t know where or how the “meow” business started, because I had yet to hear anything
close to “meow” come out of this cat. This cat could be where the Emergency Broadcast
System got its siren.

Sears scooted backwards, pushing the dam of wet blankets and dishtowels behind him.
The cat was screaming and running circles inside a freezer pull-out bin the size of
a grocery buggy. Here I go, rescuing the cat again. “You got yourself in there, Cat.
Why can’t you get yourself out?” I pulled on magnolia oven mitts so it wouldn’t scratch
me to death, then reached in for it. The cat let me know it didn’t like the oven mitts
by having one of its loud and obnoxious cat fits and attacking them. Not one sip of
coffee yet this morning, not one sip.

“You want me to help?”

“No, Sears,” I sighed over my shoulder. “I got this.”

I pulled the freezer bin out an inch and wedged my head in. “Cat. Come on. It’s me.”

It was plastered against the back wall, letting out tornado warnings and trying to
murder the magnolia oven mitts. I couldn’t reach it, and that’s how deep this damn
refrigerator was, so I pulled the drawer out as far as I could, then another inch,
and climbed in farther. Now I was half in and half out of the freezer. I could barely
hear Sears over the cat. “Are you sure you don’t need help?”

“I’m good.” What I needed were ear plugs. Between my voice and the cat’s car-alarm
distress, bouncing around a plastic box, I’d go deaf before I got the cat out. “Just
stand back, Sears.”

Four seconds later, I heard Sears let out a war cry as a Boeing 747 landed in my kitchen.
It shook the whole red refrigerator.

Cat and I froze. We stared at each other. Its eyes were big green marbles, its mouth
gaping open. I could see all its dagger teeth and its white sandpaper tongue.

“Sears?” I tried to pull out, but now I was stuck. “Sears? Are you okay?” I could
hear the Bellissimo crumpling and Sears crying out for help behind me, and somehow
I found the adrenaline to escape the freezer, scraping the hell out of my shoulders
and slamming my head into the ice bin above. I slid across the wet floor to rescue
Sears, who was under the statue rubble of Saint Somebody. “What
happened
?”

“I have no idea! The damn thing fell over on me!”

He must have backed into Saint Somebody and sent it toppling off the concrete base.
Saint Somebody had crashed down, all over Sears. He was covered in Saint Dust. He
would have been covered in Saint Dead had Saint Somebody not been caught through the
middle by the granite island, cutting itself in half and splitting the island straight
through the middle.

I pulled Sears up from the wreckage, my phone began ringing, and we both turned to
the cat, who’d decided it wanted out of the freezer, but was now trapped between the
bin it flew into and the ice bin above, which I’d knocked loose with my head, and
the cat didn’t have enough room to squeeze through.

Sears was bent over the half of the granite island still standing, catching his breath,
waving through the Saint Somebody dust, repeating, “Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.”

“Are you hurt?” I patted Sears down, not finding any weapons or broken bones, the
cat, the whole time, singing the fire alarm song, my phone, the whole time, ringing.

“I’m okay,” Sears said, “but for God’s sake, shut the cat up.”

I slid back to the cat. I tried to lift the ice bin, the cat begging me, at top volume,
to hurry. Turning to Sears, I asked, “Can you help me lift this thing? Grab one side.”
The cat had moved on to Air Raid Siren, and no coffee yet. The whole time. No coffee.
Not a drop. Not one drop.

Sears shook it off, shuffled over, and together we fought to lift the ice bin.

“Why is it so heavy?” I asked.

Veins popped through the Saint Somebody dust on Sears’s face. “I have no idea. It’s
not even an ice maker, you know,” he grunted. “It’s an ice machine.”

“Is there a diff—?”

And that’s when whatever had the ice bin tripped up and stuck gave way, just in time
for the cat to shoot out in a blur of yellow fur and the front panel of the ice bin
to snap, split, and spill thousands of platinum coins all over me, Sears, down the
freezer, onto the floor, and all across the kitchen. None of us—me, Sears, or the
cat—could do anything but watch the deluge of coins spill out of the freezer. It was
so, so, so
Pirates of the Caribbean
.

Just then my husband, wild-eyed and red-faced, burst into the kitchen, stopped dead
cold, and tried to take it all in—me, Sears, Saint Somebody, the cat, who was hanging
upside down from the swinging chandelier where it had landed, the kitchen island destroyed,
and the platinum, so much platinum, still clinking and settling. Lots and lots of
platinum.

Sears found his voice first. “I’d say all this has been the problem with the refrigerator
the whole time.”

Sixteen

“Calls came in from all over the building, Davis.”

“It was loud,” I said. “So loud. Really loud.”

My husband stood, surveyed the destruction a little further, then turned to Sears.
“Obviously,” he said, “I need you to use a little discretion here.”

Sears locked his chalky lips, then threw away the key.

Bradley pulled his phone from his pocket, dialed, and said, “Calinda, I need a cleanup
crew on twenty-nine.” A pause. “Yes,” he said, “the refrigerator, then some.” Another
pause. “At least twice the number of people it took to clean up the chandelier Monday.”
A pause. He ended the call, then his eyes fell on the empty coffee carafe. He was
momentarily stunned, as if it was the strangest thing going on in the kitchen. He
turned to me. “You need coffee.”

My head rolled around in affirmation.

He called Calinda again. “Have someone from Beans bring Davis a pot of coffee right
away.”

I love him.

Bradley, Sears, and I started lobbing frozen platinum coins into the cat’s freezer
bin. We got the last of them into the bin and the three of us dragged it across the
tile floor to a remote corner of Who Dat Hooters, where I tossed a dancing crawfish
fleece blanket over millions in platinum, then called Baylor in to see it safely to
the temporary vault where Magnolia Thibodeaux would never find it.

“Do you hear me, Baylor? Go to the eighth floor and get yourself two big guys carrying
two big Rugers, bring them here, then move the platinum to the temporary vault and
nowhere else. Not my car or your truck.”

He told me his truck was still out of gas.

Good to know.

Bradley, hands on hips, turned to me. He opened his mouth to speak and I waved him
off. He knew I knew he was sorry he hadn’t believed me about birdbrain Magnolia running
in and out of here and I didn’t, I would never, make him say it. Maybe I’d redeemed
myself. And if I was several million to the good with Bradley, in spite of the spying
and vault business, so be it, because I’d need the leverage when he found out I actually
had been hauled off to jail while he was being held at gunpoint in the vault. He kissed
me bye, thanked Sears again, and left for his office just as the cleaning crew entered.

Sears, mopping sweat, fell into one of the purple pleather recliners. I collapsed
on the purple pleather beside him.

We sat in silence for a good long while. Numbness set in when I realized if we had
the platinum, Paragon Protection didn’t. If we’d just located all the missing platinum,
it wasn’t in the Mint Condition slot machines. I’d need a good count on what we’d
just rescued to know. If Paragon wasn’t stealing platinum from us, I’d have to write
this week off to wrong roads, dead ends, jail, a cat, and menopause. Then try to move
on with my life.

“Where’d your cat take off to?”

“Not my cat,” I told Sears, “and I have no idea.”

* * *

Sears capped off the water line to the red refrigerator, the only thing left standing
in the kitchen, then water was restored to the twenty-ninth floor. I walked him to
the front door. He wrote his cell phone number on the back of an appointment card.
“If you ever need anything.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Sears.”

“Do you have a truck full of tools, Sears?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“What do they pay you?”

“Fourteen an hour,” he said. “No benefits, but I get mileage.”

Have I got a deal for you, Sears.

The cat jumped out of the magnolia tree in the foyer and followed me to the alligator
gumbo bedroom where I finally had a cup of coffee. Soon enough, I was showered and
feeling human. While I was getting dressed, the cat had been busy pulling Bradley’s
Armani and Brooks Brothers pants off hangers and kneading them in to a fat bed in
Bradley’s closet.

I didn’t have the energy.

I told it to stay out of the way and out of trouble in our bedroom until I got back
and it didn’t even look up, just swished its fat yellow tail.

The noise of the cleaning crew still at it, removing the vestiges of Saint Somebody,
forced me to go all Audrey Hepburn before I stepped out—scarf tied under my chin,
square dark sunglasses—so if they told anyone they’d actually seen Mr. Cole’s elusive
wife, they wouldn’t have details beyond she’s very sophisticated and has a cat.

When I reached the foyer, my fifth mile of the day, I had to step around a wooden
pallet stacked waist high with Saint Somebody leftovers. The man in coveralls securing
the pieces, arms and a concrete sandaled foot, looked up at me. “Did you know someone
cut out the whole back of this thing with a welding torch?” he asked. “Made it unstable.”

“Terrible,” I said, then stepped out the front door, something catching my eye down
the hall at Jay Leno’s place.

A big dark something at the door. I took a few tentative steps, then broke into a
run, digging in my spy bag for my gun and my passkey.

Honestly, it was barely nine o’clock in the morning.

Before I reached the door, I stepped out of my brand new $650 Alexander Wang white
leather open-toed wedge booties so I wouldn’t ruin them, then dropped them into my
spy bag. My feet sank into the wet carpet. I swiped the door to Jay’s place, pushed
it open, and a gush of water rushed out the door, over my feet, and into the hall.

Note to self: Stop flooding the building. Last weekend, the Hello Kitty wedding hall.
Yesterday, my kitchen. Today, Jay’s place.

“Hello?” I took in the scene. The whole scene. “Hello?”

I sloshed through to the master bath, where the waterfall fixture on the Olympic-sized
bathtub was wide open, releasing gallons and gallons of water per second, spilling
over the rim of the bathtub, across the marble floor, down the hall, and out the front
door. I was in water up to my ankles. I wasn’t about to swim into the tub, so I shot
a towel bar off the wall, bang bang, reached for it when it floated my way, and used
it as a hammer to turn off the water, thud thud, then rode three thick guest towels
down the hall and out the front door, scoot scoot, which dried my feet. Safely out,
I traded my gun for my phone and stepped back into my shoes.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hey!”

Someone was awfully chipper this morning.

“Road trip,” I said. “Meet me at my car.”

“Where to?” she asked.

“New Orleans.”

“Are we going to kick Magnolia’s ass?”

“Something like that.”

“I like it,” Fantasy said. “Have you smoothed things over with Bradley?”

“I think so.” To the tune of four million big ones.

“You can tell me all about it on the way.”

And you, Fantasy, can tell me all about Dionne Warwick’s guy.

* * *

Mile six, to my car. I called Bradley. I thought it best to butter him up first. He
caught on right away. “Just tell me.”

“When is Dionne Warwick checking in?”

“Oh, no, Davis. No.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Just tell me. What happened?”

“When is she checking in?”

“Her band gets here today. Four o’clock. What happened?”

“I’m not really sure, but we need a cleanup crew at Jay Leno’s place quick. Some wet-vacs,
and maybe a little carpet.” And that was when I stepped out of the building and saw
what was parked in my spot.

* * *

“This is truly disgusting beyond words. We could drive my car, you know.”

“You have two flat tires, Fantasy.” My appointment with Bianca’s gyno was in four
hours. Just enough time to get to New Orleans, have a little chat with Magnolia Thibodeaux,
and back to Biloxi. “Get in.”

I could barely maneuver the nasty boat of a car to the Starbucks drive-through speaker,
and only after I’d destroyed all of Starbucks’ landscaping did we make it to the coffee,
where five Starbucks people were squeezed in the window to get a better look, all
of them glazed over.

“How much!” I had to yell over the knocking engine.

One of the Starbucks people waved me on. And that might be the appeal of this humiliating
clunker to Eddie the Ass. Free stuff.

Fantasy finally pulled her sweater down from her face so she could drink her coffee.
“Why does it smell so bad and what’s up with the stupid bull horns?”

“I have no idea.”

“You look like a twelve-year-old driving this rattletrap.”

I couldn’t begin to see above the boat helm of a steering wheel. I needed a booster
seat. It had no power steering, and we weren’t ten miles from the Bellissimo before
my arms, shoulders, and neck were exhausted.

“The glove compartment is full of condoms, Davis. This is disgusting.”

“I’m going to kill Baylor,” I said. “I’m just going to kill him.”

“I’ll help.”

We rode in relative silence, considering how loud the damn car was, for several miles,
until Fantasy figured it out.

“You don’t want to go to New Orleans and kick Magnolia’s ass, Davis. You want to trap
me in this ridiculous car of Eddie’s and kick my ass.”

“I’m trying to save you.”

“I don’t need to be saved.”

We were on I-10 West, sixty miles of straight road ahead. Now my legs hurt, because
both the gas and brake pedals needed extreme coaxing. The Cadillac burned oil at a
rapid rate too, leaving a trail of sooty smoke, and the damn thing lurched every sixteen
seconds for no good reason. Like just now, sending Fantasy into the dash.

“Shit!”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Fantasy.”

“Pull over somewhere, Davis, and let’s hitchhike. We’ll buy a car, rent one, or call
a Bellissimo limo to come get us. And I’m not trying to change the subject.” She couldn’t
find a cup holder, because they didn’t make cup holders during the Civil War when
this car was built. “The subject is I don’t need you to save me.”

“Then tell me why your Jean Paul Gaultier dress is hanging off the lampshade at Jay
Leno’s place, and tell me who drank four bottles of champagne, and then tell me why
the bathtub water was on. That thing’s a lap pool, Fantasy, and you, or Dionne Warwick’s
guy, or both of you ran out of there naked and forgot to turn off the faucet. When
the water was turned back on this morning the whole suite flooded. I don’t know where
we’re going to put Dionne Warwick, and
I
will get blamed for this, because
I’m
the one who turned off the water main last night while
you
were running a bubble bath.” I caught my breath. “What is going on with you? What
are you
doing
, Fantasy?”

“I didn’t run out of there naked, thank you.”

“Did you sleep with that man?”

She stared out a filthy window the size of Macy’s storefront. “No.”

The next ten miles were nothing but bald whitewall tires and hearts turning.

She stared out the filthy window the size of a Macy’s storefront.

“Yes.”

I let my forehead bounce off the horn cap of the steering wheel.

* * *

Twenty silent minutes later, I wrestled the Cadillac to the curb at Ty and Magnolia
Thibodaux’s house. Google Earth didn’t do it justice. It was a three-million-dollar
Garden District home on 3
rd
Street, 7,000 square feet of Crescent City’s finest. Eight bedrooms, and no telling
how many ghosts. It was pink, with twenty lime green shutters, and six iron railed
balconies jutting from six sets of French doors, which Magnolia surely loved.

The Thibodeaux’s street was as good a place as any.

“Look, Davis. It’s my vacation.”

“So?”

The engine wheezed and popped long after I’d turned it off.

“Two weeks of my year, I don’t have to be home,” she said, “cook dinner, do homework,
laundry, or answer to anyone.”

“Do you cheat on Reggie every time you don’t have homework or laundry?”

“
No!
”

“Have you ever cheated on him before?”

We’d never had this talk. There’d never been a reason to have this talk. I wish we
weren’t having it now.

“No.”

“Are you going to cheat on him again? At work?”

“I work all the time, Davis. If I don’t cheat on him at work, when am I supposed to
cheat on him?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of something behind one of the lime
green shuttered windows.

“Aside from the fact that you’re married and have three kids,” I said, “do you realize
what a security risk it is for you to sleep with a guest? Do you even know this man?
Did you bother to check him out at all?”

Her eyes rolled to the battered convertible headliner of Eddie’s disgusting car. “Of
course I did. He keeps his credit cards in alphabetical order.”

“Fascinating. I’m not impressed. Did you bother to run one of the credit cards? See
how many women he might be sleeping with?”

“Davis, that’s just mean.”

Maybe.

“His watch chimes, like a church bell, every hour.”

“Oh, that would have me peeling off my clothes too.”

She had nothing to say.

“What were you thinking?”

She let her head fall back on the seat, stretched her legs, closed her eyes, then
said, “I have no idea. I wasn’t thinking. The chandelier fell on him, we had coffee,
then drinks, then dinner, then—”

I held up a stop sign. I know what comes after dinner. “Does he have a name?”

She looked at me with dreamy eyes. It was all so high school. Except for the fact
she’s married with three kids. “Miles.”

“Miles,” I repeated.

“Miles.”

For how his name came out of her mouth, you’d think she slept with Mr. Darcy Pope
Francis Johnny Depp.

We were in deep trouble. Big trouble, bad trouble, unbelievable trouble.