Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (11 page)

I didn’t sit down so much as fall down on the hard cold ground. I’m pretty sure I still hadn’t taken a breath.

The thing about her husband, Richard Sanders, is that he  was so perfectly accidental, as if no part of what made him tick was an effort. His wife Bianca Casimiro Sanders, the woman in front of me, was the opposite. Her jaw, a perfect replica of mine, was set in stone. Her entourage, a black-suited human cocoon, gave her two feet all the way around and looked straight ahead or at the ground, not at her.

And get this: to compensate for her stature, which was within a whisper of my own, she was wearing what had to be eight-inch heels. Stilettos peeked out from under the pelts of several hundred small animals sacrificed, I bet, just for her. Her blonde twist-up do was pulled back so severely it made
my
temples hurt.

The ocean quieted, the air stood still, and traffic at the VIP entrance, creature and otherwise, came to a dead standstill as her team escorted her to a black stretch limo. A Louis Vuitton trunk was carefully loaded into the back, accompanied by several matching bags.

Mrs. Sanders was on the move, and so, apparently, was my driver.

Of all things, George, who I would swear hadn’t gone anywhere the entire month of January except when I begged him to, took off after the limo. All kinds of questions raced through my mind. Was George some sort of covert tail on the boss’s wife? Was
she
the reason he parked three blocks away from everything? Another huge question: How in hell was I supposed to go apartment hunting without my driver? I can barely navigate the four roads in Pine Apple after having trod them my entire life. If left on my own here, I’d wind up in Texas by the end of the day.

I was having trouble processing it all, so I stayed on the cold hard ground watching the entourage pull out, including my ride, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal, all the while contemplating the largest curiosity of them all: was I a stunt double (whammy!) for the boss’s wife?

“Davis.”

I screamed.

Natalie’s voice was cool. “I thought we said Wednesday.”

I stammered a few syllables that came out, “Ya, ya, daaa.”

“Get your things,” she said. “Come with me.”

*    *    *

“Do whatever you want, Davis.”

Natalie wasn’t very happy with me.

“But don’t ask for a housing allowance.”

She poured herself a cup of coffee. She didn’t offer me one.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the executive-apartment offer, Natalie,” I lied, “it’s that, you know,” I stumbled around, “the ocean and all. I’d like to be closer in.” And have a little privacy, I didn’t say.

“It’s February, Davis. Not exactly ocean weather, and we call it the Gulf. Not the ‘ocean.’”

We had a little stare off, the stiff-smile variety.

“If I were you,” she said, “I’d think carefully before signing a lease.”

Funny she hadn’t had any advice for me when she’d given me three seconds to sign the encyclopedia she called an employment agreement. “I’ll keep that in mind, Natalie. Thanks.”

“Do that.” She drummed her fingers on her desk with one hand and reached for her coffee with the other.  “As long as you’re here,” she said, “you might as well get to work.” She pulled a file from somewhere behind her desk, opened it, and a photograph of a man appeared. “The husband, Hank, is a slot tech.”

She seemed rattled, jumpy, not her usual perky self, and that was in addition to being irritated at me. I think she hadn’t wanted me to know just yet that I was a dead ringer for the boss’s wife.

“What’s a slot tech?”

“Technician. He repairs and maintains slot machines.”

“And the wife?” I asked.

“She’s a casino host. Beth Dunn. She was here first. He came onboard five or six months later. They were married a year after that. And now we’re six years down the road.”

“What’s the problem?”

Nattie reached up and pushed hair out of her eyes. “Her clients win too much money.”

“How much?”

“A better way to put it might be that an unusually high percentage of her clients don’t ever lose.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “What else do you already know?”

“Well, just like with the room safes, we looked into it. We assigned surveillance to the Dunns, but that’s tricky. When we shadow one of our own, they figure it out or the guy next to them does, which gives them time to stop whatever they’re doing and cover their tracks on anything they’ve already done. We wasted a hundred security hours on the Dunns and came up with nothing. So we put our internal auditors to work on it, and they came back agreeing that a high percentage of her clients had unusually profitable play, but nothing jumped out at them.” Natalie shrugged. “So let’s get you in there, Davis. Let’s see what you can dig up.”

This could go one of several ways. I sure hoped it didn’t go the slot technician way. I could barely change a light bulb.

Reading my mind, Nattie said, “Our plan was to register you as one of Beth’s players, but with Heidi Dupree’s exit, there’s a seat to fill at her elbow.”

I nodded along with it all, catching every tenth word: auditors, technicians, elbows.

“I’ll get the paperwork run through HR,” she said, “and you be here at seven-thirty
Wednesday
morning.” She shot me a look. I crawled under the chair.

“Any ideas about where you’re going to set up camp?” she asked.

“I’ll get a newspaper and figure something out.” I tucked the two files into my gigantic tote bag and stood.

“Let me know where you’ll be and I’ll have some things delivered.”

The most promising thing I’d heard all morning. “Oh, hey, Natalie.” I turned at the door.

She looked up.

“What’s the deal with Mrs. Sanders?”

One of her eyebrows rose. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? Isn’t it obvious?”

The other eyebrow rose. “I’ll see you Wednesday morning, Davis.”

I stumbled out mentally checking box four (times this job has sent me reeling) and calculating my debt against my paycheck (still the largest reel).

I couldn’t quit just yet.

*    *    *

I had to have somewhere to sleep. And now I knew I looked just like the boss’s wife, I needed something furnished, because I had no intention of sticking around long enough to find out why. There were exactly three classified ads for furnished rentals: one had to be the EconoLodge, the word kitchenette was in there, another must have been a penthouse with twelve bedrooms and four butlers, and there was one in the middle, a one-bedroom terrace condo, Gulf view, available for a six-month sublease at a reasonable price. Perfect.

Pushing my laptop aside, waving the waitress and her carafe of blistered coffee away, I flipped open my cell phone and dialed the number.

After three rings, a female answered. “Grand Palace Casino. Mr. Cole’s office.”

Of course, it would be a casino. This city was Little Vegas. “I’m calling about the condo,” I said.

Turns out, Bradley Cole was the lead of three in-house attorneys at Grand Palace.

“Wow,” I was duly impressed. “Very cool.”

“It’s really pretty dry stuff, Miss Way,” the secretary explained. “About once a week, someone walks in, pulls a banana peel out of their pocket, then hits us with a slip and fall lawsuit. Otherwise, it’s just contracts.”

“Who would ever put a banana peel in their
pocket
?” I asked.

“We’re in the middle of one right now,” she said, “in which a patron claims he was poisoned by the landscaping.”

“How so?”

“He ate a bunch of trumpet lilies out front and they made him sick.”

“Well, duh.”

Like the Bellissimo, the Grand Palace’s parent company was in Las Vegas, and Mr. Cole, according to Chatty Cathy, was there, negotiating something or another, and the lease on the condo was a one-shot deal for six months only. Exactly what I was looking for.

The casino was easy enough to find (curses on you, George), because it was on the same strip as the Bellissimo, only several miles east and tucked back off the road. A nice place, the Palace: low-key, very little neon, no more than seven or eight stories high, but on almost as much property as the Bellissimo. Three hundred and eighty guest rooms to the Bellissimo’s sixteen hundred. I’d call it a boutique gambling resort. It had an itty-bitty casino floor that catered to high-rolling table players, lots of dimly lit private gaming venues off that, and according to their website, not to mention the lobby that looked like a Pro Shop, had some major golf going on.

I followed Bradley Cole’s secretary’s assistant to the condo, so I didn’t get lost. Her job must have been to safety-sample every morsel of food the kitchens prepared and log it for future food-poisoning claims—“It couldn’t have made you sick. I ate three pounds of it and I was fine” —because she was one extra-large girl, about the size and shape of Teeth. If she hadn’t had relatively small teeth, I’d swear they were siblings.

She eyed me. “You don’t take up much space, do you?”

I showed her
my
teeth.

“I got a leg bigger than you.”

One step into the quiet condo and I said, “I’ll take it.”

After writing a check for the first and last month’s rent, I tore it off and passed it over, and with it, I added six months to my ninety days.

“Your name is Davis
Way
?” she looked up. “Like a
place
?”

I flashed my teeth again.

“And there’s actually a city called Pine
Apple
?”

I should get married again, and quickly. Or at least change my address.

TEN

I married Eddie the first time because I was pregnant.

My mother, who was driving my life anyway, had the whole thing done in less than two weeks. The times I opened my mouth to protest, I either lost my nerve or my breakfast. I sloshed to the police station one day in monsoon rains to confess all to my daddy (who couldn’t even look at me), but the note on the door—even his handwriting looked heartbroken—said he was out on a deer-in-the-Wilson’s-kitchen-again call. The thought of which made me lose my lunch.

The problems with the program were too numerous to list. There aren’t sixteen-year-olds anywhere, under any circumstances, who have any business being married, and Eddie and I topped that list, mostly because it wasn’t his baby. I, of course, knew it. He, genius that he was, suspected it—and here’s how stupid he is—because we’d never had sex. He was too busy enjoying all the attention to admit that all we’d done in his dumb truck was drink Bud Light and listen to Nine Inch Nails. And let’s not forget that I really didn’t
like
Eddie, on any level. I was only hanging out with him so that no one would suspect who I was really hanging out with.

I married Eddie at sixteen out of fear. I married him ten years later out of guilt, boredom, and pheromones. Double Whammy.

Luckily, the first time around, I had an almost clear-thinking brand-new adult in whom I could confide, whom I trusted, and who had a vested interest. The vested-interest part was because it was his baby.

Jason Wells, recent college graduate and the most exciting thing that ever happened at Pine Apple High School, taught me way more than History.

“You still haven’t had sex with him?” Mr. Wells took a sick day ten days into my marriage and picked me up behind Mel and Bea Crawford’s double-wide, my terrifying new home. “Isn’t your plan to make him think it’s his baby?”

“I can’t have
sex
with him!” I cried. I sobbed. I wept. “He’s a
freak
! I don’t think I could have sex with him if someone held a
gun
to my head!” I was shrieking. “And I thought he
was
going to shoot me the other day because I used his stupid hair brush. And then I got
sick
!

“You’re just nauseated because it’s the first trimester, Davis.”

“You’re damn right I’m nauseated!”

With Mr. Wells’ help, I ran away. (“Please stop calling me Mr. Wells, Davis.”)

I didn’t have to be emancipated from my parents, because that had effectively happened when my mother signed off on the marriage license. I didn’t have to get a divorce; a mail-order annulment was all that was necessary, considering the marriage hadn’t been consummated. I didn’t have to scrape up the money to move into the Methodist Maternity Home in Birmingham, because Mr. Wells handled that. And I didn’t have to meet the sweet couple from Tennessee who adopted the seven-pound six-ounce baby girl I delivered, but I wanted to. I wanted to see the people who would raise my child.

I cried. They cried. We all cried.

I was allowed an hour alone with the tiny creature who tore out of me, and I told her everything I knew. The other fifty-five minutes, I sang to her, wiping my tears off her tiny face.

Mr. Wells deposited five hundred dollars in a checking account for me. I was seventeen years old, five days postpartum, standing on the steps of the maternity home, hugging my very pregnant housemates goodbye. To my name I had a General Education Diploma, two sweatshirts, one pair of extremely tight jeans, the five hundred dollars, and a bunch of literature on birth control. As I started down the concrete steps, crying
again
, my daddy pulled up in his patrol car.

Finally, I found my voice. “How did you know, Daddy?”

“I got a very nice letter, Punkin.”

“From the nurses here?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you call?”

He swallowed hard before he spoke. “You have to live with your decision for the rest of your life, Sweet Pea.” My daddy’s chin quivered. “I couldn’t interfere.”

“What about Mother?” I asked.

Daddy stared at the road ahead.

“We’re not going home, are we?”

Instead of answering, he took a right. Pine Apple, it would seem, would have been a wrong.

“Daddy,” I said, “tell me something about home. Anything.”