DOUBLE MINT (3 page)

Fantasy patted his knee.

“It’ll be okay, sweetie.”

Bradley, at the moment, did not care. He may never have a moment when he cared about
Sweetie’s quarters.

“Enough, please.”

We all cleared our throats and sat up straighter.

Bradley walked a slow circle around our crack team. “The conference starts tomorrow.
The vault has been compromised. Holder Darby is gone, Richard is gone, and Jeremy
is gone. It’s just us, and it’s up to us to at least keep the doors open.” We nodded.
Yes yes yes. “I need you three to focus. Starting now.”

I could focus until I had a migraine and still not know where Holder Darby had run
off to, but we knew where Richard Sanders, who owns the Bellissimo, and my immediate
supervisor No Hair, who others call Jeremy Covey, were. They had been on assignment
all summer at the site of our new sister casino, the Jolie. Which left us in charge
of the Bellissimo. Which was along the lines of the fox guarding the henhouse.

“We have two people to find,” Bradley (the fox) said. “Holder Darby and the person
who made off with four million dollars in platinum from the vault.”

“Bradley.”

He stopped behind my chair, a purple pleather recliner. I tipped my head back and
looked up. He’s just over six feet, with dusty blonde hair he keeps short, metallic
green eyes, perfect teeth, a dip in the middle of his chest I can’t leave alone, built
like a Major League pitcher, and he rocks his lawyer clothes. I guess they’re casino
manager clothes now, today a white oxford shirt, yellow tie with tiny Carolina blue
emblems, and dark gray gabardine pinstripe pants. His sleeves were rolled up, his
tie tossed over his left shoulder. “We know exactly who took the platinum.”

“Oh, shit, not this again.” Fantasy rolled her whole head. “There goes my vacation.”

“I am not going back to that woman’s house,” Baylor said. “That nutjob beat me with
an umbrella.”

Bradley’s grip tightened on my chair.

“When and why were you at her house, Baylor?”

I shot Baylor a do-not-get-me-in-trouble-with-my-husband look.

“My bad.” Baylor surrendered. “I’ve never been beaten with an umbrella.”

“Davis?”

“Bradley I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

My husband, who just turned thirty-six, has been in the gaming industry his entire
professional life, but from a legal perspective, which is very different from where
he is now, in the trenches, the stakes higher, and the pressure tenfold. It was beginning
to show in the corners of his eyes, and he hadn’t slept well since we married, which
isn’t about being married to me, but a combination of the job and where we live. His
job is a pressure cooker, and even that isn’t so much about the day-to-day running
of an empire; it’s more about his ridiculously large salary. A big-money job comes
with a big responsibility to earn out your big paycheck. While making the big bucks,
he was still on the Bellissimo learning curve, a ride, I’m afraid, that never ends.
It’s a laugh a minute around here, with each hair-raising adventure leaving us nowhere
near prepared for the next. It’s CasinoLand. You never know what will happen.

Bradley, after giving us a round of the suspicious eyeball, thankfully, let it go.
He had bigger things to worry about than cats, collectible quarters, and umbrellas.
He reclaimed his spot on his black velvet throne and began barking orders. Get in
Holder’s office, go back to her house, find her. Keep up with the convention, don’t
drop that million-dollar-revenue ball, and before this day is out, turn all our energies
to tracking the platinum. He was at the end of the long list of impossible tasks when
the cat scared us all to death by jumping onto his lap. It pawed around for a minute,
made two circles, then settled. Bradley held his hands up while the cat did its dance.

“That is one ugly cat you got there, Davis. Its nose is smashed.”

“Fantasy.” Baylor was offended. “It’s a Persian cat. It’s supposed to look that way.”

“That is not my cat.”

Not My Cat was rubbing all over my husband.

“You’re stuck with that cat, Davis,” Baylor said. “He likes it here.”

“That’s impossible, Baylor. No one likes it here.”

Three

It was the collapse of the oil industry in the mid ’80s that did Biloxi in. Things
weren’t great before, but they tumbled fast and hard after. What little oil money
that had been sneaking Biloxi’s way from neighboring Louisiana, and one oily step
farther, Texas, mostly by way of shipbuilding and refining, dried up and left Biloxi
in a devastating lurch. By 1992, when dockside gambling was approved for the distressed
coast of Mississippi, the city was deep in financial ruin, the infrastructure deplorable,
the whole place on the verge of implosion. That it was a coastal community was no
help, Biloxi being where the Gulf of Mexico took its nap—the beach manmade and neglected,
the water brown and polluted, and not even a ripple in the water, much less a wave.
With double-digit unemployment and poverty on every corner, there was a mass exodus
for greener pastures. Biloxi hadn’t repaired a road or built a new school in forty
years. A new home hadn’t been built in forty-one.

So when Salvatore Casimiro—second generation Italian immigrant with one wife, three
mistresses, half of Capitol Hill in his back pocket, four rotten kids, and the seven
largest and most profitable properties on the Las Vegas Strip—decided to spread his
wings and build a gambling destination in the South, mostly because he needed somewhere
to park his daughter Bianca and her new husband Richard, his casino Golden Boy who
he’d somehow roped into marrying his narcissistic, amoral, and possibly manic daughter,
he knew he’d be building residences too. The first for his son-in-law. There was absolutely
nowhere to live in or around Biloxi. The closest thing to civilization, and for all
he knew, indoor plumbing, was ninety miles west in New Orleans.

He built a penthouse mansion on the whole top floor of his Gulf Coast project, the
Bellissimo Resort and Casino, the tallest building (to this day) in the state of Mississippi,
and, at the time, the largest hotel-casino outside of Vegas proper. He hoped to ship
his only daughter to Biloxi and keep her in Biloxi. For as long as they all shall
live.

Just below her sprawling manor, he split the floor into two mini mansions. The first
for the casino’s future general manager, because it would surely take a war chest
salary plus a strong residential incentive to find a manager worth his salt who’d
be willing to move to Biloxi, and the second, twelve-thousand square feet of celebrity
accommodations—four bedroom suites, a dining room for twenty, a personal gym, two
pools, sweeping terrace gardens—in hopes of luring A-list entertainers to South, Nowhere.
Jay Leno and the like. And that’s where my new husband and I live now, in the other
mini mansion, the casino manager’s residence, down the hall from Jay’s place. Directly
beneath narcissistic, amoral, and possibly manic Bianca Casimiro Sanders.

We hated it.

The Bellissimo’s Casino Manager Residence was decorated by its first residents at
the tail end of the three-year resort construction in 1996, and no one had touched
it since. I call it the Big Easy Flea Market. The interior was designed by the Bellissimo’s
first casino manager, Ty Thibodeaux, or rather by his wife Magnolia, a Cajun Louisiana
crawfish-loving beignet-addicted nutcase. Every stick of furniture came over with
the original French settlers and somehow Magnolia had managed to round it all up and
drag it here. The walls were laden throughout with slabs of rusty flaking ornamental
iron, pieced together gates and fences she’d probably swiped in the dark of night
from crypts and mausoleums. They were welded together and everywhere, creating fake
indoor Bourbon Street balconies all through the residence, and on every fake balcony,
somewhere, was Jesus Christ on the cross. Big, little, dangling, mounted, bronze,
silver, wood, three glow-in-the-dark, all with crowns of thorns and nails in the bloody
feet. They were all over the place. And they were all looking up, to the ceilings
we didn’t have.

The tops of the rooms were gilded crown molding, even in the five bathrooms, so ornate
and sprawling they bumped into equally overdone carved ceiling medallions, there to
enhance the many chandeliers. The casino manager’s residence had seventeen tacky chandeliers,
one jazz themed and made entirely of tarnished brass trombones and saxophones, all
dripping in brightly colored crystals, mini voodoo skulls, or Mardi Gras memorabilia.

The color scheme of our new home was purple, pink, blue, green, yellow, black, red,
gold, and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese orange. There were blooming magnolias everywhere—oils
of magnolias on the walls, magnolias on each of the six thousand kitchen backsplash
tiles, several magnolia-themed sofas, magnolia bath towels and beddings, wool rugs
covered in creeping magnolia designs, and a huge silk magnolia tree in the foyer.

We could make a fortune charging admission and giving tours.

The best part? It’s haunted. The whole place. I swear to you, there are ghosts and
ghouls and goblins in every corner of the casino manager’s residence. Every single
day is Halloween. Neither I nor Bradley could get a decent night’s sleep. I could
barely eat in the middle of all this Creole mess. And I wouldn’t even
think
of conceiving a child in this Spook-Spook Bayou Yard Sale.

One person who absolutely loved it? My grandmother.

One thing that wouldn’t stop breaking since the day we moved in? The seventy-two cubic
foot red refrigerator. In what universe do two people need a refrigerator that large?
There’s no doubt in my mind Magnolia Thibodeaux kept whole animal carcasses in it
and used them for jambalaya sacrifice voodoo ceremonies. Most likely in my bedroom.

Now that I lived at the Bellissimo, there was no “I’m going to run to the store.”
Because of my Super Secret Spy status, I had to completely disguise myself to walk
out the front door. More often than not, I went Unabomber, hoodie and dark glasses.
Every five or six days, I made my escape using service elevators and stairwells. I
hiked miles to my car, uphill several ways, in the vendor-only lot behind receiving.
I drove to the Winn Dixie on Pass Road and bought a buggy full of comfort food. I
retraced my steps, this time schlepping groceries on a luggage cart up to the twenty-ninth
floor Who Dat Haunted Mansion, then put them away, only to reach for the milk the
next morning and it be room temperature, the refrigerator broken again.

There wasn’t a department within the Bellissimo that could help. Not engineering,
not maintenance, not the heat and air guys. No one at the Bellissimo really knew if
the new casino manager’s wife lived here or not. They’d never seen her; they’d never
set foot in the new casino manager’s home. Because the new casino manager’s wife worked
undercover. To let an employee in the front door (a misty beveled glass tarnished
copper number wide enough to drive a car through) would be to blow my cover. So I
had to call Sears, like everyone else.

“You say you live where, lady?”

“At the Bellissimo. The twenty-ninth floor.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“I am not.”

“Okay, here it is, and the computer says we sent someone to fix it two weeks ago.”

“It’s broken again.”

“There’s actually fourteen pages of repairs here, lady.”

A sad fact I was well aware of.

“Maybe it’s time for you to think about a new refrigerator.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? We couldn’t get the old refrigerator
out
to put a new one
in
.

A month into our marriage and new living quarters, after six visits with six different
Sears repairmen and no luck, I dragged Bradley into it. I hid in the voodoo pantry,
so deep, dark, and cavernous, I’m positive this is where Magnolia kept the dead bodies,
while he met with the Sears appliance service manager and a man from the Bellissimo
engineering department named Ding Ding. (I wish I were kidding.) (Surely to one of
the Jesuses it was just a nickname.)

“Mr. Cole, I don’t know how they ever got this refrigerator in here, but I can assure
you, we can’t get it out without a crane and tearing down a wall or two. If this refrigerator
comes out whole, it’ll have to go down the side of the building. The freight elevators
can’t even hold the
weight
.”

“Then you’re going to have to repair it.”

“I’m telling you, Mr. Cole, we’re at our wits’ end with this monster.” I heard him
tap on the blood red doors. (The refrigerator has four doors. Four. All red.) “For
one, it’s a dinosaur. I was in first grade when this thing was built. It’s a Jenn-Air
custom, we can’t find anyone who knows a thing about it, and there’s not parts for
it or a manual on it, and we’ve done just about everything we can possibly do.”

“And you can’t get it out?”

“You see that?” Ding Ding pointed to the top of the refrigerator, where it disappeared
into the ceiling. “The problem is none of the wiring or plumbing is behind the refrigerator.
Or even below it. It’s all up top. The only way to get it out is to come down through
the ceiling.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Well, we can’t. We’re right below Mrs. Sanders’s closet. I’ve already tried that
route. I filled out the paperwork and my boss shot back that he didn’t care what kind
of repairs were needed below the Sanders’s residence, the wife would
never
go for it, and we needed to figure something else out.”

Bianca Sanders couldn’t care less if we had a refrigerator or not. I could have told
Ding Ding that.

“Now, if you could move this saint somebody,” Ding Ding said.

Yes. In my kitchen, across from a massive gold-inlaid island was a five-foot-tall
garden angel on a two-foot cement cube base, with a wing span of four feet, made of
moldy cast resin, and, bonus, it was a fountain. It cried black tears that pooled
into its own hands. When we’d been married two weeks, I spent my first night alone
here. On my way to refill my glass of wine, I bumped into the angel. Barely bumped,
like grazing the sofa or catching the corner of the bed. Boom. I went down—spread
eagle on the floor, passed out, and somehow on the way down, I cracked my head open.
That angel knocked me flat on the ground. Probably with its moldy breath. I came to
later with a bloody line across my forehead and blood in the middle of both of my
palms.

Like Jesus.

“’Cause there’s plumbing behind this statue, see?” Ding Ding told him. “And we can
get a new refrigerator here.”

There were four thousand places to put a new refrigerator in the Fat Tuesday Fort.
Every time we were fed up and ready to order one and plug it up in our bedroom, or
beside the television, or in one of the many powder rooms, we tried one more time
to repair the big red devil, the whole time hoping against hope we’d get to move back
to our condo where we had a perfectly wonderful and working refrigerator, leaving
this place as we found it. (Haunted.)

“I think we have quite enough refrigerator as it is,” Bradley said, “and I don’t care
if we have to rebuild every motor in it, I need this refrigerator working. Understand?”

“You got it, Mr. Cole.”

It had been a full eight months since that day and the refrigerator wasn’t fixed yet.
It was an ongoing problem, like the ridiculous décor of my home was a problem, the
ghosts, good grief, the ghosts were a problem, but my biggest problem lately was Magnolia
Thibodeaux.

Several weeks ago, I ran around shaking the fake magnolia trees looking for the real
one. I came in from work one day and the whole place was blooming. When in bloom,
magnolias produce an unmistakable cloying sticky sweetness, with a wisp of pepper
and citrusy undertones, like lemon or grapefruit. There’s no missing it and I smelled
it. It happened again a few days later. About the same time, I began noticing things
missing—a voodoo doll here, a Jesus there—and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind Magnolia
Thibodeaux had been sneaking in here. Because she probably still has a key and she’s
one of two people, her husband being the other, who know the twenty-ninth floor setup
well enough to sneak past the surveillance cameras on their way in and out. She was
so slippery, the cameras couldn’t catch her and neither could I. In the past month,
I knew for a fact she’d been here no less than five times. I was on the verge of booby
traps.

I’d called her. She didn’t answer, so I left a nice message. “Mrs. Thibodeaux, I know
you’ve been here and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me the next time you need in.
I’ll be happy to help you with anything. I mean it, Mrs. Thibodeaux, anything you
need or want out of the residence.”

I called again the next week. “Magnolia. I know you’ve been here again. Please give
me a call.”

I called the next week too. “Look, lady. I’m not going to put up with this.”

It happened again about ten days ago. I smelled her all over my house. “Magnolia,
I’m telling you, I’m going to catch you running in and out of here like you still
live here and you’re going to be sorry. It’s called breaking and entering.”

Calling her wasn’t doing any good, so I gathered up a load of her Bourbon Street baubles
and had Baylor deliver it to her. He took Jesuses, ceramic alligator busts, Mardi
Gras beads, eyes of newts, everything that wasn’t nailed down. Maybe what she wanted
was in there. It also cleared out one percent of her jambalaya junk. I sent six-foot-tall
two-hundred-pound Baylor with a box stuffed full and a dire warning: If what you’re
looking for isn’t in here, too bad. Break into my home again and I’m calling the police.
Magnolia beat Baylor up with an umbrella and told him to stay off her property. Then
lobbed Jesuses at him. The worst was, I couldn’t get anyone to believe me. My immediate
supervisor, No Hair, widely addressed as Jeremy Covey, didn’t believe me.

“She is not sneaking into your house, Davis.”

“Yes, No Hair, she is.”