Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (17 page)

He never made it to New Orleans. He got as far as Biloxi, where he signed on with Coast Electrical Contractors to get the Bellissimo back up and running. After six months, I think we both forgot we were even married. He never really came home until the summons to appear in divorce court finally caught up with him years later, which was around when, some say, I began behaving badly.

Eddie was right about one thing: there was round-the-clock work in the beginning. The problem was he blew his paychecks at the casinos as they reopened. For the next three years he had everyone believing he was still hard at it, showing up in Pine Apple for the occasional Thanksgiving or Fourth of July, only he failed to mention he was hard at draining my investment fund of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, not hard at anything that resembled work. For my part, I knew I didn’t want him back in Pine Apple, so I left well enough alone. As far as the money went, I’d never kept an eye on it, because I’d never had a reason to. The statements were delivered quarterly, electronically, and they never had anything new to say so I didn’t scroll through the seventy pages, just forwarded them to an accountant in Montgomery. I even missed it on the tax returns, with E & J Electric being set up as a C-corporation, there were three hundred pages of IRS forms to dig through, and it never occurred to me to look for the one-liner buried in there showing the taxes due on withdrawals from the investment account. After Eddie had been on the Gulf for almost three years, I accidentally downloaded and opened a statement. Out of boredom, I read it. By that time, the money was long gone.

I had an epic fit that ended with a horrible credit rating, a welcome divorce, and my father saying to me, “Turn in your badge and your gun before someone gets killed.”

*    *    *

“Makers Mark. Make it a double. Neat.”

I gambled in Private Gaming three nights in a row with one eye on the door and one on the game. I hadn’t stopped looking for him, but I hadn’t been listening. So on the fourth night, when I was very close to unclenching, I almost fell in the floor when I heard the biggest mistake of my life order a drink.

He turned the corner and was no more than ten feet away from me before I could even catch my breath. He sat down at the end of the row. There were four empty chairs between us, which weren’t nearly enough. He tossed a pack of Marlboro Reds to the side of the video poker machine.

“Thanks, darlin’,” he said to the waitress as she passed him the drink.

“Cheers,” he finally turned my way, raised his glass, then froze mid-toast.

I suppose I reminded him of someone.

Here we were—Davis and Eddie—and he didn’t even recognize me. Or her. What I’d dreaded for days was over. The whole thing was like having my eyebrows waxed: waiting for it was always the worst part. Eddie Crawford couldn’t put two and two together on his best day jacked up on a massive dose of Adderall. Give him a whiff of whiskey, and he couldn’t tell you his own name. It was borderline comical. He’d obviously had a few, so he couldn’t decide if he was sitting across from his ex-wife, Bianca Sanders, or a perfect stranger.

I closed the space between us, took the glass of whiskey out of his hand, knocked it back in one swallow, took off my right Dolce & Gabbana lace platform pump, then drove the four-inch heel through his left eyeball.

(No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that to a shoe.)

I did, however, take the opportunity to look at Eddie from behind my green contacts, as he tried to get his bearings.
He
knocked back the whiskey in one swallow.

Eddie looks like the cover of a really trashy romance novel (
Rake in My Garden
) and—or—Zorro. That’s the way it’d always been. He was a stray who didn’t belong with the pack, or he could very well be the result of a hospital baby-swap. Mel Crawford was all gangly bones, stooped over and sunken, with a nose that took up most of his face. My former father-in-law always looked as if he’d just been dipped in a vat of boiling oil: the result of a lifetime of standing over a fryer and overserving himself Bombay Sapphire gin. His wife, Bea, who could eat no lean, had a little piggy head set atop a body that could only be replicated with jumbo beach balls, beady brown eyes set alarmingly far apart, and a mouth so small it was amazing all her trash talk escaped it. How they produced Eddie should be the Eighth Wonder of the World. And if it was a hospital faux pas, I’d sure hate to see the baby the Crawfords were
supposed
to take home.

Eddie Crawford was a gorgeous man—short messy black hair, black eyes, and a five o’clock shadow ten minutes after he shaved—easily the prettiest thing to ever hail from Pine Apple, and his good looks were his downfall. He’d leaned on them so hard he hadn’t bothered to develop any other human characteristics.

Those who hadn’t married him twice might say the good stuff came below his chiseled chin, with a dip that was almost a dimple, and while I’d love to disagree, I couldn’t. Eddie Crawford was perfectly proportioned, had a knack for making any manner of clothing look good, carried himself so elegantly you’d think symphony music was playing in his head, and was unbelievably and inexplicably ripped.

With equal airtime, he was as dumb as a rock. It was all over the second he opened his mouth. Which he did.

“You look like two women I know,” he said, “but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” Then he smiled his let’s-get-naked smile.

My heart pounding out of my chest, my face surely the color of a beet, I cut my green eyes at him, cashed out my machine, and got out of there as quickly as I could. If I acknowledged him in any way, I’d blow it all.

This job was supposed to be solving pesky internal problems. They’d really hired me to pretend like I was the boss’s wife, get her boyfriend good and drunk, and find out how they kept filling their wallets. There had to be another way, because this way was never going to work.

*    *    *

I was still shaking when I climbed into the backseat.

“Rough night?” George asked.

I didn’t know how to answer. He pulled out, and we made the commute to Bradley Cole’s in silence. He parked the car, but left it running.

“I need more stuff, George.” I passed him a slip of paper.

He muttered something under his breath, probably because I’d demanded he go to the grocery store for me the day before and I had tampons on the list. I was working day and night, either in my pajamas pulling a slot machine apart and trying like hell to make sense of his son’s notes from years ago, or dressed up like a runway model playing a slot machine. I’d averaged three hours of sleep a night for the week. I couldn’t do it without him, and he knew it. So he could mumble all he wanted. I’d just sat five feet away from my ex-husband, whom I loathed, and I didn’t, at the moment, care.

He pulled reading glasses from his pocket and held the paper close to the glowing dash. “What is a Simonhex?”

“It’s computer software,” I told him. “No telling where you’ll have to go to get it. Just ask around.”

“Is it big?”

“It’ll be a disk, George, or a slip of paper with numbers on it. You can put it in your pocket.”

“What does it do?”

“It disassembles computer programs. It lets you read computer language backwards.”

“Why do you need it?”

“I have a hunch.”

“When?”

“When did I have the hunch?”

“No,” George said. “When do you need the Simonhex?”

“Absolutely as soon as possible.”

“What’s your hunch?”

“My
what
?”

“Never mind.”

The phone woke me at the ungodly hour of six the next morning. He didn’t bother with hello. “They’re telling me you buy it
on
the computer.”

“I can’t. I have to load it manually.” I hung up, rolled over, and went right back to sleep.

I was too groggy to explain to George that downloading it onto my computer, with what I intended to do with it, would nail me if this thing went sour. But I might as well have downloaded it. I could have taken out a personal ad: DAVIS WAY, OF PINE APPLE, ALABAMA, IS USING THIS SOFTWARE TO CRACK THE CODE OF A SLOT MACHINE, WHICH IS TOTALLY AGAINST THE LAW, SO COME AND GET HER.

Because George using my debit card (that I’d forgotten I’d given him for Pop Tarts and peanut butter) was the equivalent of taking out an ad.

“Watch yourself,” Mr. Sanders had said to me. “Because the Gaming Board won’t care what your intent was.”

“I get that.” But did I? Did I really understand the significance of those words?

“Anything that happens on this property is within my jurisdiction,” he said. “But I can’t help you or anyone else if the Gaming Board gets involved. That’s federal stuff, Davis.”

Now I get it.

Boy, do I get it.

FOURTEEN

I hacked into every account Edward Meldrick Crawford ever dreamed of having. Next I hacked into the accounts of Mel and Bea Crawford, then the Mel’s Diner accounts. I ran all three Social Security numbers forwards, backwards, up, down, and diagonally through every database known to man.

Between the three of them, a whopping $38,575 in income was reported to the IRS last year. I ran title searches, checked mortgage applications, and ran all of their credit cards. I looked at every single deposit, withdrawal, and processed check image for the last six months. Mel and Bea bought a new washer and dryer on their MasterCard last September, wrote one substantial check—$2,100 to Earl and Daughters Construction—and financed a new two-vehicle metal carport at Lowe’s. (At 28% interest. Were they completely nuts?) (Yes.)

In the same six-month time period, Eddie made small cash advances and swiped his debit card at department stores, salons, and restaurants. There wasn’t a single Bellissimo hotel charge, but there were multiple charges for the Lucky Tiger, a cheesy run-down excuse of a hotel-casino somewhere nearby. How cheesy? The room charges were $32.88 per night. He had one monthly direct debit: Good Body Gym in Biloxi. $49.99. (Welcome to your thirties, Eddie.) His income was intermittent, and cash, $3500 here, $3700 there, about once a month. It barely covered his living expenses. Where was homeboy getting his gambling bankroll for the Bellissimo?

The big money Eddie won in November was in mayonnaise jars buried somewhere in Mel’s and Bea’s backyard, stuffed in a mattress, or somebody had it wrong, and it wasn’t there to begin with.

*    *    *

I didn’t know who my friends were; I didn’t know who my enemies were. It was hard to know where to turn, so I just turned around. And around. And around. When I was as dizzy as I could possibly be, I decided to take one step, one player, one question, at a time. First, I’d try to see what might be going on with Mr. and Mrs. Richard Sanders.

Natalie was out of the question. Not only did she guard the boss as if he was Fort Knox, the temperature in any room she occupied was a good ten degrees cooler than anywhere else. I wasn’t going to her for Sanders’ Marriage Dirt.

George, as much as he might have liked to help, wasn’t close enough to either Sanders to be of any assistance. Even if he were, clearly, George thought there was a direct link between Bianca and his son’s death, so any objectivity he might have had was out the window.

Teeth and No Hair scared me to death, just the bulk of them. But between the two, I felt like No Hair was the way to go. For reinforcement, or for procrastination, I called my father.

“Pine Apple Police.”

“Daddy, it’s me. Do you still have your notes on the two big guys I’m working with?”

“I do, Sweet Pea, right here.”

I knew exactly what my father was doing two hundred miles away—tapping his right temple with one finger.

“If I needed to confide in one of them, who would you choose?”

“I’d go with Jeremy Coven.”

I knew it. No Hair. (Lots of hair.) “Why?”

“Because Bergman’s a retired football player, and he has priors that have been expunged.”

“I wonder what.”

“You have to assume,” Daddy said, “if he tackled people for a living, then went into security, it would be assault related.”

“Probably,” I said.

Since he clearly wanted to choke me to death so often, it wasn’t a big stretch to think he
had
choked someone to death.

“The other one,” Daddy said, “Coven, is local. They found him at the Mississippi Bureau.” (Of Investigation, he didn’t say.) “And his record is clean as a whistle.”

*    *    *

No Hair was off on Sundays. Teeth, Tuesdays. I waited until Tuesday, after lunch, when No Hair showed up for work, and dug the Bat phone out.

“It’s Davis.”

I heard No Hair suck in a breath like I’d said, “It’s the Devil. Come on down.”

“What do you want?”

“You know this slot machine you guys brought me?”

“What about it?”

“It fell over.”

“It what?”

“It fell over on the floor.”

“Slot machines don’t fall over.”

“This one did.”

“So, you want sympathy? What?”

“No. I need you to help me get it back up.”

“Are you pinned underneath it?”

“No.”

“Then why are you calling me?”

I rolled my eyes. “I changed my mind. I am pinned underneath it.”

No Hair, not one for pleasantries, didn’t say goodbye, or hello either, when he pounded on Bradley Cole’s door twenty minutes later, scaring the bejesus out of me. I practically had to have a stepladder to look through the peephole, and not having one handy, I went ahead and jerked the door open, and there he was. All of him. Filling the doorway. A mouse couldn’t have snuck past, not that it would have had the nerve to.

He surveyed. “A tornado run through here?”

“I resent that,” I said. “I’ll have you know I’m working around the clock.” I turned and looked at Bradley’s place through No Hair’s beady little eyes, and had to admit that carrying out the garbage might not be a bad idea. Or at least corralling it. Considering I didn’t really like Chinese food all that much, there were an inordinate number of take-out boxes on every available surface, and many unavailable surfaces, like the floor. And maybe just a few (hundred) discarded articles of clothing. I was having a little dust problem, too, because I’d doodled Bradley Cole’s name in it on the entryway table, and No Hair was trying to read it. I kind of sat on it and scooted. Now I had dust all over my butt. Embarrassing.