Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (24 page)

I drove the Bug to work, took note of George’s absence, parked in the empty vendor lot, tiptoed past dark offices, took the stairs down two flights, walked four miles uphill in the snow, crossed a desert, and finally I was pressing the keypad outside Teeth and No Hair’s cave. Catching my breath from the hike, I wondered again why their offices were so utterly removed from every other venue on this property, how far I was from any manner of natural light, and what in the world that smell was.

I couldn’t locate a light switch to save my life, so using the penlight on my keychain, I batted my way to No Hair’s door, stepped in his cubicle, and settled in behind his desk. The air was almost too thick to breathe. They needed potpourri, a very large fan, and lamps.

It took no time at all to hack his computer. He’d given me the codes to the door and his desk: four, five, six, seven, and five, six, seven, eight. Getting to the welcome screen of No Hair’s computer was, naturally, six, seven, eight, nine. (He should know better. If I stumbled across an ATM card in his desk, I could drain his bank accounts.) The elevator pass was right where he’d said it would be.

Now that I had the glow of the computer monitor to work by, I snooped through the whole desk, finding nothing all that interesting, except for the fact that the lower right desk drawer was locked. That must be where the interesting stuff was. I dug around for the key, and it didn’t immediately present itself. I’d have picked the lock, but didn’t want to take the time.

It took forever to find the surveillance feed of Eddie the Ass winning the big money, and as soon as I did, I minimized it. I had other things to see first; I needed to know what had gone down before the win.

The facial-recognition software wasn’t altogether user friendly, or I wasn’t very good at it, because I couldn’t find film of Eddie Crawford and Bianca Casimiro Sanders together. After three searches, I decided that was because there wasn’t any. I gave him no credit for that, because they didn’t pass out judiciousness in Pine Apple; had it been up to him, there would be a full-length movie, scene after scene of them exiting broom closets still panting, zipping, and tucking. I had to assume that either she was an expert adulteress who knew how to stay out of the camera’s eye, or the evidence of the two of them together had been deleted from the system for the obvious reason: who wants a pissed-off boss? There was another possibility, but it was a stretch: maybe there was no footage of them together because The Affair was part of the scam. Maybe they were just business partners—not bed buddies. She was no saint, by her own husband’s admission, and yes, random women did fall into Eddie’s bed. Often. Likewise, Eddie was a smooth talker. And there was no denying Eddie looked good. Eddie would probably be a good-looking sixty-year-old, but I still couldn’t see it. This woman was way too far out of Eddie Crawford’s league. This woman was out of her own league.

I searched them separately, and retrieved enough of that to keep me glued to the screen for the next six weeks. For the fun of it, or to answer the nagging question of where Eddie got his gambling money, or to tie up loose ends, I minimized all the footage of Bianca and searched Beth Dunn, Eddie’s casino host. I asked the computer to show me interaction between Beth and Eddie. It took less than five minutes to see who was footing his gambling bill, and the steam rising off the computer monitor left no doubt in my mind that he wasn’t trading money for the rouge cashout tickets, he was trading favors of the more personal nature.

I didn’t need or want to know another thing about Eddie, so I skipped to Bianca, fast-forwarding through miles of feed that dated back years.

The creepiest part was that looking at her was like looking in a mirror. There was, between us, almost a ten-year age difference, but for whatever reasons, probably Botoxish reasons, we didn’t look a day apart.

Oh, for our bank balances to be twins.

She
never
smiled. She had a dead set to her jaw, and she wore oversized sunglasses indoors and out, rain or shine, so I wasn’t treated to her steely stare but a few times. She didn’t walk so much as she marched, and she was impatient, not pushing an elevator button once, but angrily trying to poke it through the panel. She slammed doors, she chewed food in a circular motion, she pressed against her bejeweled knuckles when forced to pretend she was listening to someone speak, and smoked long skinny cigarettes when she played the Double Whammy Deuces behind the waterfall. She shook her finger in people’s faces—the spa staff, housekeepers, her son’s nanny, and several times in the video histories, at her husband.

The woman dressed impeccably, and almost always in head-to-toe black. She could open a store with her jewelry. She could open a mall with her luggage and furs. I counted six different animal pelts on her just last month. She was in town four days, and managed to be seen in six different furs. Cruella.

The film had date and time stamps, and all told, it looked like Bianca spent an average of three to four weeks a year in Biloxi. Clips of her from June of last year (furless) were immediately followed by recordings from October (swathed in fur) with nothing in between. Where was this woman when she wasn’t here? There wasn’t one scrap of evidence she’d been within ten feet of her son in any venue on the property other than, assumedly, their private residence, which wasn’t a viewing option.

Disturbingly enough, there was one constant: when she arrived or departed, which is about all she did, somewhere in the grainy background was my driver, George.

Zooming in on the bank of machines that had broken my heart last night, I queued them for sunrise on the day of Eddie’s win, and almost fell asleep watching nothing. For the first three hours of tape, it was like staring at a still life, even though I had it running at warp speed. Between ten and eleven, a handful of people passed by the machines, mostly Bellissimo employees, one pushing a vacuum cleaner, and then nothing until three o’clock, when Hollywood strolled by. I rewound and watched an attendant wiping down the fronts of the machines at three-thirty that afternoon, but he didn’t do anything but polish away fingerprints that most likely weren’t there, because no one had touched them. Not one of the people who had been near the machines that day had taken the batteries out, pulled a plug, or whipped out a ray gun and zapped them. Then, at four twenty-seven in the afternoon, Bianca Casimiro Sanders waltzed in. I almost fell out of No Hair’s chair. I knew she was in on it, but I never expected to see the elusive Mrs. Sanders at the scene of the crime.

She sat down at the fourth machine; I could see the small LCD display with the scrolling progressive total above the machine in the background. She tipped her chin Hollywood’s way to grace him with a smile, and he appeared nervous on the small screen, stiff and fidgety without a clue as to what to do with his hands. She removed her dark glasses, hooking them in the already-plunging neckline of her black top, then looked straight into the camera. I jerked away from the screen and screamed out loud. The glint reflecting off her icy green eyes was trained directly at me, and it was a full-out threat:
Watch this and you’ll be sorry
.

A waitress walked up with a tall drink, passing it to the Las Vegas princess, and when Bianca went to set it down, she missed. I watched the tape seven or eight times, slowing it to a crawl, and watched, frame by frame from every perspective offered, as she intentionally dumped the drink between video poker machines four and five.

Employees rushed to her aid from every camera angle. The screen was so full of attempts to keep her dry, with so many backs, rear ends, and arms flying in every direction possible, their collective life’s missions redirected to sparing Bianca Casimiro Sanders any contact with moisture. Once the clean-up was complete, the waitress stepped back into the frame with a replacement drink, this one going straight to Bianca’s dermal-filler-enhanced lips.

So much went on in such a short period of time that the first four times I watched it, I missed the LCD display and the slot machine lights blinking. When I finally caught it, the flash was so fast I couldn’t even get a time on it. They went down, then powered back up in a split-second, just like Dale Boy said they would. If you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for, there was no doubt you’d miss it. Just like my video-poker buddies, sisters Mary and Maxine, had told me. “The whole game goes black for a second,” Maxine had said, “then it pulls right back up. It’s real quick.”

I will be damned. The lower-stakes version of this game, the one Mr. Sanders and Natalie sent me to my first day on the job, was rigged, too. The paydays were timed with the easily obtained Winner Winner Chicken Dinner advice, so no one suspected. It paid roughly $8000 every three weeks to a good-looking man named Eddie. But good-looking Eddie was only depositing half of the win into his checking account. What else did Mary and Maxine tell me? Who else was there every time it happened?

Say it ain’t so.

I don’t know how long I sat there before I pushed the play button and started the video feed again.

Bianca Casimiro Sanders stood. Six Bellissimo employees, including Hollywood, cleared a path for her. She walked away without ever playing. She’d been there eight minutes total, just long enough to dump a drink. Ten minutes later, Eddie Crawford walked up.

Showtime.

I split the screen into quads, and watched him win from four different vantage points. I was glad I’d skipped breakfast.

He chose a machine, ninth in the row of ten, fed it two thousand dollars in hundreds, and began playing, but only betting one credit. I wondered why he wasn’t playing all five credits, because even I knew you didn’t get a shot at the whammy feature unless you placed a full bet. No one seemed to pay a bit of attention to him, the staff, I bet, still reeling after the soggy encounter with the boss’s wife.

On his sixth try, Eddie was dealt a straight, winning twenty-five credits, at which point he doubled his bet to two credits. Ten hands later he lined up eights, and the four of a kind paid him forty credits, then he began playing the maximum bet, five credits. After a dozen hands, he glanced at his watch. I zoomed in on it. A Cartier. With diamonds instead of numbers. That good-for-nothing bastard. After another three hands, he admired his diamonds again, at length, as if he were counting. I checked the time, since he seemed to be so interested in it. He’d been playing almost thirty minutes; it had been thirty-seven minutes since the game had reset itself after its cocktail.

Next, nothing I could see about the game prompting it, he dropped back down to a one-credit bet. He hit nothing: he won nothing. He ran his palms down the length of his thighs, and looked around. His shoulders rose as he took a deep breath, and he very deliberately placed a two-credit bet, poking the machine’s button slowly, as if he didn’t want to screw it up. Nothing. He collapsed against the chair back and his left hand rose to rub his forehead, a familiar (and unwelcome) Eddie tick that made me cringe a little. He rubbed his hands together, like
here we go,
and pushed the Bet One Credit button three times for his next hand. He was dealt two fours, he held them, but didn’t manage another one on his second draw, losing that hand as well. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when he placed a four-credit bet next, was dealt a soup hand (a little bit of everything), and lost again.

“And we have a winner,” I announced to the dark empty room I occupied, as my ex-ex-husband placed a full-credit bet, but not with the Bet Max button. He pressed the Bet One Credit button five times in a row, hesitating on the last one, then pressed Deal.

Ding, ding, ding—Royal Flush.

I turned away from the computer and let Eddie celebrate from four video perspectives in private.

I didn’t celebrate so much, even though I had good reason. X = B the first time for a one-credit bet, all the way to X = B the fifth time, for a five-credit bet. But only after you reset the jackpot by powering it down for a split second, and only when you rolled the credits up individually. And that’s how it’s done.

Now what? I scratched at the itchy wig.

I cleared the cache and hard drive of No Hair’s computer for the time I’d been on it, then powered it down, plunging myself into total darkness. I batted for and found my purse when I thought I heard something beep. My head jerked up in the darkness.

I heard three more beeps. Someone was coding the exterior door.

I hit the deck, aiming for the space under No Hair’s desk, just as the door to the reception area burst open. I banged my head on the edge of desk on the way down, saw stars, huddled into a tight ball, and stopped breathing altogether.

“Shhh! Be quiet! Did you hear something?”

It was my twin.

“No. Wait. Maybe. Why? What did you hear?”

It was my ex-ex.

Bianca: “I know I heard something.”

Me:
You didn’t hear anything. Don’t come in here.

Bianca: “Never mind. Hurry, Edward, and get it.”

Me:
Edward
?

Eddie the Ass: “Which office?”

Me:
Not this one! Not this one! Not this one!

A slice of bright cut across the carpeted floor of No Hair’s office as they thankfully entered Teeth’s. There was just enough ambient light under the desk for something to catch it, something shiny. I squinted, then quietly reached for it. It was a two-inch stretch of clear packing tape, and underneath it, a key. It could wait. I pressed myself farther into the recess under the desk, staring at the key, my chin on my knees, and my arms wrapped tightly around them.

The drawers of Teeth’s desk were being opened and closed, and I couldn’t make out the details of their conversation, other than they were irritated, in a hurry, and looking for something they couldn’t find.

Just then, one of the cell phones in my bag began buzzing. I mistook it for an earthquake and almost had a stroke. Thank God I had it muted. It stopped vibrating for a half a second, then immediately began again.

Bianca: “It’s not here. We need to go.”