Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (8 page)

“Don’t mean I don’t know about it.” He turned and made the rare eye contact again, but I didn’t cry this time.

“I’m listening.” I crossed my arms.

“It’s a sweet gig.”

“In what way?”

“It’s the easiest job in the building.”

“That couldn’t be true,” I said. “It looks to me like they take care of the whims and fancies of a thousand people each.” Clicking on the client-list link of a casino host’s profile, a Rhode Island roster ensues. Page after page, thousands of guests, are assigned to each of the fourteen hosts.

“They have people to do all of their grunt work,” he said. “They spend their time in the restaurants and out on the golf course.”

Thirty minutes later, ignoring my next-door neighbors’ headboard trying to beat its way into my room again, nose to computer screen, I had my mark: Miss Heidi Dupree, Executive Assistant to the casino hosts. She was one of eight executive assistants, but hers were the only administrative initials on the portfolios, a zillion computer screens back, for the four rooms that had been pilfered. I recognized her from her employee profile, too; I’d seen her stepping into a guest room carrying a bucket of flowers.

*    *    *

The next day, I cleaned seventeen guest rooms. Three were barely touched, only one corner of the bed turned back, and a single pillow had a head dent. I’d learned quickly that not all the guests were there for the glorious guest rooms, extra glorious to me now that I knew EconoLodge squalor. A good portion of Bellissimo guests checked in, threw their bags inside the door and hit the casino, never to return.

I’d had one room for three consecutive days, nineteen thirty-seven, whose occupant had yet to get near the bathroom sink, tub, shower, or, for all I could tell, their suitcase. Down the hall, I had adjoining rooms that made up for that one; the occupants and the preschool they brought with them had moved in. Stuffed animals, gummy worms, hills and mountains of discarded clothing, bowl after bowl of liquefied ice cream, tubs used as toy storage, and half-full juice boxes everywhere. In another room, it had rained shiny black condom wrappers, and in yet another guest room, the ravenous occupants had ordered one of everything on the room service menu, taking a single bite out of each dish, leaving all the uneaten food and enough tableware to set a table for ten for me to deal with. The room safes today, like almost every day, hadn’t been touched. The best part? Eddie Crawford had checked out of his room. A guy named Millard Martin had checked in it. I had no beef with Millard.

My coworkers didn’t take lunch breaks so much as they took extended smoke breaks. As the clock inched toward noon, and I said job-well-done to myself about guest room nineteen-thirteen, Santiago, my work buddy, exiting nineteen-fourteen and in the throes of severe nicotine withdrawal, asked, “We lunch?”

“Sure.” I couldn’t see him through the king-sized bed roll of laundry I was hefting. I tipped it into my bin. The muffled music of broken glass filled the space between us. It sounded like I’d dropped a chandelier.

“Oh!” Santiago’s eyes were saucers.

We both cut our eyes up and down the hall, and seeing no one, I shrugged. Santiago shrugged. Whatever I’d just rolled up in the dirty sheets was now Coast Laundry Services’ problem.

I had the small break room behind our supply room all to myself; everyone else had made their way to the employee smoking patio on the sixth floor.

I dialed the Casino Host’s office extension. “Heidi Dupree, please.” I studied my ravaged cuticles and listened for the door. I remembered that I forgot to look under beds all morning. No telling what I’d missed.

“Casino Marketing,” a soft voice said. “This is Heidi.”

She didn’t sound like a safe cracker.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m in housekeeping and one of the guests is complaining they didn’t get a fruit basket.”

“Who is this?”

“Housekeeping.”

“We order the amenities,” she said, soft voice gone. “Room service fills the orders. Call them.” And she hung up on me.

*    *    *

“I need a hardware store, George.” I dropped the day’s treasures over the seat: two paperback books, a three-pack of disposable razors, and four Snickers bars, one smashed flat.

“No, you don’t.”

I reached over the seat, took the loot back, lowered the window, and tossed it to the traffic.

(No, I didn’t).

“What makes you think you know what I need and what I don’t?” I demanded.

“I just do. Because you can’t get in those safes with a tool.”

My jaw unhinged. How in the
world
did George know what I was doing?

“Those are S700 Protectaguards,” he went on, “and you can’t hack in. You’ve got to use the code or the electronic pass key. That’s the only way. Whoever you’re looking for has the code or the passkey.”

“I’ll tell you what, George. You take me to a hardware store and we’ll talk about it some other time.” This guy could get on my last nerve. More than that, he was just about to scare me.

“It’s your money.”

Soon enough he was backing into the loneliest parking space Center City Hardware offered.

“George,” I whined, “come on. It’s raining. It’s raining
ice
. Let me off at the door.”

He ripped into one of the candy bars. “If you’re going to waste your time and mine, you can waste some of it walking.”

I could reach up and smack the back of his head so easily.

“And don’t get a jackhammer,” he said through chocolate. “If you’re going to get something, get a multi-tool, like a Gerber.”

Gibberish. “What?”

He swallowed and caught my eye in the mirror. “You think you’re going to break into the safe, right?”

I blinked.

“Don’t think they’re going to let you lug a power tool into a hotel room. Get a multi-tool, like a Swiss Army knife, that you can slip in your pocket. But it won’t work. All you’re going to do is tear the thing up.”

I had one angry foot out in the rain, and I quickly pulled it back in. “How do you know that, George? How do you know
any
of this?”

He shrugged one shoulder.

I got out, slammed the door as hard as I could, and ran through the biting rain.

*    *    *

Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to the entrance of the Silver Moon Resort and Casino, a shrunken Bellissimo, and the only other show in town that bragged on their website about the foolproof S700 Protectaguards. A bellman craned his neck our way. George waved him off, because
he
didn’t need any help with
his
bags. “Are you going to get out or are you going to sit in my car all night?”

My new goal in life was to slam the car door so hard that it fell off. Of course, if I were successful, it would probably land on me.

The bed begged me to get in, the thick white comforter screaming, “I’m soft! And I smell good!” and I complied, for two dreamless hours I don’t remember a second of. The rest of the time I tried to break into the S700 Protectaguard safe with no luck whatsoever. None of the ninety-three tools that jutted out from the eight-pound thing I’d purchased at the hardware store, including the two-tine fork, fazed the safe. The only thing I managed to do was scratch the hell out of it and ruin most of the appendages on the tool.

“So?” George asked the next morning.

“I’m late, George. Get going.”

The next night, I dialed the hotel operator after an hour-long blistering shower. “My safe won’t open.” She transferred me to the security office.

“Have you forgotten your code?” a man asked.

“No,” I lied. “It just won’t open. It’s stuck.”

“What’s in it? You might have jammed the door.”

At which point my mind began racing. The safe was empty. I had a little more than forty dollars in cash, which wouldn’t impress them much.

“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.

I looked across the room to my purse. My wedding rings were somewhere in the bottom keeping company with lint, year-old peppermints, and loose change.

EIGHT

There’s a framed photograph of my first birthday celebration at my parents’ house, on the shelf of a bookcase in the upstairs hallway, right outside of Meredith’s old room. In it, I’m barely balanced on roly-poly legs in the middle of the dining room table at ground zero of a cake and frosting explosion. It looked like fun, and I wish I could climb on a table and eat birthday cake with both hands again, although I wouldn’t smear it in my hair this time. On one side of me are my parents, my father beaming, my mother glazed over. On the other side is my mother’s childhood friend, Bea Crawford, her eighteen-month old son Eddie in her lap. So I never actually met Eddie, he just always was. Eventually he became, out of small-town boredom, my boyfriend, and I was sort of dating him when it was announced I was pregnant (again, out of small-town boredom) at the ripe old age of sixteen. It was my mother, the keeper of the inventory of feminine hygiene products, who broke the news to our family at breakfast one morning, and none too gently. I was as stunned and slack-jawed as my father and sister were. In retort, I threw up everywhere, providing my mother with the proof she sought.

“See?” my mother demanded.

No one wanted to see.

“I knew it,” she spat.

My mother was thrilled at this new development—her being the goose to my gander—insisting all our lives that her four years of higher education were a complete waste of time and money (cutting her eyes at me) and Meredith and I might as well skip it and go straight to the real deal: dirty diapers, pot roasts, and ironing boards.

Mother wasted no time telling Eddie’s parents, turning their breakfast into a celebration. His dad probably wrestled him into a bear hug and gave him noogies. “Way to go, son!” Mel and Bea Crawford were beside themselves with glee, because we were as close to royalty as it got in Pine Apple. They envisioned a future of no parking tickets, the end of those annoying restaurant report card failures, and they probably thought sharing a grandchild with the Chief of Police/Mayor of Pine Apple would make them exempt from federal taxes, too.

Why, after all these years and heartache for everyone involved, I still lugged around my wedding rings was anyone’s guess. They weren’t worth hocking should I need the cash, the combined weight of the diamond chips maybe totaling an eighth of a carat. They had no history; it’s not like they were Crawford Estate jewels retrieved from a vault hidden behind an oily portrait of great granddaddy. They weren’t even pretty; they had been on clearance at Sears, the rock of the Westside Mall in Montgomery.

There were two reasons I kept them handy: they reminded me of what could happen if you lived a big, fat lie, and they were proof that no matter how hard you tried, some points weren’t worth making. There was a distant third reason; I secretly longed for the opportunity to give them back to Eddie in a fashion that would require subsequent surgical removal from his person. With long, pointy tongs. And no anesthesia.

They sounded like two pennies going into the safe as the knock came on the door.

“Security,” I heard.

I closed the safe door, pressed in the code I’d assigned the night before, pushed the star button to lock it, tied my robe tighter, and let the crew in.

Same drill as the Bellissimo: to get into the room safe of an occupied guest room, it took one housekeeping supervisor pass-card swipe, one security pass-card swipe, and two other employee witnesses, one from housekeeping, the other from security. Everyone, including me, had to sign on the dotted line before and after.

They all peered at the pathetic wedding rings. They all turned to me.

Really?

I smiled.

*    *    *

I had Natalie Middleton’s blessing to stay at the Silver Moon as long as I was working. So I could justify the two glorious nights, but I couldn’t justify a third on Bellissimo’s dime because I now knew there was no entering the safe without an authorized break-in crew, two passkeys, the code, an act of Congress, or a bulldozer. Did I give George the satisfaction of hearing those words pass these lips? No, I did not. But I didn’t have to; I’m sure he figured it out when I pushed through the doors the next morning with all my earthly belongings in tow. It was Thursday. I’d been on this assignment for two and a half weeks, and I suppose I was headed back to the EconoLodge after my shift today. The Silver Moon rooms were three-hundred dollars a night and I didn’t have that kind of extra loot lying around. The best I could hope for was that the porn stars next door had moved on.

The shift started, like every other shift, with Maria, our supervisor, complaining Spanish-style about the shoddy job we’d all done the day before. It was a total waste of time, the purpose of which was to give Maria’s pets time to drag into work. The second they staggered through the door Maria announced, “Dat all. Geet to de work.”  I sat through the ten-minute pep talk every morning wondering how Maria managed to maintain her perfect manicure. Her fingernails were blood red, out to there, and her index fingers had geometrical designs in white. At the end of today’s lecture, I gave Maria a big hug when she passed me a clipboard full of room assignments. She pulled away from me and looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. I pulled away from her with a passkey to every room on the floor.

At eleven that morning, six guest rooms spicked and spanned, Santiago knuckled the door frame of the room I was cleaning, lucky number seven, and in his heavy accent called, “Anna? Anna?”

I rose to my knees. I’d been between the queen-sized beds spot cleaning red wine off the carpet. At least I hoped it was red wine. “Do you need me, Santiago?”

He blabbered in his native tongue. I didn’t catch a word of it. Then Miss Heidi Dupree’s lovely frame stepped into the open doorway beside Santiago’s. In her arms she held a basket. I could see the top half of two dark bottles of wine pointed in opposite directions.