And I’d already been warned.
When we returned to work after hurricane break and the responsibility for our forty-five hundred employees was dropped in my lap, my boss, No Hair, laid down the law. He had nothing to say about Food and Beverage, Hotel Operations, Casino Services, or any other employee in any other department, but he had a lot to say about Birdy James in Lost and Found.
“Davis, do something about Lost and Found.”
“Do what about it?”
“A luncheon, a nice plaque, a big cake that says, ‘Happy Retirement, Old Bird!’”
I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.
“You could have little birds on the cake.”
It sounded like he meant it.
“Give her a gold watch,” he said.
“We don’t give gold watches, No Hair.” (Did we?)
He leaned far enough over his desk—which was bigger than he was, and that was saying something, because he was the size of three regular desks, which made his desk the size of a garage door—to look me in the eye. “Do something about Birdy James.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s reached the state of confusion,” he said. “She’s flipped her old lid. Complaints are coming in right and left that she’s addled.”
“She’s what?”
“Addled,” he said. “Bewildered. Befuddled. Birdbrained. She can’t keep things straight.”
“Keep what straight?” I asked. “Lost and Found fingernail polish? No Hair, don’t be cruel.”
He pushed two folders my way. One was pamphlet thin, the other catalog thick. “Take a look.”
“I’m not in the mood for paperwork, No Hair. Just tell me.”
“This,” he tapped the thin folder, “has every Lost and Found complaint filed since the Bellissimo ribbon cutting.”
“Okay.”
“This,” he tapped the fat folder, “has every Lost and Found complaint logged since we reopened after the storm.”
“What’s your point?”
(Sadly, I could see his fat-file point.)
“Old Bird has turned a corner, Davis. She’s not—” I could see him searching for the right way to say it “—not all with us anymore.” He tapped a temple. “In the brains department.”
“No Hair,” I said, “that is so mean.”
“I’m not trying to be mean, Davis. In fact, I think it would be an act of kindness to let Old Bird go. She needs to be playing shuffleboard on the Lido Deck. Enjoying her life. She’s worked hard, she’s done a great job, and it’s time for her to sail off into retirement sunset. It’s business,” he said. “It’s taking care of business. I’m telling you to take care of Old Bird business.”
“How?” I still didn’t understand. “Force her into retirement? Shouldn’t you be talking to Human Resources?”
“Human Resources is afraid of her.”
“No Hair, she’s as old as the hills, she can barely see, she can barely hear, she’s not even five feet tall, and she couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds,” I said. “She’s everyone’s favorite aunt. What’s to be afraid of?”
“I’ll tell you what Human Resources is afraid of, the same thing everyone else is afraid of, Davis, the Dewey Decimal System. Everyone in the building is afraid of Old Bird’s Dewey Decimal System. Those who aren’t afraid of her Dewey Decimal business are afraid of her chicken-scratch shorthand.”
“Oh, good grief, No Hair.” I might have rolled my eyes. “That’s ridiculous. What’s so scary about the Dewey Decimal System? And what do you mean by chicken-scratch shorthand?”
“How she writes. She draws instead of writes. Symbols and slashes and dots. It’s an old system people used to write things down quickly before they had phones to poke notes into.”
“Are we talking hieroglyphics from caveman days?” I asked. “Or scribbling from secretary days?”
“Scribbling from secretary days.”
“Shorthand was before my time, No Hair.” For that matter, secretaries were too. Professionals hired personal assistants and office managers. Not secretaries.
“That’s my point, Davis. Shorthand was before everyone’s time. Old Bird makes notes in shorthand no one can read, then catalogs Lost and Found items in that dungeon of hers with long numbers no one can decipher, and bottom line, no one but Old Bird can find anything.”
“Anything, what? Lost and Found is full of hairbrushes and cheap sunglasses. There’s nothing to find. When has there ever been anything of value turned in to Lost and Found that wasn’t claimed immediately? I’ll tell you when, No Hair, never. That’s when. So what exactly is it Birdy James is doing to offend you? Her job?”
He sighed. He tugged the stiff collar of his shirt. “Housekeeping, Davis. It’s just housekeeping.”
“What about Housekeeping?” (Another department very recently assigned to me.)
“Not Housekeeping the department,” he said, “but housekeeping in general. No one wants to be the person who forces retirement on Old Bird, but someone has to.” He tapped the thick file. “Yes, she’s a sweet little old lady, Davis, I’ll give you that, especially the old part. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s time for her to go. In addition to the shorthand scribbling and the Dewey Decimal System nonsense, most of the time, Old Bird’s asleep at her desk. When she wakes up, she thinks it’s nineteen fifty-two. Her hours are ridiculous. She won’t use a computer. She won’t move offices. No one can get in Lost and Found when she’s not there, and she’s sabotaged every attempt to install surveillance in or around Lost and Found.”
All true. Birdy James took long naps at her desk, was often mistaken about what century it was, refused to give up the keypad combination to the Lost and Found door out of fear someone would disturb an orphan sock lost in 2001, and all in all, was terrifically old school. But she was also really good at her job. The last time I’d visited Lost and Found, more than a year earlier, I was looking for a ten-carat diamond choker the owner’s wife, Bianca Sanders, said slipped from her neck. (Since when do Harry Winston diamonds slip? Don’t they have deadbolts?) I suggested, considering Bianca couldn’t keep up with what day of the week it was, much less her own jewelry, she file an insurance claim and replace it. She suggested I find her choker, or she’d replace me. (A threat she made good on.) I went straight to Birdy James and asked if, by any chance, someone had turned in a ten-carat diamond choker. First, Birdy said no, then she said, “It’s February.”
(It was.)
“Nineteen seventy-nine.”
(I let that slide.)
“If Mrs. Sanders went out, she wore a coat.”
Bianca Sanders had gone out. The day before, she’d flown to New York City for lunch at Elio’s on the Upper East Side. Which was probably where she lost the choker.
“She should check her coat.”
Birdy was right. I found the necklace ten minutes later hooked on the silk lining interior of the $65,000 sable jacket Bianca had worn to lunch. My point? Birdy James had an eerie knack for resolving lost and found problems. And she was a Bellissimo institution. Everyone loved her. So—and it was my final word on the subject—I told No Hair if he wanted Birdy James gone, he had to fire her himself, because in the big scheme of things, that Birdy worked odd hours (napping through most of them), and was very comfortable in her cave of a basement office next door to Maintenance (my responsibility, all mine) across the hall from Waste Management (also under my jurisdiction, yay), and didn’t want anyone who didn’t know her particular twist on the Dewey Decimal System having access to Lost and Found (which was everyone), and that she didn’t want “Big Brother” cameras watching her (see 1984 by George Orwell) (and half the time, Birdy thought it was 1984), and insisted her IBM Wheelwriter Lexmark typewriter was all she needed, because she’d “made it through the eighties without a computator and she could make it through the ni
neties without one too,” hardly mattered. She was good at her job, and as risks went, Lost and Found—again, full of cell phone chargers and abandoned cardigan sweaters—scored a big fat zero. I said leave well enough alone. And by well enough, I meant Birdy.
No Hair stared at me, long and hard. Eventually, his stern look melted. All the way to patronizing sympathy. “I understand your job has changed in ways you didn’t necessarily want or expect.”
I studied a framed photograph on the wall, just over his left shoulder, as he took the Oath of Allegiance at the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, where he worked for fifteen years before Mr. Sanders hired him as personal security. The picture was at least thirty years old, and even then, No Hair had no hair.
“I’m sorry about all that, Davis.”
I studied a framed photograph on the wall, just over his right shoulder, of Mrs. No Hair, Grace, who had lots of hair.
“But you still have a job to do,” he said.
Those were the only two pictures in No Hair’s office.
Then he told me to drag Birdy into the twenty-first century, or else.
“Or else what?”
“Or else something’s going to happen, Davis. Something’s going to happen Old Bird can’t handle, or mishandles, or panhandles, and when it does, it will be on you.”
That was months ago. And as usual, No Hair was right. Which, at six o’clock in the morning—by then it was six thirty—on the phone with Fantasy, was almost the worst of it.
(Not counting the missing five million dollars.)
(Which was also the worst of it.)
THREE
The five million dollars showed up on my Incident Report the day before it officially went missing. It was Saturday morning. My daughters were just waking up and my husband was in his home office on the phone with his personal assistant, Colleen, going over everything one last time before he left for Vegas. For casino executives, the annual Global Gaming Expo was work. But it was play too. And fine dining and sleeping late. It was being a casino patron for a change, and it was comradery. I wanted him to go. He wanted to go. I didn’t volunteer to take the Bellissimo helm while he was away—that would be the old me—but he’d asked me to keep an eye on things. And he’d asked nicely. At the time, I thought, what could go wrong? It was just a few days. I knew he was nervous about leaving me in charge, even though he wouldn’t say it, and I was nervous about being left in charge, even though I wasn’t about to say it. I no longer felt completely connected to my job, such as it was, and Bradley knew that, which was one of the main reasons he asked me to oversee operations in his absence. So I’d reconnect.
It was eight thirty on Saturday morning, and I was ready for nine when he’d leave. The sooner he left, the sooner he’d return. I killed time waiting for him to get off the phone on my phone. Might as well check my email. I accidently clicked open my Daily Incident Report, just to get it over with, when all I really did was get it going. First, Casino Credit showed a wire receipt of five million dollars.
I’d been standing in my living room at the veranda doors facing the city of Biloxi. I dropped into the closest chair. Five million dollars was highly unusual. To my knowledge, that large an amount of money had never been wired to the Bellissimo. High rollers, defined as gamblers who had more money than sense, regularly wired money to the casino, more often than not, paying off markers, defined as money they’d borrowed from the casino. At outrageous interest rates. Sometimes, instead of wiring money after their casino trips to pay us back, they wired in funds beforehand to avoid borrowing money from us. (At outrageous interest rates.) But never astronomical amounts like five million dollars. I saw the same ginormous amount of money in the next column too, under Casino Credit transfers. Transfer to Bellissimo Vault: $5,000,000. Under comments, Casino Credit’s notes read 12:15 a.m., large dark blue Bellissimo duffel bag requisitioned from Love containing $5,000,000 in cash, weight, 23.5 pounds, which, had I read under different circumstances, I would have found interesting. (That five million dollars weighed twenty-three and a half pounds.) (Minus the negligible weight of the duffel bag.) (Our dog, a Goldendoodle, Candy, weighed thirty pounds. Candy was heavier than five million dollars?) But under present circumstances, I didn’t care how much the money weighed. I was too distracted by the fact that Casino Credit received the hefty five-million-dollar wire, then for some reason cashed it, acquired a duffel bag large enough to hold it, stuffed the money in the bag, then transferred it to the main casino vault. A good place for five million dollars, under lock and key with armed guards in front of it, but from the very beginning of the story, against every standard operating procedure under the roof, first and foremost, we didn’t accept that much money. From anyone. For any reason. To wire $100,000 to the Bellissimo took a hundred thousand signatures.
What in the world were we doing with $5,000,000?
I scrolled to Vault receipts.
No five million dollars.
I dropped my phone.
I stopped breathing.
Maybe it was the other way around.
I stopped breathing.
Then I dropped my phone.
I picked it up and looked again. Under receipts, Vault still didn’t show five million dollars in a large dark blue Bellissimo duffel bag from Love. (Love, the tennis shop on the mezzanine. Cute skirts.) If Casino Credit sent the money to Vault, why wasn’t it on Vault’s receipt list?
I checked the time. By then it was 8:40. I had twenty minutes and Bradley was still on the phone with Colleen. I traded my phone for my laptop in my home office, just behind my kitchen, thinking maybe I’d missed something in small-screen translation. If so—scroll, scroll, scroll—I was missing it on the big screen too.
It had to be a paperwork error.
An Incident Report omission on Vault’s part.
Because five million dollars couldn’t disappear into thin air between Casino Credit and Vault. (Could it?)
I checked the time again—8:48. I’d get to the bottom of it as soon as I got Bradley out the door, but in the process of minimizing the screen, I made the grave mistake of flipping to the next and final page of my Incident Report. It was the page I barely bothered with, the page that hardly ever had anything interesting on it, the page that never raised even one of my eyebrows. It was the page of old-school typed then digitally scanned entries from Birdy James in Lost and Found. For the previous twenty-four hours, Birdy had logged eight miscellaneous electronic cords, seven cell phones, a six-tiered wedding cake, five miscellaneous articles of clothing, four key fobs, three baby stingrays (apparently caught in the Gulf and left swimming in a hotel bathtub, immediately handed off to Marine Mammal Studies in next-door Gulfport, Mississippi), two sports bras, and one large dark blue Bellissimo duffel bag from Love. Beside the duffel-bag-from-Love entry, Birdy had scribbled notes. Or maybe drawn notes—I turned my head sideways, then the other sideways—two ducks riding in a school bus? With dots above the school bus? Or maybe those were raisins?
It was shorthand.
What No Hair said. Shorthand.
Birdy made notes beside her duffel bag entry in shorthand.
Notes I couldn’t read.
Because I didn’t read shorthand.
Was the blue Bellissimo duffel bag from Love on Birdy’s Incident Report the same blue Bellissimo duffel bag on Casino Credit’s Incident Report?
No way.
Could there have been two dark blue Bellissimo duffel bags wandering the halls the night before? Was the one in Lost and Found empty? Or full? And if full, full of what? Surely not money. Who would drop off five million dollars in Lost and Found? I checked the time, 8:50. I still had ten minutes before Bradley left for Vegas and Birdy James was still at her desk. I picked up the phone.
“Birdy? It’s Davis. Mr. Cole’s wife.”
“Good morning, Davis, Mr. Cole’s wife. How in the wide world are
you?”
I might have woken her up.
Birdy worked Wednesday through Sunday, from six in the morning, when the Zest for Life minibus dropped her off, until noon, when the Zest for Life minibus picked her up to take her home. (Zest for Life was a senior living complex on Rue Magnolia Street. Birdy moved there when she turned sixty-five. Which was a million years ago.) Her workdays weren’t that odd, with Mondays and Tuesdays being the days of the week casinos caught their breaths, but her hours were. And why half the staff at the Bellissimo called her Early Birdy. Her incredible age was why the other half called her Old Bird. (Except Fantasy. Who mostly called her Bird Woman.) Birdy came to the Bellissimo after retiring from her first career overseeing every library in the Harrison County School System, bringing her Dewey Decimal System with her, so she was old even when she started her second career in Bellissimo Lost and Found. There we were, decades later, and she was ancient. She was a widow, a strong believer in astrology, she had a black cat named Mortimer, and from what I understood, several other black cats named Mortimer preceded her present black cat named Mortimer, which had very little to do with anything else, so back to Birdy, who never knew what year it was, and who wore a really bad gray helmet of a wig, but who was cheery. Always cheery.
“I’m well, Birdy. How are you?”
“Fine and dandy.”
I wondered if the report was wrong. (Actually, that was the exact moment I began wondering where the money was. Had it been in the dark blue Bellissimo duffel on Birdy’s Incident Report, I wouldn’t be calling her about it. She’d have already called me about it.) (Surely, she’d have already called me about it.)
Double Trouble Page 2