To Bea Crawford, I said, “No.”
* * *
At dinner, Birdy squinted across the table at Bea Crawford. “Now, who are you?”
Bea stopped gnawing on a pork chop bone long enough to pull it from her mouth and aim it at me. “She married my son.” Pork chop bone back where it belonged, she spoke over, under, and around it, “Twice.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” Birdy turned to me. “So, this is your sweet husband’s mother?”
“No,” I said. “No, no, and no.”
Quinn whispered in Bex’s ear. Bex nodded, then announced, “Banana Nana Bea Bea is Uncle Eddie’s mommy.”
“Bex? Quinn?” I held my mortification in check. “Eddie is not your uncle.”
“Who is Eddie?” Birdy asked.
“Oh, that’s a long story,” Mother said. “You want more gravy, Birdy?”
Bea shot her free hand in the air, the one not attached to the pork chop bone, flagging down the gravy.
“Then who is this large woman?” Birdy asked me. “And why is she here?”
Good question.
* * *
After dinner, and after I tucked my girls in for the night, I went straight to my office. I made good on my promise to Birdy and called Zest for Life to check on her cat.
“Zesty good evening! How may I zestily help you?”
I didn’t know how to return the greeting.
“My name is Davis Way Cole,” I said. “I’m with the Bellissimo Resort and Casino. I’m calling about our employee, a resident there, Birdy James, who is on vacation. She asked me to check on her cat. Mortimer.”
“Oh.”
All zestiness gone.
“Mortimer.” She said it with even less zest. “So sad.”
I braced myself.
“They say he’ll be fine. Eventually.”
Then it was my turn. “Oh?”
“He’s at PawPaw’s,” the Zest woman said.
“Excuse me?”
“The pet hospital?”
I’d never heard of it. “What happened to him?”
“He got drunk, fell off the top of Birdy’s refrigerator, and broke his nose.”
Were we still talking about a cat?
“He landed on his nose,” she explained.
Obviously.
“That’s how it broke,” she added.
You don’t say.
“Do you know how we can get in touch with Birdy?” she asked. “They want to know how the cat got so drunk and they want her to pick him up tomorrow.”
I told her I’d take care of it.
“The bill is fourteen hundred dollars.”
“How much?” Surely, I misunderstood her.
“Fourteen hundred dollars.”
“For what?” I asked. “Did the cat have a nose transplant?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Zesty said. “I think most of the charges were for the IVs they gave him to sober him up, but those didn’t really work, because for one thing, they said whatever Birdy let him drink was stronger than their IVs, and would probably be in his system for at least another week, and worse than that, he had an allergic reaction to the IVs and wouldn’t stop chasing his tail, so they gave him allergy medicine for the allergic reaction and the allergy medicine made him sneeze, which I thought was weird, because allergy medicine is supposed to make you not sneeze, so they had to give him a different allergy medicine, which made him sneeze even more, and they think he’s all the way around allergic to allergy medicine, because last I heard he was still drunk and still sneezing, but he can’t really sneeze with his nose broken, and to beat it all, turns out Mortimer is a girl. Past that, you’ll have to talk to PawPaw’s.”
That was way more than enough information, and again, I told her I’d take care of it.
Then I took care of Megan Marie Shaw.
I was on my computer until midnight.
Megan Shaw never worked for Harrah’s Vegas in any capacity, much less accounting. There was no record of Megan Marie Shaw having ever lived or worked in Las Vegas. I couldn’t find any evidence to suggest Megan Marie Shaw ever set foot in Las Vegas.
Megan was twenty-four years old, the single mother of a one-year-old little boy, Oliver, and other than her baby, she only had one other living relative, her mother, Louise Juliette Shaw. Louise lived at The Clare Estate on Knollwood Drive in Mobile, Alabama, sixty miles and one state line east of Biloxi. She’d lived there seven years. The Clare Estate was a memory care facility.
I turned away from the screen and gave myself a minute.
When I could face Megan Shaw’s life again, I hacked into Louise Juliette Shaw’s patient records at Clare Estate and found Megan listed as Louise’s Guardian. Louise’s condition was categorized as “very severely declined dementia.” Her room and board at Clare Estate was $5,500. A month. And that was before additional charges for medical and therapy procedures that Medicaid and insurance, of which there was very little, didn’t cover.
Megan lived around the corner from Clare Estate in an efficiency apartment with a one-year-old and a two-hour round-trip commute to her new Bellissimo job. Her rent was $499 a month for nine hundred square feet of living space in a thirty-three-year-old apartment complex. She drove a 2007 GMC Yukon with 260,000 miles on it. For the past six years, since graduating from W. P. Davidson High School, Megan had been a bank teller at BB&T, Branch Banking & Trust, on Hillcrest Road, where she’d apparently learned to misdirect money.
I searched for and studied Megan’s Bellissimo Human Resource file. She was a pretty girl: fresh-faced, innocent, with a shy smile that didn’t match her hollow eyes. Her entry-level salary was twenty dollars an hour.
Not nearly enough.
With a very heavy heart, I switched to surveillance and tracked Megan through her last day at work. I pulled video from Friday when she clocked in and checked her baby boy into Play, then zipped through the video feed aimed at the Casino Credit door for the rest of Megan’s shift until midnight. She walked out of Casino Credit with her purse on her left arm and a big blue Bellissimo duffel bag from Love on her right.
I watched her walk the long hall from Casino Credit, past Accounting, past Audit, past Compliance, past Gaming, past the Director of Slot Operation’s office, past the Director of Table Game’s office, through the casino and up one floor to the executive offices, where she coded herself into the door of Special Events.
That woke me up.
How did Megan Shaw have access to the Special Events office? And what business did she have in Special Events, which was nothing more than a dressing room?
Megan cracked the door, took a deep breath, then looked up.
For guidance?
For inspiration?
In celebration?
I couldn’t see her facial features, but I could see the slump of her shoulders, her defeated posture from behind, but that didn’t mean a thing. Given what I’d learned about Megan’s life had totally defeated me. I could only imagine what it felt like to live it.
She hiked the heavy duffel bag from Love on her shoulder, then pushed through the door where I lost her. There was no surveillance inside. Seven minutes later, Megan exited Special Events with a different bag, what might have been a backpack: smaller, still blue, but a different bag. Which meant Megan had hidden the money in Special Events or dropped it off for an accomplice to pick up. Either way, it looked like Megan wasn’t acting alone. And I didn’t like the implications of who she was acting with at all.
At ALL.
I followed her down the hall, into the elevator, then picked her up again stepping into the Bellissimo lobby where she was swallowed by late-night Elvii. I painstakingly followed her as she took the most indirect path she could to the basement and stepped into the dark hall that led to Lost and Found, where I lost her for good. Search
ing high and low, I couldn’t find another trace of Megan Shaw in our system. She’d disappeared. It was as if Megan Shaw left the hall that led to Lost and Found by magic carpet, wearing an invisibility cloak, or she hadn’t left at all. I set up system-wide alerts asking various Bellissimo identification programs to notify me immediately should she reappear and blasted out a Security BOLO—be on the lookout. Then I shut down my computer because I just couldn’t take anymore. The end of my road looked clear: I’d have to arrest and help prosecute a young woman upon whom two other humans were completely and helplessly dependent. But first, I’d have to find her.
I flipped off lights on my way through the house, checked on sleeping Bex, Quinn, and Candy, then walked the guest hall like I was walking the green mile. I tiptoed in and sat on the edge of my mother’s bed.
“What is it, honey?”
She wore a bonnet of pink sponge rollers.
“Can you help me find something for Birdy to wear?”
SEVEN
It wasn’t that my daughter Quinn couldn’t talk, it was that she wouldn’t talk. She let her sister do the talking for her. Quinn was more than happy to supply Bex with whispered ideas from behind her little cupped hand, like let’s climb the kitchen cabinets and make chocolate milk, and Bex was more than happy to take Quinn’s ideas and run with them. (Like, let’s climb the kitchen cabinets and make chocolate cupcakes.) We knew Quinn was vocal—we could hear her whispering to her sister and to Candy—and we knew her vocabulary was as large, if not larger, than Bex’s, because for one, she did so much listening, and for another, she’d aced every cognitive and comprehension test every pediatric speech pathologist could give her.
Speech processing and auditory conditions were ruled out early; Quinn did not have dysarthria, disfluency, or an expressive language disorder. But still, she’d stopped speaking aloud. Even to me and Bradley. At the midway point between their first and second birthdays, Quinn turned the talking over to Bexley. Before, she’d repeated everything Bex said, never initiating speech, but she would repeat it. After, she kept quiet. The best the many specialists could do was, “It must be a twin thing.” Quinn was adorable, happy, healthy, a good girl, she understood every word we said to her, and she was completely expressive in every single other way except verbally. So Monday morning, at eight o’clock Central, which was nine tiny hours from three o’clock Pacific, with five million dollars still missing and Casino Credit Cashier Megan Shaw completely in the wind, I called for a ride to Quinn’s standing, weekly, speech-language therapy appointment.
My daughters were worth more to me than five million dollars.
My daughters were worth more to me than my quarter-time job.
My husband would call when he woke in Vegas to hear how Quinn’s session went.
(My motivation for stopping everything for Quinn’s speech-language appointment.)
(In no particular order.)
My cell phone rang in my purse as soon as we stepped into the elevator. A chill ran through me—surely it wasn’t Bradley calling already—but dissipated quickly, because for one, it was so hot out, the only way to stay chilled would be to climb into a freezer, and for two, it wasn’t Bradley at all. It was Fantasy.
“Well?” Her hello.
“Nope.” My hello. “Big fat nothing.”
Bex and Quinn, on either side of me, jumped (and jumped, and jumped), trying to catch that fleeting feeling of elevator weightlessness.
“How early did you get up?” she asked.
“Too early.”
“When did you go to bed last night?”
“I’m not sure I did.”
“So you and Bird Woman were in Lost and Found all night?”
“Not so much.”
“Were her glasses in her desk? Did she read her Birdynote? What did it say?”
“I don’t know, Fantasy. No one knows. We may never know.”
“What does that mean? Her desk was gone?”
“I have no idea if her desk is there or not,” I said. “Things didn’t go exactly as planned.”
“When do things ever go as planned?”
She made a good point.
“I thought the plan was to sneak Bird Woman to Lost and Found for her spare eyeglasses so she could read her own Birdyhand business,” she said. “What happened?”
I tucked my phone between my ear and shoulder and held two little girl hands as we exited one elevator to somewhere between twenty and ninety Elvii at eight o’clock in the morning, only to take two steps forward and call another elevator. “That was the plan,” I said, “but I had to find a portable sewing machine first.”
“Portable as opposed to what?” she asked. “Mounted? What did you need with a portable sewing machine?”
New elevator, more jumping from Bex and Quinn.
“I had to come up with something for Birdy to wear,” I said. “I couldn’t parade her through the Bellissimo in her nightgown. She’s half my mother’s size, she’s one one-hundredth Bea’s size, and my clothes are five decades too young for her. There’s an Elvii out there looking for her, and I couldn’t risk anyone recognizing her.”
That’s when I remembered I had to push a button on the elevator panel or I’d risk my daughters jumping in a motionless elevator all day. I pushed the button. The elevator whirred to life.
Jump, jump, jump.
“And just where was it you found a moveable sewing machine in the middle of the night?” Fantasy asked.
“Portable. And in the theater costume room.”
“And what did you do with your portable sewing machine?” she asked. “Ported it, I assume.”
“I didn’t do a thing with it. My mother sewed Birdy an Elvis suit from a pair of white leggings I had to buy from Bea—”
“Wait a minute,” she interrupted. “Bea charged you for leggings? She should pay you to burn them. If there was ever a human who doesn’t need to be seen in public, or in private, for that matter, wearing leggings, it’s Bea Crawford. I can’t believe they even make leggings in Bea’s size. And if she wears the flesh-colored leggings again, I’m going to have her arrested for indecent exposure. Just how much did Bea charge you for a pair of her two-dollar leggings?”
“Fifty dollars. She claimed they were her fancy dress-up leggings.”
The second set of elevator doors opened. I asked Fantasy to hold a minute while the girls and I stepped out of the private lobby and through the private entrance to a hot June morning and a waiting car. My driver, Crisp, and I smiled hello. Bex and Quinn ran to him, held out a chubby hand each, then antsily waited as he carefully checked his pants pockets, then his hat, then under his shoes, then his shadow, then the pockets of his blazer, where he finally found two shiny quarters. He placed one on each outstretched hand and was rewarded with little girl curtsies.
We climbed in.
(I could drive. But for security reasons after Bex and Quinn were born, Crisp did all my driving.) (Plus, I didn’t have a car.) (Which was another reason Crisp drove us around.)
Crisp caught Quinn’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Is Miss Q ready to talk Dr. Tyler’s ears off?”
Always good for Monday morning giggles.
I buckled my little gigglers into their booster seats, then it was back to the phone, where Fantasy had been holding for the entire find-the-quarters routine. “Where was I?”
“Bea’s fancy leggings.”
Right. “Mother made the entire Elvis jumpsuit for Birdy from one leg of Bea’s fifty-dollar leggings,” I said. “Then she hot-glued costume jewelry to it and dyed Birdy’s wig Elvis black.”
“Where’d she find black dye in the middle of the night?”
“She busted a Sharpie.”
“Did anyone at your house sleep last night?”
“Bea and Birdy.”
“Figures,” she said. “So your m
other sewed Bird Woman a new Elvis suit, then you took her to Lost and Found. How’d it go?”
“It didn’t.”
“What?”
“By the time Mother finished sewing, I couldn’t wake Birdy.”
“Why didn’t you go alone?” she asked. “Come to think of it, in the first place?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she said, “why didn’t you go to Lost and Found without Bird Woman and get her glasses?”
“Because I couldn’t get in the door,” I said. “Birdy’s the only person with the keypad combination to unlock the door.”
“I keep forgetting that.”
“It’s certainly why she was abducted. Someone wanted in and she’s the only way.”
Crisp tried to act like he wasn’t listening.
I knew for a fact he’d heard worse.
“What do we think the someone who wanted in was looking for?” she asked. “The money?”
“I’m assuming,” I said, “but I don’t think they found it.”
“If that’s the case, we need to shoot our way in and get this over with.”
“We might as well tell Baylor first,” I said, “because someone from Waste Management or Maintenance will hear us and report it. Then we’ll have Baylor hounding us.”
“He’s already hounding us,” she said. “We’re scheduled to work the Elvis slot tournament this afternoon. Dressed as Elvises.”
“Elvii, Fantasy.”
“Elvii sounds stupid, Davis. Stop saying it. My point is, where are our Elvis costumes?”
“Didn’t you pick them up?”
“From where?” she asked.
“From wherever you ordered them.”
“I didn’t order them. I thought you were ordering them.”
Problem One Thousand. No Elvis costumes.
“Let’s do this,” she said. “Shoot our way into Lost and Found, find the money, wire it to San Francisco, then go get Elvis suits. That’s what we need to do.”
“Seattle.” We were at a red light. “We need to wire the money to Seattle.” Which was when I noticed what I needed to do was switch Bex and Quinn’s shoes. They’d traded shoes after I dressed them. A trick they loved to pull on me. They were wearing red gingham sundresses with red butterfly sandals, with Bex wearing two left sandals and Quinn two right.
Double Trouble Page 8