Double Trouble

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Double Trouble Page 13

by Gretchen Archer


  “I knew we were booked solid with Elvis fans,” I said. “I knew the slot tournament seats filled the day registration opened. But who could have possibly predicted the whole city would go Elvis crazy?” The Elvis in the road was still singing about the ghetto. If he didn’t move soon, with Fantasy at the wheel, he’d be singing about the hospital. “Go the back way.”

  “What back way?” she asked. “There is no back way.” She studied the screen on the dash. She poked it aimlessly, and among other things, like dim disco lights appearing at our feet, my seat started vibrating.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Why doesn’t this car have navigation?”

  I reached to the screen and poked. “It does. It wasn’t on.”

  The Mercedes’ COMAND navigation system roared to life. It asked where we wanted to go. “Josette’s Costumes on Howard Avenue,” Fantasy told it.

  The brilliant car had us around traffic, down one alley, and in front of Josette’s in under two minutes.

  Except it wasn’t Josette’s.

  Josette’s Costumes on Howard Avenue had, unbeknownst to us and COMAND, closed. What was a Biloxi institution before was a payroll advance store after. The sign in the window said, “COMMITTED TO SOLVING BILOXI’S CASH PROBLEMS.”

  We parked in front of formerly Josette’s, currently We Got Your Money.

  “Wonder how much cash they have in there,” Fantasy said, “because we definitely have a cash problem. You think they have five million?”

  I thought not.

  The Mercedes also had air-conditioned seats. “I wonder whose car this is.” Under the window sticker in the glove compartment, I found catalog-thick owner’s manuals, and that was it.

  “This car is amazing,” she said. “We need two of these.”

  Then we needed lawyers.

  Four Biloxi Police Department squad cars, lights blazing, sirens screaming, swarmed, blocking us on all sides. An unmarked car pulled up right behind the squad cars. We were charged with felony grand theft auto, felony impersonation of gaming officials, felony impersonation of government officials, felony impersonation of law enforcement officers, and carrying concealed.

  (Weapons.)

  Which the officers quickly confiscated.

  Retired Professor Prince Fantasy pointed out to tangerine-eyed Bee Me that the police didn’t charge us with looking like idiots when they easily could have.

  * * *

  My biggest disappointment, when unceremoniously tossed in the holding tank at Biloxi PD, was that Megan Shaw wasn’t there too. In all my efforts to locate her, I hadn’t checked booking reports in and around Biloxi. She could have been pulled over for speeding, searched, and held for questioning over the five million big ones, or even turned herself in. As chaotic as things were at PD headquarters—about like the Bellissimo lobby, but the mood, atmosphere, and décor much worse—she’d probably still be in holding.

  She wasn’t.

  No Megan, but plenty of Elvii.

  Our holding cellmates were all dressed as Elvis, except for one Priscilla Presley and one Ann-Margret. Both prostitutes. We didn’t overreact. We’d been arrested before. Several times, in fact. We’d been in holding cells with prostitutes before. Several times on that score too. And like all the other times, it was only a matter of finding the right person within the department to explain our situation to. We didn’t steal the car from the dealer. We innocently borrowed the car from our employer. The problem was everyone on the city’s payroll was busy chasing random Elvii all over the city. We were stuck with baby intake officers who didn’t know us, wouldn’t listen to a single word we said, and one told me that spouting off his bosses’ names only meant I probably had a record as long as his arm. “Apparently, you’re a career criminal,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t know everyone here. I’m not calling anyone upstairs for you. Pipe down and wait your turn.”

  The good news was by the time we got out, surely my house would be back in order. Better news, they fed us. Bottled water and stale trail mix, but at that point, we’d have eaten anything. The best news, after the breakneck stress since before my husband left for Vegas, I was forced to be still. To sit. To catch my breath. I’d rather have been still, sat, and caught my breath anywhere else, but it was what it was.

  “I wonder what your mother made for lunch.” Fantasy shook the last of the trail mix into her mouth.

  I polished off my own trail mix. “Chicken salad, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “When we flew out of the kitchen a week ago, I saw what looked like chicken salad ingredients on the counter.”

  “It wasn’t a week ago,” Fantasy said, “it was more like three hours ago. But I hear you. It feels like it was a week ago.”

  “Do you think the Black Kow would have ruined the chicken salad?”

  “Not if it was in the refrigerator.”

  The holding cell didn’t have a clock. I knew what time it was without one. It was too close to three o’clock Pacific, when the Seattle title company would be expecting their five-million-dollar wire. Which I’d get to. As soon as I got out of jail.

  “Does your mother put grapes in her chicken salad?” Fantasy asked. “Tell me she doesn’t put grapes in her chicken salad.”

  “Cranberries,” I said.

  “That sounds pretty.”

  “It is. And celery.”

  “The delicious crunch.”

  I agreed. “And she barely grates red onion in it,” I said. “Like you know it’s there, but you don’t know it’s there, and you never bite into onion.”

  “Stop.” She wadded her trail mix wrapper.

  The Ann-Margret prostitute said, “My mother puts apples and celery in her chicken salad.”

  Priscilla Presley said, “Celery, slivered almonds, and poppyseed.”

  All the Elvii weighed in with their mother’s chicken salad recipes, one cried like a baby Elvis at the memory of his mother’s chicken salad, and that pretty much shut down the chicken salad chatter. I learned that regardless of socioeconomic status, education level, age, race, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, make or model of Elvis costume, most chicken salad recipes included celery. The delicious crunch.

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Fantasy was counseling an Elvis who’d been picked up on public nuisance charges. “You have to be registered in the slot tournament to win one of the movie roles. Standing in the street having a fit because you want a role in a movie is no way to get a role in a movie. You feel me, Elvis?”

  Elvis felt her.

  “And it’s not like they’re big roles,” she explained. To Elvis. Who felt her. “Only one is a speaking role, and it’s just two or three lines. The top twenty-five scores in the slot tournament win the roles. But you have to be registered to play in it.”

  Elvis asked how he might register.

  “It’s too late,” Fantasy said. “Unless you know someone. Lucky for you, you met me. I’ll get you in.”

  “But you’re in jail,” Elvis said.

  He made a good point.

  A new uniform, worn by a gum-smacking officer so young he had to have graduated Police Academy the day before, stepped up to the holding cell. “I need Biloxi Homicide Detectives Whepler and Dunklee.”

  Fantasy and I raised fingers.

  “Nice to meet you two.” The baby officer smacked his gum. “I don’t remember seeing either of you at the precinct picnic.”

  The Elvii, Ann-Margret, and Priscilla Presley got a big kick out of it.

  “Get up.” The holding cell door slid open. “Time for your homicide detective cavity searches.”

  He was kidding about the cavity searches, thank goodness, because Fantasy might have killed someone, then we’d be in really big trouble, but the next half hour of mug shots and fingerprints w
as thoroughly humiliating nonetheless. After that, we were shuffled to booking while our prints were running through the system, which, they said, could take up to three hours with all the Elvii backup they were experiencing, and those were three hours we didn’t have.

  My intake officer was surely still in high school. Her power was fresh and new, and she used it, shoving me into a chair beside her desk. Above her head, a wall clock. It was four o’clock Central, which made it two o’clock Pacific. By then, surely my home was Black Kow free, the new carpet was down, and the children—mine and Megan Shaw’s—were back. July would have started Frozen again, and my mother would be feeding everyone a post-Black Kow feast. I was, for the very first time since the tomatoes arrived, so grateful Mother was there. (Not jail there. At my home there.) I took comfort in the fact that she would do what needed to be done and that was absolutely all I took comfort in, that my mother was in charge.

  If that were indeed the case.

  I really hoped it was the case.

  Because I’d have a hard time explaining to my husband that I’d left Bea Crawford, who shouldn’t have even been there, in charge of our children and our home. Honestly, I’d have a hard time explaining it to myself.

  “Do you know who Bradley Cole is?” I asked the teenage booking officer.

  “Of course,” she said. “Everyone knows who Bradley Cole is.”

  “Well, I’m his wife.” I went to tug off my wedding band and show her the inscription, forgetting it was in a Jane Doe Ziplock in a holding locker, along with the double diamond ring Bradley gave me when the girls were born, my watch, my black bun wig, my big black gun, and my cell phone.

  “Have you stolen Bradley Cole’s wife’s jewelry?” Officer Temples asked. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  I slumped. Two desks away, Prince Fantasy was trying to explain Baylor to her intake officer. “Baylor is his first name and his last name. He was one of those left-on-an-orphanage-doorstep babies, and the note in the basket only had one name. Baylor. Just ask for Baylor. Everyone at the Bellissimo knows him.”

  My head popped up and whipped around. “He’s at the dentist, Fantasy.” Which was to say, don’t waste a phone call on Baylor. He won’t answer.

  “Hey.” Officer Temples snapped her fingers in my face. “Eyes on your own page. No talking.”

  Not that I wanted her to dislike me any more than she already did, if that were possible, I still tipped my head back and shot out, “Call my mother and have her call Baylor. He’ll take her call.”

  “Your mother is probably roasting a pig on a spit, Davis,” Fantasy shot back. “She won’t answer. I’d have to text her and she’d text back gibberish.” She asked her intake officer if she could text instead of call. Her intake officer told her to shut up. She did, after she eked out under her breath to me, “I’m not calling your mother. You call your mother.”

  I barely turned my head, and without moving my lips, I eked back, “No.”

  Officer Temples’ teenage hand slapped the desk.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.” I held up a one-more-thing finger, then with a jerk of my head, fired out the last words that would leave my lips before Officer Temples shut me down for good. “I’m calling someone who can get us out.”

  Officer Temples yanked me up by my bumblebee arm. “That’s it. I’m separating you two.”

  “Do you know Detective Marini?” I asked, while being hustled out of intake and back through booking. “Sandy Marini? She knows me. Call her. Do you know Chief Adelson? Greg Adelson?” I reeled off every Biloxi PD name I could remember as I was being dragged out of the room.

  “Save it.” Officer Temples shoved me into an interrogation room. Her parting words, before she slammed the door were, “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Thirty nerve-wracking and totally abandoned minutes later, which was thirty minutes closer to three o’clock Pacific, the interrogation room door finally opened, and yet another prepubescent officer slipped in. He took the seat across from me. He placed a cell phone on the table between us. He gave it a nudge. Having had a long lonely stretch to myself to miserably think things through, I was more than ready to make my call. It was time to end the madness. I reached for the phone, then turning my back to the baby officer, dialed one of the few phone numbers I knew by heart. It rang several times, and just when I was about to give up, call my husband, and confess all, she answered.

  Instead of hello, I said, “Bianca, it’s Davis. I’m in jail and I need five million dollars.”

  After a pause so long I thought we’d been disconnected, Bianca Sanders, my former friend, my former boss, the woman who’d fired and replaced me, finally said, “Well, well, well.” Never in the history of spoken language has anyone dragged out three syllables the way she did, lowering her range a half an octave as she went. She took even longer to say, in the same Morticia Addams tone, “If it isn’t David.”

  It’s Davis.

  “Tell me, David. Have you called to welcome me home, or have you called to beg for your job back?”

  “You fired me, Bianca. Why would I beg for my job back? So you can fire me again?”

  “I most certainly did not fire you, David.”

  It’s Davis. And yes, she did. She fired me. Her notarized letter of my immediate termination arrived by messenger in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner.

  “You quit your job,” Bianca said, “without so much a farewell, as if I meant nothing to you.”

  “You fired me without so much as a farewell, Bianca, as if I meant nothing to you.”

  The baby officer rolled his hand in the air, as in, hurry up with your daytime drama, Bee Lady.

  “I have news for you, David,” Bianca said. “Listen carefully.”

  I was listening. Carefully.

  The baby officer was listening. Carelessly.

  “I am not your babysitter,” she said, “nor am I hosting Senior Citizen Hour in my home. I am not your dog groomer, your feline veterinarian, I am not the baggage check girl for your dilapidated luggage, and I most certainly am not your bail bondsman or personal loan officer. You’re dead to me, David. Dead. Do you hear me? Dead. Call someone else, because you’re dead to me.”

  She hung up.

  It wasn’t until after the prepubescent officer rudely yanked the phone from my hand and slammed the interrogation door behind him that I began putting the pieces together. My children and Baby Oliver were not with Baylor. Having had no other choice, July had taken them upstairs, to the Penthouse, where she knew there was a nursery, a playroom, and staff on hand for the youngest Sanders son who could easily care for Bex, Quinn, and Baby Oliver, while she helped put my Black Kow house back together. Candy, the sneezing cat, and Birdy James must have been at the Sanders residence too, and Candy might have a Black Kow aroma about her. I wasn’t unreasonably upset with July for taking everyone to the Penthouse, because considering what she was up against, she made the best decision she could, and Bianca, as bad as things would ever get between us—and they couldn’t possibly get much worse—would never take it out on anyone but me. The big problem, and almost all I took away from the horrible exchange, was Bianca’s baggage-check-girl-dilapidated-luggage line. Was it possible the black spinner suitcase containing five million dollars that was to have been delivered by Gold Lamé Elvis to the boss’s wife had been right above my head in the Penthouse the whole time?

  If so, wrong boss’s wife.

  I beat on the interrogation room door. I yelled. I made a general nuisance of myself to absolutely no avail. If the five-million-dollar suitcase made it to the Penthouse, and Bianca believed it was mine, I was certain she wouldn’t bother to look inside before throwing it out. She may have even burned it. In effigy. To David. Who she believed quit her job. Without so much as a farewell. As if she meant nothing to me.

  When she did.

  She real
ly did.

  ELEVEN

  Bianca Casimiro Sanders was an enigma, and for years, she’d been my enigma.

  The only daughter of renowned Las Vegas casino developer Salvatore Casimiro, she was raised by governesses and private tutors at her maternal grandmother’s castle in Palermo, Italy. On her sixteenth birthday, her formal education having run its complete course (after she’d shimmied down a turret by bedsheet to spend a weekend partying in Tuscany with her Humanities professor’s assistant), her grandmother kicked her out. Bianca joined her parents and three older brothers at the family’s thirty-room villa high above Las Vegas Boulevard. She was shown to her four-room suite, assigned a personal maid, a personal valet, and a personal assistant, then presented with a personal comprehensive house account at the Forum Shops at Caesars. She shopped, she frolicked up and down the Strip unchecked, and she frequented the front pages of tabloids. She called them the best years of her life.

  When she was twenty-four years old, having been missing from the Vegas party scene for weeks before Entertainment Tonight spotted her on John Mellencamp’s arm in Penrose, New Zealand, her father ordered her home to Vegas and introduced her to his protégé, up-and-coming casino conglomerate, Richard Sanders, the yin to his daughter’s out-of-control yang. Mr. Sanders was principled, focused, and ambitious, not that Bianca cared; she was in it for his surfer-boy good looks and her dowry. She married Richard Sanders in haste when he put a ginormous ring on her finger and punished him at leisure when, the ink not even dry on their marriage license, her dowry turned out to be a casino in Mississippi. Talk about a fish out of water. She hated her new role as Mrs. Bellissimo. She spent her first few years in Biloxi trying to get out. She tried to weasel out of her marriage, but that didn’t work, because as it turned out, not only did she love Richard Sanders, he loved her back. Next, she tried to bankrupt the casino, thinking if the Bellissimo went under, they could pick up where they left off in Las Vegas. That didn’t work either. When I met her, the only escape route Bianca had left was lighting Mississippi on fire, as in burning it down, the whole state, then I stepped in.

 

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