Double Up

by Gretchen Archer

  We nosed around the back and found a stack of laundered aprons. We spread them out over the drunk and Seraphina. We had no idea where Joe Joe the stoned cook was. The phone rang several times. We didn’t answer. We were trying to decide our next move when a refrigerated truck pulled in, then backed up to a small white outbuilding beside the dumpster. The driver lowered the lift, dropped out of the cab, walked to the back of the truck, then began unloading white boxes of frozen pork chops and freeze-dried steaks. We watched.

  Fantasy said, “Would you ever order a steak at Waffle House?”

  “No.”

  The driver began playing charades. He pointed to his watch. He threw his hands in the air. He pointed at us, walked his fingers along his outstretched palm, and then displayed the outbuilding. Fantasy grabbed Seraphina’s keys off the counter. We signed for the steaks and dragged the boxes into the freezer.

  “How are they allowed to store food beside a dumpster?” Fantasy locked the freezer door and dropped Seraphina’s keys in her Waffle House pocket.

  “I have no idea.”

  “They’re going to kill someone.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  We made ham and egg sandwiches on buttered toast with extra slices of cheese. The sandwiches didn’t kill us, and neither did our third pot of coffee I started at three thirty. I loaded the dishwasher while it brewed, wondering where my family was, where my Wheels Up players were, and if Fantasy and I would ever leave the Waffle House.

  We turned our attention to filling in the missing pieces of the Hang It Up and Masterpiece Salon puzzles. I supplied information from the player end of the promotion, and she filled in blanks from the casino side. She told me about Blitz’s wooly cigar-smoking sardine-eating artist who worked in a corner of the dungeon under the casino pumping out landscapes and seascapes to be Speak Up framed. Before that, he painted the twenty-four by thirty Hyatt Johnson football oils for the Hang It Up Six winners.

  “He smells like a skunk and he’s always covered in gold paint.”

  The gold paint on Bea’s tiger top.

  We kept filling in Blitz blanks.

  “The Hang It Up winners were the small potatoes,” Fantasy said. “The big fish were the Masterpiece Salon winners. They wanted thirty, one for each piece of the art.”

  “Why’d they shut it down?” I asked.

  “Bea,” Fantasy said. “They made the connection.”

  “To me,” I said. “They were watching my every move. Stealing my game. And someone recognized Bea.”

  “She’s hard to miss,” Fantasy said. “Although it’s way more likely she said a keyword in her condo the frames picked up on—”

  “—because if they were going to catch her with me, they’d have caught her weeks ago.”

  “Right.”

  “Let me ask you something, Fantasy.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You knew she was at Blitz,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell Bradley?”

  She played with the condiments in front of her before she answered, lining them up by height. The salt and pepper traded places three times. “I wrestled that one every day, Davis.” She rearranged the condiments in a tight circle on a gummy Waffle House menu. “I didn’t tell him, because I knew if you had Bea Crawford at Blitz playing Hang It Up, you had your reasons. I wasn’t sure Bradley would agree.”

  We’d been working the same case. Me from one end and her from the other. We met in the middle at Waffle House. From what we were able to piece together, we reached the logical conclusion that instead of distributing thirty Speak Up forgeries into thirty wealthy homes, realizing they were about to be caught, Blitz settled for placing ten each in the three largest estates and hitting them fast.

  “They’ve already hit two.” I went back to the laptop to look up the third winner on Blitz’s website. Uh-oh. They’d taken the Masterpiece page down. “The woman,” I said. “The third Masterpiece winner is next, Fantasy.”

  “The pharmaceutical chick from Florida? Leona Lyons?”

  I typed out her name in the search bar. Two heads were so much better than one. I called the Palm Beach police department and talked to a detective named Santos for the next ten minutes. After, Fantasy and I looked at each other over the Waffle House counter with one last unturned stone. We said it on the same beat: “Robin.”

  “What in the world does she have to do with anything, why did the feds recruit her in the first place, who pushed her off the roof, and why?”

  “The gallery art?” Fantasy scratched her head. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “You said this wasn’t about the gallery art.”

  “Which was not to say Hyatt Johnson would sit back and let someone walk off with it, Davis.”

  “Why was Robin even at the Bellissimo?” I asked. “Why were you?”

  “From what I’ve been able to piece together, Blitz surveillance spotted Robin with a man they didn’t know.”

  “Stuart Vaughn,” I said. “He was working with the feds.”

  “I think they figured that out. When they realized Robin and Vaughn had stolen the original gallery art, Hyatt sent one of his henchmen after her. I tried to get to her before he did.”

  We wondered why she ran to the Bellissimo. Neither of us had a clue. Was she seeking refuge? Was she there to ask for her old curator job back? Was she craving a Chocolate Volcano cupcake from Frostings? Nor could we figure out why she’d put herself in the line of fire to that extent over canvases and paint. Or why it meant enough to Hyatt Johnson to have her thrown off the roof. The Johnsons were about money. What was it about Robin Sandoval that warranted murder?

  Fantasy asked the final question: “So, where’s the art that cost Robin her life?”

  I came out from behind the counter and stretched. I flicked scrambled egg off a rhinestone on my Mama shirt. I walked to the front door of the Waffle House at four fifteen in the morning and looked over the parking lot. “What is that Joe Joe the stoner drives?” I asked.

  “A piece of junk.” Fantasy yawned.

  “Do you think he’d sell it to us for five hundred dollars?”

  “I think he’d sell it for five.”

  Ten minutes later, we were the proud owners of a 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass two-door Coupe, and Joe Joe, fried out of his mind, had a $500 Blitz poker chip.

  Twenty-Four

  “I can drive.” We’d patched Fantasy’s foot up a little better—a very little better—with the stingy contents of a first aid kit we found in the back room. The only emergency Waffle House was prepared for was the toxic-substances-in-the-eye variety. We had to improvise with suspicious dishtowels and now her foot looked like it was wearing a grease-stained pillow. Her Waffle House shirtdress distracted from her foot.

  “No, I’ll drive,” I said.

  “How long has it been since you’ve driven a car?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  It mattered. But the problem wasn’t my rusty driving skills; the problem was Pothead’s car. We’d been in it thirty seconds and we already smelled like Cheech and Chong. Starting it was a trick involving positioning the steering wheel just so and it took ten minutes to figure it out. I put it in R, barely tapped the gas, and crashed the back of the car into the dumpster.

  Smoke curled out of the crunched trunk.

  My passenger said, “This is going great.”

  I put it in D, barely tapped the gas, and ran the car up the Waffle House sidewalk waking the drunk. He reared from his booth, slapped his hands on the plate-glass window, smearing it up, and pressed his face between his hands flattening his nose, trying to figure out where he was, who we were, and what the bright light was. (One headlight. Pothead’s car had one headlight.) I waved. Fantasy made night-night hands against her tipped head. The drunk’s face slid down the window wistfully. I
put it in R again, and this time we wound up in the dirt on the other side of the parking lot.

  “Move, Davis. Let me drive.”

  “It’s not me. It’s this car.”

  We switched places and my door wouldn’t close. It was stuck open.

  “Just hold it,” Fantasy said.

  “I have two babies at home, Fantasy, and you want me to just hold it? What if I fall out of the car?”

  “I’ll drive slow.”

  We bucked and backfired and blew out a bald tire before we made it a block, then Pothead’s car died at the red light on Beach Boulevard and Iberville Drive. She stared straight ahead and said, “You hid. You thought you did this and you hid. Mr. Sanders ran. He thought he did this and he ran.” I could see her face by the glow of the traffic light, now green. “Neither of you did this. You couldn’t have stopped the Johnsons if they’d called and told you their next move before they made it, and he couldn’t have known he was selling the property to them if he’d been sitting in the Governor’s office when the deed was signed.”

  The light turned yellow, then red again.

  “Davis,” she said. “They’re just that good. Which makes neither of you bad.”

  My zebra pants were filthy. Not that the rest of me wasn’t.

  “In the end, there’s been nothing post-partum about you and nothing mid-life crisis about him.”

  Half the rhinestones had fallen off my t-shirt.

  She said, “The Johnsons did this to both of you.”

  I asked, “Are we going to sit here all night?”

  After ten tries, the car grudgingly started. We traveled in relative silence, the Cutlass with its blown out tire being the relative part.

  “Fantasy?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Where are we going?”

  It was the first time I’d ever been on Blitz property. We were behind the parking garage with directional signs pointing us to various Blitz venues, and it would seem we were very close to the Blitz Wedding Chapel.

  She said, “In the exit.”

  “Of the hotel parking garage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You said Bea’s car was in it, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “Why are we going in the exit?”

  She slowed at a Blitz stop sign and turned to me. “Do we look like we’re going to check into the hotel? Do you really think the parking attendant is going to let us in?”

  “Right.” I looked at us. “You don’t have shoes on.”

  She lined up the Cutlass ten yards from the barricade arm and said, “Hold on.”

  “I’m holding the door, Fantasy. How is it I’m supposed to—”

  She floored it and we busted through. The barricade arm took out our remaining headlight. We went up the down ramp dark, but the Cutlass being the tank it was, we were guided by the spray of sparks bouncing off the concrete walls as Fantasy scraped them. I gave up on the passenger door and it gave up on me. We left it somewhere near parking level two.

  “Where did Bea park her car?”

  “She got here this afternoon,” I said. “I would imagine the hotel would have been filling up on a Friday afternoon. I’d say we need to go up. Should we go to the top level and work our way down?”

  “I don’t know if this clunker is going to make it to the next level,” she said. “There’s no way it will make it to ten. I can’t believe I spent five hundred dollars on this lemon.”

  We made it to level five before the Cutlass gave up.

  It backfired again, scaring us out of our minds, and died a sudden and complete death a foot from brightly lit glass doors. We coughed and waved away the black exhaust smoke that had blown in, and when the air cleared, Fantasy said, “You’ve got a little something on your face.”

  I pulled down the visor to look in the mirror and was rewarded with a plastic bag full of doobies in my lap. “This is cool.” I looked it over. “It says the bag is smell-proof and environmentally compassionate.”

  Fantasy was out of the Cutlass. “Get rid of it,” she said. “We’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  I scooted across the front seat. Even though we’d left the passenger door on level two and I had a wide open exit, somehow she’d managed to angle the car too close to the glass doors for me to squeeze past and I was trapped on the passenger side. I felt sorry for the people who came through the glass doors to get to their cars and ran into Pothead’s rattletrap. They’d have to climb over, under, or through it to get to their own.

  When I made it out, we looked at each other for a minute. I could honestly say in all our years together, I’d never seen Fantasy looking rougher. It was a combination of the Waffle House uniform and the dishtowels. Plus, she was covered in soot.

  She said, “You have soot all over your face.”

  “Must have been when the car backfired.”

  “That car is a pile of junk.”

  “Wait ’til you see Bea’s.”

  What we saw were strobing red lights ascending the entrance ramp. Then the headlights of the Blitz security car and the whoop of its siren.

  “Well,” she said. “We’d better see it fast.”

  We crouched two rows away between a black Toyota Highlander and a yellow Mazda CX-5 and watched the Blitz security guard examine the Cutlass at length. The bad news was I’d left the laptop Bradley bought just hours ago (hard to believe) in the backseat and the security guard confiscated it. He looked the computer over, scanned a full circle looking for witnesses, then slipped it under the driver seat of his Blitz security car.

  “Thief,” I said.

  “Everyone at Blitz is a thief, Davis.”

  The security guard, who looked all of fourteen years old, went back to the Cutlass to see what else he could find.

  “Why did you leave the laptop in the car?” Fantasy loud whispered.

  “Because I have the pot.” I shook the environmentally compassionate bag.

  The security guard took a special interest in the caved-in tail of the car. He went back to his patrol car, dug out a tire iron, and broke the sound barrier when he used it to pry open the Cutlass’s mangled trunk. The beam from his Maglite sliced through the dark garage. He stooped, then inserted an arm into the small opening.

  “I hope he’s had a tetanus shot,” Fantasy said.

  “I hope you’ve had one.”

  “I can’t even feel my foot.”

  I said, “Why doesn’t he just call a tow truck already?”

  The security guard was blindly batting around the trunk.

  “He’s an idiot,” Fantasy said. “There could be a snake in there.”

  “Don’t tell me we’ve been riding around with a snake.”

  The security guard was trying to extricate his arm from the shredded metal.

  “I feel like I need to call Bradley.” I pulled the burner phone from the waistband of my zebra pants. “One of the girls is awake.”

  She said, “How in the world could you possibly know that?”

  “Because my boobs hurt.”

  She nodded.

  “How is that? The breastfeeding?”

  “It keeps you close to home.”

  “Ah.” Then, “Call him.”

  “I don’t know the burner phone number. He didn’t give it to me before he dumped us on the side of the road.”

  “Call one of your parents,” she said. “They don’t have burner phones.”

  “But they have new phones,” I said. “They got smartphones the size of lunchboxes when Bex and Quinn were born so they could see the pictures.”

  “You do take good baby pictures.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So you don’t know their numbers?”

  “No,” I said. “They’re programmed into my phone.”


  “Which is in the Sal and Mookie’s dumpster.”

  “Right.”

  The security guard finally stood, admiring a second environmentally compassionate bag of marijuana, the contents of this one loose, dark and dry, and at least a pound.

  “Joe Joe got the real bad end of this deal,” Fantasy said.

  Finally the security guard, with his weed and new laptop, got in his car and sped away. We came out from behind the cars, and not without sound effects.

  “We’re getting too old for this.” Fantasy looked around. “How are we going to find Bea’s car?”

  “We’re going to walk up and down the aisles,” I said. “I have a feeling we’ll be able to smell it.”

  “How?”

  My Burberry rain boots thumped along the wide aisle between the rows of cars.

  “She had a shrimp accident.”

  Twenty-Five

  Fantasy was the one who had the shrimp accident.

  She was allergic to everything—peanuts, ragweed, nickel, Red Dye #40, and shellfish. We found Bea’s car on the eighth level of the parking garage, or, better put, it found us on the eighth level of the parking garage. I caught the first whiff, followed by Fantasy having an allergic reaction to the petrified shrimp from four rows away. It was easy to spot Bea’s car because of the smell, and because of where she’d parked it between two green concrete knee-high stumps and under a sign that said PUMP STATION NO PARKING.

  Fantasy was choking to death.

  “Go over there.” I pointed in the opposite direction of the smell.

  She yanked her Waffle House uniform top up to her eyeballs and made a run for it, her dishtowel foot and her bare foot echoing: slap, thump, slap, thump.

  I kept my distance, with my Mama t-shirt over my nose and mouth, and only approached the car enough to see that Bea, my brilliant ex-ex-mother-in-law, hadn’t loaded the art in the trunk. The trunk on her tank would hold a marching band, yet she hadn’t chosen it for the priceless art. From a not-safe-enough distance, I saw the right angles of gilded frames and canvases in the front passenger seat and all over the backseat.