2 Double Dip

by Gretchen Archer

  Two weeks in, he began watching me out of the corner of his eye.

  “Is everything okay, Davis?”

  I swallowed it. “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Fine!”

  “You know, Davis? If you met her, you’d see that you have nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m not worried, Bradley.” I was full-blown freaked.

  Bradley Cole and I covered so much ground so quickly that we’d skipped a few steps. Maybe we should have started at the beginning instead of in the middle.

  Bradley came into our relationship as clean as a whistle. I came in with blonde hair (quickly corrected), a prison record (big mix-up between me and Bianca Sanders), two divorces (but only one ex-husband), a Southern Baptist mother who badgered me incessantly (left lengthy phone messages questioning my “unusual” roommate situation), a sister (Meredith) who popped in regularly with my seven-year-old niece (Riley) in tow to drop off my eighty-two-year-old grandmother (Granny Dee) who thought sitting around Pine Apple watching the grass grow wasn’t nearly as much fun as staying with her granddaughter (me) in Biloxi and playing slot machines at her (I wish) casino.

  Granny Dee is the very reason we began looking for a bigger place.

  It wasn’t hard to keep the fact that we were living together from Granny Dee. She couldn’t hear a bomb going off, couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face, and swallowed a small mountain of pills every night, the little blue one assuring her a good night’s rest. Of course, we gave her the bed. The only bed. The minute her head hit the pillow, she was gone for eleven hours. La La Land. It was only a couple of nights a month and Bradley assured me he didn’t mind the sofa bed as long as I was in it. (See? He’s so perfect.) He waited to come home from work until I had Granny Dee tucked in, which was about 6:15. He’d call. “Is the coast clear?”

  Granny Dee would, on occasion, sneak out of her chemical stupor and yell, “DAVIS? IS SOMEONE HERE?”

  I’d scoot to the bedroom door. “NO, GRANNY, THAT’S JUST THE TELEVISION!”

  “OKAY, DEAR.” And off she’d go.

  I’ll tell you one thing she could see and hear—slot machines.

  Granny Dee was an almost perfect human, and she had, in turn, produced one in my father. I worship the ground the man walks on. My father is the Chief of Police and Mayor of Pine Apple, and for years, on his day off, he’s driven Granny Dee to Sprague, Alabama, home of the Fortune Casino. Daddy would get Granny Dee settled at her favorite slot machine, Diamonds and Devils, get a big cup of coffee, then read one of his cold-war spy novels until Granny began showing signs of wear and tear from the Diamonds and Devils, which is to say when she fell asleep on the slot machine. Before that, it was church bingo. Before that, throughout my childhood, it was Canasta Tuesday with her girlfriends.

  But things change, and Granny’s game had to change with them. Her canasta friends, one by one, had gone on to the Big Canasta Tournament in the Sky. Bingo night came to a screeching halt when it was discovered that Brother Bob was the only one winning. Just in time, the Fortune Casino was built—a 20,000 square-foot prefab metal building stuffed to the brim with penny and nickel slot machines—close enough to Pine Apple for a day trip. But then more change last year, when Daddy had a heart attack and subsequent triple-bypass. His recovery has been amazing, but none of us, including Granny Dee, wanted him off on a field trip one day a week, so my sister Meredith began chauffeuring Granny back and forth to the Fortune, which was right about when a major Alabama gambling storm that had been brewing for years finally broke wide open and everyone involved was either mad, indicted, or dead. In an attempt to contain the chaos, temporary injunctions and cease-and-desist orders were slapped on slot machines around the state. One day it was the Fortune Casino, the next an indoor flea market. For the first time in her life, Granny Dee had no game.

  Leave it to my mother to come up with the solution: Granny could stay with me a few days a month and get her gamble on. I was just across the state line, and Mississippi had no qualms about gambling. Mississippi said bring it on.

  “What is it, Davis?” my mother demanded. “Do you have secrets you don’t want Granny to know?”

  “Of course I don’t!” Of course I do! “It’s our home, Mother. And we only have one bedroom.”

  Ooops. Until that exact moment, my mother believed in her heart that she’d raised me right and that Bradley and I were very mismatched roommates. That’s how delusional she is: I’m thirty-something, I’ve been married twice, I love Bradley, and this isn’t 1953.

  Once the Mary Ha Ha program began, though, I was thrilled to have Granny Dee stay with me, because at least I had someone to shout to.

  “DO YOU WANT MORE LASAGNA, GRANNY?”

  “Thank you, honey.” Granny reached up and patted a few hundred of the five hundred curlicues on her head. “Monique mixes this shade herself.” Monique is Granny’s eighty-seven-year-old hairdresser. Granny’s hair is cornflower blue.

  Bradley called a hundred times the first month to tell me how sorry he was that he wasn’t going to make it in until midnight. Again.

  “IT’S OKAY, GRANNY’S HERE.”

  “Davis!”

  “Oh, sorry!”

  Month two of Mary Ha Ha Daze, Bradley began throwing me bones.

  “We’re going to take a quick break, Davis. Come have a drink with us.”

  “Pass.”

  That invitation came when Fantasy and I were in the middle of a swimming pool project, serving giant frozen vodka drinks—Summer Slushes, Electric Lemonades, Blue Bahamas—to people who were, for the most part, still drunk from the night before. Our uniforms were red bikinis with floral sarongs the size and bulk of a single Kleenex. We were on the pool job because, as everyone knows, prostitution is illegal. And those cabanas are for changing clothes. Fantasy, whose skin is not all that dark, had slathered herself in sunscreen the first day.

  “You’d better lotion up, Davis.”

  “Why? It’s not that hot out.”

  I was sunburned beyond recognition. I jumped on the sunscreen train the second day, but it was too late. I was already the exact color of the bikini. I wasn’t about to sit across from Miss Porcelain Skin Law Review.

  There was precious little time to talk to Bradley about anything, because he was always with Mary Ha Ha. When we did catch up, it was about the lawsuit. The day after the news broke about pre-cancerous Bonita Jakes suing the Grand, an attorney based out of Birmingham, Alabama, Jerry McAllen, took to the airwaves. Every other commercial on every local channel showed him in a $4,000 suit, sitting at a bar with a gorgeous young woman wearing a cowboy hat and boots, not much in between, in a fog of cigarette smoke. The commercial began with him fake coughing and fanning away the smoke. His big, fat, diamond pinkie ring zigzagged across the screen.

  “Have you ever worked for the Grand Palace? Even for a day? Do you work there now? Do you plan on working there in the future? Then call me. Jerry McAllen. Let’s talk about the Clean Air Act. Let’s talk about your God-given rights and Mississippi’s promise to provide you safety in the workplace.”

  The camera panned the girl, then zoomed in on her cleavage.

  “I was a cocktail waitress at the Grand Palace for three months on my way to being a country music superstar.” Cough, cough, cough. “Now my dreams are gone.” Cough, cough, cough. “I can’t sing a note because the Grand Palace didn’t protect me, so I called Jerry McAllen.”

  Jerry McAllen reached out and patted her bare knee, poor little thing, then solemnly faced the camera head-on with ominous parting words: “Has the Grand Palace stolen your dreams and your ability to support yourself in the future too? Then call me. Jerry McAllen.” Next, the television screen filled with the phone number: 1-800-NO-SMOKE.

  Bradley and Mary Ha Ha, plus several other attorneys working
the case, fought a tough opponent, and not the ambulance-chasing Jerry McAllen. They were up against the Big Picture. The charge wasn’t that the Grand Palace broke the law, because Mississippi doesn’t have a comprehensive indoor smoking ban. The charge was negligence—the Grand Palace should have taken better care of its employees by having adequate ventilation, air-purification systems, and mandatory clean-air breaks.

  One thing has kept me going. A few times a week, since the start of this mess, Bradley has snuck in and woke me up with kisses, sometimes five or six hours after I’ve climbed into bed alone. He doesn’t turn on a light and we don’t say boo to each other. We skip all formalities and preamble. In the wee hours of the morning, we recharge our relationship batteries. These are the only times it doesn’t feel like Mary Ha Ha is in the room with us.

  One night Bradley snuck in and almost recharged Granny Dee’s batteries. I honestly didn’t know my grandmother could move that fast, hit that hard, or scream that loud. The next morning, he left a note: Davis, let’s look for a bigger place.

  We found one. A really nice one. Moving Day was hours from now. I wished my boss’s wife hadn’t shot herself in the foot. I wished her personal assistant wasn’t missing. I wished I didn’t have to play in a slot tournament instead of moving. More than anything, though, I wished Bradley and I had been paying a little more attention to formalities and preambles.

  FOUR

  Fantasy and I went through passed-out Bianca’s pockets.

  “I found her key.”

  “Good,” I said. “I found three hundred dollars and an earring.”

  “Let’s see the earring.”

  I held it up.

  “Pass.”

  We left Bianca sleeping on our sofa and rode the elevator to the Sanders’ place a mile above us.

  “We should have changed clothes.” I fanned the front of my fishy Plethora Buffet uniform.

  “Stop, Davis. You’re stirring it up.”

  The Sanders’ home was palatial, beautiful, and empty, as far as we could see. The staff that should have been there had probably scattered during the shootout. We snapped on gloves and tiptoed through, keeping our eyes peeled for dead bodies and the like.

  “The mystery of Bianca Gets a Gun is solved.” Fantasy pointed. “She borrowed yours.”

  It was my gun. A girl knows her gun. “Damn.”

  Downstairs in our closet we have a hidden vault drawer in the middle of the shoe racks where we keep our guns and ammo. Just in case. Apparently the hidden vault drawer isn’t hidden enough. We were two feet into Bianca’s dressing room when Fantasy spotted my Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 380 on the floor beside the chaise lounge. So Bianca had gone downstairs and helped herself to my gun. No big surprise. She’d helped herself to my ex-ex-husband last year. She could have him, but it’s not nice to take someone’s gun. Not that I ever said Bianca Sanders was nice.

  I took the right and Fantasy dropped to her knees on the left side of the long chair. We used our gloved fingers to comb through the thick carpet for the brass casings that eject from the gun as it’s fired. With six in the clip and one in the chamber, Bianca could have pulled the trigger up to seven times.

  Fantasy rose from her side of the chaise with four casings.

  I had three.

  “Let’s go.” Fantasy shook the empties in her closed palm like they were brass dice. “We have to find all seven rounds.”

  The dressing room had three doors. We’d entered from the hallway. Another door led to the Sanders’ bedroom, and the third door led to Bianca’s office, a deceptive designation because Bianca didn’t do anything that remotely resembled work. The wall spaces between the three doors each held Jackson Pollock abstracts. In a dressing room. The ones to the right and left of the office door each had .380 blowouts. We admired the two mutilated paintings.

  “Who shoots art?” Fantasy asked.

  “She double tapped this one,” I said. My painting had twin blasts.

  “I’ve got one,” Fantasy said.

  We found the fourth and fifth rounds embedded in the baseboards on both sides of the office door. I stretched out on Bianca’s chaise lounge, aimed a finger gun just above my feet, and determined the one to the right seemed, trajectory wise, to be the most likely candidate to have skidded along the top of Bianca’s foot before finding a home. We turned up a sixth round that had whizzed through the doorway and into the office, hitting one of Bianca’s dogs between the eyes. Actually, it hit an oil portrait of the dogs, not a real dog.

  We didn’t find the seventh round, or Peyton, the assistant.

  Here’s hoping they’re not together.

  We’d gone over the surveillance footage a dozen times before we came up here. Peyton Reynolds had not left the thirtieth floor unless she’d jumped off the roof and after two hours of searching high and low, we decided she was not in the Sanders’ residence either. We looked absolutely everywhere.

  Where was Peyton Reynolds?

  I pulled my phone out of my double-knit pant pocket. “No Hair. We found seven spent casings, but only six rounds, and the assistant isn’t here.”

  “Holy, holy hell,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

  He called in extra security and a nurse, then gave us permission to have Bianca transferred to her own living quarters.

  Fantasy and I staggered to our cars.

  “Good luck in the slot tournament tomorrow, Davis.”

  “Good luck finding Peyton.”

  * * *

  When I finally stepped inside my own front door it was after two a.m. I draped a hanging bag full of slot-contest clothes across the sofa, then used the walls to hold me up as I stumbled to the kitchen. There was a note in the middle of the table.

  Davis, We’re on our way to Corporate. Last minute, couldn’t be helped. I tried to call you ten times. X, B.

  Not Love, B, not XOXO, B, just X, B. I don’t know if X was for a hug or a kiss. Either way, I could have used a little more. I crumpled the note and bounced it off the refrigerator. Corporate was the Grand Palace, Las Vegas. We was Bradley and Mary Ha Ha. I checked my phone. I had seven missed calls from X, B, and that made me feel a little better. I felt my way to the bedroom, turned in the general direction of the bed, fell on it, still in my fish clothes, and slept until the doorbell rang.

  A large man waved a pink sheet of paper in my face. My eyes focused just enough to see the logo: 777 MOVERS.

  “Twenty-two hundred Beach Boulevard? Cole? Unit three-oh-seven?”

  “We can’t move today,” I said. “I’m running in a slot-machine race.”

  “My grandmother plays slot tournaments,” one of the three men said.

  “Tell her I said good luck.” I closed the door, started a pot of coffee, and stepped in the shower. Thank goodness the movers had woken me up. The slot thing started in an hour.

  * * *

  I showered, got gussied up, sprayed my hair medium-spice brown, poked contact lenses into my eyes until they were medium blue, poured a cup of coffee, then checked my phone. Nothing from Bradley. There was a message from No Hair letting me know that Peyton Reynolds was still nowhere to be found. He said that he and Fantasy would be hot on her trail today and when I wasn’t in the slot tournament tracking down the little old lady who lived in a church, I’d better be on the thirtieth floor getting information out of Bianca. Stay in touch. Acknowledge receipt of these pointed instructions.

  No Way was I calling No Hair. It was entirely too early.

  I sat down at the kitchen table with my coffee and the folder of marching orders, then fired up my laptop to cram for the slot-machine test. The Bellissimo website told me there were three types of tournaments. The first, in a category all by itself, was the official kickoff to Slot Tournament Season, the mother of all Bellissimo slot events, and it was right aroun
d the corner. Only high, high rollers played in this one, limited to fifty invited guests—an intimate slot gathering with fantastic odds and fantastic-er prizes. I didn’t need or want to know about that production, so I concentrated on the others. They fell into two categories: free and not free, regular and irregular, no big deal and big deal.

  The free tournaments are weekly for the duration of Slot Tournament Season, at the crack of dawn every Thursday morning, and the password to get in is probably Geritol, Depends, or Polident. Thursday mornings at the Bellissimo are set aside for seniors. It’s a traffic jam of walkers, wheelchairs, and motorized scooters until noon, when the slot tournament and two-for-one buffet are over, then the old folks scoot home for their naps. No pre-registration, entry fee, or red tape is required, just show up with your Medicare card and bang on the one-armed bandits. The weekly winner receives a thousand dollars in cash. Thank goodness No Hair didn’t have me in the Thursday senior tournament. I sprayed my hair gray once and it had been a nightmare. I looked like I’d dipped my head in a bucket of sidewalk. Never again.

  I was in the medium-sized tournament, the middle child tournament—not the huge one that made headlines, but not the weekly senior event that wasn’t the least bit newsworthy either. Today’s tournament was the first of six. These shindigs are held once a month for the season, invitation only, and themed—Cashanova, Pirate’s Treasure, Christmas Cash, Break the Bank. And little old lady who lives in a church was signed up for all six. They required a three-day commitment, an entry fee, and you have to be a registered guest at the hotel to participate.

  It all looked perfectly sane to me, as sane as casino events go, so I turned to the next order of business, the folder from No Hair. I pulled out the photo of the little old lady. Her name was Jewell Maffini. Jewell didn’t look like she could hurt a flea, but she was my mark. No Hair’s sticky read: All known associates and details of her connection to the church.