If history repeats itself, and it certainly does around here, No Hair already knew who this little old lady was associated with and he already knew her connection to the church. If I were a betting man, and there’s certainly a lot of betting around here, I’d bet No Hair sprang this on me with the singular goal of confirming what he already suspected.
Wonder what he already suspected.
Under her photograph, the details. I was on my way to the Mystery Shopper tournament, with an entry fee of $2,500. The best news? I was booked in a Lantana Suite for two nights.
The invitation was an elaborate print production that started out like an oversized greeting card. Inside was a folded, glossy shopping bag with Bellissimo stamped in gold with braided gold ribbon handles. It pulled open to reveal silky cards, individually wrapped in creamy, thin tissue paper, secured by a sticky gold seal with a raised script B.
Fancy shmancy. Tiffany’s should see this.
The first card was a wedding invitation. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the who, what, when, and where of the slot tournament. The second card listed the fabulous prizes, including the grand prize. One of the hundred participants was to be crowned the Mystery Shopper and a ridiculous cash payday was in store. The third card was a coupon for a forty-percent-off shopping spree in the Bellissimo shops, and the Bellissimo shops were nothing to sneeze at, so that meant for the duration of the tournament, the participants could get $5,000 socks for $3,000 or a $7,000 ink pen for $4,200.
The one thing about casino work that I really couldn’t get used to was just how much money was involved-- $5,000 dresses, $7 donuts, $10,000 bets, $400 lobsters, $12,000 watches. All under one roof.
I grabbed my things, hopped in my VW Bug, and got myself under the one roof.
I made my way to the convention level, a venue above the casino that I’d not had the pleasure of and where all slot tournaments took place, which is another reason I didn’t know a thing about them. Not only had I not played in one, I’d never been anywhere near this part of the extensive Bellissimo properties to even walk by one.
The Bellissimo Convention Center was, like the rest of this place, plus-sized, impeccably dressed, and mostly red and gold. Unlike the rest of this place, the lobby was as quiet as a library. And speaking of impeccably dressed, I looked great, thanks, for the most part, to the styling talents of Mr. James Perse. I was wearing his beach-blue, short linen shirt dress with drawstring waist. It was glorious, and I was glad to squeeze it in one more time before it got too cold to wear it or it took any more squeezing to get in it.
Note to self: start taking the steps and stop eating the whole box of Pop Tarts for lunch.
Over the dress, I wore a BCBG pale gray, jersey knit, cropped jacket that was as soft as a baby blanket. Below the great dress, I had on Michael Kors four-inch cork and leather sandals. Above it all, I was a blue-eyed medium-spice brunette.
I followed discreet Mystery Shopper signs to the ballroom. I didn’t even know there was a ballroom. I stepped up to the desk to find out that No Hair had registered me, set me up in the hotel, but hadn’t paid the entry fee. Dammit.
“Are you sure?”
The lady sighed. “Yes. I’m sure.”
“Can I pay it later?”
“No. There’s an ATM right outside the door.”
There were more ATMs than anything else at the Bellissimo. There were ATMs in the bathroom stalls. (Kidding. There weren’t.) I dug through my bag, a Gucci medium tote, and came up with nothing but my own bank card. I drained the money out of my account, paid the entry fee, drew a number out of a hat, seventy-six, and found a corner seat to watch for the little old lady who lived in a church while waiting for my turn to play.
The ballroom had to be twenty-thousand square feet. The walls weren’t fabric covered so much as they were fabric upholstered, all the way up, in a gold fleur-de-lis patterned silk. The ceiling was a mile high, arched, and gold. Everything else was black: carpets, linens, staff. Bright lights from somewhere above were aimed at four long rows of slot machines in the middle of the room; everything else was backlit or candlelit. Clearly, the slot machines wanted to be the star of the show, but just then the brightest Bellissimo star appeared. The slot machines saw him, gave up, and powered down.
(No, they didn’t.)
Celebrity sightings weren’t all that unusual at the Bellissimo. They headlined the theater acts every weekend, other times they were simply VIP guests. Last year, the entire ensemble of a television real wives show piled in. They brought a camera crew, a production team, and a trailer load of ill will and Spanx. The next weekend, it was an MVP NBA forward, his latest wife, and his fourteen very tall children. Several months ago, there’d been a convention of governors. Forty-eight of them. In addition to the A-list musicians, politicians, comedians, authors, actors and athletes, we had our own internal celebrities, Richard and Bianca Casimiro Sanders at the top of that list. Bianca, especially (and I knew this first hand), didn’t go anywhere on the property where the crowd didn’t part and gasp, and when Mr. Sanders entered one of the restaurants, all forks dropped. (“It’s the president!”) They were pretty, the Sanders, both of them. They were often more of a presence than the real celebrities; the crowd loved nothing better than a good, up-close Sanders sighting.
But no one, absolutely no one, at the Bellissimo had the star power of the man who’d just entered the ballroom. I was busy scanning the crowd for my little-old-lady mark when the air changed. I looked around to find the source, and it didn’t take long.
Matthew Thatcher.
The domed ceiling could have parted with Elvis descending on a fluffy cloud with wings, cherubs, and harps, and he wouldn’t have been given more than a glance, because everyone in the room was so completely smitten with Thatch. He was a real guy, one of us, and I’d heard that he, like me, was from next-door Alabama. And here he was. In the flesh. I’d certainly heard of Thatch, and had seen him dozens of times from across the casino (you couldn’t miss him), but none of my Bellissimo assignments had taken me anywhere close to working around him. He’d been in the ballroom one minute, and already his name was being shouted from every corner.
Matthew Thatcher was the Bellissimo’s resident Master of Ceremonies. If a microphone was ever turned on Thatch was at the other end of it. He emceed all contests, drawings and promotional events, including, it would seem, slot tournaments. Twice a week, a brass cage the size of a car was rolled to the middle of the casino floor. Based on points earned, gamblers were given entry slips to drop into the cage. Every hour on the hour, Thatch, with a lot of hoopla, pulled a name out of the big brass hat. The prizes varied: cars, cruises, free casino money, spin the wheel, scoop up cash. Everyone knew him, loved him, and begged him to call their name. His resident rise to fame had happened well before I arrived on the scene and while I was aware of the Thatch Phenomenon, I’d never seen it up close. Until now.
A well-dressed woman at least twenty years older than me had taken a seat at the table next to mine. She was alone with a cup of coffee waiting, I assumed, like me, for her turn in the tournament. I caught her eye. “What is the big deal about this guy?” I asked.
She glazed over. “Isn’t he something?”
Something was busy working the crowd. Had there been babies, he’d have been kissing them.
“They say,” the woman didn’t take her eyes off Thatch, “that if he walks by you, you’ll win.”
“Really?” I half-laughed.
“He’s like,” she sighed, “a lucky charm.”
Apparently, I wasn’t immune. All of a sudden I was overwhelmingly dizzy; the room spun around me at warp speed. It was like someone had turned off all five of my senses, and I wondered if it might be possible to faint while sitting down.
“Are you okay?” It was a voice from a thousand miles away. “Should I get someone?”
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The cloud began to lift and I heard a loud siren ringing in my ears. My vision slowly cleared and it seemed I’d lived through whatever had just happened without having to be picked up off the floor. Ten very long seconds had elapsed, but it felt like ten hours. When was the last time I’d eaten anything? What in the world was wrong with me?
Oh.
FIVE
My paycheck is ridiculously large. I have two jobs, so I receive two salaries, but just one check every other Friday. Direct deposit money dump every other Friday. Once or twice a month, I pull up my banking information just to stare at the big numbers.
The negotiations had gone down shortly after my release from prison earlier this year.
“At this point, Davis, you know what I expect of you in the corporate realm.” Richard Sanders was on his side of the desk. I was in the hot seat across from him.
“Yes, sir.” Under No Hair’s supervision, our team solves pesky internal problems that are part of the fabric of day-to-day casino operations. Simply put, cheating at games probably dates back to dinosaurs in cahoots with pterodactyls who spotted for them during boulder bowling for a cut in on the bucket-of-turtles jackpot. Today, with the eleven thousand cameras and a security staff of one-eighty at the Bellissimo, things hadn’t changed much. All players want an edge, and there will always be those who are willing to go over it.
Surveillance systems are in place for the small-time casino cheat. Purse snatchers, chip scoopers, past-posters, and dice sliders are expected. They show up regularly and are promptly shown the door, where they’re introduced to the Biloxi Metro Police. Tough sentences discourage apprentices; time served for emptying out a bank vault runs neck-and-neck with time served for marking cards at a blackjack table in Mississippi.
There is, however, another layer of cheating, the one No Hair, Fantasy, and I wallow in. The Bellissimo employs almost four thousand people, and let me assure you, they’re not all true blue. It takes more than a security suit and videography to catch a dealer partnered with a gang of counterfeiters, or a front desk manager skimming and selling random guest credit card information. Our team covertly immerses ourselves in the problem area, sniffing out the bad guys.
That’s my first job.
Bianca Casimiro Sanders is my second.
“I don’t know how this will work, Davis,” Mr. Sanders had said that day. “But I can’t imagine it will take that much of your time.”
(Wrong.)
Richard Sanders, Nevada native, UNLV graduate, mid-40s, blonde-athletic-handsome, is a stand-up guy and scary smart. The one area of his life that doesn’t fit the rest is his marriage.
“It’s not a bad idea for you to impersonate Bianca on occasion,” he said, “but I’m at a loss to set parameters or assign a value to something so unprecedented.” He shrugged, tapped a silver pen against his desk. “I think the Bellissimo will benefit from the goodwill Bianca’s stronger presence will bring.” (Behind every good man and such.) “But more than that,” he dropped the pen, “she’s dead set on it.”
Why wouldn’t she be? I honestly think that it had more to do with the fact that I was ten years younger than her (and let’s face it—five pounds lighter, seven on a skinny day) than anything else. At the time Richard Sanders and I sat down, I’d attended two events pretending to be Bianca—the Biloxi Mayor’s Breakfast and a ribbon cutting at the new children’s wing of Biloxi Memorial—and while she’d cut out her own tongue before admitting it, I think she liked the good press. A few days after the ribbon cutting, she’d tossed me an Oscar de la Renta Picasso Newsprint swimsuit. She added a sheer jacket, red stiletto heels, a hoola-hoop sized hat with matching straw bag, and four hundred dollar sunglasses. Then she sent me to the Bellissimo pool.
“Don’t take the shoes off.”
I guess that meant no swimming.
I had zigzag sun marks on my feet for two weeks.
People gawked all day, and it could have been that the swimsuit, folded, could have fit in my ear. If my father had walked up, he’d have thrown a quilt over me. The pretty pool boys, four of them, never spoke directly to me, and never left my side. They spritzed me with chilled Evian water. Brought me iced, spiked lemonade. Fed me grapes. (Kidding about the grapes.) My photograph appeared, a half-page, in an oversized, glossy New Orleans lifestyle magazine a few weeks later with the caption The Bellissimo’s First Lady of Leisure. The man who does our hair, Seattle, had it enlarged, matted, and framed, and I see it every time Bianca makes me have my eyebrows threaded.
Here’s what I think: Bianca is aging, and she’s not being very graceful about it. She wasn’t going down without a war either. The specialist’s surgery suite was her battleground, and the strongest weapon in her arsenal was me.
And here’s something else I think: If the Sanders’ marriage playbook hadn’t changed, everything would have been fine. But it did, and the reality of the new rules staring her right in her Juvidermed face had resulted, I was soon to learn, in her shooting herself in the foot.
After the first round of the slot tournament, I had to go see Bianca.
Knock-knock. “Mrs. Sanders?” It was a scene from The Princess and the Pea. The bed was a linen parking lot. A family of five could sleep in it comfortably. It was a study in pillows, too many to count, several propping up her injured foot, which was swathed in a silk Gucci scarf featuring green horses. I noticed she had a brand-new perfect pedicure. (Ouch.) Her little dogs were adrift somewhere in there, I could hear them snarling at me.
“You look terrible, David. What is wrong with you?”
“It’s Davis.”
She waved me off.
“I think I have a virus.”
(No, I didn’t.)
She dove behind pillow number seventy-three. Her muffled outrage escaped. “You need to leave immediately!” One of her arms shot out from the many fluffy duvets and I caught a glimpse of fur flying as she scooped her rat-dogs under the covers and away from my germs.
Ha ha.
“Just one thing, then I’ll go,” I said.
“Make it quick,” the pillow said.
“Why did you shoot Peyton?”
The pillow came down. “Because Richard is sleeping with her.”
* * *
One of the two elevators inside the Sanders’ residence went directly to a hallway behind Mr. Sanders’ office. And by directly, I mean in a hurry. Like a bomb. When it came to a stop (three seconds later), I found myself contemplating my lifelong adultery theory. Be it lack of opportunity, libido, or pulse, I’ve held fast to the belief that there was a slice of the male population pie immune to cheating. With each passing birthday, Democrat, and marriage (of mine), the slice has thinned. With this news, it may be gone.
In spite of my opinion that he has every reason to, there was no evidence of Mr. Sanders being unfaithful to his wife. There’s never been a whiff, hint, or trace. I found it hard to swallow that he’d start now, and in his own home.
But I’ve been wrong before, and in my own home.
My father could make anything work, even being married to my mother. The parts of their lives that aren’t perfect are her fault. Because he is. (Perfect.) Like any other family, though, we’d had our share of dysfunction. Sadly, most of that can be chalked up to me; I’ve had a few bumpy years/divorces.
I remember very little of middle school—the childbirth movie, pre-algebra, the 8th grade trip to Six Flags—but one thing our family never talks about-slash-will never forget is the two-year chill that settled in our home after Daddy returned from a week of hostage-negotiating training in Montgomery, as if anyone in Pine Apple would ever take anyone else hostage. At the time, I paid very little attention. I was busy twirling my baton. And I’d all but forgotten it until a few years ago, when Mother and Daddy were at odds as to how to repair the toll the tanking economy had t
aken on their 401K, and Mother went behind Daddy’s back, moving the money without his blessing. It got ugly. Meredith said, “This will be worse than the time Mother caught Daddy with that hostage-training woman in Montgomery if they don’t get this worked out soon.”
I walked around without blinking for a week.
From behind Mr. Sanders’ office, I regained a little of my equilibrium as I made my way to a second elevator ride that would take me to the Bellissimo lobby. From the lobby, I wove my way through the casino and from there, I took a steep escalator ride to the convention level. And by steep, I mean straight up. Like a missile.
The real question, though, was this: Would Bradley Cole ever cheat on me?
I made it inside the door just in time for Round Two of the Mystery Shopper slot throwdown. A lady with sliver hoop earrings as big as bicycle tires checked me in and passed me a slip of paper. I barely perched on the edge of a chair before I heard Matthew Thatcher call out from behind his microphone. “Where’s number sixteen? Number sixteen! You have less than a minute to get to your slot machine!” I looked at the slip of paper in my hand. Sixteen.
I shot up and the lights went out.
* * *
“You what?” Fantasy asked. “You fainted?”
“Yes,” I said. “I passed out cold.”
“You stood up, then went down.”
“That’s what happened.”
“And this was last night?”
“Round two of the tournament. On my way to round two.”
It was too early Sunday morning. Weekends meant nothing around here.
“So the old lady who lives in a church is still on the loose?”
“I never saw her.”
“She won.” No Hair came barreling into Mr. Sanders’ sunny office, our appointed meeting place. Around his neck, a noose. His tie was a noose. The hang someone kind. In all my time at the Bellissimo, I’ve never seen No Hair wear the same tie twice.
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