Round Two upset the leader board. A woman from New Orleans gained a substantial point lead, having lined up triple scoops four times during the twenty-minute round—sprinkles bursting everywhere with spectacular fireworks sound effects—and second and third places were only a scoop apart. When the machines powered down, the contestants kept their seats as Armani-suited accountants from Deloitte recorded player scores. The accountants started at one end, I started at the other with a cordless mic.
“Good grief, Mr. Rosenberg! Give someone else a chance!”
He was dead last, but he enjoyed the attention so much, he forgot. I wished him luck for round three. Down the row.
“Elaine Vega! Stand up! Could we have a spotlight? What’s this I heard about you?” I grabbed her hand and held it up high. “Everyone say hello to Mrs. Vega! Look at this ring! Elaine’s a newlywed!” She turned fifty shades of red. “Elaine,” I covered my mouth with my hand, “just between us girls—” (into a microphone for all to hear) “—this marriage business ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.” The audience, who loved Bianca’s husband, roared.
And on. Until the accountants finished and I’d let everyone know how much we appreciated their money. (Them being there! Them being there!) I made my way to the stage. Someone in the audience shouted, “We love you, Bianca!” I found him, made eye contact across the big room, and told him I loved him too. He beat on his chest with both fists. I announced current first, second, and third places with a drumroll soundtrack, and told them I couldn’t wait to see them tonight.
The dizzy crowd exited the front and took a left for the banquet hall where they would have a fancy lunch, as a clean-up and overhaul crew entered through the back to repair and reset the room. Technicians came in from a side door and positioned themselves for the best possible views of the cupcake waitresses, who were clearing tables. Security entered through a different door to lock down the room while the techs switched computer chips in all fifty machines.
My marketing handler, Laney Harris, was waiting for me at the stage door after I said my goodbyes and good lucks to the tournament participants. “You’re a rock star, Bianca.” She handed me off to my assistant Fantasia, who looked like she’d seen a ghost.
I stopped dead in my Dolce & Gabbana tracks. Was it Bradley Cole?
Laney, no flies on her, said, “I’ll leave you two alone.” She shooed everyone out of the dressing house.
“Sit down, Davis,” Fantasy said.
I collapsed into the salon chair.
“It’s your grandmother.”
I bent over double, like I’d been chopped in two.
“Not that, Davis! Not that!” She crouched to my level. “It’s not that anything bad has happened.” She tilted my face up. “Your family can’t find her.”
“Fantasy, you can’t hide in Pine Apple!” I cried. “Something’s happened to her!”
She passed me my phone. “Here,” she said. “Get it together. Call home.”
The door burst open, and Bianca came roaring in, dressed exactly like she had been this morning, except she’d been dipped in black paint. Black shoes, trench coat, sunglasses, and scarf.
I shot out of the salon chair. “No!” I yelled. “I’m not listening to it, Bianca. Get out!” I pointed for the door with a shaky hand.
She stood there statue still. She spun and left, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman on her heels.
There goes my job.
* * *
It took a lot to rock my sister. When I got Meredith on the phone, though, she was a driveling puddle. “Oh, God, Davis! We can’t find her anywhere!”
“Who else is missing, Meredith?”
“What? We’re looking for Granny, Davis. We’re not taking roll all over town.”
“Where’s Cyril Bunker?”
“How would I know where Cyril is? Again, Davis, we’re looking for Granny.”
“Go find Cyril. And let me talk to Daddy.”
“Daddy’s out looking,” she wailed. “Call him on his cell.”
Fantasy traded me a glass of water for my phone. She scrolled to my father’s number, tapped, then handed it back.
“Daddy.”
“Cyril’s gone too,” my father said, no preamble.
I was born on his page.
“Surely neither of them would try to drive, Daddy. They’ve got to be with someone. Who else is missing? Who’s driving them?”
He must have had his window down, because I heard the crunch of gravel. Then I heard nothing until, “Eddie.”
I made immediate plans to kill him. (Eddie.) Dead. Very, very dead.
“Eddie’s Lincoln isn’t in front of his trailer,” Daddy said, “and it’s only one o’clock.”
Eddie Crawford, that total rat bastard, didn’t roll out of bed until three, and everyone knew it.
“Where could they be? Have you checked Cyril’s old property? Maybe they just took a ride.”
“I tried that first,” Daddy said.
“Have you tried Bates Turkey? Maybe they just went to Greenville for lunch.”
“I called,” Daddy said.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
“He’s taken them to Andalusia, Daddy.” I said it on a very long sigh. “They’re at the Sweet Gum Bottom Wedding Chapel. It’s where we eloped the second time.” I almost choked on the words.
“Sweet Jesus.” My father’s foulest language.
He called me back five minutes later. That’s where they were. My eighty-two-year-old grandmother and her eighty-eight-year-old beau were eloping. The officiate told Daddy that the bride and groom were napping on chapel pews, and he would conduct the ceremony as soon as they woke up. The man who drove them there had been drinking heavily and steadily, and the officiate was a little concerned.
“When you get there, shoot him, Daddy,” I said. “Just get it over with.”
I staggered to a Barcalounger and dropped into it. Fantasy perched on the arm of the Barcalounger across from me. The sudden silence was eerie. A twinkle sparked in Fantasy’s eye and a smile crept across her face. I caught it.
“Ain’t love grand?” she asked on a laugh.
We laughed until we decided it was time for blueberry martinis. “They’re so good!” I told her. “They taste like pie in a glass.”
“You’d better have two, Davis. You’re going to have to get your butt to the Elvis floor and grovel.”
Right. There was that.
TWENTY-FIVE
A criminal’s number one fear is being caught. A criminal’s number one relief is being caught.
Sometime during being cuffed, transported, and processed, they realize somewhere down the road there will be a decent night’s sleep in it for them. Once they recognize they’ve turned the corner from hunted to trapped, the confessions begin spewing. As they confess, they name accomplices. They want you to know who made them do this—names, shoe sizes, all known baby-mamas—and where they, the real criminals, can be found. Many, by the time you get them in the box, can’t wait to tell you all about it. They’re tired of the burden, the guilt, and looking over their shoulder. The future suddenly looks brighter than the immediate past, as the future holds a like-minded community, three squares, and much-needed supervision.
None of this applies to drunks.
I’ve been in prison (a story for another day), and it wasn’t that way for me, either, but there again, I’m not a criminal. Or a drunk.
Jewell Maffini had been carrying an extra-large load. She’d watched her grandson turn his back on all that she’d raised him to be, which was mild-mannered, unambitious, and careful. “Blend in, LeeRoy. It’s safer.” She’d watched him merrily walk away from his heritage—his Catholic faith, ginger-colored hair, and strong Maffini nose. What started out as a simple solution to their problems,
and fun to boot, turned into something that took her grandson from her, and all she could do was stand by helplessly and watch as the So Help Me God scams exploded, with her grandson, carrying a microphone torch, leading the way.
Jewell blamed herself. She felt certain that if not for her, her LeeRoy would be alive today. To make up for it, she’d do anything within her power to right the wrongs. Of which there were many.
No Hair let Jewell get settled in—cream and sugar? too hot in here?—and think about it, while he kept a closed-circuit eye on us, Double Dipping Round Two. He gave her just enough time to stew and when he stepped back into the room, Jewell began spilling her guts on video at about the same time Fantasy and I were enjoying our first blueberry martinis. Delicious blueberry martinis. Well-deserved blueberry martinis. Hard-earned blueberry martinis. You get my point.
At the same time, my family was scrambling to cover the fifty miles between Pine Apple and the Sweet Gum Bottom Wedding Chapel in Andalusia. I spoke to my father once and could hear the rest of my family in the background, after his patrol-car siren finally faded. “God, leave that off, Daddy. I’m getting a migraine.” (Meredith.) “I’m a flower child!” (My niece Riley.) “Flower girl.” (My mother.) “You don’t want to be a flower child. It’s flower girl.”
No Hair asked Jewell if he thought our resident (literally, for me) flower child, Peyton Beecher Maffini, was capable of murder, and Jewell stated what we all believed, Peyton is capable of anything.
Fantasy and I locked the dressing house doors so no unwelcome visitors would barge in while we enjoyed our second, well-deserved, blueberry martinis. No Hair called as we contemplated a third round (hard-earned, blah, blah), and had me forward my So Help Me God zip files to him, which I did via laptop. “Good God, Davis.” It took a while to download. “What is all this?”
“Ethidence.”
“Are you drinking?”
The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, and the Alabama Attorney General had been notified, and they were scrambling. In Montgomery, Alabama, the offices of Dr. Brianna Barbosa, head of the Department of Revenue, and Associate Justice Lee Garner of the Alabama Supreme Court, were being raided. Beehive, Alabama, was not going to know what hit it when one hundred fifty federal agents and two hundred healthcare workers swooped in, sometime in the next forty-eight hours. “We’re almost ready,” a federal agent said, then asked, “Who put this package together? We want to hire them.” Which was good, considering I’d be unemployed the second the Double Dip tournament was over.
Documents were shuffled around in Las Vegas, Nevada, too, as Richard Sanders would soon arrive, then sign off on the Macau deal, and a text had come from my marketing handler, Laney Harris, to inform me Mr. Sanders would make it back to Biloxi in time to make an appearance at the Double Dip grand finale tonight, or at least for the awards ceremony afterward. GOOD NEWS. YOUR HUSBAND’S ON THE WAY! ;)
I wondered why she got my husband’s schedule before I did.
Wait.
It would be nice to have Mr. Sanders back at the helm, but I hoped to be far, far away for the debriefing. If that chore somehow fell to me and Fantasy, he’d say, “Okay, ladies, let’s hear it,” and we would start babbling sweet nothings. “Garbage Cowboy. Bitch stole my gun. Banana Therapy. Don’t smoke microphones.”
We only made it halfway through our third lunch martini before we decided a nap was in order.
“Leth’s see.” Fantasy’s arm zoomed in and out as she tried to focus on the big hand and the little hand. “We can sleep for oneth hour.”
I was drunk.
* * *
The coffee woke me up. That, and Cowboy poking me. “Davis. Get up.”
We’d slept for threeth hours.
“Bradley?” I sat straight up in my Barcalounger. “Bradley Cole?”
“Whaaaa?” Fantasy, hair out to there, shot straight up in hers.
“What time is it, Cowboy?” I stretched. “How’d you get in here?”
“I came through the ballroom,” he said, “and it’s three-thirty.”
I resumed my previous position. “Plenty of time.”
He picked up Fantasy’s half-full martini glass and helped himself to a sip. Then he began spitting and spewing. “This is horrible. Have you two ever heard of this new thing they call beer?” He picked up a house phone. A minute later he said, “One of everything on the menu, heavy on the carbs, and send a bottle of aspirin.”
He dropped a folded section of newspaper on me and with his foot, pushed my Barcalounger to a sitting position. He took two steps and did the same to Fantasy. There was groaning.
Page Six. Bellissimo’s Shiniest Star, Bianca Sanders.
I flipped it around for Fantasy to see. “You look like a movie star, David.”
“Bianca’s decided to let you live,” Cowboy said.
“Where’s that aspirin?”
* * *
Coffee, showers, coffee, aspirin, jeans and T-shirts, coffee, and turkey clubs later, we assembled in Mr. Sanders’ office.
“These are the personal effects from his desk, Mrs. Maffini.” I put the box in front of her. We’d have to ship the photographs he had of himself to her on a flat-bed truck. The box was full of trinkets, a winter scarf, and a stapler.
Jewel Maffini was in her early seventies, but today she looked in her early hundreds. She wore a dark red cardigan over black knit pants, flat rubber-soled shoes, and her hair was a helmet of stiff, dyed, wheat-colored curls. She twisted the wool scarf into a ball and hugged it. “I’d like to see where he lived.”
“That means seeing Peyton,” I said.
“I’d like to see Peyton,” she said. “I want to talk to Peyton.”
Maybe the two halves would make a whole.
Maybe we could get them out of my place and into his.
Cowboy carried the box and the two of them left for the Regent.
“He’s savvy enough to listen in. Right?” (Fantasy.)
“He’s sharp,” No Hair said, “but he can’t hear through walls.” He turned to me. “We hooked up your place with audio this morning.”
The words sank in slowly. “I’m moving.”
“Okay, ladies.” No Hair’s beady eyes narrowed to slits. “And I use that term loosely.” He looked at the clock. “You have a couple of hours before you need to be downstairs for the tournament. I need to prepare for Richard’s return and I’d like, very much, if you two would stay here, out of trouble, until it’s time for you to get dressed.” (Me. Fantasy was already dressed.)
We nodded.
“I mean it.”
We nodded. Nod, nod, nod.
I knew what she was thinking. She knew I knew what she was thinking. We both knew that we knew what both of us were thinking.
“Okay,” I said. “Come help me.”
It was time to track down Bradley Cole. My heartbeat kicked up to the next gear. It might be past time to track down Bradley Cole. She was right. I should have done this days ago.
A big red light was blinking steadily in control central with a message on the landline phone. Only a handful of people even had the number and they only used it in extreme emergencies when all else failed, or when I accidentally misplaced my personal phone. And I had my phone in my hand.
The robot said, “You have three new messages.”
* * *
Bea Crawford heard about my grandmother eloping in the checkout line at the Piggly Wiggly, Pine Apple’s only grocery store. (She heard about it in the checkout line. Granny didn’t elope in the checkout line.)
“Why didn’t they tell anybody?” Bea asked Shirl, Pine Apple’s gum-smacking cashier. “I’ve got a closet full of New York clothes and nowhere to wear them.” She fluffed her silver-fox hair. “Call down
there, Shirl.” She claimed her grocery bag full of dinner—Cheese Wiz, Bam-Bam-Bama wieners, canned chili, day-old hot dog buns. “Tell them to hold up till we can get there.”
Word got around, and a Pine Apple convoy threatened middle Alabama at an alarming speed, until they were all pulled over at mile marker 57 on I-65.
“Look it,” Bea told the trooper. “We’ve got a town emergency and we’re in a hurry to get to it.”
“What town would that be?”
“Did your mother not teach you to say, ‘Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am,’ boy?
The trooper’s fingers curled around the butt of his Sig 229. “No,” he said. “She didn’t.” He was rethinking his decision to pull the line of beat-up cars over. “And I’d advise you to leave my mother out of this and answer the question.”
Bea twisted in her seat. Her Ford Fiesta rocked. “We’re from Pine Apple.”
“Never heard of it.”
She pulled off her Polaroids. “Where are you from, boy?”
“Cincinnati.”
“What the hell are you doing in Alabama?” she demanded. “You’re gonna get rode out on a rail if you go around telling people you’re from up north.”
“Cincinnati’s not ‘up north’.”
“Don’t you sass me, boy. Like hell it’s not,” she said. “We don’t ask questions down here. We shoot Yankees on sight.”
The trooper reached for the radio on his shoulder. “I’m going to need a wagon.”
The first message left on the landline phone was from my ex-ex-mother-in-law, Bea Crawford. “Davis. We’re in the lockup in Ascambia County. Need a little help.”
“Did you give her this number?” Fantasy asked.
“Hell, no.”
The second message was from No Hair’s wife.
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