Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper)

by Gretchen Archer

  “You’re our new super-secret weapon.” She stood. “Come with me.”

  I hopped up.

  “Leave your things,” she said, “we’re not going far.”

  I dropped my purse in the chair, then followed her across the room at a clip. Natalie, if the fancy machine on her credenza and the empty cups and saucers on every corner of her desk were any indication, consumed large amounts of high-test coffee; the girl was jacked up on caffeine. We were headed straight for a wall when she stopped so fast I all but ran into her.

  “Get dressed.” She pushed and a seamlessly hidden door swung in. “Then we’ll talk more.”

  The door closed quietly behind me of its own accord, and I was alone in a lounge of sorts, but a lounge as large as my bedroom at Pine Apple Luxury Living Condos. How convenient. It was library quiet and smelled like a rose garden. The room was barely lit and there were no windows, so it took a second for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I was met by more of the red/gold décor that was the theme throughout the Bellissimo. A plush red sofa was against the wall to my left, with a mammoth gilded mirror above it. Two gold wingback chairs were separated by an oblong side table on ornate pedestal legs opposite the sofa, with a wide aisle of thick gold carpet between. A stained-glass Tiffany lamp on the table emitted a dome-shaped glow, the only direct light in the room. This is exactly where you’d want to be if you were having a migraine. Or an affair.

  A wide arched doorway between the two seating areas led to a traditional ladies powder-your-nose room where I found a change of clothes, a wig, contact lenses, and really cute boots.

  Fifteen minutes later, fourteen of them poking myself in the eye, I stared at a stranger in the mirror. The stranger had thick, dark, shoulder-length hair and Martian green eyes. The jeans were pencil, designer, and a perfect fit. They were paired with a Christian Dior vanilla-colored cashmere pullover that floated. I could only have been identified by the tomato-red Tory Burch peep-toes I had on, which were mine. (Technically, they were my sister’s. I’d accidentally borrowed them.)

  “I guessed you at a six,” Natalie said when I’d worked up enough nerve to leave the red and gold retreat, a boot in each hand.

  “Six and a half,” I apologized.

  “Now we know.”

  “I can try to get into them,” I offered, because they were gorgeous and I could take a little pain in exchange for the mid-calf chocolate-brown leather.

  “I’m a six.” She gave me a wink. “I’ll find something to do with them. Take a seat,” she waved, “and relax a little.”

  I hadn’t moved my head; I’d never worn anyone else’s hair on it. I had plenty of my own and it was pressing against my scalp like socks stuffed into a hat that was already too small.

  “You look great.”

  I looked like someone else, which was, I suppose, the point.

  She passed me a fat stack of paper, as thick as the Montgomery Yellow Pages. “Sign here, here, and here.”

  I signed there, there, and there.

  She whisked the phone book away and replaced it with a gorgeous brown-leather Marc Jacobs messenger. “Your room keys are in here, a little cash to get you going, a new cell phone, and ID.”

  I had no idea what I’d just signed, but the wardrobe and accessories for my new job were great.

  “You’re already checked into your room and everything you’ll need for the next few days is there.”

  And still, I sat on the edge of the chair.

  “Right.” Natalie clapped her hands together. “As our in-house investigator, Davis, your first assignment is to play video poker.”

  In-house what? I thought this was a security job. And how might one go about investigating video games? Or for that matter, securing them?

  “Double Whammy Deuces Wild. Progressives.” She stood and walked around her desk. “Double Whammy Deuces Wild,” she said again. “Got that? Go right through the middle of the casino, then take a left. You can’t miss them.” She waited to speak again until she was sure she had my undivided attention. “Play it, learn it, come back and tell me how it’s won.”

  Is that all?

  “Good luck, Davis.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “I hope you win!”

  THREE

  Bellissimo guest room 20027 was, like the rest of this place, Five Star. It was a showroom of luxuries and amenities, including a full ocean view, Jumbotron flat screen, and great big bed with at least a foot of air between it and the thick gold carpet. The linens on the bed were stark white, with gold pillow accents everywhere and a giant red duvet folded across the foot. Five Star and Fancy.

  Natalie Middleton, I could see, had gone to a lot of trouble on my behalf. The armoire contained at least five days’ worth of clothes, all my size, ranging in style from a pair of J Brand jeans to a bright blue-silk cocktail dress with a swooping jeweled neckline that I was tempted to put on right then. In the drawers I found Ralph Lauren silk pajamas, an extra-large Bellissimo T-shirt, two Calvin Klein bras, a demi and a push-up, both 32C, perfect, a rainbow of Hanky Pankys, and three additional cashmere sweaters. It would seem that Bellissimo In-House Investigators dressed to kill, and that might be the saving grace of this “security” job. Well, the expensive clothes and the gorgeous hotel room. Well, the expensive clothes, the gorgeous hotel room, and the paycheck. But in-house investigator? Police officer-to-investigator is the same as executive chef-to-fry cook.

  All this time, I’d been applying for a security position, not an investigator position. You can’t spend ten minutes in law enforcement, even in a place as small as Pine Apple, much less the years I had in blues, without hating the words private investigator. An in-house is nothing but a private who stays put. Their cousins are mall cops and third-shift parking lot attendants. Investigative services are a thing of the past, back when you couldn’t find people in two seconds flat through social networking. Facebook and Twitter are good for two things: hooking up with people you never got to sleep with in college, and skip tracing. It takes one Follow and two Tweets to locate a skip. Ditto insurance fraud with current electronics: Hack into the boyfriend’s cell phone and browse the photo album. He’s taken fourteen pictures of Miss Bad Back snowboarding. Busted.

  These days, PIs do absolutely nothing but take photos of cheating spouses. Adulterers are generally smart enough to keep it off the World Wide Web, and it still takes hard evidence to get your fair share in divorce court, especially when the stakes are high. (I know all this first-hand.) I seriously doubted the Bellissimo hiring me had anything to do with cheating spouses; they didn’t take me on so I could run around the casino taking Polaroids of adulterous clients, when they had better surveillance than NASA.

  I dumped out the contents of the Marc Jacobs bag onto the king-sized bed. I found a cell phone and a wallet with Mr. Jacobs’ name all over it. It would seem that I was now Marci Dunlow from San Antonio, Texas—my Photoshopped likeness on the driver’s license was a dead ringer for my new look—and Marci had a thousand dollars in cash so fresh off the press I had trouble separating the bills to count them. Marci was tempted to shimmy into the blue dress, take her thousand dollars, and head for the hills.

  I opened my own purse, a beat-up Louis Vuitton knockoff, and dug for the noisy bulky mass that hid the key to my black Volkswagen Beetle. First things first, I checked the room with my handy-dandy radio-frequency detector. As Seen On TV. I found two signals: one emitting from the smoke alarm in the dead center of the ceiling (clever – who’d look there?) and one from Marci’s cell phone on the bed.

  What did they think they were going to hear in my hotel room?

  Thankfully, there were no cameras—I’d have hit the road—and there were no bugs in the bathroom, which is always a good thing. It was spacious, decorated like the bedroom in a sort of antique French Riviera, with a recessed makeup table that would serve me well as a desk, so I deemed it headquarters. I sat on the wide edge of the bathtub with the two cell phones, my own and Marc
i’s. Marci had a nice phone: a 4G, with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS (immediately disabled), a quad-core processor, a 20MP camera, and a high-resolution backlit TFT display. I popped off the side panel, no larger than a splinter, and found 64GB of memory and a 2GB SD card. I popped off the back of my own phone, and sure enough, found a new memory chip that Natalie had slipped in. (“Leave your things. I need to plant a bug.”)

  Time to go shopping.

  And for the record, I didn’t particularly trust them either.

  * * *

  No doubt someone was busy installing a tracking device in my car that I’d parked in the seven-level garage adjacent to the main building. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I decided to grab a cab.

  The glitzy street entrance of the Bellissimo was packed with people—working, coming, going—and even more cars. The lane closest to the six double doors was specified for drop-off traffic, the next two for valet parking, an unspecified lane in the middle, a lane lined with black limousines, and a lane of taxis. I could easily have gotten a ride there. But another more discreet entrance on the east side of the main building had caught my eye. Several times I’d seen the same dirty white taxi tucked a half a block away from the doors, almost hidden behind thick landscaping, and I took off in that direction, heading east through the lobby. I thought I’d reached a dead end when I noticed gold lettering on dark-glass double doors to my right: VIP.

  I took a deep breath and pushed through. This would be where the rich people checked in and out. Several heads turned my way. I gave them a nervous smile, crossed the quiet room, and stepped outside, where I was met by a blast of winter. January only looks like June on the Mississippi coastline. The difference is the icy, wet wind whipping off the Gulf, and this entrance to the Bellissimo was two feet from it.

  Three limo drivers perked up. Spotting the taxi I was looking for, I waved them off.

  I woke the driver, a black man who was probably in his sixties, with a knuckle on the window. He seemed none too happy to see me.

  “Unavailable,” an old man said without looking at me. “Off duty.”

  “Really?” I wasn’t climbing the hill to the other thirty-five cabs. I’d turn into a block of ice before I could get there. I dug out one of the hundred-dollar bills and slapped it against the glass. That got me a huge sound of disgust from the old man, then the door locks clicked open. I hopped in the back.

  “Could you turn on the heat, please?” It was ten degrees colder inside the cab than out. He pushed a button on the dash, then the cab filled with burning dirt.

  “Do you want to go somewhere or not?”

  I batted at the cloud of singed dust with both hands. Maybe not.

  He drove me to a super sell-all store several miles down a busy road. Every time I looked up, I caught the old guy staring at me in the rear-view mirror instead of watching the road. I unearthed the seat belt and buckled up. I don’t think anyone had been in this cab in the past decade, and I certainly didn’t intend to get in it again if I managed to get out of it this time with life and limb. The only thing in the car that wasn’t retro, including the driver, was a custom-installed satellite radio/scanner, lighting up the dash like New Year’s Eve.

  I knew we’d arrived because he slammed to a stop so fast I added neck brace to my shopping list.

  “I need you to wait on me.”

  “Then you’d better hurry,” he said.

  I purchased a pre-pumped cell phone, had someone at the customer-service desk break into it with a chainsaw and power it up, then made my way to the deserted automotive department, where I dialed my parents’ phone number as slowly as humanly possible.

  My mother could answer a telephone in the most hostile manner imaginable. She’d say “hello” but it came out “WHAT?”

  I steeled myself. And there it was.

  “Mother, it’s me.”

  A giant pause. “Well, Davis, so good of you to call. Make it quick; I’m in no mood to talk. In fact, talk to your sister.”

  See?

  “Hey, Sweetie,” my sister Meredith (note the non-talking-point name) said, and thankfully her voice wasn’t dripping hostility like Mother’s. But then she ruined it with her next cheery line. “We miss you!”

  Meredith—my rock, my shield, my salvation from Mother, and my only sibling—had her own sugary way of sticking it to me. Her “we miss you” was Mer-Code for where the hell are you, Davis? And where have you been? And when will you be back?

  “Davis?” Meredith asked. “What’s going on?”

  I fingered the packages of windshield-wiper blades that hung on hooks in front of me, getting them all swinging and bouncing off one another.

  “I’ve taken a job in Biloxi.”

  I heard the back door squeak on Mer’s end. “Davis! You have not!”

  “I have.”

  “Why there?” Meredith demanded.

  “You’re the one who told me to get out of town.”

  “That’s not what I said. And even if, there are a million towns, Davis. Why that one? How can anything good come of following him down there? You know if it was anyone but Daddy, you’d have restraining orders on you that would put you on a different planet from Eddie. You can’t go sit in his lap! You’ll be in jail by the end of the week!”

  Yes, Eddie. My rat ex-ex-husband, Eddie Crawford, formerly of Pine Apple, has been scratching his raging gambling itch in Biloxi for years. And, yes, I married him twice. And yes, it’ll be a nightmare if Eddie and I cross paths, because I had a $150,000 bone to pick with him, and he wanted me locked up in a loony bin.

  I’d taken the second divorce pretty hard, if burning down his double-wide bachelor pad (he started it, I just didn’t put it out), taking cheap shots at him with my service revolver (grazing his girlfriend Danielle’s fat ass once), and giving him salmonella poisoning constituted taking it hard. And that was just in the months leading up to the divorce. As a result of the misbehaving, I lost my job, then got nailed in divorce court, which irritated me even more, often at three in the morning when it was just me and my laptop. Eddie found himself badly burned by identity theft, had a credit report that would prevent him from borrowing a wooden nickel for the rest of his miserable life, and one night I was so mad, I plastered him all over the National Sex Offender List. Eddie had the nerve to take me back to court, where Pine Apple’s one and only judge—a friend of our families—said that what I’d done to him was no worse than what he’d done to me, and he told us to stay far, far away from each other. For as long as we both shall live. Taking a job in the city where I knew he was holed up wasn’t exactly staying far, far away. I was well aware, but it didn’t keep me from trying to talk my sister into it.

  “This isn’t Pine Apple, Mer. Fifty thousand people live here and another blue gazillion pop in and out of the casinos every day. It’s not like I’m going to run into him on the street corner. Besides,” I scratched the itchy wig, “even if I do, he won’t know it’s me.”

  “He’d know you a mile into a dark cave, Davis, because you’d be the one shooting at him.”

  “You know Daddy took my gun, Meredith. I’m not going to shoot anyone.”

  I could see my sister on the back porch, shivering in the January chill, a mirror of my mother thirty years ago, looking out over the seven acres that made up the family homestead.

  “I’ve taken the job, Mer. And I’m not getting anywhere near Eddie because I don’t want to lose it before I even get paid. You’re the very one who insists I need to get my fresh start on.”

  “You’re not going to get your fresh start on in the same city Eddie’s in, Davis, and you know it. Job or no job.”

  Speaking of my new job, I needed to wind this up. A blue-vested boy who’d been hanging on my every word and peeking at me from between containers of transmission fluid and pine tree air fresheners had worked up the nerve to approach me directly. Not to mention I had a new purse full of my new employer’s new money, and should probably get back to my new job. “Just cross y
our fingers for me, smooth things over with Mother, and don’t tell Daddy anything. Let me handle that.”

  “Be careful, Davis.”

  “Oh, Meredith,” I said, “you worry too much.”

  “Wait! Don’t hang up! First of all, I want my shoes back.”

  Shoot.

  “And second of all, where is it you’re working? What is it you’ll be doing?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure? Which part? Where or what?”

  I heard the squeak of the back door. Meredith either went back into the kitchen or she was standing there with the door open to aggravate Mother by letting out all the heat. Wait. That would be me.

  “When you figure it out,” my sister said, “let us know.”

  “I will.”

  “Love you.”

  “You, too.” I made kissy noises.

  * * *

  On the ride back to the hotel, Bad Attitude at the wheel, I stared out at the gray afternoon, wondering how the highlights—some might say lowlights—of the past decade of my life had escaped an organization as seemingly shrewd as the Bellissimo. True, there was no hard documentation of my end-of-marriage misdeeds, but only because my father hadn’t arrested me for them, and I knew how to get on and off a computer without anyone knowing. But truer than that was that our divorce played itself out on the sidewalks of Pine Apple, in the produce section of the grocery store, at the Gas and Go on Banana Street, and everywhere else Eddie and I happened upon each other. Every resident of Wilcox County, Alabama, knew every detail. How had the Bellissimo missed it?

  I had a leg out the door, ready to be away from the surly cab driver, when I glanced up and caught him watching me again in the rear-view mirror.

  “Surely you don’t expect a tip.”

  He continued to stare. I reached up to pat my head; maybe the wig was on fire.

  “I’m going to give you some advice,” he said. “First time and last time.”